rihanna_rudeboy_single-cover

I wonder if the average consumers on the street assume pop star Rihanna to be American. How many of them are aware that she was in fact born and raised in Saint Michael, Barbados? The manner in which she has been predominantly implicated as an exponent of black American R&B, to be considered systematically alongside the likes of Beyoncé, speaks to a kind of cultural eclipsing, whereby an archetype for the American R&B songstress has already been set in place, potentially inhabitable by any woman from the outside whose looks, mannerisms, and voice match the established criteria. It should be noted, of course, that Barbados is an Anglophone country – more economically developed than most of its neighbouring Caribbean islands – and one must assume that the influence of mainstream pop and R&B from the United States is highly pervasive among the young population. I was not surprised to learn that, upon first auditioning for American songwriter and producer Evan Rogers in 2003, Rihanna performed a rendition of the ballad ‘Emotion’, as recorded famously by Destiny’s Child. It was this audition that ultimately provided the impetus for her relocation to the States a year later. The rest, as they say, is up on Wikipedia.

 

By identifying Rihanna as satisfying some pre-existing paradigm, I do not mean to suggest that she has not successfully transgressed that stereotype since her initial rise to fame in 2005 with ‘Pon de Replay’. This first single differs from almost all of her subsequent hits in that it works in a Jamaican-derived dancehall style (as popularised internationally by Sean Paul), delivered in an idiomatic form of Caribbean English. Commenting on the song’s lyrical style at the time of its release, Rihanna states: ‘It’s just language that we speak in Barbados. It’s broken English. Pon is on, de means the, so it’s just basically telling the DJ to put my song on the replay.’ She also speaks of the significance of the title of her first album, Music of the Sun: ‘The word sun represents my culture where I’m from, the Caribbean. It represents me. So the album consists of music of the sun.’

 

Going by this first release, then, it would appear that Rihanna’s Caribbean heritage is referenced freely as a means of distinguishing her from her contemporaries. This invites the question of why on her two albums that follow – A Girl Like Me and Good Girl Gone Bad – this aspect of her image becomes increasingly downplayed. Granted, A Girl Like Me features two tracks that are strongly indebted to this influence: ‘Dem Haters’ is a down-tempo reggae-tinged number featuring fellow Barbadian singer Dwane Husbands, while ‘Break It Off’, with Sean Paul, is an energetic fusion of dancehall and mainstream pop. While this last song became the fourth and final single from the album, it featured no accompanying music video, and only came after the major hits ‘SOS’ and ‘Unfaithful’ had already provided the era’s definitive images of Rihanna as a thoroughly Americanised black pop icon. On the other hand, Good Girl Gone Bad, the record which would cement her place among the most preeminent music stars on the planet, is purged altogether of any overt Caribbean musical influences. One could reason that these developments reflect upon dancehall’s general decline in mainstream popularity since Sean Paul’s career peaked in the earlier half of ’00s, reinforced in turn by the rise of more technologically sophisticated forms of R&B, as exemplified by Timbaland’s work with Justin Timberlake and Nelly Furtado.

 

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footnotes-in-gaza

Ever since ‘Palestine’ was published between ‘93 and ‘95 Joe Sacco has occupied something of a privileged position as an author and journalist, offering widely acclaimed work that is as aesthetic as it is political. By applying the narrative and graphical/contextual devices of the comic to an investigative journalists’ exploration of an issue as emotive and tangled as that of the West Bank and Gaza, he found a unique voice and offered a more nuanced, subtle and just plain ‘real’ view than the more abstract reportage in the mainstream media or the extreme partisanship of activists. In many ways he reinforced the need for some context to the current situation, no matter how complex that may at first feel.

 

The American Book Award that ‘Palestine’ won in ‘96 is a reminder of the success Sacco had in rendering such breadth of vision combined with attention to detail and the everyday, as well as the triumph of the form itself moving into yet another avenue. For anyone who doubted the power of the graphic novel in a non-fiction setting, ‘Palestine’ is a sharp rebuttal. Like all the best comics it exploited the versatility of the medium to show you events in a new light, and with the space and time to give it a depth rarely seen in other forms.

 

After an intervening period that has seen Sacco take in Bosnia and Iraq, amongst other topics, Sacco has returned to the topic that made his name for ‘Footnotes in Gaza’, but this time with a more focussed brief; to uncover the truth regarding two bloody incidents in the towns of Khan Younis and Rafa in 1956. . The investigation stemming from some sense of injustice, following work originally for a report with Harper’s magazine that was deemed surplus to the article’s requirements, that what may amount to the greatest massacres of Palestinians on Palestinian soil has been reduced to seeming obscurity and two lines in a UN report.

 

What follows is easily as intelligent and well-crafted as the original ‘Palestine’ series, again emphasising the understanding that can only follow from knowledge of the history and context a conflict. Stylistically the book is in keeping with Sacco’s oeuvre, and yet somehow slightly more refined. Each page feels somehow less cluttered , less overwhelming than ‘Palestine’, each frame given just enough space, without losing the claustrophobic sense of place, whilst the detail in individual frames has if anything increased.

 

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Grupo Revelação

The band I want to write about here, and have wanted to write about for a while now, are not especially contemporary. To the best of my knowledge, they are not particularly well known (outside their native Rio de Janeiro). They are certainly not ‘cool’ or well respected as musicians. But there is something held within the music of ‘Grupo Revelação’ – and it really is an inexplicable essence – that I really love. It is, to use one of the most well-worn popular music clichés under the sun, ‘infectious pop’; inexplicable and capable of producing a very strong, yet massively underappreciated emotion within me. ‘Grupo Revelação’ makes me feel cheerful.

