By Joe Bendel. If not necessarily the road not taken, A Tribe Called Quest definitely represents a road less traveled for hip-hop. Influenced by jazz and African musical forms whilst largely eschewing the nihilism of gangster rap in favor of a more spiritual message, ATCQ achieved a level critical acclaim unusual for hip-hop, yet still maintained their grassroots popularity. Alas, it would not last forever. Indeed, Michael Rapaport records the band’s break-up in his up-close-and-personal documentary, Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest, which premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.
Despite sitting for many interviews and allowing backstage access to Rapaport’s crew, the very vocal Q-Tip has reportedly since turned against the project. It’s hard to understand why, though. As backstage conflict goes, ATCQ’s is pretty tame stuff. Indeed, there’s nothing Charlie Sheen-worthy to be witnessed in the film. As seen through Rapaport’s cameras, their break-up appears to be largely attributable to the stress of Phife Dog’s health issues and the inevitable resentments bred by a long period of familiarity. Frankly, as behind-the-music profiles go, BRL makes ATCQ look pretty together.
A Tribe Called Quest.
After beginning at the apparent end, Rapaport rewinds to the beginning, giving a brisk overview of the band’s history. Signed for what was then an unprecedented advance, ATCQ was under pressure to deliver from the start, but that was not a problem. The early years were glory years, both in terms of music and sales. Perhaps the group reached its artistic high-water mark when collaborating with De La Soul in the egoless super-group Native Tongue.
Throughout their tenure, ATCQ had a rep as a musician’s hip-hop group. Not surprisingly, the best moments of BRL capture a sense of the group’s grounding in jazz and soul. A committed crate-digger, Q-Tip in particular emerges as an authority on vintage soul jazz LPs, like (Dr.) Lonnie Smith’s Drive, which he famously sampled and discusses at length in the film.
While opinion amongst ATCQ seems decidedly mixed, BRL will hardly damage their legacy. It will rather more likely strengthen their reputation as the thinking man’s hip-hop group. Though a snip here or there would not have been the end of the world, the animated sequences created by James Blagden & Phillip Niemeyer and the original incidental soundtrack by Madlib tie it all together in a solid, often entertaining package. Given the band’s continuing popularity as well as Rapaport’s name recognition as an actor, it seems like a good bet there will be considerable demand for BRL following its recent Sundance premiere. Well put together and only occasionally voyeuristic, BRL was a hit at Sundance, which concluded Sunday (1/30) with special screenings of this year’s award winners.
By David Ross. I wonder how much of my sensibility is traceable to the 1982 edition of The Rolling Stone Record Guide, edited by Dave Marsh and John Swenson. I was a twelve year old oddly drawn to what Greil Marcus calls the “old, weird America,” and the guide pointed toward an American shadow culture of the swamps, the back roads, the cotton fields, the mountains, the bordellos, the late-night clubs on the wrong side of the tracks. The music was important to me, but even more important was the writing of critics like Marsh, Marcus, and Lester Bangs, which seemed to model a nerdy cool that was not entirely beyond my powers of imitation and which excitingly presupposed an American vitality and mysteriousness invisible to the teenage suburban eye.
Picasso's "The Tragedy."
With the guide in hand, I felt sure that the Brit-boy synth pop then dominating the charts – remember the Human League’s massively annoying “Don’t You Want Me”? – represented a momentary masochistic derangement (rather like communism) and not the human norm. This notion turned out to be only partially true – the great age of American music really was over – but it allowed me to grit my teeth and get through sixth grade.
I particularly remember the guide’s entry on Skip James (1902-1969), a Mississippi bluesman whose music had a strange ethereality and almost modernist abstraction, reversing the usual earthiness of the blues and turning it into something elegant and almost formal. These days his music puts me in mind of paintings from Picasso’s blue period. Wrote Marcus: “James’ high, ghostly voice pierces the night air – it always seems like night when these albums are playing – and his guitar shadows the moon.” This line thrilled me as a kind of poetry, and Skip James became – and remains – one of my touchstones. It really does seem like night when his albums play; his guitar really does seem to shadow the moon.
Here is the best of what little footage exists of James, from the film Devil Got My Woman: Blues at Newport 1966. And Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World pays homage to James here.
