Life Is For the Living

 The Beach Boys, We Gotta Groove: The Brothers Studio Years (2026)

I.

The great Jokermen podcast ended its two-year survey of every Beach Boys album from Surfin' U.S.A. to That's Why God Made the Radio along with many solo albums as well as an entire separate section on Van Dyke Parks' discography. This follows a similar, thorough, years long analyses of both John Cale/ Lou Reed/Moe Tucker/the Velvet Underground as well as Bob Dylan's discographies. After both of those series, the Beach Boys presented a fascinating conundrum for the podcast: both the worlds of the Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan remain firmly within the realm of art. Though, Bob Dylan has had enormous success in his career, he's never completely given himself over to exclusively commercial enterprises and had retained enough of his own idiosyncratic persona that even his most crassly commercial stuff ("Tight Connection," Hearts of Fire) can't help but be artistic in its own way. Lou certainly had his dalliances with commercial success in the 1970s but, famously, used his artist trump card to follow his most commercially successful LP (Sally Can't Dance) with his most notoriously non-commercial (Metal Machine Music). John Cale is most widely known for a cover of a Leonard Cohen song that was used in Shrek.

The Beach Boys, on the other hand, recently sold their "brand" and "likeness" to Irvin Azoff for an undisclosed sum (to be fair, Dylan sold his music catalog for a hefty sum to Sony but, last time I checked, Bob Dylan owns the rights to his "brand and likeness"). They could do this because, for all intents and purposes the Beach Boys have been a "brand" and "likeness" for the majority of my life. I've already written about the Beach Boys during the pandemic (https://languageoftheonagainoffagainfuture.blogspot.com/2020/09/teenage-gymopaedia-to-god.html), focusing on the digital-only compilations of both the Friends and 20/20 sessions (both of which still haven't been released in a physical format). However, I didn't really go into my history with the band. My parents weren't Beach Boys fans, so I rarely heard them growing up and my first exposure to the Beach Boys as a contemporary band (I had probably heard "classic" Beach Boys songs on the radio) was their collaboration with the Fat Boys, "Wipeout." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-kAnNgqN9o&list=RDr-kAnNgqN9o&start_radio=1). If you've never heard that song or watched that video, then I apologize in advance. It's terrible. I'm shocked how many people on the internet, just based on briefly searching for any information about the recording of the song, will defend it. Oh well. The song was the Fat Boys' attempt to recreate the success of Run DMC and Aerosmith's "Walk This Way," and it worked: the song was a top 20 hit (Apparently, the single was originally supposed to be recorded with Run DMC, but Mike Love made a deal with the Fat Boys instead. Brilliant move, sir!). As an artistic statement, "Wipeout" is a tragedy: it heavily influenced my desire to never listen to the Beach Boys on purpose if I could. 

The success of that single led to the even greater success of the 1988 hit "Kokomo,"  their first number one hit since "Good Vibrations" in 1966. I have very ambivalent feelings about "Kokomo" today: it was the first Beach Boys song my kids liked independent of me saying anything to them about the group. "Dad! The name of the group is the Beach Boys and they're singing about beaches!" Honest to god that's what my youngest said when playing the song in my car for me. I had to point out that they've been singing songs about beaches since 1962 and cued up "Surfin U.S.A." which they loved for many of the same reasons they loved "Kokomo." So I'm going to say, in terms of gestalt, we're dealing with the same aesthetics here. However, once you listen to all of their songs in their proper contexts, "Kokomo" only shines because there is very little surrounding it that could even compete with its mediocrity, i.e. the aforementioned "Wipeout." But in 1988 I was discovering Pere Ubu and the Pixies and Sonic Youth and the Velvet Underground and Joy Division and why the fuck would I want to listen to the band that recorded "Kokomo" even if their earlier stuff was good. As Anton Chigurh would say, "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?"

It all changed when I met a guy who worked in my mom's office who was only slightly older than I was. I found out that he was an R.E.M. fan like I was and made an awesome mix tape of R.E.M. bootlegs and rare singles that I hadn't heard before. He asked me what other music I liked and named some of the bands above. He asked me if I ever listened to the Beach Boys and I was kind of surprised. At this point in the early 1990s the Beach Boys were well ensconced in the Disney period of their career: happy to be wheeled out on Full House or Dick Clark's New Years Rockin' Eve or some Disney park celebration. Happy to play "Fun, Fun, Fun" until the end of their or our lives. The one exception to this was Brian Wilson's solo album from 1988. Brian had pretty much left the group by this point for many reasons (most of which are ugly) and started a solo career in fits and starts. His first solo album was universally praised and even I couldn't resist the lead single "Love and Mercy." This was the first inkling I had that maybe the Beach Boys (or at least Brian Wilson) could write wonderful songs. As with many singles I bought when I was young, I liked the B-side even better: "Couldn't Get His Poor Old Body to Move" was written with Lindsay Buckingham and was weird and fun and incredibly catchy. Not sure why I didn't get the whole album when it came out but I loved the single. 

