Never forget?

We will never forget Vietnam. We will never forget the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. On October 7 next year, Page One of The New York Times (if there still is a Page One) may even memorialize the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. But today, March 20, 2009, there is no space reserved on the front page for the Iraq War, now beginning its sixth year.

Just as Afghanistan's was the less-important war last year, Iraq's is a low priority this year. As Afghanistan and Pakistan have exploded into the public consciousness, violence in Iraq "has flattened at the lowest level since the war began six years ago." Iraq's provincial elections "took place in a remarkably peaceful climate" (although, at least five candidates were assassinated). The status-of-forces agreement signed by the U.S. and Iraqi governments in late 2008 "will reduce boots on the ground and U.S. influence on Iraqi matters." President Obama has vowed to end combat operations by August 2010. Last month, Obama told the world: "Iraq's future is now its own responsibility."

A year ago today, I wrote on this blog: "The question of American responsibility remains fixed in reality; it always will. Let's proceed with that question on our minds." Even I, in a sense, have moved on: to music, to the war in northern Uganda, to the crisis in Zimbabwe. Like so many others, the recession haunts me like a poltergeist. But I still believe that even after all of our troops leave Iraqi soil two years from now (if all goes according to plan), we as Americans must still consider our responsibility to Iraq. We can work to find secure living situations for the millions of Iraqi refugees; or donate to progressive cultural institutions in the country, like the Iraqi National Library and Archive. We can just read a few great books to learn more about the nation that our nation has invaded and occupied, and to understand the war's historical implications.

I understand that this will be a struggle. This past year has brought so much hope, but there have also been so many dark days. Many of us will forever reserve this day for memories and tears, for the contemplation and recognition of innumerable sacrifices and scars. But for many Americans, recent memory has cast a pall over those of the past.

My musical doppelganger rears its ugly head

Postscript:

"My name is Jonas!" -Weezer

Ever since I hiked through the Mission Valley showroom with my mom before moving to New York City to start college five years ago, I've always hated Ikea. The labyrinth of home supplies, flat pack furniture and jars of lingonberry jam (labeled "IKEA FOOD") in Red Hook was no less disorienting and exasperating. But once I reached the section of desks and workstations, I felt content. That's where I found this concoction of particleboard and beige, ersatz-wood veneer: starkly practical, big, and ideal. Writing this here feels like therapy.


***

I've been meaning to write an entry about this - for that matter, I've been meaning to write about a lot of things - but writing has become practically impossible. All I have by way of desk space at home is a cramped particle board desk burdened with impractical cubby holes, plus a metal folding chair, rusty and blue. My Macbook is crippled and sputtering - its battery is fried, the keyboard has gone mad, the CD-rom drive is broken, and a series of USB hook-ups (external hard-drive, external CD-rom drive, external mouse, external keyboard) keep it on life support. The act of sitting down to read a single article, or to write a single sentence, is torture. If I was dead and hellbound, I would probably be condemned to spend eternity writing a novel in this very room. This week, I'm going to melt the folding chair into a concentrated ball and fire it into the sun. I will tear the panels of my desk to pieces with my bare hands, drink the blood that spills from my veins in order to revitalize my spirit, and huck the chunks like silver Frisbees to the moon. I will conjure a tornado inside my room; it will sweep up all ill elements and carry them into the stars. I will consult with Harmonia to make a new room. In the mean time, I will tell you this from my work desk:

Some good friends of mine run a record label called the 8088 Record Collective, and a song of mine went onto the collective's latest two-disc compilation, The 8088 Record Collective Compilation Vol. III, which features 22 fantastic tracks by musicians and bands from across the United States, namely Arkansas, Texas, North Carolina and New York. To learn more, check out this informative infomercial.

To hear more of my music, check out the Two Eyes Meet Myspace page. To obtain a copy of The 8088 Record Collective Compilation Vol. III, e-mail me or visit 8088's Last.fm page.