From Puccini's "La Fanciulla del West" ("Golden Girl of the West") HD series at The Met.
By Patricia Ducey. Giacomo Puccini’s Wild West opera, La Fanciulla del West (“Golden Girl of the West”), is the latest offering from The Met: Live in HD series (Encore: Wednesday, January 26, 2011, 6:30 PST).
Commissioned 100 years ago by the Metropolitan Opera, Fanciulla is Puccini’s homage to the conventions and themes of the American Western—and to America itself. Puccini gave his patrons exactly what they were looking for, and after 19 standing curtain calls on opening night, the Met knew they had a durable hit in their first commission.
This year, the Met celebrates Fanciulla’s centenary with a boisterous, lyrical restaging featuring American soprano Deborah Voigt and Italian tenor Marcello Giordani and a delightful ensemble chorus of gunslingers, miners and banditos—a wonderful addition to a movie season that includes other shining examples of Americana like True Grit and the lesser Country Strong.
The music is Puccini-gorgeous, from one of his most beloved arias, “Ch’ella mi creda” (see here) sung by Dick Johnson as he begs his executioners to spare Minnie the knowledge of his perfidy, to the orchestral passages that reportedly inspired Andrew Lloyd-Weber’s Music of the Night.
Fanciulla’s story centers on frontierswoman Minnie, a saloon owner and Bible study teacher to a gold mining camp’s barely civilized miners. These are rough men: they drink their whiskey straight and shoot first, ask questions later. The only trace of sentiment emerges when they share stories of the dear mothers and big old dogs they left behind. Minnie and her “boys” are courageous loners, striking out for the fabled Sierra gold mines, for personal freedom and for adventure. Minnie with her book-learning and Bible lessons is the slim thread that ties them to civilization, and they are all in love in one fashion or the other with her. She helps them write home and tempers their anger in their many arguments and brawls. In one scene, when they catch one of their own cheating at poker, she instructs them, Bible in hand, “Every sinner can be redeemed.” Later, we suspect she will have to walk that talk herself.
In Minnie we have a new kind of Puccini heroine: a self-made woman, owner of a thriving business, cheerful in adversity and fiercely independent. Her pistol is her best friend, she recounts to an overly amorous miner, and she breaks up more than one unruly mob with a few well-aimed gunshot blasts. Puccini looks more to Annie Oakley than Mimi for this Minnie. She would rather live alone than be trapped in a loveless marriage with any of the several men in camp who endlessly woo her–as soon as she asserts that independence, though, in walks the handsome stranger. Of course she falls totally in love, but her love leads her to triumph here rather than to a pitiable death, as in most of Puccini’s other operas. In the final act, she singlehandedly holds back the lynch mob and at the same time inspires her man to renounce his banditry and dedicate his life to goodness and love.
Deborah Voigt as Minnie.
In Fanciulla, Puccini weds the traditions of operatic tragedy with American optimism. Like the deservedly praised True Grit, Fanciulla exults in themes of Americana as well as in the Judeo-Christian heritage that anchors them. From True Grit’s Bible allusions–read without irony–to the rollicking barroom brawl in Fanciulla, both honor the eternal truths expressed by the Western genre and thus revive its classical expression. Puccini recognizes that the Western is the essential American morality play, and that goodness eventually will triumph in this land caught between wildness and civilization. That’s the real American Dream and the sense of possibility that drew so many of Puccini’s countrymen to our shores.
Writer/Director Shana Feste, on the other hand, is all mixed up about her Americana in Country Strong. She misses entirely the reason country music is so popular: there is no self-hating in Nashville. The movie starts out as a melodrama about Kelly Canter (Gwyneth Paltrow), a fading country singer sprung a little too early from rehab by her emotionally distant husband James (Tim McGraw) because … well, we’re never told why. He insists she needs to start touring before the docs release her. Do they need the money? Is he trying to gaslight Kelly because he loves a younger singer? We hope to find out, yet McGraw’s character and motivation remain a mystery.
Kelly wants rehab orderly Beau (who also conveniently happens to be a singer) to open for her on the tour, but James chooses newcomer Chiles Stanton (Leighton Meester) instead. Kelly is jealous of the younger woman and imagines her flirting with James—or maybe she is flirting with him?—yet Kelly herself has been bedding Beau since rehab. Who’s zoomin’ who? Eventually all four of them are on tour together, in the crucible of Kelly’s comeback. They hook up, break up, fight and make up, with lots of streaked mascara but little discernable rationale. With all possible plot points on the table, the histrionics and plot twists remain vaguely mystifying. No much is at stake here: not principles, life and death, nor even love. In hipster movies, love hurts.
