Chris Smith’s blog

Note for note, Sudan produces some of the most infectiously happy-sounding music I’ve ever heard. Maybe it’s the country’s position at the fulcrum of Africa, its mixing of North and South, East and West, Arab and sub-Saharan Africa. All of these influences–the pentatonic scales, the brass and strings, the crisp percussion and soaring, crooning vocals–are on display in this clip by the legendary Mohammed Wardi, recorded during a concert he played in Addis Ababa in the 1990s. Wardi, who was a teacher until Sudanese state radio plucked him out of obscurity in the 1950s, has seen more than his share of hardship–he spent years in prison, then went into exile for pissing off the thugs who pass themselves off as Sudan’s legitimate government–but you wouldn’t know it from this clip.

I’ve never seen Wardi play live, but I have seen another Sudanese legend, a guitarist and singer named Sharhabeel Ahmed (naturally, he has a Facebook page), when I was working in Cairo about ten years ago. He played a free show somewhere in Gezira, I think, to an open-air courtyard stuffed front to back with Sudanese. Cairo, of course, has a huge population of Sudanese–workers, refugees, exiles of all sorts–and it seemed like they all came out on this hot July night. Ahmed wore a galabeyah, his guitar slung over his shoulder, something of the wise old man about him. His band was tight, the sound sugary and kind of liquid in the heat. The guys around me were losing their minds. Near the end of the show, he played one of his signature songs (if memory serves, it’s El Leil El Hady) and the place went nuts. After he finished the song, the crowd continued to chant the chorus, a wave rolling across the courtyard.

Then Ahmed did something I’ve never seen a musician do, before or since: He played the song again, note for note. And the crowd went crazy all over again.

So check it out for yourself: This stuff positively buzzes with joy.

In the latest issue of San Francisco magazine, I review the new album by Kowloon Walled City, the city’s best new metal band. These guys combine the aggression of Black Flag (sans Henry Rollins’ petulant moaning) with the sludgy grandeur of the Melvins, producing the aural equivalent of a primal scream. Check it out.

A band’s name is usually a clear indicator of its sound. (Really, could Cannibal Corpse play anything but metal?) This holds true for Kowloon Walled City, though you might not realize it at first. The San Francisco metal band takes its name from a famously dangerous Hong Kong neighborhood run by killers, drug dealers, and pimps–a sort of hell, in other words–and the group sounds satisfyingly like its name. Banging out a symphony of down-tuned guitars and turned-up amps, KWC harks back to similarly heavy forebears, like the Melvins, Helmet, and Oakland legends Neurosis. The band’s brutal debut EP last year earned it a spot at the gene­rally metal averse Noise Pop Festival, and its first long-player only improves on the formula. The opening track, “Annandale,” sets the tone, with front man Scott Evans’ sandpapery croak slicing through the barrage of low-end riffs and hammer-fall drumming. A keen sense of dynamics keeps things interesting all the way through: “Paper Houses” swings like an undertaker on his way to the boneyard, and the cathartic closer, “More Like the Shit Factory,” features a chiming guitar that could almost be called pretty. But the idyll doesn’t last long–these guys have a name to live up to, after all.

1. Fittingly, the band came on just as the sun was going down.

2. The pit on the lawn was huge, and in the golden light it looked like a Tibetan mandala. A really violent mandala.

3. Frontman Tom Araya was exceedingly polite throughout the set, repeatedly thanking us for coming out then dipping into a growl to introduce the next song.

4. Guitarist Kerry King sported an incredibly long beard that was braided into a knot stretching down to his solar plexus. With the lighting just so, the effect was that of a desert monk, maybe. Purity of the faith.

5. The other guitarist, Jeff Hanneman, played a guitar sporting a Heineken graphic. We wondered how much money that brings in. (On a related note, Slayer hockey jerseys were on sale for $90.)

6. Shoreline, with its bright, Disneyish colors and Pirates of the Caribbeanesque wooden footbridges, is a weird (though not unpleasant) place to see a metal show.

7. There was an old guy on the lawn in front of us wearing a shirt that read, “Everything louder than everything else.” There were a lot of kids wandering around carrying branded shopping bags full of the swag they had bought.

8. It was tough not to be reminded all over again exactly how influential Slayer is. Every other band in the world has stolen at least a little something from them.

9. When their set finished, it seemed like the entire amphitheatre rushed for the parking lot. Marilyn Manson might have been the de facto headliner last night, but this was a Slayer crowd.

(Update: I added one more thing after the post went up.)

