Parkey
06-23-2007, 12:29 PM
This was in yesterday's Guardian (http://music.guardian.co.uk/urban/comment/story/0,,2108459,00.html) newspaper;
Voice over
The Beasties have proved one of popular music's truths: that jazzers aside, only a few talents can get away with going vocal-free
John Harris
Friday June 22, 2007
The Guardian
Watch out Chinese communists, misogynistic rappers, and pretenders to the fortysomething hip-hop crown: the Beastie Boys are back. Kind of.
Their new album is entitled The Mix-Up, and - as with 1996's The In Sound From Way Out! - it's entirely instrumental. Funksome, noir-ish and tinged with hints of subtle experimentation, it is surely just the job to put on the car stereo if you mysteriously find yourself night-driving through a large American city in 1974 with the suspicion that you are being followed by the cops. For anyone resident in the here and now, however, it may prompt troubling thoughts: chiefly that the Beasties are essentially dabbling in acid jazz, that genre beloved of Soho scenesters and Japanese tourists circa 1988. There again, some of it (as with a bass-heavy item entitled Off the Grid) is actually pretty good, and anyway, if ever an album was - to use a term pioneered by Beck - "parenthetical", it's this one, so maybe everyone should lay off.
But still: parenthetical or not, how odd is it that three men so famed for their facility with words ("Four and three and two and one/ And when I'm on the mic, the suckers run," as their part-time bassist Adam "MCA" Yauch once pointed out) should switch off their microphones and once again go mute on us? Watching them perform an instrumental-only show at London's Roundhouse in September will surely only compound the bafflement. Who, really, will clap eyes on those three faces and not guiltily hanker after a bit of Intergalactic, only to have to make the most of slightly arch Starsky & Hutch music?
The Beasties, I dare say, have once again proved one of popular music's incontestable truths: that jazzers aside, only a few talents - Booker T and the MGs, Mogwai, the 70s German gods Neu!, the select merchants of the very best dance music, those neo-prog exponents Battles - can really get away with going vocal-free. The varied strands of music that came to bestride the world post-1955 are surely so rooted in the idea of, you know, saying something, that cutting out the words can lead to what feels like the acme of pointlessness.
Certainly, once they have decided that vocal music is their metier, it's rare for even the most skyscraping talents to turn to instrumental music and come out smelling fragrant. Cases in point: those annoying singing-free pieces on Blur's Britpop albums, and the title track from Radiohead's Kid A, which just about fits the instrumental bill and surely can't make it on to many fanboy compilations. To really plumb the depths, listen to the Jam's 1982 low point Circus, a piece by Bruce Foxton that reportedly caused Paul Weller no end of embarrassment. Oh, and while I'm here: I recently came across a long-forgotten instrumental number by the Police called Behind My Camel. It was really not pretty at all.
By way of counterarguments - and by all means, if you've long coveted a homemade CD called something like Now That's What I Call Great Instrumentals By Usually Vocal-Based Artists, send it in - there's a case to be made for the Smiths' haunting Oscillate Wildly. I am fond of the title track of the Small Faces' Ogden's Nut Gone Flake, if only for its evocation of a shiny London of cheap property, Harold Wilson and fancy-free drug-taking. Half of the instrumental bit of Bowie's Low is top-hole, and Pink Floyd's Interstellar Overdrive remains an example of incredible power and magic. But that, I think, might be that.
To finish, a cautionary tale for any musicians. At the peak of their powers, one of Britain's better rock groups once decided to liven up the wee hours by trying out an instrumental piece imaginatively entitled 12-Bar Original. Mothballed soon after, it was belatedly released some 30 years later, and sounded decidedly like four men on the brink of musical death, clunking away in search of the kind of inspiration that the absence of vocals denied them.
That was the Beatles. So be warned.
Voice over
The Beasties have proved one of popular music's truths: that jazzers aside, only a few talents can get away with going vocal-free
John Harris
Friday June 22, 2007
The Guardian
Watch out Chinese communists, misogynistic rappers, and pretenders to the fortysomething hip-hop crown: the Beastie Boys are back. Kind of.
Their new album is entitled The Mix-Up, and - as with 1996's The In Sound From Way Out! - it's entirely instrumental. Funksome, noir-ish and tinged with hints of subtle experimentation, it is surely just the job to put on the car stereo if you mysteriously find yourself night-driving through a large American city in 1974 with the suspicion that you are being followed by the cops. For anyone resident in the here and now, however, it may prompt troubling thoughts: chiefly that the Beasties are essentially dabbling in acid jazz, that genre beloved of Soho scenesters and Japanese tourists circa 1988. There again, some of it (as with a bass-heavy item entitled Off the Grid) is actually pretty good, and anyway, if ever an album was - to use a term pioneered by Beck - "parenthetical", it's this one, so maybe everyone should lay off.
But still: parenthetical or not, how odd is it that three men so famed for their facility with words ("Four and three and two and one/ And when I'm on the mic, the suckers run," as their part-time bassist Adam "MCA" Yauch once pointed out) should switch off their microphones and once again go mute on us? Watching them perform an instrumental-only show at London's Roundhouse in September will surely only compound the bafflement. Who, really, will clap eyes on those three faces and not guiltily hanker after a bit of Intergalactic, only to have to make the most of slightly arch Starsky & Hutch music?
The Beasties, I dare say, have once again proved one of popular music's incontestable truths: that jazzers aside, only a few talents - Booker T and the MGs, Mogwai, the 70s German gods Neu!, the select merchants of the very best dance music, those neo-prog exponents Battles - can really get away with going vocal-free. The varied strands of music that came to bestride the world post-1955 are surely so rooted in the idea of, you know, saying something, that cutting out the words can lead to what feels like the acme of pointlessness.
Certainly, once they have decided that vocal music is their metier, it's rare for even the most skyscraping talents to turn to instrumental music and come out smelling fragrant. Cases in point: those annoying singing-free pieces on Blur's Britpop albums, and the title track from Radiohead's Kid A, which just about fits the instrumental bill and surely can't make it on to many fanboy compilations. To really plumb the depths, listen to the Jam's 1982 low point Circus, a piece by Bruce Foxton that reportedly caused Paul Weller no end of embarrassment. Oh, and while I'm here: I recently came across a long-forgotten instrumental number by the Police called Behind My Camel. It was really not pretty at all.
By way of counterarguments - and by all means, if you've long coveted a homemade CD called something like Now That's What I Call Great Instrumentals By Usually Vocal-Based Artists, send it in - there's a case to be made for the Smiths' haunting Oscillate Wildly. I am fond of the title track of the Small Faces' Ogden's Nut Gone Flake, if only for its evocation of a shiny London of cheap property, Harold Wilson and fancy-free drug-taking. Half of the instrumental bit of Bowie's Low is top-hole, and Pink Floyd's Interstellar Overdrive remains an example of incredible power and magic. But that, I think, might be that.
To finish, a cautionary tale for any musicians. At the peak of their powers, one of Britain's better rock groups once decided to liven up the wee hours by trying out an instrumental piece imaginatively entitled 12-Bar Original. Mothballed soon after, it was belatedly released some 30 years later, and sounded decidedly like four men on the brink of musical death, clunking away in search of the kind of inspiration that the absence of vocals denied them.
That was the Beatles. So be warned.