In this issue: The Afro-Celtic Stylings of Laura Love
I was surprised by how much off-list positive feedback I got for my essay on Middle Eastern music and the Kamkars. I was afraid that it would be too technical to be of interest. For those of you for whom it was too technical: Fear not! I expended about 60% of my meager store of music theory in that one shot, so you won't be burdened with more of it any time soon.
In our next issue we will examine a gorgeous album with a really cheesy name: "The Ultimate Guitar Collection" by Julian Bream.
LAURA LOVE, OCTOROON, Mercury Records LAURA LOVE, HELVETICA BOLD, Octoroon Biography Records
In old New Orleans the Creoles developed an elaborate system of classifying people of mixed race, using Spanish and French terms. A "mulatto" (little mule) is of course half black and half white. A "quadroon" is one-quarter black and three-quarters white. An "octoroon" is thus a person who is one-eighth black and seven-eighths white.
The American singer, composer and electric bassist Laura Love repeatedly has used the term "octoroon" in connection with herself. Although the term does have insulting connotations, it is accurate - not only with regard to her visage but to her music.
Love, who is the daughter of jazz saxophonist Preston Love, plays in a style she calls "Afro-Celtic music." It is hard to describe - and indeed labels are the bane of popular music - but I would say that it is a kind of funky folk music. The "Afro" part comes in the form of Love's slapping and popping bass, her emphasis on the beat and some of her material. The Celtic part comes from her somewhat hillbilly-like sound (fiddle, accordion, along with steel guitar, percussion, etc.), her jig-like rhythms and her voice.
Laura Love has an amazing voice. It's nasal and reedy without being thin or annoying. Although she was born in Nebraska and lived for many years in the Pacific Northwest, she has developed a singing style that makes her sound like she's from eastern Tennessee. She has a bit of the drawl, the exaggerated r's, the occasional substitution of "sh" for "s," etc. It's a bit pretentious, I suppose, but it's never bothered me. (At least she doesn't say "hit" when she means "it"!) In keeping with this mountain-woman persona, Love's voice is capable of dancing, of hollering, of crooning, of getting down into the earth and pulling up the primal. All this without in the least having a brassy or plummy "big mama" sound. Plus, she yodels.
Yes, yodels. Yodeling, you may or may not know, is a tradition in country/folk singing. The first big solo country singer from the 1920s, Jimmie Rodgers, was known as "the Yodeling Brakeman." It's kind of a natural slide from the mountain drawl and the rebel yell to the full-throated yodel. It's not so different from scatting in jazz or the wordless improvised singing typical in rock. Her yodeling adds to the hillbilly sound of her music as well as conveying a great exuberance. (One of my very favorite male vocalists, Randy Erwin-Skalicky of the group Cafe Noir, was a world champion yodeler.)
Love has a big range of material. She writes most of her own songs, but generally finds room on each album for one or two covers and one or two traditional numbers. For example, on "Octoroon" she covers Nirvana's "Come as You Are" with just her voice and bass providing a scary gloss on Kurt Cobain's suicide when she sings "I swear I don't have a gun." She does a rousing a cappella version of the old gospel song "Blind Bartemus" where she overdubs her own voice, with handclapping as her only accompaniment. And like everybody else, including Ani Difranco, she does a version of "Amazing Grace." Love's version starts out a cappella and religious, but halfway through the guitars, accordion and drums kick in, transforming it into a rollicking Zydeco tune. My nickname for this is "A Cajun Grace."
(I have to mention as an aside, however, that Laura Love, like almost everyone else, errs in listing "Amazing Grace" as a traditional. The author of it is quite well known. His name was John Newton and in the eighteenth century he captained British slave ships. He repented of his evil and became a Christian minister, spending the rest of his life pressing for abolition. So, when he speaks about grace saving "a wretch like me," he actually is entitled.)
Among Love's original material is typically one or two sort of "nursery rhyme" songs per album. My favorite of these is on "Helvetica Bold" - a song called "A Ha Me A Riddle I Day." This song at first seems to be a bouncy, fun jig with a lot of nonsense lyrics, but some of it actually is saying something. One verse goes:
"I didn't even know how sad I was.
I didn't know the answer wasn't ' 'cuz.'
I hardly even know what a master does.
Was not was so was not was."
I take this to be a comment on the lot of a person subject to arbitrary authority with a little reference to the band Was Not Was at the end. (Love likes to throw in little references or quotes. On "Octoroon" she quotes Sly and the Family Stone, Rodgers and Hammerstein and the Beatles - and I've probably missed some.)
Other Love songs are more overtly meaningful. The song "All the Pushin'" on "Octoroon" is about how it takes two to make a relationship work. Another song on "Octoroon," one that I expect could be popular among Objectivists, is "June 4th Foundation." It's about the Tianenmen Square Uprising. Love is very sympathetic to the students who followed Lady Liberty and very disgusted with the cynical American politicians who stood by and did nothing when the tanks moved in.
