SOTW: Spring Songs by Carmen McRae and Clifford Brown (w. Max Roach)

It was an unusually cruel and punishing April of killer flus, and catastrophic health dramas for my loved ones--all sandwiching triumphant, but physically draining show openings for the BdP and Hector Silva. So on the heels of ATV's lovely, mellow gold offerings, do forgive if I indulge my emo-bear instincts and share as my first SOTW after a long hiatus, the soul- scarring rubato of Carmen McRae's "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most." Featured on McRae's aptly titled Bitersweet album released in May 1964, "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" has to be the saddest spring song ever written. The intro brandishes a little society wit before we find out the spring fling tanks, as the melody begins its dizzy swerves from major to minor and back again:

Now a spring romance hasn't got a chance
Promised my first dance to winter
All I've got to show's a splinter
For my little fling...

Written in 1950 by "the jazz world's answer to Dorothy Parker," Fran Landesman and her collaborator, pianist/composer Tommy Wolf for an unsuccessful musical about beatniks, "Spring..." makes elaborate octave leaps, and skips its way through the circle of fifths in a brilliantly schizoid ode to the season and its hushed co-dependency with the death and dearth of winter. [Landesman is pictured right, seated atop the piano next to JR Ewing himself, Larry Hagman. Wolf is seated at the piano. ]The song demands that anyone who tackles it work like an agile instrument, nailing each turn at the peak of every precarious arpeggio, only to lay bare the very brokenness of the chords forcing the voice to run.

Set in the glorious ruins of Carmen McCrae's low and dirty, smoked-out, coked-out, inimitable voice, this version of "Spring" resists its own histrionic momentum--exploited by other diva interpreters like Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler-- towards the melancholy conclusion, "when you keep wishing for the snow to hide the clover." Carmen keeps it low and low key. But it's her unruly take on the phrasing and rhythm that always threatens to burst weed-like through the frigid surface, and offer the lovesick something truly springy to sneeze at. Listen over and over again here.

On a much happier note, allow me to close with one of my all time favorite spring songs--an instrumental I love to both listen to and play. (Or that I loved to play when my saxamophone-playing hands still had some agility). My dad, a jazz pianist, taught the song to me when I was at the peak of my instrumental prowess with the alto, and playing in several jazz ensembles during my mid to late teens. The tune is "Joy Spring," trumpeter/composer Clifford Brown's best known work. He was a prolific composer, and amassed some remarkable recordings within 4 short years, collaborating with Max Roach to form a quintet that included the young Sonny Rollins on tenor sax. [The Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet (from L-R): Sonny Rollins, Clifford Brown, Richie Powell, Max Roach, George Morrow]

Brown and his wife's lives were cut tragically short in a car crash when he was only 25. But before we let that detail plunge us into more May gray, let some damn fine unison lift your spirits. Here Brown's trumpet and Sonny Rollins' tenor don't compete for virtuosity, but rather pace each other, like a couple of championship long-distance runners grooving on draft and adrenaline:




With that offering I wish us all a happy spring into spring for realz. For a last minute Oh! Industry twist, and as a bonus for all the "ChickenJoy" loving Pinoyz, choir dorks, lost Sweeney Sisters fans, and a capella aficionados out there, here's Manhattan Transfer's super-tight, sequined and harmonic take on "Joy Spring." Anghang sarap!!!- (KT)

SOTW: The Bee Gees and Lo Borges

It’s spring (sort of). This means a few things: the city shares the same case of the sniffles. Partly out of the shock of the newness of everything, morale takes a melancholic dip. Many feel more extraterrestrial than usual. That pile of papers that needs grading—a deafening presence in the house--feels like the hardest. thing. to. get to. ever. More than anything else, spring means that we all need take a long hard look at the damage wreaked by the winter uglies. Cue up some Duice and commence the extreme pedicures and waxing marathons...



With spring comes pain, but also pleasure. For one thing, being able to go for a long, joyous run outside means goodbye to microbio-infested gymnasiums. I’d like to offer up some songs to celebrate current wellness of heart, mind, body and employment (bulla!). Although the feel of Summer Breeze steadily approaches, I’d like to offer two mellow gold jams for the transitional here and now (my cusping of Gemini makes me hear double). These were chosen by the glow of the Forsythias:

Song #1: The Bee Gees, “You Stepped into My Life”
The older I get, the better prepared I am to think carefully about the Bee Gee’s sound. This is a pleasant yet raunchy little ditty to help celebrate the birth new friendships and romances that might be making you, breathlessly, “oh so happy.” Enjoy the gentle and just-right evanescence of Barry Gibb’s guitar and the serious glee of Robin Gibb’s teasing falsetto. Tune into the song’s conga-presence and consider its refraction with Willie Cólon and Ruben Bladés epic “Plástico” (no, it’s not important which song came first—and yes, us ladies-who-like-our-things have been out rightly reappropriating the latter for some time now).


