Category Archives: Eric Dolphy

THE DEMISE OF THE MASK (VOL 3)

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demise-cvr-3

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A MOUTHFUL OF PENNIES PRESENTS:
__The Demise Of The Mask (Vol 3)__  ___
  • And I Was Blue – Sunforest
  • Fantastic Voyage – David Bowie
  • Defriended – Beck
  • The Bogus Man – Roxy Music
  • The Bogus Man – The Bryan Ferry Orchestra
  • Solid Wall Of Sound / Dis Generation – A Tribe Called Quest
  • Yes Indeed – Ron Carter With Eric Dolphy & Mal Waldron
  • Abbaon Fat Tracks – Tricky ft. Martina Topley-Bird
  • Downward Spiral – Danny Brown
  • Think Like They Book Say – Saul Williams
  • Ful Stop – Radiohead
  • Re Run – Kamasi Washington
  • Don’t Hurt Yourself – Beyoncé (ft.. Jack White)
  • Shoo-B-Doop and Cop Him – Betty Davis
  • Jersey Yo! – Redman
  • I Wanna Know If It’s Good to You? – Funkadelic
  • Pass The Mic – Beastie Boys
  • Stirring – Flying Lotus

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Hello All.

Welcome to Volume Three of my new series of MixTapes: The Demise Of The Mask. –(Volume One here)__(Volume Two here)-.

Although the MixTape features what I find to be many fine songs, I did want to make special mention of David Bowie‘s 1979 track “Fantastic Voyage” as I think this odd pop work is one of the greatest songs to tackle just what it feels like for We The People to live under Nationalism and the soul distortion of patriotic rhetoric. In particular it captures the peculiar and ambiguous but very human emotion of volatile resignation when under absurd power structures or abandoned and made vulnerable in what he describes as both “this criminal world” and “a very modern world.”

“Loyalty is valuable…” Bowie sings, “…but our lives are valuable too.”

As Chris O’Leary wrote on his fantastic blog Pushing Ahead of the Dame (published in part as the book Rebel Rebel):

David Bowie will likely never tour again, may never even sing live again. If so, the last song that he ever performed on stage was “Fantastic Voyage,” a neglected song from a neglected record. It’s a fitting choice. “Fantastic Voyage,” though sequenced as Lodger‘s lead-off track, could have easily served as its closer, and it also works as Bowie’s final statement, a cranky humanist manifesto.

In “Voyage” there’s a striking change of tone from the other Berlin records or Station to Station: Bowie’s no longer at a remove. He’s on the ground, restored to humanity, admitting his powerlessness, reduced to observing and making asides. He sounds both warmer (the slow, generous phrasing of the opening lines) and less calculating; he lets scattered, volatile emotions overrun his song.

Bowie had once seemed to welcome the apocalypse, as it held the potential for transformation. Now in “Fantastic Voyage” he seems older and generally pissed off (“think of us as fatherless scum“), with such delusions drummed out of him. He’s grasped a peasant realism: we are largely governed by killers and fools, our lives hang on their arbitrary mercies.

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“Fantastic Voyage”

In the event
that this fantastic voyage
Should turn to erosion
and we never get old
Remember it’s true, dignity is valuable
But our lives are valuable too
We’re learning to live with somebody’s depression
And I don’t want to live with somebody’s depression
We’ll get by, I suppose
It’s a very modern world,
but nobody’s perfectIt’s a moving world,
but that’s no reason
To shoot some of those missiles
Think of us as fatherless scum
It won’t be forgotten
‘Cause we’ll never say anything nice again, will we?And the wrong words make you listen
In this criminal world
Remember it’s true, loyalty is valuable
But our lives are valuable tooWe’re learning to live with somebody’s depression
And I don’t want to live with somebody’s depression
We’ll get by I suppose
But any sudden movement I’ve got to write it down
They wipe out an entire race and I’ve got to write it down
But I’m still getting educated but I’ve got to write it down
And it won’t be forgotten
‘Cause I’ll never say anything nice again, how can I?

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The mix also features a bit of music off of just some of my favorite albums of 2016, like Saul Williams‘s MartyrLoserKing, A Tribe Called Quest‘s long awaited reunion We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your service, Radiohead‘s A Moon Shaped Pool, and Beyoncé‘s collaboration with Jack White from her album Lemonade. (Jack White is having quite a year appearing on both Beyoncé’s and A Tribe Called Quest’s records, as well as releasing the great double-album compilation Acoustic Recordings 1998–2016 and his label Third Man Records being responsible for the release of  Margo Price‘s impressive debut, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter).