So when this guy who seemed to have good taste told me that the Beach Boys was his favorite band I think I said something like "the 'Kokomo' band?" He of course told me he didn't like that song that their new stuff wasn't very good but that I should listen to Pet Sounds and that as I got older (again, this guy was a few years older than me) I might enjoy it. So I did what I often did back then and went to the Needham Public Library and took out the Pet Sounds CD. Of course I knew "Wouldn't It Be Nice?" and "Sloop John B." and "God Only Knows." I wish I could say that I instantly fell in love with it but I didn't. I thought it was mostly fine, a few of the songs stuck out, but I didn't feel particularly interested in investigating their whole catalog. Over the course of the early 90s Capitol Records released a number of Beach Boys albums as two albums on one CD or cassette. I had read about the lost masterpiece Smile and was curious enough to buy a used copy of the Smiley Smile/Wild Honey cassette with bonus tracks for $4. 

This is where I found my entry point into the Beach Boys. Smiley Smile isn't Smile instead, now having heard the original Smile, it's variations on motifs in Smile as performed by some very stoned men in a sandbox. I think, given its availability since the late 60s, that its influence on music is underrated. In the liner notes to the first Faust record, producer Uwe Nettelbeck concludes, in English, "I like the Beach Boys!" and its impossible to hear some of the music on that first Faust record and not think of Smiley Smile. I also hear its influence on the early work of the Residents and other outsider groups throughout America in the 1970s. In many ways, as I'll discuss with regard to Love You and Adult Child it's clear that if he didn't have a supernatural gift for harmony and arrangements, Brian Wilson would most certainly be an outsider artist himself. 

I'm not sure if it's their best period, but the decade from Smiley Smile (1967) to The Beach Boys Love You (1977) is their most interesting period to explore. During the first half of that decade the wreckage from the Smile project would resurface over multiple albums alongside new material written by various members of the band. The second half of the decade finds Brian Wilson expressing hope while battling personal demons. Since writing that early essay regarding the unavailability of the 1968 and 69 sessions, there have been several exhaustive box sets in physical formats chronicling the Beach Boys in the early 70s. This series continues with a three cd/five LP box set dedicated to the recordings they made in the mid 70s. 

II.

We Gotta Groove covers three albums recorded in the mid-70s: 15 Big Ones, The Beach Boys Love You and the unreleased album Adult/Child. All three of the albums were part of an effort to get Brian Wilson writing and recording (and ultimately touring, though he never did much of that to begin with) music again. As the recording sessions for Smile fell apart in 1967, Brian stepped further away from recording music with the band. Some albums, like Smiley Smile and Friends, had significant contributions from Brian. Others, like Carl and the Passions 'So Tough' and Holland, had fewer contributions. Brian was suffering from depression and drug addiction during this time, making the act of writing and recording music difficult. There was the pressure to live up to an album like Pet Sounds, something Brian felt he couldn't do in his current state. This difficulty was compounded by the Beach Boys albums not selling as well as in the 1960s despite the band spending lavishly on things like a new, mobile studio in the Netherlands to record Holland. 

In 1974 the band compiled the perennial bargain bin stalwart Endless Summer, which shows up so often in dollar vinyl bins because it sold a ton of copies. Endless Summer is an undeniably great collection of songs, but its massive success ensured that people awaiting new Beach Boys music would always be focused on the sun-drenched nostalgia of the past. Interestingly, one of the projects the band announced they would be releasing was a finished Smile, although it never materialized. In the middle of all this Murry Wilson, Brian, Dennis and Carl's abusive father, passed away. This affected Brian deeply and furthered his already depressive state. The liner notes to We Gotta Groove, as with so much of the "official" band history, gives a general overview of the recording process without any of the obvious tension, addiction and general sadness that existed in the band. It's pretty clear, as with so many of the Beach Boys projects, the Wilson brothers remained on one side and Mike Love remained on the other. Brian apparently had enough original material for an album but Mike Love wanted to include a mix of oldies they had recorded in the studio as warm up sessions along with some originals. Love won out, despite Dennis and Brian's resentment, and the resulting album 15 Big Ones is the weakest material on the We Gotta Groove set. In fact, the collection doesn't even include the 15 Big Ones album, just outtakes. 

The two standout tracks on the original 15 Big Ones album are one original, "Back Home" and one cover "Just Once in My Life." The latter is especially significant given that the original version of the song was produced by Phil Spector, a figure who haunts all of Brian Wilson's music. The Beach Boys version features cigarette-damaged lead vocals from both Carl and Brian, giving an older, more desperate feeling to the lyrics. A decade out from Pet Sounds and nine years out from the Smile failure, hearing Brian Wilson sing: "Just once in my life/ let me hold on to/ the good thing I found/don't let me down" is to hear an artist nakedly addressing his failures. "Back Home" is the flip side of this: evidence that Brian could still muster the energy to record a memorable song with a great opening lyric: "Well, I'm going back this summer to Ohio" (the song is an old one that had been recorded a few times by the band before finally being released on 15 Big Ones). 

