• Hear Me Out: I'm raising a glass to one of my all-time favorite albums, and the one least likely for any reader of this blog to have heard. It comes from the Congo, released in the U.S. on the small world folk label Shanachie in 1985, and profoundly ignored by the American public. Omona Wapi is a collaboration between two artists immensely popular in their homeland, singer Franco Makiadi and guitarist Tabu Ley Rochereau. It’s an odd pairing, Franco was a cummerbund-wearing elder showman, Rochereau a much younger electric guitar-slinger. An American writer described the album's pairing as the Congolese Frank Sinatra and Jerry Garcia recording together. They were both important to the development of African soukous music, a sort of faster, electrified rumba, that became one of the most commercially successful genres on the continent.
Despite the supposed mismatch, Omona Wapi is simply one of the most beautiful, uplifting records I’ve ever heard. There's no Western pop sensibility here, it’s unmistakably African. Four long songs with lots of lilting, danceable, polyrhythmic interplay, sung in the artists' native language. I have no idea what the songs are about, and I truly don’t care. They make me happy every time I hear them. The best example I’ve ever heard of the joy of music-making transcending cultural barriers. It's available on several streaming services, and I recommend it highly.
EARWORM: "Omona Wapi" - The title song is a great place to start.
• What's That You Said?: I don't speak Congolese, as I mentioned, but it got me thinking: What’s the best indecipherable English-language album of all time? And by that I mean albums that have the lead vocals either buried in the mix or intentionally sung to make the lyrics elusive, or both. The Rolling Stones’ recorded-in-a-dank-French-basement classic Exile on Main Street takes my #1 spot, but right on its tail is R.E.M.’s second album Reckoning. Michael Stipe’s unique, "now he enunciates, now he doesn't" singing style is spectacular on that one, even more evocative than their debut.
• Rocking in their 70s (and 80s): I’ve been watching some YouTube vids lately of concert performances by classic rock-era musicians who are still out there on stage; 40, 50, even 60 years after they started. I was curious to see what allowances they’ve made for aging bodies and voices, played-to-death setlists, and modern concert presentation. I'm left with a few observations.
The Rolling Stones: I saw the Stones last in 2016, when Charlie Watts was still with us and Mick and Keith were in their early, rather than late, 70s. They were energetic and sassy, still the band I love. The years between then and now have obviously taken a toll, all of the key remaining players have had well-publicized health issues. Leaving aside the fact that their songs don’t really sound like their songs without Charlie, Mick’s dancing days seem to be over. At 78, his performance involves a lot of walking around the oversized stages and swaying or shimmying in place. He might hop briefly. His current singing voice is the biggest obstacle for me. Again, not criticizing a man nearly 80 years old on a rock concert stage, but his loss of nuance and power has left him with a kind of “shouty” sameness on every song that I find a bit disappointing. Keith and Ronnie don’t move around much anymore, nor do they offer up any guitar work that isn’t heavily rehearsed and expected. Keith fell onstage mid-concert on their last go-round, and briefly took a seat during a couple other performances, so it's obviously getting more difficult for them. Make no mistake, the Stones are still very good at playing their music, but I have to question whether big stadium tours should be in their future.
Paul McCartney: Speaking of big stadium tours, Sir Paul can still pack ‘em in like few others. What he can’t do completely is disguise that fact that his singing voice is a faint echo of what it once was. He’s savvy enough to have spent his last few records writing songs that match his current vocal range better, so they sound great live. The backing vocals and musicians do a decent enough job of covering up his struggles with the Beatles and Wings classics, too. Unfortunately, the big “surprise” of his current shows is a little cringey, maybe they should have thought it through a bit more. For the encore every night, a film clip of John Lennon singing “I’ve Got a Feeling” from 1969 is shown on the huge screens, while Paul sings live, accompanying his old partner one more time. It’s a pretty cool idea, but the difference between John’s powerful, vital, young man singing and Paul’s 80-year-old version is jarring. The crowd goes nuts, of course, as they should, but I find it hard to watch.
