Spaceship (2005) – Kanye West

(Part Six of the Damned If You Work and Damned If You Don’t hexology)

Like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” Kanye’s tale of escapism
takes us back to the past through a black-colored prism
Mall job, face accusations of theft and embezzlement
He ain’t robbed nobody, don’t know where the cash and them khakis went
He workin’ them late hours reserved for the black folks
Ignoring rules, hittin’ chronic and nicotine smokes
They won’t fire him, tho’; management need a bro’
to fill a racist racial quota for the front of they sto’
A disgruntled Gap employee who just biding his time
‘till the day Jay-Z gon’ need inventive beats for his rhymes
And when that day come, Kanye gon’ bid them goodbye
GLC singing ‘bout when his spaceship arrives
Mr. West at his best when concocting the tracks
that sell records. Got signed, now he drivin’ Maybachs

Consequence takes the mic
talks about street knowledge and strife
and the constant motivation to achieve more in life
Hard work, overtime to keep the pain off his mind
of losing loved ones, of why he ain’t signed
And educational shortcomings lead to lifestyles of crime
Hip-hop culture ain’t forgiving when you run out of time
Just waiting for your options to materialize
is like waiting for that spaceship to emerge from the skies

Kanye’s back. When no one wants to hear your music
it can damage your frail self-esteem
but success is circumscribed by how boldly you dream
So excuse Kanye West if his ego has grown
‘cause when his raps were unwanted he kept folding them clothes
for a wage. Now he gettin’ paid
We speak of his music in appreciative tones
So, it’s clear his metaphorical spaceship has flown. . . .

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Overture/Going Through The Motions (2001) – Sarah Michelle Gellar (Joss Whedon)

There’s ennui in the vampire slayer business and Buffy Summers has come down with a case of the blahs. While Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s musical episode, Once More With Feeling, boasts more complex and entertaining fare (“I’ve Got A Feeling/Bunnies/If We’re Together,” “I’ll Never Tell,” “Something To Sing About”), opening number “Going Through The Motions” whets the appetite by alluding to the puns, visual gags, and inside jokes that cater to viewers’ knowledge, as well as showcase Buffy creator Joss Whedon’s surprising brilliance as a songwriter with a knack for the tongue-in-cheek musical jocularity of The Simpsons. With its refined orchestration, and in true Hollywood soundtrack tradition, the overture foreshadows a central theme to be revisited later in the episode (“Something To Sing About”). The episode itself weaves in the series’ ongoing storyline, and this song in particular epitomizes Buffy’s chronic grievance as she kicks vampire and demon ass while nonchalantly strolling through the cemetery, yearning for a deeper purpose in life.

Sure, Sarah Michelle Gellar is no more accomplished a singer than, say, Winona Ryder is an actress. But hey, at least Sarah’s chosen profession isn’t singing. (Sorry, Noni—loved ya in Beetlejuice, Heathers, and to a lesser extent Edward Scissorhands, but it’s been all downhill since then). Gellar’s voice is tenuous, unsophisticated, nasally, and comes off like that of a girl starring in a backyard play—endearing qualities all. But, importantly, she is able to remain fairly within the neighborhood of the twin suburbs called timing and tune, where Buffy vanquishes the undead as she strolls down the boulevard, cutting a svelte figure that has a promising spot as musical guest on Sesame Street singing a duet with Count Von Count.

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Looking For The Perfect Beat (1983) – Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force

In 1982-83, Afrika Bambaataa, The Soul Sonic Force, Arthur Baker and John Robie stood near the pinnacle of artistic achievement. If “Planet Rock” was the paradigm by which they had set the standard for the future of hip-hop, “Looking For The Perfect Beat” was their masterpiece—a paragon built upon the desideratum of beat innovation. Its taut kick drum raps patterns in rolling succession, introducing distinct passages throughout with different permutations of the perfect beat theorem, as well as alterations in the variables of timbre, tension, tone, reverb, stereo placement and stuttering panning. Whereas The Soul Sonic Force emceed “Planet Rock” to acclaim with their party-inciting persiflage, “Perfect Beat” dazzles due to its intricate yet propulsive beats, galvanic programming and dynamic arrangement. Here, The Force promote the concoction like traveling medicine show charlatans peddling their aural elixir: “It’s working!” Unlike with most sales puffery, however, believe the ballyhoo.

