[FRIDAY PLAYLIST] A Nick Cave Retrospective

Text by Adam Lehrer

I recently interviewed an iconic musician who had a personal relationship with Nick Cave in the ‘80s (not going to say who). This artist felt like Nick Cave’s work had grown stale and safe since his time in The Birthday Party in the early ‘80s. I nearly choked on my chicken avocado omelet. I couldn’t help but detect a hint of jealousy. How could a rock musician of a similar era not be jealous? Nick Cave is arguably the last great rock superstar ARTIST. We have “rock n’ roll artists” of course, but most of them operate so deep in the music underground that the most stardom they could hope for is a Pitchfork review and some free beer after a show. And there are superstar artists: your Kanye’s, your Beyoncé’s, your Frank Ocean’s, your Kendrick’s, etc.. But finding any worthwhile rock music amongst mainstream culture is a fool’s errand. It doesn’t exist. Rock music is not the important pop cultural force that it once was and it never will be again. 

And then you have Nick Cave: world famous, constantly written about, high profile indie rock romances with PJ Harvey and Kylie Minogue, and refusing to waver in his commitment to artistic expression and poetry. Not only has Nick Cave’s output not grown stagnant, it’s grown stronger with each release. Some underground music fans would rather their heroes remain the rail thin, anti-fashion chic, drugged out, intense freaks that they were in their youths. And of course, some artists do their best work during their angry and vivacious ‘20s (unless of course you think ‘Chinese Democracy’ was a good album). Nick Cave, on the other hand, has seen his art evolve with him. Coming onto the late ‘70s London post-punk scene from Australia with his first band, the art damaged bluesy noise rock band the Birthday Party, Cave was a goth rock icon upon first glimpse: tattered clothing, skinny, pale, dark eyes, and a messy tussle of thick black hair. But Cave matured, and his music with The Bad Seeds would grow more musical and in some ways, more experimental. Eventually cutting heroin from his diet, Cave’s ideas grew more nuanced and detailed as his life stabilized with fatherhood and marriage. One of the greatest songwriters of the last thirty years, Nick Cave has never remained still. Oddly, Cave is now more Leonard Cohen than Iggy Pop, more Neil Young than John Lydon. For Nick Cave, maturity doesn’t denote an acceptance of the banal. Count in the fact that he’s a published novelist and screenwriter of brutal Western film Proposition and the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, there are very few artists on Earth who have been able to build an aesthetic as definitive as the one Nick Cave that has built.

2016 has been the best year for music that I can remember in my entire life. From the top of the mainstream to the bottom dwellers of the underground, every single day I read about a record on The Quietus or Resident Advisor or Pitchfork that would blow my mind later that day. Now consider that, and consider the fact that Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ recently released Skeleton Tree, the band’s 16th record, is easily in the top five of the best albums released this year and very possibly the best record of Nick’s or the Bad Seeds’ careers. 

We all know the tragic circumstances surrounding the recording of Skeleton Tree. In 2015, Cave’s son Arthur (a twin to brother Earl, both of whom appeared in the Cave documentary 20,000 Days on Earth, watching DePalma’s Scarface contentedly in bed with dad), who was born to Cave and his wife Suzie Pitt in 2000, plummeted to his death in a freak accident whilst hiking near their home in Brighton, England. Death and loss have always floated above Cave’s poetry like inevitable harbingers (Pitt has expressed a belief in her husband’s ability to write prophetic lyrics, on previous masterpiece Push the Sky Away Cave sings on the track ‘Jubilee Street,’ "I'm transforming / I'm vibrating / I'm glowing / I'm flying / Look at me now / I'm flying,” there’s no way to listen to that song now without thinking about the tragedy that would soon follow its creation). A noted agnostic, Cave seems to have doubts about god and religion but welcomes hope that there could be such a creator. His morbid fascination with death, both natural and murderous, have been loaded with pathos and conflict since the beginning of his career. On Skeleton Tree, Cave has to confront the most powerful grief a man can endure from the first person view point. These lyrics have no protective distance. 

