22Cats | 10 Years of 22Cats

Listen to "Grunge Love"

Get it all here.

It's too early for a Best of 2012 post, but not too early, I hope, to begin upping some of my favorite records of the year. There are 10 albums at the top of my list, one of which is this freebie from one of Hong Kong's most beloved alt bands, 22Cats--the others will follow soon.

I'm not going to mince words: I've already checked out Pitchfork and Spin's 2012 Best Ofs, and I have to say, I don't care how hard you foist Grizzly Bears, Frank Ocean, Swans and other pretentious & immediately forgettable U.S./U.K. crap in my face, you're never, not in a million billion years, ever going to convince me that killing myself in the most horrifically painful way imaginable is not the more desirable alternative to resigning myself to living in a world where people honestly consider it listenable.

Fortunately, I don't have to resign myself to living in that world. I can live right here in the real world, where albums like this one exist. And, guess what? You can live there, too.

22Cats don't have so much as an English-language Wikipedia page, but they've been rocking, if this compilation is any indication, for the last decade--and rocking harder than your average cats. I got this free download through a link on Facebook posted by the band's label, Harbour Records. I guess the idea is that, once you listen to this comp, you'll want to buy their actual albums. Considering that: (a) no one in the mainstream music media has nor ever will write about them; and (b) they will not likely therefore ever be asked (and paid) to play anywhere in the U.S., it's the only way you're ever going to hear more by them.

Yui Yatyoe | Cha Rot Mai Nia

Listen to "สองแสนแหวนวง"

Get it all here.

In his 1995 book Ocean of Sound, David Toop quotes Jimi Hendrix talking to Melody Maker during the last year of his life on the possibilities of expanded musical textures:

"I don't mean three harps and fourteen violins ... I mean a big band full of competent musicians I can conduct and write for. And with the music we will paint pictures of earth and space, so that the listener can be taken somewhere." 

Toop then describes how two of Hendrix's posthumous records, Crash Landing and Midnight Lightning, were assembled after his death, basically using a cut-and-paste sort of method to pull together unfinished tracks, speeding up or slowing down things to match keys and adding new parts where, say, a guitar track abruptly ended with no clue as to where it might have gone.

Reading this passage, one comes away with a sense of the real power of the studio, one that almost seems to contradict how the studio is so often used today, especially by the southeast Asian music industry. 

What we have here tonight is an example of what music blogger and Thai pop music cataloger Peter Doolan calls "guitar & keyboard workstation-driven luk thung." Listening to the sample above, it's difficult to tell what's "live" and what's "canned": the drums, for instance, clearly falling into the latter category; the guitar, voice and possibly the horns falling into the former. "Workstation-driven" seems like the perfect descriptor: these albums are cranked out, one after the other--this is, in fact, CD number 16 (Peter posted number 3 from what I believe is this same series on his great Monrakplengthai blog, here). God only knows how many total CDs there are.

But does this factory-output approach to pop music make it any less fabulous than something more "authentic"? Does it, in fact, make this music any less "authentic"? 

I would say no. The studio is a factory, no matter who's in it or how it's being used; I was blown away watching David Byrne and St. Vincent perform live on the Colbert Report the other night, so much so that I immediately went and downloaded the album, Love This Giant, that they were promoting. And it just didn't have the same oomph as their live performance. It sounded canned. And, in that case, it wasn't because they were substituting a drum machine for drums, or a synthesizer for horns. It just felt "cold" in comparison to the live performance.

I've always argued that there is nothing "authentic" about popular music. That authenticity is not a quality or attribute in any way relevant to the art form. But there is one way in which popular music can be said to be authentic, for, in order to become truly popular, it must offer an "authentic" reflection, simultaneously, of the dreams and real lives of those who consume it--the soundscape version of its listeners' life- and dreamscape. 

Thanks to the aforementioned Peter Doolan for transliterating this album and identifying the singer. The title, by the way, translates as "I Will Survive," at least according to Google's translation feature ...

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.)