While you're here, why not check out Melba Moore's kick ass version?



Lo Borges, “Club Da Esquina No. 2”
I’m thinking much these days about certain countercultures, particularly those generated out of Brasil for (at least) the past 400 years. In scribblelife, I’ve been trying to transcribe my heavy sonic visitation of 1970s Cuba. But as I write, I find myself drawn to some soundways from Brasil (generally), Minas Gerais (specifically). My interest was really given cause after I was gifted a recording of Pablo Milanes’s stunning 1984 concert in Rio. There’s much more I’d like to say about all this, probably in a book someday. In my dreams and without protocol schmooz, however, I’d be tapped to do a special radio program on it. It’s kinda like another dream of mine that has the folks over at 33 1/3 calling me up and asking me to contribute a volume on Donna Summer’s Bad Girls.

If there’s anyone out there who’s reading, please check out Lo Borges. Equatorial, perhaps his most famous song, is Club de Esquina's preemption of Chicago’s heavy-petting rite-of-passage “If You Leave Me Now.” Its lilt allows you to imagine what it could have been like to slow dance at a house party in the Belo Horizonte of 1972.




For the second song of the week, however, I’d like to pair the Bee Gee’s with his “Club Da Esquina No. 2.” There is not only more falsetto to be heard here, but you can also get a sense Borges’s place in the trajectory of badass Brasilian vocal interpreters.



Cuidense. (ATV)

Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay || by Media Sheep

This month's special guest spot is scored to the giddy galloping of andro-hooves. Please welcome our prolific pal and expert on all things ovine, Media Sheep, who's here to help launch Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay on opening day. So shed your winter coats, and spring into the summer movie season with eXTREEEEME reflections on race, terror, drugs, stoners and sliders...

In a series of public service announcements which aired between 2002 and 2003, U.S. television audiences were told that “Drug Money Supports Terror. If you buy drugs you might too.” Capitalizing on the fears of an American public recently rocked by the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the U.S. War on Terror offered a window of opportunity to reinvigorate its War on Drugs. These ads, created by the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, employ images of children as the victims of a terrorism funded by recreational drug use that both kills them and turns them into killers. In one ad, a child tells us:



Apart from the rather obvious use of a child to forward the organization’s political message via an appeal to worried and paranoid parents everywhere, the ad works to exclude drug users from national belonging as it conflates drug user with the terrorist who, in the contemporary War on Terror, is always already foreign. And it is the subtextual foreign-ness of the drug user/terrorist proposed by this particular ad that, in some cases, makes the PSA so effective. The effectiveness of a message linking recreational drug use to terrorism can be found in the reactionary and defensive denials of this message, as one YouTube user comments: “I buy directly from growers in my neighborhood. I'm not funding shit from any fucking foreign country.” Patriotism, it seems, knows no bounds, as such (what I would like to call) narco-nationalist reactions can be found in a variety of comments for similar PSAs.

The idea of foreign-ness that becomes associated with the drug user and terrorist and the drug user as terrorist, might help us to really think about the ways in which the U.S. War on Terror has come to influence various foreign and domestic policy decisions by our current government. It is no coincidence that this new War on Terror/Drugs has sparked heated debates about what we might call the current “immigrant crisis” in the U.S., a crisis whose primary concern is with the preservation of a pure national body, untainted by foreign invaders.

It is perhaps odd, or all too obvious, that a confrontation with the conflation of the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the “immigrant crisis,” and the racist nature of the U.S.’s current fear-based foreign and domestic policy decisions rests on the shoulders of two unlikely stoner heroes: Harold and Kumar. In Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004), two Asian stoners (Harold, a Korean-American; Kumar, an Indian-American) embark on a drug induced adventure, motivated entirely by the munchies, to eat at White Castle, setting them on a journey that by the end of the film is explained as a narrative of immigration and the Asian diaspora. Moments away from being arrested, Kumar makes a motivational speech in which he states:

"So you think this is just about the burgers, huh? Let me tell you, it’s about far more than that. Our parents came to this country, escaping persecution, poverty, and hunger. Hunger, Harold. They were very, very hungry. And they wanted to live in a land that treated them as equals. A land filled with hamburger stands. And not just one type of hamburger, hundreds of types. With different sizes, toppings, and condiments. That land was America. America, Harold. America. Now this is about achieving what our parents set out for. This is about the pursuit of happiness. This night is about the American dream."

