Fairuz | 7-10 PM EDT

 

Now playing on Bodega Pop on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio: Hits, homages, deep cuts, covers, early 78s, deconstructions, and legendary performances by the world's greatest living singer

Listen to the show and join the conversation

A Trip to Nouri Brothers

Discs plucked from the shelves of Paterson, New Jersey's greatest self-proclaimed"shopping center": Nouri Brothers, where new stock butts heads with decades-old, dust-covered gems we didn't even know were available on this continent.

This three-hour tribute features Morocco's Grande Voix d'el Aita, Syria's King of the Oud, some long out-of-print Oum Kalsoum, mid-period Nass El Gihwane and Jil Jilala, nascent raï, jaw-droppingly rare Fayza Ahmed, and much, much more.

Listen to the show in the archives

Bad Boys

Provocation, poor taste, questionable ethics, incompetence, regrettable decisions, and egregious criminal acts, featuring:

Russia's "unsurpassed master of profanity." 

The Cairene laundry presser whose ode to bin Laden was yanked from the Egyptian airwaves. 

The troubled Jamaican genius who spent the last years of his short life in prison for murder. 

Japan's greatest unpop star. 

The Beirut underground star whose fuck you to Lebanon's military leaders nearly ended his career. 

The creepy American hustler whose death unleashed a torrent of horrifying not-so-secret secrets.

Listen to this show in the archives

Soap Kills | Complete Discography

 Reupped by special request on September 3, 2015, here.

How can you not love Zeid and Yasmine Hamdan -- who were both born in 1976, but who are not, as I know y'all are thinking, twins? I mean, look at them. If they're not twins, what's with their matching last name, their same year of birth and -- above all -- those groovy velvety black long-sleeved shirt-thingies they're both wearing?


Spurred on by a growing electronic pop movement in Beirut, the duo formed a band in 1997, calling themselves "Soap Kills" because, as Zeid recalls, "We thought that at the time, in the context of Beirut being ... you know, reborn, and all the war being wiped clean, we thought, wow, it's shiny and it's awful and it's soap kills. We thought it would be a nice name for a band."



Both artists went on to pursue solo careers and it's unclear whether or not they have plans to ever reunite. According to their Wikipedia page, Zeid is currently spending time in prison for political sedition (he wrote a song that includes the lyrics "general, go home," an apparent reference to president Michel Suleiman, formerly Commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces) and the entire Soap Kills catalog is banned from radio and television broadcast.

Revolution Rap: Arabic Hip-Hop | Bodega Pop 12

 
Listen to "Ramallah Underground" 

 
Listen to "Beit" 

 
Listen to "I'm Not Your Prisoner"

 
Listen to "As Salam 3alikum"

 
Listen to "Talakat" 

Just reupped the 24-track album here.

Hyperbolic as it may sound, Arabic rap and hip-hop has had a significant place in the series of uprisings that have swept across North Africa and the Middle East since December 2010. Considering that what we in the west sometimes like to call the "Arab Spring" is predominantly a youth movement, it makes sense. 

Despite the not-coincidentally alliterative title of this mix, not every track I've chosen to include has a relationship to the "revolution," as it were. (Lebanese rapper Rayess Bek's "3al 2anoune 3al2anine," for instance, was recorded a decade ago.) But all of the tracks are, in some way, shape or form "revolutionary" -- for their content, their sound, their innovation. Nearly half of the tracks feature a female artist. 

Here's the moment where I'm tempted to make reference to my country's seemingly inexorable movement toward war in Syria, relating that to this music (and, by association, the people who made it) ... but there really is no real relationship and, frankly, I don't know, exactly, what to say. We tend -- as a culture, a country, a political player on the world's stage -- to speak too often for others. We need to learn how to listen.

Asmahan | Legend of the Druze Princess

Just reupped this revelatory 27-track collection here.

Asmahan (born Amal al-Atrash, 1917, reputedly on the Mediterranean en route from Izmir, Turkey, to Beirut, Lebanon) was, simply put, one of the 20th century's greatest singers and the only Middle Eastern diva generally considered to have given Egypt's Oum Kalsoum a serious run for her money.

