CANNIBAL
OX
The
Haunt, Brighton, Tues 14th July
What
happened to hip-hop... sometimes I feel it could break my heart.
Pioneering bands like Public Enemy and the Wu-Tang Clan audaciously
tore music apart and reassembled it in a different order, to the
point where it felt there was no real putting it back together again.
They unleashed rule-breaking sonic assemblages which should by any
rights have sounded insanely cacophonous but for some inexplicable
reason always pulled together.
But
all that innovation just led to the likes of Puff Daddy (or whatever
he's called this week), rhyming badly about how many consumer
durables he either owns or has for sale over some randomly chosen
cheesy disco track. It went from the sonic equivalent of graffiti
art, colourful unexpected and transformative, to the plain tagging
of a wall.
I
suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Nothing is more conservative than a
failed revolution. And perhaps it's no different to the Beatles and
the Stones “influencing” Oasis. But the result is that I tend to
treat hip-hop the same way I do black metal. I love the idea of it,
but so rarely do I take to any actual examples I figure I'm better
off sticking with the idea.
Cannibal
Ox, for example, get labelled 'underground hip-hop' when they are surely the truer
inheritors of the great Wu-Tang tradition. Yet as Christopher Dare said in Pitchfork they're in many ways
“like a musical negative, an inverse reflection of hip-hop history,
full of everything DJ's cast aside, from Sega sound effects to
electro-industrialism, gear-work grooves malfunctioning, synthesizers
belching, a menagerie of digitalia.”
Like
both Public Enemy and the Wu-Tang Clan, they hail from New York and
make urban music. Not in the marketing sense of 'made by black people
and therefore most likely edgy', but reflecting the urban
environment. Their classic, and until very recently only, album
'The Cold Vein' is dedicated to “New York City,
the Mecca of Hip-hop” and seems inspired less by music history than
by a walk around the city block.
Marshalling
the insistent force of repetitive beats may inherently evoke the
urban environment, as in the otherwise quite different Godflesh. Pere Ubu named an album
'Dub Housing' after seeing a street on repeat,
repetitive beats evoke repetitive landscapes. But as William
Burroughs said the city is itself like a real-world collage, things
thrown together randomly and ever-shiftingly, and the lyrical
logorrhea and sonic assemblage of Cannibal Ox's music takes in both.
'Cold
Vein' slips from one line to the next between the social
realism of streetwise ghetto tales, grandiosely science fiction
images and Marvel comics references, never giving you the chance to
catch up. (It's bizarre but not all that unusual for New York natives
use both the real and the media image of city equally for
inspiration, like one accentuates rather than dispels the other.) Its
New York is a “rotten apple... evil at its core” and an Iron
Galaxy, described by the somewhat excellently named Sumo Kaplunk as "like a wildlife
documentary on the concrete jungle seen from an alien perspective”.
The lyrics seem at once stream-of-consciousness surrealism (Vast Aire
getting mid-way through one track, commenting he “used a word
twice”, and going back to the start with a substitute term) and
some fully fledged Burroughsian mythology, released in cut-up and
piecemeal fashion.
“Now
the environment's a product of me” they rap audaciously on 'Ox
Out the Cage' (not alas, a track they perform live), which
may be the key to the whole thing. It's like they've got a rhyme to
counter every brick and body in the city, and figure they might as
well set the lot off at once. A
while ago we looked at the way George Bellows’ turn-of-the-century paintings of New York celebrated “the strenuous life”,
and however different in style Can Ox’s turn-of-the-millennium
music has same spirit to it – the individual in constant conflict
between being crushed down by the mighty city and rising up to meet
it. They become critics and embodiments of the city simultaneously,
and like the city they're describing they're abrasive, overpoweringly
forceful and strangely compelling all at once. Picking it as one of his favourite albums, the Guardian's Dan Hancox called it “the true soundtrack for the end times”. And its one of
those releases that somehow doesn't stop, you can't imagine listening
to and not hearing something new in it.
The
alert reader may notice at this point in the gig review that I have
not said much about the actual live performance. And its perhaps an
irony of hip-hop that it started as a live affair, as a DJ and a
rapper performing in a park, but soon became a studio sound. It
passed quickly from its 'Hard Days Night' era to
its 'Sergeant Pepper'. Part of its collage quality
is to present sounds arranged at different levels, your ears
assaulted from every angle. While a live PA can have a flattening and
blurring effect, like watching a 3D movie without the special
glasses. Indeed when their one-time collaborator, and 'Cold
Vein' producer, El-P was in town I hummed and hawed over
this, and ended up not going.
Their
new album 'Blade of The Ronin' seems to have got
the thumbsdown from critics, rather witheringly compared by Pitchfork to a new 'Paranormal Activity' sequel. Yet live I sometimes found myself favouring the new
tracks, not having a recorded version in my head to hold them
against.