That White Castle even addressed immigration during a time when the U.S. “War on Terror” reinvigorated notions of an “immigrant crisis” on the domestic front is interesting. Though the speech itself suggests that Harold and Kumar’s pursuit of happiness and the American dream are tangled up with neoliberal notions of consumption and national inclusion, the film itself portrays them as perpetually excluded from the national body by virtue of their Asian-American-ness, echoing Asian American exclusion narratives and practices as it simultaneously confronts issues of assimilation and incorporation.

The immigrant narrative that plays out to the end of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle seems to be further problematized and overtly placed into the context of the “War on Terror” in the upcoming Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, in which the conflation of South Asian and Arab or Muslim identities becomes the means by which Harold and Kumar are plunged into the world of anti-terrorism and U.S. military hegemony.




In one scene, a woman imagines Kumar in “terrorist drag,” which in light of the War on Terror has taken on a different, racialized and Orientalist form since the days of domestic terrorist attacks such as the Oklahoma City bombing. This becomes quite apparent when Kumar is imagined in Osama bin Laden drag, childishly mimicking the fall and eventual destruction of the plane. The garb of Muslim clerics and their association with Osama bin Laden fashion, functions for the older, white woman on the plane, as an always already Orientalist and essentialized understanding of race. This imagined “terrorist drag” also points to the ways in which South Asian and Muslim or Arab subjects have problematically come to stand in for the terrorist “other” as a function of U.S. nationalism, which must identify the other in order to prevent even the possibility of future harm. During a time when fear seems to be the most influential force in American politics, suspicion becomes the primary means of controlling, disciplining, or even castrating particular people. As the various trailers for Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay suggest, Kumar becomes the target of terrorist suspicion for being brown.

That this is also the result of Kumar's impatience and need to get high aboard a plane allows us to suspend our disbelief. As Kumar takes a drag from his bong (not “bomb”), the “logics” of reality are suspended and replaced by the (il)logics of being stoned (illogics, I should add, that seem more and more reflective of our lived reality). It would be easy to say that getting high is a form of escapism, but getting stoned in a Harold & Kumar film typically shifts daily happenings away from escapism and into an exaggerated form of persecution, marginalization, and shenanigans. The film’s promised conflation of Harold’s (South) Korean-ness with the “threat” of North Korea (a country identified as one part of George Bush’s “axis of evil”) and his relationship to Kumar (suspected of being an Al Qaeda terrorist operative) speaks to both the problem of racist conflations of ethnic identities, but also the paranoia that allows the characters in the film (and people in the real world) to imagine terrorist alliances between East Asia and the Middle East. Furthermore, escape from persecution, marginalization, and imprisonment are actually initiated by marijuana, as seen in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, in which Harold and Kumar are able to escape and evade re-capture by the police.

The "terrorist alliance" imagined by the Homeland Security operative in the Escape from Guantanamo Bay trailer is interesting to consider via a moment of "affective alliance" from Go to White Castle.

After stealing the "eXtreme" SUV from a group of "eXtreme," homophobic, racist white dudes, Harold and Kumar realize that the eXtreme dudes aren't nearly as eXtreme as they would like people to think. Listening to a mix CD of what might stereotypically be seen as "gay" music (an assumption that is dependent upon a variety of factors, one of which includes the rigidity of thinking about homosexuality via a gender inversion model), Harold and Kumar initially have the last laugh at the expense of the eXtreme white dudes, who become labelled as "gay" as a direct result of their taste in music. But Harold and Kumar also get swept up into the affective attraction inherent in this "gay" music as, while listening to Wilson Phillips' "Hold On," they begin to sing along, at first with some apprehension but finally with feeling.



This moment of "queeraoke" is interesting to note, particularly in relation to the "Do you boys like to spoon" (or in the restricted trailer, "You boys ready for your cock-meat sandwich?") moment in the ...Escape from Guantanamo Bay trailer which positions Harold and Kumar as potential victims of sexual torture, and places them in a negative affective relationship (fear, terror) with both each other and the prison guard that is distinct from the affective alliance forged with the help of Wilson Phillips. And the lyrics to that song take on a new dimension of meaning when read together with the "cockmeat sandwich" scene of sexual torture/terror:

Some day somebody's gonna make you want to
Turn around and say goodbye
Until then baby are you going to let them
Hold you down and make you cry
Don't you know?
Don't you know things can change
Things'll go your way
If you hold on for one more day...

Interesting how such hopeful lyrics can also become so disturbing: "Hold you down and make you cry" *shiver*. But it also points to the kind of hopefulness that may not be available to those imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, where holding on for one more day means little and does little to create the change necessary for "terrorism suspects" to "turn around and say goodbye" to the very regime that holds them down.