I was surprised to pick up the Times this morning and see this piece on Death, a Detroit punk band from the early 1970s, a band that was, as the headline so aptly put it, “punk before punk was punk.” Also, these guys were black, in a music scene dominated by Motown on one hand and white rockers like Alice Cooper and Bob Seger on the other. They didn’t fit in, and their record company–which apparently had no idea what to do with them–dropped them after they refused to change their name. They recorded an album but never released it; soon enough, they upped and left Detroit for Vermont, where they became a reggae band. Yeah, truth is stranger than fiction.

I first came across these guys last year on an mp3 blog, a couple songs posted as a stopgap before the full release came out. One of those songs, “Politicians in my eyes,” just blew the doors off: though recorded in 1974, it’s got the buzzsaw guitar work, abrupt tempo changes, and hyper-fast vocals that everybody first heard in Bad Brains five years later. You can hear the anger of those times in the music–the race riots, the war in Vietnam, the general, unshakable feeling that it’s all going to hell and there’s nothing you can do about it. All of that’s in this song. Now that the whole album’s out, you can hear it for yourself. Everybody knows that the MC5 and the Stooges are the godfathers of punk, but these guys deserve a place in the pantheon, too, as the bridge to what followed. So now, more than three decades on, Death gets its due.

I don’t know about you, but heavy metal always gets me thinking. Things like, “Damn, this is some deep stuff–I had never considered the possibility of  a sword coming up through the toilet. But now I’m scared.”

There’s a problem, though. In our harried, time-challenged world, who’s got the time to really soak up the nuances of each and every song on their iPod? If only it were possible, I thought, to condense these profundities into a simpler form, giving them a platform at once more concise and, perhaps, a shade more delicate.

Then it dawned on me: the haiku, the short poetic form that originated in Japan and frequently muses on the changing seasons, might just be the ticket. With that in mind, I bring you Heavy Metal Haikus, a blog cataloging some of my favorite lyrics along with their pithier, haiku-ish offspring. There are a few posts up already; I’ll add more as the mood strikes, so please check back often.

The other night, I went to a punk show in the city, one of those shows with a re-formed, old-school headlining band (Verbal Abuse, in this case–remember them?) and a bunch of less heralded, newer bands in the opening slots. One of these newer bands dressed like it was SoCal 1982, right down to the bandannas tied around the ankles of their motorcycle boots. They were young-looking, sloppy and sort of fun in a retro way, but it got tiring after a few songs–there wasn’t anything even remotely new going on up there. As I watched, it struck me that punk is far more limited as a form than metal. I grew up during a time of transition, when punk bands were abandoning their short-and-fast bursts for slower, heavier, and longer songs. The crossover results were mixed. Some of these bands managed to combine the very worst traits of both genres (witless thrash bands like S.O.D.; the sad-sack late-period Discharge, when audiences booed them off the stage; pretty much any speed metal band). Some were accused of selling out (oh, the rage against Black Flag), but it seemed a natural enough progression. And when it worked, it really worked. C.O.C.’s “Animosity” and Bad Brains’ “I Against I” still get regular play on my turntable.

Simply put, with metal there’s more room to move. Think about what punk stands for: in essence, it’s a big, aural “fuck you,” a broad-brush-strokes sentiment that doesn’t leave much room for nuance or growth. The Ramones, for instance, played the same song for the entirety of their career. Metal, though, for all of its lyrical absurdity, can make virtually any musical statement, from the intricate, neo-classical song structures of Bathory to Motorhead’s fist-pounding 4-4 orthodoxy to the sludgy hammerfall of bands like Sleep and the Melvins.

At its best, punk has incredible power, the equivalent of a smack in the teeth, the force of John Brannon screaming his lungs out on a tiny Detroit stage. But once you’re done screaming, where do you go? In most cases, you cease being a punk band.

I’m aware that this isn’t much of an original thought, but it really hit home for me on this night, watching what felt–and sounded–like a time capsule up on the stage. There was a lot of shouting, a lot of motion, but no heft. As somebody on Yahoo! Answers put it (there’s actually a “punk vs. metal” thread):

punk is fun, metal is deep.

Mali’s Festival in the Desert, the only music festival in the world in which most of the audience arrives by camel, begins tomorrow. A nine-year-old gathering of the tribes that mostly features West African musicians but occasionally draws the likes of former Led Zep frontman Robert Plant, it’s held in Essakane, an ancient Saharan trading post hours from the nearest paved road (which might be in Timbuktu–itself shorthand for “end-of-the-world”). So you get the picture: it’s way the hell out there in the dunes. It’s hosted by the Tuaregs, nomadic tribesmen who ride for days, coming from villages scattered across the sands. Essakane lies at the heart of their ancestral territory, more or less, so the festival is something like a big family reunion. (Of course, the Tuaregs, having never really accepted the idea of the modern nation state, view basically everything around here as their territory. Hence the on-again, off-again insurgencies against the Malian government. But that’s a story for another day.) Writing for San Francisco magazine last year, I gave the festival an SF spin–”Burning Man without the glow sticks” (caveat emptor: PDF).

