The end of the year brings a flurry of world music albums with commercial intentions ranging from the archival to the optimistically opportunistic. Some, like the Creole Choir of Cuba’s Tande-La or Vlada Tomova’s Balkan Tales, accompany tours by the outfits that made them; others are heavily branded theme compilations — brain candy for collegiate introverts, mood music for bars and boutiques. Continue reading “A Look at Pop Around the Globe, From Operatic Creole Harmonies to Riot-Grrl-Inspired French Rappers”
Author: Carol Cooper
David Guetta’s Dance Music Melting Pot
People were so busy comparing Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” to Madonna’s “Express Yourself” earlier this year that they didn’t notice the similarities between the lead single from Gaga’s new album and French DJ/producer David Guetta’s 2009 Kelly Rowland collaboration “When Love Takes Over.” Indeed, when you strip both artists down to their sonics, the cultural revolution represented by Guetta’s two most recent records could be potentially more significant than anything yet manifested by Gaga. Continue reading “David Guetta’s Dance Music Melting Pot”
Live: The Boogaloo! Party Keeps It Moving at Nublu
Boogaloo! with Spanglish Fly, DJ Turmix
Nublu
Friday, July 8
Better than: Paying twice as much to watch the same crowd drink and not dance.
It could have been a disaster — subway service to Loisaida was screwed up (again), it was raining, one of the club’s turntables was on the fritz, the band had had mere hours to warn Facebook fans to feed their own heads since the club would serve no booze due to a sudden (but temporary) problem with their liquor license. Not only did people from different age groups, classes, races, and boroughs come, they cheerfully paid to dance their asses off in a dry bar roughly the size and shape of a large railroad flat. Continue reading “Live: The Boogaloo! Party Keeps It Moving at Nublu”
More Than Words: Going Polyglot With Concha Buika and Les Nubians
In the ’60s and ’70s danceable jazz-pop in foreign languages made American radio more exciting: Jorge Ben’s “Mas Que Nada” charted when recorded by Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66; it was followed by Miriam Makeba’s remake of “Pata Pata” in 1967, Tito Puente’s “Oye Como Va” when covered by Santana in 1970, and Manu Dibango’s irresistible “Soul Makossa” in 1972. Something about each single’s arrangements, rhythms, and vocals allowed these crossover miracles to seduce stateside listeners who only understand English. Continue reading “More Than Words: Going Polyglot With Concha Buika and Les Nubians”
The Rebirth Brass Band Bring Their Brashness to “Treme”
During the first episode of HBO’s Treme, members of the Rebirth Brass Band and the show’s trombone-playing character Antoine Batiste end a jazz parade in front of a neighborhood bar owned by Batiste’s ex-wife, LaDonna Batiste-Williams. The uncomfortable nature of their reunion is underscored when the younger band members try to flirt by asking why she left Antoine. “You wanna know what went wrong?” she replies, dryly. “Married a goddamned musician. Ain’t no way to make that shit right!” Continue reading “The Rebirth Brass Band Bring Their Brashness to “Treme””
Links to Peers, Idols, and Colleagues
- www.deadmedia.org — From cuneiform tablets to carrier pigeons to the ordinary typewriter, the tools and systems of human communication keep changing and ultimately rendering themselves obsolete, leaving artifacts that may or may not be worth preserving in New Media. The archives of a listserv that obsesses about dead and soon to be dead media and media languages, from the platforms of early computer games, to Victorian era “flower language”. Also speculates about the relative permanence of electronic and digital storage and transmission mediums.
- www.viridiandesign.org — This link is to the archives of the Viridian Green design movement, launched on the cusp of the 21st Century by author/lecturer Bruce Sterling. It’s core premise is that artists, engineers, scientists (social and “hard”) as well as politicians, cops, and ordinary civilians, need to begin thinking about creating sustainable lifestyle products (from cars and homes to radios and clothing) that are less (or not) dependent upon fossil fuels. A challenging proposition to make ecological rectitude beautiful and sexy to a global consumer base.
- Rock’s Backpages — The online library of Rock & Roll. Original archives penned by the pioneers and young tyros of rock and pop criticism, with reviews and interviews from the 1960s to the present. Searchable by membership subscription. An all-star roster of writers and editors from England and the U.S.