 

I say this not to belittle the music. I don’t want to present a colonial discourse of ‘oh, listen to this really cheery, sunshine music – effortlessly played by laid-back Brazilians on their funny little guitars’. This is not it at all. What I mean to say is that this music celebrates inclusion, movement, joy and emotion, and that it makes me feel happy. This does not make the music frivolous. The ability to induce a feeling of cheerfulness is as dramatic an effect as a piece of music that makes you feel pensive, sad, etc. I suppose in popular music discourse (to a certain extent) the concept of ‘seriousness’ and value are often synonymised with the more introvert and sombre spectrum of emotions.

 

So – personal history time. How I got to know about this band. Whilst living in São Paulo, I used to frequent a small, (illegal) copied CD stall – the kind that seem to crop up all over the world (thankfully). Having purchased extremely badly photocopied CDs from some of Brazil’s better known musicians (Fernanda Porta, Daniela Mercury, Djavan and a couple of MPB[1] compilations being among some of the highlights), I hit upon a novel idea. In (very) broken Portuguese, I asked the vendor what his favourite CD was. Without hesitation, he picked out ‘Ao Vivo’ [‘Live’] by ‘Grupo Revelação’ a fairly unassuming front cover – a few pictures of musicians, although, to be honest, the photocopied cover I got was almost unintelligible). The back cover, with the track names, was unreadable and the CD itself only had the word ‘REVE’ crudely written in CD pen; an enigma of a musical purchase if ever there was one, so much of an enigma in fact that the CD lay un-played for a number of weeks.

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teendream

Usually, when a band has song titles like ‘Silver Soul’, this is a clear sign they don’t have any (soul, that is). Happily, in the case of Baltimore, Maryland dream-poppers Beach House, this doesn’t apply. Their latest album Teen House has gallons of the stuff.

 

Sweep aside the hipster paraphernalia – the neo-psychedelic cover, the aesthetics of teen kitsch, the stray croutons of ‘80s revivalism – and you’re left with a record of astonishing melodic scope and intricacy. Building on previous explorations into the realms of waywardness Beach House (2006) and Devotion (2008), Teen Dream offers a polish and focus that will surely, and perhaps unfortunately, lead to an avalanche of mainstream attention. Call it their Merriweather Post Pavillion.

 

But let’s try to focus on the songs themselves (after all, it’s not Beach House’s fault that – as wanker-extraordinaire-who-also-every-once-in-a-while-comes-up-with-a-good-cultural-observation Martin Amis says in this month’s GQ – there has never been a period of human history more emphatically obsessed with the surface world of visual appearances).

 

Because, friends, these are quite simply wonderful, wonderful tunes. Track 9, ‘Real Love’, I’m not crazy about, but otherwise this is the strongest suite of songs I’ve heard all year. Lead singer Victoria Legrand has a voice of such lightly jagged expressiveness, I find it difficult not to wheel out the inevitable Cocteau Twins comparisons. But this shouldn’t detract from her great achievement on Teen Dream. Again and again, a vocal nuance will fizz out of the speakers to prick your attention. This has a nice habit of happening towards the end of a tune when you least expect it, as in ‘Walk in the Park’ and ‘Lover of Mine’, both of which have startlingly beautiful outros.

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Cov

I’ve always had a soft spot for Hot Chip, based largely it has to be said on their likeably average appearance, but one always combined with a strange distance. Let’s not pretend we live in anything other than a time when image and marketing are as important to a band as how they actually sound, but by largely avoiding press coverage or even reviews of Hot Chip, I’ve managed to avoid whatever market position they have assumed (although I am aware of a vague indie/electronic/dance thing reminiscent of that [in hindsight bizarre] nu-rave moment). I’ve heard all their albums and singles, even caught a video or two, but somehow missed out on the band. In the few photos/videos I have seen Hot Chip look . . . well . . . refreshingly normal – normal like my friends look – with a dash of misfit between members, and maybe even something of the reassuringly unpretentious and unfashionable (covering the spectrum of heights and weights of averageness). I find it all quite encouraging, and although this may all  be naivety on my part  as their record label manoeuvres the band  towards some fashionable unfashionable place, I think they essentially look like the sort of band you could be in, and therefore would want to be in.

 

The upside of no knowledge of the narrative or biography of the band in articles/press releases etc, including whether they have chosen or been pushed into the misfit  narrative (god knows it has been used before), has left me mostly with the music and their reassuringly mundane appearance to base any judgements. And Hot Chip, fitting in with this broader view, are consistently good or quite good, without ever inducing in me the need to pay any particularly close attention. They delivered solid albums with the occasional single that betrays writing and craft at a higher level than they were given credit: hearing ‘Over and Over’ now, I’m not reminded of the numerous adverts and TV jingles that use 30 seconds of it to promote something, but the first time I heard it (which can only be a good thing). Meanwhile ‘Ready for the Floor’ and ‘One Pure Thought’ seemed to solidify their status without really grabbing you by the balls so to speak (Note: it goes without saying that these songs were also quite good and came from albums that were on the whole quite good). Why the ramble on the overall quite-goodness of a consistent band (with reassuringly commonplace appearances that do not appear to be a contrived attempt at averageness)?

 

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