To substantiate the bold claims, a dizzying spiral of concatenated plinking skitters upward in carbonated effervescence on rungs of programmed handclaps; snares resound in explosive thwacks, and then tight, crisp cracks; synthesizers stab with succulent pink noise warmth, spring in nimble staccato dabs, drop burrowing clusters of bass; ersatz scratching zips about in synthetic sterility; cyborgian syllabic gurgles orbit in the sonicsphere; clinking metallic hi-hats pitter, programmed percussion patters, electro-rototoms fulminate. In the nucleus of this synergy, The Force issues a “BEAT THIS!” drumline challenge before Baker and Robie throw down their neoteric marching cadence that continues to resonate in the Bonus Beats II and Instrumental version, which are more than mere appendages: rather than rehash the track sans vocals, they recast the quest, bringing into focus the nuances of this crusade. The former features the skeletal percussive elements upon which the proposition was developed (including a brief nod to “Planet Rock”), while the latter celebrates the achievement by reconfiguring its components, culminating in a panoply of recognizable world anthems that collapse to the sounds of nuclear warfare (about which Bambaataa would later rant alongside John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon in 1984’s “World Destruction”). Shortly, the coalition will reconvene to reinvent the elusive ideal that drives them to “keep looking, searching, seeking, finding. . . .” As “Perfect Beat” attests, the reward is in the going.

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See also "Planet Rock" (1982) – Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force.

Surfboard (1967) – Esquivel (Antônio Carlos Jobim)

Arguably, the 1994 Bar None release of Space Age Bachelor Pad Music, which compiled sundry Juan García Esquivel selections, was single-handedly responsible for the mid-century modern revival of the mid-1990s. Its quirky ebullience opened the door for a new generation to lounge in the futuristic atmosphere that the modernists crafted in their architecture, their furniture, their fashion, their cocktails, their music. Capturing this aesthetic, Esquivel’s adaptation of this zippy Antônio Carlos Jobim instrumental is an ambrosial mixture of Star Trek otherworldliness and downtown department store shopping excursion whimsy. Esquivel imbues intrigue, caprice and zest into the exoticism inherent in Jobim’s compositions. “Surfboard” washes ashore on a swell of cymbal and trumpet exclamations, receding to staccato driblets of casino organ, syncopated pecks of wood block, and isochronal dabs of double bass that samba in simpatico rapport. Throughout, celestial female vocables “oohoohoohoohooooh” in astral etherealness, “beedoopbeedahbeedoopbeedaah” fancifully, and “bopbopbopbopbopbopbopbop” with gusto. A hollow-body guitar sneaks furtively through the atrium of an Eichler to partake of splendid vistas through the ceiling-high glass panes of an Eames-adorned living room. At times, Esquivel’s arrangement blends its elements so well, audio mirages insinuate themselves: Is that a duo of women shrieking along with the trumpets in the introduction? Is there whistling along with the organ in the second verse? Such indistinctness enhances the vagaries. In embracing the leisurely modus vivendi of space age bachelors, “Surfboard” serves up a sonic slice of suburban utopia for an artifical atomic age.

Not available from iTunes Music Store.

Buffalo Gals (1982) – Malcolm McLaren & World’s Famous Supreme Team

A quirky amalgam of square dance tradition and an emerging hip-hop movement, “Buffalo Gals” introduced scratching and sampling to the mainstream pop culture in 1982, receiving airplay alongside the likes of Hall and Oates and Foreigner (and a loose reference twenty years later in Eminem’s 2002 single “Without Me”). The fingerprints of Trevor Horn, Anne Dudley, J.J. Jeczalik and Gary Langan—future collaborators in The Art of Noise—are transparently laid throughout, while the introduction of the ironically-named World’s Famous Supreme Team—a pair of New Jersey radio DJs—bring milk crates of street cred to the shindig. Malcom McLaren, former manager of the Sex Pistols and Bow Wow Wow—and mastermind behind this enterprise—plays the part of square dance caller in a funky hoedown that intermingles country folkishness with urban edginess. A Fairlight CMI sampler spits out a throbbing gyroscopic beat, sizzling hi-hats and lumbering pachydermatous toms in a wicked brew fraught with curious soundbites and out-of-kilter keyboard bursts, flavored with malt, hops and fidgety turntables that whip, warble, flutter, scratch and stutter. The Supreme Team take a turn at the mic, spotlighted in an R&B break that hints at The Art of Noise’s later battles in the soundscape.

Finally, the world was given music for buffalo gals and hobos to promenade and do-si-do alongside B-boys bustin’ windmills, 1990’s, flares and headspins. Avant-garde in its eclecticism, “Buffalo Gals” coherently presents its patchwork in a 40 of sonic moonshine.

