vol #1: welcome
Including blood harmonies, "Enter Dilla," Perez Hilton, and a panic attack from a laced joint
Hi, welcome to 3x3. (Or, per the URL rules: threexthree.substack.com.)
Every so often, we (Jacob & Jack) will pick three songs, write a bit about what they are—or mean to us—and ask the other person if the song connects to them as well. Below our missive, the other person will give their thoughts. At times, it will produce harmony and beautiful agreement: Wow, this is a lovely thing. At other moments—and likely much more often—it will show off one of the more interesting and amusing parts of adoration: People think the things you love are a bit average.
The write-ups of songs will lean toward reviews in tone (read: over the top, sanctimonious, trying too hard, way too long); the responses will often be as straightforward as text messages. It should create a bit of fun frisson. And, hey, you got six or so new songs to listen to every so often.
At the bottom, we may or may not list some extra tracks to listen to, stuff “in the mix,” etc. Basically notable exclusions. At times, as this week, the other person might have an announcement. It’s a blog. Take it for what it’s worth. Calm the hell down.
Why do this? Well, it started because the other week, I (Jacob) sent Jack the song “Everything She Ain’t” by Hailey Whitters. It’s a modern (pop?) country song, running at a tight 2:31 minutes with a quick hit chorus including references to Hank Williams, Corona, and a Tacoma. I adore it. It’s part of a growing country (again pop? I’m not sure?) cohort of women remaking modern country. I’d include in that Carly Pearce, and her album 29, and certainly the fun single “Next Girl.” (When I asked people at work—which is to say on Slack—if they knew Pearce every single person said “no”; but she is quite popular and if the world was a fair place “Next Girl” would be one of the great karaoke songs of our time; everyone learn it!)
Jack responded to my notes on country pop and the Hailey Whitters song: “Sorry can’t listen to this until my 21 minute avant bagpipe song is over.”
That song was “Weave” by David Watson & Matthew Welch.
I told Jack that I wasn’t going to put up with a 21 minute bagpipe song, then listened to it, and responded that I thought it was great.
So, that’s the interaction we’re attempting to capture here. Sharing something we love with the cold knowledge others probably won’t like it and also surprising each other (maybe you?) with music, or our opinions on music, that makes the day more joyful. In the end, it’s about negating what Dave Hickey called a “consensus of desire” and striving for something like the pleasure of community.
JR—1: “Make Him a Soldier” - The Louvin Brothers (1953)
If you do not like country music, and have heard of the Louvin Brothers, it is likely because of the garish cover of their 1959 album Satan Is Real. Two boys, clad in white, stand amidst a fiery hell. They besiege the camera, singing, stepping forward. Behind them stands a poorly constructed cutout of a childish Satan—hardly a danger. Capital Records is in the top left corner. It’s funny. And it is unclear—as it always is with the Louvins—just how much they are “in” on the joke.
The Louvins are famous within country music for their use of “blood,” or close, harmony. They revolutionized the sound. And the usual story of the brothers discusses that harmony and the severing of that blood; Ira, one of the two brothers, died in a car crash in the mid-1960s—after years of drinking that broke up the band.
But I’ve always been fascinated by the pull here of the 1950s Americana element. It’s not only Satan is Real that has an odd cover. They have two other records with Norman Rockwell-esque scenes: Weapon of Prayer and The Family Who Prays. To what extent is this music kitschy? Does that make one like it more? Less?
“Make Him a Soldier” is the last song on the latter of those two records, from 1953. It’s a bouncing affair. And it is the song I think of most often to disprove the Louvin’s as a sideshow, or joke act. Each singer pops in and out like a pogo stick. Multiple times, it feels as if the song is about to die, only for the guitar to start it up again. At under three minutes, the track somehow is stretching itself, a bit too long, and it burbles on. It’s a song about Jesus. Specifically, how He fought for us and we must fight for Him. “Heed now the call.” It’s sometimes embarrassing to be so blunt that you love the Lord and are afraid of hell. That doesn’t make it untrue.
