Higher Ground - Common and Kanye West

Nas said it best: "All I need is one mic, one beat, one stage."

Saturday night he was on stage, mic in hand, when Common & Friends took over the Hollywood Paladium. Common also just needed one mic, as did his friends Kanye West, Queen Latifah, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Heavy D, Ludacris, and MF Doom. De La Soul needed three mics. The Roots got a mic for Rahzel and a set of drums for Questlove. Further accompaniment came from a rotating DJ and someone who manned the keyboards. Not much else was necessary for the greatest collection of hip-hop headliners I've seen under one roof, on one stage.

It was a pleasant break from the bravado and the boasting, the glow-in-the-dark gloating that came before Common dictated hip hop’s main tenant: Family First. The show did take on the air of a family reunion—from story time with Heavy D (he was one of the first Jamaican hip-hop acts to make a successful career in 1980s America), to prayer time with Mos Def (who performed his soulful 'Umi Says'), and the arrival of unannounced guests (my favorite MC, MF Doom, jumped on stage for only one verse from De La Soul's 2004 song "Rock Co. Kane Flow").

But what really brought this hip-hop family together was that highest of group values—charity. Sticking true to the consciousness of his lyrics, Common sought to empower urban youth, so he started an organization called Common Ground that supports after-school and mentoring programs for teens, and he recruited founding sponsor Hennessy Artistry to help assemble this fantastic family reunion of a benefit concert. Ticket proceeds were donated in full to the foundation.

Turns out all they really needed was one concert.

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine at: http://www.lamag.com/do/blog.aspx?dt=10/01/2009

What Might Have Been Found - Bon Iver

Everyone wants to witness a piece of history—indie rock fans especially. There is no greater validation of love for a band than those simplest of words: I was there; I saw them live. With the 40th anniversary of Woodstock having come and gone, I’ve been looking to claim attendance at a world-changing event of my own.

Hollywood Forever Cemetery pins the number of attendees of their Bon Iver show at nearly 2,500, and because I was there I know they witnessed something heretofore unseen. The details seem absurd: thousands of warm bodies watching movies, drinking wine, and sleeping above ground in a cemetery for hours. But after the show, as the sun revealed the Santa Monica mountains and people shuffled sleepily off to their cars, the idea of a concert at 6 a.m. didn't seem so absurd anymore; It seemed like history.

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine (with plenty more great writing) at: http://www.lamag.com/do/blog.aspx?dt=09/29/2009

I Want My Music Videos - Flux Screening Series

At the end of the last century, the best place to turn for music videos was cable TV. Five years ago, the cable channel that still has music in its name but is better known for its reality programming, MTV, announced that its little sister station, MTV2, would put the focus back on music videos. Then they aired Wildboyz and the Andy Milonakis Show instead. Nowadays anybody who still watches music videos does so mostly online.

Flux changed that, for a night at least, last Tuesday when they curated a screening of five new videos at The Billy Wilder Theatre at the Hammer Museum in Westwood. First they screened the Jonathan Glazer-directed video for Jack White's latest project, The Dead Weather, which features White in a machine gun fight with bandmate Alison Mosshart. Next was a Chris Cairns video that featured green-screened DJs and would be at home on a Michel Gondry highlights reel.

The biggest applause of the night went to the group the New York Times once called "the most insufferable band of the decade"—Coldplay. Their video for “Strawberry Swing,” a pseudo-stop-motion masterpiece directed by UK director duo Shynola, is so creative it wouldn’t matter if the music was by Yanni. Shynola's work made me do something I haven’t done after seeing a music video in a long time: I bought the song.

The final video of the screening, H5’s Logorama, though not technically a music video, raised the central questions facing the music video industry today: Is a music video a sales tool for music? Or is it an advertisement for the director (and, by extension, the record label and their budget)? I won’t spoil the work, but the video left the crowd stunned—both at H5’s talent and the recent news that they are separating as a group.

After the show, I caught up with Sheira Rees-Davies, former head of Anonymous Content's music videos division, which was cut earlier this year. Rees-Davies has since moved to Hello!, and she brought many of her directors with her. Today she’s confident that, despite budget challenges, music videos will survive no matter where they find an audience. It’s an art form she considers beautiful. Given the extraordinary work presented by Flux, I see her point.

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine at: http://www.lamag.com/do/blog.aspx?dt=09/25/2009

Magic's Wand - John Williams

To those who say that classical music is unpopular, I present this evidence to the contrary: roughly 19,000 people who filled the Hollywood Bowl on September 4th from the pool circle to the top row of benches. They cheered after every song with a fervor that would be inappropriate in a concert hall. They followed along wordlessly with every movement, and they rose to their feet for encore after encore. This being the Hollywood Bowl, they also packed snacks.

In fact, the only difference between the waves of fans at the Bowl and a tailgating crowd in the Forum parking lot before a Ratt concert was the headliner (a big difference, admittedly). At the Bowl it was John Williams, master of the movies.