Musically, Skeleton Tree plays like a building on the sound that The Bad Seeds developed with Push the Sky Away: sparse, experimental, deeply musical, and washed in ambient sound. To look at the evolution of Cave’s career one has to examine the chronological list of his most important collaborators. The Birthday Party was largely birthed out of Cave and guitarist Rowland S. Howard’s deep love of the blues, Iggy, and The Damned, and the band dissolved when Cave wanted to take his sound further out (to his credit, Howard’s solo career is one of the most irresponsibly underrated collections of blues punk in the history of rock music). The Bad Seeds were born out of Cave’s emerging friendship with Einsturnzende Neubauten founder Blix Bargeld when the two were both living in Berlin. Bargeld, a lover of komische bands like Neu and Can as well as experimental music, defined The Bad Seeds as a band informed by deep musicality and experimental tendencies as much as it was by blues and rock heritage. But after Bargeld left the band in 2003, Warren Ellis was able to come to the fore of the band. Warren Ellis, a virtuoso guitar and violin player, multi-instrumentalist, and founder of Australian instrumental rock band Dirty 3, has proved to be Cave’s artistic soulmate. In 30,000 Days on Earth, we see Cave laying down the lyrics to “Higgs Bolson Blues” while Ellis strums a beautiful guitar pattern. Cave starts swaying and dancing subtly to the music, realizing just how fucking good it is. That scene cuts to the heart of their partnership, a partnership that has produced the beauty of The Bad Seeds, the primitive thud of Grinderman, and the expansiveness of their film scores.

Ellis’ watermarks are all over Skeleton Tree. The electronic swaths of ambience that cloak Cave’s voice in mysticism, on tracks like ‘Magneto’ and ‘Rings of Saturn,’ that’s Warren’s KORG synthesizer. The lush string arrangements on ‘Jesus Alone’ and ‘Skeleton Tree’ are Ellis’ composition at its apex. The duo of Cave and Ellis has become the Bad Seeds’ focal point. Jim Sclavunos, Martyn P Casey, Thomas Wylder, and newer guitarist George Vjestica recognize this notion, and this band has never felt like such a well-oiled machine like it does on this record (with a line-up that has been playing together for some 16 years now, that really is remarkable).

Cave’s poetry has largely been founded upon the grief Cave experienced when his beloved father died when he was only 19. But all those songs have been written with a hindsight view of that loss. Arthur died in the middle of this recording. It’s impossible to not hear pain dripping from the cadences of every uttered syllable on this record. Are we projecting these emotions as listeners and as lovers of Cave the man and the artist? Cave is one of those artists that feels like your friend when you really get attached to his music and his words, and empathetic viewpoints are easy to take when it comes to this kind of tragedy. But no. I think someone who knew nothing of Cave or the accident would listen to Skeleton Tree and know that this man singing was bleeding from the heart. At one point on the song Girl in Pain, Cave sings, “Don’t touch me.” He is inconsolable. He doesn’t want to be consoled. But he still wants to sing. 

[FRIDAY PLAYLIST] Alan Vega: His Music, His Influences, His Influence

Text by Adam Lehrer

 

This is probably the longest playlist that I’ve ever fashioned for this column, and sometimes, size matters. The influence of Alan Vega in his capacity as the frontman for Suicide and as a solo artist cannot be understated. It has been a very sad year for music, with the deaths of Prince, Bowie, and now, Alan Vega. The influences of Bowie and Prince loom titanic as well, but in a much different way than Vega. Bowie, for instance, holds an influence over the culture of self-presentation. He taught countless artists from countless mediums to be ruthlessly committed to their own actualized selfs. A similar statement could be made about Prince, though pop music would also radically alter in his wake. But Vega stands amongst a very few artists that created a sound so singular that one can audibly hear elements of it in the slew of genres and sub-genres that would follow. From the top of the charts to the scourges of the underground, Suicide’s sonic approach has been obsessed over and employed by musicians for decades. Who else can claim to monumentally influence pop music in such a direct way? The Velvet Underground, to be sure. The Stooges, without question. Hendrix, maybe. But I don’t think any of those artists can claim to be the progenitors of as many sub-cultures as Vega, Martin Rev, and Suicide have proved: Post-Punk, Industrial, Techno, Synth-pop, IDM, Trip-hop, and even contemporary Hip-hop to an extent. Damn. Full disclosure: Suicide and Alan Vega were responsible for much of the music that I hold dear, and there are few artists throughout the history of music that had as profound an effect on my own personal taste.