Vampires, Fairies, and Succubi: Inside the Shapeshifting Mind of Laurell K. Hamilton
| Ardeur: 14 Writes on the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series Edited by Laurell K. Hamilton Smart Pop, 224 pp., $14.95 |
Laurell K. Hamilton writes supernatural mysteries — overtly erotic and political thrillers that sell millions of copies around the world. Sometimes her protagonists are actual detectives or police surrogates; other times they’re vampires, fairies, succubi, or necromancers. Bizarre though such casting may seem, during the early ’90s Hamilton began proving the viability of blending gothic romance, horror, Celtic mythology, and the police procedural. Her books now top the New York Times bestseller list with surprising regularity, and her international fandom is almost as avid and well-organized as Neil Gaiman’s.
Despite comparisons to the currently higher-profile Twilight and Sookie Stackhouse properties, those multimedia franchises appear little better than updated rewrites of Dracula compared to the complex story arcs Hamilton crafts — for a moody necromancer named Anita and a fairy princess called Merry. Moreover, Hamilton’s witchy, combat-ready heroines intentionally evoke tragic tribal avengers like Britain’s warrior-queen Boudicca more than Joss Whedon’s Buffy — with all the depth and sociological resonance such a distinction implies.
That’s why the critical essays in Ardeur: 14 Writers on the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Series couldn’t arrive at a better time. After more than eight years of authorial blogging and online fannish debate, the many controversies raised by the characters and content of 18 Anita Blake novels get formally addressed, not only by fellow novelists like Lilith Saintcrow and Vera Nazarian, but by “role-play” game writers, professional academics, and the author herself.
The pieces explore Hamilton’s signature innovation of juxtaposing zombies (the ugly living dead) and vampires (the pretty living dead) against shape-shifters (viral, hyperabundant life) in interpersonal situations where body image, body strength, and bodily urges all loom equally large in determining character motivation. They discuss the symbolic meaning of unrepentant female violence in a series about female empowerment. And they examine the pivotal moment in book six when Hamilton transformed her quasi-virginal, sexually repressed vampire executioner into a sex-positive, polyamorous maverick.
Hamilton confesses the autobiographical nature of her process. Plotting by subconscious impulse, she playfully indulges then explodes the rules and tropes of classic horror fiction. Some essayists have a better grasp of exactly how and why she does this than others. But all the contributors agree that, despite the fact that Hamilton habitually defies conventional pacing and audience expectations, her stylistic transgressions function to liberate not only Anita Blake, but the narrative potential of horror fiction itself.
Published in: Village Voice, April 6, 2010
Rise of the Anachronauts
On Dan Hicks, Leonard Cohen, Etta James, and other fearless time travelers
I call them anachronauts: performers whose core appeal stems from their ability to transport listeners to another time and place. Whereas ordinary pop stars strive to intensify awareness of the present moment so that nothing else matters, anachronauts use archaic language, modes, and instrumentation to expand our egocentric understanding of the present with illuminating reminders of forgotten history. Continue reading “Rise of the Anachronauts”
Philip José Farmer: 1918-2009
The wildly inventive and passionately polemical science-fiction writer Philip José Farmer quietly expired at home, Ash Wednesday morning, at the ripe age of 91. I and many others first became aware of Farmer’s work in the 1970s, shortly after the first volume of his legendary Riverworld series, To Your Scattered Bodies Go won the Hugo Award for best novel. The central conceit of Riverworld is that all existing religions are wrong about the afterlife: In Farmer’s work, earth’s luckier dead reawaken in fresh adult bodies on a magical planet far, far away where all the most influential or memorable personalities of human myth, literature and history are reborn (memories intact!!) to coexist. Provocative collaborations and personality clashes ensue. Continue reading “Philip José Farmer: 1918-2009”
The Speculator: On Joanna Russ
A new collection takes stock of the pioneering SF writer and feminist
| On Joanna Russ Edited by Farah Mendlesohn Wesleyan University Press, 298 pp., $29.95 |
On Joanna Russ is a collection of essays that manages to revel in everything ever done by the first openly gay, feminist spitfire of fantasy and speculative fiction. As a whole, the book avoids partisan temptations to segregate or compartmentalize the various aspects of Russ’s life and work. As editor Farah Mendlesohn notes in her introduction, Russ is “a thoroughly three-dimensional author and cannot be viewed through only one lens.” By refusing to ignore her contradictions (and refusing to elevate Russ the Radical Feminist over Russ the Fan-Girl), this book invites the broader appreciation and readership its subject deserves.
