Westblog

Click To Play

Country rock star and Texas Troubadour Steve Earle lives life to it’s fullest, and he doesn’t care about other peoples’ opinions - especially not opinions about his haircut. He is - it is a known fact - a greedy man when it comes to music, marriage, heroin and strong political conviction. As a grandpa of well over fifty, his performance may balance somewhere on the line between intensity and indifference. But he still is wholeheartedly criticizing government for all ills and wrongdoings of it’s foreign policy. In 2002 he wrote a song, which, he claimed, would get him deported: John Walker’s Blues. Well, it is easy to make fun of his haircut, but this song about ‘just an American boy’ who joined the Taliban I find exceptional powerful.

Click To Play

If I am correct, Toxic was originally written for Kylie Minogue. She turned it down and it was passed on to Britney Spears, who made it into a million seller. Now it is on the repertoire of a whole bunch of folky pop artists, amongst others Dutch Stevie Ann. Rising star Yael Naïm also recorded a spacey version for her debut album. She performs the song live in a very ‘back to basic ‘ style, as you can see in this clip. “It is dèngerous…”

Yael Naïm was born in Paris in 1975 from Tunesian parents, and bred in Israel. Just for a change I added the sheet music of her hit New Soul as a picture.

Click To Play

My favorite musicblog is radio oh la la by Amsterdam based French Canadian Natasha Cloutier. The webdesign is beautiful, the selection of songs for her podcasts - French retro music - is very tasteful. Just check it out. My favorite song from the blog is a classic by vaudeville artist Colette Renard: Les nuits d’une demoiselle. In Natasha’s words: ‘A dirty song without dirty words so your parents think you are listening to jazz music.’ My knowledge of French is not sufficient when it comes to female satisfaction, but we have to believe Natasha here. According to Wikipedia the song is a long list of synonyms of cunnilingus: the act of performing oral sex to stimulate the female genitals. In short, the song is very suggestive, but at the same time it sounds sweet and elegant. For years Colette Renard (born in 1924 in French small town Ermont) performed the role of Irma in the renowned musical Irma la Douce - woman of easy virtue.

Click To Play

Drinkin’ & ramblin’: it is an exceptionally popular pastime in the lands stretching from the Appalachian Mountains to the New Mexican plains. Why there? Maybe it has something to do with thinly populated areas, empty spaces, deserted settlements, isolated mountain villages. It makes you want to forget and move on. The good news: it is fertile soil for great music.

The unsocial behavior of boozing and running away is not limited to hobo’s, whino’s and poor laborers. Rich kid Townes Van Zandt also left home at an early age. Born in a wealthy family of oil tycoons in Fort Worth, Texas, he was haunted by the blue devils. Shy, uncomfortable, self-conscious, depressed, a great authority on loneliness. His story is one of hypersensitivity.

An insulin shock therapy at an early age didn’t bring any solution. Weather the booze helped him is a topic of permanent discussion amongst the limited but faithful group of admirers, who claim he is a better songwriter than Bob Dylan. Some say his performance improved when he drank. Others say it improved despite his drinking. He died in 1997 at the age of 52.

The clip is taken from Heartworn Highways, a documentary film by James Szalapski on a group of young Texas troubadours trying to make it in Nashville, Tennessee. At the time of filming (1975), they were all but very well-known names. The musicians - Van Zandt, who was around already for some time, Guy Clark, John Hiatt, Steve Young, and a very young and very skinny Steve Earl - later turned out to be a fine lot. The film has cult status. Some say it is an impressionistic portrait of a group of very talented singer-songwriters later to become famous. Others say sceptically, these are just a bunch of drunk musicians celebrating Christmas and not having a clue what they are doing.

Click To Play

I’ve always had a weak spot for the obscure and the anarcho style punk rock. Vialka is the Pyrenees based couple Eric Boros from Canada and Marylise Frecheville from France. They tour the world on a shoestring, traveling countries as remote as Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Russia and - closer to home - Slovenia, preferably by public bus service. Wherever they stay they pick up local tunes and transform them into their anarcho style punk rock. The name Vialka supposedly originates from a village of ex-convicts in the Gulag region of North Russia. The couple’s performance is very intense, permanently changing rhythm and mood. Eric on his guitar can hardly keep pace with Marylise‘ drumming and singing and jumping around. She is explosive, like the hand grenade tattooed on her arm. Go and see them, sooner or later they will also pass a town near you.

No clip, only a song. It is called Kang Ding Town, a Chinese traditional. Listening may cause disturbances in the brain.

Click To Play

Sometimes the song tells a different story from the clip. When the two stories touch on each other and both know to evoke the same kind of melancholia, the impact can be double.

The song Oceans is about someone who wants to cross the ocean figuratively. In the clip the crossing of the ocean is taken very literally. The song is highly subjective. It is a simple line: When you are lonely, I will cross the ocean. But we are standing on very loose ground here, because she is not suffering loneliness. He is the one who is in need.

Dutch band Johan released its first album in 1996. It was simply called Johan and very well received. Due to bandleader Jacco de Greeuw’s depressions it took 5 years before the second album Pergola was completed. Another 5 year period of melancholia followed. In 2006 the 3rd album THX JHN was released containing the single Oceans.

Click To Play

The king of bad taste is accusing girls for … their bad taste. Or to be more precise: for their lack of distaste. They don’t mind when a man is ugly with large bags under his eyes, when he has a filthy mouth and when he is constantly smoking. At least, that is what Serge Gainsbourg is claiming in the song Les filles n’ont aucun dégout (Girls don’t have any distaste), a trio performed by France’ first female popstar Sylvie Vartan, Serge Gainsbourg and his then wife Jane Birkin. The song is funny, not very serious, a bit vulgar, but at the same time disarmingly honest. Gainsbourg wrote it on request for Vartan in 1972. He was afraid she was too well-bred for the kind of argot he was using. But she didn’t change any of the words, and afterwards he praised her for that.

Serge Gainsbourg, grand dirty ol’ man of French pop music, was always enjoying to publicly expose his worst side. Always smoking, always drunk, always unshaved, always acting like a very naughty boy. A man with such a rare talent for words and such a fine ear for melodies can get away with this kind of behavior.

In Gainsbourg’s world there was no room for illusions. In his songs he is portraying life as vile and prosaic as it is, in a very playful and witty style. We are not perfect beings - on the contrary. Accept the fact and have a laugh - or better - have a grin about it. On these views he seemed to have built the fundament of his wide and divers oeuvre.