Perhaps because he felt guilty about forcing the covers on Brian and Dennis, Mike gave pretty much total control over to the Wilson brothers for their next album: The Beach Boys Love You. Brian had named this album (along with Pet Sounds and less often Friends) as his favorite Beach Boys release. Engineer Earl Markey (who also worked on 15 Big Ones) described the album as "frighteningly accurate" to Wilson's personality and, indeed, listening to the record it sounds like the audience is privy to Wilson's random everyday thoughts an experiences ("the solar system is cool," "I like Johnny Carson," "I'm honking my horn while driving down the gosh darn highway.") Within the Beach Boys own catalogue, these types of songs could be compared to "In My Room," "Vegetables," "Busy Doing Nothing." 

As I mentioned earlier, this type of songwriting can be found in a lot of what gets classified as "outsider music." This term, coined by the DJ and journalist Irwin Chusid in the 1980s, and catalogued through a book as well as several CD compilations in the 1990s. What's fascinating is that Brian Wilson isn't an outsider artist: whereas most of the musicians championed by Chusid were often working on the margins or even outside of what could be termed the music industry, Wilson was a famous artist who had previously found great commercial success. What Wilson shares with many of these artists is a diagnosed mental illness. In 2006, Wilson gave an interview to Ability magazine with a licensed therapist discussing his schizoaffective disorder https://abilitymagazine.com/brian-wilson-a-powerful-interview/ It's worth reading the whole thing but here's an excerpt of Wilson talking about his symptoms: 

"[F]or the past 40 years I’ve had auditory hallucinations in my head, all day every day, and I can’t get them out. Every few minutes the voices say something derogatory to me, which discourages me a little bit, but I have to be strong enough to say to them, 'Hey, would you quit stalking me? F*** off! Don’t talk to me—leave me alone!' I have to say these types of things all day long. It’s like a fight."

With regard to The Beach Boys Love You Brian says in the liner notes to We Gotta Groove: 

"That record [Beach Boys Love You] was bottled inside my soul somewhere way back in there, and it came out like butter. I didn't have to really try very hard; it was just so natural...I wrote some songs that were about how I felt in my 30s, the same way that Pet Sounds was about how I felt in my 20s. I wanted to make a record to help everyone around me feel better...the title was my idea. It told the listener that they're admired."

Wilson understood Beach Boys Love You as a sequel to Pet Sounds, however, whereas Pet Sounds reflects the universal hopes and fears of its listeners, The Beach Boys Love You is one person's hopes and fears after living with schizoaffective disorder for a decade, which, by its very nature, cannot be universal. And, yet, even if they don't express themselves universally in the way that "Wouldn't It Be Nice" or "God Only Knows" do, the songs on Beach Boys Love You communicate the joy Brian Wilson experiences in everyday events that can be translated into an ethical posture: every one of us can find joy in simple things like watching Johnny Carson and receiving wisdom from the solar system. 

To that extent, the other artist that Wilson reminds me of on this record is Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. In 1977, a few months after the Beach Boys released the Beach Boys Love You, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers released Rock 'n' Roll with the Modern Lovers. With song titles like "Ice Cream Man," "Summer Morning" and a "Shortnin' Bread"-like stab at "The Wheels on the Bus," there's a theme and execution that makes both records spiritual kin to one another, not the least of which is the listeners inclination to ask whether or not the songs are meant as jokes. This is in no small part due to the fact that both Brian Wilson and Jonathan Richman are/were responsible for foundational recordings in the history of popular music. Richman's "Roadrunner" birthed punk in the same way that Wilson birthed so much pop music in the 1960s. To hear both of these trailblazers sing songs about "Rockin' Rockin' Leprechauns" and "Johnny Carson" respectively must have been disorienting to the listener in 1977. And, yet, as we mark the 50th anniversary of punk as a widespread musical and cultural movement, what's more "punk" than subverting your audiences expectations? If punk was also a reduction of musical and lyrical complexity, then what could be simpler than "Shortnin' Bread" and "the Wheels On the Bus" both of which are sincerely sung by grown men? 

Even within the sanitized narratives of Beach Boys liner notes, the interviews included in the CD set have a hard time disguising Mike Love's ambivalent feelings about Beach Boys Love You: "I think you've got to admit (the album) wasn't commercial music--it didn't sell. 'Johnny Carson,' was bizarre (laughs) and it had nothing to do with top 40 success for sure!" That feeling with regard to this music persists to this day. The only physical version of this collection available in the United States is a three LP/five CD hybrid set that runs over $120, I had to get my three CD set in Japan. This is quite different from the previous two archival sets (Feel Flows and Sail On Sailor) which were widely distributed in multiple formats. Al Jardine has tried to sing the praises of Brian's songwriting at the time as he tours this material with the Pet Sounds band (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDnC-sRBtB4&list=RDEDnC-sRBtB4&start_radio=1). The song they're performing comes from the second disc of the three cd set, the first official release of the often bootlegged Adult/Child sessions. 

Adult/Child was to be the second album the Beach Boys would release in 1977. It was clear that Brian was on a creative roll. This time, rather than a stripped down "solo record," Brian brought in a big band and string section for arrangements. The highlights of this unreleased project might be the highlights of the entire We Gotta Groove set. "Life is for the Living" is a song that Brian wrote for Frank Sinatra, who, according to Brian, "didn't say yes to the song." Lyrically it hews close to a song like "You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone" from Carl and the Passions--"So Tough" with entreaties to avoid "sitting on your ass" or "smoking some grass" because that existence isn't living at all. Carl and Brian trade vocals on the song, with Brian singing the final declaration of "Life!" in what can only be described as a Cookie-Monster voice. It's an oddly touching song especially when you hear Brian imploring himself to eat "three times a day." Again, I have no idea what Sinatra must of thought about this song. He never struck me as a man who needed to be reminded to eat three times a day. 

