We continue last week’s theme of only locally popular music and have a closer look at the Senegalese artist Youssou N’Dour, who is considered one of the most celebrated African artists in history. He joined Star Band, Dakar’s most popular band in the 1970ies at the tender age of sixteen and became one of the founding fathers of Mbalax, a hugely popular musical style combining traditional Senegalese music with the Latin styles popular at the time. But despite frequent collaborations with several well-known Western musicians (not least among them Peter Gabriel or Paul Simon) outside Africa he is by far best known for the single he did together with Swedish singer Neneh Cherry.
Cherry – whose family history is rather complicated and who moved a fair bit around the Western hemisphere in her life – stated that the huge success the song had worldwide took her quite by surprise, as the track was supposed to be an experiment.
The title of “7 Seconds” refers to the first few breaths in the life of a child, as of yet unaware of the harshness and violence of the world it’s coming into. It features lyrics in French, English and the West African Wolof.
Despite being the best-selling American Girl Group there was a time when the members of TLC had to file for bankruptcy – just like M.C. Hammer, for whom they had been opening act in the early 1990ies. But neither that, nor sickle-cell anemia or burning down a multi-million-dollar mansion in a drunken fight with a boyfriend stopped them from having careers filled with both hits and headlines.
Their signature song, is very socially conscious, with the eponymous “Waterfalls” referring to elusive fantasies and their “chasing” giving little thought to consequences. It was addressing the prevailing problems of the 90ies, notably the dangers in the illicit drug dealing scene and the importance of safer sex due to the rising number of HIV infections. It’s certainly the first number-one song that contained the word “AIDS”.
The video, featuring liquefied versions of the band members which were notoriously difficult to render was absolute state-of-the-art at the time and cost over a million dollars to create.
When Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, who had written and performed the rap part of the track died in a car accident in 2002 the verses were engraved into her coffin.
It’s our 50th episode and to celebrate that we’re having a special treat: One of the most important, influential and decade-defining videos of the 1990’s.
One night in the winter of 1990 Kathleen Hanna, singer of Bikini Kill, and Kurt Cobain were out spraying graffiti in the streets of Seattle and got hideously plastered before hanging out at his room, where the intoxicated Hanna took out a sharpie and began to write on the walls. As Cobain had been recently dumped by her bandmate Tobi Vail she thought it important to let her readers now that he reeked of Vail’s deodorant, “Teen Spirit”. Alas, the meaning was lost on Cobain, who read “Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit” as a compliment of his rebellious essence and asked Hanna for permission to use the phrase for the title of a song he had been working on. He intended it to be “the ultimate pop song – ripping off The Pixies”. The manufacturer of the deodorant certainly welcomed the free publicity…
The song became a huge hit and as a result Cobain was often considered a spokesman for Generation X – for whom “Here we are now, entertain us” became somewhat of a credo – , which he despised just as much as the term “Grunge” that was assigned to their music.
The audience in the video was recruited at a Nirvana concert a few days earlier, where director Samuel Bayer handed out flyers looking for kids between 18 and 25, attending as a typical high-school persona: punk, nerd, jock (Well, most of them were. The cheerleaders came from a local strip club). They had expected to be there for an hour or so, but were ordered to sit in the stands and look bored for more than 11 hours, while the band was acting out a prep rally. As a result there was quite some pent up aggression when they finally requested to destroy the set – and when permitted so they did. The mosh pit and destruction is quite real.
Up to this point it was the norm for people on MTV to be pretty and trendy and initially the network refused to play the video. However, they finally gave in and due to the video the practice actually changed, paving the way for artists with “radio faces” – and by the year 2000 it had become the most played video on MTV Europe.
Note from the editor: So we made it to 50 videos. Yay! Unfortunately the two visitors we get on a good day don’t really justify the time required to keep up the pace, which is why starting next week we’re cutting down to two episodes per week. Thank you for your understanding!
We already covered that music often is political, and that is of course just as true for the followers of anarchism. But whereas the typical representative of that mindset has a high likelihood of founding a punk band, and expressing her frustrations about the state of the world by screeching in sweat-soaked cellar holes, there are some who take a more sophisticated approach. Such as The KLF (also known by several other monikers), whose explicit goal was to subvert the art world. And so they defaced billboards, fired machine gun blanks into their audiences, deleted their catalogue, and burned all of their earnings in a blazing fire – one million pound sterling.
“Justified And Ancient” had been in the making since the group was formed, originally even sharing the name. Like kindling to blaze it grew over the years and was remade in an upbeat pop-house version, named with the subtitle “Stand by the JAMs” – with vocals by the “First Lady Of Country Music” Tammy Wynette who is best known for “Stand by Your Man” – shortly before they went out with a bang in the aforementioned burning performance, effectively ending the project that was The KLF.
Both Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty would continue with artistic and anarchic projects, but while some of them were really good – Drummond’s “The17” project resonated specifically with me – none made quite as big a splash on a popular front.
Songwriters Anne Preven and Scott Cutler of the LA based band “Ednaswap” wrote “Torn” in 1991 together with Phil Thornalley, with Preven taking inspiration for the devastation chronicled in the song from her work in a mental hospital in New York that dealt with suicidal juveniles as a teenager. It was first recorded two years later in Danish and had its English debut by Ednaswap, but none of this recordings took off.
That changed when Natalie Imbruglia, who was known to a broader audience from the immensely popular Australian soap opera “Neighbours” started a second career as a singer and released a version of the song as her debut single in 1997. Not immediately though, at least in the US, where the song was proposed to a number of record labels and turned down repeatedly – only to have the same people bending over backwards to seal the deal when the song exploded on the UK charts.
