In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Rockin’ With the Lord

Hugo thinks Christian music is seen as inherently uncool in the secular world. What he doesn’t know is that all the kool kids listen to Christian music, even a godless, atheist heathen like me.

One of my not-so secret secrets is my love for this band label: Sounds Familyre. I believe every artist on this label is either a) putting out specifically Christian music, or b) Biblically-inspired, morally explorative music. This label is the brainchild of Daniel Smith, head of the band The Danielson Famile.

You can get most of the following mp3s from their website, thus these mp3s will be removed from our servers in a few days. Catch while catch can. Right click, save as.

The Danielson Famile puts out some of the quirkiest feel-good music that I have ever heard. My first listen was both amused and slightly skeptical because of the childish, chiming voices and melodies. It grew on me — and it will grow on you if you have an appreciation for the noisy, upbeat, and avant garde. And yes, they are wholeheartedly serious and are supposed to be a great treat live.

All the kids in the Danielson Famile were fathered by Lenny Smith, a laudable musician in his own right. This song, overtly Biblical, rocks like the best bands of the 1960s. Smith has a back catalogue of songs stretching back at least thirty years that are to be released in album-length selections over the next few years.

This Dan Zimmerman tune has had me rocking out for days. It absolutely plows through musical darkness and light. Great song.

Of the artists I list here, the most popular artist who deals with Christianity in his music is Sufjan Stevens. This indie rock god “came out” as a Christian two years ago with his album “Seven Swans,” whereas his spirituality was only hinted at in previous albums. I highly recommend it as well as his other albums, especially the conceptual geographic- and culturally-themed albums “Michigan” and “Illinois”. His music is all-ages friendly with solid composition and unusual arrangments and instumental choices. Almost all of his songs deal with moral stories or personal tales of hardship, but all capture the beauty of humanity with his lovely voice and lyrical content without being overt or preachy. Just wonderful.

See also: A more comprehensive review of Seven Swans.

If anyone has any similar artists to share, I’d love to hear your suggestions in the comments.

UPDATE: This song I just found (notice: decidedly unchristian) is an electropop Too Short cover with a female vocalist. I can’t decide if it sucks or not.

Reviews

Of things I love:

The Rolling Stones (favorite song: Paint it Black).

Zadie Smith, as reviewed by Frank Rich. Awesome. The Voice has an interview. (I’m obsessed with White Teeth, and I can’t wait to read On Beauty… another thing to do after I graduate law school).

Female Chauvinist Pigs: A book I want to read.

Rushdie’s latest gets mixed reviews (but hot damn I love Michi Kakutani). I’m in the middle of The Satanic Verses right now, and it’s inspiring me to re-read Midnight’s Children.

My favorite writer Tom Robbins lands at #15 this week on the NYT non-fiction list, and is featured inside the list in today’s paper. I have not yet bought Wild Ducks Flying Backward, because I am poor, and because I have no time to read. If you’re looking for a good Robbins book to pick up, my favorite is Skinny Legs and All, but there are a great many other fabulous ones: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Jitterbug Perfume, etc. His style is engaging, funny and borderline insane. For example, Robbins on Debra Winger: “She’s walked a tightrope between fire and honey, between sulfur and roses, between sarcasm and succor, between monolith and disco ball.” Beautiful.

Anyone else read anything good lately?

Another Mixmania

The disc (“DRIVE”) is sitting right in front of me, packaged and ready to go. Making these compilations is getting more and more difficult after I figured not everyone would enjoy the avant garde and punk rock.

The contents:

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A Shoelace, A Bike, and Finally A Piano

I made the mistake of falling asleep at 9pm this evening, waking up from my apparent nap at 11:30. I’m wide awake and it’s way too late to do much other than watch infomercials or blog.

Thus let me take a moment to brag. In the last two weeks, Ethan learned to

  • tie his own shoes,
  • play the piano, and
  • ride his bike.