JD: The blood harmony of the Louvin Brothers cause two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see the lord saving souls! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by the lord saving souls! The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a basis of kitsch and blood harmony. I really like the syncopated pop-goes-the-weasel backing vocals that appear intermittently. They make me feel like I’m rowing down a river fed by the lemonade springs from “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” As with certain Roy Orbison and Everly Brothers tracks, there’s an unreality to it all that sounds as if there’s something deeply sinister going on just below the buttoned-up facade.
P.S. Satan is real, and strong, and he’s my friend.
JD—1: “Let’s Take It Back” — Jay Dee [J Dilla] (2003)
Maybe it started with the dissolution of the village. For a long time, nobody wanted to admit that conservatives could be onto something, because any point they might have had was for the wrongest of reasons. Plus, it was uncool to mourn bowling leagues. But something was missing. People, friction, idiosyncrasies, the tangible. It became harder and harder to deny, became a background hum of immiseration that was considered embarrassing to acknowledge. Wonder was the grace of the country, and the tools of that wonder came to learn that humans were an obstacle to smoothed-out efficiency, not a partner in the coalition for progress.
Tech saw this sadness and recognized a need—a potential market opportunity—but one it couldn’t actually fulfill, not exactly. What it offered instead was a panoply of skeuomorphic concerns: wood-paneled digital skins, “It looks like you're writing a letter!,” the shutter sound of cell phone pics, Facebook pokes, chatbots, a portal into an endless series of similarly-alienated individuals making eye contact with you through the front-facing camera.
Enter Dilla. As music production and distribution became lethally inextricable from tech, and MIDI sounds seeking to pass themselves off as acoustic performance proliferated, J Dilla’s music and the living legacy of his approach were a bulwark against all this malnourishment of the soul. Dilla music is proudly digital, but rejects the need to be tethered to any BPM beyond the impulses of heart. Since he chopped his samples in a non-quantized flow that recalls the give-and-take of live musicians, it is easy to get confused by the marketing materials that would have us believe the skeuomorphic world that’s sold to us daily is up to the same thing. It’s not. Dilla’s music doesn’t just recreate the wobbliness of live performance, but also translates human feelings through a digital smear of idiosyncratic glitch music. It breathes, it smells. The name of J Dilla’s hometown group included the word village. He had the antidote.
Take “Let’s Take It Back,” off a mildly-obscure EP Dilla made in the span of a work-week so he could have something to listen to while he drove around. It’s not hard to imagine a version of the song produced by someone like the Alchemist, straightened into a diamond-clear loop that doesn’t stray from the pocket. Instead, it begins with a complete splintering of the beat, a simple melody of harpsichordic sounds overlaid and pixellated into fragmentation. A live musician probably couldn’t play this, not exactly, but its disorienting effect is instantly resonant, musically and emotionally. The song soon enters a more recognizably boom-bap mode, but never fully emerges from the haze of its opening gambit, some of which repeats over raps and a flagging kick and snare. Its refrain is about partying (and we’re treated to a “Hot in Herre” reference), but we’re firmly in the realm of dreams—a powerful land of human emotions that computers still can’t map, let alone mimic. And just as soon as the song gets going, it’s gone. Like Dilla, like us.
JR: As usual, I begin by noting I had to look up a word—in this case “skeuomorphic” (which you used twice!)—and I still honestly am struggling with it because I’m dense. Anyway. Loved the beat on this song. Listening to like an hour of J Dilla beats after. Always great.
Lyrics missed me on first few listens. Went back to it, and saw this line: “I had a dream 'bout my man last night / And his name is, Frank-N-Dank, that's what's up.”
That’s so funny. We are saying “that’s what’s up” about our dreams now!? Okay!?
Your thesis about technology sort of half-works for me. I need to think about it more. Loved the detail about him making it for his car though. (Just like me recording myself singing Slanted and Enchanted in Garage Band and then accidentally burning it on a CD I had in my Mom’s car!!)
JR—2: Sizzlin’ Hot - Paradise (1981)
Disco joy from 1981 Bermuda that was reissued in 2017 to some adoration. I heard for it for the first time about two weeks ago and, ever since, it’s been on repeat. Basically from three seconds into this, you know it’s going to be great. It has the shuffle.
I think the reason I enjoy it most of all is because it’s affirmative. The first lyric: “You are / Sizzlin’ Hot.” The voice here is crisp. It cuts through, and somehow from there the song builds. This is a rather dumb, maybe niche thing, but I really love songs that are nice—overtly kind—in the second person. You are sizzlin’ hot. Me? Thanks!
