Spoon's nano-rock

I'm not a music theorist and can't really explain this 100% to my satisfaction, but I think there's something very interesting happening in Spoon's music that isn't very present in most modern music, especially in the rock/indie rock pigeonhole, which is where they are usually categorised. So please bear with me and feel free to comment if you have another opinion.

What is it that makes Spoon different from the other 10,000 indie rock bands in America? My feeling is that it's something that happens at an almost molecular level, or, if we see the beat, the pulse as the smallest unit of rock music, it's the nano level. How does that happen?

A few weeks ago I got the change to find out in the flesh, when I went to see Spoon live. And what a show it was. I arrived with very high expectations and they were more than fulfilled. Well into their second decade, the band continue to hone their unique take on leftfield rock, crafting a sound that mixes dub inflexions with angular new wave sounds. But describing what they do as a mere mixing and matching is wholly insufficient. Because it seems to me that Spoon have managed to rebuild rock from the ground up, taking the lessons of dub and dancefloor music and applying them at the most basic level of their sound: the bass and the beat.

In jazz innovation has always begun with the rhythm section - the great breakthroughs of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and John Coltrane were all predicated on the interplay of the double bass and drums. Spoon's Rob Pope (bass) and Jim Eno (drums) do a similar thing with rock, whittling down the cage of 4/4 time to the singular pulse that is their signature sound. The result is a style which is minimalist, funky and inflected. Rather than plastering "dance" affectations over a standard rock track, it is this syncopated base motif that generates their subtle, swinging, but nevertheless rock-steady groove. A good example of this is I turn my camera on from the album Gimme Fiction

On top of this rhythm comes a pared-down take on indie rock, mirroring the pulsing substratum to the extent that it sometimes is reminiscent of both dance music and John Adams or Steve Reich. Put another way, they like staying on the same note for a long time; alternatively, individual figures are stretched and distorted through dub effects resulting in a similar trancelike repetition. The final touch is provided by Britt Daniel's vocals which can range from falsetto-pure to raw and emotional, and deliver often laconic and fragmentary lyrics.

And while the lyrics are sometimes of themselves oblique, their treatment as part of the overall sound further underlines their oneness with the sound, because they are distorted, arbitrarily cut off and otherwise manipulated just like the rest of the music. So you can leave your cigarette lighters in your pockets.

And that's maybe where Spoon also differ from their rock contemporaries. Most indie bands (take Sigur Ros, Fleet Foxes or Tocotronic) or their stadium equivalents (Coldplay, Radiohead) write songs that function on a rhetorical level, building up instrumentation, vocals and emotions in an architectural manner, creating an affective and narrative arc from the song's start to its end. Spoon songs don't usually work this way: the effect is immediate, the sound swallows you, the mood doesn't build in any architectonic sense; instead, as in dance music it circulates, brews and diffuses.

Fatih Akin's Soul Kitchen

"Heimatfilms were noted for their rural settings, sentimental tone and simplistic morality, and centered around love, friendship, family and non-urban life. Also, the polarity between old and young, tradition and progress, rural and urban life was articulated." -Wikipedia

With films like Against the Wall, Crossing the Bridge and The Edge of Heaven, Fatih Akin has set a high aesthetic bar at which his newest work inevitably stumbles. Which is not to say that the film is a failure by any means, simply that it must be judged as a minor work in this impressive directors oeuvre.

Set in Hamburg's seedy demi-monde, the film relates the fortunes of the Soul Kitchen restaurant and its unhappy-go-lucky proprietor, with a meat-and-two-veg narrative arc from wretched normality through multiple adversities to a slightly more hopeful normality. And while the restaurant moves up-scale gastronomically the story remains comfort food throughout, providing plenty of opportunities for comic set pieces and tragi-comic misunderstandings.

What we end up with is a patchwork of scenes, connected by a narrative strand that connects property speculation, prostitution, drugs and music. None of it quite makes sense, but this is a film ruled by the heart and not the head. What it lacks in precision it makes up for in warmth.

In general the performances are impressive, and the unavoidable Moritz Bleibtreu (who seems to be compulsory casting in any German film worth its salt) is particularly engaging as the protagonist's jailbird brother, constantly swinging his prayer beads as hustles.

The film's lightness of touch is perhaps its saving grace: the music complements the story without dominating; food and cookery play a subordinate, if enjoyable role, but never do we get too bogged down in the niceties of nouvelle cuisine. And this must be the first major film in which Skype plays such a major role. Product placement perhaps but very realistically done.

As an ironic take on the Heimatfilm, the interplay of cultures - Greek, Turkish, German, whatever - is handled in a no-nonsense workmanlike way. Perhaps it takes a German of Turkish extraction to do this. My feeling is that other German directors would be more sheepish in their handling of these issues.

In conclusion I'd say that the film is good, not great, and shows that Fatih Akin can also make a gentle, feel-good comedy without compromising his higher aesthetic achievements.

Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuściński

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Shah of Shahs (Penguin Modern Classics)
by Ryszard Kapuściński

From the cover you would believe that Shah of Shahs tells the story of Mohammed Reza, the last Shah of Iran. But in fact the destiny of this cruel, hapless and slightly silly habitué of Swiss ski resorts is only part of the picture.
Rather, Kapuściński's theme here, as in The Emperor before it, is not the person but the ecosystem of repression that keeps a dictator in power. In the Shah's case it was the villainous secret police, known as Savak, that shored up his throne with a rule of terror that in Kapuściński's description makes Stalin's Russia sound like a walk in the park.
Eventually the Iranian people turned on their oppressors in a bloody revolution that was powered by self-sacrifice and martyrs' blood. Here too, Kapuściński is riveting in tracing the moment at which inner resistance turns to outward defiance, leading with ever greater urgency to the ultimate overthrow and ejection of an unloved monarch. But in this the Shah is no more present than any other member of the crowd. He is, rather, a cipher in military gear, a puppet cut loose and greying at the temples.
In his work as a reporter for the Polish news agency, Kapuściński witnessed dozens of coups and revolutions. The Iranian revolution is described in a series of meditations, interviews, reportage and diary sketches that communicate both the tension and the feeling of emptiness that followed the elation of overthrow.
Once the Shah left, the "good" revolutionaries, who wanted democracy and toleration, were quickly removed by a group of "ignorant bearded thugs", Kapuściński tells us, calling to mind Yeats's dictum that "the best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity". And thus Iran"s current leadership was born.
To my mind Kapuściński is one of the twentieth century's great writers in any genre; indeed, genre is something it's difficult to pin on him. Too profound for travel writing, too poetic for politics, too political for belles lettres, and too playful for sociology, he stands above the common fray. If you're interested in dicovering his world, this book would be a fitting beginning.