Franco & Le TPOK Jazz, "Francophonic: A Retrospective Vol. 1 1953-1980" (Sterns Africa; 2008)

Franco & Le TPOK Jazz wasn’t so much a band as an institution. Led by the eminent François Luambo Makiadi—le Grand Maître, the Sorcerer of the Guitar, the posthumous Commander of the Order of the Leopard of former Zaïre, or simply Franco—the band helped forge the immensely influential Afro-Cuban style once known as African rumba, now called soukous, out of clavé rhythms, the arpeggios and solos of the sebene, and of course Franco’s wicked guitar. The always impressively large band didn’t itself invent the genre, but Franco and co. certainly were its champions. For anyone curious about the history of African popular music, Francophonic is an invaluable resource, distilling Franco & Le TPOK Jazz’s humongous output (by one estimate, the band released many as 150 albums in four decades) into a two volume set. This first installation features 28 carefully selected tracks, a glossy booklet full of photos (including one of a smiling Franco in traditional garb groping a woman’s breast), and a detailed and insightful essay by compiler Ken Braun, mapping the band’s evolution from a scrappy beerhall act into an intercontinental powerhouse.

Franco is legendary for his silvery guitar licks—elongated, harmonious, and sliding. But as Braun writes, he was more than just a great guitarist. In many ways, he embodied the revolutionary transitional age from which he emerged: the years when the Belgian Congo became Zaïre; when the government’s preferred language went from French to Lingala; when the eminent political leader Patrice Lumumba suffered a grisly assassination and Mobutu Sese Seko ascended to power, introducing pro-West policies, platitudes on African “authenticity,” and torture chambers reserved for political prisoners. Over a long and highly successful career in which he ballooned into a 300-pound gourmand, Franco was a folk hero and something of a playboy, a cautious patron of Mobutu who indulged in European fashions and penned songs in French, Spanish, Lingala, and Kintandu, the tribal language of his mother. He had few qualms about setting sophisticated arrangements to endorsements of commercial products (who knew that the 1973 hit “AZDA,” with its sly guitar and six-part harmonies, was actually a one-off advertising a Volkswagen dealership?) or tributes to the Mobutu regime’s policies. But his verses, sung in the mbwakela lyric style, were also known to deliver acidic criticisms masked in allegory. “Liberté,” a romantic African bolero of jangling guitar and piercing horns, is ostensibly about an authoritarian wife, but nobody can ignore the subtext of a line like, “Since you’ve confiscated my passport I’m determined to regain my liberty.” Franco’s patronage seemed to bolster Mobutu’s own popularity, but it ultimately failed to save him from state harassment—he and his bandmates were even thrown in jail once, on the pretext of writing “obscene” songs, after the public got hold of some particularly nasty bootlegs.

The most fascinating aspect of this compilation is Braun’s essay, which examines the importance of each track with lyrical passages and a bit of historical analysis, working as a useful adjunct to the tracks themselves. Disc one shows us the early years of Franco’s career. Opener “Esengo ya mokili” is one of Franco’s first studio takes, recorded in August 1953 with the help of his street urchin friend Dewayon. Throwing down a driving samba, the two of them are already lauding themselves, singing: “Let the priests Dewayon and Franco and the others / sing a rumba.” By 1957, with the singer Vicky Longomba as a de facto frontman, the bandmates are introducing their motto in the comparatively dainty “On entre OK, on sort KO”: One enters O.K., one leaves knocked out, a point they clarify with the sultry guitar, pared down rhythm, and striking vocal harmonies of “Tcha tcha tcha de mi amor.” As the Congo gained its independence in 1960, Le OK Jazz grew to twenty but Longomba dropped out, to be replaced with songwriters-vocalists Mujos Mulamba and Kwamy Munsi, who conjures swing-like razzle-dazzle with “Bolingo ya bougie,” replete with punctuating bass, plucky guitar, and another one of those oblique multi-part vocal harmonies the band is famous for. “Ku Kisantu kikwenda ko” (“I will not go to Kisantu”) is decidedly more cryptic, a take on an old song from Franco’s mother’s village, with a subdued guitar and an opening sketch that perhaps alludes to the witchcraft of a neighboring village.