Asmahan strikes an interesting contrast to Kalsoum. Whereas Kalsoum was one of the most powerful Egyptians in history, in great part due to her brilliant management of her own career and image, Asmahan's brief, stop-and-go trajectory, which ended in her death at age 26 by suspicious car accident, was shrouded in rumor and intrigue, despite her family's suffocating control of her life and, subsequently, her memory.




The song above, "Ya Habibi Ta 'al al-Haqni," was my first sonic experience of this legendary singer's small but significant body of work; it was, oddly enough, also Sherifa Zuhur's. Zuhur, who wrote Asmahan's Secrets: Woman, War, and Song, first heard the tune on a cassette in the early 1970s that she picked up in a small music store on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles -- Silwani's Imports.

Zuhur's description of the place sounds remarkably like the places frequented by the present narrator. "Cramped, lively and filled with audio cassettes, key chains and souvenirs," she writes, "men from the Arab-American community dropped in and drank tea and coffee with the owner. I used to visit and browse, adding to my small collection of Arabic records and tapes."

Zuhur didn't listen to the tape that Silwani's owner, Mustafa, had suggested to her until she was on a trip to Cairo, by way of Sweden. In the early morning she popped the tape into her recorder:

"Percussion instruments and violins plucked a la pizzicato began with a tango. The singer's clear tones descended and rose, emphasizing the rhythm. Suddenly, the Eastern character of the song became more pronounced, as she began her improvisation (the mawwal) and modulated to another musical mode (maqam). The singer's diction was precise, and she effortlessly executed the wider sliding, trills and tonal patters performed by Arab singers. The song was 'Ya Habibi Ta 'al al-Haqni,' composed by Madhat Assim. 'It sounds so ... so old-fashioned. A cartoon tango but sophisticated,' I told my friend." [The song, Zuhur notes later in the book, had been previously sung by the Egyptian cinema pioneer Mary Kwini.]

I made my own discovery of Asmahan a quarter century later, at Daff and Raff Books & Music ("A Gateway to Another Culture") in the heart of Cambridge, Mass. (52-B JFK Street, currently occupied by Raven Used Books.) I don't know how my friends and I stumbled on to this store -- my memory suggests it was a random accident -- but I do recall immediately plucking this 1988 Baidaphon Beirut CD from the shelf. My own response to "Ya Habibi Ta 'al al-Haqni," the first track on the album, was much less sophisticated than Zuhur's had been to the same song: I began to tear up, felt a dull ache in my chest and watched as the skin on my arms filled with goosebumps. 

Over the last 15-16 years since I first heard Asmahan's voice, I've managed to find maybe half a dozen CDs of her music, mostly in Arabic media stores like long-since closed Princess Music in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (the neighborhood where much of Saturday Night Fever took place). For this collection, I've excised all duplicate songs, as well as those featuring Asmahan's brother, Farid, rather than Asmahan herself. Not quite random, the order was determined largely by choosing my favorite five or six songs first and then following those with whatever seemed to best click. While most of these tracks run somewhere in the 5:00 - 10:00 minute range, there are two longer pieces, of nearly half an hour each. I placed one in the mid-section of the collection; the other I placed last. 

Brooklyn Bodega, Syrian Soul

Roads and Kingdoms commissioned me to write a piece for them. I focused on the Syrian bodega on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn where I first began to seriously collect this music, with tangents on Syrians in New York, a bodega-related conceptual art project, and more. (Read it here.) Bonus ten-track "Best of" playlist, here.

Zeina Hamieh | Evening Habibi

Listen to "تركنى من جروحى"

Reupped by reader request, here.

This album is so incredibly kick-ass that it took me a couple of days to decide which song to share with you as an example. I chose this one because, given the simplicity of the music, Zeina's voice really stands out. 

I know nothing about Zeina other than that she's Lebanese and that the other record I have by her, Delila, is equally stunning. I found this one in a phone card and miscellany place on Court Street in Brooklyn about a block north of Rashid's. Both places have since closed.

There are now only two places that I know of where I can get Arabic music in New York, and both are in my neighborhood. Last week, at Alfrha (25-23 Steinway Street), when I asked if they had Rola Saad's new album, the guy behind the counter promised to order it for me and that I could come pick it up this weekend. We'll see how that goes. If well, I'll be asking if he can order some more Zeina.