The best song on the album is, indeed, the aforementioned "Still I Dream of It." It's a solo Brian vocal and lyrically it might be the most nakedly honest song Wilson has ever written: descriptions of being hungry (Brian's food addiction would be a constant source of difficulty for him during this time), whether he will learn the lessons of his life, whether he will ever find love. Again, in some ways he's been writing songs like this since the early 60s. It's the lyrical concern coupled with his smoke and coke ravaged vocals that make it so profound. Although he had to go through hell to get there, I'm glad that Brian was able to get the help he needed and surround himself with family who loved him as he got older. Still, I appreciate that for a brief period of time Brian was given the freedom to explore this musical terrain even if it took almost fifty years to be officially released. 

April 2026 (playlist)

 Here's my playlist for April 2026, featuring tracks from albums I bought in Japan. It begins and ends with two long pieces from Miles Davis that exemplify some of the recent stuff I wrote about Miles (https://sevendeadlyfinns.blogspot.com/2026/03/a-world-within-itselfa-language-we-all.html). Enjoy! 

Your favorite band is a psyop

 

Soundtrack for a Coup d'Etat (2024)

The Cradle Will Rock (1999)

Tom O'Neil, CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the 60s (2019)

Grant McPhee, https://thevelvetundergroundmyth.com

Geese, Getting Killed (2025)

Tony Price, https://open.substack.com/pub/maximumexposureinc/p/you-dont-actually-like-the-band-geese?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

"The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop" (WIRED, April 14, 2026)

Negativland, True/False (2019)

I.

In the 1999 movie The Cradle Will Rock, based on the historical events regarding the staging of the musical The Cradle Will Rock not the 1937 musical itself, John Cusack plays Nelson Rockefeller who commissions Diego Rivera (played by Ruben Blades) to paint a mural for Rockefeller Center. The mural, "Man at the Crossroads," would eventually be destroyed due to the fact that Rivera decided to depict Lenin in the mural, as a counterbalance to Abraham Lincoln. Once this was discovered the New York World Telegram published an article labeling the mural as anti-capitalist propaganda. Rockefeller eventually had the mural destroyed and replaced by another mural American Progress, which remains on the west wall of Rockefeller Center's lobby. As Phillip E. Wegner writes in his essay, "The Ends of Culture or Late Modernism Redux" regarding the depiction of Rivera's mural's destruction at the end of the film: 

"The destruction of Rivera’s mural literally erases the artist’s attempted ‘appropriation’ of this space, reasserting the private nature of this apparently public domain. Even more provocatively, the film shows the destruction of the mural transforming it into something else altogether…. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the whole appears to have been transformed into something not unlike Jackson Pollock’s postwar abstract expressionist paintings. In the film, abstract expressionism quite literally comes to occupy the place held by Rivera’s ‘representational’ work'.” (251-252)

In another scene, Rockefeller, speaking with Mussolini's envoy played by Susan Sarandon, can be seen hanging a painting above his mantle, which appears to be far more abstract than the mural Rivera has been painting in the lobby of Rockefeller Center (I haven't been able to identify the painting but, given the fact that Mussolini's envoy has been gifting various artworks to the wealthy industrialists she's been in contact with while in the U.S., it appears to be an example of Italian futurism). This only underscores the point that Wegner makes above: the powerful, moneyed interests will no longer allow representative art to be hung in public spaces for fear that such realistic messages might penetrate the consciousness of the public and lead, as the great Philip Baker Hall fears throughout the film, real revolution. 

This suggestion, which is hinted at strongly though never explicitly mentioned in the film, was new to me when I first saw the film in 1999. Soon, however, it became an almost shibboleth within the academic world I found myself in to take as fact that post-war American painting, and to a greater extent post-war American culture, was supported and disseminated through the power and largess of the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as wealthy men like Rockefeller: https://www.artforum.com/features/abstract-expressionism-weapon-of-the-cold-war-214234/

This story is well documented and, as I stated above, is accepted as canonical history within academia: abstract expressionism is a weapon the CIA used to silence impulses of political artists who would use realism to depict the United States as it actually is. In other words, you could happily hang a Rothko in a corporate office without anyone being unnerved by what it was depicting. It would be easy enough to shame the average viewer into thinking they "didn't get it" and thus educating them into an eventual appreciation, than dealing with the message socialist art would clearly communicate to the masses. 

The film Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat tells a contemporaneous story regarding how the "jazz ambassadors," most famously represented by Louis Armstrong, were used by the CIA to provide cover for the United States' coup of the first democratically elected leader of the former Belgian Congo. The jazz ambassadors, featuring musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone and Dave Brubeck was a program the state department had set up in the early 1950s to promote American culture to a wider audience while simultaneously demonstrating that racism, while a real phenomenon in the U.S., took a back seat to the larger, celebratory, cultural impact black artists had made and continued to make. 