Not available from iTunes Music Store.

I wear your ring. (1990) – Cocteau Twins

As the true star of this show, Simon Raymonde’s bass glides in liquid suspension, floating over an ocean of droning synth, a synthetic reef of drum machine, and shallow crests of guitar, sliding from pillar to post with fluidity and impetus in dictating the chordal undertone. Elements augment each other in counterpoint, resolving harmonic tension in prismatic fission and fusion. Elizabeth Fraser’s voice is a species unto itself: rich—at times supernal—with a warm timbre that imbues her vocals with resplendence as it escalades and alights between alto and soprano in seraphic grandeur. The lyrics . . . oh, the lyrics are unimportant, especially since only Fraser knows what she’s singing. They serve their purpose in spurts, though—their intelligibility weaving in and out intermittently due to Fraser’s thick Scottish brogue, euphonic modules allowing glimpses of lucidity between waves of kaleidoscopic beauty.

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Numbers/Computer World 2 (1981) – Kraftwerk

The electro-funk movement found its progenitor in Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Forces’ “Planet Rock,” which in turn owed its foreboding space-synth hook to Kraftwerk’s “Trans Europe Express,” and its ubiquitous beat to Kraftwerk’s “Numbers.”

In the vacuum of a space station interrogation chamber, the listener is numerically debriefed in German by cyborgs before being jettisoned into an asteroid field of erratic tone modulations: satellites orbiting an austere synthetic beat that would find immortality as the foundation for “Planet Rock.” Soon, pulses of energy oscillate in belts of pattering palpitations across the sonic spectrum. An androidial master of ceremonies sputters granular German gurgles in a counting symposium of international robotics, inviting exchanges in Speak & Spell™ English, French, and Spanish. Periodically, a decomposing Cylon interjects in obfuscated Italian drawls. A Japanese duo of geisha automatons chime in, while a Russian numericist finally realizes that it takes simultaneous formant and carrier signals to activate a vocoder. The colloquium seamlessly transitions into “Computer World 2,” in which synthesizer découpage sparingly laminates “Numbers” before the dialogue disintegrates into garbled chatter.

Listen to "Numbers" and purchase from iTunes Music Store.

Listen to "Computer World 2" and purchase from iTunes Music Store.

The Purple Bottle (2005) – Animal Collective

Reminiscent of Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue,” resonant Taiko-esque drums throb out a ritualistic cadence, coupled with clattering rim-clicks that skitter across the expanse of Animal Collective’s habitat. Kaleidoscopic brushes of sonic watercolors pirouette about, suspended in an indistinct gestalt of guitars above an enchanted lake of piano echoes, coalescing into purple hues indicative of an intense adoration: Prince—he knows all about it. “The Purple Bottle” is a williwaw of nervous energy, all clickity-clack and yakitty-yak—the Beach Boys on amphetamine, quaffing a caffeinated cocktail of reverb and balderdash, Willy Wonkan wackiness and Bacchanalian abandon. A frenzied strain of erratic lyrics spit out in a loopy streams of consciousness celebrating the disorienting swirl of infatuation as the Purple Bottle is unceremoniously uncorked: a heart chock full o’ ecstasy gushing forth; wine pouring out in an elixir of dizzying intoxication; Barbara Eden coaxed out of her confines to grant her master’s wishes. Moments of repose settle in as the hullabaloo adjourns for a recess of subliminal mumbles, mews and murmurs before morphing into the playful clicks of one drumstick striking another being held out and thrown down into the snare amid a mélange of joyous whoops and exuberant exclamations, floor tom wallops, ripples of snare and a dash of cymbal. With the blithe zestfulness of a Milton Bradley™ jingle, “The Purple Bottle” waxes amorous, punch-drunk and slap-happy after being bludgeoned by the fierce charms of “a girl that likes to drink with horses,” “knows her Chinese ballet,” and “smell[s] like fruity nuts and good grains.” Veritable sonic lager on tap.

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Monochrome (1997) – The Sundays

(Part Four of The Moon In The Mind’s Eye tetralogy)

Subdued trumpets transport us back to a moment when the world gathered to watch the July 20, 1969 lunar landing. With childlike fascination, Harriet Wheeler’s delicate voice fondly recalls the hazy details of a night long ago, as if watching an old 8mm film. Wheeler uses the grammatically incorrect “me and my sister” to suggest that she was young at the time (6, in fact), when the siblings surreptitiously spied upon the guests who had gathered around the sitting room telly in the early morning hours.