The actors do a heroic job, and a few of the tunes, even though we never hear one in its entirety, are iPod worthy. Paltrow proves again what a rich, emotionally layered actor she is, and Meester, of Gossip Girl fame, wrests depth and nuance from a most shallow stereotype. Garrett Hedlund from Tron could have a singing career. Tim McGraw, one of the most radiantly masculine stars on screen, though, is seriously misused or underused. McGraw’s James is written as cold and distant, but this behavior is never explained. Maybe a prequel will explain his pinched rejection of the whole lot of them?
Country Strong is a serviceable enough musical melodrama, but it’s hard to tell what the point is. This is either a script-by-committee mashup, or Feste is another screenwriter gripped by existential confusion towards her subject. She cannot decide if CountryStrong is a classic melodrama or hipster hit-piece. On the one hand, the script panders to the bien pensant with jabs at what she envisions as flyover country: Christians are hypocrites, patriots are jingoists, pro-lifers are haters, crossover country is insipid and beauty queens are stupid, etc. Then why is Kelly’s triumphant comeback song an insipid pop song itself, presented without irony? On the other hand, sometimes Country Strong seems to be playing it straight, as with the actors’ performances, and that does work. Her method seems to be to throw tropes and clichés on the wall, however contradictory, and see what sticks.
Puccini’s Minnie and the Coen brothers’ Mattie Ross would be perplexed at so much wild emotion in service of such small stakes. Minnie probably would chuck Kelly out of her saloon at the first whine, and Hattie would sniff and ride off, head held high, to right another wrong. They knew that their journey was the American journey, into the wilderness and into the human heart, and that “strong” is more than just a word in a song.
In related news, the inevitable: the Royal Opera House’s Carmen is soon to be released in 3D (see here). I’m down with that.
By David Ross. Between 1961 and 1968, Rolling Stone co-founder and music critic Ralph Gleason hosted twenty-eight half-hour episodes of Jazz Casual on public television. There wasn’t much glitz: Gleason would say a few words of introduction and his musical guest would be off to the races. Even so, Jazz Casual was probably the purest dose of cool ever delivered by American TV. In 2006, all twenty-eight episodes – 840 minutes worth – were released as a DVD box set titled The Complete Jazz Casual, but the set is now, alas, unavailable. Netflix offers three episodes – Basie, Gillespie, and Coltrane – on a single disc, as well as discs devoted exclusively to Coltrane, Brubeck, and B.B. King.
John Coltrane & Miles Davis.
Coltrane, of course, is like some astral event that comes around only once in many lifetimes; to see and hear him is to witness something epochal.
Jazz aficionados should also make a particular point of viewing, via Netflix, Miles Davis: Cool Jazz Sound (2004), a 25-minute dose of the Miles Davis Quintet – Davis, Coltrane, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb – filmed in New York in April 1959. Davis and Coltrane are such spectacularly paired opposites, the former’s angular reserve balancing the latter’s delving, groping virtuosity.
By David Ross. Rock has become such a ludicrous synergy of boobs without brains and b-schoolers without balls that it’s hard to remember why one ever cared. Springsteen’s Hammersmith Odeon London ’75, a sweating, writhing, heaving tent revival of an album, will remind one. When the album appeared in 2006, I knew instantly that my ears feasted on one of the supreme live albums: not a marginal addition to the giant Springsteen oeuvre, but a core masterpiece materialized out of nowhere to rival the likes of Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard (1961), James Brown’s Live at the Apollo (1963), the Allman Brothers’ At Fillmore East (1971), and Bob Marley’s Live (1975). When I discovered that the concert had been released on DVD – that full footage existed – I felt as if the earth had split open and coughed up something like a 39th Shakespeare play or a 10th Beethoven symphony. Indeed, the DVD revealed what may be the greatest concert ever captured on film (a musical judgment; the film itself is pedestrian). I found myself entertaining the fantastic notion that the 1975 incarnation of the E Street Band is the greatest band ever – not remotely the best assemblage of individual musicians, but the best band, absolutely cohesive, committed, and co-equal, with a jazzy adventurism that it would eventually purge in favor of the irritating thump of Born in the U.S.A. The Odeon concert represents Springsteen at his very height, as much a deity of the American spirit as Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman.
