Joel Schalit

Blast From the Past

It’s finally out, and boy does it look good. Strolling through the Haight yesterday, Jennifer and I stumbled upon the brand new edition of the Punk Planet interview collection, We Owe You Nothing, at the appropriately DiY, volunteer-staffed Bound Together Books.

Featuring several new interviews conducted between 2001 and 2007, We Owe You contains six pieces I acquired for PP back in the day, including interviews with Steve Albini, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, Negativland, Team Dresch’s Jody Bleyle, Outpunk’s Matt Wobensmith and Black Flag.

Toronto’s Eye Weekly reviewed the collection on the 9th, together with former Punk Planet Associate Publisher Anne Elizabeth Moore‘s excellent Unmarketable. Putting Anne’s book in the mix not only was smart. It also explains why PP remains essential to understanding the zeitgeist.

On the Radio

Wednesday at noon, former Political Asylum singer and AK Press founder Ramsey Kanaan will be hosting an hour-long discussion about the political legacy of The Clash on Against the Grain, courtesy of Pacifica flagship station KPFA, 94.1 FM in the SF Bay Area, and everywhere else, online.

Ramsey’s guests include yours truly and Craig O’Hara, the author of The Philosophy of Punk: More Than Noise, a new edition of which is scheduled to drop in the new year. If you’re interested in the band, in punk, or in how music and politics collide, we pretty much cover it all.   

The Liberal Arts

   
Ron Nachmann is an Israeli-American journalist based in San Francisco. A close friend and colleague, we’ve worked together at a number of different periodicals, including Tikkun, where Ron served as music editor. Now a contributor to Zeek, his latest article, a review of Tom Segev’s 1967: Israel, the War and the Year That Transformed the Middle East, was published in the December issue. It’s not only a marvelous piece of writing on an incredibly complex and politically loaded book. Ron’s essay is an excellent introduction to the politics of writing about Israeli history.

The appropriately-titled Continuity has finally arrived. A CD/DVD by the Tokyo-based, Polish sound artist Zbigniew Karkowski (in collaboration with Japanese videographer Atsuko Nojiri), this unorthodox career retrospective is the last project we signed when I was Asphodel‘s label manager. Already receiving excellent reviews in Europe from publications such as Vital Weekly, given press like this, I have the sneaking suspicion that Continuity will cement Karkowski’s reputation as one of the world’s most forward-thinking electronic musicians.

Publication Party

The new issue of Other is officially out. Though I’m running a little late posting this terrific postcard, (the release party took place a couple of weeks ago), we finally had the time to scan a copy.

A contributor (and sometimes contributing editor) to this great, freethinking mag since it was first launched, there’s a piece in the current issue by me, about my years editing the late Punk Planet.

For the first time since 2003, when I served up a really loud noise set for a bunch of tranny friends at a local hair salon, I brought my Macbook and MIDI controller to the Other party and played DJ.

Speaking of Punk Planet, Paul M. Davis posted his article on the distribution crisis that triggered PP‘s collapse to the magazine’s website. Click here to read his analysis. It’s from the very last edition.

The Mirror Stage

You know you’re starting to feel old when, in the space of one month, three films about three dead musicians hit the theaters, and you can still remember when their very first records came out. Such was the case when, watching the previews before the new Anton Corbijn biopic about Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, I saw plugs for new feature films about The Clash’s Joe Strummer and Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain.

Two down, one to go, so far, Control is the winner. Casting Ian Curtis as the unstable, miserable genius that he was, the black and white feature debut by the famous Dutch photographer has a truly literary feel to it, eschewing Curtis’ star quality for an up-close study of a talented young man totally falling apart. Julien Temple‘s homage to Strummer, The Future is Unwritten is Control‘s polar opposite.

A documentary portrait of an equally brilliant middle aged rock star burdened with enormous regrets, Future is best summed up in the highly critical words of my wife, who published her own terrific take on the film last night. Check it out. If you haven’t read the Bionic Farmer blog yet, this is the perfect introduction.

Just Say Fez

Oh No‘s new American take on Middle Eastern hip-hop is not without similarly single-minded precedents. In terms of actual full-lengths, Mutamassik‘s 2005 LP, Definitive Works, is of equally subversive significance. For anyone familiar with post-war Egyptian pop, from the sampled string sections to the galloping percussion, the influence of Om Kholtum‘s band looms large on this Brooklyn DJ’s debut album.

Listening to Definitive last weekend, like a lot of records of its kind, I was struck by the ways in which Mutamassik almost plays with Western clichés of oriental music. Particularly the popularity of specific types of orchestral arrangements, and belly dance signifiers popular during the early ’60s, when cities like Los Angeles boasted of a number of Arab-themed club bands.

