Bird Fruit Flower Fish

This is a great game, this, and perfect for a rainy Friday afternoon. It's a distraction. Seeing as I'm not going to get around to submitting for next weeks Contrast Podcast, on the theme of chickens and other birds, I thought I might as well do a bird-fruit-flower-fish for today's post. And why not? It's an easy game to play, just pick a bunch of categories then a random letter and get 10 points for a unique answer, 5 points if shared with one of the other players.

Work is really productive at the moment.

Note to colleagues: we didn't actually play this. Today.

Bird

A Hawk & A Hacksaw - In The River

Resisting the urge to post either Charlie Parker (good) or They Might Be Giants (horrible), I find myself asking: why on earth I haven't posted about these so far? I've had the mp3 in my inbox from Leaf for weeks, so sorry about that. Anyway: A Hawk & A Hacksaw have been on the road with Beirut recently, a pairing that works pretty well. While Zach Condon's efforts have failed to impact my life in the way I'd hoped (though there's still time), his collaborators on Gulag Orkestar seem to have gone that little further in the Eastern Europea gypsy-folk-indie hybrid.

Jeremy Barnes was, of course, drummer in Neutral Milk Hotel, an extremely credible addition to any resumé. Aside from violinist Heather Trost, Barnes plays most of the instruments himself, creating something of a madcap one-man-band image, which can't fail to be great, despite lacking the traditional three-legged dog in support. Their latest record, The Way The Wind Blows, has been garnering much critical acclaim and automatically interests me given their position on one of my favourite labels, Leaf (who've been kind of quiet on my radar this year, unlike Beirut's UK label 4AD who've had a quite genuinely barnstorming annum). So please enjoy the offering, and investigate Leaf further. Please.

Fruit

Apples In Stereo? The Lemon Song? No... How about some Belafonte? Yes... Who doesn't love the soft lilt of calypso's biggest star, and the gentle Banana Boat Song is one of the most famous. It's a work song at heart, originally sung by Jamaican dock workers lifting crates of bananas onto the banana boat (duh...) at night, hence "daylight come, and me wan' go home."

Of course, such is the media-saturated modern mind that I can't listen to "Hide the deadly black tarantula!" without thinking of Ubiquitous Teen Movie Grown-Up Jeffrey Jones making like a possessed spider in Beetle Juice.

Harry Belafonte - Banana Boat Song

Flower

Public Image Ltd. - Flowers Of Romance (album version)

PiL were great. I mean really good, have a listen to Metal Box and tell me that's not innovative, fascinating music. In a cool tin. John Lydon is clearly a joke these days, and kind of was in the Sex Pistols. Being born well after the implosion myself, I find it hard to judge but my feeling is that I would have found it hard to take him seriously even then, certainly not the threat to society as envisaged at the time. But Pil, those inbetween years? Those are great. Even if you just know Rise, surely that's enough to tell you how great they were, a monster of a song with falls and rises, and Lydon's inimitable hectoring, his oblique railing at the world, or anyone who would listen.

Photo by s76fitz

Flowers Of Romance (from the album of the same name) is based on, or at least references the band of that name, featuring then-Pil guitar hero Keith Levene (who's sound defined Pil on a number of occasions) and one Simon Ritchie (Sid Vicious to his ma). It reached #24 in 1981.

Fish

If you were hoping I would post Fish or Phish, sorry, that's just not going to happen. Think it through. What I will post is Red Snapper. If you love you some fried fish (and who doesn't?) then red snapper is the route to go down. If you love you some dubbby, jazzy, breaky, millenial London beats then Red Snapper's for you. Free from the Matador website, Some Kind Of Kink is apt an introduction as you could hope to have to this often dizzying act, with it's large bassline and congas, and somewhat claustrophobic, unsettling fx.

Red Snapper - Some Kind Of Kink

The 'fo
Artists: A Hawk & A Hacksaw/Harry Belafonte/PiL/Red Snapper
Websites: brokenheartfoundation.org.uk/wikipedia/johnlydon.com/matador.com
Recommended: The Way The Wind Blows/The Essential.../Metal Box/Prince Blimey
Label: Leaf/RCA/Virgin/Warp & Matador
Buy: Amazon AH&AH/HB/PiL/RS
More: Hype Machine AH&AH/HB/PiL/RS; elbo.ws AH&AH/HB/PiL/RS
If you like this you might like: anything...
Tags: bird; fruit; flower; fish; A Hawk & A Hacksaw; Leaf; Beirut; Harry Belafonte; calypso; Jamaica; John Lydon; Public Image Limited; Red Snapper; Matador; Warp

Pirates vs Chiefs

Tsotsi: this is a good film. It also might introduce you to some music you wouldn't have otherwise heard. People (i.e., the world at large) have been getting acquainted with South African music since Graceland, almost exactly twenty years ago. If you were to read the liner notes to that record you'd become familiar with the concept of 'township jive', the street music of the time in Soweto. Soweto's obviously the most famous township you could name, and rightly so, as it's about a million (a very rough estimate) in population and as such constantly shifting. Like any vibrant, culturally-aware city, Soweto's music has developed and today kwaito is the most popular form.

Although I've been familiar with the concept of the music since visiting the country a couple of years ago, it's only since seeing Tsotsi that I've actually heard it. The film features Zola, probably the biggest kwaito artist in South Africa, as Fela, and there's others like Vusi Mahlasela (a little more easygoing), Pitch Black Afro (one of the leading rappers) and Unathi (one of Ghetto Ruff's biggest female acts) on the soundtrack. The sound has a hard-edged hip hop quality - especially Zola's, which sounds like an angry Apache Indian - featuring the occasional traditional instrumentation, and heavy percussive sounds that might be produced on a dustbin lid, for all I know.

It's not usually in English, but that's probably not the biggest reason why it hasn't translated well out of South Africa. It's township music, it's rough, it's lyrically very meaningful. Zola's music provided (as mentioned in the credits) a lot of inspiration for Tsotsi, with it's moral-free crooks and kill or be killed tone. It's not gangster rap by a long straw though: the artists are born out of the townships and aren't glorifying it, just describing it.

The film brought back a lot of memories for me, although the cultural tourism part of my trip there freaked me out to the extent where I never went for a township tour. But seeing the beautiful gated houses with electric gates stood next to a mass of shacks, and kids living in pipes, was one of the things to affect me most about the country. I'm glad that I didn't just stay in the city, because the countryside, while desperately poor, is a completely different thing, but the atmosphere of mistrust and fear affects everyone. The first conversation we had on arrival was directions from Cape Town airport to my brother's friends house, and this involved instructions to wind up your window and lock your door at this particular junction, it's well known for car-jackings.

It was fascinating to listen and watch Tsotsi then: to see that contradiction in lifestyles (there's no middle ground), and to hear the language. The way Johannesburg, and therefore Soweto, has evolved, with migrant workers to mine gold in the Gauteng province, the language is a real melting pot. The predominant influences are Zulu with it's softer edge, and Xhosa with it's click consonants, which make up the two biggest African language groups. But if you've any familiarity with Dutch you can pick out the Afrikaans influence, and of course the English. It's a really expressive and fascinating language.

Zola - Ehlala
Zola - Bhambatha
Buy Zola here

Ishmael feat. Bongz - C.R.A.Z.Y.
Label/album/buy

Vusi Mahlasela and the A-Team - E Sale Noka
Buy/audio