-Media Sheep

SOTW : "We Belong" by Pat Benatar

My song selection for this week's rotation comes on the heels of a set of recent global events in the last few weeks as well as some mid-day musings on my larger project of belonging as I’ve been reading some critical works on the topic (namely, Elspeth Probyn’s Outside Belongings and Lauren Berlant’s , The Female Complaint, the final installment in a trilogy).

Even in my pre-pubescent (and proto-MTV) years of jamming out to Friday Night Videos, I always got the sense that Pat Benatar's anthemic "We Belong" was a song that spoke to more than just the inner workings of intimate or romantic relationships. In my rebellious and feminist-separatist years of attending an all-girls Catholic high school, the song took on the tenor of banding together in a utopically-driven sisterhood, mobilized around a diverse set of interests –race, ethnicity, music, sexuality or fashion, to name a few. The song marked a type of naïve yet crucial political commitment to dialoguing with others in the spirit of understanding while simultaneously recognizing the Zen-inspired belief of mutuality or, as profoundly sung by The Monkees, the ethos of "a little bit me, a little bit you"



(more deep suburban thoughts and Oh! posting on this musical quartet later on down the line) that infuses the entangled nature or, in the vein of visual studies scholar, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, “the framework of bondage” that structures projects of belonging to national, racial, cultural, feminist, queer politics.

Drawing from the lyrical philosophies of Benatar’s power ballad, the sentiment of “cutting my feelings to the bone” provides a visceral and ironic reference to last month’s barrage of anti-emo riots in Mexico City. As thoroughly covered by LA Weekly writer Daniel Hernandez and OC Weekly editor Gustavo Arellano, violent reactions to emo youth goes beyond mere disagreements over fashion or musical taste. In Mexico City, where a majority of emo-affiliated youth are queer, the “anti-emosexual” campaign takes on a different valence of violence in belonging as homophobic aggression is thinly disguised under pop music “cultural” differences while emo youth continue to choose overt association with the scene despite consequences such as this



Meanwhile, half way across the world, a recent BBC News radio program debated this question – “Do Blacks and Asians have to behave like white people to succeed?”

Sparked by incidents of journalists and bloggers throughout the British Empire messily grappling with their levels of identification towards ideologies of blackness (whether as “coconuts” or “oreos” or even as “not-black-enough” by African American standards), at the same time, these incidents gesture towards the parallel experience of U.S.-based people of color’s reactions towards the now infamous blog, “Stuff White People Like.” As myself and a plethora of friends and family have wondered – Am I “white” because I like some of this stuff too? OR Does normalcy, almost to the point of boredom, still constitute what is considered “white” (and, therefore, not black and deviant, brown and spicy, or Asian and exotic)? OR, in the end, as the years in my undergrad Ethnic Studies classes taught and then beat into my head, can we really not veer that far from the Hegelian dialectics of intercultural contacts embodied in Benatar’s lyrics –

Don’t want to leave you really
I’ve invested too much time.
To give you up that easy
To the doubts that complicate your mind.

Heard through the headphone filters of this constellation of related news stories and critical writing, the melancholic yet tenacious undertow of “We Belong”’s melodies and mantra pull it back to its goal of meditating on the limits and possibilities of relationality (and away from the Hilton commercials’ creepy lifting of the children’s choir-sung ending to invoke its domestic and branded appeal for world travelers). The song’s strong, affective pull not only propels the currents of markets, cultures, politics, discourse, and commodities that infuse intellectual projects around belonging, it also provides us a soundtrack as we ride the waves of more ethical yet realistic approaches to living with each other in the present. - (CBB)



p.s. - please leave a comment and let us know if you
a. appreciate how PB is catherine zeta-jonesin' us by covering her pregnancy with above the chest camera shots

b. too owned this white blazer with shoulder pad look back in the late 1980s (bonus points if you had an additional brooch)

c. can explain the continuum of 1980s music videos that featured hanging cloth as backdrop

d. would like to argue for this video's reference to Tuck Everlasting or a bayou scene from a certain Disneyland ride with the final shots of the children's choir

Dispatch from Seattle: Experience Music Project Conference

I admit that some weeks, I'll drop as much as 75 cents into Rupert Murdoch's coffers. Here's why:


All for Cindy Adams, Our Lady of the Puns, the grande dame of NYC gossip columnists. She often comes with a politics as nasty as the New York Post wants to be. With time, you come to need her patented tag line. In your head it carries the sound of what glitterati hangers-on at Sardi's might have sounded like 30 years ago ("Only in New York Kids, Only in New York"). I'd like to try and approximate her overly baubled, insiderish, yet snappy formal moves to talk about the Experience Music Conference that went down last weekend in Seattle. Before memory fades, here is a litany of fragments and celebrity sightings.



