THE ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT OF MOST

VS. THE ARRESTING EXAMPLE OF MOS

I feel bad for Willie Nelson. But his recent ordeal made me reflect on the other high-profile arrests we’ve seen this year, from 50 Cent and DMX (both for traffic violations), to Busta Rhymes and Foxy Brown (both for assault), to Paris Hilton and Mel Gibson (both for drunk driving). Lately it seems like a lot of dumb celebrities are getting busted for doing dumb shit.

But when Mos Def was arrested outside the VMAs in New York a few weeks ago, it was mos-definitely not for some stupid, selfish slip-up -- it was a courageous act of civil disobedience. I realize this is old news, but the incident didn't make it on a lot of people's radar, and it deserves more shine.

Here's what happened: Mos rolled up outside Radio City Music Hall on a flatbed truck for an unauthorized performance of his song “Katrina Klap,” a fierce indictment of the Bush Administration. He didn't have a permit and he was charged with disorderly conduct. Check out actual footage of the arrest here and check out the music video here.

My hunch is that Mos meant to get arrested. But even if he didn't, his aim was certainly to disrupt a bit of the glamour and gloss of the MTV event and bring attention to the the deliberate negligence and inaction of our leaders and the suffering of our fellow citizens from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

Afterwards, the media predictably spent much more time dissecting other aspects of the night, such as LL's and 50's rant about their label head Jay-Z. As Mos Def puts it in his song, "What's Beef?": Some beef is big, and some beef is small, but what y'all call beef is not beef at all. Real beef is the persistance of poverty and racism in America. Thank you, Mos, as always, for showing that it's bigger than hip-hop.

PHOTO OF THE DAY: Willie Nelson's stash (!)

MARCHING BAND CHIC: “One Time in Band Camp…”

Is it just me, or has 2006 been the year of the marching band? Here's my evidence:

-- A college marching band plays a big role in Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. Dave shuttles the youngsters from Central State University in his home base of Ohio all the way to Brooklyn to perform at the event. Their enthusiasm is infectious and their rendition of “Jesus Walks” is one of the highlights of the film. And at the Grammies earlier this year, Kanye himself (along with Jamie Foxx) dressed up in a marching-band outfit and performed “Gold Digger” with college musicians from Florida A&M.

-- Outkast’s single "Morris Brown" from their new soundtrack album Idlewild is named after Atlanta’s Morris Brown College's Marching Wolverines, who provide the beat and the horns to this joyous and inventive track. The chorus includes the lines: “My heart is like a marching band, I’m a fan in the stands.”

-- Stones Throw Records recently released a slamming 2-disc collection, Texas Thunder Soul 1968-1974, by the Kashmere Stage Band, who were an outrageously funky high-school band from Houston’s Kashmere neighborhood. A “stage” band was slightly different than a traditional “marching” band, in that it was modeled after a jazz big band. But Kashmere’s sound was more James Brown than Benny Goodman. Check it out. Highly recommended.

-- Earlier this year, there was a series on BET called Season of the Tiger about members of the Grambling State University football squad and marching band.

-- Even in the rock world, bands like My Chemical Romance have been performing in marching-band garb.

-- Part of the renewed interest in music from New Orleans that we’ve seen in the year following Hurricane Katrina has involved an appreciation of Crescent City brass bands.

Now, I know marching bands have been hot for a while (probably since the movie Drumline came out in 2002), and songs ranging from Destiny Child’s “Lose My Breath” (04) to Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” (05) have incorporated drumline sounds. But something new is definitely in the air. Perhaps we have arrived at a cultural moment where the generation weaned on hip-hop is starting to grow weary of programmed drums, etc., and so they are drawn to the modern marching-band mixture of current hip-hop sounds with old-fashioned instruments like cymbals and French horns?

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN GENTRIFICATION AND

THE DEMISE OF NEW-YORK HIP-HOP

There has been much chatter in the rap world in recent months about how New York -- the birthplace of hip-hop and its epicenter for many years after -- has become increasingly irrelevant, with Southern artists ruling the charts and homegrown talent barely making a dent. It is true that Busta Rhymes generated a bit of heat this year, Ghostface came back pretty hard, and Nas has a new one soon -- maybe even Jay-Z before 2006 is over. (50 Cent is generally not classified as a NY rapper, even though he's from Queens, because his flow doesn't share the same regional characteristics.) But there's no denying that the Big Apple is on serious life support at the moment, struggling to compete with all the T.I.s and Young Jeezys.