JL Murat | Lilith

Listen to "Le Cri du Papillon" from disc 1


Listen to "Emotion" from disc 2

Get both discs here.

Born Jean-Louis Bergheaud in 1952, JL Murat spent much of his youth with his grandparents in Murat-le-Quaire, the village in Auvergne that presumably inspired his pseudonym. Though he began playing music with his father at an early age, he didn't record his first album until 1981, when he was nearly 30, and waited to go on his first real tour a dozen years later, then in his early 40s. When this double CD was recorded in 2003, he was 51; by the time I discovered it for 25 cents at the Alliance Francaise booth at Bastille Day on 60th Street in Manhattan this summer, he was 60.

According to one English-language webpage about Murat's life and work, this double album is his tribute to Neil Young. I totally don't hear it. What I hear is Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen. And, in some of the longer, complexly orchestrated pieces, like "Se Mettre Aux Anges," Scott Walker.

This record is all over the map in a way that continues to surprise, thrill and delight me. Oh, god, wait--did someone hit me over the head and now I'm writing music reviews for Time magazine or something? Whatever. The samples above, though I enjoy each of them, don't really do the full breadth of this record justice. If you're stuck indoors like me post-Sandy, take some of the time you've got on your hands and give it a listen ...

Ceza | Med-Cezir

Listen to "Meclis-I Ala"

Get it all here. 

Please, mighty Allah, please grant me this opportunity to add to the hundred and fifty billion ga-thousandy x infinity FB, Twitter and blog posts filling the airwaves this evening about FRANKENSTORM SANDY! Please.

I promise to work it in subtly: "Well, here I am after hours in the ol' Bodega, just hangin' out and restackin' the Goya shelf as, heh, it's gonna be a looooong night ahead as it looks like the New York City subway system has been shut down as of 7:00 p.m. what with of the impending--"

Can we talk? First of all, I'm sick of hearing about the storm. (Admittedly, I made the mistake of switching on NY1 earlier this evening--my bad.) Secondly, okay: like, I discovered that I hadn't yet upped this really divine album by Ceza, Turkey's Número un rapero (de Turquía)? And I listened to it, really for the second time since I bought it at Uludag Video in south Brooklyn eons ago, and I just thought it was beautiful and that you should have it. 

It's very different from Rapstar, which I added to the shelves here two-and-a-half years ago. Ceza's rapping style is the same: a slightly-to-very-much sped up version of Eminem. But the use of music and samples is very different, less about creating a jangly, perforated soundscape for the rapper to weave and bob through than it is a kind of lush, at times celestial, tapestry against which the rapper "throws" his voice (oh, shit, I forgot that that word also has to do with ventriloquism) like Jackson Pollock throwin' down alkyds, acrylics, vinyl-acrylics, polyurethanes, polyesters, melamine resins, epoxy, and oil.

Get beyond the Aerosmith loop in the sample above, and you'll see what I mean. Hope you enjoy it. And, yeah, sorry; all out of peanut butter, water and candles.

An Open Letter to Edo Maajka

Хеи, хов аре иоу доинг, Едо? Yeah, good? Great, man; me, too.

Except, you know what? Dude. I received an email from Blogger (which is owned by Google, who own everything around here) explaining that my post on your CD, Spomen Ploča, was taken down, and that if I put it back up again with the live links to the CD in place, it would count as a violation on my account. 

Let me back up a moment. I know you're a huge star in the Balkans; the single most sought-after rap artist in the area. But until last April, when I happened upon a Bosnian bodega in my neighborhood--Astoria, it's part of Queens, which is one of the five boroughs of New York City--I had never heard of you. No one I knew had ever heard of you. No one I would ever have met, in the few decades I have left on this Earth, would likely ever have heard of you. This is America. Or, more precisely, the U.S.A. We don't get out much. And we like to think we invented everything. And in your case--rap and hip-hop--we sort of actually did. 