Though the film shows that Gillespie and Armstrong vehemently opposed what the CIA and the state department were doing in the Congo once they found out, it tells a similar story to The Cradle Will Rock insofar as it depicts how involved the U.S. government was in the production and dissemination of post-war American culture. Moreover, no matter much the artists in question might have distanced themselves from the aims of the state department in featuring their art, there is a residual taint to these art forms having been so entwined with the Cold War ideology and its real life political violence. Most of the musicians involved in the ambassador program, unless they forcefully broke from that particular ideology like Nina Simone (who was openly calling for violent revolution by the end of the following decade), were left behind as jazz moved into the 1960s (Armstrong and Gillespie especially).  

You could make the argument that the state department, Central Intelligence Agency and the United States imperialist ideology decided to be less overt in the following decades. Museum boards and cultural ambassadors were too forward facing to be effective covert weapons in shaping the hearts and minds of both United States citizens as well as those around the world who appreciated American culture. Thus, when "uncovering" the covert influence of the government upon cultural products, writers and cultural critics have had to rely on speculation and conspiracy to find connections between governmental control and mass culture. Additionally, as the culture became the counter-culture, one which was often in direct opposition to the explicit aims of the United States' government (most explicitly exhibited in the opposition to the Vietnam War, but also evident in the civil rights and, especially, post-civil rights discussion of racism), it becomes far more difficult to ascertain what is potentially directed from above and what genuinely grows out of unrest from below. 

Nothing makes this more manifest than the obsession surrounding Charles Manson and the Sharon Tate murder. Tom O'Neil's book traces Manson's connections to the music industry in the late 1960s (specifically his relationship to Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, producer Terry Melcher and promoter Gregg Jakobson), Manson and his followers' frequent visits to the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical clinic, which was overseen by CIA informant Louis Jollyjon "Jolly" West, as well as the suggestion that Manson, who was often treated with leniency by authorities after being arrested many times, was a CIA informant himself. Or, as my friend Josh said after reading the book, "Manson was a psyop that went right, or a psyop that went wrong." 

However, the lack of concrete connections that might flesh out Manson's story, illuminates further odd aspects of the west coast counter culture that only adds to the conspiracy: the following passages posted by Jared Smith from his blog the Wax Museum in 2025 sums up many of the connections

"Some researchers push the theory even further, suggesting the rock stars themselves may have been willing — or unwitting — participants in a larger PSYOP. The military and intelligence connections are almost endless.

The 'spontaneous' Laurel Canyon scene took root in 1965, the same year the Gulf of Tonkin incident — based on dubious intelligence — escalated the Vietnam War. Commanding U.S. Naval forces that fateful night was Admiral George Stephen Morrison, father of The Doors’ Jim Morrison. While one Morrison ignited a war, the other scored its soundtrack.

Frank Zappa’s story is just as curious. His father, Francis Zappa, was a top chemical weapons specialist at the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal, a facility tied to both chemical warfare research and MKULTRA mind control experiments. 

Zappa’s manager, Herb Cohen, a former Marine, was among the first to arrive in Laurel Canyon. In 1961, Cohen was in the Congo at the exact time Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was tortured and killed in a CIA-backed coup — a moment when the agency was sending jazz musicians overseas as cultural cover.

Stephen Stills, one of the Canyon’s earliest stars, grew up in El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama while his father worked on covert U.S. operations. These countries, perhaps not coincidentally, were all sites of American-backed coups during that era. John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas had his own proximity to power, attending the Naval Academy before winding up in Havana at the height of the Cuban Revolution. Jackson Browne entered the world on a U.S. military base in postwar Germany while his father worked for the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA.

The deeper you dig, the more the lines blur between the counterculture’s leading voices and the very power structures they appeared to oppose."

All of this begs the question to what end was the government involving itself in the counterculture of the 1960s. The answer echoes the argument The Cradle Will Rock and Artforum make with regard to the art world during the Cold War: 

"The early anti-war movement was disciplined and deeply political. But when psychedelics flooded the streets, protests turned into festivals and organizing was replaced by flower power and personal liberation. The CIA later admitted to helping spread LSD through various channels. Rock stars became the new spiritual leaders, and the revolution lost focus."

The explicit political motivation of the anti-war/anti-imperialist movement that could be found in, say, the folk music revival of the early 1960s gave way to the more abstract, psychedelic movement of the late 1960s. Devoid of any concrete political aims, and supplied with all the psychedelics the hippies would need, the "peace and love" generation would generally avoid being a real political threat to the hegemonic order, until it was eventually brought to a cataclysmic end by Manson and the family. 

II.