Let me get this out of the way: it was, yet again, a bit of a schlongfest. It is a toxic myth to say that this reflects the demographics behind musical criticism. But thanks to the path of OH! enlightenment, yoga, and leafy greens, I’ve learned a few things over the past four conferences or so. Overall, it helps to not show up to or participate in or provide body for the conference’s…um…swordfights. Instead, score some undercommons action and sustenance at Pho Viet Anh, a mere three blocks away (right next to Asian Breeze). Get your textual healing on with friends in the real world. Go outside, get a cone of soft serve, and watch the Ferris wheel go-round. Write about things that will enliven your project, versus doing the work that others are unwilling to do. Play with some of the interactive machines in the museum. Drink some. Wear a sturdy pair of boots.

One of the things that’s so great about EMP, is that there’s always hope when you think there isn’t any. Like when you catch a glimpse of what I call the Veterana Force, ladies whose mere presence provides backup. Thank you Ann Powers, Daphne Brooks, Gayle Wald, and Kandia Crazy Horse. Panel standouts, a.k.a. the underground rumblings of music criticism, included Garnette Cadogan’s “argument for the sake of meditation,” the entirety of “Racial Ambivalence and the History of Rock” (Tavia Nyong’o, Camara Holloway, Greg Tate, Daphne Brooks, with moderation by Kandia Crazy Horse). Gayle Wald’s elegant work on the “Soul!” TV series, and Abraham Gómez-Delgado’s testimony about the formative power of Boston (more the band, less the location). Processing much of this with Josh “Kunmora” Kun and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro was an absolute joy.

Finally, I'd like to circulate the work of two new friends to the fellowship. I'm delighted to report that our San Antonio ranks have swelled.

If you don’t already know it, acquaint yourself with the work of Jim Mendiola. This San Antonio-proud-but-L.A.-based filmmaker has done some truly lovely work on the ladysupergroup Girl in a Coma (see past post by Oh!'s KT). There were lots of feelings being had during his presentation of their reality show pilot and video of their hit “Clumsy Sky.” Especially touching was the footage with Stephanie’s mother who, very gently, kept reiterating, “They’re good girls.” It is rare to find such intelligent and tender documentation of girlhood. He's also the fuerza behind www.kenburnshatesmexicans.com.

Then there's Oscar "Mambo King" Garza, editor-in-chief of Tu Ciudad Magazine. Thanks to his important efforts, we'll know what's up and look cute too.


Thank you, Gracias, Salamat, Grazie, to the organizers, especially to Eric Weisbard for so generously bringing us all together.

Yours in Sweet Sensation (ATV).

SOTW: "Dreaming of Me" by Depeche Mode

This past Saturday, a misty evening in the City of Angels, scholars and writers gathered at Tropico de Nopal gallery (a community-based gallery which, as my fellow ALOTR sister, KT pointed out is actually housed in Historic Filipinotown, rather than Echo Park as the org's website purports, diagonal from the "Chinese-Filipino foods" bodega, Little Ongpin) for an evening of poetry and music that focused on the themes of fandom and obsession. The culminating event for USC's English graduate student conference, "Getting Obsessive", the evening featured the latest permutation of Critical Karaoke, a tradition started at the annual EMP Pop Music conference (a site for the creation and development of ALOTR's fellowship): 1. choose a song, 2. write about its personal (and, sometimes, cultural) value and importance, and then 3. read your write-up, no longer than the length of the actual song playing in the background. Special shouts out to organizers, Alexis Lothian and Matthew Carrillo-Vincent (MCV), and to our fellow Critical Karaokistas, Jen Ansley and Maura Klosterman. Here's part one of our live mixtape breakdown and a SOTW to push us into April and springtime:

"Dreaming of Me": Depeche Mode (1981)

With an intro completely recreatable through Garage Band,

Released as a single in the U.K. in 1981, Depeche Mode's "Dreaming of Me" wasn’t commercially distributed in the U.S. until the 1988 re-release of their first album, “Speak and Spell”. Taken from the title of a French magazine, the band's name according to musician and songwriter, Martin Gore meant 'hurried fashion or fashion dispatch' -- connoting the new wave ethos of conveying provocative messages in a direct manner.