THE MUSIC:

At the risk of sounding like a hack, I’ve often thought of Alan Vega as the musical equivalent of William S. Burroughs in one fairly important way. Burroughs, the junkie god of Avant-Garde 20th century literature, was actually the corporate heir to a massive fortune, a Missouri blue blood gone wrong. As experimental as his work grew, it never lost a palatable sense of Americana-rooted sentimentality. There’s a real “American tale” around his mythos. Vega, the junkie god of downtown NYC street-punk, was raised in a similarly American archetypical home: the son of Jewish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn. His parents weren’t artists, and his early musical exposure was mostly the country western favored by his parents and a little later, the early rock stars. 

But, Vega was also a visual artist first. His infamous light sculptures inspire the same sense of dread-laden awe as artists like Hermann Nitsch. But he grew disillusioned with the art world and started making music after meeting best friend Martin Rev. Together they formed Suicide. Vega wrote poems about and created music for the working class. That sense of real struggle was what interested him. But at the same time, he never really was able to shake off his artistic background. Alan Vega as a frontman for Suicide was almost like a character born of conceptual art. It was like Vega created this rock star persona for himself to deliver his message in a way that could be relatable to his target audience (in both Suicide and later on as a solo artist), but was never able to fully detach from his own artistic self-awareness. Suicide really was one of the first bands that drew a line between the world of avant-garde and pop music and delicate walked that line with the swaggering vocals of Vega and the minimally harsh but thoroughly catchy synth melodies and baselines of Vega. That might be Suicide’s most fascinating trait as a band. They inspired experimental artists to flirt with the mainstream and inspired the mainstream to flirt with experimental art. That is why their influence grew so titanic. They drew attention to the fact that drawing a line between mainstream and underground was pretentious, short-sighted, and stupid. All that really matters is authenticity: are you creating the art that best communicates your ideas and delivering it in the medium best suited to the audience that will best understand your ideas. And nothing was more authentic than Suicide and Alan Vega.


THE INFLUENCES:


As stated above, Vega’s musical influences started with the building blocks of Rock n’ Roll: Elvis Presley, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee. He also declared having been massively in love with the voice of Roy Orbison. When you actually examine those first two Suicide records, it might be surprising to some how much those early rock stars impacted the actual Suicide sound. Vega to be certain looked towards stars like Elvis for his own self-mythologizing as a self-actualized rock star: charisma, mystery, swagger. But also, the Suicide songs often sound like early rock ditties degraded by updates in technology. But the minimal structures and near-singalong quality made the experimental approach all the more thrilling. Vega also is something of a crooner.

But to ignore the experimental music that influenced Vega and Suicide would be grossly negligent. Krautrock, or the experimental rock music that came out of Germany in the ‘70s, is the most obvious precursor to Suicide. The minimal structures of Faust, the delirious funkiness of Can, and the digital mania of Kraftwerk are all massively important to the Suicide sound. Though from New York and not Germany, the band Silver Apples were one of the first experimental rock groups to use synthesizers, and are hard not to think of when thinking about Suicide. Vega was also a noted classical musical enthusiast, having developed an interest in sonics by scratching classical records to make them sound weirder. The German 20th Century avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen had a profound impact on Vega by teaching that within the simple blip of an electronic sound comes a world of possibilities.

And finally: The Stooges. Vega was blown away when he saw The Stooges in 1969, going home to play ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ on repeat. The Stooges were intimately aware of the fact that a direct and academic-less approach to music might be the most profound artistic experience: “once you’re making music for artists, you’re fucked,” Iggy seemed to suggest while shouting until his lungs gave out and rolling around in broken glass on the stage. Suicide took this to heart and sought to provoke audiences through direct violent gesture. Not for art, but for the sake of provocation. And pure provocation is at its essence, the purest form of art.


THE INFLUENCE:

Deathrock, despite its silly name, brought a new heir of theatricality and art to the Punk Rock attack. Those theatrics and sinister nature were directly inspired by the musings of Alan Vega and the tribal nature of some of Suicide’s heavier music. The sense of atmospherics and theatrics inspired by Suicide are best felt by the Northampton Post-punks Bauhaus. Bauhaus knew the power of menacing stage presence combined with repetitive rhythms working themselves up to primordial states. Nick Cave as a young Heroin shooting poet in Australia also took note of Suicide’s approach. Though his first band The Birthday Party weren’t really “Deathrock,” per se (they were equally important in the development of Noise Rock for instance), Cave certainly shared a taste for theatrics and stripped down rhythms.

