A highly recommendable concept album series + anti-pop rant…

People from bb.jamiroquai.com and jamirotalk.net possibly do know of me as a guy completely obsessed with three specific early-70’s records, all of them performed by the great Herbie Hancock’s sextet. An interesting fact about this sextet is that it had no name (I know of). All of the sextet’s members adopted a Swahili name. Hancock took the pseudonym/name ‘Mwandishi’, and that’s how the 1969-1972 sextet, the three albums the sextet spawned, and the ‘69-’72 era of Hancock’s career got their unofficial names. The albums are (chronologically):

1. Mwandishi; (1970. Here’s a fun fact, it was recorded on New Year’s Eve between’69 and ‘70)
2. Crossings; (1971)
3. Sextant. (1972)

I called this series a ‘concept series’ for a couple of reasons, them being:

• All of the albums had this sort of stTructure that had one long track occupy one side of the record, with two other, shorter ones on the other side.
• The albums had their side-long tracks shift sides on every album. On the first and the third one, the tracks were on side B. The second LP had the epic on side A. To put it simply – the epics and the two shorts changed their place on every next LP in a zig-zag fashion.
• Seemingly, each album ‘explored’ a certain kind of ‘enviroment’. Mwandishi was an album with an ‘underwater’ feeling. Crossings explored the limits of outer space, while Sextant seemed to be lurking around some sort of a strange surrounding – like a world within a machine.
• They are all just damn great.

Out of the three, Crossings is my favorite. Sextant is not as good as Mwandishi. It’s kinda too loud, noisy. Even Herbie himself said that he recorded the Headhunters LP because he was feeling that he went too far, made the sound noisy, and that he wanted to get back down to earth. Oh, and he was also plagued by his bad financial situation and the poor sales of Sextant, but he didn’t tell us that. ):

The band released their first two records on Warner, but then got kicked out because Crossings was selling badly, and because the two records recieved very mixed reviews. So Mr Hancock turned to Columbia, who decided to release Sextant. They all thought it was gonna be one fat, fat bitch-slap at Warner. Well, it wasn’t. Kids found out Sextant was really unbearable to listen to, and sold poorly, so the sextet disbanded(, so it really wasn’t the sort of situation that was a year later when Mike Oldfield would turn to Virgin records and Richard Branson after Tubular Bells was refused by every other label and get a huge hit from what everyone thought was shit). At the right point in time, too. Sextant’s a great album, too, no joke, but it did mark a drop in quality which could’ve killed the series if it sold well. After that, Herbie gathers a completely new band, called the Headhunters. And while M. Davis was talking to Jimi’s ghost via that Oujama (or however you call it) board, trying to recieve some heavenly advice from Jimi to find out what to do next (well, not really), the Headhunters released their self-titled debut only a year after the sextet fell apart. Instant hit. Haha. Yaey! Take that, Warner! Hancock’s popularity started spreading like a forest fire. At about the same time, Pink Floyd released The Dark Side of the Moon which turns out not to be as good as Meddle or Wish you Were Here, but was, and is still a fat seller, but that’s completely unrelated to this article, so we’ll stop here. Now for the rant:

FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU

No, wait… That’s not the rant. This is the rant:

I hate MTV. In fact, I hate all this simple and disposable music ‘performed’ (< Milli Vanilli reference there) by completely replacable artists that are according to one of themselves (will.i.am. or however that thing is called) ‘here today and gone tomorrow’. MTV and many record labels are literally showering us with unbearably bad, homogenous plastic crap many believe is ‘good’. Everything is the same these days – albums with two or three ‘hit’ singles, those other ten or nine tracks being only filler, all of them being repetitive tracks with no substance, history or feeling behind themselves, written by record label executives and computers specifically programmed for that. These days, it’s either a boy band, or some guy talking over two repetitive drums. (no rapper, just crapper, real hip-hop, just like the rest of the good music is hidden away) Should those be hitmakers? Guys with guitars and drums who don’t even know how to play their own instruments? Pop-punk princes and princesses who talk/yell/shit on top of a single chord repeated for 3 minutes and 40 seconds? Give me a break, it’s really sad to see people of my age have a spontaneous orgasm at the sheer mention of “Linkin Parkin’ Lot” or any other boy band out there who have no talent/whatever but still have suecess for they wear black clothing, nose/breast jobs or anything else alike. Music has never went anywhere without innovation, experimentation and most importantly – one’s own self. You can’t fake will and emotion, and put it into a song. You can’t possibly print a million hearts out on little pieces of paper and call it love – a symbol representative of something can’t be that something unless that very something is standing behind that symbol. What I’m asking here is where are the 27-minute epics gone? Where did we leave behind the strange time signatures and the exotic instruments? How did we let ourselves throw away our individuality in favour of masks and cliques? Why did we do that, and where are the messages we once stood for? All those things and all the answers to those questions are under a pile of dirt I today call ordinary pop. (Why people still rave around such truly awful music is beyond me…) I could talk about this for the rest of the night, but I’d just take things over the top, something I love to do, but am usually not supposed to.

My New Year’s Eve.

So, it was some 16-17 hours ago, pretty recent, no? To tell you the truth, I didn’t like it. The celebration was really, really awful, even worse than I expected. People were throwing firecrackers and all other kinds of blow-your-hand-up toys around. Plainly put, so many firecrackers went off at once, that the (official, professionally set up, and quite beautiful) firewoks were barely visible from the smoke. Just imagine. I was ready to turn away and go home as my watch was set precisely according to the GMT +1 (and every other one was either late or early), but then the fireworks started, and I just wanted to see if I could see them, so I stood and watched. Well, I could, but it was not so pleasant to close my eyes and cover my ears every single time some piece of shit goes off near me. This was probably the worst new year’s eve I’ve ever expirienced. Or not. Most of the other ones parallel it.

The song with which I entered new 2008 is Mike Oldfield’s “Amarok”. Or Prince’s “1999″. I don’t remember, but I’m pretty sure it’s the first one. So, once again, my album of the day for 1. I 2008. is… (drumroll)

Tracklist:

(Do you really think I’m that much of a  freak to post the ‘tracklist’ to an album which contains only one track that runs for an hour and two seconds and from which its ‘album’ got its name?) (Oh, by the way, the tape and LP releases cut the track in half at some 30 minutes. The LP edition is very rare, I heard. I saw one of those once in Belgrade last summer when I was on an album-shopping spree, but I didn’t buy it ’cause I didn’t have the money to do so.)

I don’t think I even need to explain why this album is so great.  It’s just got this kind of aura, and this fearlessness many works today don’t have. Sure, maybe it didn’t go into unexplored territory, but it’s still a musical adventure. Sadly, I never really find the time to listen to it start-to-end, without any interruption.