The New Holy

I've written about the Fountain before – in another blog and in my review for Detour. But it's such an important movie to me that I've bothered to edit some of that material into a separate review:

In Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, Hugh Jackman plays three versions of the same soul. The first is Tomas, a 16th century conquistador on a mission to find the Tree of Life and, with it, save his country and queen. His relentless loyalty and refusal to accept any defeat, even imminent death, are themes he will stubbornly carry with him for more than a thousand years of rebirth. Of these we see Tommy, an oncologist obsessively trying to cure his wife’s cancer through experimental research; and Tom, an astronaut hurtling solo through space toward the golden nebula where he believes the soul of his dead wife can be reborn. The superficial differences between their times and circumstances create a relief by which we see their sameness. It's not a story about eternal love as much as eternal persistence; a devotion to illusion so strong it distorts the truth and stunts acceptance.

Owing to a seismic performance by Jackson and an ornate, breathtaking special effects approach that uses manipulated macro photography in lieu of CGI, The Fountain will likely be to film what Siddhartha was to literature – the definitive western poetry for eastern mysticism. But outside of its spiritual overtones, it works simply as a piece of fantasy eye candy because its gilded visuals are an end in themselves.

Hugh Jackman's performance is the next-level. It goes so far beyond the standard of the craft that it's not even fair to call it acting. It's more like becoming. He should win the Oscar for best becomer. It caused me to rethink the value of his profession and the possibilities of people at his wealth and status level. I am skeptical of actors–and millionaire artists in general–but then I watch The Fountain and I think, what do I want from art? And the answer is, I want this. Here is a celebrity working in an industry that's superficiality must be stifling to any kind of personal or artistic growth and yet, somehow, Jackman has access to the power and focus to enact the essential human drama. What could be more important art? It is simply beyond me how someone can pull that from themselves even once, let alone repeatedly, under the monotonous microscope of film production.

Though The Fountain is enjoying an after-the-fact buzz of web adoration, it was critically misunderstood and virtually ignored in its theatrical release. It's easy to see why the studio would have trouble promoting something so esoteric since the essence of movie promotion is the promise of something you've seen before (there is no marketing template for sci-fi Buddhist meditations that lure audiences with brand-name actors, and then confuse the shit out of them). So it’s ironic that a film about rebirth now seems certain to have a second life. (For evidence of the shift see metacritic.com where its composite score of critic reviews was 51, in contrast to its user reviews, which, buoyed by the DVD release, are up around 80.)

For all its abstractions, and a plot that ping-pongs seemingly carelessly through time, it has a linear story once you get your head around it. But these few plot strands are almost beside the point once the main character is revealed to be an abstraction of the self.

I've come to think of The Fountain as a new genre. It's not sci-fi, not surrealism–terms which only describe its style–but a mystical, symbolic work of such singularity and compressed articulation that it transcends the whims of popular culture and rises to the level of spiritual edification. I might be getting carried away here, but I want to say that it is a holy film. Maybe not to everybody, but to me. Popular culture is probably not the best place to put something holy–and it has been a failure by those standards–but I think it will have its day when people quit expecting from it what they get from other movies.

The Indescribable Voice of Mark Lanegan

Mark Lanegan’s voice cannot be described. In fact, until recently, Mark Lanegan’s voice couldn’t even be recorded. At least not properly. It took more than 30 engineers over the course of 20 plus records in as many years just to crack the code of his baritone – a rumbling throttle so coarse you could strike a match on it. This long-overdue feat was accomplished on his 2005 album Bubblegum, on which his voice has so much low end it practically gives the bass guitar the bitch seat. 20 years is a long time for a musician to go without having their instrument accurately captured, especially a world-famous singer like Lanegan who’s fronted bands as big as The Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age. But you can’t really fault the recording engineers. After all, Lanegan’s voice is a bit of a physical anomaly and was once even the subject of scientific research:

In the mid ’90s he volunteered for a series of experiments in Phoenix that were involved with the weaponization of sound. The so-called “brown frequency” produces extremely intense resonance at very low frequencies, causing a person in its path to spontaneously shit their pants. But scientists believed that lower-midrange frequencies, like the ones in Lanegan’s baritone, had the potential to do even more damage to the human body, including shattering bones and bursting blood vessels, if wielded with enough severity. So Lanegan spent a bizarre week being the government’s guinea pig, a pretty strange move for a rebel’s rebel who’s been at odds with the law his whole life. But Lanegan is not the kind of person you want to try and understand. Like God, you’re just supposed to listen to him, not fathom him.