That said, I'm a bit obsessed with international pop music. I spend most of my weekends on the prowl in Queens, Manhattan, Bronx and Brooklyn looking for immigrant-run bodegas and media stores, where I buy cut-rate CDs, many of which are forgettable crap, some few of which are utterly sublime, and most of which are listenable-to-pretty good. I post anything I deem pretty good and above here. This is my bodega. It's virtual. If it was real, it would go quickly out of business. 

I maintain this virtual bodega for one reason and one reason only: because I believe American pop culture (specifically U.S. pop culture) is more or less in decline. The movies, the music, the writing, the art and performances worth experiencing all seem to mostly be coming from other places. Have you tried to read Jonathan Lethem or listen to Bruce Springsteen or watch a Sofia Coppola movie recently? It's horrifying how bad the shit we produce really is these days. Okay, granted, I just posted a link earlier to a piece I wrote about Breaking Bad, an American television show that, I admit, is pretty great. We haven't totally lost it.

But, still. We mostly suck. And that's where you come in. You and artists like you all over the world. Artists who are doing unconscionably fabulous things but, because you haven't yet proven you can move more than 12 copies of whatever it is you might possibly sell here, you haven't been written about in Spin, Rolling Stone or Pitchfork. And because our mass media ignores you, our collective understanding of the pop music field beyond our borders is basically M.I.A., Bob Marley, those Buena Vista Social Club guys, Bjork and "Gangnam Style." Which pretty much ensures that we're going to suck very hard for a very, very long time.

Where was I? Oh, right: You. And your music. Which you had Google come sit its huge stinking fat corporate ass on my face to ensure that I'd forever remove it. Good for you. Not only have you stopped "rampant" piracy, helping you not receive precisely the amount of no money whatsoever that you would have never in a million years received anyway, but now, the only way anyone in the U.S. is going to stumble onto you is through this post. 

One last thing, and I'll let you go. The sample song I had posted on that no-longer-extant page, "Jebo Vladu" ("Fuck the Government"). I just want you to know that I still love that song, even more so, and precisely now for the irony of your having used the U.S. government (in the form of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) to erase the sole source of English-language sentences singing your praises on the entire worldwide web that anyone in this country, or the rest of the English-speaking world for that matter, was ever going to find.

The Extreme Poetics of Breaking Bad

An essay I wrote exploring the poetics of Breaking Bad, with a beautiful video by Dave Bunting, just went live on IndieWire's PressPlay, here.

For a contemporary cinematic experience as visceral and visually arresting as Breaking Bad, audiences must look abroad, to Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, or further, to films coming out of Thailand, Japan, and South Korea. ... Vince Gilligan’s series puts U.S. cinema to shame, not just in terms of story, but in its execution: The direction, the dialogue, the acting, and—as is evident from the video essay above—the cinematography are, quite simply, of a higher order of intelligence. An intelligence that is extremely, at times obsessively, self-aware.

Anita Mui | Days of Being Wild

Listen to the "Days of Being Wild"

Get the Bodegapop exclusive Anita Mui mix here.

If you're a fan of Wong Kar-wai, you probably remember the sample song above as the music accompanying the closing credits of his film of the same name. You may not have known (a) the singer, Anita Mui, or (b) that it is a version of Xavier Cugat's "Jungle Drums," but with lyrics.

Mui's rendition wasn't the first time Cugat's song made it into Hong Kong cinema. In 1957, it made an appearance in "Our Sister Hedy" (see the video here). I'm fascinated by the international popularity of Cugat's tune, which strikes me as a case of ersatz "exotica," the likes of which the great music critic David Toop wrote about in his 1999 book Exotica: fabricated soundscapes in a real world, the single most influential bit of music writing on your friendly Bodega proprietor. (See, for instance, this talk.)