The early Industrial bands took the music of Suicide but applied a heaping dose of abstract theory and avant-garde art to it, taking aggressive electronic-based music down to the bottom of the rabbit hole. The legendary artist Genesis P. Orridge formed his/her first band Throbbing Gristle to explore the most rank aspects of the human condition: obsession, hatred, compulsion. They used confrontational imagery such as pornography and Third Reich propaganda, gaining them a notorious reputation. The desire to provoke outrage to provoke discussion shares characteristics with Vega and Suicide. But Throbbing Gristle’s electronics were unpolished, using samples and synths to provide a degraded backdrop to spoken word poetry or lyrics. They are what Suicide would have sounded like had Suicide freed themselves from the desire to make pop songs. Genesis would continue this crusade with group Psychic T.V., using video art as a backdrop to its industrial soundscapes. Industrial was in many ways the most interesting form of experimental music in the early ‘80s, and it’s hard to imagine it coming into fruition with the influence of Suicide. 

Just thought I’d throw this in here. But Suicide’s impact was felt even by mainstream artists during their time. It’s been stated that Ric Ocasek loved Suicide so much, that he recorded The Cars’ album Candy-O as an audition to produce Suicide’s second album. Which he eventually did. Perhaps even more famously, Bruce Springsteen LOVED Suicide, and the duo inspired him to strip his sound back to its bare essentials: rhythmic acoustic guitar patterns and his one-of-a-kind rock n’ roll voice. Low and behold, he recorded Nebraska, the best album of his career. Track State Trooper sounds like the acoustic guitar version of Suicide’s first record, and features Bruce doing his best Alan Vega howl.

1980s goth music, with its tendency to incorporate elements of dance music into its darkly bombastic take on rock, was influenced by Suicide’s approach. While Suicide generally worked in minimalist structures, Goth acts often took the underlying tribalistic patterns of Suicide and then cleaned it up with big stadium sounds. The Sisters of Mercy, for instance, incorporated loud and vivacious elements of Psych Rock and Metal over dance beats indebted to Suicide’s second LP. Though often ignored by the Rock history hierarchies, one need not do more than take one listen to The Sisters of Mercy’s Floodland collection to find a startlingly unique unit deftly capable of incorporating its influences (like Suicide) into a new and exciting Pop Music sound.

Suicide was so diverse in its approach that it could realistically appease the more adventurous of disco fans while also holding similarities in common with the No Wave bands that played New York directly after punk exploded: Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, James Chance and the Contortions, DNA and Mars, amongst others, differed from Punk in that Punk brought Rock back to its three-chord roots, while No Wave bands were referencing genres as diverse as Jazz and Psych and stripping Rock of melody and tone all together. Suicide certainly had beats and structures, but the duo’s raw primal energy doesn’t feel out of place in the conversation surrounding No Wave. Perhaps that raw dissonance is what attracted a young Steve Albini to Suicide’s music when he decided to eschew a drummer in his first band, Big Black, in favor of a Roland drum machine. Albini learned from Suicide that when there is no human error involved in creating the back beat of a sound, then that sound can become as ferocious and ugly as humanly possible. Big Black seemed to apply the violence of Suicide’s music, amplify it, and strip it dry of any sort of sexuality or funkiness that was unquestionably an aspect of Suicide’s music.


The earliest Techno music that was blaring out of Detroit club speakers in the 1980s often felt like Suicide beats amped up and made danceable. These producers, including Juan Atkins, Carl Craig, Underground Resistance, and Derrick May, certainly were indebted to Disco and House Music before them, but perhaps due to the outsider spirit of Detroit itself, these guys were experimentalists. Perhaps tired of playing Donna Summers tracks to get their crowds moving, they forged a sound of their own. Due to lack of money and technology, Suicide’s minimal synths and barebones rhythms proved a fitting jumping off point for Detroit Techno artists who instantly recognized that MDMA and amphetamines in combination with simple and repetitive electronic beats make for one hell of a good time. 10 or so years later, Daft Punk would realize that that same formula could be applied to a stadium full of people.

By the late ‘80s, Brits had had exposure to countless exciting sub-cultures of music: Punk Rock, Hippie Psychedelia, Hardcore, Acid House, Brit-Pop, Goth, and on and on and on. At a point, it was way too difficult to pick one type of music. So some Brits didn’t. Bobby Gillespie was among them when he decided to leave The Jesus And Mary Chain and form his own band Primal Scream. Primal Scream drew upon all of Gillespie’s musical loves: The Rolling Stones, Acid House, Post-punk, and without question, Suicide. Suicide, being one of the first bands to marry Electronic instrumentation with Pop song formats, cannot be excluded from the conversation surrounding Neo-Psychedelia and Primal Scream. Spacemen 3 (one of my top 10 all-time bands, by the way) didn’t use electronics much, but both its members, Sonic Boom and Jason Pierce, were self-avowed Suicide fanatics and used Suicide’s minimal rhythms in their drawn-out, druggy, and pained songs. Spacemen 3 understood that sometimes, the most far out music is the most barebones.

