Fluxblog 413: U2 rework one of my favorites from Zooropa
Plus new songs by Kenya Grace and B. Cool Aid
I’m a little light on material this week as circumstances decreased my laptop access by about 70%. That means there’s no new playlist this week, but I do have a relatively lengthy U2 post to share. So let’s just get to it…
A Work That’s Never Done
U2 “Dirty Day” (Songs of Surrender)
U2 are among the artists I have the longest and deepest relationship with, going back to pretty much day one of my life as a music obsessive. There are some artists I have this sort of relationship where I can endorse pretty much everything they’ve ever made, artists who’ve rarely if ever been embarrassing or pursued creative directions that didn’t suit them at all. U2 don’t make it easy. U2 have created some of the best music I’ve heard and some of the most cringe, and even at their best they’re more likely to make a goofy decision than a cool decision.
This is a long way of saying if you’ve wondered who their new record of 40 remakes of songs throughout their catalog is for, it is for people like me. I’m invested enough in The Edge in particular to be fascinated by how he approaches translating his own style, especially when he’s trying to drastically reduce things crucial to his aesthetic – implied scale, odd electronic textures, density of sound. I’m interested enough in Bono to want to him compensate for his reduced vocal range with different approaches to phrasing, and taking his tendency to rewrite lyrics on the spot in shows back into the studio. While I’m sure some of the new versions of old songs will take on lives of their own, particularly through use in television and film, Songs of Surrender is for hardcore fans. The revisions here are meant to be additive, a new way of hearing something familiar. Nothing is being replaced, and at best the songs are enhanced with a new perspective on their musical and lyrical character. (That said, the material from Innocence and Experience is mostly greatly improved by scraping off all the “this has to be a radio hit” gloss of producers like Ryan Tedder and Paul Epworth.)
“Dirty Day” is one of my all-time favorite U2 songs. It’s a song about how complicated relationships between fathers and sons can be, especially when the son is old enough to be a father too. Bono has written a fair number of songs about his relationship with his father – “Kite” is about Bono’s experience of preparing for his dad’s death while he was dying, “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own” one album later reflects on their strained relationship after he passed. In all of these songs Bono’s father is portrayed as stern and stubborn, emotionally distant but affectionate in unexpected ways, and a man who offered wisdom in ways that were often blunt and abrasive. The power of the songs is in how much Bono yearns for this man’s love and approval, and how frustrated he is that the things that make them alike are what pushed them apart.
“Dirty Day,” written many years before either of those songs, focuses on the tension. In the context of Zooropa the song is in sharp contrast with “Lemon,” one of several U2 songs in which Bono tries to connect with his mother, who died when he was very young. She exists mainly as an idealized memory; in that song he’s extrapolating as much as he can from a bit of video footage from when she was alive. “Dirty Day” is largely about familiarity breeding contempt, and too much messy history getting in the way of important things. Many of the lyrics are adapted from things Bono’s father had said to him, and I think Bono was trying to understand something about him by singing from his perspective. A lot of these words were clearly meant to deflate Bono, to force him into recognizing how futile some things are, how there’s no satisfying explanation for a lot of things. The most haunting line is somewhere between a promise and a threat – “I’m in you, more so when they put me in the ground.”
The Edge’s new arrangement for “Dirty Day” cuts out all the ambience and weight of the original version, and transposes the main bass part to cello much like the Garbage remix of the song from the “Please” single. The recording is unusually raw for U2, so minimal and closely mic’d that you can hear hands pressing down on strings and squeaking on fretboards, or what sounds like Bono adjusting his body in his chair as he sings. It’s almost uncomfortably intimate, and Bono’s voice is low and sometimes a little whispery, like he’s doing U2 ASMR. The additional strings bring a mournful quality to the music, trading the passive-aggressive antagonism in the original for lamentation. This arrangement reorients everything in the song around lingering regret for how life was actually lived, and Bono inhabiting his father’s perspective now seems more like proof that his father is with him more in death than he ever was in his life.
Buy it from Amazon.
Find Yourself Another
Kenya Grace “Afterparty Lover”
When Kenya Grace sings “I don’t want to be your afterparty lover” she really means to say she doesn’t want to only be their afterparty lover. The afterparty loving is already done, she’s singing from the perspective of someone who has fully caught feelings and is trying to figure how to convert a one-off into a full-timer. The sound is very well suited to the subject – Grace’s vocal melody is sticky and assertive while the drum and bass beat lends a clear sense of immediacy and urgency, but also a butterflies-in-stomach twitchiness. There’s a lot of songs like this where you can easily predict how things will probably go for the character, and usually it doesn’t look good. But in this case I’m feeling good about her chances, at least in the short term.
Buy it from Amazon.
You Stay On My Mind
B. Cool-Aid featuring Liv.e, Jimetta Rose, and V.C.R. “Soundgood”
Dan Charnas’ book Dilla Time was a revelation to me in the sense that it made me realize there was a musical thread connecting so much of the R&B and rap I like, and it was J Dilla’s odd approach to time. I recommend reading the book and listening to my What Was Neo-Soul? playlist to understand what I mean, but it basically comes down to Dilla meticulously editing beats so the groove was tight but some beats would be just off time enough for a pleasant, loose swing. This has been emulated in sampling and by live drummers, at this point it’s such a part of popular music that it’s easy to just take it as a given and not question it, as I most definitely did before reading Charnas’ book.
B. Cool-Aid, a duo consisting of producer Awhlee and rapper Pink Siifu, definitely fit into this tradition. Awhlee’s track for “Soundgood” is laid back and centered around an organ part and thick bassline that projects a nostalgic warmth that sometimes feels a little too hot, like sitting a little too close to a radiator at full blast. The off-kilter aspects of the track make it all seem a little hallucinogenic and dreamy, and Pink Siifu’s largely rasped and muttered verses only exacerbate that effect. The thing that really puts this over is the way the additional backing vocals seem to float around in the background, always trailing him on the beat. It fills out the atmosphere nicely, like the vocal equivalent of a smoke machine on stage.
Buy it from Bandcamp.
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• The always excellent Amanda Petrusich – who has dealt with some major personal tragedy in the recent past – talked with Nick Cave, who is also no stranger to personal tragedy, for The New Yorker.
• Chris Deville wrote a nice tribute to Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks’ classic Pig Lib on its 20th anniversary for Stereogum.