Oh and at about 1 minute and 43 seconds in, when the beat drops away, and she begins to say you have made her happy, happy, happy. Glorious.
(This is also the song that I was listening to when we were biking to the Rockaways on President’s Day and then we swerved into the nature reserve and…I flipped over my handlebars. Sense memory, Proustian joy, mud in my face.)
JD: I find this one oppressively upbeat. It makes me feel like I’m stuck in a Best Buy clearance sales event commercial. (Come on down to Willowbrook Mall—one weekend only!) I might have even called certain elements paint-by-number, such as the splash of piano glissando as the beat drops.
I know this song well, and initially couldn’t recall how. Thanks to the long memory of my text message archive, I found myself sharing it with multiple friends two years ago, after I discovered it on a list of Dan Snaith’s picks that Bandcamp Daily published. (Dan also remixed the song to make it unnecessarily fast. Even more oppressive. Perez Hilton liked it though.) At the time, I wrote things like “immediately entered into my ‘got control of the aux’ rotation” and “f/w/this”—which I share in full disclosure of my taste’s fickleness. I’m currently under the weather, so it’s possible I can’t summon the right energy to enjoy a tune designed for ripping up the dance floor. In penance for my inconsistency, I’d like to share these two YouTube comments I found on an upload of the original:
JD—2: “Firecracker” by Martin Denny (1959)
Martin Denny, the so-called Father of exotica, wanted his songs to be "window dressing, a background." The music associated with the term birthed by his post-WWII excursions through the South Seas and beyond tends to be stiflingly lackadaisical. Along with the theremin-sodden lounge music that Neil Armstrong brought to the moon, it served as the Lofi Hip-Hop Beats To Relax or Study To for the era. The genre wants you to come home to your newly-created suburban subdivision after a long day in the gray flannel suit, pour yourself a martini, and take a little sonic vacation to momentarily forget it all. Along with the spread of tiki bars, exotica was part of a post-war returfing of the American understanding of the Pacific, from a setting for war to a hazy fantasyland of relaxation. The same white woman, dressed in foreign garb, graced the cover of more than a dozen of Denny’s albums of canned Shangri-La. Maybe she could be your wife. Guadalcanal who?
“Firecracker,” though, is something else. While certainly an Orientalist vision of Eastern music gleaned from the shadows on the cave wall, there’s nothing relaxing about it. On the surface, it’s inspired by traditional Chinese music (for exotica, a bit of a departure as well), but Denny’s interpretation on vibes and marimbula has as much to do with the grand mania of roughly contemporary American works like “Hoe-down” from Aaron Copland’s Rodeo and the ripping, complicated melodies that Oscar Peterson and Bud Powell were playing around the time. Propulsive and neatly composed, “Firecracker” wants to avoid any tricky questions or irresolution—but all geeked up, it can’t help grinding its teeth along the way, displaying its fundamental uneasiness.
Listening amid such disquietude a few decades later, Haruomi Hosono sought peace in Denny’s work, especially “Firecracker.” During a studio session in Tokyo, Hosono was passed a joint and inhaled. The hit turned out to be laced, triggering a crisis of panic attacks that endured long after that day. Through an inverted postwar experience, he’d grown up hearing American exotica on AM radio as a child, and he returned to the soothing sounds while reading new age books as he sought to handle his anxiety. Even after he’d recovered, Hosono couldn’t shake “Firecracker,” and was obsessed with turning it into a disco hit. He recruited Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi to do just that, and they created Yellow Magic Orchestra in the process. But Hosono was after more than mood improvement with his version. “The thing was to take these western ideas of the exotic, but to subvert them," he reflected in 2008. "With Martin Denny, the exotica is kind of fake. But I am real!"
With its synthetic palette that would come to inspire the transhumanist futurism of Detroit techno and generations of video game music, reality might not be the most obvious descriptor for Yellow Magic Orchestra’s “Firecracker.” But there’s a kind of double negation at play here: the chintzy and cartoonish sounds laugh in the face of Denny’s stereotypical fantasy and at the terrible void of drug-induced panic. Three lefts make a right, and we’re back in the realm of the human. Listen to the way those digital hi-hats sit just behind the beat.