Dead and Company: At 74, Bobby Weir is the spring chicken on this list, and he’s done his best to give Deadheads a safe space to twirl and party like it’s 1969 over the last few summers. Dead & Company is Bob, the Dead’s original drummers, Mickey and Bill, and John Mayer filling the lead guitar / vocal slot (I hesitate to call it the Jerry slot ‘cause it’s a very different direction.) Round it out with some very fine musicians who have played with one incarnation or another of Bob’s solo bands and you have the makings of a worthy torch-bearer for the Grateful Dead’s music in 2022. Bobby’s in fine voice these days, and John brings an appealing youthfulness to the sound, but I find myself put off by the slow pace of the songs. Lord knows, the Dead could really slow things down in their day, but they also played their up-tempo stuff with vigor and agility, giving their shows a finely-tuned sense of balance. Dead & Co. play every GD classic a few beats of the metronome slower, and I find listening to them to be a frustrating experience.
Elton John: With Sir Elton, we’re talking about his planned final go-round. He’s already announced that his current Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour will be his last, before he retires to the English countryside with his husband and kids. From what I’ve seen on TV, it’s a breathtaking visual production, from the open clamshell-shaped stage to the wonderful stories-high video screen at the back, to the odd bi-level shelves behind him where the band resides. The huge screen is used brilliantly. Eye-popping animations, colorfully clad dancers filmed boogieing to “Philadelphia Freedom” like a 2022 version of Soul Train, sparks, fireworks and space footage during “Rocket Man,” all amazing stuff that fills the arena with a crowd-pleasing spectacle. If you’re watching on the small screen at home, like I was, it’s a little easier to note the spots when Elton’s voice doesn’t go where it used to, but in the context of his unmatched live showmanship, and his still amazing piano skills, that’s a small quibble.
• Old Analog vs. New Digital: One of the things I try to do with this blog is to entice fans of old music to try something new. I’m thinking about folks in my general age bracket who deeply loved the music of their late teens and early twenties, now codified into the “classic rock” radio format. I listen to new albums with an ear toward connecting them in some familiar way to their beloved Fleetwood Mac albums, or Tom Petty cassettes, or Bob Seger, or Journey; you get the idea. The big obstacle I run into in trying to make those comparisons is that new albums just don’t sound like old ones. I don't say that because sampling a new record for most people involves streaming a digital version of it, often through a dodgy single speaker or earbuds, although that’s part of it. Modern artists have the unlimited palette of digital recording available to them, bands rarely record together any more, and the days of a studio's physical limitations are gone.
Bands from the 60s and 70s, for the most part, recorded together in a studio, with live mics, room echo, analog tape hiss and a limited number of available tracks. The end result of analog recording's imperfections was a final product with a small amount of distortion and a narrow dynamic range, especially when it was played back on analog media like LPs and cassettes. That distortion and range is what nostalgic listeners today call "warmth," the feel of a live band playing together. In the modern all-digital era, musicians are often not in the same room for some, or any, of their parts. That's a trend that was well-established long before covid arrived. Rather than the sound of a band playing together, modern albums, especially rock and pop albums, sound like what they are - carefully layered digital studio assemblies. Instead of warm and natural sounding, contemporary records tend to sound far more dynamic and level-compressed (read: louder). There are some fabulous records being made with the new technology, art always adjusts to its tools, but I recommend something like Mike Campbell's excellent new album, External Combustion to fans of his former boss Tom Petty with some trepidation. Even though the album is built very much on the same musical framework Tom created, even down to strikingly similar vocals, it's not likely going to sound much like a beloved old-school copy of Damn the Torpedoes to a fan from back in the day. Truth is, if Tom were still here, and decided to remake Damn the Torpedoes using state-of-the-art digital studio technology, it wouldn't sound much like that old-school LP either.
• A Plan that Failed: Britpop was huge in the U.K. in the 90s, far less so here. The U.S. went with grunge instead. I thought it would have been fun to offer a Yank-ranking of the three acknowledged classics of the Britpop genre – Oasis’ What’s the Story, Morning Glory, Blur’s Parklife, and Pulp’s Different Class. I’d heard the Oasis and Pulp albums back in the day, Blur was new to me. After a couple days of listening, I realized I didn’t like any of the three enough to write about them. To my ears they’re too archly British and too derivative of the Beatles, Kinks, and Who. I’ll keep listening to the originators instead, thank you.
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