Easy Like Sunday Morning
Easy Like Sunday Morning
Stoner music meets the zeitgeist pops at the Avondale markets
Last Sunday Sage and I woke up at 4.30 AM and drove to the Avondale Markets, where we set up a stall to sell the DopeAs brand of artily stoner-themed t-shirts, tote bags and cups - the family business, which will hopefully prove more remunerative than this blog to date.
This involved 5 or 6 hours of sitting around to one side of of the passing crowd; a key part of the plan for enduring and hopefully enjoying this was to (get high and) entertain ourselves, and hopefully our potential clientele, with some suitable sounds. Sounds that would also help promote the world of weed art, that could suggest both “if you want to be cool like us, able to get into this exciting music, buy our product” and “we’re down with your tastes, our products will fit into your world”, challenging and flattering our potential clientele.
We ran into a hiccup early on because, overcommitting to my stoner role before the edibles had even come on, I’d left my phone at home and it was, or so I thought, our only source of music. Hayley, light of my life, would be able to drop it off, together with a few choice words, at around 10. As things turned out, the market garden fruit and vegetable stall opposite us had a Spotified sound system so, as the fog rolled down from Mount Albert ahead of the slowly rising sun, we sat listening and critiquing the music on their playlist
From the very first I recognized the reggaeton beats and Spanish lyrics that are everywhere today, and that I had been planning to blast too, but there was something wrong with them. Instead of the insistent and precise “cha-cha-cha” rhythm I was used to from repeated spins of Motomami, they seemed in a mix to which diverse other beats were being added, and this diluted version kept slipping into reggae, a mixture which caused me pain, because reggaeton is the new dance beat and reggae is an old and played-out one, as dead as the foxtrot. Nothing dates music harder than its dance beat; pull the foxtrot out of 20’s jazz, as Bix Beiderbecke did on his last few compositions, and it sounds fresh enough (learn to accept it formally and that world of music is once more accessible, except as party music). Then we noticed that the chord changes and melodies we were listening to were often those most familiar from decades of doo wop and western pop. If you come up with a new dance beat, you can re-use all the old hooks and changes and most people won’t know. To add insult to injury, its autotune was a case of too little too late. Could this regressive mix of reggaeton and reggae be the original or transitional form? Did modern reggaeton evolve from it by the reductive process I’ve described before, by someone singling out the one cool new rhythm evolving within the blend, isolating and emphasizing it? Sage, whose preference would be for old school reggae, said that this “island-time” playlist music was everywhere in hospitality and he had learned to put up with it. I kept hoping that Rosalia or some equivalent artist would come on the playlist and make everything okay but this didn’t happen, in fact there were no female singers doing anything but the occasional backing vocals and we were twenty songs in by now, a good example of the unconscious bias of algorithms, compared to human listeners. I believe now the stall holders would hit one song they liked occasionally and the rest was what Spotify thought they wanted based on that – i.e. further copies, as close as possible to the mean, with diminishing returns.
Eventually Sage disclosed that his Nokia phone did have Bluetooth and a few mp3s on an SD card, by blasting Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” – everybody must get stoned! - and a mix of Homebrew and @peace, Max Normal (Sage challenging me to “separate the art from the artist”) and Ab-Soul, Pink Floyd (“Comfortably Numb”, “Arnold Layne”, and the start of “Echoes” for a joke) and Adam Green’s “Drugs” -
I like drugs
I like to linger in the alleyway
I like drugs
I like to hold them for a friend
And everything's gone
And my finger is longer
I never want to come down again
Walking through the markets, where I bought a cute Agfa pronto camera as a gift for Hayley, I heard another reggaeton/perreo playlist similar enough to the one I’d left (I’d also heard a similar playlist from two workers in the neighbour’s yard last week – if you don’t already know, our zeitgeist speaks either Spanish or patois). I heard, from whoever was spinning the second-hand records, “If I Said You Had A Beautiful Body Would You Hold It Against Me”, and I heard an old school hip hop set. So when I came back to our DopeAs stall, the sun now shining, gratefully holding my Alcatel SmartE10, and connected to the Wonderboom 3, I had to play Motomami, as I’d wanted to all day. Sage was a bit sceptical that there could be an original and authentic version of the pop we’d been hearing, but here it was. I don’t need to understand a word of “Saoko” or “Candy”; Rosalia’s voice, which seems to me to carry within it the pain of the Spanish-speaking historical-present, underwriting every joy, so that she could be a folk singer, if she isn’t already, the knack by which every melody she sings comes out sounding like a fresh one, a gift she shares with Georgia Ellery of Jockstrap, and the spot-on production, which stirs things up just enough, all make her songs some of the best around. It felt good to be one with the zeitgeist.
After this I played Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” which got a thumbs up from some passerby; it was nice to hear Nirvana in a context in which they were still punk. Those guitars sounded great. As does, every time, a song by the Commodores, “Easy”, which Lionel Ritchie recently played at the request of King Charles III and which expresses our monarch’s view of his role – like the devoutly anti-royal Sam Kriss, I’m happy to have a King who can’t always live in bad faith like almost every other holder of power.
