Soothe Me, I'm Savage (Part IV)

Allen Ginsberg wrote: “A few individuals, poets, have had the luck and the courage and fate to glimpse something new through the crack in mass consciousness.” Is there a moment or moments in music that you would say the same? An artist or group or emerging style that changed the face of music?

Tijanna: Check out Mick Karn. He was the bass player for the band Japan, a much more sophisticated and polished version of Duran Duran. David Sylvian, The singer was pretty as all fck, but he sang like a man! All deep-n-shit. Mick Karn takes bass playing to a whole new level. He finds a pattern and expands it. He finds the sounds in an AREA on the bass. I saw him in support of Mark Isham at the Great American Music Hall once. The music was totally unfamiliar to me but Mick's playing was so......stch....mmmh!....that....you're just like...he played everything you wanted to hear on songs you'd never heard before. Such an inadequate description but you just had to be there.

DJ Luna: Hip hop of course.

Lolo: In my lifetime, punk and hip hop. There was a time when some people thought electronica was going to take over the world—remember Prodigy?—but that didn’t happen. Personally, I love electronica in the broadest sense. I mean I’m not to into trance or rave music or other styles within the genre, but I still love IDM, house music, and d&b/breakbeat and nujazz, which has an electronic element to it. I really enjoy the way electronica has seeped into other genres (Radiohead, Madonna, etc.) but I’m not surprised the electronica didn’t win the commercial hearts of the consumer public.

In jazz it was constant from bebop to free jazz, each successive stylistic twist taking over and all the giants were true geniuses. Charlie Parker alone…. In popular music, you can’t overlook The Beatles even if you want to.

Actually this is too difficult a question to answer. I mean even Madonna changed the face of music in a way, if not the music itself then definitely the way it’s packaged and received and even by whom it’s received. Her initial audience was pretty different than the audiences of the other big name acts at the time that she became a household name and a lot different than what women were listening to in the decades prior. Why? Because nobody had ever done what she did.

And speaking of packaging, I’d say “world music,” too, because of course the rest of the world has always had its own musics but it’s never until we Westerners go out and discover it and get our grubby little paws all over it and comoditize it that it gets validated. And now, more and more, you find it seeping into places it didn’t used to be—just like electronica. Like how bossa nova became all the rage in the Sixties and suddenly the hippest thing in the world was for an American artist to incorporate some kind of bossa sound into their music. Nowadays it’s Cuban—you can’t go wrong inserting some Cuban elements into your shit. I’m not saying I’m against it; I just find it interesting to hear. And to whom do we owe this phenomenon? In a certain sense to people like Alan Lomax, who made sure it all got recorded.

Article Author: mpho

Visit mpho's author page — mpho's Blog