Terry Ork in his punk rock bunker. Unlike most record execs, Terry was content with a cheap 14th street stereo system. The kind the people who bought his label’s records could afford.
Terry Ork’s loft was a safe house for unsafe music. With money he made working at my favorite store devoted to the movies, the long gone Cinemabilia, Ork funded one of the few really great DIY labels to come out of New York City, Ork Records. Releasing 45rpm records by Television, Alex Chilton, Mick Farren, The Feelies and The Marbles, among others, Ork had a great feel for what made Manhattan’s downtown music scene special.
I would go to Cinemabilia to thumb through the movie books, magazines and posters. I really loved the place and I grew to really like Terry Ork. We’d shoot the shit on film and that’s what I knew him as, a film geek. Although I was a musician with a decidedly punk outlook, I had no idea that Terry had an indie label until one day when I was in Cinemabilia he handed me a record with the Ork label on it. The record was a single by Television called “Little Johnny Jewel” and it occupied both sides of the seven inch vinyl. My already high esteem for Mr. Ork escalated into the stratosphere.
From the Daily Mirror newspaper, 1978 (uploaded by Cornershop15)
This 1978 essay on the cultural meaning of disco by the respected British musicologist Simon Frith (author of Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music and Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock ‘n’ Roll) was recently unearthed and re-published by the ever excellent DJHistory.com.
It goes some way towards highlighting the difference in appreciation of the genre on both sides of the Atlantic—it always seemed to me that disco never had the cultural impact in the UK that it had in the States, possibly because of the distinct ethnic and social heritage of the music—while Britain had to wait another ten years to experience its own genuine dance revolution.
What is common on both sides of the Atlantic, and of interest to anyone who likes disco music or lived through these years, was the sneering derision the genre faced from rock listeners and their corresponding press. It took another 20 to 30 years to rehabilitate disco’s reputation, and it’s interesting to read these very criticisms usually levelled by the music media coming from a self-professed disco fan:
In public I’m into punk like everybody else (saviour of rock ‘n’ roll’s soul and all that) but privately I’m a junk rock junkie and the junkiest music of all is disco. Everybody hates it. Hippies hate it, progressives hate it, punks hate it, teds hate it, NME hates it, even Derek Jewell hates it.
Disco is music for the disillusioned. It isn’t art: no auteurs in disco, just calculated dessicating machines. It isn’t folk: no disco subcultures, no disco kids seething with symbolic expression It isn’t even much fun: no jokes, no irony, only a hard rhythmed purposefulness. Disco is the sound of consumption. It exists only in its dancing function: when the music stops all that’s left is a pool of sweat on the floor. And disco’s power is the power of consumption. The critics are right: disco is dehumanising – all those twitching limbs, glazed-eyed, mindless. The disco aesthetic excludes feeling, it offers a glimpse of a harsh sci-fi future. ‘What’s your name, what’s your number?’ sings Andrea True in my current favourite single, and it’s not his telephone number she wants, but his position in the disco order of things. The problem of pogoing, I’ve found, is not that it’s too energetic for anyone over 30 years and 11 stone, but that it requires too much thought.
Popular music has always been dance music; disco is nothing but dance music. It has no rock’n’roll connotations; off the dance floor it is utterly meaningless, lyrically, musically and aesthetically. Every disco sound is subordinate to its physical function; disco progress is technological progress. The end doesn’t change but the means to that end, the ultimate beat, are refined and improved – hence drum machines, synthesisers, 12” pressings. And disco is dance music in the abstract, content determined by form. Popular dance music of the past, in the 1930s say, was a form determined by its content. The content was developed by dance hall instructors and sheet music salesmen and band leaders whose rules of partnership, decorum, uplift and grace, can still be followed in ‘Come Dancing’: the music is strictly subordinate to the conventions of flounce and simper. In contrast, when Boney M, German manufactured black American androgynes, sing for our dancing pleasure, ‘Belfast’, it means nothing at all. Any two syllables arranged and sounding just so would do and how we dance to them is, of course, entirely our own affair. There are no rules in disco, it’s just that individual expression means nothing when there’s nothing individual to express. I trace disco back to the twist, the first dance gimmick to be taken seriously and the first dance step to be without any redeeming social feature. I blame disco on Motown, the first company to realise that if the beat is right, soul power can be expressed without either the passion or emotion that made it soul power in the first place.
You can read the rest of the essay here. In the meantime, here’s something by Andrea True Connection. It’s not “What’s Your Name What’s Your Number?” as mentioned in the essay itself, as I’ve never been a big fan of that track. Instead it’s an earlier gem by the band that predates the awfully similar sounding “Is It Love You’re After” by Rose Royce by a good three years:
Another great vintage Talking Heads concert, this one an energetic outing at the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, TX on September 9, 1979 during the Fear of Music tour.
The set list:
Artists Only
Stay Hungry
Cities
Paper
Mind
Heaven
The Book I Read
Air
Warning Sign
Love - Building On Fire
Found A Job
Memories Can’t Wait
Psycho Killer
There’s more great live Talking Heads footage on the recently released Talking Heads: Chronology DVD.