Regardless of how rooted in reality these narratives are, there's an undeniable similarity to these stories: an artistic movement with political leanings (painting, jazz, rock music) is co-opted by the government (state department, CIA, etc) for its own nefarious ends, selling that artistic movement back to its unsuspecting fans as a weaponized extension of hegemonic power. The difference in each of these examples is that whereas both painting and jazz have concrete examples of how these art forms were manipulated by actual government and government adjacent organizations, the story of 1960s rock being a psychological operation is filled with hazy conjecture and tenuous connections. The larger narrative which encompasses the counter-culture and music of the late 1960s lays out the ways in which artistic expressions of "freedom" adhere to an already established narrative in the West that artistic freedom is only something that can be achieved under a free, democratic capitalist society. Abstract expressionism is only something that can become a significant art movement if the government abstains from dictating which artistic movements are acceptable and which aren't. Jazz is an art form from a minority community that can only be allowed to flourish in a free society that recognizes the significance of that art form as such, Jim Crow laws notwithstanding. As the Prague Spring in 1968 demonstrated to the world, the counterculture of youth can only be safely practiced in a free democratic society, again, Kent State aside. 

Yet, with the last example, we see a shift in how the psychological operation is defined: no one would argue that abstract art or jazz was invented by the CIA or the state department, yet, in the narrative stipulated by the Wax Museum blog post and repeated elsewhere, would any of the shifts found in music and culture in the late 60s have taken place without the participation of the military or the CIA? You could argue that psychedelic music pre-dates the Doors, Haight Ashbury, Laurel Canyon and Frank Zappa, but the Brits have their own version of this conspiracy, the Tavistock Institute. This institute, founded in 1947 and tasked with the study of group psychology, has been accused of "inventing" the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd as examples of a larger conspiracy which by "'means of rock music and drugs" encourages society "to rebel against the status quo, thus undermining and eventually destroying the family unit'. In the 1940s and 50s the groups attempting to hijack extant cultural forms can be named. By the 1960s these forces shaping culture hide in the shadows, manipulating the culture and counterculture by secret organizations overseen by nameless people who can only be discovered going down rabbit holes. 

I think the end game of this type of thinking is evidenced by the "controversy" surrounding the band Geese. I will say upfront that I like the band Geese, that I enjoy their most recent record Getting Killed, that I find opening your record with a song in which the lead singer keeps shouting "there's a bomb in my car!" is funny and entertaining (while also being provocative and annoying at the same time), that the second song on the album, "Cobra," demonstrates that they can write decent songs and that their live show, as evidenced by the very good Coachella set I watched with my daughter this past weekend, is solid. Has all of this been determined by a start up company named Chaotic Good, which, in multiple interviews, explained the methods by which they have pushed Geese songs onto social media platforms? Maybe. I'm both old and jaded enough to know that we are shaped by things far beyond our acknowledgment (I am not a subject outside of ideology), while also realizing that if everything is simply PR than the ability of PR to actually do what people pay PR to do is as effective as ultimately doing nothing. Also, I've listened to enough music to develop individual taste so that there have been countless "good" bands shoved down my throat for which I have zero interest. 

It's the final point that those who view all of what gets "passed off" as culture as a long-running "psy op" would take issue with: to what extent is your taste your own? How much of your taste has been shaped by forces beyond your control? You can always fall back on the argument that you know what you like, but, in the last sixty plus years your "taste" has been heavily inundated with propaganda whipped up by men in lab coats who work for the CIA, state department, McKinsey, big capital, multi-national corporations and now, in the age of Artificial Intelligence, machines. What I'm fascinated by is how this discourse moved from "this band is an industry plant," a term that suggests, not without a long history of such things, that a band has connections to money and or someone within the recording industry, to "this band is a psychological operation" suggesting something much more sinister with the goal of mind control and manipulation. 

The endgame of this argument is well represented by two blogs, one of which I discovered after the Geese article in WIRED broke and the other I have known about for a little while. Tony Price, presciently, published a blog post on April 5th (nine days before the WIRED story was published) loudly stating "YOU DON'T ACTUALLY LIKE THE BAND 'GEESE'(TM)." The piece doesn't actually begin with a discussion of the band Geese but of "the Sixties" in general and the band the Velvet Underground in particular. Much like the history mapped out in the first part of this essay, Price is sure that "'the Sixties(TM)'" [sic]:

"The common cultural narratives about 'the Sixties (TM)' that have been drilled into our skulls tells a story of a generation animated by a revolutionary impulse, a kaleidoscopic cornucopia of cultural offerings that propped up a paisley-patterned facade whose surfaces were littered with spray painted messages about hope, idealism and unification. 

The Sixties (TM) can be read as an index of mythologies: a laminated catalogue of icons, slogans, martyrs and spectacles." 

Interestingly, Price echoes the message of fellow sixties "psy op" Frank Zappa's famous LP We're Only In It for the Money which, as I've been hearing since the re-discovery of that record since the late 1980s, parodied the Beatles' Sgt. Peppers and "skewered" the peace and love bullshit from the Height-Ashbury crowd. As the Library of Congress, an institution which bestowed We're Only in It for the Money the honor of being added to the "National Registry" of recorded music in 2005 (during George W. Bush's presidency) explains:  in the original liner notes to the album Frank Zappa encouraged everyone to read Franz Kafka's short story "In the Penal Colony" while listening to the record. You see, we, the people indulging in the spectacle of the 1960s are "in the penal colony"--one assumes the same "penal colony" constructed by his dad and manager as part of their grand "psy op." 

