Deluxe package includes a 100-page book,
2 CDs and a DVD
HERE LIES LOVE
David Byrne & Fatboy Slim
To be released 23 February 2010 on Todomundo/Nonesuch Records
“The story I am interested in is about asking what drives a powerful person—what makes them tick? How do they make and then remake themselves? I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be great if—as this piece would be principally composed of clubby dance music—one could experience it in a club setting? Could one bring a ‘story’ and a kind of theater to the disco? Was that possible? If so, wouldn’t that be amazing!” DB
featuring guests-Florence Welch (Florence + The Machine),Allison Moorer,Róisín Murphy,Alice Russell,Santigold ...
more HERE
With the news that ABBA & Genesis (amongst others) will be joining The Stooges in the 2010 Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame, I can forsee a 'Lamb Lies Down On Broadway' (with Gabriel) world tour and ABBA selling a shitload of CD's.
Fuck I do wish that I was going to be at Hammersmith....
Sexism, sadly, is what comes through most strongly in Carlos Moore's Fela: This Bitch of a Life, the newly rereleased 1982 authorized biography of Africa's greatest musician, Fela Anikulapo Kuti. Well, sexism and police brutality. The book, translated from the French, is essentially a well-organized and very long interview of Fela at his peak. For die-hard fans of the originalBlack President this may be a enticing read, but the average yuppie with an eclectic taste in music is probably better off checking out the Fela Project.
Fela is an natural topic for Moore, a scholar of race who's led a very interesting life in his own right. Fela's anticolonial message is a powerful one and there's a lot to like about his politics and worldview
This is the Fela who was sold to me as a teenager into Bob Dylan, jam bands, and reggae. The Fela who created his own republic inside of Nigeria as an act of defiance, who relentlessly criticized the corrupt military regimes, who sang a song ("Zombie") that actually triggered riots, who went to court more than 200 times and was unjustly in and out of prison his entire adult life. That's all there, of course—and just how many times Fela and his crew were beaten, tortured, and imprisoned by the Nigerian authorities is a staggering reality that leaps out of Moore's book.
But chances are you know about all that if you're picking up Fela: This Bitch of a Life. What you probably didn't know, but will learn in Chapter 20, is that "the law that says: 'Don't fuck until you're sixteen,' turns men into homosexuals and women into lesbians" or that "pollution, religion, and food... are the causes of homosexuality." When it comes to women, the quotes are laughable: "Men and women are on two different levels," and "Equality between male and female? No! Never! Impossible!" and, the topper, "Do I see man as being naturally superior to women? Naturally."
A 65-page segment in the middle of the book consists of the same short interview conducted with each of the 15 wives, or queens, he had at the time (down from 27 at his mass marriage.) In nearly all the interviews the women admit that Fela had, on multiple occasions, slapped them, but that yes, they liked living with him.
A short paragraph describing the personal history and physical appearance of each wife reads like the plaque in front of an animal at a petting zoo ("Of average height and plumply slender, her broad, round face is studded with large, sensitive eyes and an expression of alert awareness.") Moore isn't doing much to empower the women or critique the hyperpatriarchy, and at one point asks a queen if she likes Fela's penis. In this case, giving a voice to the voiceless doesn't amount to anything and these pages are a bitch of a read.
How Fela became such a profound sexist is actually quite interesting because, unlike most people, he wasn't born that way. Fela's mother was a pioneering feminist activist, an incredible woman who in her capacity as president of the Women's International Democratic Federation traveled the world, met with Mao personally, and was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1960. Fela's own attitudes towards women emerged later, when, after living as an outsider in the racist London of the early 1960s and befriending Black Power advocates in the United States, he rediscovered his Africanness. Thus began a lifelong and entirely uncritical embrace of traditional African values, among them a very low opinion of women, formal education, and the threat of AIDS, of which he would die in 1997. A Mother Jones interview of Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian author Wole Soykinka mentions this specifically:
MJ: You write about your cousin, musician Fela Kuti, and how you think his own politics were kind of naive… WS: Not think, were! He was a passionate Africanist. But his definition and embrace of Africanism did not discriminate: Anything that was African was positive. You would never hear a word against Idi Amin, against the monsters. He always accused me of being a CIA agent when I was campaigning against Idi Amin. He’d say, “Boss”—he called me “Boss”—“Boss Wole, don’t be influenced by the CIA people.” I said, “Shut up, you don’t know anything about it!”