JR: Well, honestly, I fuck with “Diga Dia Doo” and some of the other—shall we say—shittier Denny. All Hosono is good. But, have to admit, his story of redemptive art is much better than that version from the Yellow Magic Orchestra. Not doing it for me. Starts to sound too much like a video game soundtrack at like the 1:28 mark. (Thought we might we get to this “Firecracker”, horrific little ditty, love it—boom, boom, boom!)
JR—3: “Da Kosyv Kosar – Salt Trader’s Song” + “Rozpletala Mene Diadina – Wedding Song” + “Oi Shcho My Skhotily – Wedding Song” — Ensemble Hilka (2011/2015)
On February 21, President Vladimir Putin declared that Russia recognized Donetsk and Luhansk as independent regions. War came after that. The horror of this reminded me of a few things, none of them particularly musical, none of them particularly new, certainly none I would say I should “say.” (I don’t have much to say beyond thinking war is—as the Quakers I grew up around taught me—morally damning. It’s evil. Against God’s will.)
But the thoughts led me to some music. So, here they are: one side of my family comes from a group of nomadic Jews on the border of Ukraine—the Hungarian one, far away from Donetsk; my family’s ‘village’ was not a set place, supposedly my ancestors went across borders constantly; so, in this way we were from a place, but it was not ground or soil; my father’s grandfather moved to Pennsylvania in the early 1900s; my Dad says we do not know exactly if we’re Hungarian or Ukrainian, and it doesn’t matter; or maybe I think that?; in any case, I learned about the village later in life, after reading Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities in college, and that book helped paint the picture here of the myths of nation-states and bust the general idea of concrete borders that inherently belong to any secure set of people—certainly relevant for whether or not Russia can “retake” Ukraine in their flimsy arguments needed to justify neo-imperial power compulsions (beyond the NATO explanation); and all of that is reminiscent of the Germanic nation building exercises—one of the few things that stuck from my degree in folklore—about how the idea of a capital-n Naturalism inspired a series of fascinating people to collect music and culture but also the entire project was to build up nationalism; as part of the current battle over whether Russia can invade there’s a bizarre thing where the US Embassy feels the need to tweet a meme to prove that Ukraine is autonomous and has a set pre-Russian culture—which falls into the same traps over and over, of the idea of the Volk and it makes me think of the Nazis and it makes me of someone saying this is “real and authentic blues music”; I hate that shit.
That’s inchoate. But the gist is that I got a degree in folklore, I adore “folk” music—and field recordings—but it’s hard to escape that the whole practice is (like it or not!) connected to the process of building up a mythical patriotism—or at least myth of inherent naturalisms—that justifies murder and racism and genocide.
Anyway.
All that is how I found this album from Smithsonian Folkways called “Chornobyl Songs Project: Living Culture from a Lost World.” In the 1970s, before the nuclear disaster, the folklorist Yevhen Yefremov collected songs from the region that would be later destroyed. In the 2010s, in collaboration with singers in New York—and then in performances on the 25th anniversary of the nuclear disaster—the songs were performed and recorded. All the records are beautiful. But I really have loved these three songs: Da Kosyv Kosar – Salt Trader’s Song; Rozpletala Mene Diadina – Wedding Song; Oi Shcho My Skhotily – Wedding Song. I’ve listened to them as a suite. (Indulge me on that? Three songs for the price of one? Sorry.)
The one thing I’d say musically here, beyond my screed, is that listening to this it makes complete sense to me that certain pieces of art connect beyond their realm of artistic—they fling to the divine, the spiritual, the eternal, the “natural.” That’s the danger. Music, as these songs are for me, can be so overwhelming to convince you it is not some show, a magic act, but that certain music is True. I believe that myth enough to enjoy these songs but, more than that, I have some half-belief in me that I connect to certain music because of my history. I fear when you start thinking this way, you become an adherent of blood and soil. And yet what else but these myths of identity can be used to explain how art feels it has greater value than just pleasure?
