The best songs in the world... ever!: 1971

Saturday, May 15, 2010

"Thank You for Talking to Me, Africa" by Sly and the Family Stone (1971)

What is funk? I think it's one of those things that aren't really easily defined, but when you encounter it, you know it. Obviously, James Brown holds the patent. Even if funk wasn't entirely a one-man creation, certainly he's the touchstone from which all funk derives. His journey from soul man to funk viruoso in the late sixties and early seventies is an inspiring and awesome one.

But I think you could argue that it's not actually the most illustrative journey into funk. For that, one needs to turn to Sylvester Stewart. Stewart, who rechristened himself Sly Stone, was a music insider in San Francisco, working behind the scenes, before launching his own career. It's interesting to think that such a charismatic frontman originally kept himself out of the limelight. It's seen as revelatory that his band, the Family Stone, was mixed-race. I'm not so sure that it is, really. After all, you can't hear skin colour on a CD, and I don't even know – or care to know – whether it was the drummer or the keyboardist who was white. You know, whatever. What does matter, at least for the early years of the Family Stone, was the way their music arguably fused what was popular in 'white music' and what was popular in 'black music' – in the 60s, they weren't very distinct things either, with all kinds of cross-pollination, but Sly and the Family Stone played just as readily on 'R&B' stations as on 'rock' stations.

More importantly, they were jubilant. Ecstatic. Happy, carefree music: righteous, yes, but righteous in an idealistic way. Positivity, in music and in message.

Things got a bit different with 'Thank You (Falletinme be Mice Elf Agin)', the unfortunately retardedly-titled song that forms the linchpin between 'early' Sly and 'late' Sly. It's somehow upbeat and downbeat at the same time. It's somewhere between the sunny-optimism of the hippie-era sixties and the more strident realism of the more radical early seventies. And, just as importantly, it's still sixties pop, but it's becomeing a deeper and deeper funk: just listen to that bass. That's funk. That's where James Brown lives.

Or...

After that single, Sly and the Family Stone apparently fell intol a drug-induced haze that made it tough as nails to actually get an album released. It took a few years – which was a few lifetimes back then – for them to produce There's a Riot Goin' On, with its iconic, red-white-and-black American flag cover. The fifty stars have been replaced by suns, but there's nothing sunny here. This is deep, dark stuff. To say it's drug-induced is missing the point: of course it's drug-induced. So was everything they did in the sixties. Just different drugs. Or, perhaps, different reactions.

This album takes funk into, arguably, a deeper and darker place than James Brown ever went. And the highlight, the centrepiece, is a rerecorded version of that very single. This time, it's seven minutes long, slow, narcotic, messy, but undeniably funky as hell. Whatever Sly and the Family Stone were on, it wasn't peace-and-love pills. But that doesn't make this music depressing: it's not. What it is is intoxicating, addictive... the bass played by Larry Graham is so effortlessly funky that it's stunning. He's not doing much here, but whatever 'funk' is, he's exuding it with every slap of a bass string. Everything else is merely wrapped around that amazing bass, and it's all as sloppy as possible: it's still a communal sing-along, but no one is listening to each other really. The guitars are not exactly chicken-sctratch, but they are abrasive: not musical at all, really. And all over the place...

How does this song work? With its messy and depressing constituent parts that barely cohere, how can the result be so affirming, so exciting and so thrilling? Well, whatever funk is, I suppose it is at its core truly a mystery. Or a form of magic, maybe.

Saturday, January 9, 2010

"A Case of You" by Joni Mitchell (1971)

Truth be told, I’m not all that impressed by Joni Mitchell. Perhaps it’s that at times I find her sincerity insincere, or it’s just that the iconoclast in me rebels against the reverence with which so many people view her.

More to the point, it’s probably that that reverence raised my expectations just a little too high, especially when in the 80s, what you had was 80s Joni, which is not the most pleasant of sensations.

This, i.e. the “Blue” album, is meant to be the starting-off point for Joni, but I reckon it’s an acquired taste. She sings like a child, plays guitar like a child and leaves all of her songs as frustratingly half-finished as Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon”. The very definition of twee, it created legions of wide-eyed ingénues pouring their hearts over their six-string acoustics. Somehow, it’s the music of slumber parties, of girls clumsily expressing feelings they have but can’t identify.

So why is it not rubbish? Why is it, in fact, amazing? Well, I’m not sure, really, but I reckon it’s got something to do with that melody: indelible to say the least, on first it doesn’t resonate at all, but at the strangest points thereafter it reasserts itself in your memory. That childish three-string guitar line manages to haunt and ensnare at the same time.

Her poetry is, again, the poetry of the angsty high-school girl, yet in the same way that mawkish poetry can still touch, it is still beautiful, filled with a handful of great lines, involving such subjects as the devil, paint, the northern star. All set in a backwoods bar in some place presumably very, very cold in her homeland Canada, whose name Joni trills in the song, sending up our backs that queer shiver of embarrassed pride that we Canadians have come to call patriotism (I can’t imagine Americans would ever react in the same uncomfortable way at a musical mention of their homeland).

It all comes together in the chorus, though, where her voice trills in a way that will turn off as many as it will clue in, fingers squeakily sliding up the guitar neck as the voice squeakily slides up into a falsetto, and the awe-inspiring conflation of the blood of Jesus, the wine at the bar and the soul of the song’s subject.

Stunned into reverent silence by that beautiful chorus, the listener suddenly finds it all coming into place – this is music with no distance whatsoever between performer and listener. Joni seems so amateurish because those who we actually know in our real lives are amateurs too. She could be sitting on the edge of someone’s bed in the upstairs of a suburban house, or on a wooden barstool in the empty bar of the first verse. This is art as in the opposite of artifice, and all the more touching when you realise how readily Joni Mitchell is associated with artifice.