| orange crate art |
[Mar. 19th, 2008|04:58 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | all summer long, big thoughts, british music, britpop, california, geography, modulations, orange crate art, smile, that lucky old sun, the beatles, the kinks, the small faces | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  tired | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | "san fransisco" by van dyke parks and brian wilson | ] |
it has come to my attention over the last week that i have a few "anonymous" readers here, HELLO. HELLO CARPO!
i have a few of these fragmented posts i have been meaning to write but have somehow lost the inclination to actually type. where do i start here? i guess i can start by saying i'm officially done with ALL SUMMER LONG (LP) - there was quite a hold up going through this record, not because it was overly difficult, but because i had a bit of a crisis of low motivation and just general restlessness and feeling overwhelmed. the usual "how did i think i could be capable of pulling this off? i am an idiot" - you know the drill. though, that was last week, and now i'm here trying to get myself together again. printing out pages of charts from All Summer Long and putting them into The Folder of Charts with my other ones was quite a good feeling this afternoon. on the whole, the record wasn't too tricky, i had some moments with 'all summer long' but my biggest problem by far was 'girls on the beach' - which i always knew was going to be a bitch of a song to work out, but sounds so simple on the outside. it also has an truly excellent chord change MID-VERSE. the tonality is all over the place and it did my head in trying to figure out what was going on.
[random sidenote:
TOP 5 MODULATIONS in BEACH BOYS TUNES [so far]:
5) Girls on the Beach (last verse, MID-VERSE! - ah, this shift just kills me!)
4) I Get Around (verse-chorus - this is such a sneaky little shift i don't think i even realised it until i had to work it out!)
3) Don't Worry Baby (verse-chorus - this works much like "I Get Around" but this small change into a new key for the chorus is so skilful, you hardly know it's there. it's painfully obvious that the reason the beach boys were often written-off musically in their early years was because no one was HEARING these incredibly clever musical changes going on in the songs. the deeper you go, the more complicated it gets)
2) Keep an Eye on Summer (all over the goddamn place - this song has FOUR modulations - starts in the original key, moves through two modulations in the bridge, back to the original key again, and then up again to a different key to finish. the average listener would have no idea that any of this was happening because it sounds like a simple song, but it's anything but. CLEVER!)
1) Dance, Dance, Dance (last verse, MID-VERSE! - oh man, does this ever flip me out, the modulation right before the last chorus in this song is so amazingly clever and so amazingly fitting at the same time, it just hits that sweet-spot! i could play it over and over again! in fact, i think i will now!) ]
i digress...
on monday night, tim and i went to see ray davies at the enmore theatre because he's one of Those Dudes we probably won't ever get the chance to see in real life again (though i was sure wrong with the Stones!). it was also another case of Jadey and Tim vs the Baby Boomers. this seems to happen to us a lot, and i do often get those "looks" from them that say "aren't you a little young to be here?" - well, NO! actually, i even get it when i wear my Beatles tshirts, they tell me "you're too young to listen to that music, i bet you don't even know their songs" ...to which i say "OH? TRY ME! you patronising jerk!". okay, i might not say the last bit, but i probably know more than they do, i know EVERY song in intimate detail, if only they knew i was on here typing about my PhD in POPULAR MUSIC.
listening to all those kinks songs, i had the ideas from an article andy bennett wrote about britpop and british music in the back of my head. almost all of those old kinks tunes he played (and even some new ones) were describing british life - the streets, the houses, the people, the stereotyped little things they do, the lingo they used... not only this, but it sort of romanticised the whole thing (with the exception of "dead end street" i suppose...). the small faces did a similar sort of thing (even down to the pronounced accent - think of "lazy sunday afternoon") and the fabs sure dipped their toes in the water there ("penny lane", etc) too. while the idea of describing scenes where they live was not remarkable in itself, the romanticising of it was - andy bennett called this a "harking back to a Golden Age of British Life" (paraphrasing) and used it in describing britpop bands in the 1990's that were drawing from the ideas of the kinks and the small faces (blur's "parklife" or "charmless man" or pulp's "common people" - yes?)... i suspect the 1960's bands were doing it themselves too. there was still a very defined class system going on during that period, and for the working class, life wasn't always "tea and toasted buttered currant buns"...*
all of this was no revelation to me, but it was something i was flipping about in my mind while listening, because it reminded me a lot of what the beach boys were trying to do on the other side of the world, too. the beach boys were describing a type of fantasy world, a "golden age" of california, the stereotype, as bruce johnson put it, the "hollywodised version" of how things were. most of the beach boys (with the exception of maybe dennis) were not even involved with that kind of life - the beach and the surf and the girls and all the macho junk that goes along with it (mike love already had that last bit going on already!) - it was a dream, a "cartoon" portrait of how life was as a young person in california. while the beach boys weren't exactly "harking back" to some golden age (it was current at the time, the generation before the wilson's parents were the first to really head west and set up a new life in the sun)...but the idea was the same, it was trying to capture a snapshot of idealised californian life at the time.