To his credit, Moore has added a fabulous epilogue chronicling the decline and fall of Fela, contextualizing many of the performer's views within a life that was puntuated by violence, incarceration, and illness. He also sets Fela alongside James Brown and Bob Marley as "the only 20th century musicians to have electrified the world with explicitly anti-establishment and unapologetically ghetto-inspired black music."
Unlike Marley, Fela was an angry political organizer in open conflict with the state. You've got to give Fela props for not selling out. He could have acquiesced to the demands of western record companies, moved to Europe or the US, made millions selling a vague African revolution, and have his poster hanging in every college dorm room in the world, right between Che and Marley. Instead he decided to set up a massive commune in the middle of one of the poorest parts of Lagos, loudly and specifically criticize Nigeria's military regimes, and give away all his money to friends, hangers on, and the poor. He died broke and crazy, of AIDS, and 1 million people filed by his glass casket, where he was laid to rest with a joint in his hand. "No one will force me out of this country," he once said. "If it is not fit to live in, then our job is to make it fit."
Ultimately, Fela's story is a tragic one, a fact too easily forgotten while listening to his often mirthful, raucous albums. Reading Moore's book restores an emotional weight to a music that was forged in protest, under duress, suffering from grief. The mournful ballad "Trouble Sleep Yanga Wake Am," will leave your soul aching. This is Fela, he of the bitch of a life.
This article was originally published in Mean Magazine (October 1999), with art direction by Camille Rose Garcia, and an overview of Fela’s catalog by Michael Veal; the main article text, and sidebars, were later reprinted in full in the Da Capo Best Music Writing 2000 book (thank you Douglas Wolk and Peter Guralnick). Main article text is online here: http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/11/02/fela-king-of-the-invisible-art BILL LASWELL
by Jay Babcock Bill Laswell is a bassist, producer and, having worked with countless important musicians from dozens of countries, one of the vortex points around which the musical universe revolves. I spoke with Laswell about his controversial work with Fela…
Q: When did you first get into Fela’s music? Bill Laswell: When I started listening to Cream and stuff, I started to read interviews with people like Ginger [Baker] about where they were getting their stuff from. Just like [Eric] Clapton was getting ideas from blues guys, I realized that rhythm musicians were getting a lot of information from Africa. I immediately started looking for the records, especially Afrobeat. Just that syncopation, the up feel. You get ideas about putting rhythms together.
Those early bands Fela had were really tight. This African guy told me James Brown had just ‘messed him up’—well, Fela had bands that were almost like that. I don’t think as aggressively tight, but it had a feel, an Afrobeat, African feel, with a modern sound. How did you end up producing Army Arrangement?
At that time in Paris in ‘84 or ‘85, Celluloid was the label that all African, or West African, everybody, was going to them for some reason. And they got ahold of Fela’s contract and his catalog and they just started calling the shots. Fela was on his way to New York to come and we were going to mix the record when he came.
On the way to New York, getting on the plane in Nigeria, he had something like ten grand in cash in US dollars, I think. He was immediately put in jail, the tapes arrived, and the Celluloid people were like, ‘Well great, let’s go ahead and mix it. Let’s capitalize on the fact that he’s in jail, we’ll get more press.’ But the tapes I received weren’t really musical or necessarily well-recorded. So we felt that if we just mixed it, it wouldn’t bring anything new to what Fela’s legend was. So we added Sly Dunbar, Bernie Worrell and Aiyb Dieng from Senegal. Did you ever meet Fela?
