RIFF MARKET

---

Throughout this week and probably next, Riff Market is proud to publish some friends' remarks on Music 2006, with the emphasis on riffs. Each contributor was asked to spend only 35 minutes on his piece, though there were no particulars given topic-wise. Check back mid-day for the next one. Thanks for reading. --NBS

---

YEAR IN RIFFS: SEAN FENNESSEY
Kim Weston: “Take Me In Your Arms (Rock Me A Little While)”

The author of this web site (his name is not Phil) and I had a conversation recently where he floated an idea (one of his big ones) about music that is designed to be heard in certain formats. Not so much the cassette vs. compact disc convo (though I would have had that one) or the compact disc vs. vinyl one (I definitely would not have had that one), but rather the sort that involves a song that is meant to be heard via digitally encoded sound. He used Motown’s sound as a counterpoint to the .mp3 revo-solution. Motown was built to last on the radio, on AM stations high in treble and tone, lacking the deep bass, he said. Digital music is meant to amplify deep, full sounds, ones that don’t need a high-pitched melody to win. This, he says, or David Banner says, or Not Phil Banner says, is why Southern rap music does so well with downloaders. The compositions are by design digital sonatas. Not Phil is a pretty sharp guy, so I kinda took him at his word and gave him the old “Oh, wouldn’t that be interesting, you wily muskrat” chitchat back. Right back at him – pow. So, later we go on our merry way (at least, my way was merry. His could have been paved with broken bottles of Cristal. I blame Jay-Z.) and I start thinking about his thoughts on Motown. I’d seen Dreamgirls, the major motion picture starring people you’ve heard of, the night prior and was galvanized by one of the stagy, cutesy scenes in the film. The burgeoning record entrepreneur from Detroit that basically is Berry Gordy, played by Jamie Foxx, fashions a recording studio out of his garage/car dealership, just as Gordy did when he opened Hitsville USA in Detroit in 1959. During a recording sesh in the film, a drummer uses the spokes of a rim as a hi-hat, and a bassist plucks cables and a man holding a greasy chain, one you might see in a garage like that, shakes it melodically, as if it were a tambourine or jingle bell. It’s a real Emmet Otter Jug Band moment – DIY shit. My major trouble with this scene is if you own a car dealership, one assumes you can buy a goddamn tambourine, but this is another matter. So I leave Not Phil, scurry up my stairs, sit down in front of my desk and slide too-tight headphones on. I start Hitsville USA: The Motown Singles Collection 1959-1971, a boxed set released in 1992 that’s probably never going to be topped as far as by-the-second quality goes. So I crank from the beginning and something becomes clearer and clearer. Not Phil is full of fucking shit. Sure, the bass is buried in the cut, and my rubbish hearing phones can’t churn up the quality. But on Kim Weston’s “Take Me In Your Arms (Rock Me A Little While),” the opening seconds – SHOTGUN SNARE, PUFFY ¾ BASS DRUM, A TAMBOURINE (OR A GREASY CHAIN OR WHATEVER) – aren’t designed for anything. The vocal is faint, distant, traipsing away from the rest of the sounds which are sharp and sinewy. The song structure may have been written for the radio, in so far as it’s catchy as all hell, thanks to HDH and Smokey and Gordy himself and scads of other songwriters and the rhythm band and that greasy chain. But it’s not written with an emitted sound in mind. Same goes for Martha Reeves & The Vandellas “Nowhere to Run” and The Temptations “My Girl” (have you heard that bass line, Not Phil!) and especially The Contours’ “Do You Love Me, which feels like it was recorded on a hematoma on my skull, it’s that bulbous, the opposite of buried. They couldn’t have been written that way because they were recorded in a godforsaken garage – though admittedly the garage thing is a myth, the studio at Hitsville USA was actually just out in the back of the building. At the same time, Phil Spector arranges in a million dollar studio. Brian Wilson burns downs homes to find the perfect sound. Burt Bacharach composes for seventy piece orchestras. Berry Gordy puts Kim Weston’s two octave off-key purr in a fucking converted garage. Any why, cuz he had to that’s why, so we don’t begrudge – only black artists released music on Motown until Rare Earth came along and fucked things up, things were tight in the beginning. But this insinuation that someone was writing for the acoustics of the radio is snake oil salesman shit and I won’t stand for it. So: 6 Riffs.

91 YEAR-END RIFFS

Labels: year-in-riffs-2006