The record company, Rosie, gave me a big advance! This line, from “Rosalita,” of course, explodes not merely with the sense of release from tribulation but with the affirmation of the inevitability of release. It embodies what President Obama fails to understand when he says “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism,” etc. There is such a thing as American exceptionalism: it is rooted in an amalgam of joy (sometimes tragic joy), energy, freedom, and providential faith. Socialism fails in American not least because everybody expects their own big advance to arrive at any moment, and the damnedest thing is that it does tend to arrive, not always in the form of a fat check from New York, but in the form of a realized dream: a kid in college, a small business that turns a corner and starts to pay the bills. Though he has lately become a celebrity leftist, Springsteen understands this entirely; indeed, he understands America far better than the president does. He understands as well, in a song like “Racing in the Streets,” which may be his most moving and profoundly perceiving, that while dreams do not always become glittering realities, our glory nonetheless is to have dreamt, and to have passed through the fading of the dream into a deeper reconciliation and grace.
YouTube used to be awash in footage, but the abovementioned B-Schoolers have had it all purged. Sony might have let this one slip in the simple interest of disseminating something wonderful and assisting the efflorescence of the national spirit, but, of course, no. In any case, for the price of half an oil change you can buy the DVD.
Additional preferred rock and rock-related concert films, with dates of performance:
Miriam Makeba, Live at Berns Salonger, Stockholm, Sweden, 1966
The Complete Monterrey Pop Festival (1967)
Jimi Hendrix, Live at Monterrey (1967)
Stax/Volt Revue: Live in Norway 1967
Elvis Presley, Elvis: ’68 Comeback Special (1968)
Jimi Hendrix, Live at Woodstock (1969)
The Rolling Stones, Gimme Shelter (1969)
Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music (1969) – deplorable generation, unmatched concert
Joe Cocker, Mad Dogs and Englishmen (1970)
The Beatles, Let it Be (1970)
The Who, Isle of Wight Festival 1970 (1970)
Led Zeppelin, Live at the Royal Albert Hall, 1970 (see the compilation titled Led Zeppelin)
Neil Young, Live at Massey Hall (1971)
The Band, The Last Waltz (1976)
Patti Smith, Live in Stockholm (1976) – not exemplary, but I’ll take it.
Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Sting, et al., The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball (1981)
Stevie Ray Vaughan, Live at the El Mocambo (1983)
Sorry, but Stop Making Sense doesn’t interest me in the least; irony is to be transcended, not indulged. The raison d’etre of rock is conviction, with all its potential for foolishness and pretension.
By Patricia Ducey.The Taqwacores is one of a few notable films lately (like Four Lions) nibbling at the margins of mainstream cinema with Muslims as its subject. Supported and developed at Sundance, and distributed by Strand Releasing, The Taqwacores is an original and winning little marvel.
The word taqwacore itself is a mashup of “taqwa,” meaning piety, and “core,” for hardcore – and the movie itself was adapted from Michael Muhammad Knight‘s 2003 novel, The Taqwacores, about an imagined Muslim punk scene in the U.S. – which in turn inspired an actual Muslim punk scene in America, then a documentary about it, and then this movie.
Strangely,The Taqwacores has been outright reviled by mainstream critics, but well-liked by audiences – Rotten Tomatoes gives it an 11% approval by critics and 51% by audiences – illustrating the apparently growing divide between the critical community and moviegoers. (I first began to notice this divide five years ago when I read a review of Memoirs of aGeisha, a movie I enjoyed and felt surpassed the novel, which stated that while the movie was well done and compelling, the reviewer felt he could not give it a thumbs up because its subject was a Japanese woman who engaged in and enjoyed – yes, shockingly, enjoyed! – an affair with an American military man in post-WWII Japan.) Sadly, it seems as though too many critics are either intimidated by political dogma, or feel obligated to uphold the politics and aesthetics of their mentors, to give little films like The Taqwacores a fair hearing.
Actress Noureen DeWulf, when not wearing a burqa.