Disc two takes us through the ’70s, after the tragic death of Franco’s brother Marie-Marie, a short hiatus, and a transformation of the band: Franco added the acronym for “Tout Puissance,” triumphantly dubbing his band Franco & the Almighty O.K. band. (O.K. meant, alternately, Oscar Kashama, his OK Bar, and, as Braun puts it, “Yeah! Everything’s cool.”) At their height, Franco and his bandmates have been known to fill half of an LP with one grooving song, allowing them to develop the transitional soukous style. This they do in “Chèrie Bondowe 2,” with Franco working off a light bass line with shiny ascending guitar licks as the vocalists and musicians come in and out; just past the halfway mark, the band suddenly moves into a hot double-time finish. “Kinsiona” (Kintandu for “Grief”) and “Mambu ma miondo” (“The problem of land”) are meditative and mournful, with haunting vocal harmonies soaked in reverb, respectively reflecting the tragedies of Marie-Marie’s death and the post-colonial wars. Closing on the ten-minute, drum machine-laden oddity “Nalingaka yo yo te” (“I don’t like you”), Braun has shown us the signposts of an oeuvre full of wit, pomp, and sadness, but he notes that there still are ten more years to go before le Grand Maître stops strumming.

Franco must have known he was on to something when he crafted his first guitar out of tin at the age of seven. Now, his kind of languorous phrasings are so omnipresent that they show up in anything from Vampire Weekend to Ugandan dance music made on FL Studio. If you haven’t before heard the African rumba evolve before your ears into the proper soukous, then Francophonic is what you need.

Rating: 80%

:: myspace.com/letpokjazz

Published today on Cokemachineglow.

Marion Maerz, "Burt Bacharach Songbook" (Reprise Records/Bureau B; 1971/2009)

For every pop singer who achieves celebrity status, there are dozens whose budding music careers tank before their fame fully blossoms. It’s a story so common that the list of names could go on forever, if only we hadn’t forgotten them all. In Germany forty years ago, that’s what happened to the sprightly young pop singer Marion Maerz (who, it’s worth noting, had a comeback in the ’90s and emerged again in the ’00s). Burt Bacharach Songbook was supposed to revivify her career, a sign of her refinement and maturity, but it ended up a commercial failure. Now that 38 long years have passed, the record is getting another chance. Largely forgotten except by collectors, emblematic of so many grand ambitions and ill-fated dreams, Burt Bacharach Songbook might finally win Maerz the recognition she never received back in the ’70s. But it seems more likely that these stale arrangements will fall into obscurity once more.

Putting on Burt Bacharach Songbook feels like opening a time capsule and peering into the ephemeral pleasures of another age, one that bears a striking resemblance to today. Maerz practically lived the short life of an American B-level pop star, getting a spot on a Pepsi-sponsored talent show as she studied to be a secretary, losing the contest but winning a contract with Polydor, shooting to the top of the charts with her first single, “Er Ist Weider Da,” and then steadily falling out of fashion over the next decade or so. Coming in the twilight of her fame, Burt Bacharach Songbook feels strangely anachronistic. Maerz’s bright voice, reciting Bacharach lyrics in German with subdued rolling Rs, exudes a teeny-bopper’s coy innocence. On the other hand, Ingfried Hoffmann’s stale band-orchestra ensemble arrangements—with its grooveless rhythm section, mock-triumphant horns and hyper-dramatic strings—are fit for a washed-up celebrity living out their last years in a Las Vegas amphitheater. This is supposed to be Maerz’s prime, but it sounds like she has already passed it—without having grown up in the first place.

With the recession in full swing, this re-release couldn’t have come at a worse time. Burt Bacharach Songbook faces a tough American audience—so many of them reared, no less, on the laws of fame that spelled Maerz’s demise forty years ago and that, on American shores, are now explicitly enforced on American Idol. Burt Bacharach Songbook probably won’t pass the muster of the disagreeable Simon, or win nearly as many sales as Taylor Hicks’ next record, but it still deserves a second round. If anything, it can assure all those who failed to make the cut that even the obscurest stars have their day. (For all I know, Maerz has a cult following that has been waiting on this re-release for decades.) Only time will tell how successful Burt Bacharach Songbook will be this time around, but one thing is certain: even if it languishes, it’s not disappearing any time soon if it goes up for sale online.

Rating: 50%
As it appeared on the Glow today

Dinky, "May Be Later" (Vakant; 2008)

Under the moniker Dinky, Alejandra Iglesias has run much of techno’s worldwide gauntlet. She was born in Santiago and she’s cool with fellow Chilean producers Luciano and Ricardo Villalobos. She lived in New York City during the grimy, golden rave days of NASA and currently resides in Berlin, long a hotbed for minimal techno. In an oevure spanning the past nine years, she’s matched a dance background and an avant-garde sensibility reminiscent of Arthur Russell with the limber grooves of her Chilean confederates and the more mechanical thumps of the Berliners, conjuring an exquisitely elaborate swagger.