I have heard numerous explanations for the demise of New York hip-hop. Some say that the burden of tradition creates a rigid purism that stifles artists here from exploring new sounds. There may be some truth to that. Take DJ Premier, whom I idolize. He personifies the NY aesthetic, but the latest Gang Starr album (2003's The Ownerz) was predictable, even somewhat boring. Most listeners don't literally want to go back to 1991 or 1988 (considered the two best years in hip-hop); they just want a return to the quality, creativity, and diversity of the Golden Era. But that era is so intimately tied up with New York that maybe a lot of Gotham artists just can't help but sound dated. It makes me wonder whether an act as innovative as Outkast could have emerged from here? But getting back to Preem, I also find it ironic that some of his most exciting recent productions, in my opinion, were for Southern artists Devin the Dude ("Doobie Ashtray") and Cee-Lo ("Evening News").

I've also heard it argued that restrictive sampling laws are to blame for putting a clamp on producers like Pete Rock and Large Professor, whose sample-based sounds are the hallmark of New York hip-hop (whereas most Southern rap is synth-based). OK, that makes some sense. Unless you've got Kanye-type money, you'll end up blowing your entire budget on sample clearance. Still, as much as I believe that there is an art to sampling, this argument strikes me as kind of an excuse for lack of creativity.

Suprisingly, I haven't really heard anyone make the seemingly obvious connection between New York's dwindling status in the hip-hop sphere and the city's simultaneous ascent in the corporate and real-estate spheres. It's no great revelation that rap music is heavily occupied with notions of authenticity and that a big part of its allure is that it comes from "the streets." So what does it mean to its young consumers across the country that NYC is now one of the safest big cities in America? What does it mean to them, for example, that the block where Biggie grew up is now home to million dollar brownstones? Are they aware of these facts, and does that play in to their perception of NY hip-hop?

In the early- to mid-Nineties, before I moved here, I admit that my image of the city was partially influenced by the grimy descriptions I heard in songs by Wu-Tang, Smif n Wessun, etc. They spoke of blunts, Timbaland boots, pissy project hallways. Nas and Mobb Deep painted a gritty picture of life in Queensbridge. (Then, when I finally came to New York, my first apartment was in Park Slope, which was slightly different, LOL!)

But my point is, maybe hip-hop fans today just don't quite buy it when New York rappers rhyme about their violent 'hoods and so on? Obviously, I realize the city isn't all Starbucks and sushi -- but by any measure, the gentrification we've seen in the last ten years has been extraordinary. And I think the word is out in the rest of the country. The perception, whether true or not, is that NYC just isn't that "hard" anymore. Could it be that this is the real reason the average American kid is now looking elsewhere -- to New Orleans, Houston, Atlanta -- for his rap authenticity fix?

ANNOUNCEMENT

I am relatively new to this blogging thing, and I just realized (thanks EG!) that I’ve had Musical Biscuits set to only allow comments from people with Blogger accounts. My bad. I have now enabled it to allow anonymous comments. So please, comment away! Let me know you’re out there! Pleeeease…

NEW MUSIC BOOKS

I read two very different books recently, one a humorous rock trivia guide, the other a study of the neuroscience of music listening. I highly recommend both!

First, let's talk about Is Tiny Dancer Really Elton's Little John: Music's Most Enduring Mysteries, Myths, and Rumors Revealed by Gavin Edwards. Gotta love that title. It refers to the urban legend that Elton's song "Tiny Dancer" is really about his penis. (Alas, it is not -- lyricist Bernie Taupin was inspired by the freewheeling women he encountered when he first moved to Cali in 1970.) Edwards is also the author of another very funny music book, 'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy, about commonly misheard song lyrics. While some of the rock myths covered in the new book are a bit too familiar, like the whole “Paul is Dead” saga, there was plenty here to keep me entertained. I devoured the entire thing in about two hours. Some items of note…

* John Mayer literally sees music as colors. He and Hendrix and Franz Liszt all share a rare condition called synaesthesia, in which one’s sensory perceptions overlap. Yikes, does this mean that we’ve all been fooled and Mayer is actually a musical genius?

* Lots of crazy sex stuff: Brian Adams’ “Summer of ‘69” is indeed about the physical act not the year; Elvis’s chosen method of birth control was to pull out and finish with his hand; Steven Tyler admits to being inappropriately attracted to his daughter Liv.

* We’ve talked before on Musical Biscuits about Ringo’s musical abilities. Edwards maintains that Ringo was a great drummer, not showy but always in the groove, and he points to a few moments where the Beatle really stands out: “Drive My Car” (“where he’s particularly inventive on the breaks”), “Ticket to Ride” (“where he basically invents heavy-metal drumming”), “Rain” (“where he’s playing like a man possessed”), and the “Strawberry Fields Forever” outtakes on the Anthology 2 (where he is “basically inventing the trip-hop beat”). I would add to Gavin’s excellent list the drum solo in “The End” from Abbey Road.

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession also happens to talk about a lot of Beatles songs. For example, author Daniel J. Levitin points out that the reason "Yesterday" is so beloved is that its main melodic phrase is seven measures long, whereas most musical units are four or eight measures -- and it is precisely this small deception, this setting up and manipulating of expectations, that so pleases the human ear.