Can you tell I'm exhausted after a week of work and don't really have it in me to write anything interesting? Seriously, I'm going to post this and crawl into bed. Check in this weekend, when I'm back up and running: I've got a special surprise in the works for you ...

Najwa Karam | Rouh Rouhi

Reupped in 360kbps here.

[Originally posted in April 2010.] I've learned from more than a decade of scrounging through bodega racks for pop music CDs that there are basically two kinds of shop keeps. Those who are suspicious as to why you are looking through "their" music and those who are nothing short of thrilled to see someone other than their regular stream of customers actually show an interest in it.

My first experience, happily, was the latter. After moving to New York and a year of month-long sublets in three boroughs, I finally settled in an apartment on 13th Street and 6th Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in a fourth-floor apartment with the poet Chris Stroffolino. I lived there from mid-1998 to mid-1999.

While strolling a few blocks away on 5th Avenue, I noticed a corner bodega, which appeared to have a whole rack of CDs and tapes for sale. I popped in, said hello to the shop keep--a friendly looking middle-aged woman wearing a scarf over her hair--and began perusing.

"How much are these?" I asked, holding up the CD you see at top of this post.

"Five dollars," she said, "or twenty dollars for five." A brief pause, as my eyebrows arched. "You speak Arabic?" she asked.

"Oh. Not really. I just--"

"If you like Najwa Karam," she nearly blurted out, "you should try Asalah! She is from my home country: Syria. Beautiful voice!"

Thus began one of the most pleasant customer-shop keep relationships I have ever had in my life. I took the five CDs--including the Najwa Karam and something by Asalah she recommended (more on her in another post)--and headed home. My world, to put it mildly, had been rocked.

Najwa Karam was born in 1966 in Zahle, about an hour east of Beirut. At an early age she showed signs of a natural gift for singing and, in 1985, without getting her parents' permission, signed up to compete on "Layali Lubnan," a TV show that I gather might have been a classier sort of "American Idol," which she won.

She began recording in the late 80s and by the 90s was an international superstar. Her career, however, has not always been the smoothest. She hasn't shied away from controversial, often feminist material (in one song she tells her fictional cousin that, because she was forced to marry him, he can have her body, but never her soul). Perhaps because of this, she has sometimes run into trouble.

In 1999 a rumor was started that she had told an interviewer that she had named her pet dog after the prophet Muhammad, and was subsequently banned from entering into Egypt to perform. A former Jordanian prime minister reportedly issued a fatwa. The rumor was false, and after a concentrated PR effort, she overcame it.

More recently, in 2004, the Lebanese Surete Generale censored the video clip, "Why Are You Emigrating?" which focused on Lebanon's economic crisis and the problems of the young.


Najwa Karam singing a mawal

Over the years I managed to find all of Karam's CDs, but still return most often to "Rouh Rouhi," one of the most powerful, rockin' pop efforts I have ever heard. After I moved from Park Slope to Kensington I returned one day to the Syrian bodega on 5th Avenue, and was happy to find the shop keep still there. She still recognized me, made a few recommendations, and played a few things for me to see if I could guess who the singer was. (I could, but when she asked if I knew what each song was, I had to shrug. She seemed to like that.)

I haven't been back in nearly half a decade, though, and I was a bit saddened that I have been thus far unable to find it looking around the area via Google's "Street View" function.

Zeina | Delila

Reupped in 320 kick-ass kbps here.

Found several years ago at Princess Music in Bay Ridge. I miss Princess Music. I believe they finally closed their doors in 2009.

Without being hyperbolic, I can honestly say that Zeina, to my mind, is the single most awesome pop singer to come out of Lebanon since Najwa Karam. Forty seconds into the first track of this album, see if you agree. It's an opinion based on nothing more than the strength, and frankly the aggressiveness, of her voice. Where most other Lebanese pop stars exhibit a light sweetness, Zeina is gritty and tough. 

Here's rare live footage of her (warning! terrible sound):

Fairuz | Eh Fi Amal

Listen to "Al Ayel"


Listen to "El Bent El Shalabiah"

Pick it up here.

