I have yet to really post about music from "here" on this blog, but in principle I'm all for it, since I think it's stupid that we treat everything but "our" folk musics as outside of the whole notion of World Music.
So, in line with my mission to stretch the definition of "World Music" to its breaking point, or at least turn it on its head, let's talk about something from "our"... oh sorry... I mean *my* part of the world. ;-)
Lately I've been really fascinated by a certain trend I've observed in a lot of music from the late 70's and early to mid-80's. Amidst the lot of bland FM-Radio ballads you still hear while getting cavities filled, there have been numerous tunes over the years where it seems as if their producers smuggled a bit of that local anesthetic out of the dentist's office and back to the recording studio.
That's to say that there is this sub-genre of adult-contemporary music that's haunted by a vague numbness--an air-conditioned sort of cool which evokes various sorts of rainy scenes, shot on 1980's filmstock. It's a little too crisp-and-clean, a little too neat-and-tidy for its own good, so much so that it ends up coming off as a little remote.
A perfect example--visually, conceptually and sonically--is the wistful yet somehow aloof sax-n-synth smooth-jazz Vangelis composed for the love scene in Blade Runner between Dekker and Rachel (for those of you who don't know--an android). While the music carries all of the usual 1980's middle-of-the-road signifiers of romance and sensuousness there is something rather cold and appropriately robotic about it.
Some real grumpy people would argue that the sound I am describing is merely a byproduct of the advent of digital synthesizers and other studio technologies at the start of the 1980's and not an actual aesthetic choice made by musicians and producers. Yet while some of the defining features of this sub-genre are due to datedness I'm certain that many people were conscious of the inherent rigidity of these musical instruments, and in fact permitted this to influence there musical decisions. Surely some producers thinking they were real clever were convinced that they could fleece the public, putting that "Doogie Hauser" DX-7 Electric Piano sound in place of a real Fender Rhodes, and even started to believe in their own lies... But I'm also willing to bet that others saw enormous potential in cold FM Synth presets, glacial-palacial reverbs, deadpan drums, and fluorescent-lit ersatz instruments.
I think of it as one of many extensions of the disco approach to music-making birthed during the seventies--doing everything within the confines of the studio and severing the ties between live performance and recording. With greater emphasis on shaping the sound within the studio people opted to craft particular emotional spaces there, rather than working on replicating the ideal live performance.
The group which basically epitomizes the sound I am describing is the Blue Nile. Perhaps they are the only true real practitioners of a pure form of this sound. Their songs paint vivid portraits of the lonely night-times of sensitive introverts living in a big, and, judging by their lyrics, often-rainy city.
Many tracks, like "The Downtown Lights" or "Tinseltown Is In The Rain" create these images in a darkly dual manner. The lyrics suggest the romantic lives of well-to-do yuppies: ostentatious nights out on the town, invitations to candlelit dinners, quiet rides in sleek sports cars, or sweet-nothings whispered close to perfumed necks between cigarettes in the back of a limousine. Near-empty strung-together statements, fit with each other to form a 90% of the perfect 1980's nitelife fantasy worthy of some Club Med ad from 1982.
But what about that other 10%?? That empty part? The little hint of disappointment?
It's as if you're witnessing singer Paul Buchanan, seated by the window in his spacious, glassed-in penthouse atop some highrise building, staring out across a sprawling city. He's singing to a (perhaps) imaginary woman, while dreaming of the ideal romance-filled evening... The table's set with the fancy cutlery, he's got some bubbly on ice, but no one's coming. Does he know? Is he playing some pathetic game of make-believe to entertain himself on Saturday Night? Lord only knows because he maintains so much statuesque poise that you'd never want to disrupt the little ritual. And you sorta figure he's actual drunk as fuck and crying on the inside, so if you were to press him for details you might push him over the edge...
Like... do you ever have those dreams where everything's going terribly wrong but everyone is insisting, in an emphatic euphoric slow-mo voice that they're the best they've ever been in THEIR ENTIRE LIVES? The Blue Nile is like this sort of, without so much foreboding. And there are plenty of safe voyages into MOR-melancholy along the way.
That hole left by the slightly banal lyrics is definitely there on purpose in my mind, in order to permit the high-gloss backing music the shine through. And it reflects the texts perfectly. On the surface it's a band plus a full orchestra in a majestic resonant hall. Listen closer, and you realize it's too good to be true--those people playing violins are actually mannequins. The sounds are just slightly-off kilter, slightly mechanical imitations, almost like the replicants of Blade Runner. But they're almost believable, thanks to the fact that Blue Nile were basically the official spokesband of Linn (makers of the legendary drum machine). They had first dibs on the new digital gadgets and they knew just how to use them. That near-trickery they achieve and the ensuing slight disappointment is what thrusts the music into darker territory.