Born in 1937, Russ discovered SF by 13, entered college at 15, finished Yale Drama School in her early twenties, and was teaching at Cornell by the time her second novel, And Chaos Died, came out in 1970. A bold, ambitious woman, her public persona was shaped by the male-dominated fields she decided to infiltrate. Swiftly embraced by genre institutions like The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (where she sold her first story in 1959), she was applauded and published by important male editors like Damon Knight, Harlan Ellison, Frederik Pohl, and David Hartwell. Russ became a vocal fixture on the wider scene, attending star-studded Milford writers’ workshops and winning major awards (Nebulas, Hugos).
Mendlesohn brings 17 writers (including eight men) to her critical enterprise, which picks up where Jeanne Cortiel’s 1999 Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ/Feminism/Science Fiction leaves off. The essayists all believe that Russ’s career trajectory has much to teach next-generation feminists. And all approach Russ’s seven novels, three nonfiction collections, and three short-story collections impressed by how each book bristles with epistemological invention. Her fiction twists the most shopworn genre conventions — like time travel, sword-and-sorcery, or all-female planets — into scenarios that intentionally subvert stereotypical expectations. Comparing these texts against copious amounts of analytical opinion from her various interviews, letters, book reviews, and pedagogic essays, Mendlesohn’s team constructs a fascinating picture of this pioneering “scholar/practitioner” as visionary cultural critic.
Samuel R. Delany and Paul March-Russell address the semiotic arena, wherein Russ’s most disquieting tropes (such as routinely homicidal female protagonists) can be safely deconstructed. Gary K. Wolfe, Edward James, Dianne Newell, and Jenéa Tallentire speak for the interdependent, incestuous world of SF fandom. Lisa Yaszek, Helen Merrick, Pat Wheeler, and Sherryl Vint go for the women’s studies crowd, who look more closely at the social impact of Russ’s texts than the texts themselves. Keridwen N. Luis and Sandra Lindow both build arguments around issues of developmental psychology. The remaining essays all engage in fairly straightforward literary criticism, although some more clumsily than others. The lesbian reader looking for identity politics will probably glean something useful from all of the above, because these writers seldom forget lesbians exist.
Pivotal clashes of will and perspective are teased out of Merrick’s “The Female ‘Atlas’ of Science Fiction” and the Newell and Tallentire piece, “Learning the ‘Prophet-Business’: The Merril-Russ Intersection.” Russ’s early need to formally debunk popular works by other female authors is partially credited to her belief that there might be room for only one female King of the SF Hill at a time.
In “Russ on Writing Science Fiction and Reviewing It,” Edward James points out that between 1966 and 1980, Russ reviewed more than 100 books for the prestigious Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Russ’s witty, incisive summations proved her widely read in pulp-magazine classics, source material she used to enhance her own fables with resonant borrowings. James notes that as a genre critic, Russ was “prepared to tolerate and even enjoy shlock” — largely because she found it politically important to discuss the problematic clichés of shlock as a guilty pleasure.
Reviewing one author’s sloppy Lovecraftian pastiche in 1968, Russ remarked: “It is one of the worst books I have ever read and very enjoyable, but then I did not have to pay for it.” Such pre-blogosphere snarkiness became a minor Russ trademark. When fans took offense and wrote in to disagree, she sometimes met them head-on. In 1979, she organized “categorical” responses to letters protesting her disdain of derivative Tolkienesque trilogies. To those demanding, “Don’t shove your politics into your reviews. Just review the books,” she replied, “I will, when authors keep politics out of their books.”
And yet, in 1986, Russ could tell Larry McCaffery she regretted using a repressive Islamic setting to mirror 1950s American sexism in her 1978 novel The Two of Them: “I have to be careful about falling into the same sexual or racial stereotypes I criticize,” Russ confessed, “. . . the ‘All Arabs are terrible’ kind of thing.”
This willingness to rethink and reassess the pervasive nature of bigotry and oppression is a recurring motif for Russ, something she insists mythic storytelling is obligated to engage. Although not fiction, On Joanna Russ also embraces that obligation, because nothing meaningful can be said about Russ without it.
Published in: Village Voice, February 3, 2009