As weird as the Phoenix experiment story is, it’s not the weirdest anecdote about Mark Lanegan. Not by far. His biography is a litany of rock’n’roll hyperbole. In his defense, he got off to a bad start. He was raised by a northern California chapter of the Hells Angels, a radical anti-authoritarian biker gang at its most notorious and violent in the ’60s. (It has been alleged that this same chapter of the Angels was responsible for the murder of Lanegan’s parents in a drug-related incident.) Reared by professional hellions, Lanegan learned the art of trouble-making from the best. But somehow he managed to absorb the culture’s rootless and drunken lifestyle while still remaining a man apart and, until the age of 17, Lanegan had serious ambitions to become a priest. His attempts to convert his fellow bikers to Christ fell flat when it was discovered he was sleeping with not one, but three, of the Angels' "old ladies." I would imagine this is about as unforgivable an offense as exists in the world of outlaw biker gangs and Lanegan was ordered to be taken out. Lanegan claims he fled on foot and escaped in a blinding dust storm that blew through at the last possible minute (his old friend and former Screaming Trees member Van Conner contradicts this account, saying that Lanegan just bribed one of the hitmen with money he had stolen from the Angels’ treasury).

After this, Lanegan went through a period of urban vagrancy in northern Seattle and began meeting many of the musicians that would eventually be part of the grunge explosion. During this time, he stole a copy of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums from a coffee shop. In the book, Kerouac takes a job as a fire lookout for the United States Fire Service on Washington state’s Desolation Mountain, using the experience for Buddhist epiphanies. Lanegan was so enamored with the story and its ideas that he mimicked Kerouac by securing a similar position on Vancouver’s Ash Peak. He lasted less than a week. The Fire Service removed him after lightening struck his camp three times in five days – nearly starting a forest fire – in a particularly dry week in which there were no storms. (Lanegan claims that lightening has followed him his whole life, one example of which burned down his apartment complex in ’92.)

But even that isn’t the weirdest story about Mark Lanegan. The weirdest story might be the time Lanegan was broadsided by an “off-duty” ice cream truck doing close to thirty miles per hour and walked away with only scratches while the truck had over eight grand in damage, including a caved-in engine. Doctors credited his miraculous survival to adrenaline but at the time of the incident (which was a nightly news phenomenon for days) Lanegan insisted he had seen himself surrounded by a cold, blue light, which he believed was an angel of God wrapping him in its protective embrace. (In the news video from the incident, Lanegan is covered in what looks like several vats of blue Superman-flavored ice cream. I can’t help but wonder what relation, if any, this has to his “cold, blue light.”)

So that’s pretty weird. But actually, the weirdest story might be the one where a group of renegade priests from an L.A. archdiocese tried to use Lanegan’s voice for ritual exorcisms – in one case asking him to sing Ave Maria repeatedly for over three hours – because they believed that his growling, sandpaper croon was imbued with a special power over devils. Lanegan, probably tired of having his voice treated as a commodity of control, first by the government and now the Catholic church, cut his exorcist career short almost immediately, claiming he had only agreed to try it so he could “see who was eviler.”

And then there's the other time he made the nightly news, this time twice in one week. First when he single-handedly stopped the robbery of a late-night Mexican fast-food restaurant. And second when, six days later, he tried to hold the same place up and was arrested in the process.

Come to think of it, the weirdest story by far has to be that the first thing he did with his cash advance when the Screaming Trees signed to Epic Records was to have two stumps of bone and cartilage surgically removed from his back that had been there since birth. They were, oddly, in the exact spot a pair of wings might grow – if a man could grow wings. (Van Conner says that, in high school, Lanegan would sneak into the woodshop at night and try to file them down with a belt sander.)

And the stories never stop. He sold the publishing to “I Nearly Lost You,” the Trees’ biggest-selling single, for a pack of cigarettes and a dirty magazine. His favorite delicacy is to put Maker’s Mark in his Cap’n Crunch cereal. He sleeps in his truck and only eats on the toilet. He can only writes songs in the month of May and, since the early ’90s, has annually spent those four weeks locked in his bedroom with a guitar and a pad of paper, stricken with a mysterious fever. He has over 50 tattoos, all of which he did himself, all of the same picture – a busty, 50-ish San Francisco bartender named Lane that Lanegan met and fell in love with in his early teens and hasn't seen since.

All of these experiences, as heartbreaking and extreme as they are, have made Lanegan’s voice what it is: unknowable. Music writers inevitably use descriptives like “whiskey soaked,” or “cigarette stained,” or some other cliché that implies its weathered sonority is the product of hard living. Because it sounds charred, like a smokestack smells; like a barn looks after it has burned. But it’s really his phrasing, which is Billie-Holiday tattered, that rattles the listener. It’s hard feelings, not hard living, that make his sung sentences waft heavenward like smoke ring prayers (only to die unanswered at the ceiling). It’s the brusque but meticulous delivery, the careful performances carved out of some kind of sad surgery, that make Lanegan’s singing its own kind of holy.