For the first half of the show, Williams concentrated on his most recent work: The score for the mega-successful Harry Potter series. Actress Lynn Redgrave helped unravel the complex storyline for the more seasoned ticket-holders who haven’t read all seven books or seen all six movies. According to her, the film franchise has earned over one billion dollars at the box office, meaning an entirely new generation has been swept away by John Williams’ music. Just as he did with the scores of Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Superman, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Jurassic Park, Williams has brought classical music to the kiddie masses.

That’s not to say the crowd at the Bowl wasn’t feeling nostalgic. The upper rows were lit like a sci-fi convention by little Jedis and their parents twirling neon red and blue swords to the theme of Star Wars. In the box seats nearest me, a father and son softly clashed sabers to the beat, punctuating the score with a canned sound effect. The father must have been in his seventies; his son in his forties or fifties.

I ended the night thinking that Williams' work, wound so tightly into the scenes he scores, is the perfect gateway to classical music because it is reminiscent of so many greats—Hoist, Shostakovitch, Wagner. And who doesn’t love lightsabers?

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine

The Audition - No Age

No Age has been the most effective L.A. buzz band of the early 21st century. They've played concerts in museums and libraries, in backyards and in the drainage channels of the L.A. River. They've popularized, if not created, a sound for Los Angeles: a woozy and distorted ambient punk rock that echoes the endless hum of freeway traffic. They're the reason why kids in Iowa can talk about The Smell, one of the smallest L.A. venues. Most of all, the band, with their critically-acclaimed records and, well, their buzz, have given savvy Angelenos a point of pride, a rebuttal against the endless wave of Brooklyn blog bands.

But there is a statute of limitations on buzz. Around the second album, bands that run on buzz run out of tiny theaters to rock and poses to strike. Fortunately for Randy and Dean of No Age, they've been running on something more. So while their clothes have been photographed, their look turned into trend, No Age have been working on something they care about: scoring the soundtrack for a children's movie live in a tiny theatre.

During the last weekend in August, Cinespace, the Silent Movie Theatre on Fairfax Ave., hosted two sold-out shows with the L.A. duo, who graciously unboxed their instruments and played over the entirety of director Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 1988 children's film L'ours (The Bear). The film follows a simple man-versus-wild formula, with an adorable young bear cub in the lead.

Despite what you might think about a punk duo scoring a pastoral children's movie, No Age proved singularly qualified for the gig. The most innovative songs on their soon-to-be-classic Nouns are the fuzzy, ambient bridges that link the more traditional songs together—or, the holes between the music, as Jeff Tweedy would say. These songs have informed No Age's score for The Bear, an ever-growing analogue groan, sunny during cute bear cuddling scenes and suffocating in tense bear hunting scenes. The film’s long, wordless stretches gave the band space to craft intense, mood-shifting music that gives the film a modernity and meaning it didn’t have before.

No Age passed the audition. They made a soundtrack extraordinary enough to stand on its own that simultaneously adds to and rises above the film it accompanies. Now they deserve a better paying gig in this other L.A. music industry. You know the one I mean. The one with the moving pictures.

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine

Sunset Junction Street Fair 2009

Sunset Junction has always presented itself to me, first and foremost, as the perfect venue to catch up on local artists. Miss a residency at Spaceland? Keep hearing about a new Silver Lake band but haven't gotten around to checking out their MySpace pace? Well, Sunset Junction is for you. It’s a modern day headphones wall in that gone-but-not-forgotten CD Megastore of yesteryear, a place to try new things and rediscover old ones.

Sunday's lineup included Mika Miko, Local Natives, Nico Stai, Love Grenades, Dengue Fever, and Fool's Gold—all Los Angeles locals. Though the crowd at Sunset Junction seemed to have shifted from Saturday's hipsters to Sunday's shirtless musclemen, no band did a better job of uniting the festival than my perennial favorite, Fool's Gold, a band that has enough chops for the indie set and enough danceable grooves for the burners.

Norteño-defenders Nortec Collective also united the two festival camps. They aren't from L.A. proper, but brought a big enough Tijuana crowd to have been hometown favorites.

Saturday’s festival-goers woke from their mid-day naps and made their way back to the Junction after Nortec Collective’s set, so the Sunday artists yet to take the stage—heavy hitters Arrested Development and Built to Spill—got the audience they deserved.

Arrested Development, as relevant for their positive message today as they were during the bi-costal hip-hop war of the early 90s, looked like they could keep going for another 15 years. Built To Spill, meanwhile, deserves a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction for more-or-less inventing indie rock. They proved their worth at the festival by closing out the weekend with a brilliant set running almost two hours, their final notes of feedback the last live notes that will hit the valley until next year's fest.

If there is one, that is. Every year it seems the festival’s existence is in jeopardy.

And yet, for all of her wonderful traditions, Los Angeles has no Carnival, no Outside Lands, not even a McCarren Park Pool Party. The one (admittedly small) festival that represents L.A. in the pantheon of outdoor summer concerts has been, for 29 years, Sunset Junction. I can't think of any tradition more deserving of another year.


Originally in Los Angeles Magazine