The pre-digital examples of the MOR-noir vibe make it clear that it is indeed a case of artistic agency over accident. For instance, some of Roberta Flack's output from the late 1970's foreshadows the frigid 'scapes traced by the likes of Buchanan & co. Her hit duet with Donny Hathaway "The Closer I Get To You" definitely gestures in that direction but long before the advent of Roland TR-505 drums and horrid gated reverbs.
The pallid long-player Roberta Flack Featuring Donny Hathaway seems to be haunted by Hathaway's passing, especially on the closing cut where Flack begs the object of the lyrics "Stay with me... Maybe you can rearrange your plans?" Is she singing a lover, or her friend Donny? Either way her aspartame-soul delivery indicates that it's beyond futile--said person is no longer capable of rearranging their plans--she's given up but for some reason decided to sing the song anyway. "I know there's a whole new world you've found, and it's to that world you're bound"... Ouch. And the ghostly quiet-storm stylings of the arrangement certainly provide enough empty space for you to realize that there's something rather sinister lurking beneath those mundane-lovesong lyrics.
Nina Simone's album Baltimore from 1978 was full of similar dark smooth surfaces to the production and arrangements. Apparently Simone had very little say in the arrangements, song selection and other aspects. But still she coaxes an unrelentingly neutrality (to the point of bleakness) from the ballads on the disc. "That's All I Want From You" has Simone almost dismissively snapping her finger between verse despite the song's extremely sombre tone. This underscores the emotional remoteness of the arrangements--violin melodies dangling from the ceiling like tinsel after some party. The mirror ball still spinning, Simone sings alone at the piano?
Even the reading of Hall and Oates' "Rich Girl", while upbeat sounds somehow defeated.
Weather Report's downright sappy smooth-jazz ballad "A Remark You Made" makes extensive use of analog synthesizers but sounds right at home alongside the Vangelis track mentioned earlier.
Coming back to the early digital era, another important record in this mini-canon is Pat Metheny's Offramp.
It's tempting to dismiss Mr. Metheny. He has made some awful records, and has a really bad hairdo, but it's hard to contend with warmth of Bright Size Life or the wacky Song X.
Grammy-award winning Offramp, though, is a neglected (well, perhaps among those who ignore things like the Grammies) gem of eerily blank smooth jazz. It's just like it's foreboding cover, which recalls (or forcalls?!) the driving scenes in David Lynch's Lost Highway.
For most of its duration Pat is playing guitar synth, while Lyle Mays plays solos on rectangular-sounding instrument samples (like the dementedly fake harmonica on "Are You Going With Me?"). Everything is bathed in long, gasping reverb that sounds like early November wind. And the big hint that this is not pure new-age-cum-jazz: listen for Nano Vasconcelos' spectral whispers and shrieks which float around the perimeter of the album. Without these peculiar sounds "Au Lait" might be merely your average mid-afternoon cafe jazz.
The titular track is anything but convivial FM-friendly smoothness. Instead it points ahead to the freak-outs on his collaborations with Ornette.
In any event, again, there is a clear-cut conscious choice to add some eerie ingredients to an otherwise bland recipe. Perhaps some of that 2-D quality though is a result of the outmoded electronic techniques. Who's to know, though?
"Are You Going With Me?"
"The Bat, Part 2"
"Au Lait"
There are other artists who also seemed intrigued by this territory, albeit from a more ostensibly experimental perspective. David Sylvian has certainly, over the years, explored this moody-yet-willfully-almost-bland terrain. Scott Walker's Climate of Hunter , the bridge from his 1970's work to stuff such as Tilt and The Drift certainly has moments of Glade-plug-in
-synth-pads and stern reverbs which seem to expand and constrict the perception of space simultaneously. In fact, Walker's 1970's output seems is almost like a predecessor to the later form of dark MOR. Even on superficially saccharine songs like "Joanna" he basically carves gaping, dark holes into ez-listening style arrangements.
Certainly Nico's painfully blasé reading of "My Funny Valentine" exists at the remotest cusp of the bleak-ballad spectrum. Notorious for her teutonic delivery, the almost-digital-sounding piano the "is-it-electronic?" Chris Botti-on-ketamine trumpet solo, the cavernous cut-glass room-sound takes it out of the realm of gothic folksiness found Desert Shore etc., to a place where the interpretation almost comes across as feigned feigned-sentimentality... a ghostly facsimile of the jazz standard.
Even in dance music circles, classy Canadian synth-pop duo Junior Boys appears to have stolen a couple 5 1/4 inch floppy diskettes from the Blue Nile's sound library, yet have maybe sexed things up a little bit with their Destiny's Child-meets-Basic Channel beats. They still have well-rehearsed poker-faces, though despite lapses into slinky funk.
So in summary, this is a bit of nebulous and perhaps dubious subgenre. I guess for me it's more of an illicit whiff of cheap perfume on the collar someone's leisure suit than, say, an actual article of clothing, if you know what I mean. It's more stealthy than an actual style. It's like the aftertaste of diet cola... There making you feel queasy amidst the EZ-listening.
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