Suicide, perhaps more than any other band, holds equal influence within underground music scenes AND mainstream Pop music. This was particularly true with the advent of Synth-pop in the ‘80s. Depeche Mode, Soft Cell (Tainted Love is one of the best songs all time, am I right) essentially drew from Dance music but applied vocals. Sound familiar? Though Suicide of course used this approach for darker purposes, the ground was laid for what pop would become and still pretty much is. Dance music that you can singalong to. Rihanna, Gaga, Miley and whoever else, weirdly enough, can thank Suicide.

Merrill Beth Disker, better known to the world as Peaches, achieved her sound by picking up a Roland MC-505 drum machine in her compositions (later, M.I.A. would pick up the same machine, inspired by Peaches). Her biggest hit, Fuck the Pain Away, she played on a whim live. Its funky but aggro sound is ripped right from the Suicide playbook. In fact, Suicide’s output was highly fetishized by the group of young musicians playing dance-y Post-punk music around downtown Manhattan in the ‘00s. Some of the music (dubbed “Electroclash” by the NME set) wasn’t all that good. But it had its true talents of course, including the then-Brooklyn-based Liars, who would go from dance-punk to one of Indie’s truly experimental bands.
 

Perhaps this is a reach, but when I first heard Kanye West’s Yeezus back in 2013, well, at first I was blown the fuck away. To this day, I think it’s the most extraordinary work of art that Pop music has offered this millennium. But also, I couldn’t help but think of Suicide. Yeezus was heavily indebted to experimental electronic music. Though it’s maximal all the way through, it often feels like a swirl of various minimal electronic sounds. I can’t not think of Suicide when hearing it. Also, the self-aggrandizing and actualization that ‘Ye employs on the record feels like the self-conscious “rock star as art statement” that Alan Vega was the king of. In fact, a lot of contemporary Hip-hop, or “trap,” and its tendency to bring aggressive electronic textures to Hip-hop beats, reminds me of those first few stunning Suicide records. No longer is Hip-hop solely sample-based, instead, producers are actively engaging with synths, drum machines, and all manner of processed sonic goodies. 

[FRIDAY PLAYLIST] Primal Scream Alternative Dance

Text by Adam Lehrer

Primal Scream just released its 10th album, Chaosmosis, this week. The band has always flirted with mainstream pop and dance rhythms, but on this record the band is fully embracing indie pop, collaborating with Sky Ferreira on the excellent Where the Light Gets In and Haim on the less good Trippin' On Your Love. The band has evolved past the alternative dance sound they helped define. I won't comment on the quality of the album, but let's ust say Bobby Gillepsie has not let the past define him.

Alternative dance more or less set the pace for what pop music would become in the decades to follow. It was the first time when indie rock kids would dance at raves and DJs would open for rock bands. In the Information Age, peoples' tastes have grown even further outward, and no one blinks twice when you see the lead singer of your favorite rock band dancing on Molly at Output.

Alternative pop was basically broken down into three eras. The first came out of England in the early and mid-80s, starting with the Madchester (but that's for another playlist) scene based around Factory Records honcho Tony Wilson (immortalized by Steeve Coogan in 24 Hour Party People) and his club The Hacienda. New Order, formed in the ashes of Joy Division after Ian Curtis' suicide, was arguably the first band to approach dance music from a traditional rock attack. Later,The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays would own the club with their own riffs and dance rhythms. Primal Scream, formed by Gillepsie after his tenure in The Jesus and Mary Chain, was an amalgam of a love for LSD-worshipping psych rock, amphetamine-driven punk, and MDMA-laced acid house. Scream's debut Screamdelica is the landmark album of alternative dance music.

The second wave, in the mid-'90s, had more in line with techno and dance music that it did rock music. Groups like The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers, and to a lesser extent The Crystal Method, had the anthemic bombast of punk and rock but used all electronic sounds. These groups did however predate mainstream EDM with their ability to take the sounds of the acid house and make it work within a stadium context.