Released in 2012, Eh Fi Amal (Yes There Is Hope) marked the legendary Christian Lebanese diva's return to the studio after years of live albums. It was--according to Wikipedia (so, grain of salt)--her 99th album, recorded when she was 74 years old (she's now 77) and was a huge hit all over the middle east.

I picked up the album just a couple of weeks ago at the Nile Deli while biking down Steinway with my poet friend Brandon Downing to see Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers. Fairuz was the clear winner that day.

This is a bizarre album, not quite like anything I've heard before: part Arabic art pop, part cheesy lite pop, but one hundred and ten percent Fairuz. I've got a number of her other albums I'll be posting over the weekend--it's unconscionable that we've ignored her here for so long.

10 Best Albums of 2012

It's that time again: Holiday lights have filled the windows; radio stations are besotted with Christmas ditties; Fox News commentators have dusted off their War on Christmas toilet paper cozies; and dorky listmakers everywhere are starting to put together our Best Ofs for the year. 

But, can we be honest? What I offer are really not the best albums of 2012. For one thing, how could anyone in good conscience ever confer such a status on anything when there is no qualitative system we can all agree upon to measure "bestness"? When, in fact, "best" can--as we've seen happen this year--include sonic driftwood by the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Frank Ocean? It should be pretty ding-dong clear that the word means wildly different things to different people--anything from "I'm sympatico with this dude's politics" to "I guess the D'Angelo album is going to be delayed another year."

So ... awrighty, then. Here, in order of their release dates, are my personal favorite albums of the last more-or-less 12 months:


Birdstriking 
Birdstriking 
January, China
Purchase a copy of the CD ($15.60 US) or individual songs at 75 cents each, here.
I first came upon this album half a year ago while doing research for this mix; I somehow forgot I even had it until maybe two months ago. Since then, it's been the most re-listened-to album on my iPhone. This obnoxious review in Timeout Shanghai to the contrary, what separates Birdstriking from other Beijing two-chord wonders is their unflagging level of energy: they might be the Metz of mainland China. I don't care who invented this general sound--Sonic Youth, the Velvet Underground, a group of Neanderthals in prehistoric El Castillo--what ultimately matters is who is currently kicking the most ass with it. That would be these kids.

 
Listen to "Monkey Snake"

* * *

Noisecat 
Sunday Sunset Airlines 
February, Korea
Buy a digital copy for $7 here.
One of the nicest things about doing a music blog is that people begin to come out of the woodwork, offering to turn you on to music from their own part(s) of the world that for, whatever reason, you've given short shrift to. Noisecat, who I "discovered" thanks to a guy currently based in Seoul going by the name of "Male Cousin" who put this mix of South Korean pop (as opposed to K-Pop) together for us last month, is a bit like one of those American bands from the 1990s who wishes they were British and it was the 60s (e.g., the Dandy Warhols or Brian Jones Massacre). They remind this listener a bit of 22Cats and Guitar Vader--my nerdy, hipster-hat-y, "look how much I know about shit" way of saying that I've quickly grown very, very fond of them. As, come to think of it, so might you. 

 
Listen to "Running" 

* * *

Mati Zundel 
Amazonica Gravitante 
March, Argentina 
Procure an MP3 version of this album for $8.99 here.
Anyone remember the Nortec Collective? Well, a similar movement is afoot in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where musicians like Zundel and others associated with Zizek (aka ZZK) Records are blending electronica with local forms, such as cumbia. A fitting thing to be happening in a city about which the great Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama once said "the epic and lyrical meet." 

 
Listen to "Bronca" 

* * *

The Yellow Dogs Upper Class Complexity  
May, USA/Iran 
Get the 4-song EP for $4 here.
My first experience of this four-piece was a live performance at the Brooklyn Bowl that I witnessed with my friend Carol in October that completely blew both of us away. After that, we became obsessed with the group: we downloaded all of their available music and watched No One Knows about Persian Cats, a film about the underground music scene in Tehran that the Yellow Dogs appeared in. I even begged my editor at Open City to let me write about them. A self-described dance-punk unit (we hear a bit of Gang of Four and Siouxie and the Banshees, yeah?), the Dogs are currently living in Brooklyn and working on a full-length collection of new songs that they hope to have ready some time next year.