this continued in so many ways throughout the beach boys songs, most obvious with SMiLE, i suppose, which while described as the soundtrack to a "bicycle ride from one coast to the other" - discusses so many things in abstract, fractured words. to me it is about stages of a life, of society but yes, also of the land and of those stereotypical american ideals. heroes and villains is probably the greatest example of this - but also through to the 1990's record brian wilson and van dyke parks released called 'orange crate art'. some of these songs seem to connect into thematic ideas from SMiLE (no surprise, all the songs on orange crate art were written by parks, and SMiLE was the height of their collaboration) - i know these themes of america, of land, of places and ideals have always been of interest to parks, and obviously to brian too.
"orange crate art" the song is tribute to the artwork that adorned the boxes that carried oranges from california. citrus fruits grew very well in california and was the reason many started a new life there in its early days. on these crates were pictures of the sunshine, the beach, the green trees, and tried to encourage people to make the big move west where the skies were bluer, the grass greener, and the oranges...well...more orange. "san fransisco" from that same record is almost a "heroes and villains part two" - and both songs seem to encompass that desire to be at one with the land, to explore, to jump on a train, hitch-hike, anyway you can, but just get out there. reminds me a lot of jack kerouac, actually. the thought never occurred to me to compare kerouac of the beats to the beach boys but somehow, today, it's making a lot of sense. kerouac is one of my favourites, maybe it's all coming together! beyond that, brian's new work "that lucky old sun" will come out sometime this year i suspect, and it is pretty much the same deal. sketches of californian life - the show i saw at the state theatre in january pulled all of this into place even clearer with all of the imagery on the screens behind the band and the spoken word "poems" (hello, maybe it is like the beats!) between songs...
what ties all of this together was when ray davies introduced "dedicated follower of fashion" on monday night, explaining that it was the song that really broke the kinks in america, and how it was always perplexing to him as it was such a "british" song and couldn't understand how the americans would "get it" let alone like it. Lines like "they seek him here, they seek him there, in regent street and leicester square, everywhere the carnabetian army marches on..." assumes a knowledge that the listener knows what "carnabetian" is referring to - what's the deal with the americans digging it?
the same thing happened throughout the entire beach boys career - they were always tremendously recieved in the UK, even through the 1970's - when the americans got tired, bored and ashamed of them, simply pegging them as those "little boys who wore the stripey shirts and sung about very UNHIP things like the beach and cars" - the UK audiences totally "got it" - perhaps because all of that sunshine was "exotic" in the same way carnaby street must have seemed "exotic" to the americans. this was especially notable with the release of "pet sounds" which absolutely bombed in the US (capitol was ashamed of it and rushed out a best of comp to make the consumers forget all about it) but was a hit in the UK. they "got it" - they understood that it has grown up from the candy stripes, it was artistic, psychedelic music. in fact, the beach boys out-voted the beatles in some of those "top musicians of the year" polls - out did the beatles in the UK?!
it's a phenomenon that has always perplexed me a little, and I know this is linked up with music and geography and will have to find a way to express this properly. i do happen to have one specific article about it, but will need to look harder. i know i haven't exactly explained it well, but i hope when i read this in a years time when i come to write about some of these things properly i will understand what i meant.
i managed to rant this little thought to tim throughout intermission (wonder if those baby boomers were listening?) and since he knows i forget these things as soon as i say them, kindly texted me a string of random words from what i had explained to him so i wouldn't forget, so hopefully i managed to expand "beach boys, locality, kinks, america, dedicated follower of fashion, exotic" into something that makes sense?
i must admit sometimes i have to fight the urge to jump on a plane to LA and just sit on one of those "surfin' USA" beaches under a palm tree and ponder all of this.
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* - i understand that it should be noted there is a certain amount of irony, a certain "cartoonishness" in the portraits these bands were singing about, i do take this into consideration...but that's a whole other can o' worms. |
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