Lou Reed - Modern Dance

Some things are better to enjoy in a modified form. For example, without sound or color or simply a soundtrack or vice versa or heavily distorted or from another room or while the refrigerator is humming and the washing machine is drumming and the kettle is whistling and the teeth are rattling. You get the point.

Such is the case with the music video for Lou Reed's song Modern Dance.

I already covered the other Lou Reed music video on this blog and now Youtube recommended me this video, so why not have another about the great one?

Modern Dance is a song from Lou Reed 2000' album titled "Ecstasy". The song itself is a contemplation about going places in a manner of a modern dance composition. Which doesn't say much because modern dance is a mystery and its function in the lyrics is to defamiliarize narrative with an arbitrary detail that sticks out. Over the course of the song, the protagonist mentions options like going to Amsterdam and spending evenings at the Van Gogh Museum. Or Yucatan, "where women are women, a man's a man". Or just falling in love because that's a fine option too.

The video for the song is closely tied to the lyrics and yet it is something completely different. On the surface, it is on the nose mockery of the blatant performance art, but the more you look at it - the more earnest stupid fun it seems. There is no undercurrent - it is just what it is and it is really weird to realize that there is nothing to it except for what is on the screen.

And what is on the screen. There is one and only Lou Reed in a chicken costume, standing in the middle of the stage while two showgirls are doing the job. Lou just stands and stands and endures whatever girls are doing to him. The girls are doing basic walkaround routines. Their costumes adapt to the national symbols of the countries mentioned in the lyrics. So you get a tartan suit, french beret, a sombrero and so on. At the same time, the girls are slowly but surely tear the costume apart, throwing feather away.

In the middle of the video - Lou's chicken suit is cleared off the feather and he sits around like a bag of nutshells. Then we cut to girls preparing the soup - throwing mock vegetables in and mixing the thing with the giant spoon. Then the narrative fragments into the glimpses of tearing the feathers, Lou sitting around, Lou being boiled in the soup, Lou dancing with the girls, being boiled in the soup, being torn apart, dancing, boiled, dancing. Then the song ends, he takes of the chicken head and walks away.

When you watch this with the sound on - it is just there. It doesn't do much because you are focused o the song. But if you turn the sound off - things change. You start to piece together a narrative. The video starts looking like one of those old vaudeville documentations that capture the routine but none of its context. It feels odd, misplaced and incomprehensive.

You see the man in the chicken suit. And he looks really passive. Sometimes he lips a phrase to punctuate the narrative, but for the most part, he is just there. The girls are walking around in, changing costumes all the time, then they start to tear the chicken costume apart because they want to make a soup out of this chicken. The man is still passive and so he ends up in the pot and girls continue to dance because that's what they do.

BSPH: Alan Vega - Ghost Rider

New versions of the old songs are nothing new. Usually, it is a shameless cash-in on one's glorious past, an exploitation of the devoted fanbase. But sometimes an artist manages to subvert the original and reinterpret it in a way that brings a couple of new shades to the original and somewhat changes its substance.

Case in point - Alan Vega's solo version of "Ghost Rider".



"Ghost Rider" is a song written by Alan Vega and Martin Rev of legendary synth punk band Suicide. It was originally released on the band's 1977 eponymous album. Alan Vega had released his version of the song in 1981 on an album titled "Collision Drive".

This version is a slight elaboration on the original with a couple of new flourishes, an expanded lyrics and a completely new sonic aesthetic that somehow manages to fit the theme and the tone of the song even better than the original. It is a weird example of the successful reinvention of the song by its author. The song retains the intensity of the original, but manages to be distinct enough to hold on its own and build upon the original.

In its core, the "Collision Drive" version of "Ghost Rider" is a rockabilly song. Unlike the monotonous solid drum machine grooves slashed by the thudding synth vamp of the original version, "Collision Drive" version is played by actual musician and that brings a completely different dynamics to the song.

The song is rolling with that rockabilly straitjacket swing. In fact, its skeletal primitivist arrangement owes a lot to early The Cramps stuff.

The monotonous stomp of the song consists of the one track mind drums, detuned piano, constipated guitar lines and thumping bumbling bass.

The song starts and ends with the pitch sweeping whopping wailing drone - an allusion to the revving engine. It is joined by 4x4 permabasskick polka dot beat that creates a rock solid groove underlying of the song. The drums are on the offensive in a meat mincing way.

Over the course of the song, the drums are joined by clapping. This brings some reminiscence of the classic Stooges stompers. In a way, it sounds as if the song was submerging into a quicksand substance with those claps.