It would be cute to say that Lanegan can only sing that way because he’s done time. Or because he’s learned about time, watching so many of the other addicts from the Seattle rock boom die or lose their muse while he has survived, still and tall like a tree, his voice hardened over with bark, his songs ever-widening, wind-blown blooms. It would be cute, and it might be true. But that would be trying to describe Mark Lanegan’s voice. And Mark Lanegan’s voice cannot be described.

Mark Lanegan Band – When Your Number Isn't Up [From Bubblegum]


Mark Lanegan Band – One Hundred Days [From Bubblegum]


Soulsavers – No Expectations
[From It's Not How Far You Fall, It's the Way you Land]

Soulsavers – Through My Sails (feat. Will Oldham)
[From It's Not How Far You Fall, It's the Way you Land]

Queens of the Stone Age – In The Fade [From Rated R]

Tony Allen's Seasick Sound

I’ve gotten addicted to Tony Allen’s seasick drumming; but I had to go back in time first, to Tony Allen’s Version of Time, which is outside of time; an idea about rhythm that sloshes back and forth between swing and straight, perpetually adrift and uncontainable.

It’s a rebellious feel and Tony Allen did rebellious things with it. When I say rebellious, I don’t mean he wore a controversial t-shirt on Saturday Night Live, or wouldn’t let HUMMER use one of his tracks in a commercial. I mean that the Nigerian percussion master was out of his mind with independence. First he helped let loose a whole new kind of music (a militant witchdoctor funk called Afrobeat designed to put your ass into a trance of dance and tap you into the communal ecstasy and out of the communal psychosis). And then, after sicking his groove on the Dark Continent, his band, Africa ’70, made its own compound and declared independence from the state.

I haven’t mentioned Fela Kuti yet, on purpose. Fela started Africa ’70 with Allen. Allen was musical director, but Fela wrote the tunes and gave the sound a face. Kuti’s name became the brand name forever stapled onto “Afrobeat” in the histories, while Allen’s became a footnote. But Afrobeat was nothing if not politics through rhythm and if Fela supplied the polemic, Allen’s eternal groove gave it its conduit.



Madness is a reoccurring theme in African legends and Fela’s pan-African fervor definitely blossomed into something approaching mania. When he tried to use concert proceeds to fund his presidential campaign, a lot of his band bolted, feeling he had crossed the line from muso-political to just political. Allen knew the difference, and which one he was qualified in, and left as well, moving to Europe. After all, if he wasn’t going to let the Nigerian army push him around, why should he let Kuti?

Afrobeat has been pulling me into its tractor beam for years but Tony Allen himself didn’t enter my radar until I heard Damon Albarn’s latest project, The Good, The Bad, and the Queen. Albarn started going off the deep end of low end with his band Blur’s Think Tank, and (side project) Gorillaz’s Demon Days was even dub-heavier, drowned in fathoms of sub bass black. The fact that bassist Paul Simonon from The Clash was involved in the new scheme (The Clash are the only respectable example of whites playing reggae I know of), and was going to be anchoring possibly the greatest drummer of all time (according to Brian Eno), promised untold wonders of perverted pocket. Not only did it not deliver, (it’s a beautiful record, but with very English/white rhythms, staccato pianos and folk guitar; and only half of it even has a rhythm section) at first I thought the drumming was a joke. But that’s because I didn’t understand it. I wasn’t prepared to see what is so clear now: that Tony Allen is the fulfillment of the prophecy of pocket. Accepting his sound meant surrendering to it. Because it had revolution in it, not cordiality.

To get why Allen’s feel is the end game, it has to be seen in the bigger picture of drumming itself, starting with the present. Computers have by now altered every form of expression – music in particular. But if musicianship has gotten a shot of Botox (pert, plastic), drumming has had drastic reconstructive surgery. Drums, in their most primitive form of stretched skin over wood have been around who-knows-how-long. It wasn’t even until the 1600s that they started to show up in musical scores and another 300 years after that before the concept of a drum “kit” appeared in American jazz. Jazz was like battery acid on percussion’s musical heritage. It put it through a sort of devolution, undoing centuries of practiced and rigid symmetry by making exploratory drumming foundational to jazz’s unshackling agenda. Jazz was off the grid before there was a grid. That is, before the drum machine came along and confined the place of a beat into a very narrow compartment, there were years of anal white men perfecting gross systems of musical organization-through-notation intended to wield masses of individuals (orchestras) collectively like military institutions (armies). Jazz made those traditions seem obsolete, if not wrong-headed, not only rethinking scale and harmony, but treating the measure itself – the basic unit of musical division – as a kind of colonial prison to be broken out of.