At the foot of the staircase, the girls watch the astronauts bound sluggishly across the surface of the moon, as if puppets suspended on wires, cavorting on a surreal stage. Guitar notes waver in elasticity, a state of weightless buoyancy. Wheeler recalls the comfort of hearing adult laughter—familiarity amidst the curious event they are witnessing—and the momentous beauty of the world celebrating in unison. Perhaps Wheeler also wistfully laments the loss of childhood innocence—the days when she could put blind faith in things she did not understand.

Wheeler takes one last pull at the heartstrings by reminding us of the awe and fanciful perspective of childhood we eventually leave behind—marveling at the dangerous romance of space exploration and the uncertainty of what it all means: “And I run to look in the sky and / I half expect to hear them asking to come down / Will they fly or will they fall?” Quite possibly, to this day, a part of her still wonders. . . .

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Good Morning, Captain (1991) – Slint

“Good Morning, Captain” is one of the finest moments in music—an exercise in purposeful dynamics and poetic storytelling cloaked in barely audible murmurs. The prevailing opinion is that the lyrics are a tribute to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem, The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner. However, if one wishes to fit the lyrics into some sort of logical framework, liberties must be taken to expand upon The Rime to enter the world of, say, The Sixth Sense, The WB/CW’s Supernatural, or CBS’s Ghost Whisperer. In that this song has assumed legendary proportions, a possible reading follows:

[Out of the silence, a lonely guitar materializes, plinking out eerie intervals. Suddenly, a second guitar adds to the dissonance, a bass guitar drones in discord with itself, and impeccably recorded drums—all sizzling hi-hats, cutting brass snare, bellowing tom-toms and cymbal washes—slog an unearthly procession through the darkness.]

A violent storm has shipwrecked a trade vessel. The entire crew has perished, save for the captain, who has washed ashore upon a desolate beach. When he comes to, it is dawn. He notices a solitary house not far from where he lays, its windows dimly illuminated. He drags himself across the sand toward the house and stumbles onto the doorstep, whimpering to be let inside as the morning chill bites into him.

[The procession stops momentarily for a brief salvo of guitar and drums. The guitars join the cadence of the bass in a distinctly ominous refrain as supernatural forces converge.]

No one answers the door. The excruciating pain in his head is relentless, causing him to lose consciousness. He awakens to find the waves lapping upon the foot of the porch. A rustling sound at the window catches his attention.

[Shortly, amid an eruption of guitars and drums, thunderous toms roll and cymbals crash like lightning across a blustery sky. Suddenly, in the eye of the storm, a guitar pick plinks muted tones as if an extinguished spirit is re-materializing.]

The captain sees a child peeking at him through the window, apprehensively, knowingly. The boy has been withdrawn and reclusive since his father, the captain of a trade vessel, was lost at sea a year ago. On occasion, as now, the boy hears a voice from outside that asks to be let in. He recoils from the window, withdrawing from the murmured plea.

[The instruments recede, leaving the plaintive strains of a lone guitar.]

A glimmer of recognition flashes through the captain’s mind. There is a strange familiarity about these waterlogged steps, the weatherbeaten door, the boarded window on the second floor. Although disoriented, the captain now recalls the tears of the son he left behind the day he set sail. He whispers a remorseful apology through the door.

[Suddenly, distorted guitars, roiling bass and hammering drums consolidate and swell, as if a rogue wave is preparing to swallow a ship in its fury.]

The boy knows the voice well. He responds in kind: he misses his father; he’s grown since then.

The captain promises to make up for lost time. The boy struggles to overcome the grip of his fear, longing, and regret, knowing full well what happens next . . . every time.

Finally mustering the courage, he flings open the front door. Alas, he is greeted by the sound of waves crashing upon the shore, a frigid wind . . . and an empty doorstep.

Again.

An anguished howl peals from the doorway into the salty air, as the boy cries out: “I MISS YOU!!!”

The wails fuel a torrent of churning guitars, which cast off overdriven harmonic overtones amid explosions of snare and cymbals. The ocean shatters the ship to pieces, engulfing the crew in the maelstrom, discarding flotsam, and the captain, upon the shore. As the whitewash of guitars ebbs, the captain lies motionless on the sand.

When he comes to, it is dawn. He notices a solitary house not far from where he lays. . . . Good morning, Captain.

* [Lyrics from the song are italicized.]

Not available from iTunes Music Store.