The most unique aspect of The Taqwacores is that, for once, American Muslims are portrayed as the subject of a narrative and not as an objectified “other.” The Taqwacores is actually a coming of age story told from within a unique strata of American culture, with young people and their hopes and fears propelling the story. We are viewing the story of young American Muslims as they tell it to us in the way they want to tell it.
By contrast, a ‘mainstream’ Hollywood narrative would probably have involved a journalist writing about a punk rock scene that was pulling in local Muslim youth and ‘contaminating’ them with Western values. Somehow he would save these poor, besotted naifs; and, music swelling, the youths would return to the more pure, authentic lifestyle of their Muslim parents. (Or maybe a burned-out, disabled U.S. military vet would travel to another planet and rescue these well-meaning young people from American imperialism?)
In doing this, you might say that The Taqwacores revives the genre of politically incorrect cinema. I have not seen a movie that turns cliché on its head with such relish since the superb Last King of Scotland, a film that was as much a scathing indictment of western do-goodism as of Idi Amin.
As we hear the worried telephone voiceover of his mother, we meet young college kid Yusuf (Bobby Naderi), an American of Pakistani origin, arriving at a student rooming house run by “good Muslims,” as his mother assures him. Yes, a devout brother, Umar, does greet him and show him to his neat room, outfitted with a Koran – but as the day goes on, Yusuf begins to suspect that something is not quite halal about this place: metal music blares from the floor below; the refrigerator is filled with beer and nothing but beer; the one sister in the house, Rabeya (Noureen DeWulf) greets him – in a burqa covered with punk patches – and chats casually with him. A woman and man alone together, alcohol and rock and roll! What has Yusuf gotten himself into?
He spends the rest of the movie finding out. Soon he meets the other roommates – most notably the charismatic Jehangir (Dominic Rains), lead guitarist and resident punk theoretician. Jehangir has conceived his own anarchistic and liberating version of Islam, as expressed in his music. But Jehangir loves all music and especially idolizes Johnny Cash – “Johnny ruled the world” – and Jehangir is tired of being small. He wants out of submission and into relevance.
The roommates conduct Friday prayers, but with the woman, Rabeya, giving the sermon, and the prayers are usually followed by an all out drunken bash. Yusuf eventually falls for pretty former Roman Catholic Lynn, who has embraced Islam for its seeming lack of hierarchy that stands in contrast to her Catholic faith. But she and her freewheeling sexuality prove too much to Yusuf at the moment. Gradually though, Yusuf comes to understand and appreciate these new feminist and radical interpretations of his beloved Islam. He respects and is even thrilled by the way his housemates question and argue and embrace the Big Questions of life, like students everywhere, but he can’t jump into the mosh pit quite yet. And even though Yusuf is devout, he harbors no hostility to anyone – in contrast to angry young man Umar. He soon develops real affection for his housemates and their motley crew of hardcore rockers, feminists, and gays.
Yusuf changes, and he grows.
Actors Bobby Naderi and Dominic Rains.
Bobby Naderi plays Yusuf with the winning innocence of Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. I would call this a breakout role for Naderi, except that America’s critical establishment has frozen out this little film and Mr. Naderi along with it. Dominic Rains brings handsome, tragic Jehangir to life, and the supporting characters all shine. Shot in primary colors against the grey sky of Buffalo’s winter, the camerawork echoes the graffiti slathered over every inch of the Taqwacores’ corner of the concrete jungle, and frames its characters like they are jumping off the page of a graphic novel.
Unfortunately, I suspect The Taqwacores will come and go quickly from theaters (not unlike Memoirs of a Geisha). So for an evening with Yusuf and his friends of smashing taboos and shocking the neighbors – set against the music of real taqwacore groups like The Komanis – you’ll have to move fast.
By Joe Bendel. If not necessarily the road not taken, A Tribe Called Quest definitely represents a road less traveled for hip-hop. Influenced by jazz and African musical forms whilst largely eschewing the nihilism of gangster rap in favor of a more spiritual message, ATCQ achieved a level critical acclaim unusual for hip-hop, yet still maintained their grassroots popularity. Alas, it would not last forever. Indeed, Michael Rapaport records the band’s break-up in his up-close-and-personal documentary, Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest, which premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.