Even if nobody knew it, this started a fight. Or it became a place to take the fight. White/black, straight/swing could have meant oppressive/progressive. The matter was never really solved and the two have continued to rub up against each over the years, sometimes making some beautiful children in the process (e.g., James Brown’s air-tight, uglified pocket). And it’s not as if the black approach was anti-beat – a tribal rhythm is about achieving a state of mind through repetition – and I’m not saying the free-jazz deconstructions of Art Blakey were the promised land. Only that drumming needed to get out of the head for a second and get down to the hip, so the hip could shake up the body and loosen the mind.

Then drum machines fucked the whole thing up. It’s one thing when it’s Kraftwerk – essentially Bach in a Star Trek suit – and the stiff stuff works as a relief for the simple beauty of melody, harmony, counterpoint. It’s another when people start to think that good drumming is about precision – and I don’t mean about being precisely badass, but about turning rhythm into a math equation to be solved on paper. About gated snares, and drummers practicing to metronomes, and human beings trying to copy the cadence of a machine that was just a weak substitute for four limbs, two ears and a soul in the first place. Our musical innocence was lost from too much knowledge and there was no going back. The people got attached to that feel, and took comfort in its consistency.

Two things eventually happened which restored some sanity to the proceedings: sample culture and ?uestlove. By the time the DJs appeared drummers were already adept at mimicking the modules by playing as fluctuation-free as possible. But when the new school started to build their tracks from small fragments of other people’s music – sampling, for its energy, the pre-technology drummers, the jazz and funk guys – they were butting those different sources right up against each other, which meant that as the track passed between this sample and that one, the feel was changing all the time, sometimes in the same song, sometimes from bar to bar. The most extreme example is Amon Tobin, who began by creating massive collages of breakbeat that used absolutely no original parts, only what raw ore he could carve out of his vinyl collection with an equalizer and Cubase. And that’s an itchy sound because your brain is a computer, but that computer is a sponge soaking in juice, not a mainframe humming in a temperature-controlled room. It knows when something’s off the grid and even though it knows it’s wrong, it knows it’s right. It wants to itch and it wants to be scratched. It wants friction, imprecision, loose ends, lubrication, slop, soil and trees. So now, through cutting and pasting, we again created a drum feel that a real person could never reproduce – only now it’s flipped. It’s unattainable levels of imprecise. Jerky in a way that no real drummer could ever be (on purpose). But then somebody was, a jovial, dark-skinned pocket prophet calling himself ?uestlove.



As the drummer and producer for Philadelphia hip-hop band The Roots, he taught himself to emulate the push and pull of hip-hop’s sampled foundations and tuned his drums to replicate its metallic, over-processed clang. I don’t know how much of it was instinct, and how much philosophy, but that kind of metatextuality is po-mo to the core.

Maybe that explains why, when I first found Tony Allen, I thought it was a mistake. Because the amount of junk he was putting on his groove, of speeding up and slowing down within each measure, of losing and finding the swing, made ?uestlove sound robotic in comparison. I’ve done a small amount of producing and recording, which sometimes requires “fixing” drummers’ takes, and I guess I’ve grown hyper-sensitive to waver. I've worked with a few drummers who are so clumsy that by the time you’ve repaired their performance, which involved lining up kicks and snares on a measure-by-measure basis, you end up with a kind of slinky effect where they’re always expanding off course, only to find their way back at the top of each bar. When it’s not intentional, this is not a good thing. And first listening to Allen, I thought I was hearing this type of stitched up, band-aided performance, another sad statement on the abuse-through-overuse of recording software. It wasn’t until I went back to the original Afrobeat tracks that I realized he’s been playing this way all along, toying with the boundaries of feel, sounding out of control but always in control.

The mark of a great musician is that they have their own sound, a style of phrasing that is instantly recognizable, like Miles Davis, James Jamerson, or Mark Knopfler. But the drums, with little tonal variety or dynamic range, are difficult to trademark. Several drummers have been said to have done it – Tony Williams, Matt Chamberlain, Larry Mullen Jr., etc. – though I could never pick them out in a blind taste test. But months after catching the Allen bug, I picked up Pocket Symphony, the new record by french electronic duo Air, and instantly recognized his playing on the track “Once Upon a Time” while driving to work. As soon as I got home I looked for confirmation on allmusic.com and got it.

Allen’s sound was an acquired taste for me, and its genius is subtle, maybe too subtle for most people, who haven’t spent as many hours as I have obsessing over something like rhythmic feel. But almost anybody can appreciate its rebelliousness, which is so gentle. It’s a soft-spoken fuck-you to all forms of oppression, political, musical or otherwise. In it, I hear wisdom, power, chronic innovation and a deep intent to never be held down.

The Good, The Bad, and the Queen – Nature Springs [From The Good, the Bad, and The Queen]

Air – Once Upon a Time [From Pocket Symphony]

Tony Allen – The Same Blood [From Afrobeat... No Go Die!]

Tony Allen – No Discrimination [From No Accommodation for Lagos/No Discrimination]

Fela Kuti and Africa '70 – Mistake [From Zombie]