remembersongs

[remembersongs]

I brought this up in the miguel post below; the video is this black and white re-take on metropolis, fusing it with a slightly lame nod to NYC hiphop feel of the streets. sade stands there barefoot with a gibson and the eerie shots of WTC floating around behind her. I slipped this tune into my trusty walkman mix tapes for all the flying around i did in the mid-90s, on the wings of sade and usually preferred the spacy soundtrack to reality. the robert glasper remake is pretty great, that's la la hathaway singing--daughter of donny, who remembers him anymore? 

yep those were the poetry tour days. here are the cherish-the-day-inspired lines from a poem I called "Love/Revolution":

Being a street poet

Is like having sex with death

Republican orgasms

Leave me with nothing to say

I can't tell the Marquis de Sade

From Sade

Show me how deep love can be

[remembersongs]

Sur Le Fil

Theme song for an airport bar on a stopover between previous and future jologorios. Memory of sand, sun, and madness cling to you like the sweat of your ancestors, a third language popping into your head, a James Bond theme, found deep within. Your boarding pass slips off the beveled edge and into the sticky humid tropical air outside the hermetically sealed tourist trap. On the edge, all is calm...on the edge.

[remembersongs]

Obra de arte

Somewhere around the beginning of the Great Recession I heard this one on the subway. Robi has always been kind of a melancholy guy, but in a good way. Here he pours himself into the idea that a lover, like a racial identity, is a social construction. He must spend every day painting her so that he can share in her mystery. 

ay amor, paso el día pintándote

What a concept. The subway and the passengers and the smell and the scrape of the wheels against the track become a canvas. You are painting the object/subject of your affection, making her even more fluid, less susceptible to the mundane gaze of commodity lunches in the bedroom office. Your brush strokes wield ecstatic bursts of poetry that slowly become the source of the light. The one that leads you straight ahead towards everything you love.

[remembersongs]

La Cura

There was one weekend where I rented a beat-up Mitsibushi and decided to check out Piñones and had too many Medallas and passed out somewhere near an alcapurria shack. When I came to, the music had already started and it felt like one of those nights when I was going to have to fight to keep the bathroom floor from spinning up and smacking me in the face. Fortunately this song came out of the jukebox and I felt like someone finally understood. Frankie is one of the under-appreciated vocal geniuses of his or any generation and this arrangement is so fine and tinny that you can taste the salty ocean air and the cuchifrito at the end of the rainbow.

La cura resulta más mala que la enfermedad. Never were truer words ever spoken.

[remembersongs]

I Can't Get Started

There was a time in the East Village when I listened to the jazz show on WKCR every morning and there was this guy on with incessant knowledge about every session ever recorded with all the major and minor jazz players from 1920 on. This is how I learned that Lester Young played with Billie Holiday. Before that I only knew him from leaping in on Charlie Parker. The tone is so rich it's stunning and this is Billie before she started losing her voice. There really isn't music that's truer to New York than jazz.

[remembersongs]

I Am the Cosmos

Big Star can be an acquired taste, and most likely if you haven't already downed a six pack of domestic this song will probably be useless. And yes, the crowd here is a little scary. But I'd be hard-pressed to find a song that better expresses what it feels like to be in love with someone you can't stand anymore. Gotta love those power chords.

[remembersongs]

Running Away

Willie Correa used to play this when there was a break in the middle of the Friday night slam at the Nuyorican. I'd either go nervously upstairs to get some breathing room or find Steve Cannon in the corner. I never listened that much to the lyrics, it was a good song to dance to. Roy Ayers must have been weird to write arrangements like this. The vocals sound like they were inspired by Native American chants, and there's a frantic-ness that plays off this laid-back Afro-Caribbean vibe. What an Afro-bohemian living room Miguel had spent all his life creating...

       Back downstairs, there was always someone from Long Island waiting to ask me how to get chosen for the slam. Or get me to buy them a beer. The dancing would stop, they'd call my name, and I'd find my way back to the stage and lunge into the microphone.

[remembersongs]

María

This was right around the first time I went to Mexico City. I was staying with a fledgling movie star who lived in a studio near el Bosque Desierto de los Leones. Donde no hay desierto ni leones, she would say with a kind of disappointment. We rented a red Volkswagen and she took me to Bar León, where they play salsa, and El Hábito, for performance art rock. The night we went Ofelia Medina was there, and here she is in this video walking through the streets of Coyoacán. When you see this stuff for the first time it's breathtaking, like there is nowhere else in the world like this place.