I don’t mean to suggest that this album intentionally stakes out a critical position in relation to these long forgotten artists. However, if you’re hip to the phenomenon (think guitar-driven mini-orchestras with fez-wearing, Arab-American and Armenian band leaders, not shriners), its hard not to place the new engagement with Mideast music in American hip-hop in relationship to them.

I own a number of out-of-print recordings by several of these groups, but they’re hidden somewhere deep inside my office closet. This weekend, I’m going to do some serious excavation work, and slap them straight back onto my turntable. I imagine that I’ll find them a bit more ideologically complex than I did before.

East Meets West

Not long after 9/11, my favorite local record store began stocking up on European reissues of Turkish psychedelia from the late sixties and early seventies. Perhaps the third wave of musical imports from the greater Middle East that I can remember being taken up by American hipsters (beginning with their adoption of Ofra Haza in the mid-nineteen eighties,) the timing was entirely appropriate. Amidst the wreckage of the World Trade Center, American music fans were instinctively finding themselves drawn to the sounds of the Islamic equivalent of New York, London, or even San Francisco.

Indeed, if one wants to take a sampling of what makes the music of the eastern Mediterranean so unbelievably great, you can’t do any better than listen to what’s been coming out of Istanbul over the course of the past fourty years. Thus, I was reminded, as I delighted in the strangely familiar sounds of an American album whose arrangements epitomized what’s best about Middle Eastern pop. The second full-length to be issued by Madlib‘s younger brother, Oh No, Dr No’s Oxperiment is the closest thing that one will get to an archetypal Lebanese or Israeli Arab hip-hop record like Clotaire K‘s Lebanese LP, or DAM’s more recent album, Dedication.

Relying exclusively on regional source material, if there is a recording that reflects a Middle East-impacted American zeitgeist, this album is ground zero. Opening with the Turkish fuzz guitar of “Heavy”, to the mournful Arabic vocal part of “Down Under” near the it’s end,  Dr No is an excellent example of how organically Middle Eastern music and American hip-hop speak to each other. As cheesy as that sounds, it’s the political metaphor implied by that conversation’s fluency that’s so crucial. Think back to the pretense of the album’s title. It’s like a book report about the positive things Americans may have learned from their Iraqi sojourn. Baghdad Calling, anyone?

Download Me

Between the fall of 1999 and the summer of 2001, I spent an untold number of hours capturing field recordings of anti-capitalist demonstrators from around the world. Posted to an assortment of websites ranging from Indymedia to the BBC, once I’d start playing a file, I’d record it in real time to a Phillips 765 CD-R dubbing deck.

The best example of these recordings is a montage I pieced together of a demonstration in front of the IMF HQ in Washington DC, in April 2000. Cut and sequenced manually, and then placed over a heavily edited hip-hop percussion track, the song, What’s Your Badge Number?, ended up on the first Elders of Zion record, Dawn Refuses to Rise.

Today, at the request of a listener, a community radio DJ posted the piece to her blog. Click here to read the entry and download the track.

Men’s Recovery Project

It’s always a pleasure to encounter an image that perfectly corresponds to a piece of music or a band. Scoring a two dollar copy of one of my favorite punk records today – Bolides over Basra, by Men’s Recovery Project – sent me looking for a picture of the CD. Oddly enough, this turned up.

Given the kind of irony that MRP specialized in, I’m sure that singer Sam McPheeters would appreciate what Google is mathematically tying his music to. Is there a connection between a SWAT team hunting house cats and a concept record about the Middle East? You most certainly bet.

Cultural Imperialism That Works

By now, you’d think that a beats and Bollywood synthesis would be the stuff of nineties cliche. Indeed, it most certainly is. Witness all of the lazily titled ‘Buddha Beat’-style anthologies issued by exotica imprints on the one hand, and the ‘sitar and bass’ records once the province of boutique ethno labels like Outcaste on the other.

Finding a copy of this new Madlib disc for only four bucks, I decided to make the plunge. When this kind of work is done right, absolutely nothing beats it. Luckily, my intuition proved correct. Sampling both film dialogue and music, with Beat Konducta India, the legendary Oxnard DJ takes the idiom in an entirely new direction.

What makes this record work is how it inverts the experience of world music. Instead of making the listener imagine they’re somewhere else, it helps you figure out where you already are. Like my block, where sometimes I can hear Bollywood soundtracks blasting out of an Indian restaurant, while cars idling in front pump out loud hip-hop as they wait for the light to change.