Everybody wants me to be what they want me to be
I'm not happy when I try to fake it
After discussing the undersung merits of the Black Eyed Peas we spun Fergie’s “Fergalicious”, something I haven’t heard in aeons and which sounded fantastic, but before I could search for “Kelis Milkshake” the internet broke and YouTube music wouldn’t load.
Our silence revealed that a minor miracle had occurred, and the stall across the way was now playing a mix of female singers, with the more defined, reductive reggaetón beat that sounds like a military marching band on its way to some costly, mythic victory. Perhaps our choices had reminded someone across the way of a song they loved and which was enough to reset the algorithms. I was happy to listen in, and to wonder how it came about that in 2023 we all (they being Chinese and Pasifika and we being Palangi) were wanting to hear the same music, sung in a language I am sure none of us understood at all.
After I while I discovered that Bandcamp would play music when YouTube refused to. I played some Frog Power and Vorn songs I’d bought there, then Sage suggested Avantdale Bowling Club’s Trees.
I was mildly dismissive in my review of this a few blogs back but eager to give it another listen, and there we were in Avondale after all, and there I was able to relax and enjoy Trees, and dig Tom Scott’s weed-infused philosophical vision in a way I hadn’t been able to at home. After Trees, I dug up the small amount of Rosalia music on Bandcamp, and found “BESO”, one of three recent duets with fiancé Rauw Alexandro on their EP RR, on this Greek compilation of the latest and greatest hits in “POP - HIP HOP RAP -DANCE - LATIN - RAGGAETON - NUDISCO”. For a relatively classy remix overview of all such pop one might have missed, this will do, with some choice trap tracks under hip hop rap, one (possibly sampling Can’s “One More Saturday Night”) from Young Dolph, who died in Memphis in 2021 in a hit carried out by another rapper and ordered by Hernandez Govan, whose own daughter Destinee, an up-and-coming rapper by the name of Lotta Cash Desto, who had collaborated with Lil Uzi Vert, would be fatally shot in Houston in 2022.
All along I was wondering, if the best Spanish music works in this space, why wouldn’t the best Japanese? I’m no world music expert but I wanted to play 4S4ki, the alt-J-pop singer, producer and songwriter I’ve mentioned before in reference to P.H.F’s production on Purest Hell; her 2022 album Killer In Neverland is on Bandcamp, so I started with “paranoia” and “ring ring, you kill me”, recognizable trap/indie rock and earworm pop respectively, but realized that the whole album is that listenable and that 4s4ki’s highly autotuned1 voice and picturesque synth arrangements fill a space as satisfyingly as does Rosalia’s far different art. The songs on Killer In Neverland blend trap, rap, indie rock, and pop balladry within never-a-dull-moment hyperpop, arranged expertly and in spectacular detail. 4s4ki’s artificially coloured and sweetened musical creations, with their English otaku titles and post-emo verses sung in a language I don’t understand, are as moving as any music that’s more organic or more studded with familiar reference points. When we reach the single “Bounce Dance”, I hear something new, a dance rhythm that’s a Japanese equivalent of a reggaetón beat, only slightly out of synch with Rosalia’s, and I want to hear that collaboration, already blending in my head – which, as this is the modern world, is no longer so very impossible.
“Music in itself is privileged to be a kind of spiritual Esperanto, the purest diplomatic language” – Vítězslava Kaprálová
Having gotten away with this bait-and-switch – even Sage approves of this music once there’s enough autotune in it – it’s certainly stoner music heard high – I remember that Twink’s Think Pink is on Bandcamp.
This 1970 solo project by the Pretty Things and Pink Fairies drummer was pretty much the apogee of UK hard rock druidic weirdness; “10,000 Words In A Cardboard Box” cuts a swathe with its heavy, doomy chords and Paul Rudolph guitar freakout for its second half, but there are tracks on Think Pink that are less successful, because when these lads play the ritual magic game they can’t commit to it, there’s too much stoned taking the piss; only on “Fluid”, the track vocalised by Silver, is the singer fully committed to the conceit – in the modern era “Fluid” has been sampled by both Gnarls Barkley and Tyler The Creator. If I could re-edit Think Pink I’d replace the weak jokey tracks with other Twink solo tracks released on The Lost Experimental Recordings 1970, particularly “Drum Crazy”, a drum solo that fills up a song-sized space. Twink continues to make psych rock with a band called The Technicolour Dream and I ended my Avondale Market impromptu DJ set with tracks from their 2013 album You Reached For The Stars. Sage approved.
After we pack up, we have time to kill before meeting Hayley, so head along to the New Lynn Hospice Shop, where they play hard rock radio station The Sounds, “we’ll play not one but two tracks from every classic rock album” is their promise. I hear familiar guitar riffing and Sage reminds me it’s his main man Neil Young, with “Rocking In The Free World”. The natural order has been restored.
Stoned algorithmic suggestion “Uncle Harry’s Last Freak Out” by The Pink Fairies.