I’ve never been to the festival, but I have been to Mali, so I find myself wishing I had the cash to get back over there. All the usual suspects are onstage this year: Vieux Farka Toure (son of the late lamented Malian guitar god Ali Farka Toure), who often wears a cowboy hat with his boubou when he plays; Etran Finatawa, from next-door Niger, who are rapidly making a name for themselves in the West; and headliners Tinariwen, aka the Tuareg MC5, former rebels who traded in their AK-47s for guitars. (Imagine them doing “Kick Out the Jams.” Ah, well. I’ll have to settle for “Whole Lotta Love,” with Robert Plant.) What all these guys have in common is searing guitars and clean, crisp rhythms, sounds perfectly adapted to a climate so dry that you can actually feel the hot wind sucking the moisture out of your body (Lessons learned: I got heat exhaustion when I was there last year). Desert blues, indeed.

The only real absence this year, by my lights, is Group Inerane, an obscure seven-piece from Agadez, Niger. When I saw their lp (via demoniazed) buried in the stacks at Amoeba, I had to have it–the cover shows a dude in a turban, staring down the camera, brandishing a battered guitar. And the music: Raw leads and ululating call-and-response, the songs’ unpolished punch enhanced by fluctuating, basement-tapes-style production values. Mythic stuff. Or as the liner notes put it, “the now sound of the Tuareg Guitar Revolution.”

It wasn’t until I saw Bad Brains at Slim’s last year that I realized I had gotten older. These guys, the black rasta-skaters from DC who almost singlehandedly invented hardcore punk, had gotten back together with their original lineup and gone out on tour. As you might expect for a bunch of now-middle aged punks, they were older and a little fatter. But they still played fast and hard, and songs like “Banned in DC” sounded every bit as heavy, 20 years on, as I wanted them to sound.

I wasn’t prepared for the crowd, though, which probably averaged 35 or so in age. There were pockets of younger people in the audience, each of them doing their mohawked, Discharge-patched best to look like they had beamed in from 1985, but most people looked about like me: jeans, black t-shirt, some gray around the temples. And that’s when it hit me: I’m getting old.

Once upon a time, way back in high school, I sang in a hardcore band. Just like thousands of other teenage basement-bands across the country at the time, we spent our days skateboarding, building launch ramps in our driveways, and working up new ways to express our dissatisfaction with the world. This was the Reagan era, after all, and there was plenty to be angry about–the threat of nuclear war, for instance, seemed ever-present back then. And I lived in the suburbs of Detroit, which had a scarred, end-of-days feel to it due to the auto industry’s fall and the crack industry’s rise. Trips downtown were bleak: acres of feral high rises, rubble-strewn yards, even the occasional just-burned house, smoldering away under the winter sun.

I had spent the previous few years listening to the most aggressive metal bands I could find, wearing out the grooves in my Motorhead and Venom lps on a crappy turntable in my bedroom. When I discovered hardcore bands like Black Flag, C.O.C., and the Necros, it was a revelation. Faster and harder than anything that had come before, this was brutal, primal-scream stuff, a rumble you felt in your guts. It opened my eyes. (As it turns out, it also politicized me–a formative experience that I somehow forgot until, decades later, I tried to explain how I ended up a lefty journalist in SF as opposed to, say, a Detroit doctor or Charlotte bank manager. The difference was punk.)

But while the politics were important, it was the DIY aspect of punk that really inspired us. Intention and spirit were all; real musical skill was, in some ways, beside the point. Noticing that lots of punk bands sucked, we naturally thought, “Hey, we could suck like that, too!” And so the band was born. After a bit of debate, we chose the most hardcore moniker we could conjure: Moral Decay–a name that I’m both inordinately proud and sort of embarrassed to say that I came up with. As it turned out, there was a far more legit band from California out there by the same name, but with the Internet just a gleam in some tech wonk’s eye, we didn’t know it.

All through the fall of 1986, we spent our Saturdays in A.’s basement in Birmingham, a neighborhood of sheltering oaks and stately colonials. We wrote and practiced songs, recording them in one or two takes on a four-track, then surfaced to make sandwiches and drink Cokes in the kitchen, descending again to cut a few more minute-long tracks. I screamed through an underpowered microphone, imagining myself another Henry Rollins but sounding way less tough. J. and E. switched off playing distorted, warp-speed bass lines on a keyboard. J. played some guitar and was often lost in the mix entirely. It was A., who even at 14 was an accomplished drummer, and R., who actually knew something about the guitar, who really held the songs together. This was important because everything we did tended toward entropy. Each song ended in chaos, collapsing in on itself as people in the background cursed and threw things across the room.