 
Listen to "This City" 

* * *

Sharliza Jelita 
Strange Things 
June, UK/Singapore
Seize your own digital copy ($12.88) or autographed CD ($16.10) here.
This album is to pop music what Falai's Elementi is to dessert offerings: decadent, fruity and a bit self-consciously exotic. (That's Carmen Miranda in the lower right quadrant, btw.) This record--Jelita's first after having moved from Singapore to apparently still-swinging London--lays down one sugar-filled gnosh after another--from the one-two (fruit) punch of openers "No Go Pogo" and "Is That Your Underwear on the Floor?" to the heartbreakingly gorgeous "Breaks My Heart in Two" and curtain-closing title song. But what I love most about Strange Things is how it can feel simultaneously pop-pitch-perfect and amateurishly awkward ("I Want More Sun"? "Credit Crunch"?), as though, hey look!, one of your best friends made a record and you're sort of obligated to listen to it, but actually, whoa, wait: It totally doesn't suck.

 
Listen to "Breaks My Heart in Two"

* * *

Melhem Zein 
2012 
June, Lebanon
Preview and grab it (gratis) here.
Is it a failure of imagination or just brutally candid honesty that leads one to title their album after the year it was released? Maybe it's an avant garde or, like, jazz thing? Whatever. If the year 2012 was this album, we'd have all had us one of the greatest years of our entire freaking lives. Oh, and guess how I discovered this album. No, seriously. Give up? On Amtrak. That's right. I had my computer open and was listening to something--God knows what--when suddenly, freakily, someone's entire iTunes library was being shared with me. I didn't even know such a thing was possible (I'm not exactly young or tech-savvy). I remember incredulously scrolling through this person's vaults and randomly clicking on something from this album and, then, as the hard-driving music began pounding its way through my brain, my hands shaking with excitement, I quickly scribbled guy's name in my notebook. Within a few days I'd found my own copy at Alfra (25-23 Steinway Street), a few blocks from where I live.

 
Listen to "Taj Rassi" 

* * *

MC HotDog 
Ghetto Superstar 
June, Taiwan 
Want it? Go here and scroll all the way down.
MC HotDog, known for laying down some of the most vulgar lyrics over spliced-and-diced super-cheesy pop (from Glen Frey to Teresa Teng), released this year what your humble Bodega proprietor believes to be the second-best album of his career (first best would be this one). I picked up my copy at my favorite Manhattan go-to mom-n-pop, P-Tunes & Video, featured in the header image of this blog. How can you not love an album that includes a song titled "Party Like Hotdog"?

 
Listen to "Party Like Hotdog" 

* * *

Abou el Leef 
Super Leefa 
July, Egypt
You'll find it for nuthin' here.
Currently the fastest moving disc in the Bodega (click link above), owing to a shout-out from the fabulous Doug Schulkind at WFMU. I'm glad, because this really is the kind of record I want everyone to hear and know about, it's really just that good. Plus, how else can I bring it up "casually" in conversation? ("Yeah, it's like Abou el Leef says in 'Hatofrag Aleena' ...") Also-also? "Super Leefa." Now, that's a catch phrase just waiting to be super-memed into the collective conscience.

 
Listen to "Khaleek fe Elnoor" 

* * *

Pussy Riot
Kill the Sexist! 
July, Russia
Your copy is waiting right here.
The runaway success of PSY's "Gangnam Style" has apparently made Seoul a newly popular destination for American vacationers; can't say the same for for Moscow after Pussy Riot members were imprisoned and their videos banded in Russia. But these gals so quickly and thoroughly became an international cause célèbre, there's already a doc detailing their story premiering at Sundance next month. The music, which I actually do happen to like, is almost beside the point.


 
Listen to "Ubej Seksista (Kill the Sexist)" 

* * *


My Little Airport 
Lonely Friday
October, Hong Kong
Pick up yours for $14.49 at YesAsia. 
Another P-Tunes & Video find, this is the seventh album by my all-time favorite band from Hong Kong. When Nicole and 阿P started a decade ago, they sang almost exclusively in English; 10 years later, only three of the 17 songs on this album are in English, including the uber-charming "How Can You Fall in Love with a Guy Who Doesn't Know Gainsbourg?" If I were one half of a twee pop due (阿G, maybe?), my song would be "How Can You Fall in Love with a Guy Who Doesn't Know My Little Airport?"


