I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK:  PUBLIC ENEMY-Live at All Tomorrow’s Parties, Convention Hall, October 2, 2011 (2011).

NPR was cool enough to record and provide as a download most of the shows at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in Asbury Park, NJ.  (Portishead wouldn’t allow their show to be recorded, sadly).  But Public Enemy was a welcome surprise!
This tour is in celebration of the anniversary of Fear of a Black Planet.  And they play most of Fear and a lot of other things too (with almost nothing from their 2000 era CDs.

I can remember back in the early days of rap that it was hard to imagine what a rap show would be like live since they didn’t play instruments and much of the music was sampled.  Well, PE has musicians on stage and they have DJ Lord filling in for Terminator X behind the turntables (big shoes to fill, but done largely well–especially his fun “solo” in which he samples The White Stripes and Nirvana–although he should have mixed in Portishead, no?).  And mostly they have the personalities of Chuck D and Flavor Flav.

I suspect that this show would be a bit more fun to watch than it is to listen to–Flavor Flav’s antics don’t always translate well without his visuals.    Like when he asks the audience if that can all say “Ho” (which he eventually holds for 33 seconds!), it seems like a delay tactic in audio, but is probably fun to witness.

What’s especially cool about the show is that PE play so many songs, including small snippets of songs as segues to other ones (like the seventy second version of “Anti-Nigger Machine” that intros “Burn Hollywood Burn” which is practically hardcore) or the minute and a half of “He Got Game” that follows “Night of the Living Baseheads.”  I like that they even threw in some skits from the record like “Meet the G That Killed Me” and “Incident at 66.6FM.”

But of course the real joy is the full length songs, “Brothers Gonna Work It Out,” “911 is a Joke,” and of course “Bring the Noise” and “Fight the Power.”

Some of the improv sections don’t work all that well, the guitar solo in “Power to the People” leaves something to be desired (Khari Wynn maybe a legend, but he;s no Vernon Reid),  although the  “Jungle Boogie” riff is cool.   But the improv with guest drummer Denis Davis was pretty bad ass.  Flavor Flav hopped on the drums and was quite good for “Timebomb.”  We also got to meet Flav’s daughter Jasmine.  And Professor Griff was there too.

It’s also interesting that they keep saying they have no time left in the set (Portishead is next) but they play for at least 30 minutes after this.  Including a wonderful “By the Time I Get to Arizona and the set ending “Fight the Power.”

Chuck D has still got it and Flav is just as crazy and fun as ever (even if his screams and yos seems out of tune from time to time).  Of course, Flav has to get the last word in by raging  on for six and a half minutes  at the end (and about six-minutes in the beginning as well where he gave himself props about his reality show.

It’s a really good set–a little distorted from time to time, but really solid.  Here’s a link to the downloadable show.

[READ: October 2, 2012] Hocus Pocus

This book may have put me over the edge in terms of Vonnegut exhaustion.  I bought this book some time in 1992, but I never read it. It’s been in my house for twenty years and it was about time I read it.

But as I’ve been noticing, each Vonnegut book has been getting darker and more misanthropic.  And this one is no exception.  The construction of the book follows Vonnegut’s cut and paste style but it feels even more shuffled and indirect than usual (more on that later).  In many of Vonnegut’s books, the “climax” occurs somewhere in the middle and he fills in the details later.  For this one, the climax came around h.and I wouldn’t have felt like I missed anything.

In this book, the main character, Eugene Debs Hartke  is a Vietnam vet (usually his protagonists are military men, and Vonnegut has criticized Vietnam a lot, but this is the first time he’s had a Vietnam vet as protagonist).  He married his wife and had a wonderful family until he learned that his mother in law had a disease that made her crazy–but it only kicked in later in life, after he married her daughter.  And that his wife has the same disease–so by the middle of the story both of the women in his life are crazy “hags.”  And, like in his other stories, his children hate him.

He attended West Point and is sent to Vietnam and kills many many people (he tallies the total as a secret answer for his tombstone).  And when he comes back, he has a small breakdown, until he is offered a job at Tarkington College.  This college was created for rich people who had learning disabilities  They weren’t all stupid, some of them were idiot savants and went on to great careers, but there was something unusual about all 300 students (300 was to be the number of students ad infinitum).

Across the river from the college is prison for black people.  The story is set in 2001 and all prisons have been segregated by color.  So this prison is only for black people, most of whom were drug dealers. Eventually Hartke loses his teaching job for political reasons (that was an interesting part) but he is almost immediately hired as a teacher at the prison.

Since it is 2001, most of America has been sold off to other countries (to pay off our debt).  The prison has been taken over by the Japanese.  They need someone who can teach the prisoners things to keep their minds active.

There is eventually a prison break (Hartke is spared in the racial destruction because the prisoners know him), but he is seen as a mastermind of the revolt, because black people couldn’t think of this themselves.  And the story ends (and begins) with Hartke in prison with tuberculosis (cough).

In between this plot, there are all kinds of observations about race, about America, about war, madness, anger, freedom of speech and everything else that a millennial author might be concerned about.

It’s possible that if you hadn’t read Vonnegut for the three years between this and his last book, these ideas may seem fresh, but with the exception of a few ideas that are more fully developed, there’s really not much difference between this novel and some of his other recent books.  If you hadn’t read his other recent novels at all, then this one would be pretty mind-blowing.  His observations about everything seem really spot on.  But again, there are even some lines that are repeated from other books.

Of course, his predictions are false: by 2001, American is not owned by the Japanese, but his observation that we are so crazily in debt is not wrong (it just happens to be to China).  He has also created a machine called GRIOT which predicts the outcomes of anyone based on the biographical data that’s put in (most black people end up in jail or as addicts).

There’s also a short story by Kilgore Trout called “Protocols of the Elders of Trafalamdore” (which is obviously designed to mock the Protocols of the Elders of Zion).  It’s used to good effect but I found it a little confusing since it was given piecemeal.

Interestingly, Eugene Debs Hartke is a pretty unlikable character–he is only somewhat regretful for his awful behavior (in addition to counting people he has killed, he also counts the women he has had sex with).  Although he is somewhat repentant for all of his sins, his tone is a sort of blasé the world sucks attitude which gets exhausting.

The odd thing is the structure of the book.  Each page is divided up into small sections  One or two paragraphs).  The Editor’s Note in the beginning says that all of the sections were found on numbered scraps of paper that the author (Hartke) wrote while in prison.  He wrote on whatever was available but numbered them for ease of collation.

This book was about 70 pages too long.  I felt pretty abused by the end of it.

But it hasn’t made me stop reading Vonnegut   There’s one more of his novels left that I have to read.  And it’s a another book that I own.  I’m quite certain that I read it, so we’ll see if I remember anything.  (I’m also reading it now because it’s only 219 pages).  Then, there’s six more collections of essays and such, but I’ll be taking a bit of a break after Timequake.