What can I say about Harem in Tuscany on this, a PG sort of blog (the occasional F-bomb notwithstanding)? In trying to keep it clean I won't compare portions of it to climactic physical acts. I'll simply point out that this song almost never fails to kick my behind right out its doldrums and get it shakin'. And for a Monday night, what could be more in demand? I'll just get back to dancing wildly about my living room and let you get on with it.
The other day I started a lengthy consideration of the history of the fadeout in commercial music. I started in the fifties because, well, a lot of what I have from the 40s is live big band and swing which generally ends a great deal differently than studio recordings. Let’s turn to the next three decades.
For the sixties I tried Manfred Mann’s Do Wah Diddy Diddy which ends abruptly after about twelve seconds of repeat and The Angels with My Boyfriend’s Back that closes after about seven seconds of fade with a little noodling just before it. The Dixie Cups only sang Iko Iko for 2:03 but the last ten seconds was fadeout. Martha & the Vandellas gave Jimmy Mack about five seconds to fade.
In the 70s I went for Boogie Nights from Heatwave, which fades for a whopping 40 seconds at the end, and The Guess Who’s Clap for the Wolfman, with a shorter fade of about five seconds but about twenty-five seconds of fade-able repeat before that. And Styx stayed true to form with about 25 seconds of fade at the end of Come Sail Away. Even The Clash got in on the act with twenty faded seconds at the end of All the Young Punks.
Then I moved to the 80s. I tried Run DMC and Aerosmith’s Walk This Way, which doesn’t fade but includes about ten seconds of basic sample loop at the end. The Pointer Sisters closed The Neutron Dance with fifteen seconds of fade after about thirty seconds repetition. The Housemartins noodled around for about twenty seconds to finish Freedom but the only actual fade is about two seconds of the last note. U2 took their own 30-second repeat (and a quick, two-second fade) at the end of New Year’s Day but Prince, after a full minute of self-indulgent wailing, ends Let’s Go Crazy with a scream and a downstroke.
And so we see a general expansion of the fadeout in the seventies and a backing off into the 80s, but not without exceptions. I’ve purposely stuck with more mainstream music for these examples. I wonder if the expansion of the fade was a record company push or if the musicians or producers heard and liked it. You can read the end of this series and see if I think this is the end of the fade. Any thoughts?
For the sixties I tried Manfred Mann’s Do Wah Diddy Diddy which ends abruptly after about twelve seconds of repeat and The Angels with My Boyfriend’s Back that closes after about seven seconds of fade with a little noodling just before it. The Dixie Cups only sang Iko Iko for 2:03 but the last ten seconds was fadeout. Martha & the Vandellas gave Jimmy Mack about five seconds to fade.
In the 70s I went for Boogie Nights from Heatwave, which fades for a whopping 40 seconds at the end, and The Guess Who’s Clap for the Wolfman, with a shorter fade of about five seconds but about twenty-five seconds of fade-able repeat before that. And Styx stayed true to form with about 25 seconds of fade at the end of Come Sail Away. Even The Clash got in on the act with twenty faded seconds at the end of All the Young Punks.
Then I moved to the 80s. I tried Run DMC and Aerosmith’s Walk This Way, which doesn’t fade but includes about ten seconds of basic sample loop at the end. The Pointer Sisters closed The Neutron Dance with fifteen seconds of fade after about thirty seconds repetition. The Housemartins noodled around for about twenty seconds to finish Freedom but the only actual fade is about two seconds of the last note. U2 took their own 30-second repeat (and a quick, two-second fade) at the end of New Year’s Day but Prince, after a full minute of self-indulgent wailing, ends Let’s Go Crazy with a scream and a downstroke.
And so we see a general expansion of the fadeout in the seventies and a backing off into the 80s, but not without exceptions. I’ve purposely stuck with more mainstream music for these examples. I wonder if the expansion of the fade was a record company push or if the musicians or producers heard and liked it. You can read the end of this series and see if I think this is the end of the fade. Any thoughts?
It always surprises me how little attention jazz master Manu Dibango’s 1994 album “Wakafrika
” gets. I adore the thing and listen to it often. For a man credited with inventing makossa his reimagining of his own Soul Makossa seems to have gone under the radar for years. He’s got a beautiful version of Paul Simon’s Homeless on it, too, and Wimoweh with Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Biko with Peter Gabriel.But you know my weakness for French lyrics even when, as is the case here, the title of the song comprises 80% of the words. And so today I’m sharing with you Ça Va Chouia which means…I have no freaking idea. I know if I say “Comment ça va?” I'm asking, “How are you?” and "Ça va?" is a more casual, "How's it going?" but that's about it. Apparently chouia means "a little bit" so "A little bit of how's it going?" I dunno.