It was during that visit that another VW picked me up somewhere on Avenida Insurgentes and took me to Satelito to see Tacuba playing in one of their garages. I don't think this band ever wrote as coherent and well-executed a song as "María," but I am in the decided minority.

[remembersongs]

Lyrics to Go

I had a cassette player, don't know if it was an aiwa or a walkman, and I really thought the cassette tape was going to fray or fold into an accordion the way I kept rewinding this. Those tinny earphones driving everyone crazy at the departure gate. No sleep till LAX. Then back again, my head lurching uncontrollably from side to side. The inevitable Manhattan Bridge at 6 a.m. syndrome. Feelin Canal Street.

The high-pitched whine of Minnie Riperton. Check it out y'all. It's like that y'all.

[remembersongs]

Willy

There were some songs that Joni Mitchell wrote that seemed like she was directly speaking to me. Several of them, actually. It’s freaky. Stories about guys she knew, or imagined she knew, that fit my description. After first hearing her as an adolescent, I wanted to grow up quickly so I could sit across a table from her and buy her a drink. It was right before the whole culture became geared toward adolescents (john hughes movies) and prevented everyone from actually growing up. I wanted to go to a jazz club and come home smelling like cigarette smoke, disillusioned with being an adult.

[remembersongs]

Debo Partirme en Dos

He said it's a song he wrote while he was fishing. Off the coast of Africa. In a kind of re-education camp. I guess we all need schooling, from time to time. Still I don't think I'm referring to "Holiday in Cambodia." Anyway, who knows where they got this gem of a live recording, it certainly sounds authentically '70s. "I Should Split Myself in Two." It explicitly addresses the politics of cultural production. "Dicen que yo canto cosas indecentes: Te quiero mi amor/no me dejes solo/no puedo estar sin tí/mira como lloro." We all feel like we would like to make ourselves two selves--it's the double consciousness Dubois wrote about, it's Living in Spanglish. It's also a timeworn strategy of fiction and an archetypal problem of masculinity. Here are a few examples: Kirk and Spock. Kemp and Yeamon, Oscar Wao and Yunior, Miguel and j. cole.  It's the perfect way to have a discourse about the ambivalence of the oppressor. But Silvio is the New Man, and whether he's Taino or not, he's going to have something new and revolutionary to say. So you're wondering if all the oppression from the totalitarian socialist state apparatus is worth it just to keep the dialog going. After all, the dialog is not going to happen in the capitalist world. It's not only that, there's the whole vaina about the hetero-normative and hence patriarchal dyad. You know, the you and me thing that's been the central narrative of the free-world business plan. Six words: Que se quedan sentado los intelectuales. The reason for that is, it's time for an artist to speak. I also used to speak in minor chords. I also suffered from that pain. I also seemed like I sang like a saint. I also sang this refrain in millions of songs: I love you, my dear Don't leave me I can't be without you See how I cry Damn if you have to sing about the revolutionary subject and archaic ideas like romantic love at the same time. That would no doubt fuck me up. Isn't this already sounding a whole lot better than Pitbull? What Silvio is saying is, I ain't playin that (video game). Playa Girón, son. "Solo quiero cantar y no importa que luego suspendan mi función!"  (I love that in Spanish, función means both "function" and "gig.")

[remembersongs]

All I Want Is You

First remembered song was heard just a few weeks ago booming from an SUV parked outside my window just trying to let the last days of summer flow. Introduced by j. cole, a lesser version of jay z trying to riff on Gang Starr's "Ex Girl to Next Girl" as in "who's got next?" Miguel, working a Prince-like androgyny, possesses the high-end tenor that recalls Sade's torment on "Cherish the Day," which I sampled during a poetry reading in Copenhagen. Willie and I think Samantha Coerbell were there. When I karaoke'd "Show me how deep love can be," everyone laughed but I'm not sure they got the joke. 

Maybe it's because he's half-Mexican but Miguel breaks old ground by employing the strategy of admitting you were wrong when you know you weren't. That's why the blues is so powerful--the way it evokes the truth asymptotically. It's all there in black and white, the black skin, the white lips, and the two sides of the same dude, i.e., Miguel, heartache-y-break-ey, j. cole, defiant, muscular spitting.

"Cause they don't smile/Or smell like you/No they don't make me laugh/Or even cook like you/And they don't photograph/Nah, they don't sex like you/Let's face it, I can't replace it"

Once you get past the foodie reference, it's clear that he can't equate the jpeg with the love-make. The chorus agrees, dispelling the myth of the secret self not shared.