The bass part is weird. It plays the iconic three note motif so sloppily it merges into a subsonic quakes - it is not as much a bass line as a melodic undercurrent as it is a physical pushing of the song forward with its groove. Funny thing is that at times the bass player gives up on playing the motif and he just plays along some stuff that sometimes sticks out of the tune. This bass combined with morose detached drums creates a beat to behold. It is disjointed and yet it works due to its ferrocious tenaciousness.

The other elements of the groove are manic guitar and honky tonk detuned piano. Both guitar and piano are playing simple two note rambling riff that goes on top of the song as if it was attached to it with a duct tape. They work as a background flashing behind - a sonic wallpaper. They ignore everything that goes on in the song.

The lyrics are slightly expanded with a couple of more phrases fleshing out the title character of the song - The Ghost Rider. There are more references to the Ghost Rider being on fire, swinging the chain and being an utter force of destruction blazing away. No mentions of the blue jumpsuit though. I guess it was out of fashion then. Weirdly enough, the way the lyrics are structured resemble a good old Delta Blues chantey. It boomerangs around - goes for a walk on the theme and then goes back to the central refrain.

BSPH: Oxbow & Marianne Faithfull - Insylum

 "Insylum" is a song collaboration of the American noise rock psycho punk blues band Oxbow and singer-songwriter Marianne Faithful. The song is an interpretation of the classic Willie Dixon song "Insane Asylum". However, it is reworked to the point of being a thing of its own.

"Insylum" was released in 1997 on Oxbow's album "Serenade in Red". The song is punishingly abrasive hard-edged interpretation of the classic blues song spliced with the hard rock reiteration of the blues by the likes of Led Zeppelin.

This song is a great example of a creative use of cliches and subverting them into something else with its own substance. "Insylum" is a Frankenstein monster of the song that seems like a casualty of a transporter accident in "Star Trek". "Insylum" is deformed and barely hangs together. At the same time, the song contains this weird imposing aura. Every second of "Insylum" means it. This song is not a pleasant listen, this song erupts the void upon the listener and makes him gaze into it looking for something nonplush nondescript.

The song stomps its way through with that particularly nasty bone crunching 1-2 step that grows with intensity throughout the verse until it breaks down into a hysteric chorus.

The lyrics of "Insylum" are about longing and yearning in its most brutal and devastating form. In its core, "Insylum" tells a typical story of the relationship falling apart and subsequent attempts to fix it. The catch is that the lover is locked up in the asylum and probably for a reason. Because of that the song slowly morphs from trying to get things back to accepting the reality of the situation.

The song is all about sonically depicting the throes of the protagonist who just can't take it anymore but slowly getting over it. This notion is delivered by an assorted collection of seething sobbing, crying, torturous howling, wailing, bailing, grunts, random sideline snorts, and opaque babble.

The song starts in medias res and then immediately takes a u-turn in an opposite direction. It kinda walks backwards all the time and it creates a sense of suspense - you almost expect this song to stumble and fall apart.

The rest of the dreadful atmosphere is accomplished with a mindful use of blues cliches wrapped into an additional layer of coarse fuzz and tingle. It is a dark-dark song.

The guitar parts are slightly malformed and tremblesome. They play some classic blues lick with an additional deep to the feel, but ut is not as much playing as it is erupting upon the song with its melting lava burning the ground in its way. Then there is a little organ that almost mocks what is going on in the song with its tingling hiss.

The MVP of the song are the drums by Greg Davis. His drum parts are less about constructing a rhythmic backbone of the song as they are all about the suspence, ebbs and flows of tension. The majority of the drum arrangement is a simple 1-2 16th beat that acts that plays waiting game staring contest with the listener until it breaks into a brutal beatdown.

The use of bass in this song is also very unconventional. Dan Adams' bass follows the drums and adds some shiny blacks to the beat. At the same time the bass line is delineating space in which the action is going. It is something like echolocation - flickering contours that may or may not resemble something familiar. If there is a way to depict the monsters produced by the sleep of reason - this is a good example of making it right. The bass line itself reeks of dread. 

The other strange thing about the song is an anticlimactic closure it delivers in the end. Over the course of the song the arrangement slowly devolves into a carnival mockery - it gets ridiculous with its intensity and then it stops as if it was all play. It leaves an unsettling feeling afterwards.

"Insylum" is a master-class in layered subversion of cliches and forging something new out of the old parts. The way it preparates the blues conventions, reinvents its most generic elements and adds the new flourishes to the age old narratives is spectacular.