FEELS LIKE I’M DREAMING, BUT I’M NOT SLEEPING [228]

I had no idea about this music video existed until I came across a screenshot online of a dog, thought it looked like something from a cartoon series, and clicked on it. What did I get? The sound of one of the most sampled guitar riffs of both the 1980s and 1990s, and wild imagery that spans everything from your childhood drawings to Piet Mondrian. I’m glad I clicked.

“Genius of Love” is the title track from the 1981 album by Tom Tom Club, a band formed by married couple Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, as a side project from the band Talking Heads – Frantz, playing drums, and David Byrne recruited Weymouth in 1974 to play bass guitar, and they married in 1977. The lyrics, sung by Weymouth, are a testament to the power of the boyfriend - “Time isn’t present in that dimension” and “he’s got a greater depth of feeling” - while listing the musicians and singers who take her to that same level, like Bootsy Collins, Smokey Robinson and James Brown. (Click here for when I discussed “Wordy Rappinghood”, another song from the same album.)

Tom Tom Club is not a simple husband-and-wife duo like the White Stripes purported to be, but also an umbrella term for the groups Wentworth and Frantz formed to make their albums. As a result, the very distinctive keyboard sounds on “Genius of Love” are from Tyrone Downie, of Bob Marley and the Wailers, while the guitar comes from Adrian Belew, who worked with Frank Zappa and David Bowie before leading the band King Crimson.

The video feels amazingly lo-fi. I thought I had come across an episode of “Roobarb,” about the rivalry of the eponymous dog and Custard the cat, animated by Bob Godfrey using felt-tip pens on paper. The style used by the series, where lines constantly move even when characters and objects stand still, is technically known as “boiling.” The “Genius of Love” video is made the same way, but the boiling also comes from the dizzying array of images thrown at you, from figures that turn into shapes, and the patterns that appear to have made their way into 1980s postmodernist designs by the Memphis group and others.

The video builds on the work of New York pop artist James Rizzi, who created the cover to Tom Tom Club’s first two albums, and whose style appears to be a maximalist, overwhelming even more colourful version of Keith Haring’s work. It can only be considered child-like in the bold and frantic use of flat, primary and secondary colours, and because few of his faces, if any, do nothing but smile. The animation by Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, also directors of the “New Frontier” video for Donald Fagen that we talked about here, later the creators of “Max Headroom” and directors of the “Super Mario Bros.” film – yes, that one - preserved the energy of Rizzi’s art, while throwing as many images into the melting pot as possible. Jankel and Morton also channelled Rizzi for a later Tom Tom Club video, “Pleasure of Love,” which rendered the line art in neon.

After “Genius of Love,” both single and album, was released in 1981, it was sampled in a rap song, “Genius Rap” by Dr. Jekyll & Mr Hyde, before the year had ended. The following year, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five used it for “It’s Nasty.” Public Enemy, Busta Rhymes, 50 Cent, and Ice Cube have all used it, and it formed the basis of songs as diverse as Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” and Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack.” “Genius of Love” is just about the most sampled track of the 1980s – when you hear it for the first time, you will feel as if you heard it your entire life, because you have.

TAKE ON ME, TAKE ME ON [216]

A question has been plaguing me for weeks: should I buy a Yamaha reface DX? 

One new year’s resolution for me is to make more music. I can read music, and play the piano a bit, but there Is much space for improvement. Music is just one of those things it feels like I should be able to do. But when a particular idea plants itself, one that will require a substantial commitment from me, in terms of time and financial outlay, in order to justify itself, it is a decision I could not take lightly – it has been in the back of my mind for months.

The Yamaha reface DX is one of a series of four music keyboards, released in 2015, that aims to replicate other keyboards in Yamaha’s history and, like the Sega Mega Drive Mini and Nintendo NES Classic Mini, give users the experience of using the original hardware, with authentic knobs, switches and sliders – the CP is an electric piano, the YC a combo organ, and the CS is a synthesiser representing the late 1970s / early 1980s period when sounds where carefully shaped through adjusting many different levels, meaning it is the only keyboard in the range with no sound presets.