As Asian Americans at high school dances in New Jersey or the military-based homes of Virginia Beach or at the Rhino Records in Claremont or parked outside the Ranch 99s of Milpitas could attest, bands such as DM and New Order, Erasure and Echo & the Bunnymen not only provided a soundtrack for the feelings of ennui and angst we experienced in suburban America but infused us with the hope of an 'outside' these self-proclaimed United States. As one of my Oh! Industry collaborators, Karen Tongson, has pointed out, perhaps the accented ways of living inflected in the music of the second British Invasion best spoke to our own understandings of provincialism by connecting Liverpool and Manchester, England to Riverside and San Jose, California. As my friend Phuong Tang confessed, it was often assumed that these New Wave bands were actually Vietnamese pop stars singing in a foreign tongue since the English sounded so affected and they found such popularity among Vietnamese and other Asian immigrants in her hometown of Queens, NY.

What was and is it about New Wave music that appeals to the sonic desires of Asian America? Is it the often simple, sometimes brooding melodies played on a nothing more than a Casio synthesizer layered on top of drum-machine manufactured beats that you could pogo to and smoothed out by guitar and bass lines? Is it the saccharin sweet pop-ness that remind us of songs from worlds oceans away, music that offers the type of mega-mall air-conditioning relief after an hour in the third world heat, an apt metaphor for imperial salvation from the unbridled nature of the tropics? Did new wave music's cinematic style--reproduced in fashion and song--invoke alternate versions of modernity that we witnessed on childhood trips back home to Hong Kong, Tokyo, Manila, or Seoul, years before a certain Quentin made them available to the self-named cool kids on the block?

Perhaps it was all of these things and more, namely, the directive we get from this Depeche Mode single - a command for Asian America to recognize its utopic potential precisely by dreaming of itself and, riffing off literary critic Kandice Chuh, imagining otherwise all the things we could be. With musical artists such as Ming & Ping, Paper Doll, and The Jack Lords, and venues such as San Francisco's PopScene, Yellow Buzz blog, Directions in Sound, and the Shark Club in Costa Mesa, to name a few, Asian Americans have and will continue dancing with distant friends, picturing their futures, and all the while envisioning themselves through the dreams that music can inspire. - (CBB)

SOTW: Viva Cachao

On this Easter weekend, let's rethink the terms of resurrection. Israel "Cachao" López, who forever swerved the course of the bass in popular music, passed away from kidney failure this morning. From the early 1930s and onward, Cachao has altered the curvature of bass's sound, generously mined its potential, and provided us with many of those funky bottoms we now know it can give us. Here you can read one of the first of what one hopes will be a cavalcade of obituaries. Listen and mourn in your way, before the Estefans can find a way to overdetermine, which is to say, profit off of his passing. For easy access, I recommend Cachao Descargas: the Havana Sessions or tracks off of the Cuban Jam Sessions collection, all available on itunes. If you're more patient, puhleeze fill up a cart and support the good folks over at descarga.com.

Here's an always-interesting ditty that assures us that Cachao's spirit will continue to make a ruckus from somewhere else:
El Fantasma by Cachao


Feliz Pascua (ATV)

Idol Thoughts || Vegas Edition

If I were a bettin' type (she says with a dry casino cough after 5 days and 4 long nights in Sin City), I wouldn't put my money on Ramiele Malubay this week. After another bad Beatles song-choice, one has to wonder if Ramiele has officially pulled a Hillary (pre March 4)--she's become a former front-runner now dangling on the precipice of elimination thanks to campaign mismanagement and questionable costume choices. I know Ann Powers made a similar analogy with Carly Smithson a couple of weeks ago in the L.A. Times. But if anything, Smithson is the Hillary heralded by Time and Newsweek post-March 4th: scrappier, but with the odds stacked deeply against her. It's unclear if her theatrical, multi-octave take on "Blackbird" will finally win people over, or whether her cocky judge's table showdown with Simon will instead convince everyone of her self-indulgence and sense of entitlement.

Fittingly, Ramiele sang "I Should've Known Better" last night. It was a performance one might find on the lesser stages at an off-strip casino like the Palace Station. Her hat was Culture Club cute, but her awkward stomp-shuffle dance was decidedly not. Meanwhile, her ersatz stage "momma," Brooke White (who knew?!?) rocked her best Big Bird impression, down to the dress, skipping and head-bobbing to "Here Comes the Sun."

On a conciliatory note, Amanda Overmeyerer--who I once dubbed a "Garbage Pail Kid"--has been solid the last couple of weeks, evidenced by her confident stage strut. Last night's outfit was much better than last week's. The tailored, Beyond Thunderdome vest worked to her advantage and accentuated her tough-gal guns. Syesha Mercado also offered a tasteful, restrained take on "Yesterday." I'll have to agree with Paula who, in one of her more lucid moments last night, advised Syesha to make more eye contact and sell the song. Like many of the ladies she suffers from a likeability gap. Look for Syesha to struggle again tonight. She and Ramiele will likely be clutching each other's forearms wishing for the best. But if I had to drop cash for real at the "Race & Sports" desk on who'll be eliminated, my money would be on Katy Lee Cook (aka REI Speedwagon). I actually liked her sweeping and twangy take on "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away"--but her insistence on constantly missing the correct chromatic note on "Hide" (consciously or not) won't convince anyone to keep her around for one more try.