Price in his blog post relates all of this to Zappa's great enemies, no not the hippies, but those other anti-hippy noiseniks "'the Velvet Underground (TM)'"[sic]:

"When it comes to music, no band from the Sixties (TM) has been so over-mythologized as the Velvet Underground (TM). From the moment I first encountered it, that Banana (TM) [a reference to the famous "banana cover" created by Andy Warhol, who would greatly appreciate Price's continued use of the trade mark symbol] consistently told me that, so long as I kept it near me, I could consider myself Cool (TM)." 

It is here that Price refers to Grant McPhee's 23 (!!!) part series on "The Velvet Underground Myth 1963-December 1967." I'll let Grant describe his important work: 

"Around four years ago I woke early with nagging thought that seemed to come from nowhere. Surely the Velvet Underground were far more popular in their own time than we've been led to believe? A quick bit of research confirmed it: they were far more popular than the myth suggests." 

You can read the twenty three part investigation for yourself to determine if, in McPhee's words, "this is huge." The basic conclusion is that the myth of the Velvet Underground started around the same time that Lou Reed's solo career was taking off and MGM reissued the first three VU albums as well as issued the Live 1969 album. There's probably a grain of truth to all of it, but it seems truly bizarre to me that a) you'd wake up one morning with the "nagging feeling" that the VU was more popular than you'd been led to believe and b) spend this much time trying to prove that although the Velvet Underground weren't that popular they weren't as unpopular as people think they were at the time. And that all of this is based around an offhand quote that Brian Eno gave sometime in the early 1980s. It's nice to have no other pressing issues in your life.

But this is where Price's current discussion of Geese comes in: if the Velvet Underground, the ultimate example of a "cool band," is the product of some marketing executive in 1974, then how can we trust that any band that anyone says is cool IS actually cool and not made to seem cool to you or I, the humble, average, music listener? And while we can discern the greatness of the Velvet Underground from just listening to their records versus, say, the records Geese has put out over the course of their short career, what happens when 'the system" becomes so all encompassing that they are telling you that Geese are the new Velvet Underground because of how cool they are. Which leads Price to the conclusion that "EVERYTHING ON THE INTERNET IS FAKE" and, therefore, every band you've discovered on the internet is fake too. Of course, this has shifted from a conversation about music and the quality of music to a conversation about the internet, who controls the internet, who controls the conduits by which music is streamed on the internet, etc. All very good and important conversations to have but discussions that have nothing to do with the music itself. Or so those who are in control would like me to believe. See where we end up? As the source of music becomes more opaque and, potentially, less human, the conspiracy that you like what you like because of things shaped beyond your acknowledgment becomes darker and all encompassing while simultaneously becoming more legible through the technology we encounter every day of our lives. In this process a bunch of "nepo babies" become the immaterial conduit by which psychological operations bombard us in every micro transaction we partake in throughout our days. Geese aren't merely attractive white people with industry connections who release music, they are the machine by which we are controlled day in and day out. 

III.

The most important LP released in the last ten years is Negativland's True/False from 2019. Many think pieces have been written regarding the paucity of "protest music" in Trump's America, suggesting that as politics went from bad to worse, as they did at the end of the 1960s and 1970s respectively, music, setting itself up as something oppositional to those politics, would get better. Yet, popular music in the last ten years hasn't exactly been oppositional neither in message nor in sound. There are exceptions, of course, but many of those have come from older artists who are more established, often already committed to being oppositional figures within the culture (Neil Young, A Tribe Called Quest, Bruce Springsteen). Younger musicians have tended to remain mostly apolitical, with little interest in making music that sounds in opposition to dominant music within their particular genre. The one glaring exception to this rule is, unfortunately, Ye [Kanye] West who has made music and fashion in opposition to the mainstream of popular culture by adopting the aesthetics and symbology of National Socialism. I suspect that the arguments made by Price and others above are precisely why music has neither been overtly political nor oppositional the last decade: it's not that the musicians pushed by the internet are psy opps or industry plants, it's that, with dwindling resources available in the creation or art and music, a band can't afford to be labeled as political or oppositional. As we have experienced over and over again, it would be a relief to believe that artists are plants for brands to sell their goods online, we could suss out the authentic from the inauthentic, rather artists themselves have realized that certain things in opposition to dominant culture hinder the slight possibility a band or musician might become more successful. 

The entire ecosystem by which we consume media, whether it is real or unreal, true or false, is the main concern of Negativland's True/False. It's also been the main concern of the collective known as Negativland for almost fifty years. Back in the 1980s, Negativland participated in the earliest forms of hacking and jamming mainstream audio and video culture. They understood how to manipulate the media in an analogue age: on their 1987 album Escape From Noise they recorded a song called "Christianity is Stupid," created a fake press release stating that the song inspired the mass murderer David Bron to kill his entire family, and then subsequently recorded an album, Helter Stupid, which parodied the various news outlets that ran the press release unverified. A few years after that the band released an EP entitled U2, which sampled the band U2 as well as Cassey Kassem. They were sued by Island records and eventually in turn sued by their own label SST and the EP was withdrawn. They then spent several years documenting the ordeal as a way to discuss the insanity of copyright law, arguing for reforms in the U.S. Copyright Act. Negativland has always been a band that uses samples, radio transmission, press releases and other methods to parody and call out the media. In that sense, True/False isn't that different from their other releases. However, the context has changed.