And then there were the lyrics. To call them sophomoric is to insult sophomores the world over. “BBQ Cat.” “Let’s Mug Someone.” “Kill Your Neighbors.” Lots of songs about skating. A few random, comically mean swipes at other, allegedly less-cool ninth graders (sample lyric: “You suck!”). And buried beneath all that silliness, a budding social conscience. “Turn on the News,” for example, was a muddled attempt at media criticism, inspired by a seething dislike for Detroit’s Ted Baxterish, gadfly-anchorman Bill Bonds, who could have been the inspiration for The Simpsons‘ blowhard reporter Kent Brockman. “Cats in trees and dancing bears/Chase away your fears and soothe your cares/ At home you won’t feel all the hate/Turn on the news/Don’t be late.” But mostly it was dumber stuff on our minds, propelled by double-bass drumming and driving guitar lines.

Our ambition, if not our skill level, was pretty much boundless. We quickly recorded a few tapes that we sold via MaximumRockNRoll, the San Francisco-based punk bible. I whipped up an ad featuring a Dario Argento-esque zombie and big, Impact-style letters (think Lolcat fonts) screaming our name. It sold surprisingly well, and for a while there I had a bunch of hardcore pen pals, from Colorado and California, Germany and Japan. At least a few people, it seemed, actually liked our music.

We never really made it out of the basement, though. I was the only one in the group who actually liked hardcore, and the rest of the band got bored with always playing as fast as possible. Our last recording sessions featured a shambolic cover of New Order’s “Love Vigilantes,” an oddly catchy take on the ’70s-sleazy theme song to the Barney Miller show, and a discoesque original called “Nuclear Destruction.” There was also, as A. reminded me recently, one final blast of fury entitled “Dicks.” That was our swan song.

So winter came, and the band drifted apart, each of us more interested in hanging out with girls or drinking beer than making marginal music that few people would ever hear. As the years passed, most of us lost our copies of the Moral Decay demo. I left my last copy at an ex’s house in Ann Arbor in the 1990s, collateral damage from my last-chopper-out-of-Saigon exit from the relationship.

Out of the blue a few weeks ago, J., one of the keyboard players, got in touch and mailed me a copy of that 22-year-old tape, transferred to CD. I blushed when I put it on for the first time, even though I was by myself. It wasn’t easy to place all the feelings: sadness and nostalgia, pride and self-consciousness. But mostly wonder: I can’t believe how young I sound.

It’s perhaps fitting that as Halloween approaches, the sounds of metal are in the air. On Monday, I saw Oaktown heroes High on Fire (aka the heaviest band on God’s green earth, as I described them in a piece earlier this year), who opened for Opeth, a proggy Swedish metal band that I could take or leave. (To paraphrase a friend: I want my metal to take its cues from Motorhead, not Yes). As always, High on Fire killed it, but they only played for an hour or so. Tonight, the Sword, an Austin, Texas, doom rock act, headlines at Slim’s. These guys hew to the old Black Sabbath playbook–sludgy riffs, a surprisingly swinging rhythm section, and a singer with an (ahem) untraditional voice–and it works. The lyrics, though, are the icing on the cake. A fantasy world of wizards, frost giants, and “fire lances of the ancient hyperzephyrians,” the words are delivered with the utmost seriousness, with the deadpan of a high-stakes poker player. As a palate cleanser, here’s the Sword’s live version of the old ZZ Top burner, “Nasty Dogs and Funky Kings.”

Livingstone, Zambia

Funny where procrastinating will get you. I’ve recently discovered the weird, wild, world of African MP3 blogs–old and new, afrobeat, high-life, and juju, from Angolan electronica to heavy West African funk. That’s how I came across Amanaz, a psych-rock band from northern Zambia, circa 1973. As far as I can tell they only put out one album, called Africa, but it’s a hell of an album. The sound is all fuzzed-out guitars and stoned-sounding lyrics–an African cousin of Cream, as the press release so aptly puts it. Interestingly, they weren’t as sui generis as the idea of an “African Cream” might sound today. They were part of a scene: there’s a recognized Zam-rock sound, with lots of the bands (like The W.I.T.C.H.) hailing from the copperbelt, an area most visitors to Zambia don’t visit (I never got anywhere near there, alas). Unfortunately, it’s impossible to find out much more about them online. Thirty-five years is a long time; who knows where they are now?

A few months after I first heard Amanaz, I found a reissue of Africa while grazing in Amoeba in the Upper Haight–it’s an lp, and it has that satisfying heft of 180-gram vinyl when you plop it down on the turntable. The lps are part of a really limited run, and hand-numbered; mine reads 445/450. Needless to say, it sounds fantastic.

For a taste, check out “Khala My Friend,” hosted on the Gorilla vs. Bear blog.