As for the boys...
David Archuleta is back, although I'm fundamentally suspicious of his awkward teen schtick. C'mon...the guy won Star Search when he was a kid. How "diamond in the rough" can he be? I'm cynical enough to think he screwed up last week's lyrics just to look a little more accessible. Jason Castro (let's just call him Santa Cruz) wins the Stoner Bob/Mr. Sincerity prize this season. I'm willing to give him a break for fessing up to the fact that his semi-finals rendition of Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah" ended on a sour note. I frankly didn't mind the muppetry of his "Michelle," although it was strictly amateur hour.

Simon nailed it when he called David Cook out on his newfound "rock star" arrogance (I've always preferred the polished Aussie, Michael Johns, but like Ramiele, he's yet to knock anything out of the park). Chikeezie may be the most likeable contestant this season, but his pschizo-tempos on "I've Just Seen a Face" were at once, too reminiscent of a recently dumped Ruben Studdard (who lost his recording contract) and the Country Bear Jamboree at Disneyland. I'm going out on a limb to say the bottom boy this week (if there happen to be *any* in the bottom three) will be David Cook. - (KT)

Jem and The Holograms || by Ricardo Montez

For too long, we've needed a little Texas in our collective scroll. For this month's special guest spot, we're honored to showcase the critical stylings of fellow Misfit Ricardo Montez. Keep reading if you've always felt that being truly outrageous wasn't what they had in mind. (ALOTR).

Days after I accepted a temporary post in academia, Netflix delivered quite the gem to my mailbox. In the wake of job market stress and commands to make difference legible according to institutional desires, I turned to Jem and the Holograms seeking relief in the form of dazzling animated pop. In the privacy of my bedroom I could revisit deeply satisfying musical numbers amidst complicated dramatic plots. I wanted to indulge in the nostalgic despite the fact that gushing over the greatness of Jem is really all too cliché amongst a certain hip set. Season 3, Disc 1 did deliver a satisfying escape to youth, but the pleasure of viewing was also marked by rather painful remembrances. I still love the show but in light of this most recent viewing, I must admit that I harbor some resentment and perhaps hatred (my yogic side resists) towards the title heroine.

Jem and the Holograms appeared on television between 1985 and 1988. I remember watching the series not in the usual Saturday morning slot but instead on early weekday mornings before school. Dwight D. Eisenhower Middle School in San Antonio, Texas provides the crucial backdrop against which Jem and The Holograms became a magical departure. My older, thinner, popular sister would also watch the show with me—validating my interest in a cartoon that may have been age-inappropriate at a time when I was learning the importance of being cool. Though I'm sure she called me a fag for liking it. Unlike Jem, I did not have a Synergy to make me over before I made a public appearance. No clever catchphrase and earring clutch was going to transform my chunky, effeminate, acne-ridden, brown body into an alter-ego capable of running a mile under 10 minutes or fitting into normal, non-Husky jeans. Maybe I resented Jem then too. She moved between skinny, professional, wealthy blonde (Jerrica Benton) and pink-haired rock star tart. She really did have it all.

Season 3 of Jem and the Holograms opens with a two-episode storyline titled “The Talent Search.” When Shana, the black Hologram, is given the opportunity to design clothing for a famous television actress, she leaves the band and Jem must find a new drummer. The band holds auditions through a talent search. The Misfits--those trashy, brazen bad girls whose songs really are better—are, of course, pissed off by this publicity stunt. News of the talent search spreads to a Mexican greenhouse owner with a Speedy Gonzalez accent. He excitedly relays the information to his daughter, Carmen a.k.a. Raya Alonso. With encouragement and crafty assistance from her father, Raya gets her audition. On her way out of Starlight Records, Raya realizes that her father left one of his prized black orchids behind and returns to the studio to collect it. Through a slightly ajar door, Raya unexpectedly witnesses Jem’s transformation back to Jerrica. She instantly recognizes this knowledge as an immense burden. The Misfits’s manager, Eric Raymond, senses Raya’s vulnerability and offers her a contract in exchange for Jem’s true identity. In the end, Raya keeps her secret. After bringing a piñata to Starlight mansion (Jem’s home for wayward girls) and proving her loyalty, Raya wins the competition and becomes a Hologram.