This evening I took him out to a walking/riding path so he could show off his new biking skills that Grandma taught him. In the beginning he couldn’t start himself off — I had to hold the bike up while he pushed of and got his feet situated on the pedals. At the end of the half-hour, he could start and stop with little difficulty.

The most lovably painful part was watching him, his little bike and little body, wobble all over the path and into a double stroller pushed by a very concerned mom. Every once in awhile he would stop the bicycle to assess his shoelace situation, climb off the bike, and retie his shoes with a look of severe concentration.

My baby’s growin’ up.

Since Ethan has started taking piano lessons, I finally had a decent excuse to move my piano from the parents’ house to my own.

Piano Keys

This beauty is a Roland electric piano that I got for my sixteenth birthday. Until this point I had played on an antique, hand-me-down upright bought for my oldest uncle. The old piano is at least eighty years old, with a broken pegboard, still situated in my parents’ dining room. The switch of instruments was enormous for me — going from an actual instrument with strings and hammers to an electric version with weighted keys — but I took off soon enough and was pleased that I knew what the songs were supposed to actually sound like instead of imagining the songs on the out-of-tune upright. Then again, I missed the upright.

One little-known fact about me: I can play Stairway To Heaven on the piano. I learned that lame party trick on the old upright.

Growing up, my piano influences apart from the classical masters were the Gershwins and Tori Amos (much respect for the lady, but I’m over her music after years and years of replay). There was something that Tori said that has always stuck somewhere in the deep recesses of my brain: Each instrument is different. You must approach each instrument with respect. Listen for the differences and play to them.

As I grew older and began to discover my penchant for low-fi music I would return to the old upright, a family heirloom, and play certain songs on it, songs that didn’t sound right on the infintely, perfectly tuned Roland. I thought of my grandfather and how pleased he was that his granddaughters learned to play, my parents who would occasionally request songs by yelling through the house, and perhaps my future sons and daughters and how I wanted them to take on my love of music.

Piano or no piano, Ethan has definitely inherited my love of music. Yesterday he requested that I make him a CD to take along in the car. The quick CD I made included AC/DC, Queen, and Skynyrd, songs that he already knows and loves and sings along to in the backseat. (Parenthood is nothing if you haven’t heard your child singing along to Hell’s Bells.) For some reason, music has always meant family to me, something that I have consciously passed along. Maybe it’s the thirteen years of lessons, the generations of old sheet music I have inherited, learning to play the songs that I knew my mother, my father, my sisters, and my grandfather loved so much. Hearing today that my mother told my boyfriend that she wished I would play again, that I once played beautifully.

Cry/Smile

Ethan’s father, too, got an electric piano for Ethan to learn on. With our crazy custody schedule Ethan will have to practice at both our houses. Having similar instruments will help in the beginning, though there is something in me that wishes he too could learn to play on that old, broken instrument.

One day, I hope to have that old piano.

I set up the Roland in our little house this afternoon and sat down to play, trying to shake the rustiness from my inflexible fingers. The boyfriend sat down on the couch and looked through the piles and piles of cheesy sheet music, requesting everything from Desperado to the Muppets theme song to Horse With No Name, but I turned to my old favorites, dragging out fragile pages of forty-year-old sheet music and my deceased grandfather’s thirty-year-old issues of Sheet Music magazine. Bach’s fugues, Chopin, Singin’ in the Rain, the Gershwins, jazz and blues standards, Joplin, La Vie En Rose, Jerome Kern, Cry, Smile, Tenderly.

I tried to play, cursing through every song, stop and start and retry, all of it slowly coming back to me, but jilted and screwy. It will take awhile for the five years without practice to be undone. When it was time for me to go pick up Ethan from his afternoon at his dad’s, I stood up from the piano and suveyed the room, furniture akimbo to make room for the piano. For the first time, my house truly felt like my home.