The reface DX aims to capture a very specific period in pop music that was defined by the original Yamaha DX7, known as an “FM synth,” as Frequency Modulation Synthesis, in the most basic sense, involves using the frequency of a sound wave to alter the sound of another one. The programming of a DX7, which could use up to six operating frequencies at once, was notoriously difficult, meaning most musical artists and groups stuck to the original thirty-two preset “patches” it came with. Therefore, from the DX7’s release in 1983 to the end of 1980s, by which point keyboards became more sample-based, the carefully-shaped sounds of pianos, bass and tubular bells could be heard in songs by A-Ha, Kraftwerk, Talking Heads, Jan Hammer, Genesis, Supertramp, Steve Winwood, Vangelis, Toto, Elton John, Queen, Level 42, Beastie Boys, Stevie Wonder, U2, Donald Fagen, Yes, Jean-Michel Jarre and Dire Straits – the last one is mainly the opening bit to “Money for Nothing.” Brian Eno used the DX7 extensively, but unlike most people, he mastered the programming.

Why wouldn’t I like to join that list buy buying a reface DX? The nostalgia from that period in music is intoxicating, because it sounds unlike anything that came both before and after it, as sampling slowly returned a more natural sound into the 1990s. The FM Synth sound is something to which people keep returning, both because it evokes a particular setting, or time period, as much as being part of a musical palette. I would like to do something with that.

Justifying the cost is one thing when you both consider its deliberately smaller form figure, made to accompany bigger set-ups for performing artists, makes it look like a toy keyboard. Korg also make the Volca FM, one of their series of portable synthesisers, but it was too complex for me – the reface DX uses touch-sensitive sliders and USB downloading for programming its sounds, making them far easier to contemplate than the original DX7. Most of all, the ability to emulate any old sound using computer programs and apps make the idea of spending a single penny sound pointless.

What could I do? Over the last few months, I have read countless articles, and watched numerous videos, from people talking about the reface DX, going over every possible subject from what samples have been included – the link to more recent drum ‘n’ bass and EDM music has been made as much as 80s pop – to what happens If you run a factory reset. I know I will need to make space at home for the new keyboard, and I will make time every day to practice making music on it. Even as part of making a trip to London, I looked in at Yamaha’s showroom in Wardour Street to try playing one...

Yes, of course I bought one. As soon as I hit an “F” note using the Tubular Bell preset, that was it. I may have committed to this like I was owning a pet for the first time, but I know I am going to enjoy using it.

WORDS ARE WORKING HARD FOR YOU [137]

With almost no exception, these articles use song lyrics for a title. There are three reasons for this: it provides a moment of recognition before I plough into dry subject matter; it fulfils the need for a title; and it may come up online when someone is searching online for those very lyrics. The first reason relies on the lyrics remaining in their original context, while the second requires them to stand on its own, and the last simply needs those particular words to be in that particular order.

This time, the lyrics created the article. Tom Tom Club is a new wave band, formed by husband and wife Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, also members of Talking Heads. Their first self-titled album, released in 1981, led to two very different single releases: “Genius of Love,” more like of a traditional love song, while serving as a tribute to singers like Smokey Robinson, Bob Marley and James Brown; and “Wordy Rappinghood,” a torrent of words and ideas more along the lines of early rap records. The music of both songs has been sampled in kind by the likes of Public Enemy, Ice Cube, Busta Rhymes, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Mariah Carey, The Gossip, The Ones and George Michael, but the lyrics of the original “Wordy Rappinghood” knocked me over.

“What are words worth? / What are words worth? Words / Words in papers, words in books / Words on TV, words for crooks / Words of comfort, words of peace / Words to make the fighting cease / Words to tell you what to do / Words are working hard for you / Eat your words but don't go hungry / Words have always nearly hung me”

Not many songs, and not many people, call the use of words into question, and that is when you wish it happened more often. I’m not about to break down the meaning of the lyrics here, but their effect on me was to break down how I understand the use of words, even beyond their inherent meaning: “Concrete words, abstract words / Crazy words and lying words / Hazy words and dying words / Words of faith and tell me straight.”

I always hope to create some meaning here, some factual information, a bit of informed judgement, a constructed article at least once a week. You then see people charging words with particular meaning, then applying them like a spray into people’s eyes - yes, Donald Trump, the original Don Backslide, I am talking about you. At the same time, words are cheap, words are plentiful, and words can be made to look like articles, which are supposed to be meaningful in themselves – it doesn’t matter if it has to mean anything, especially if it only has to be a diversion.

That doesn’t feel good enough somehow. With the breakdown of meaning being decried in the media, and those words themselves being decried as “fake news,” this is something I need to explore, before these words turn even further into gibberish.  

“Rap it up for the common good / Let us enlist the neighbourhood.”