Celebrate Music: Two Quick Picks

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If you’ve been to the library, its webpage, or its social media presence lately, you’ve probably noticed that our Black History month theme, Celebrate Music, is in full effect throughout the library system. With so many great sounds floating around, it can be difficult to pick just one to explore, so here’s a sampler duet of music-related materials you might enjoy.

Starting at Zero, Jimi Hendrix. Alan Douglas (his producer) and filmmaker Peter Neal took it upon themselves to edit letters, interviews, random napkin scribbles, and other writings Hendrix left behind into a coherent, poetic facsimile of an autobiography. As he walks us through his early life, time in the Army, and first forays into musicianship, Hendrix reveals himself to be a thoughtful, passionate young man with a vision larger than his abilities could express. After leaving for England and becoming part of the scene there, his writing grows more confident and sure, and his dedication to his practice begins to produce the results of those wild, extraordinary visions. Reading this book will make you want to sit down and listen through the entire Hendrix catalog again (we can help you with that), and wonder what rock music would be like today if he had lived even a little longer. The book’s companion website is equally stunning, too.

Kansas City Lightning, Stanley Crouch. Turning from the Screaming Eagle, we go back through time to the man called Bird and the musical community that nurtured and influenced him. Crouch’s book, the first of a two-part biography of Charlie Parker, mingles tales from the musician’s childhood and growth to maturity with the stories of the men who became his mentors, comrades and rivals, a list that includes–but is not limited to–Lester Young, Chu Berry, Buster Smith, Jay McShann, and Walter Brown.  This alone would have been terrific, but Crouch takes it a step further and a generation back to paint the entire portrait of the Kansas City jazz scene, with such luminaries as Count Basie, Bennie Moten, and Walter Page and their legendary bands. If this book doesn’t keep you hopping back and forth between the page and the library catalog–and/or YouTube–you might want to check to see if you still have a pulse, because this book swings. Hard.

It’s really difficult to pick just two musicians to talk about when your choices range from Jelly Roll Morton to Janelle Monae, but I’ve always been partial to jazz and classic rock. Luckily, other library workers throughout the Carnegie system have created a dazzling array of music-related programs, including a screening of ROCKSTEADY: The Roots of Reggae on 2/18/14,  that explores your full range of choices. Which African American musical artists are you celebrating this month?

–Leigh Anne

Disco Sucks!

I grew up on Long Island in the late 70s/early 80s, when one could see that slogan in graffiti everywhere. My friends and I were firmly in the “rock” camp, although this did not preclude me from surreptitiously seeing Prince’s Purple Rain or purchasing an Adam Ant record. One friend was a Rolling Stones fan, another, a Jimi Hendrix aficianad0, and still another was constantly blasting the Doors from her HUGE boom box. My favorites at first were Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and later Frank Zappa and King Crimson, which I listened to through my headphones on my stereo system in my room.

Ah, those were the days of the vinyl record, when you could lie on the floor and study the relatively large album covers. I use the adjective “vinyl” before the word “record” so that you, the reader, would know what I mean; in those days we just said “record” and knew what that referred to. We were all so righteously against anything “pop.” We deplored the Studio 54 club scene and its clothing style. Yes, I felt this way too, even though one of my very first record purchases was the seminal Saturday Night Fever, when I was twelve.

Then the music video revolution came along. I still remember the very first videos I ever saw. I slept over at a friend’s house to watch the movie Woodstock on HBO.  Right afterwards two videos from Devo aired: “Satisfaction” and “Jocko Homo” (Are we not men?).  We were dumbfounded. Not only did we not have the words “music video” in our vocabulary, but we had never heard music like that before; we talked about how weird it was for weeks. MTV exploded all over America, even making its way to a TV installed in our local deli/hangout, “Eat Joe’s Hogie” [sic]. A clever friend dubbed it “MTVoid” and thought up alternate lyrics to songs we were subjected to over and over, such as “We got big feet!” for the Go-Gos’  “We Got the Beat,” and other less blog-friendly quips.

While disco evolved into MTV new wave, we anti-pop-rock kids were developing a taste for hardcore punk or prog rock. Your high school years are often the ones in which the music you listen to defines you as a person. While I enjoyed going to CBGBs in the city with my punk rock boyfriend to see his band play with bands like The Cro-Mags and Agnostic Front, I retained my own musical identity by keeping my hair extremely long, wearing deliberately unfashionable clothes (hip-hugger elephant bell bottoms), and listening to jazz fusion and prog rock bands like Return to Forever, Gentle Giant, and Gong. I was always amused that a group of people so adamant about saying how non-conformist they were actually conformed just as much to their punk style as any other adherent of any other musical style. The girls in the bathroom didn’t talk to me until I let my friend’s sister’s boyfriend give me a mullet.

A good twenty or thirty years later, I am nostalgic to hear any disco, new wave or classic rock song that comes my way, regardless of the genre, and I happily sing along to old songs to which I mysteriously know every word.

–Joelle