Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy, is in a lot of trouble because an escort he has been frequenting has gone public. One story has the PM in bed with twenty girls at the same time.
The thing about sex, and the same thing about music, is when you do it (or listen to it) all the time your tastes get refined: you have to get your kicks off the beaten track. Verse-Chorus-verse won’t do it any more. You need to hear James Chance skronking, or Dirty Projectors harmonizing or David Byrne found sounds with brian Eno.
Every thing you’re hearing, every pop band, every Harper Blynn or Jeff the Builder, sound like a thousand other bands.
As a populist I have always had problems between my mainstream tastes (my firm belief in not just just the sanctity of numbers but also the species subconscious working on best selling music) and the twenty girls at a time of a highly refined palate.
TV On The Radio’s Dear Science is the third best album of the decade because, much more than any of the other Brooklyn alt-rock, indie, noise, soul, bop conglom, it is both a populist sound and a mainstream rock and soul album.
2006’s Return To Sugar Mountain was a big deal for TVOR but it was a little outre. I loved it but I didn’t return to it much. Dear Science is something else entirely. In the midst of songs discernably but not shockingly better than those on Sugar Mountain are three pop music home runs. Track Two “Crying”, Track Five “Golden Age” and the last track “Lover’s Day”. These songs push the album over the top, it pushes it into the major artistic statement where, say, Sign O’ The Time or Young Americans preside.
All three songs are written or co-written by guitarist Kyp Malone and the importance of this is that you can imagine what TVOR would be without Tunde Adibimpe to anchor it into something else: something weirder and deeper. Because when you get past those three songs you’ll find yourself in stormy weather indeed. In the middle of the album, and in succession is “Family Tree”, “Red Dress” and “Love Dog” and it is certainly downward concern in relief of the unbreable lightness of being elsewhere. The two off set each other, they question each other. It is Dear Science’s internal dialogue. Where the arrangements, the strings and loops, sink you in. The balance of the album is fascinating -it seems to be a battle together to reach a place of concord.
All the sounds are out here, all of David Sidek’s production, every bleep, blast, horn, and loop, is at the service of very strong music. All the politics, all the problems, everything that disturbs whether it is sex or lynchings.
The remixs are fine as well though I really think they should hook up with trouble And Bass -a guy like the great DJ producer, leader of Drop The Lime, Luca Venezia, could take their songs places they haven’t been to yet. It’s a nitpic but what was so important in the Solange Knowles cover of “Stillness Is The Move” is not the sample but the soul vocal. TVOR stick to soul any way, they could easily stick to dance. Dance, if nothing else, is not only color blind, but multi-lingual.
I went to see David Lynch’s new play Race the other day. It’s an excellent play and it boils down to this: whites hate blacks because blacks hate whites, blacks hate whites because blacks know that eventually whites will fuck em over. Interesting but it is not the axiom it was thirty years ago (on a personal level I wasn’t aware of racism till I came to the States: in Arabic countries the citizens may have black or white skin pigmentation). Certainly, the bi-racial TV On The Radio put the lie to the incipient racism at the heart of the American dream.
Rock was made to destroy racism.
TV On the radio were made to bring the disparate starnds of modern rock together in a mainstream assault.
One succeeded, the other may do one day. I’ll leave you figure out which is which.