Most of Love's songs lie between the extremes of cryptic and overt. The title track of "Octoroon" is about what has been expected of and done to light-skinned black women, from slave times on. Fading in and out of the background one can hear Love imitating an auctioneer, symbolizing the buying and selling of human flesh. It's harrowing and invigorating at the same time, ushered in and punctuated by a scouring blues harmonica and driven by complex hand-jive rhythms.
Laura Love did not start out a roots musician. She grew up very rough. She did not know her father when she was a child, and I believe her mother was mentally ill (she has since disappeared). Young Laura got tossed around a lot and ended up in prison for awhile. She re-settled in the Seattle area and became a rock musician. Eventually she was drawn to old-time music and started her own label to produce it on. Her first album, mercifully out of print given its title, was called "Menstrual Hut." Indeed, she had become quite the lesbian feminist. She seems to have mellowed a bit; I detect no misandry on her albums (I have a total of five), and her lesbianism is alluded to only occasionally and then tastefully. For example, on "Octoroon" the dirge-like song "If I Knew" is about the anguish of not being able to dance, kiss or hold hands in public. (What is it, BTW, with lesbians and roots music? LL, k.d. lang, Ani Difranco . . . )
If I were going to recommend just one Laura Love album, it would be "Octoroon." It's her major-label debut; she still produces herself, only now with greater technical resources at her disposal. It also contains her most mature song-writing. The album before it, "Helvetica Bold" is almost as mature, but the production isn't quite as good. But for those of you who insist on philosophical content to your popular music, it does have two songs which mention reason in a favorable light.
At all costs, however, avoid her latest album "Shum Ticky." Though it has its moments, it's a real disappointment. It has new versions of four of her old songs on it, and they do not represent an improvement. Some of the original material is just crude, like "Mahbootay," i.e. "my booty." Really, a song about someone's butt is not my idea of a good time. Also Love has altered the Afro-Celtic mix to the point where the album sounds like straight funk. Ho hum. I'm hoping that the label rushed her into the studio prematurely and the next album will be better.
For CDNow sound samples from "Octoroon", go to: click here. For CDNow sound samples from "Helvetica Bold", click here.
Now I wanted to say something about folk music in general, keeping in mind that Laura Love is a very unusual example of the genre. Ayn Rand disparaged folk music on more than one occasion. For example, in the essay "Philosophy and Sense of Life" Rand explains how sense of life works as a process of emotional association. She gives two instances of things bundled by sense of life: 1. "a heroic man, the skyline of New York, a sunlit landscape, pure colors, ecstatic music"; 2. "a humble man, an old village, a foggy landscape, muddy colors, folk music."
For a man of self-esteem, according to Rand, bundle #1 is united by "admiration, exhalation, a sense of challenge" while #2 is united by "disgust or boredom." For a man who lacks self-esteem, however, #1 is united by "fear, guilt, resentment" and #2 is united by "relief from fear, reassurance, the undemanding safety of passivity." (_Romantic Manifesto, pbk, p. 27).
I will not comment on the facileness of Rand's opinion except to say that from this description, it sounds as if the woman smoked way too many cigarettes and drank far too much coffee. I don't see how a person who was centered could possibly have been this judgmental and held such a "hyped" view of life. I know that while I lean toward bundle #1, I am capable of loving the things in bundle #2 as well. In fact the bundles themselves don't seem to reflect the way in which human beings divide themselves up - except insofar as #1 represents rationalist Objectivists and #2 represents sandal-wearing leftists, the kind who unfortunately are all too well represented in the ranks of folkies. (I believe that the presence of lefties and even outright Communists in the world of folk music may have been in part a deliberate ploy to give Communism in America populist face and does not represent anything intrinsic to the genre, except that intellectual left-wingers fancy themselves as "close to the people.")
At any rate, I would suggest that Rand missed the virtues of folk music. First of all, almost anyone can make it, at least in its basic form. All you need is a group of people who can sing, one guy with a guitar and maybe someone with a couple of spoons. Second, it ties one to the American tradition. I even love religious songs like "When the Saints Go Marching In," and the songs on the soundtrack of Ken Burns's _The Civil War_ are achingly beautiful. Third, it has a primal quality. It cuts to the emotional heart with the simple joys and sorrows that even philosophers must face, without (usually) being simplistic or simple-minded. Fourth, far from being boring or passive, it invites one to dance and sing, to live ecstatically - not just in the head, as classical music often does - but in the heart and body, too.
It's not by chance that many schools teach folk music to children: it is core music that is an essential part of everyone's cultural capital. Of course it is not the only music. But it is centered music for centered people.