The photos you are looking at were shot by Jon Jackson back in July, 1982 during the Brixton Academy stop of The Clash’s “Casbah Club Tour.” Jon’s son, who is a Redditor, posted this little back story about his dad and the photos:
My dad was born in Cambridge in the 50’s, growing up very close to David Gilmour and other members of Pink Floyd - he has always followed the Cambridge music scene very closely and has seen many of their influential concerts. He lived in London during the 70’s and early 80’s, experiencing the cataclysm of culture and music which living with certain people during that time became. He toured with The Clash, The Beat and Bob Marley, there might be more but these are the ones I know about.
I chose six shots of The Clash from Jon Jackson’s Flickr set, but you can see the rest here.
Bonus: Jon also captured The Beat at Nottingham in1982. You can view those here.
Of all the national TV broadcasters in the UK, Channel 5 has the worst reputation. Its content is sensationalist and downmarket (it’s where the declining Big Brother show has gone to die) but this advert-scheduling screw-up really takes the biscuit. The fact they had a documentary on Whitney’s life and death barely a week after her passing says a lot, but what’s even worse is that nobody at the station seemed to think the two adverts featured here might clash just a tiny wee bit…
Flying Lotus and Harry Smith, two great tastes that taste great together!
Tomorrow night, our friends at Cinefamily present this inspired avant garde pairing:
Reprising an unforgettable show commissioned for the Ann Arbor Film Festival, L.A.’s own Flying Lotus joins Animation Breakdown for a unique screening of animator/folk music archivist/string figure enthusiast/culture hound extraordinaire Harry Smith’s 66-minute animated collage film Heaven and Earth Magic. The marriage of Smith’s ‘50s folk art mindset and Flying Lotus’ genre-defying 21st century sound may seem at odds, but they are both equally brilliant alchemical cut-and-paste samplers of world culture—and as kindred as spirits can get. Heaven and Earth Magic is a testament to the ability of animators to act as magicians, breathing life into even the most static, eyeworn 19th-century imagery—and as Flying Lotus contributes audio from disparate yet familiar sources (drum machine, turntable, laptop, synthesizer), two giants of sampling unite across time, and Smith’s playful experiments are imbued with a new, positively cosmic energy. This is one-of-a-kind live pairing you are not likely to see again!
Tickets $12, Tuesday, February 28th, 8:00pm at Cinefamily
Below, an excerpt from Harry Smith’s “Heaven and Earth Magic.” If you aren’t lucky enough to live in LA (I love saying that) as you’re watching it, maybe listen to Cosmogramma?
Songs by The Beatles re-interpreted by The London Jazz Four, from their rare 1967 album of fab covers, Take A New Look at The Beatles. The London Jazz Four were assembled by Steve Race (yes, he of the dummy keyboard fame from quiz show Face the Music), and consisted of Mike McNaught (keyboards), Jim Philip (flute), Brian Moore (bass), Mike Travis (drums). The quartet original cut a couple of vanity tracks, which proved so popular that an album soon followed. The following tracks manage to improvise on the Lennon/McCartney originals, with use of harpsichord, marimba, glockenspiel, and vibraphone, creating a light swinging versions of the songs, which at times develop (“Rain”) and improve (“Michelle”) on the originals.
“Paperback Writer”
“The Things We Said Today”
“Rain”
“Michelle”
“Norwegian Wood”
Bonus: Jerry Fielding and the Hollywood Brass take on The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”
Divorce is a femme-thrash four piece from Glasgow, Scotland, quickly picking up a reputation for being one of the best live acts in the UK. I have posted about Divorce on Dangerous Minds before—a fitting tribute, I felt, to the newly-wed future King of England and his blushing bride—and now the band are back with a new 7” release on Milk Records called “Horseheads,” with a strange accompanying video.
Fans of both spiky, angular post-punk and the heavier end of hardcore will find a lot to like here. Drummer Andy Brown describes their influences as “loud, ugly and offensive. Anything that luxuriates in the joys of noise.” He adds that “genres and middle-class whiteboy whining can get fucked.” I second that emotion.
The video for “Horseheads” features a humanoid-chicken pecking at a pentagram-emblazoned snare drum (a nod perhaps to the infamous ‘Chicken Lady’ character from Kids In The Hall?) but as Brown states:
“The fact that there’s no-one dressed as a horse in the video has not gone unnoticed. The song’s not about horses anyway, it was named after the town that our vocalist Jennie comes from in America - only she really knows what it’s all about!”
There is, indeed, a village in upstate New York called Horseheads that describes itself as the “gateway to the Finger Lakes”. Visitors will be glad to know that, as of the 30th of January 2012, the drinking water from well number five is safe and does NOT require a “boil water advisory”. I don’t know what they’re putitng in the water in Horseheads, but I sure am glad it somehow turned out like this:
Divorce “Horseheads”
For more info on DIvorce (including upcoming tour dates and current releases) visit the Divorce the Band blog.
Legendary punk, post punk, hardcore, hip-hop, photographer (and Dangerous Minds pal) Glen E. Friedman gives an excellent interview to Paradigm Magazine. He discusses Occupy Wall Street, the importance of your voice being heard in political debate and the importance of of having a rebellious attitutude:
If you’re inspired to do something, if you want to do something, if you have some kind of feeling that you should do something … then you should just do it; don’t let what other people’s preconceived ideas of good behavior, or whatever it is, limit you to thinking what you should and shouldn’t do.
DVD.