The whole song sounds vaguely Middle Eastern, but you can hear a lot of other influences as well. Dibango himself hails from Cameroon originally. His family moved to France when he was 15 and he’s traveled the world for decades incorporating the sounds he finds into his own music.
To me, this is the most accessible of his albums, the one non-jazz fans and people not wild about “world music” are most likely to enjoy. It’s also filled with great work and Manu Dibango’s deep, buttery voice as well as the work of other great musicians. Plus it’s got a really great album cover. How could it go wrong?
Can I just say that there should be a band named General Sprynczynatyk or at least The Sprynczynatyks? That name just slays me. I’m a sucker for a good band name (witness The Dandy Warhols, Pomplamoose, Suburban Kids with Biblical Names, and Apostle of Hustle). I am often lured by such names and find myself lamenting the waste of a fantastic moniker on mediocre music or worse.
I couldn’t resist the arrogance of Little Caesar & the Empire, for instance, and the song Everybody Dance Now, a little proto-funk that I have heard many times over the years without knowing the performers. So I’m sharing today both the great name and the fun song from the depths of the popularity of soul. The band was obscure enough that they warrant not even a Wikipedia stub or any other song on which I can lay my hands. Do you know if they turned into Little Caesar & the Romans and then The Upfront or were those different folks entirely?
And, with thanks to the comment below, I can send you to listen to the original from The Soul City. Do have a listen and let me know which you prefer!
I couldn’t resist the arrogance of Little Caesar & the Empire, for instance, and the song Everybody Dance Now, a little proto-funk that I have heard many times over the years without knowing the performers. So I’m sharing today both the great name and the fun song from the depths of the popularity of soul. The band was obscure enough that they warrant not even a Wikipedia stub or any other song on which I can lay my hands. Do you know if they turned into Little Caesar & the Romans and then The Upfront or were those different folks entirely?
And, with thanks to the comment below, I can send you to listen to the original from The Soul City. Do have a listen and let me know which you prefer!
A fade to silence used to end what seemed like every song. Radio stations would lay the beginning of the next track right over the fade out of the last in a seamless manner that that little space between songs on a record couldn’t quite match. When we started making mix tapes we could either time it or roll back the tape enough to get the same effect. Ah, finally we could all feel like our own DJs, back when, to most of us, that meant someone playing discs on the radio rather than mixing and sampling.
These days, it seems to me like almost all songs end with, well, an ending. That means, of course, that you cannot use the crossfade feature on your mp3 software without cutting off the song. It used to be that the beginning of the repetitive fade signaled the end of the song so you expected a new one. Now songs go until they stop, and you never know if there’ll be something extra at the end (much like movie credits, these days).
But don’t jump to the conclusion that I’m going to rant about the loss of the fadeout. I don’t miss it. It seemed like a lazy way to end a song to me. To check my own perceptions, I went through a few songs from the past six decades. Here are the results of my non-scientific survey. This will actually be a three-part series because it’s so long.
I started in the 50s, with Jimmy Rogers’ Honeycomb. That song doesn’t fade out, though the last note is held for three seconds or so and could be crossfaded, I suppose. Dion and the Belmonts gave us five seconds of fade at the end of The Wanderer. Little Richard had the Heeby-Jeebies for 2:15, however, and stopped dead on a saxophone toot.
In a few days I’ll post a few more decades’ worth of random songs and how they end. Check my finding for fade in the 60s, 70s, and 80s and whether this is the end of the fade. Any one have predictions?
These days, it seems to me like almost all songs end with, well, an ending. That means, of course, that you cannot use the crossfade feature on your mp3 software without cutting off the song. It used to be that the beginning of the repetitive fade signaled the end of the song so you expected a new one. Now songs go until they stop, and you never know if there’ll be something extra at the end (much like movie credits, these days).
But don’t jump to the conclusion that I’m going to rant about the loss of the fadeout. I don’t miss it. It seemed like a lazy way to end a song to me. To check my own perceptions, I went through a few songs from the past six decades. Here are the results of my non-scientific survey. This will actually be a three-part series because it’s so long.
I started in the 50s, with Jimmy Rogers’ Honeycomb. That song doesn’t fade out, though the last note is held for three seconds or so and could be crossfaded, I suppose. Dion and the Belmonts gave us five seconds of fade at the end of The Wanderer. Little Richard had the Heeby-Jeebies for 2:15, however, and stopped dead on a saxophone toot.
In a few days I’ll post a few more decades’ worth of random songs and how they end. Check my finding for fade in the 60s, 70s, and 80s and whether this is the end of the fade. Any one have predictions?
