The irony of commodification and the solipsistic pressures of mass consumption were enough to drive anyone to the brink. It can inspire artists to transform themselves and make some of the greatest, most redemptive work of their professional lives. Apparently Kurt Cobain was a bit of an amateur installation artist.
Friends of his would recall arriving at his apartment to find skeins of dark cloth, furniture akimbo, and various found objects stuffed animals, plastic figurines, characters from a nativity scene arranged like miniature sculpture. Some of his best work was like that. The chorus has that devastatingly understated cello line, tolling like a church bell as the mournful backing vocals weave in and out of the melody like a winding sheet. I think the mood Nirvana creates has to do with an almost Beckettian concern for the empty, the absurd, the gleaming light above a void, which still resonates many years later.
At that moment, whether he knew it or not, he had less than six months to live. Recently, a beloved friend from my high school years and I got back in touch.
One day, he called and suggested we go see The Smashing Pumpkins. There I stood amid hundreds of bodies, stage lights flashing over us, a teenage dream fulfilled. Billy played everything electric that night, nothing acoustic, and I found myself doing something the teenage me would have never done.
At first the voice is quiet, tentative, then matter of fact, spelling out the syllables one by one and eventually rising on the third word to rest, at last, on the percussive thud of the last syllable. Leaning back, he made guns with his hands and darted them back and forth.
I was going to tell you all about the time a certain British guitar legend from the 60s shouted at me and a friend yes, at us — specifically at us across a packed hall in Greenwich Village eleven years ago. I was all set to tell you about that.
Another time. This almost never happens. I popped it into the CD player when I got home, strapped headphones onto my unsuspecting head, and within seconds I knew I was done for. I found his writing to be sharp, engaging. Thoughtful, evocative, musically textured and, above all, beautifully written and sung. Even when I was physically elsewhere — with friends or family — I had it going through my head. I was pretty much useless as a friend or son for the last couple of days.
I was mentally trying to redirect every conversation toward contemporary music. I wanted to talk about this record, but without getting sidetracked by a discussion about Tabloid Doherty. This is an album full of melancholy — sometimes wistful, sometimes painful. Always gently poetic. This level of musical obsession happened frequently when I was younger.
In school and in early university I would breathe Beatles and Rolling Stones albums. In the years that followed, the occasional album would turn into an obsession — but it, too, was generally something from an earlier era.
Rarely something contemporary. Every one of these albums is part of me, even after the initial obsession subsides. What a wonderful article that I will bookmark and share forever :- Thank you.
I saw her in interviews and she speaks normally. Your email address will not be published. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. His ability to live on the edge of utter disaster while dishing up exhilaratingly lyrical, fantastically complex solos night after night became the stuff of legend. The undisputed master of Bebop, which was at one time the hippest, fastest, most complex version of jazz one could hear.
Playing it well means that one must invite and then master a certain kind of aesthetic risk. A jazz musician is, in a sense, a kind of acrobat. We listen, whether we realize it or not, for how well they can handle themselves as they maneuver high up on the thinnest of wires, balancing order with chaos, with the whole band cooking behind them and the crowd watching as they try to claim a freedom both emotional and aesthetic that exists for, maybe, a few minutes at a time, night after night, until they drop.
For an impressively long stretch of time, Parker was the finest — and most precarious — acrobat in town. Everybody, it seems, wanted to either play with him or play like him. The multidisciplinary ambitions seem to have added new depth and vigor to an already peerless artistic vision.
Bianca Casady spoke with Entertainment Voice to unravel some of the mystique behind the enigma that is CocoRosie. How did you dream up the personas that you adopt for your vocals? What are some forces that shaped your sound? Sometimes Sierra is a really old lady who sounds like she smoked a lot of cigarettes, you know? There are all these eras colliding in one moment. What did you seek to express in this song, musically and lyrically?
It kind of goes all over this place. It talks about flying, and kind of the moment of death. And I think religion trying to define these very, which for me are completely undefinable human realities, feels oppressive it feels false and it also cuts the individual off from discovering their own truth from, you know, building their own mythology. And also having their own sense of spirituality without having to have like a mediator.
Beyond CocoRosie, the two have kept busy utilizing other artistic mediums as a form of social activism. More recently, Bianca and Sierra along with a collective of inspired activists started up Future Feminists , a group that fosters advocacy for female empowerment.
From my studies as a Religion major, I have often found sanctuary in feminist and womanist theologies. Bianca and Sierra Casady also adopt a similar rhetoric through their art and music as they challenge the notion of a male God the image of Jesus comes up frequently in their work and patriarchal interpretations of religion. As Sierra shared on religion:.
Freaky folk is commonly characterized by unusual sounds and lyrical themes rooted in avant-garde and psychedelic music. Over time, CocoRosie has evolved into a collective of artists including the talented beat boxer, Tez.
Sierra elaborates on what has kept CocoRosie distinguished in the freaky folk movement:. I think that this is what is the reason, you know, in that it does continue to be interesting is that we challenge each other so much.
Bianca and Sierra have very different voices that derive from different places. Bianca tends to take on an erratic childlike tremor while Sierra performs like a disciplined Italian prima dona. Somewhere where people are just passing thorough and have nothing to lose. We did our most essential creative process by being isolated and simplistic in our tools. I feel like our own musicality, our true musical personalities really came out the most. Opposed to two albums ago for instance, Grey Oceans , we worked a lot with this incredible pianist.
The music got much more complex. He did a lot of synths. It became very layered and plush. This is just the two of us in a simple space and I started exploring a lot more complicated rhythms in how I dealt with the text.
Somehow this is more of what we really sound like. We just took everything away you know? This is your sixth album. You guys have been a band for over ten years. Going back to that first album, did you have any idea that this project would be still ongoing? Definitely not. All along the way it was always a surprise. We had no idea about it being a record, about being a band. It keeps opening up really. It just kind of keeps opening up at every turn.
Your band has been polarizing to an extreme degree.
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