 
Listen to "How Can You Fall in Love with a Guy Who Doesn't Know Gainsbourg?"

Kazim al Saher | Fi Madrasat al Hob

Listen to "Sallami"

Get it all here.

After a bike ride this afternoon from Astoria to Woodside and back, I switched on the news, not having seen it in a couple of days. The footage was sobering, to say the least. Miles and miles of destroyed beaches, property, downed trees, flooding--and image after image of someone surveying their former house or neighborhood and sobbing. The destruction and cost, including loss of life, of Hurricane Sandy is enormous and really almost unimaginable. 

But then I got to thinking. This is the sort of destruction, on a much grander scale, that this country inflicted on Iraq from 2003 through the end of last year. In fact, the cost of that invasion and occupation, in terms of dollars and, especially, in terms of human life and property, utterly dwarfs what we're living through and/or watching on the news right now. 

Kazem al Saher, born in Mosul, Iraq, in the late 1950s, is one of the greatest composers in Arabic music history, even if not everything he does will appeal to everyone. Not just because his work embodies the idea of art in the era of globalization, but because so much of what he does is both innovative and devastatingly expressive. Take, for example, the sample track above. 

Currently living in Cairo, Egypt, al Saher left Iraq for Jordan in 1991 during the first Gulf War. From there he moved to Lebanon before finally settling in the City of a Thousand Minarets. Released in 1997, Fi Madrasat al Hob ("In the School of Love") was his 10th album. (Read more about al Saher and get his 9th album here.)

Asmahan | Yalli Hawak

Listen to " Emta Ha Ta'raf"


Get it all here.


I will not open the Lester Bangs book to a random page and build another entire post on a creative misreading of one of his sentences. I will not open the Lester Bangs book to a random page and build another entire post on a creative misreading of one of his sentences. I will not--


Oh, hey; how you doing? I didn't hear you come in. Heh. Happy Bastille Day! Sit, sit. Have some tea and help yourself to a bit of the baklava; I'll be right with you ...

So! While you were away, I received a couple of very sweet, appreciative emails from folks who recently wandered into the Bodega. In addition to making me feel warm and fuzzy, they also reminded me of why I started this blog in the first place: the fact that there has been, historically, so little attention paid in our culture to music from around the world. If, by "attention" we mean "reviews, essays and books," then this is still very much the case, although music blogs like the dozens of examples I've linked to in the right-hand aisle are one medium or platform or whatever where music from all over the world is finally getting some of the international exposure that so much of it deserves.

The great Druze superstar and pop innovator Asmahan was one of the first non-western voices your Bodega proprietor ever heard; it was back in the 1990s when I discovered this CD in the stacks of the since-closed Daff and Raff Arabic Bookstore in Boston. I remember it as though it was just yesterday ... but worry not, I shan't bore you with that particular memory. Suffice to say that it was a purely random find and that, along with a handful of other random finds, also in the 1990s, completely changed my musical horizons forever.

The present CD--would you like some more tea?--was a more recent find, mid-2000s maybe, most likely at (the since-closed) Princess Music on Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge. I had, by that time, read Sherifa Zuhur's Asmahan's Secrets: Woman, War, and Song, one of the few (like, three? four?) books on Arabic music in English, so I had some context for her, or at least knew something about her life and influence as well as about her mysterious death, on this very day in 1944, an event that has given rise to a thousand conspiracy theories--everything from Asmahan being a Nazi spy to Oum Kalsoum having her rubbed out so she, Oum, could take over as the First Lady of Arabic Song.

Before you leave with your precious download, I should say that--and I'm being completely honest here, I swear--I had no idea that Asmahan died on July 14 when I pulled her CD down off the shelf tonight to post it and, yes, when I glanced at the Wikipedia page I linked to above and saw that date, I got a body-wide case of goosebumps. So, I don't care what your religion is, things do happen for a reason and, despite my use of the word a paragraph or two above, there is probably no such thing as "random." 

Fairuz | Best of Fairuz

Listen to "Mush Qasah Hay"

Get it all here.

This being a post about Fairuz, one of the greatest living artists on the planet, a woman with a voice so powerful, so soulful, it was capable of bringing moments of peace between Israelis and Palestinians, it seems manifestly appropriate that I begin this post by talking about the Music Industry.

