blissblogger
Well-known member
Well, it's not some late-blooming perversity on my part, or getting soft and accepting in old age.
Got into that Weather Report album in the mid-Eighties when I moved to London for the first time and the friends whose West Norwood flat I stayed in had it on cassette.
Particularly dug "River People" and also "The Elders" - this really haunting Wayne Shorter tune.
Later on got a bunch of Weather Report LPs from Music and Tape Exchange.
There was even then a certain kitsch appeal to the florid artwork. And florid song titles. But mostly it just sounded great
Musically I could probably find some commonality with Gilles and Kirk - it's more the whole sweep of it as a credo and a set of assumptions / biases. A view of history and where music goes wrong, the righteous path etc - that's what doesn't sit well with me.
But he's a good bloke Kirk actually. Since that blog-launching fiery exchange I've had a few pleasant chats with him over the years.
He does bang the "it all comes from black music, ALL of it," drum a bit stridently. There was some debate in which he was involved a few years back - it may have spilled onto the pages of Dissensus actually, via Zhao - about how Kraftwerk were deeply influenced by the Isley Brothers. I thought this was a silly claim. for sure, like anyone with any taste, Kraftwerk may have liked some Isley Bros tunes, the Motown stuff or the later "That Lady" guitartastic stuff. But to say that this would have been a formative thing in their music, more so than the Beach Boys and Schubert and minimalism and the Velvets - seems a bit like daft anti-Eurocentric overcompensation.
He's a relative of Marc Bolan's, Kirk, would you believe?
Got into that Weather Report album in the mid-Eighties when I moved to London for the first time and the friends whose West Norwood flat I stayed in had it on cassette.
Particularly dug "River People" and also "The Elders" - this really haunting Wayne Shorter tune.
Later on got a bunch of Weather Report LPs from Music and Tape Exchange.
There was even then a certain kitsch appeal to the florid artwork. And florid song titles. But mostly it just sounded great
Musically I could probably find some commonality with Gilles and Kirk - it's more the whole sweep of it as a credo and a set of assumptions / biases. A view of history and where music goes wrong, the righteous path etc - that's what doesn't sit well with me.
But he's a good bloke Kirk actually. Since that blog-launching fiery exchange I've had a few pleasant chats with him over the years.
He does bang the "it all comes from black music, ALL of it," drum a bit stridently. There was some debate in which he was involved a few years back - it may have spilled onto the pages of Dissensus actually, via Zhao - about how Kraftwerk were deeply influenced by the Isley Brothers. I thought this was a silly claim. for sure, like anyone with any taste, Kraftwerk may have liked some Isley Bros tunes, the Motown stuff or the later "That Lady" guitartastic stuff. But to say that this would have been a formative thing in their music, more so than the Beach Boys and Schubert and minimalism and the Velvets - seems a bit like daft anti-Eurocentric overcompensation.
He's a relative of Marc Bolan's, Kirk, would you believe?