Worth 1000: Kevin Costner, Swing Vote, Elton John, and Tequila

MP3: Elton John -”Social Disease”

Hip-Hop Wisdom: Pharoahe Monch’s Lyrics Loop the Loop on “Body Baby”

Pharoahe Monch’s Desire somehow evaded 2007’s best-of lists. In addition to a dozen absolutely blazing beats, Monch (a part-time Diddy ghostwriter) sports a spectrum of rhymes, from fun wordplay to left-field philosophizing to good old-fashioned self-hype. Here’s an example of the former, from the gospel-style shout “Body Baby”:

No flash in the pan raps are not flashy
Free at last we, will never recycle
the same songs from last week, we’re free of last week
Thank God almighty we free at last, we
Went back to the ashes raw raps and raspy

Monch’s delivery sputters rhythmically as the backbeat jolts his trains of thought, like Harrison Bergeron interrupted by his in-ear noise machine. This leads him to explore every permutation of a phrase like “free at last,” until the repetition of that phrase becomes a sort of paradox. First he promises not to repeat himself. Then he almost does, but instead he pulls a lyrical fakeout, pulling up out of a nose dive with yet another play on “free at last.”

Meanwhile, “Let’s Go” shows what Monch can do once he gets a theme on his mind: exhaust it.

You use sex to sell, your Nextel to Sprint
Everything you represent is immoral
Cingular, not plural
You and your Sidekick get rid of that whack Trio
I freeze emcees zero degrees below
The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice
You need to get loose, to the heat of produce
From Long Beach to Boston
Your chicks text us like Dallas and Austin
I spark tireless illumination
Fire sixteen bars, wireless communication

That a solid eight cellphone references, six of which are brand names. Not the album’s strongest work, but it shows Monch owning a verse, flexing a new muscle, showing us a new trick. And if that’s not your bag, I’ll leave you with a one-liner, from the song “Desire”:

Still get it poppin’ without artist & repertoire
‘Cause Monch is a monarch only minus the A&R

MP3: Pharoahe Monch – “Body Baby”

Muxed Bag: 10 Songs (Sort of) About Dancing

Wordsworth’s Muxed Bag is now playing at Prefix Magazine!

Read the piece,

and listen along with Muxtape.

Cheers!

Bowerbirds: Saving the Earth Through Anthropomorphism

Last week we discussed songs (or the lack thereof) describing the alien landscape that made existentialism so easy in Werner Herzog’s documentary Encounters at the End of the World. While Keane’s song “Bedshaped” put into words the intangible feeling of haziness that enables this polar rumination, I had a hard time thinking up songs specifically about setting; that is, songs about place.

Then I saw Bowerbirds, opening for Bon Iver at Black Cat. Hailing from Raleigh, North Carolina, their docile, creaking folk keeps close ties to home, whether it be the North Carolina woods, a vague lakeside memory, or the very house they write in.

One scientist in Encounters says Antarctica feels like a living being, that its constant drifting and shifting — and its push-and-pull relationship with climate change — make him feel like he lives aboard a giant creature. (This quote doesn’t seem to be online; anyone have it?) In the song “My Oldest Memory,” off Bowerbirds’ album Hymns for a Dark Horse, the band sings about a natural haven preserved in memory:

And I dont know whose land we’re on
Is this an island that plots like a villain,
Or an old ghost friend we don’t believe in?

The verses flip like a photo album of a hike along the water: “Out where the waves wrestle with the dirty brine,” the band crosses sand and thicket to rest their heads in the nooks of a cypress. In the memory, recalled through the lens of a child, the land becomes a mystical character, large beyond comprehension. Now, looking back as adults, the picture is foggier: Is nature still an omnipresent spirit as it was during those barefoot and carefree summers? Or is it slowly dying at the hands of amnesia, fading like Tinkerbell as it disappears from our modern, responsible lives?

MP3: Bowerbirds – “My Oldest Memory”

XTC’s Marching “River of Orchids”

For all their herky-jerky new wave, XTC’s flourishes of modern classical music have produced some of their finest work. “River of Orchids” opens Apple Venus, Pt. 1 with the orchestral cinematography of a nature documentary — violin strings pluck like the first droplets of a rainstorm, setting still leaves to bounce. One by one, the landscape fills with counterpoint salvos of trumpets, vocal groans, and sung proclamations, until they build to a rushing river, a fanfare march, a column of soldiers parading into London.

As the music is a sort of round, so are they lyrics. Singer Andy Partridge recorded the vocals in a solitary fit of creativity — locked in his garden shed, shirtless and barefoot. He had the string samples laid down, and flipped through his notebook to find a stray couplet to fit: “I heard the dandelions roar in Piccadilly Circus.”

This surreal image (dandelions don’t roar; Piccadilly Circus is actually an urban area in London’s West End) grew into “River of Orchids,” a call to arms in the name of England’s flora. Here are the lyrics, with repeated lines removed:

I heard the dandelions roar in Piccadilly Circus
Take a packet of seeds
Take yourself out to play
I want to see river of orchids where we had a motorway

Push your car from the road

Just like a mad dog you’re chasing your tail in a circle
It’s all in your back yard
You’ve the whole world at your feet
I said the grass is always greener when it bursts up through concrete

River of orchids winding our way
Want to walk into London on my hands one day
River of orchids the road overgrows
Want to walk into London smelling like a Peckham Rose

I had a dream where the car is reduced to a fossil…

Note that Partridge sings in commands, lending urgency to the green rebellion. Some of the lines almost border on acts of violence — throwing around cars and upturning concrete — and the “I want” lyrics could be shouted from a dais. All in all the lyrics are snippets, related but nonsequential, letting the spinning melodies braid with the left-field violins and trumpets and dissonant “Hmmm” grunts. A time-lapse scene of sprouting dandelions becomes a Tolkien-like battalion of trees, marching to the sound of buglers and bullhorn slogans, the soundtrack of an unseen revolution.

MP3: XTC – “River of Orchids”