Jem and the Holograms reflects a Benetton age of hip multiculturalism. Their morally virtuous character is tied to a representation of inclusion. Shana and Aja, the Asian-American lead guitarist, are foster care sisters of Jerrica/Jem and her kid-sister Kimber, also a Hologram. In a show so dependent on ethnic visibility, Jem’s struggle to hide her true-identity is a curious plot device that drives every episode. Synergy, the hologram machine built by Jem’s father, transforms Jerrica to Jem, and through that transformation she promotes the financial success of Starlight Records. Synergy warns, “If the secrets your father built into me fall into the wrong hands, they could be used for evil purposes.” What are these secrets? What could happen with the abuse of makeover magic? A record producer’s daughter gets to be the only money-generating act of her father’s company. As his legacy, she is both the business owner and the star. Her foster siblings and newly acquired Mexican drummer must continually prove their loyalty to Jem by keeping her secret no matter what pressures may arise. Their moral character and continued access to showcase talent is a condition of silence—a silence that secures property rights and the control of wealth for the Benton daughters. During Raya’s audition, Kimber gleefully exclaims, “That’s just the beat I wanted for my new song!” And like that, Raya’s ethnic beat becomes hers.

In my youth, I may have been hailed by my Mexican sister’s struggle to succeed and taken comfort in Raya’s inclusion into the glamorous world of Jem. Today I watch the episode longing for a different kind of escape, another route for self-transformation. Perhaps she could take the money and join the Misfits. Not only would she be making better music, but she would reveal the arbitrariness of Jem’s moral world where increased revenue is dependent on the visible (and audible) ethnic’s silence.

Ricardo Montez is currently the Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in Latino Studies at NYU. Princeton, NJ will be the next stop on his tour.

Idol Thoughts || Dispatch from Philadelphia

This week's Idol Thoughts are brought to you from the land where Whiz is king. While I'm still waiting for the first cheesesteak of this Philly visit, I managed to indulge in a little Idol chatter Thursday afternoon, pre-results show, with Tavia Nyong'o, our Bluegum compatriot. T and I were rather prescient about this week's eliminations...

But first things first: O!I is pleased to be able to follow up on last week's Idol Thoughts query--WWAIS (What Would Adria Imada Say) about Ramiele Malubay's tropicalia magic? Here's the scoop:

"It's hilarious that you all picked up on the 'Polynesian' theme, since we were watching and wincing at Ramiele's moves and were reminded of Sanjaya's previous tropicalia forays. Hawai`i or no Hawai`i, she was a more competent dancer than Sanjaya. (Though she described her movements as 'hula,' her hip movements are part of a dance vocabulary most commonly identified as 'Tahitian' today, but which may have originated in the Cook Islands... but who's counting?) What more authentic Filipino subject could Ramiele be -- between the PCN,fidelity to R&B, and hula hobby? After all, to the chagrin of many on-island (that is Hawai`i-based) observers, hula on the US continent is probably practiced by as many Filipinos as Native Hawaiians, since Filipinos have become competitive with, if not preferable to, indigenous Hawaiians because the former are more legible as Hawaiian bodies. This slippage has been happening at least as early as the 1930s, when Filipino men and women began passing as Hawaiian musicians and dancers on the show room circuit."

Big salamats to Adria for getting back to us about this! We're hoping to hear more from AI as Ramiele's primetime persona evolves during the finals.

Right now 2/3's of O!I are currently on the road, so we've seen only snippets of this week's Idol (girl's night and the results show are waiting on the Tivo). Suffice it to say that we were saddened, though not surprised to hear that the sassy emo queen, Danny Norriega was axed from this week's show for his performance of "Tainted Love." The other 3 pretty much deserved to go, especially Luke Menard who managed to make Wham's "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go" sound both gayer and squarer. (I'm personally of the opinion that As'iah Epperson should've outlasted Rock Band avatar, Amanda Overmeyer--but I understand the allure of novelty, especially on Idol). As Tavia and I discussed over a healthy and fagulous lunch, Danny N was set to be AJ Tabaldo-ed. His dramarama, flamboyant gestures weren't enacted by an innocuous white body (think Clay Aiken).



Like Tabaldo before him, the double-dose of brown and fey--a finger-snapping, shoulder slinking fey at that--may just have been too much for mainstream America. They opted instead to keep former gay stripper David Hernandez for his take on the diva gut-buster, "It's All Coming Back." My hunch tells me his brand of out, studly gay beefcake (or perhaps the pointedly "butch"/fratty anecdote about his "walnut sized booger") was just a much more acceptable, legible form of post-millennial masculinity (think Ricky Martin).

More to say, but that elusive cheesesteak is a callin'. - (KT)