Alison Maclean, who shot the video was able to create a very intimate feeling by combining acting (recreating a scene from the 1972 erotic drama “Last Tango in Paris”) with footage from breaks, where the actors were not aware that the camera was still rolling.
When the Backstreet Boys, who had released their first album on an international market in 1996 and were already hugely successful in Europe told Jive Records president that they wanted to include a song called “Backstreet’s Back” – written by Swedish hitmakers Max Martin and Denniz Pop – on what was to be their debut album in the US, and even release it as a first single, he was having none of it. It was kind of hard to argue back from where exactly (the band argued back in the states, but didn’t get their way). And so the first million copies of the US album was produced without the track. Only when Radio stations close to Canada – where the song quickly caught on – started picking up the track and playing it, too, he relented and the track finally made it into the rest of the albums produced.
The song became a huge success in the states as well, but when it was time to produce the video (with director Joseph Kahn who so far had done mostly Hip-Hop and Grunge videos and wanted to diversify into pop) and it was decided to lean on Michel Jackson’s famous “Thriller” with a side-serving of the Rocky Horror Show, with their bus supposedly breaking down and them having to look for shelter in a haunted mansion, the label went through the same spiel again, arguing that MTV would not go for the concept. So the band funded the video themselves and had to fight hard to get reimbursed once the video – again – was quite successful after all.
It won “Best Group Video” in 1998’s Music Video Awards.
There’s this great song from Arthur Brown, which doesn’t qualify for the blog, as we’re limited to seventies to noughties and it’s from 1968. It starts off with a terrifying threat: “I am the God of Hell-fire, and I bring you…” only to immediately switch to the cutest little melody. 28 years later, Keith Flint came over way more menacing when he – who at the time was a dancer for Prodigy, had never sung on a track and for whom the English language most definitely wasn’t his strong suit – decided to live up to his surname and added lyrics to what was supposed to be an instrumental piece.
The video, shot in black and white for budget reasons, was considered so grisly that fire brigades felt the need to compel what they regarded as an incitement to arson and the tabloids chastised it for frightening kids.
Flint was promoted from dancer to frontman.
He also owned a little pub in Essex that had an open fireplace. If you caught him lighting a fire there and brought up the song you had to donate a pound to charity.
The art of Scat singing – vocal improvisation with nonsensical syllables, vocables and other sounds produced by means of the human vocal apparatus – has been part of Jazz vocalists’ repertoire since at least 1911 and was popularised in the Roaring Twenties by the likes of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. Which is how a young John Paul Larking, a Californian child born in 1942, who had been suffering from a massive stutter ever since he began to speak, realised that there were means to communicate without having to go through what for him was constant humiliation: Music! He began to play the piano and became a proficient jazz pianist.
In 1990 Larkin moved to Berlin, where he found a thriving Jazz scene that welcomed him warmly and he became able to add singing to his acts as well despite the deep insecurities, receiving standing ovations. But when his agent Manfred Zähringer suggested to go one further and produce a song combining the modern jazz derivatives of dance and Hip Hop with scat singing he still was very apprehensive, fearing being laughed at and criticized again, as he was used to as a child. Luckily for us, his wife Judy was able to convince him to tackle the problem full frontal and speak about his struggle in his own way – through music.
He adopted a new persona along with it and Scatman John soon became a worldwide star at the age of fifty-three.
Sadly, he would contract lung cancer only four years later and died a month before the great party when we rolled over into 2000. FsckCancer!
When Everything But The Girl released the second single of their ninth album – which was already much more electronic than their usual folky fare – “Missing” failed to excite the masses. But that changed big time when Todd Terry, who was largely responsible for making the genre of House popular outside it’s Chicago origins, remixed the track and it was re-released a year later – even though their record company at that time had dropped them, seeing no future, so there was little to no promotion, just the song’s own merit.
Ben Watt, the male half of the couple, who met and formed the band in 1982 but were very secretive about that the fact they were also a couple in private and finally married in 2009, contracted a rare auto-immune disease, Churg–Strauss syndrome in 1992 and the prospect of potentially having to go on after the death of a loved one certainly did it’s part in writing the tune.
The song became the first single to ever stay in the US charts continuously for more than a year.
They would perform their last show at Montreux in 2000.
We briefly touched the importance of Detroit for Techno. Seattle provided a similar role for Grunge (a slang term meaning “repugnant” or “dirt”), an alternative rock subgenre that blends Punk and Heavy Metal and was hugely popular in the early to mid Nineties. While some of the bands considered to be typical representatives of the genre embraced the term, others – like Soundgarden, one of a number of big names to initially sign with “Sub Pop”, the Seattle label that popularised the musical variety – did not at all.
Formed in 1984 it took the band ten years to get to their zenith, the album “Superunknown” which contained a number of Grammy award winning hits, among which “Black Hole Sun” is probably the best-known.
The song was allegedly written in about 15 minutes, with lead singer Chris Cornell mishearing something on the news as the titular quote, then fantasizing about what might happen should a black hole collide with our sun. It’s a rather bleak end-time scenario, but the singer disclosed that writing such lyrics “usually make me feel better”.
When it came to producing the video the band at the time was quite disillusioned, as they had been working with a number of directors that did not understand their point of view. So they told Howard Greenhalgh that they just wanted to stand there, doing nothing and distinctively not be excited about it, while he was given a free pass to do whatever he liked around them – an idea he ostensibly loved.