Related: If you too are interested in vintage music, scroll down this page to a slew of links to old sheet music available for fair use. For example, can you tame wild wimmen? And, Eve wasn’t modest ’til she ate that apple. That old apple was to blame.

And When It Becomes Too Frustrating To Blog About The World, Blog About Music

As of this last week, I have rediscovered my long-time love for Nick Cave. Many years ago, someone gave me “Murder Ballads,” a fascinating concept album that reconfigures the folk tradition of tales of murder for a modern audience. The album includes interesting and unexpected duets and some rather shocking songs.

Two years ago, I blogged about Nick Cave and the search for Stagger Lee, the beginnings of the gangster persona in black neighborhoods of the Midwest coinciding with the rise of the blues, after reading a fascinating article on the history of the song.

Stagger Lee — “While he was waiting to record an album, Nick Cave was reading a book on urban black folklore and came across a version of the Stagolee toast. Cave decided to record it for two reasons. He was fascinated, in the first place, by the homosexuality of this particular version.”

Wild Rose — duet with Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue

Henry Lee — duet with Nick Cave and PJ Harvey

The Curse of Millhaven — whence came my only nickname, Loretta

Baby I Got You Bad — from the B-sides released this March; all other listed songs from “Murder Ballads”

For less provocative versions of “Stagger Lee,” see Fats Domino, Lloyd Price, and Dr. John.

That Music Thing

Okay, everyone’s doing it. If everyone else jumped off a bridge, I would too. Because the list accompanying the year of my high school graduation is so bad (I liked one solitary song) I’m completing the list, at Norbizness’ suggestion, from the year when I was thirteen.

If this doesn’t make me feel like a baby around you fogies I don’t know what will.

Songs liked in bold, songs hated crossed out. I can guarantee there will be a pattern to this awful list.

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You Like Prince?

I resisted Mount Sims for a long, long while, but last night the boyfriend forced me to sit down and listen to the stuff. So here I am sitting in my computer chair shamelessly rocking out to this seedy, Prince-like, electro jam. If you’re like me, you’ll have to ignore the lyrics to enjoy the music. This grew on me despite my deep, snobbish, anti-electronic reservations.

Rational Behavior (my favorite)
Good Behavior
How We Do

Right click, save as. You Mac users do whatever it is that you do.

Female Hip Hop Callout

Via Lynne,

This is what you have been waiting for: to release one of your homemade tracks on our new netlabel called femalehiphop.net. For our first release “Flip Flops – The Instrumentals” we are looking for beats you’d like to share with the world. We will then release six selected tracks online on femalehiphop.net. This basically means that you can download an mp3 of the track and either listen to it or – this will lead us to our second release “Flip Flops” – add your own rap to the instrumental and send it to us. We’ll then choose the best versions and publish them as Flip Flops.

Via FlipFlops, you’ll be able to work with a beat/a vocal track of a producer/an MC you didn’t know before, so you could sit in Berlin while your MC would be e.g. in Detroit or Sydney. Our motivation to start a netlabel is to push female MCs and producers who didn’t get a chance to publish a record yet and also to connect female mcs worldwide. Your tracks will be published under a Creative Commons license (please visit creativecommons.org or www.femalehiphop.net for more information on the license). So get your equipment running and hit us with some banging beats at flipflop@femalehiphop.net! Good luck!

So, so cool. Any music makers out there?

“Feminism Didn’t Suit You”

While blogging to some background music I caught this lyric in a song by Jens Lekman, one of my new favorite artists:

oh her highness, I heard you say in some interview
that feminism was something that didn’t suit you
a lack of interest perhaps
or maybe you’re just stupid and inbred

but I still remember when I saw you as a goddess

Something about this seems pro-feminist, and something seems condescending. I’m too lazy to figure it out for myself. Interpretations? Download “Silvia” here.

For more of the pleasantly ironic Jens Lekman, see his Department of Forgotten Songs at Secretly Canadian.