Oh My Fucking God, please tell me, Gary, that you're not going to add to the Emily White slash David Lowery meme. We've already read dozens, maybe hundreds of articles, tweets and blog posts about it. Please, Gary. Please. Not that.

Look. I don't want to add to it. For one thing, I don't care about white alt rockers of the 80s and 90s and I most certainly do not care about anything involving NPR. For another, you've already made up your mind, one way or the other.

That said, I implore you to listen to the Fairuz sample above and tell me, even if it involves scraping the last honest layer of sentiment from your nearly emptied-out heart, honestly and truly whether or not this music has even the slightest bit to do with the White / Lowery debate. Right? Right. I mean, right.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Because this song--as is true of most, maybe even all of the songs on this terrifyingly sublime CD--is neither yelp nor yawp nor for that matter 80s/90s ironicized yelp or yawp. It is an extended moment of formalized, yes, but extremely convincing emotive realization. It isn't, in other words, the kind of shit that the music industry is trying to sell you; nor is it the kind of shit that you ("you" being NPR interns) are illegally downloading. That shit is one thing and one thing only: Product. They know it. You know it. We all know it. And that's all it is. It isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, art. It feeds an immediate, gnawing need, like a cigarette. And, just as quickly, it's forgotten.

It absolutely sickened me to read David Lowery's suggestion that illegal downloading might have contributed in any way to the suicide deaths of Vic Chesnutt and Mark Linkous. Like David, I've had two friends, both artists, who have taken their own lives. Both were poets. One of them, oddly enough, wrote a book titled Product, which I--in my 20s in San Francisco--published two decades ago.

The poet who wrote the book titled Product was seriously ill. His illness had much to do with his suicide. His economic situation had a lot to do with his suicide as well (he was on SSDI). But what ultimately led to it was his decision and desire to commit the act of suicide. There are plenty of poets who are or were in as dire or worse straights, physically and economically, who just kept on living, some of whom kept on writing poetry, despite the fact that it doesn't, ever, sell.

The fact that there are people, lots of people, with just enough twit of brain to cheer on  David Lowery's rant completely baffles and saddens me. Really? Really? Some unpaid laborer (cough!) at NP effing R admits to getting whatever she can for free (just like, uh, her "employer"), and this sets you off? Pushes you over whatever brink exists between sanity and the completely insane act of publicly making a connection between willful suicide and downloading crappy, forgettable pop and "alt" rock music?

Give me a fucking break. Where--in all of this insane debate--is the suggestion, anywhere, that the music industry might have some possible responsibility here? Or that musicians who willfully enter into contracts with these corporate scum have a responsibility to themselves? If you want to look at producing music as a livelihood, as a profession, as a job, then who is your employer? The audience? No, no, no, no, no. It's the music industry. It's your label. It's your label that isn't giving you vacation time. Who isn't providing you with health care. It's your fucking label who reaps everything you sow and maybe tosses you whatever coagulated bits are left after they've finished sucking the blood from your labor. If they even do that much. You signed the contract, dumbass, not the audience.

The music industry switched over to digital in the first place for one reason and one reason only: They saw that they could resell the same sad albums by Pink Floyd and Bruce Springsteen on this new format to the same poor suckers who had bought them on vinyl. Their greed led to the greed of everyone taking advantage of the fact that this new format is easily shared. Period, end of discussion. You want to make things right, by which I mean profitable, again? End digital and go back to analog. Or come up with some other solution.

I'm not sure what's worse: that people like David Lowery who imagine they are artists and not what they really are, freelance contractors, have never successfully fought for their rights as laborers and instead blamed everything on the general public, or that people like David Lowery and his employer have no idea who Fairuz is and why she makes everything they've ever done in their lives, beyond making or not making money, ultimately moot. What does it say that the crux of this debate is around making money and not making art?

If you want to make money and you can't make money making music, then do something else and shut the fuck up so people who care about music can hear people who are, like Fairuz, actually making it.


UPDATE: Another poet, a great one, and a great friend, Rodney Koeneke sent along a link to the video above in response to this post, so I thought I'd pop it into the mix. Thank you, Rodney!