UNBORN WHISKEY

(the problem with music according to brad nelson)

permalink ICONOGRAPHY: Express Yourself

It perfectly reinforces Madonna’s oft-misinterpreted sexual politics - firstly, that to be desired is empowering, and secondly, that a visible, free-spirited sexuality can be for one’s own sake, and not imply a come-on to any man that’ll have her. As she’d soon whisper on Justify My Love, “poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another” - and of course, the same goes for women. The heart of the song isn’t a series of demands towards men, but a celebration of womanhood - beautiful, empowered, self-sufficient, but partial to a partner who really can “lift you to your higher ground”… mutually.

I should not have to tell you anymore why Iconography is awesome. It is self-evident!
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MAX ROACH:

“TRIPTYCH: PRAYER, PROTEST, PEACE”

When I knew God, I knew God as John Coltrane. He made spiritual invocations the necessary bedrock, grounding us all in the thought that we play this music (both as musicians and as listeners) to traverse the unknown light, and the unknown light is God, or inner peace, or infinite space, or something in which we may feel whole for once in our fucking lives.

Five years earlier, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln prayed. They prayed to clear the table of the nonessential and the uncommitted, because they knew when they fell into “Protest” that they’d be unearthing some essential shit that requires commitment. Like Wu-Tang Clan’s “I Can’t Go to Sleep,” “Protest” is the recognition of prison bars beyond the prison bars. Though we have escaped the initial traps (here: slavery), there exist endless peripheral ones that will oppress us unseen.

It is only through the raw telling of this pain that one reaches “Peace”—there are many screams that shake the skeleton and Lincoln commands all of them. But the peace is not Coltrane’s. This peace is unsure. This peace is frightening, and thus is not peace at all. We still see eternal fields of imprisonment, though some of its hills may only be hills of the mind. Our telling of the trauma has only served to reenact its tyranny. The unknown light only leads to hard darkness. We will never feel whole.

This is the truth. This is the truth in drum abandon.

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Why don’t we all strap bombs to our chest and ride our bikes to the next G7 picnic? Seems easier with every clock tick.
— Propagandhi (via showerbeers)
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ERIC DOLPHY:

“EPISTROPHY”

rendit:

And here we have Dolphy, taking a tower of drunken swagger erected by Monk and twisting the steel girders underneath the concrete and glass until it is a straight-edge grotesque.

Dolphy dedicates so much to the cigarette burns of this song. The foundation established, he casts his eyes toward all the horror at “Epistrophy“‘s edges, how it separates itself from its landscape in the most malevolent way.

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INDIAN SUMMER:

“ORCHARD”

hardcorefornerds:

this is the first song of theirs that I heard (and along with Moss Icon, ‘Guatemala’, the first classically emo songs) on a internet page of mp3s, and the choice is sort of double-edged. on the one hand, it’s one of their most stirring songs, although not necessarily the most, while on the other the echo-y effect on the guitar that comes through on the recording is slightly anomalous for their work, though it has its own charm too. in fact, it’s the poor quality of the recording - the vinyl pops, the wobbling chimes of guitar -  that make this song hit the spot so well. faute de mieux.

and perhaps the people that got to see them live, or have some original 7” which sounds slightly different, would strongly disagree. for my part, I don’t want to seem an intergenerational Luddite celebrating the inherited technological problems of the past decade, but it wouldn’t be the same without that archival roughness.

Likely recorded from the inside of a mouth. Chronicles the grand journeys of the tongue. Ending is the tongue descending back into our throat.

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