[When he got out of jail,] Fela did a press tour in the States. He was at the Gramercy Hotel in New York. I went there and he was sitting around his room wearing a shirt and some underwear and sitting in a lotus position on the couch, a bunch of people coming in and out, and we spoke for a few minutes. He was kind of amazed that I would come because he had said that he didn’t like what I had done. There was an African magazine where I was quoted as saying, “It’s much better to mix an artist’s work if they’re in prison.” Some really stupid shit. And that freaked him out. And he was saying that there was a sound that wasn’t African that I put on the album. [But] it was a Senegalese drummer, so of course it’s African.
It’s very interesting because everybody thought I wouldn’t go meet him, so I just went in anyway. By that time he had started to deteriorate, he wasn’t as strong. You could feel he wasn’t the person he was. He just
wasn’t the presence that he was before. And it showed in the music too, because in the ’70s Fela had a really strong band and then he just got kind of more lighter and lighter. And then a lot of weird shit came into that scene… That was a heavy scene. They were around some heavy people. Cuz he was the BIGGEST thing happening in Nigeria, and there’s some heavy stuff in Nigeria—not all positive.
@'Arthur'
"...Sadly, the remaster is a fiasco. The soft tones of 'Computer Love' become sharp, the wide spaces of 'Home Computer' contract into tunnels and 'Pocket Calculator' bears down on us like a spiked ceiling in a horror film. Equally poor is the remaster of 'Radioactivity', where atmospheric crackles and hisses have been removed by noise reduction software. For pity's sake, they're part of the music..."
-David Cavanagh (Uncut 11/09) (I even went so far as to get a hold of the German language versions for comparison!) Having said that...check this out...
In the week before Christmas. A time for tying loose ends, getting boozed up at numerous parties and cramming in some last minute shopping before everything shuts up and we all head homeward bound. There's one very important purchase you mustn't forget to make this week though, and that's an MP3 or two of Rage Against The Machine's 'Killing In The Name'. 3/4 million people are promising to head to iTunes this week to buy the song in an attempt to prevent the latest 'X Factor' mush from becoming Christmas Number One. We've been arguing the pros and cons of the campaign on the blogs recently, and all week this week we're following the two tracks' progress to see if this thing can actually happen. Plus, on the galleries, we're looking at both contenders in the festive race. We're also having a good old smirk at the failures from previous X Factor shows. Chico, Journey South, and some guy called...WHO THE FUCK CARES...
I love this interwebby thingy that is now such a BIG part of our lives...
Of course, while the old guard is looking for ways to fuck us in the arse, the rest of us are just going about our way of communicating w/ each other!
What can I say?
I recently left a comment at a fellow blog, that to be honest resulted in a bit of a flame war...I say "bit" as the blogger concerned locked the comments and who knows what the final outcome may have been...
I have never left an "anon" comment in my life...nor have I ever "pretended" to be someone else...but of course THIS may just be a whole joke to begin with!
Anyway, to draw a long story short...I do find it amazing that the people who would/should have met up together WAY back then are still finding the common ground now!!!
The Obama administration is expected to announce on Tuesday that it has selected a prison in northwestern Illinois to house terrorism suspects now being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in a major step toward shutting down that military detention facility.
An administration official said President Obama had directed the federal government to proceed with acquiring the Thomson Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison in a rural village about 150 miles west of Chicago
Gov. Patrick J. Quinn of Illinois and the state’s senior senator, Richard J. Durbin, will be briefed about the plan at the White House on Tuesday afternoon. The officials, both Democrats, have been enthusiastic supporters of bringing Guantánamo prisoners to Thomson, arguing that it would bring jobs to an impoverished part of the state.
When talk of bringing Guantánamo detainees to Thomson first surfaced in late November, both Mr. Quinn and Mr. Durbin held a series of news conferences to promote the idea of turning over the empty state prison, which was built in 2001 at a cost to Illinois taxpayers of about $120 million, to the federal penal system.
Top Illinois Republicans — including Representatives Donald Manzullo, whose district includes the prison, and Mark Steven Kirk, a candidate for the United States Senate seat once held by Mr. Obama — have denounced previous talk of such a move, saying it could make Illinois a target for terrorist attacks.