I know I’ve been a bit slow this year to dig in to new music as I spent the majority of the year mourning two of my all time favorites, with the first half of the year listening to David Bowie’s discography and the latter half listening to Prince’s. 

However, this MixTape additionally features “Downward Spiral” by Danny Brown, which is the opening track to his beautifully disturbed record Atrocity Exhibition. No, not necessarily an easy listening experience; this is a record that certainly lands on my top ten releases of 2016 (falling closer to the #1 spot than 10). Making me think of some anxious black tar mutation between Tricky, Talking Heads, and the ridiculous Trap music everyone blasts from their cars in my neighborhood, Atrocity Exhibition still remains one of the most idiosyncratic works in a genre that often seems to enforce and celebrate the homogeneous with a false smile.

As for what is my #1 record of 2016, well that without a doubt belongs to Blackstar by David Bowie. Or as Danny Brown perfectly put it himself in an interview with the online music magazine Pitchfork:

Blackstar is definitely the biggest album to me this year. That album is fucking creepy. It scares the shit out of me. And those videos. Fuck. I kind of relate to it, to him. When you put that much of your life into music, can’t nobody ever take that—you can’t rate that. You can’t review this. He died for this. This is his life right here. When people talk about the best albums of the year, I be like, “Y’all don’t realized Bowie’s album came out this year and he fucking died? What is y’all talking about?” We should hands-down know what the best album of this year is. Shouldn’t be talk of nothing else.

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Also below you’ll find a long list of things I read (or re-read) this year that I truly enjoyed and/or loved. I highly recommend them all! These are not necessarily things that were published this past year but more likely just things I got around to reading since January 2016. When not working on my long, sprawling meditation on the extraordinary and inspiring art of recently deceased David Bowie (R.I.P.) or reading the stunning and always stirring blog Brain Pickings by Maria Popova, I did spend a good deal of my reading time this year immersed in various news articles and such but I wont inundate you with those. I was pretty delighted that the Village Voice had a big upswing in terms of quality, and super excited to find that the entire 1967 to 1973 run of the magazine OZ had been completely digitized.

However, I must list and make honorable mention of what I found to be perhaps the best article I’ve read all year, the Pulitzer Prize winning article “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” published in December 2015 and written by Pro Publica‘s senior reporter T. Christian Miller in partnership with The Marshall Project‘s Ken Armstrong.

As for the books listed, they are in no particular order of preference except for the graphic novel memoir Becoming Unbecoming by Una, which I can say was one of the most impressive things I’ve read all year and actually brought me to tears. This year I also became a huge fan of the philosopher Simon Critchley through his slim work Bowie and of writer Angela Carter through her fantastic 1972 novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. Samuel R. Delany‘s 1973 novel of hardcore erotica and cartoon, occult pornography must get special mention as the most disgusting thing I’ve ever read that is still yet a thing of exquisite language and beauty: Equinox. In its introduction he describes it as thus:

“This is an artificial, extravagant, and pretentious book […]. But it is honest before its artifice; and in this age of extravagant expressions, honesty is the last pretension.”

This year I also re-read (and not for the first time) two comic book series that I can never recommend enough for those in need of a shift in consciousness (and who is not in need?): Promethea by Alan Moore and The Invisibles by Grant Morrison.

I didn’t read too much poetry this year but wanted to mention the work of one poet I had never heard of that I really thought was absolutely great: Dark Sparkler by Amber Tamblyn. I look forward to reading other work by her.

Speaking of poetry, I did want to share this fantastic piece called Moving Into A Period, which I read in Leonard Cohen‘s 2006 work Book of Longing:

We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of just what Authority is will arise in every mind. The family will appear again as the Foundation, much honoured, much praised, but those of us who have been pierced by other possibilities, we will merely go through the motions, albeit the motions of love. The public yearning for Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The sadness of the zoo will fall upon society.
You and I, who yearn for blameless intimacy, we will be unwilling to speak even the first words of inquisitive delight, for fear of reprisals. Everything desperate will live behind a joke. But I swear that I will stand within the range of your perfume.
How severe seems the moon tonight, like the face of an Iron Maiden, instead of the usual indistinct idiot.
If you think Freud is dishonoured now, and Einstein, and Hemingway, just wait and see what is to be done with all that white hair, by those who come after me.
But there will be a Cross, a sign, that some will understand; a secret meeting, a warning, a Jerusalem hidden in Jerusalem. I will be wearing white clothes, as usual, and I will enter The Innermost Place as I have done generation upon generation, to entreat, to plead, to justify. I will enter the chamber of the Bride and Bridegroom, and no one will follow me.
Have no doubt, in the near future we will be seeing and hearing much more of this sort of thing from people like myself.