On
the other hand, rapping is about personality and the interplay of
characters, possibly even more than punk. And its surprising how much
being able to put a face to a voice has transformed the way I listen
to 'Cold Vein'. Vast Aire is like the Chuck D of
the band, an unstoppable force, gesticulatingly working the crowd as
he spins lyrics. Yet Vordul Mega is less Flavour Flav than hip-hop's
Brian Jones, a semi-spectral presence drifting across the stage with
half-closed eyes.
I
have already squirrelled away my ticket to GZA this Autumn, so expect
further reports of live Hip-hop shortly...
Not
from Brighton, but the classic album opener 'Iron Galaxy' from a
Dutch festival on the same tour...
...and
for the sake of comparison the studio version...
TERRY
RILEY
Barbican
Centre, London, Sat 18th July
With
a better claim than most to be the father of Minimalism, any
appearance of the legendary Terry Riley is not something to be passed
up. You would of course be disappointed if he was promising a
programme of his best-loved tracks in note perfect order. But then of
course his freeform methods of creating pretty much make that an
impossibility from the get-go. Instead he's showing up for Station to
Station, a self-styled post-Sixties Happening, where he'll compose a
new piece while in situ (titled 'Bell Station III')
while on view to visitors. And he'll perform it... well, this very
evening. With Riley the unexpected is unsurprising.
And
as he walks on he certainly looks the part, an almost perfect double
for Robert Crumb's Mister Natural, even pressing his hands together
when taking applause. Yet surprise arrives along with the other
players. Minimalism normally operated through small ensembles, agile
guerilla units against the regimented rows of symphony orchestras.
Yet not only do countless players march on stage, they even bring
with them a children's choir.
As
the baton is passed back and forth between a solo Riley and these
amassed ranks, the point of the exercise would seem to be a creative
juxtaposition between the two. Yet the two were so
different it was hard to even contrast them, it felt like two
separate programmes spliced together. Worse, the ensemble's
interruptions served to cut against the all-important mesmerising
quality induced by Riley's performances.
The
ensemble's pieces were palatable enough, the clear children's voices
made them feel almost Christmasy (bizarrely enough for a hot July
day), but in the twinkly rather than the schmaltzy sense. The best
piece matched those freshwater voices against woozy jazz brass,
finding a creative juxtaposition within a piece rather than between
them. Yet overall they weren't especially memorable. If asked blind
to guess their composer I would have suggested Sid Vicious or the guy
who wrote the music for the R Whites lemonade ad before ever coming
up with Riley.
Riley's
solo performances took advantage of their un-ensembled nature to
become more free-form, and were most likely semi-improvised. They
also meshed well with Austin Meredith's film backdrop which, with its
held semi-abstract images, was involving without being
attention-grabbing. He swapped instruments for each piece, and for
his best number took to what I assumed was an electric organ but
discovered later was a synth... well he was playing it like
an electric organ. The notes naturally swirled and clustered around
the instrument, as if making patterns in the air. It bore a
similarity to the classic 'Persian Surgery Dervishes'.
But
his raga singing and prepared piano were listenable yet not
exceptional. Anyone blind-dating the gig, hoping to catch up with
what made Riley so important... well, in all honesty I don't think
they would.
It
might be overtly romantic to expect the man to still be making music
as innovative and captivating as in the days of yore. It might be
verging on contradictory to demand something brand new that also
holds up against past triumphs. At the age of eighty, the remarkable
thing might be he's still producing work at all. And ultimately it
doesn't really matter. Riley's longevity was assured a long time ago,
and proven more fittingly two years ago in this very venue when two separate ensembles
performed two wildly different versions of his classic 'In
C'. Musicians often face a dilemma between enabling new
work to happen or keeping alive the great compositions of the past.
With Riley's indeterminate, unprescriptive scores there's no need for
such concerns. Every time someone plays one of his works it will
sound new.
Events
conspired against my seeing any other Station to Station events. I would have been curious to see Suicide's Punk Mass, keen for Beck and would have loved to see the Boredoms with eighty-eight cymbal players – but
alas events intervened. Whether the whole event truly was a Happening
or merely a festival trading under a more attention-grabbing name,
I'm not really the one to ask. I retain, however, my natural
skepticism. Getting to see rehearsals live seems a bit of a thing
currently (PJ Harvey was also at it earlier in the year), but feels more
like the logical next step from the way everything
– including rehearsal tapes – now gets released. But witnessed
rehearsals doesn't seem very much to do with the 'no audience' spirit
of happenings. I took in two art instillations while at the complex
which were notably not just bad but bad in identical ways –
gimmickry stuffed with New Age platitudes.
A
different performance inside a video instillation in France three
years ago. Only excerpts but sounding distinctly better than the
night I went to...
...plus
some classic back-in-the-day footage, just because it would be
foolish not to...
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