But Obama administration officials argue that the prison would be secure and that it would enhance national security to close Guantánamo because it has become a global symbol and a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda.
Mr. Obama declared shortly after his inauguration that he would close the Guantánamo prison — a signature component of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policy — within a year. But dealing with the roughly 200 detainees at the prison has proved difficult, and he is widely expected to miss that deadline.
In May, Mr. Obama proposed bringing some detainees to a facility inside the United States, including some who officials have decided are too difficult to prosecute and too dangerous to release. They would continue to be held without trial as “combatants” under the laws of war.
Under the proposal for Thomson, the Bureau of Prisons would buy the facility and improve its security. Most of the prison would house ordinary high-security inmates, but a part would be leased to the Defense Department to hold terror suspects.
It was not immediately clear how the government would pay for the prison and upgrades, but White House officials have floated the idea of including financing for it in the 2010 military appropriations bill.
Earlier this year, Congress enacted a law forbidding Guantánamo detainees to be brought onto United States soil except for the purpose of prosecution. But leading Democrats said they were open to lifting that restriction after the administration came up with a plan for how to handle the prisoners.
Anfield Stars to Come Out as City Honours Bill Shankly
LIVERPOOL’S Lord Mayor is to make an on-stage tribute to Bill Shankly at the Echo Arena.
Councillor Mike Storey will commemorate the 50th Anniversary of Bill Shankly’s arrival as manager of Liverpool FC by awarding him the title of Honorary Citizen in recognition of his outstanding contribution not just to football but to the whole City.
Councillor Storey said: “This is a fantastic opportunity to recognise one of our finest special citizen’s and honour everything that he brought to the our city. Bill Shankly represented the city with distinction and never missed an opportunity to talk up the city. He really was a great ambassador for Liverpool and I thought it would be great to be able to give him some form of official recognition and fully acknowledge him as a Liverpool great”.
The Lord Mayor sought the agreement of Party Leaders Cllr Warren Bradley and Cllr Joe Anderson and will be holding a small get together for ex-colleagues, family and friends of Bill Shankly at the Town Hall on Thursday 17th December before making the award during the Shankly Show at the Liverpool Echo Arena, that evening.
Andrew Sherlock writer and director of The Shankly Show approached Councillor Storey with the idea. He said: “It has always rankled with Liverpool fans that we should have had at least two footballing knights, Sir Bill Shankly and Sir Bob Paisley, so on this special anniversary I asked the Lord Mayor if we could honour our own with a special award for Shankly – not just for what he did for LFC but for all football fans and for the life, passion and energy he brought to the City he made his home”.
Receiving the award on behalf of LFC and the Shankly family will be Brian Hall who will also be inviting friends and colleagues from the Former Players Association who, like himself, played under Shankly.
Brian said: “Bill Shankly had the greatest single impact on the development of Liverpool Football Club and on my life more than anyone bar none. It is a phrase that is used often, but of him it is absolutely true, he is a legend. It will be great to get the boys together to honour his memory”.
The Shankly Show is on for two nights only on Thursday 17th and Friday 18th of December at 8pm at the BT Convention Centre with celebration and tributes made on both nights and the Honorary Citizen’s Award to be made on Thursday 17th.
Tickets are available at BT CONVENTION CENTRE (Next to LIVERPOOL ECHO ARENA)
Dates: Thursday 17-Friday 18 December 2009 at 8pm Tickets: £25.00 and £35.00
Liverpool Echo Arena Box Office: 0844 8000 400, in person at the Liverpool Echo Arena or online at www.echoarena.com
TMZ reports that Courtney Love is no longer the legal guardian of Frances Bean Cobain, her 17-year-old daughter with Kurt Cobain. On Friday, the Los Angeles Superior Court assigned guardianship of Frances Bean to Kurt's mother, Wendy O'Connor, and his sister, Kimberly Dawn Cobain.
According to TMZ, guardianship reassignments like this happen when "the parent is not capable of taking care of their children." Court proceedings are sealed, so we don't know why, exactly, the court found Love to be an unstable parent.
