Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill [A&M, 1985]First time I heard this I started muttering, "Kurt Weill invented rock and roll," which I report only to indicate how turned on I was, because it's ridiculous--Weill really only invented rock. Milking abrasive pop for outreach and meaning, he had more in common with Dylan and Newman than with Porter and Berlin, and the rock artistes who take their turns on this sequel to Hal Willner's 1983 Monk tribute sound completely at home. You can imagine improvements on some of Willner's choices--David Jo rather than Sting on "Mack the Knife," the Clash rather than Stanard Ridgeway on "Cannon Song," etc.--but that's a parlor game. With Lou Reed's "September Song" and Marianne Faithfull's "Ballad of the Soldier's Wife" the unmitigated triumphs, every track on this hour-long disc holds its own. Introduce yourself to one of the century's greatest songwriters and composers. Or augment your Weill collection and be glad you did. A
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Soweto Never Sleeps [Shanachie, 1986]For all but a tiny minority of its U.S. cult, mbaqanga is a fantasy of resilience and resistance--we hear in it the defiant strength we believe must lurk beneath its surface whatever its ostensible subject. Reflecting its earlier date of origin, the latest collection is less sure-footed than The Indestructible Beat (compare "Wozani Mahipi," a/k/a "Hippes Come to Soweto," to its source, the Meters' "Chicken Strut"). It's also less catchy, with what I assume to be the traditional chant of the midtempo title tune the prize melody. But I suspect the major reason it doesn't connect as powerfully is that it compiles "classic female jive." Even though the idiom's male and female singers both adhere to the conventions of tribal syncretism gone showbiz, those conventions format women more tightly than men. As a result, the men sound more assertive. Which suits our fantasy. A-
Best of House Music [Profile, 1988]Rough and unmediated house may be more fun than Euro-abstraction for sure, but it's for-dancers-only with a vengeance--formally, it's almost as exclusionary as hardcore. Thoughtfully sorted onto diva, sleaze, jack-your-body, and jack-of-all-nations sides, these cuts earn a permanent spot in my reference collection rather than my heart or my somatic memory. Even Marshall Jefferson's "Rock Your Body" and Moonfou's "Shut Up" disintegrate into breaks designed exclusively for the communal intoxication of the steamy floor. I don't get out enough, but I know what jacks my body when I do. B
Kickin Mental Detergent [Kickin', 1992]This 1992 U.K.-label comp proved so seminal that it spawned 1993's Vol. 2, which is merely less consistent, and 1994's Kickin Hardcore Leaders, which is scene specific to the verge of abstraction. And after trolling among competing fast-techno collections, I suspect the downward spiral is an omen. Early on, with label and movement still worried about being liked, songs of dread and abandon bedeck themselves with spoken-word hooks, lending their apocalyptic aura an illusion of coherence that squares can relate to, and aren't above other vulgar fripperies--layers of texture, sound effects, tunes. However impure they are counted by the small legions who have since undergone full aural immersion, they're as cleansing as claimed when approached from the other side--from the rest of music. A-
Motel Lovers [Trikont, 2007]I'm too far away to judge how vital this particular chitlin' circuit is. But I trust the money-where-her-mouth-is of 66-year-old Barbara Carr, who quit her factory job of 20 years and returned to music full-time in the wake of regional hits "Footprints on the Ceiling" and "Bone Me Like You Own Me." Presumably not all current Southern soul records stick to explicit adulterous sex, Friday-night hustles and the circuit itself. But I bet a lot of them do--enough for Munich-based Trikont to top its two '60s Black & Proud collections with these 18 contemporary songs. Young Sheba Potts-Wright furrows her own groove as she counsels coital subtlety. So does Johnnie Taylor's son Floyd analyzing his woman's failure to bring him his house shoes. Big Cynthia's matched demands for clitoral and vaginal stimulation and Denise LaSalle's Anita Hill-era "Long Dong Silver" are good cheap novelties. And standing tallest of all is a standstill ballad by Carr, who is pained to admit that her macho man is also a "Down Low Brother." A-
What Goes On: The Songs of Lou Reed [Ace, 2021]As punk loyalist Kris Needs's fact-filled notes fail to note, the subtitle on this well-compiled collection of cover versions flirts with a misnomer, because all but six of these 20 Reed songs are also Velvets song--and those six include a Pickwick demo, a pre-Velvets Reed-Cale song, and Nico's 1967 "Wrap Your Trouble in Dreams," with the only full-fledged exceptions an expendable spoken-word closer recited by the honorable James Osterberg, "Perfect Day" from 2007's The Raven, and the inevitable "Walk on the Wild Side." It's enough to leave you shaking your head saying, "Jesus, and he was just getting started." As you'd figure, paying tribute are new wavers honoring their roots--Yo La Tengo do right by "I'm Set Free," the Soft Boys by "Train 'Round the Bend," Echo & the Bunnymen by "Run, Run, Run." Equally impressive is the lyricism of such varied female admirers as June Tabor, Rachel Sweet, Tracey Thorn, and Susanna Hoffs all singing as if Nico has never crossed their minds. And though I'd love to hear a follow-up comp that included, say, "Sally Can't Dance," "Set the Twilight Reeling," "Smalltown," "Egg Cream," and "Ecstasy," I wish I was convinced there were young singers out there savvy enough to pluck those songs from the great tradition. A
Sacred Soul of North Carolina [Bible & Tire/Music Maker Foundation, 2021]Recorded just pre-pandemic, featuring mostly artists from Greenville, the 90,000-strong urban center of the east North Carolina KKK stronghold of Pitt County, this 18-track collection is almost as striking as the same label's 2020 Hanging Tree Guitars. Their forebears go back to the Mitchell Christian Singers, who represented for gospel at John Hammond's 1938 Carnegie Hall Spirituals to Swing do. And indeed, most of these groups--only three solo artists including the woman who closes things out with an unsurprising, unaccompanied "Amazing Grace"--have been at it professionally if not therefore fulltime for 30, 40, 50 years, and their songs tend traditional. But the joyful life of these titles, many of which feel familiar to me even though they don't show up in my iTunes, is convincing, irresistible, a guaranteed up. Credit at least some of their energy to the well-miked drums that back almost every track, particularly Phillip Johnson on "Trying to Make It" and the stalwart Jahiem Daniels on Johnny Ray Daniels's "Somewhere to Lay My Head." A 2ff7e9595c
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