The book is filled with these kinds of revelations, and they are all remarkably digestible because they involve songs everyone knows by heart. Levitin was a record producer (for the Dead, Chris Isaak, and others) before he was an academic, and his love and familiarity with the music is what makes the book work so well. I have a hard time with a lot of popular science titles, because they often assume the reader holds a certain degree of scientific knowledge -- and, I'll be honest, I have zero. But like in Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct, which this most closely resembles, there is more than enough non-hardcore science here for a total ignoramus like me to latch on to that I stuck with the book to the end (occasionally skipping passages) and learned quite a bit in the process.

I was fascinated to discover, for instance, that one theory as to why we sometimes experience almost an elevated state of consciousness when we hear loud music in concert, as opposed to on record, is that the extreme volume (over 115dB) floods our auditory system and triggers neurons to fire at their maximum pace. "When many, many neurons are maximally firing, this could cause an emergent property, a brain state qualitatively different from when they are firing at normal rates."

Interesting stuff, eh? And how many books are blurbed by both Oliver Sacks and Stevie Wonder?!

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN MUSIC AND RUNNING

Obviously, you all know I love music, but something else I've grown to love is running. I've been jogging regularly for years now, and I've even done a few marathons. On the surface, these two hobbies seem to have little in common. In fact, most people associate music (especially rock-and-roll) with drinking, drugging, staying out late, and all-around abusing one's body. Fitness, on the other hand, holds various "uncool" associations, from military basic training to narcissistic gym culture to, well, Richard Simmons.

I admit the jogger scene is not exactly cool. (Go to any New York Road Runners Club-sponsored race and you'll see what I mean.) But running, the activity itself, is cool -- and it is cool in fundamentally the same way that music is cool. The beauty of music, of course, is how it fills its listener with a magical, expansive sensation of total freedom and infinite possibility. Not unlike the feeling, I've come to realize, that I get when my two feet hit the pavement and I just take off.

Now that I've made this mental connection between music and running, I've been on a search to find more evidence of the unlikely link between the two passions of mine. It hasn't been easy. Yes, there are tons of famous songs about running, from "I Ran" by Flock of Seagulls to "Born to Run" by Springsteen, but they seem to all be about running toward something, running away from something, running wild, running free -- not about literally running, just for the sake of running.

There are songs that are associated in the public's consciousness with the literal kind of running, such as Vangelis's "Chariots of Fire." And there exist lots of pump-you-up songs that are excellent to listen to while you run, like "Ain't No Stopping Us Now" by McFadden & Whitehead.

But I can only think of one example of a song that is about running per se. Thankfully, it is a gorgeous tune: "Joggin'" by reggae great Freddie McGregor. Not only does it feature a chorus about "jogging on the sand," it even name-checks different brands of running shoes (Adidas, Puma).

But upon closer inspection, is the song just a simple, heartfelt tribute to running, "a paean to trainers," as it says in the liner notes of my Story of Jamaican Music box set? Or is it an extended metaphor "damning corporate imperialism and condemning those who get fit for Babylon," as it suggests here?

Okay, so trying to find a running anthem is a bit of a challenge. But what about trying to find some musical artists who are also big runners? Again, not so easy. There are a few celebrities who have run marathons including, famously, Oprah, and more recently, Will Ferrell. And some politicians, including President Bush (which doesn't exactly help me in trying to make the argument that jogging is cool).

In terms of music, though, other than P Diddy -- who ran the NYC marathon a few years back, but whose own contributions to music I find dubious (as opposed to his undeniable role in the careers of talented artists like Biggie and Mary J Blige) -- I could only think of one single performer whom I knew was a runner . . .

The late Joe Strummer of the Clash ran three marathons. (That's him in the photo on the right finishing the London marathon.) He even revealed that he wouldn't train at all and he'd drink ten pints of beer the night before. Now, that's punk rock! Who cares that he didn't take training seriously? Jumping in there and running a long-distance race obviously gave him a feeling of joy and liberation. And that's enough for me. Joe is all the proof I need that jogging is hella cool, fuck the naysayers.

Like all the best music, Strummer's work was dangerous and sexy and it was all about challenging the status quo. Not just in your typical abstract, anti-establishment, rock-and-roll way, but in an unusually political, concrete sense. Unlike his peers in the Sex Pistols, he wasn't a nihilist -- he was committed to changing the world for the better, through his raw, visceral music and provocative lyrics. Politically-oriented artists always run the risk of either sounding too soft and pie-in-the-sky (Lennon's "Imagine" sometimes strikes me this way, even though I recognize how radical many of the lines are) or sounding pedantic and restrictively topical (I'm thinking here of KRS-One's less-classic material). To Strummer's credit, he and the Clash broke right through these confines, forging their own path and making political music cool again.

It is Joe's brand of gritty idealism that continues to inspire me. And his passion for gonzo running -- and the freedom it represents -- seems to me an extension of this worldview.