JD: I have no education in folklore, and very little connection to or even knowledge of my family’s various histories and ethnic pasts. So I come to this suite of songs, and folk music in general, from a very different perspective than Jacob. It’s a naive, aestheticist approach (and in some ways a privileged one), but maybe allows me to wear my enjoyment a bit more lightly. Without denying the way that folk music has been employed in the building of exclusionary identity myths—no question—I don’t think these myths explain my appreciation. What appeals to me about folk musics is the way they sometimes feel rough around the edges in ways that more commercial contexts usually deem unacceptable. In both sound and content, they take seriously how goddamned mean the world is, and cherish the joys we have in the face of such hardship. Just as I’m a sucker for this kind of thing when it comes from individual musicians, I love it with more communal music as well. I’m flattening lots here, but this is what sticks out to me about these Chornobyl songs. “Salt Trader’s Song” dirges along, unwilling to deny the sadness of work, endless work, whereas the “Wedding Songs” are so bright and elastic. They remind me, roundaboutly, of some of the Melanesian music used in The Thin Red Line. These songs know how good they have it, if only for a moment.
JD—3: “Misdemeanor” by Foster Sylvers (1973)
When I was a child, I was convinced there was no better sandwich than one eaten on the beach with a dusting of sand sprinkled throughout like oregano. This worked best as an accidental development on a windy day down the shore, but I have vivid memories of intentionally preparing a liverwurst sub this way with far too heavy a pour—and resultantly struggling to choke down a meal more sand than wich.
Although my culinary preferences have evolved since those days, I think I was onto something fundamental about aesthetic greatness with my stupid beach eat: that many forms of conventional beauty are not only made more interesting, but also magnified through the interjection of a bit of ugliness or friction. Add a little stink to the sweet perfume, a hint of barnyard in the pinot grigio, some noise underneath the signal, and the resolving payoff is all the more satisfying. Such intermingling of the unusual and familiar, according to the dubious results of social science research, is an essential ingredient for the stuckness of earworms.
But to understand this, there’s no need for the pretense of a controlled study. Just put on Foster Sylvers’ “Misdemeanor,” a song that would drown in its cuteness were it not saved by the strident. It opens in bizarre parenthesis, with affectless backup singers reading an overdramatic tagline while someone hammers a xylophone alarm many more times than good sense would allow. This only lasts five seconds, before 11-year-old Foster’s perfect before-the-fall vocals come in for the feel good. (Best accompanied by his eponymous album cover’s cheesing perm.) The song’s quick two and a half minutes fluctuate back and forth between these states with tantalizing herky-jerkyness as it carries out a very funny lyrical conversation between Foster and the chorus: “She stole my heart!” he beams. Sure, they say, “but it’s just a misdemeanor—you got to get over it.”
The song (written by his brother Leon) was a big enough R&B hit that little Foster was ushered into his elder siblings’ family band, in an effort to revive a 10-sibling soul group whose prior success had topped out at an appearance on Groucho Marx’s quiz show game. The Sylvers would score a few subsequent hits, but never approached the uniqueness they hit on with “Misdemeanor”’s mix of wit, an enduringly funky bassline, and that annoying xylophone. It’s repeated inclusion is absolutely insane—I love it so much.
JR: No notes. Love it. Banger. A child singing about a parking ticket is…so good. Wish I had picked this one.
(Sorry one dumb note: I love sandwiches and wish people would let me/us/society eat them for dinner more. I guess I can? But like restaurants should have sandwiches for dinner—all of them. French restaurants, too.)
Extras stuff in JR’s mix:
“Back Up Kid” - DJ Nate; “War—Live at the LA Coliseum, 1985”- Bruce; “In the Room” - Tara Clerkin Trio; “I Gotta Get Drunk” - Willie Nelson; “Oiran II”-Meitei; “Bad Complexion” - Spider Bags (I probably won’t write about this but it’s driving me absolutely fucking crazy trying to figure out the lyrics to this song’s best part, which is something to the effect of “Tear down then John Denver had trouble in bed / Now John Denver is dead”; if someone can tell me how John Denver’s “trouble in bed” is getting him “dead,” please let me know.)
Housingkeeping/announcements:
— Jack is not going to say anything. But…pretty cool a piece he has a byline on got a magazine award.
— For Lent, I (JR) am giving up cigs, podcasts, self-criticism as a personality, posting bad jokes on Twitter, and drinking too much when I’m nervous.