May Be Later‘s nine tracks are variegated “four to the floor” stomps, powered by beefy kicks and jumpy wet bass lines, overlaid with metallic percussion, ricocheting congas, dancing laser shots and unpredictable clicks and clacks. In “Mars Cello,” bizarre vocoder vocals coo over a racing heart beat rhythm and the disjointed plucking of what sounds like one of John Cage’s prepared pianos. “Fademein” takes off like a pixilated rocket ship with a squawking bass and Jorge Gonzáles’ sexy robot vocals. Atop the glassy scraping and harsh hi hat of “Sunday Set” lies a liquidy loop, jazzy keyboards and, finally, a funky modulated synth. It’s refined party music, intricately composed and hard-driving.

May Be Later is the kind of record that seems to transform depending on how loud you play it. Put it on low and it’s mellow morning music. Crank up the woofers and it’s a wacky romp. So if $18.98 for CD or $22.98 for vinyl feels like to high a retail price, think of it as a two in one deal.

Rating: 73%

:: myspace.com/dinkydj

Published Friday on The Glow.

Kusikia, "Turtle Wars" (Self-released; 2008)

In the East African language of KiSwahili, kusikia means both to hear and to feel. Clearly, this Portland-based duo of guitar and drums understands that sound is a vibration and music a nutrient, coursing through you, injecting energy into your body. In the case of Turtle Wars, though, music sometimes feels more like the fever cycles of malaria, with unrestrained outbursts taking hold of lilting refrains.

Kusikia has the angular edge of Slint and the languid attitude of Delta blues, cultivating a live sound in which things like loop pedals are conspicuously absent. But really there is no saying exactly where this band is coming from, although one might presume that it’s a despairing realm. Then again, right before guitarist Nsayi Matingou throws down the deep and swaying theme of “D,” she lets out a happy giggle. Like “D,” tracks “Danger” and “Trouble” follow a similar improvisation-friendly structure—and they are just as foreboding: Matingou puts down a heady guitar line, singing in rich murmurs over Peter Ryan’s intricate drums as the tension builds; finally it erupts into malarial tremors of gnarled riffs and skittering crashes, only to return ever more gently to the original motif. The driving beat and cutting chords that open “Heart,” and the propulsive three-chord bass and hoe-down beat to follow, offer an invigorating change of pace. “Rumbly” forms the album’s fever pitch, beginning with a crushing blast that segues into a strained, stabbing motif. As Ryan clobbers his toms and cymbals, Matingou repeats creepily, “I just wanna be friends.” The mood lifts at the end of closer “War,” when Matingou breaks into laughter. Ryan, with his wacky shrieking, seems to indicate that the fever has passed.

Yet it’s not finished. Kusikia has been tearing across the northwest and, in due course, their bruising but brittle sound is sure to materialize in recorded form again—indeed, like most strains of a defeated malarial fever. Unlike such a scourge, however, many listeners will be more than happy to welcome Kusikia’s heavy doses of catharsis into their body.

Rating: 71%

:: myspace.com/kusikia

This review was published Wednesday on Cokemachineglow.

The Best Business Names in America

Bringing a close to an update hiatus, I present to you the latest Best Business Names in America list, which I've compiled since August in my capacity as an employee of GMP. (Check out the previous lists here and here.) Feel free to e-mail me with any suggestions for the next list.

He Who Eats Mud

The Cloak and Dagger

Negod Gwad

Lucky Wang 2

The Flying Carp

Ain’t That a Frame

Xtreme Bean!

Don’t Eat The Furniture

Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary

Robot Village

Fingerhut

Crafty Olde German

The Butler's Secret

Butler University

Stoner, Inc.

High As A Kite

Hip Hop Horses & Decked Out Dogs

Gonzo Parenting

Paranoid Parents Stop Worrying Shop

The Portable Baby

Gypsy Baby

I Know You Like A Book

La De Da Books

Shrine of the Black Madonna Bookstore

Whimsicality

Sharondipity

Pow! Science!

Whoops! & Co.

Screamin' Monkeys

No More Monkey Business

Globsterpotamus

The Wacky Shack

Cardthartic, LLC

Ro Sham Beaux

Coolest Toys On Earth

Shoplift.com