Taylor Noakes {.} Com

One of my all-time favourite early-90s hip-hop tracks, from one of the brilliant minds in comedy, Mr. Barrel Roll himself Tom Green. This 2011 remix music video was shot right in my backyard, Downtown Montreal.

I’ll add this to a list of great Montreal music videos later. Enjoy!

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The phrases that most easily come to mind when I think about this album are ‘burning down the house’ for obvious reasons and the refrain of ‘stop making sense’ from the track “Girlfriend is Better” off of side A. This makes a fair bit of sense, given the former was the band’s only American top-ten hit and the fact that by David Byrne’s own admission, he made an album and created lyrics subsequently to fit the nonsense originally sung over the music composed by Talking Heads.

It is not a typical Talking Heads album given the previous prevalence of Brian Eno’s production. It is still a seminal work for the band andy Byrne in particular, in that it is as though the student has finally demonstrated a mastery of the teacher’s technique. It is more musically minimalistic than previous albums, especially if compared to Remain in Light, though lyrically it seems far more complex. Perhaps it is a commentary on the public discourse of the era, in which mass corporate communications were first beginning to make headway into the American popular discourse and create their own authority via the immediacy of their preferred medium. In another sense, perhaps it is the Talking Heads recognizing the danger of the new meta-talking head, made dangerous by combining sub-par intellect with state-of-the-art tools of communication. If the lyrics on side-A leave you confused about what exactly you’re listening to, then maybe Byrne has succeeded more than he expected.

I find the album perfectly listenable, enjoying the highs and lows, the elements of new wave, funk and reggae blending into one another, the stripped down instrumentation covering the sonic range while re-enforcing the cooperative ‘drum-circle’ spirit Byrne had explored with Eno on previous collaborations. That said, I remember the first time I listened to this album, perhaps about eight years ago, and finding it almost unbearable. It grew on me, and still does. And aside from the admissions of gibberish and nonsensical lyrics, and i can only say I agree completely with Robert Christgau in his opinion ‘Swamp’ is one of the greatest anti-Capitalist songs ever written (indeed, the album is exceptionally political and highly critical of early-1980s American society) and This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) is perhaps one of the greatest pro-Love songs of all time. I couldn’t agree more with that last bit too – it is an exceptional love song; sincere, timeless and real.

Key Tracks:
- Girlfriend is Better
- Slippery People
- Swamp
- Moon Rocks
- Pull Up the Roots

* Like this: more album reviews can be found at Vinyl.

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Tom Tom Club – Wordy Rappinghood

I think the chorus is “what’s her word’s worth?” oft repeated.

What can I say I’m completely addicted to this funky jam. Enjoy!

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Brian Eno & David Byrne - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

A fascinating album to say the very least.

I’ve been a big fan of Talking Heads and David Byrne for years – actually, since I was a child, aged ten listening to Stop Making Sense over and over again while playing G.I. Joe with my brother. What can I say, Joe had some funky adventures.

This album opens with a track I found almost unlistenable at first, America is Waiting, which features a sample of an irate talk-radio host. The prodigious and precautions use of sampling on this album in fact held back its release, and it still stands as a shining example of a very early use of the technique. Moreover it is an analog recording, and therefore the samples would have had to have been synched manually, a difficult and frustrating task which often led to chance discoveries and happy accidents. The sampling itself, which also includes Lebanese mountain singers, an exorcism and radio evangelists sits in interesting juxtaposition to the African rhythms, which are complexly overlaid resulting in an intricately interwoven tapestry of funky punctuation. Eno would later say he thinks the principally innovative factor isn’t the sampling itself inasmuch as how the sampling is used as the principle vocals.

Like this? See the rest here.

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Arcade Fire's view of the crowd at last thursday's show - not the work of the author

26 September 2011/ Listening to David Byrne & Brian Eno/ Apartment is hot-as-hell, Indian Summer’s a happening, but for how much longer?

About that show…

I had to be there. Work got in the way of the last two opportunities I had to see the Arcade Fire perform, so I couldn’t afford to miss it.

I got there unfashionably early and planted myself in what would later be described by various people I encountered at the concert as ‘the happy zone’ to contrast it with the many ‘angry zones’ around the Place des Festivals where people had got boxed in and forced to listen to the show while facing the opposite direction. Not the band’s fault of course, I think they prefer smaller venues.

But in part I think that may have changed last Thursday.

I was enchanted with them, their presence, their palpable joy. Despite the fact hat an poorly-placed tent and cherry picker obscured my view partially, it didn’t seem to matter. In a strange twist it seemed as if it was fundamentally more important for the band, this quintessentially Montreal concoction, to see the crowd that came to see them. I cannot imagine what it felt like to stand on that stage and see the sea of people, citizens united under a common joy, a shared sentiment expressed by Time Magazine’s ‘most intriguing of Canadian bands’ (fuck it, they’re all intriguing – Nickleback’s fan-base perhaps most of all .

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