You’ll see that there is a lot of Star Wars related material listed (I didn’t get to see The Force Awakens until it was released on DVD midway through this year) and If I had to pick just one to recommend I’d have to go with the novel Star Wars: Lords of the Sith by Paul S. Kemp.

For the sake of full disclosure I have included in the list the two books that I am currently reading: The Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner, and the collection of brilliant essays Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts by Clive James. Although only a little more than halfway through both I know now that I’d easily recommend them as they are just great.

But again, I’d truly recommend anything you find below.

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If you dig the mix then please feel free to pass & post it along; if you dig an artist then please support them and go out and pick up some of their stuff. Oh, If you dig the blog overall there’s always the “FOLLOW BLOG VIA EMAIL” button somewhere down at the bottom

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—————–======ENJOY YOURSELF____———–

—  –   ————-______________ ->

demise-cvr-3

__________———
—————————————–================__^__===================  ===  _ ===== == =   = =  __  _
__________—
A MOUTHFUL OF PENNIES PRESENTS:
__The Demise Of The Mask (Vol 3)__  ___
  • And I Was Blue – Sunforest
  • Fantastic Voyage – David Bowie
  • Defriended – Beck
  • The Bogus Man – Roxy Music
  • The Bogus Man – The Bryan Ferry Orchestra
  • Solid Wall Of Sound / Dis Generation – A Tribe Called Quest
  • Yes Indeed – Ron Carter With Eric Dolphy & Mal Waldron
  • Abbaon Fat Tracks – Tricky ft. Martina Topley-Bird
  • Downward Spiral – Danny Brown
  • Think Like They Book Say – Saul Williams
  • Ful Stop – Radiohead
  • Re Run – Kamasi Washington
  • Don’t Hurt Yourself – Beyoncé (ft.. Jack White)
  • Shoo-B-Doop and Cop Him – Betty Davis
  • Jersey Yo! – Redman
  • I Wanna Know If It’s Good to You? – Funkadelic
  • Pass The Mic – Beastie Boys
  • Stirring – Flying Lotus

—————————————–================__^__===================  ===  _ ===== == =   = =  __  

2016 Reading List:________

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___    ______________—————__
_[play]
[And I Was Blue - Sunforest]

[And I Was Blue – Sunforest]

[Fantastic Voyage - David Bowie]

[Fantastic Voyage – David Bowie]

[Defriended - Beck]

[Defriended – Beck]

[The Bogus Man - Roxy Music]

[The Bogus Man – Roxy Music]

[The Bogus Man - The Bryan Ferry Orchestra]

[The Bogus Man – The Bryan Ferry Orchestra]

[Solid Wall Of Sound / Dis Generation - A Tribe Called Quest]

[Solid Wall Of Sound / Dis Generation – A Tribe Called Quest]

[Yes Indeed - Ron Carter With Eric Dolphy & Mal Waldron]

[Yes Indeed – Ron Carter With Eric Dolphy & Mal Waldron]

[Abbaon Fat Tracks - Tricky ft. Martina Topley-Bird]

[Abbaon Fat Tracks – Tricky ft. Martina Topley-Bird]

[Downward Spiral - Danny Brown]

[Downward Spiral – Danny Brown]

[Think Like They Book Say - Saul Williams]

[Think Like They Book Say – Saul Williams]

[Ful Stop - Radiohead]

[Ful Stop – Radiohead]

[Re Run - Kamasi Washington]

[Re Run – Kamasi Washington]

[Don't Hurt Yourself - Beyoncé (ft.. Jack White)]

[Don’t Hurt Yourself – Beyoncé (ft.. Jack White)]

[Shoo-B-Doop and Cop Him - Betty Davis]

[Shoo-B-Doop and Cop Him – Betty Davis]

[Jersey Yo! - Redman]

[Jersey Yo! – Redman]

[I Wanna Know If It's Good to You? - Funkadelic]

[I Wanna Know If It’s Good to You? – Funkadelic]

[Pass The Mic - Beastie Boys]

[Pass The Mic – Beastie Boys]

[Stirring - Flying Lotus]

[Stirring – Flying Lotus]

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__________——————– =__^__=___________________———

___________________))))))))))))))))

All the best to you and yours & Happy New Year!—  –   ————-______-________ ->BOBBY CALERO[—+=-_________________If you dig the mix then please feel free to pass & post it along; if you dig an artist then please support them and go out and pick up some of their stuff. Oh, If you dig the blog overall there’s always the “FOLLOW BLOG VIA EMAIL” button somewhere down at the bottom.

_           _________________   _  ___   _ _________ __________->