In the early '00s, the rock sound came back into the onslaught of Alt-Dance bands. For a while, it was the sound of New York, with The Rapture's House of Jealous Lovers blaring out of every speakersystem south of 14th street. Kathleen Hanna followed up her legendary riot grrl punk band Bikini Kill with a decidedly dance-leaning trio, Le Tigre. And perhaps the most successful of all of these bands proved to be James Murphy and LCD Soundsystem, who used Alternative Dance as a conceptual art project and had massive effect on popular music at large.

[FRIDAY PLAYLIST] Arca's Mind Blow Of A New Record Will Have You Taking Personal Inventory

Communication by means of social media and technology can no longer be argued as being a less expressive mode of communication than any other. It’s quite interesting that people are using these modes of communication to, for lack of a better term, pour their hearts out. What else is a Pinterest page other than a digital bearing of the soul? “This is who I am,” is what we communicate, and we do so through image and curation of content just as much as we do through the written word.

Perhaps this is why Venezuela-born wunderkind electronic music producer Arca feels like one of the most important artists on planet Earth after just two solo records. On 2014’s ‘Xen,’ Arca developed a musical language that could be abrasive and sentimental, spiritual and atheist, and masculine and feminine all at once. Though good electronic music has never been devoid of emotion (can you honestly tell me you feel nothing listening to Brian Eno’s ‘Music for Airports’ or Aphex Twin’s ‘Selected Ambient Works Vol.2’ or LFO’s ‘Frequencies?’), it doesn’t seem that electronic music has ever been made with the intention of expression as such an obvious ambition.

Arca’s newest full-length ‘Sinner’ feels like an even more realized effort than ‘Xen’ and after only a few listens I can already argue it’s one of the year’s best releases in an extraordinarily strong year for new tunes. Arca’s millennial approach (that must have certainly been honed as being part of Shayne Oliver of Hood By Air’s GHETTO GOTHIK parties in which industrial music from the ‘80s and Houston rap were played in equal measure) finds Arca digging deep into his soul. The music is danceable, but dancing is not its ultimate conceptual purpose. It’s about looking within and taking personal inventory. Who am I? What do I like? Who do I like? These questions are asked throughout the record. Arca doesn’t need the written word to express himself. It’s all there in the sonics.

Arca’s aesthetic is clearly in high-demand. The man has of course been responsible for sounds on records of three of contemporary pop music’s most fascinating and experimental superstars: Kanye West, Bjork, and FKA Twigz. But it is in his music that Arca most defines himself.

In an article by Pitchfork, writer Phillip Sherburne deduced that Arca does seem to be the leader of a new aesthetic in electronic music along with artists like Rabit and Lotic. These artists are always weird, sometimes queer, and absolutely deconstruct what we assume electronic dance music is. With these Autre playlists, I have often dug up music that has been personally important to me in my own history. But the release of ‘Mutant’ has me thinking about the here and now. The artists on this playlist are some of the most important and culturally relevant artists working in any medium today. Hyperbole? You wish.

 
 

[AUTRE PLAYLIST] Second Wave of Black Metal

Text by Adam Lehrer

Before I continue, I should mention that I really don’t listen to extreme music with the same regularity that I once did. When I was about 20 to 22 years old (2009 to 2011 or so) I was living in Tucson, studying creative writing, and carrying a major chip on my shoulder. I was wearing black exclusively (even in punishing Arizona heat), watching horror films, reading Anton Lavey, using hard drugs, and listening to the most extreme forms of music that I could find: harsh noise, death metal, power electronics, power violence, dark ambient, and lots and lots of black metal. It was fun for a while, but I lacked the pervasive sense of unhappiness to really commit to that lifestyle. So I moved on, or back, to other forms of music that I loved: hip-hop, dance music, psychedelic rock, jazz, punk, etc.. But an appreciation for the explorers of extreme sound has persisted.

So, while introducing this new playlist, “Second Wave of Black Metal,” I would like to talk about neo black metal band Deafheaven and their new record, ‘New Bermuda.’ Metal traditionalists have called this band a slew of ugly names largely consisting of barbs aimed at their hipsterdom or perceived upper middle class backgrounds. Not only is the assertion that these guys are rich kids false, it’s also ridiculous. To say that only certain types of people can make certain types of music is classist and beneath us. I despise when people tell me that they hate Drake because he isn’t “hard enough.” What does his hardness have to do with his music? To say only people that grew up poor and in gangs can make hip-hop is beyond reductive and would have robbed us of a great pop music talent. Drake is a monumental talent, and I am glad he makes music. Good music is good music, regardless of who is making it and where they are from.