Wong Kar-wai, whatever else he does, traffics in a kind of cool, knowing exotica, which is, I would argue, why he was so popular in the United States at the turn of the century. A reasonable person might ask: Why didn't Wong Kar-wai just get Faye Wong to record the song, considering her presence in more than one of his films? Because, I would argue, Anita Mui, among Cantopop singers, was by far the most self- and media-exoticized superstar the genre ever birthed. Often referred to as "The Madonna of the East," a more appropriate reference, had she been around in the 90s and aughts, is Lady Gaga. (A Google image search may give you a quick sense of why I say that.)

I've long wanted to post a mix of Anita Mui's cooler, more dance-y exotica, but I was waiting to find a copy of her last album, the ironically titled I'm So Happy, recorded before her untimely death at age 40 from cervical cancer. Alas, I haven't yet found it and, as I'm not sure when I ever will, I've gone ahead and put together what's here now, which draws heavily from her 1999 album Larger than Life, where she does (in that instance) look more than a bit Madonna-esque.

Anita Mui got her big break in 1982, beating out over 3,000 other contestants in that year's New Talent Awards; she began recording soon after, causing almost immediate controversy with her 1985 hit "Bad Girl," a song that you probably have to understand the lyrics to appreciate (I didn't include it in this mix). When she toured mainland China she held off singing the song until her final night and then reaped the negative-publicity benefits of the shit-storm that followed.

Although I'd appreciated her acting for many years (she was especially terrific in Stanley Kwan's Rouge), I had no idea she was a singer until I found the aforementioned Larger than Life CD in a Hong Kong media store on Bowery and Canal several years ago--from that moment on, I became obsessed with her as a singer, although admittedly, I couldn't stand most of the music I was picking up. What I do like, I've included here. She is, I will say this, unique in Cantopop, not simply because of her hyperexoticized stage presence, but also for her contralto voice--husky, deep, and serious, though (I assume) fairly knowing.

I'd love to know what you think.

Hoang Oanh | Souvenir 08

Listen to "Mua Gat Moi" 

Get it all here.

Born Huynh Kim Chi on January 27, 1950, in My Tho Province, Hoang Oanh (which means "Golden Songbird") grew up with five sisters in Saigon. Her father taught singing and, by the age of eight, the fledgling songbird gave her first performances on stage. A mini-breakthrough came in 1964 when she was 14 years old and was asked to give concerts in Hue, a coastal city about 50 miles north of Da Nang. According to one Vietnamese webpage I Google-translated: "Due to complaints and often poetry recitation before singing, she has made ​​a difference for her performances throughout her career and was rated as 'good enough song immersion.'" In other words, one assumes, she didn't bore the shit out of everyone by reciting a bunch of poetry before kicking out the jams.

Seriously? I have no idea what that really means, although I suspect it does point to a shift in the live performance of Vietnamese popular music. And a shift for her as well, as she graduated from the University of Saigon with a BA in literature and briefly considered a career as a teacher. 

On April 28, 1975, the Golden Songbird flew out of Vietnam for New York, New Jersey and, ultimately, San Jose, Calif., where she lives to this day.

I plucked this fabulous CD from the stacks of an intimidatingly vast Vietnamese media store on Argyle Street in Chicago, where I also found the other two CDs I have from this series. Unlike 75% of pre-1975 Vietnamese pop music currently in print, the songs have not been altered in any way (e.g., no cheesy Casio tracks have been threaded into the mix), allowing the listener to experience it all as it was meant to be heard in Saigon before the fall.

PS: I'll make another push for readers to take the survey to the right before the deadline passes tomorrow evening.

Hoang Oanh | Souvenir 06

Listen to "Tua Canh Beo Troi"

Get it all here.

I was surprised this morning while flipping through the stacks to find that I hadn't yet shared this absolute gem, a collection of pre-1975 tunes by one of the most popular Vietnamese singers of all time.

The album is rich and various, with more traditional Vietnamese songs and instruments sprinkled in among more pop-y and blues-y pieces--including the mournful yet slightly funky guitar you hear in the sample above.

If you like this album--and I can't imagine that you won't--be sure to get this one as well, if you haven't already.

Oh, and before I forget: There's still time to weigh in on the poll at top right, but today I believe is the final day.