That being said, I don’t think Deafheaven is that solid of a band, period. Black metal in 2015 feels boring regardless of its creators. The world has moved past double bass kicking drums and agonized screams. These guys may love the music, but it’s just not as powerful as it once was when black metal was new. The second wave of Norwegian black metal was a fiercely experimental and exciting wave of new music. My belief in this fact has nothing to do with the makes of this music actually burning churches. It is that the music excites me. That is what we judge artists by: their art. Not their backgrounds or their authenticity as perceived by you.

Adam Lehrer is a writer, journalist, and art and fashion critic based in New York City. On top of being Autre’s fashion and art correspondent, he is also a regular contributor to Forbes Magazine. His unique interests in punk, hip hop, skateboarding and subculture have given him a distinctive, discerning eye and voice in the world of culture, et al. Oh, and he also loves The Sopranos. Follow him on Instagram: @adam102287. FOLLOW AUTRE ON INSTAGRAM TO STAY  IN TOUCH: @AUTREMAGAZINE

[AUTRE PLAYLIST] Praise Jah: The Best of Dub and Reggae

Once in a while I find myself pulling out my dub and reggae records: Lee “Scratch” Perry’s ‘Ape-ology,’ The Congos’ ‘Heart of the Congo,’ Augustus Pablo’s ‘King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown,’ and even that glory hogging egomaniac Bob Marley, who just couldn’t live without the toe (I’ll quantify soon). I don’t listen to these records for the same reasons that hippie stoner burnouts do, which is primarily for the sake of wearing Birkenstocks and drug rugs to more occasions. I have always loved the music’s textures: the melodies swirling into one another all tied together through one very simple and elegant beat. It is very heady music, indeed, but it’s also very musical music.

Some people don’t understand the difference between dub and reggae music so I’m going to put it down for you. Reggae was a music that combined traditional Jamaican elements with the pop and rock music coming from the States. Dub borrows its name from the practice of dubbing instrumental, rhythmic versions of reggae songs to the B sides of 45 rpm singles. Basically, reggae requires a band and dub needs studio wizards. Reggae mostly has singing dub mostly doesn’t. That process of dubbing over reggae bands led to some of 1970s Jamaica’s best releases like ‘King Tubby Meets the Rockers Uptown’ and Keith Hudson’s ‘Rebel Dub.’

Dub is experimental music at heart. It requires the producer to sit in the studio for days on end searching for new sounds and precious rhythms. That sonic joie de vivre can be felt in every aspect of the sound if you really let yourself dive into this music. On the flip side, there was nothing experimental about Bob Marley. In fact, I had grown disdainful of Bob Marley; he had been ruined by the legions of frat boys playing “No Woman, No Cry” at keg parties when all of a sudden the white guy with dreadlocks deciphering Marley’s lyrics pukes all over your Nikes (True story). But last year I read a brilliant and violent book, Jamaican American novelist Marlon James’s ‘A Brief History of Seven Killings.’ The book follows Bob Marley’s attempted murderers in the days leading up to their assassination attempt on his life. It got me thinking about Marley again. Here was a guy who just loved having fun, loved soccer, loved women, and loved playing music being elevated to the status of a deity, certainly in his home country and even in the U.S. in some respects. But he was up to the task, and when you hear some of his songs you realize why he was the musical ambassador of Jamaica to the U.S. The man had the gift of connecting. There is concert footage of Bob on Youttube that will still make you feel like he’s singing right to you.  Few have ever been able to command a stage and elicit that kind of joy from an audience. But the pressure that man felt must have been intense. It would be like if Kanye West was born in a third world country and was tasked with not just being a symbol of hope for his people, but immediately being forced to become a political figure. Bob Marley literally woke up one day to find that the weight all of Jamaica was sitting on his shoulders, and he just wanted to play.

Adam Lehrer is a writer, journalist, and art and fashion critic based in New York City. On top of being Autre’s fashion and art correspondent, he is also a regular contributor to Forbes Magazine. His unique interests in punk, hip hop, skateboarding and subculture have given him a distinctive, discerning eye and voice in the world of culture, et al. Oh, and he also loves The Sopranos. Follow him on Instagram: @adam102287

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