In one sense, True/False is very much in conversation with the idea that the culture you consume is created and disseminated by forces controlled by capital and power. A voice (most of the "lyrics" are samples from all over the place) on the third track says "We'll manufacture, uh, a whole smorgasbord, of these events for the same purpose, so that our, are linking us up on the same, inner dynamics, yearnings, and needs on a deep psychological level." This certainly sounds like the manufactured monoculture railed against in Price's piece. But, as evidenced from the title of the album, the bigger question that Negativland are tackling has to do with the framework through that which we discern as "true" and "false" on an epistemological level, not uncovering that which is true and false. On the first track of the album, appropriately titled "Either/Or" a voice says: "And already you are separated into two camps. And you are on the point of fighting over absolutely non-existent differences." The engine which manufactures and names these differences is social media and the internet more broadly: this reaches an apex with "Fourth of July," a piece of music about the digital warriors fighting an imaginary civil war online. A completely deranged individual spends most of the track complaining about how people ineffectively post online, describing her own commitment to fighting the cultural as well as not yet real wars by posting all day long. Eventually, towards the end of the piece, she exasperatedly shouts: "You either believe in what you're posting or you don't!"

"Fourth of July" eerily predicts what political discourse and, more broadly, life felt like during COVID and lockdown: incapable of leaving our homes for a period of time, everything related to our social lives took place almost exclusively online: shopping, learning, political engagement as well as conspiracy theorizing was mediated entirely by our relationship to the internet. Of course, the track "Fourth of July" already anticipates the bigger problem with living through this mediation: the suspicion that everything you are experiencing through social media posts, YouTube clips, video podcasts, etc is potentially a lie or is potentially the truth and that which is outside of that domain is a lie. To paraphrase Arti Aster's great Eddington (a movie very much in conversation with this whole piece): "Your being, manipulated." 

The whole album concludes with the title track, a type of manifesto for the whole project. After a fanfare of horns, a woman's voice softly intones the words "true or false" before being replaced by another, less human voice repeating the same phrases over and over again:

 "If I say to you this statement is false, let's just think about this statement for a minute, if this statement is true, then, this statement is true. And, if I say this statement is false, then, this statement is false. Let's just think about this statement for a minute: if this statement true, then, this statement is false. And, if this statement is false, then, this statement is true. And we get into a loop which goes on forever." 

The statement itself, the content of what we might be able to discern as either true or false is never given, we are simply told over and over again that a statement is true when it is false and, conversely, a statement is false when it is true, eventually the voice concluding that there are statements which can neither be proved or disproved. The loop the voice keeps mentioning is eventually made manifest in the music with a catchy little rhythmic loop that turns into one of the more dance-like things the band has done. Eventually another voice emerges from the music loop and repeated "true/false" voice: 

"Conclusions? Whatever people want is true even if it isn't. How can you make a statement saying something is true even if it isn't? Who can say it isn't? Who can say what is? Feelings are facts. So who is to say what's a fact? There is no reality. There is no absolute. There's no objectivity. There's no right and wrong. There's no basis to criticize anybody. There's only people's arbitrary desires."

Negativland's point on this track is not to argue that something you believed to be true (you like the band Geese, the Velvet Underground were an underground band) is actually false (you don't actually like the band Geese, the Velvet Underground was more popular than you think) but that the very framework of uncovering the truth is part of a larger, cyclical process by which you cannot determine which of those statements are true or false. In the examples offered at the beginning of this essay (the jazz ambassadors, the state department's involvement in the elevation of abstract expressionism) the act of uncovering complicates our understanding of jazz and post-war art respectively, but it doesn't invalidate the idea that jazz and post-war art would exist independent of government involvement and manipulation. Price in his blog post explicitly states that "EVERYTHING ON THE INTERNET IS FAKE" thus understanding that the medium by which such things may be uncovered has manipulated your being to the extent that anything you may encounter on it could be both true and false at the same time. And we get into a loop, etc. 

This is how Geese go from being industry plants, nepo babies, friends with other famous people, music critic darlings, etc basically all of the criticisms I've heard about (especially indie) bands my whole life to Geese is a psychological operation. Your enjoyment of the band Geese is part of psychological manipulation at the hands of those in power to get you to listen to them and agree to their genius. Asking to what end does this psychological operation known as project Geese exist is asking the wrong question (takes long drag of a cigarette), the praise of the band Geese is the end itself. We can make you think anything we'd like you to think by hyping it on the internet, through its multifaceted tendrils reaching out across social media. However, through the lens of true/false and True False, who's to say to what extent the truth uncovered by the great Geese PSYOP isn't the PSYOP itself: the continued erosion of belief and trust in one's own senses to enjoy music, literature, movies, art, theater all of the creative acts that make life worth living. Isn't it much more fun to scroll through articles telling you that it's all fake than to engage with the art you would be engaging in were it not already assumed to be fake? 

March 2026 (playlist)

I am about to go on a trip to Japan, hence my relative silence on the blog this month. In honor of the trip, I'm sharing my March 2026 playlist which features a bunch of music by members of the Yellow Magic Orchestra before the formation of the band in 1978-9 (plus one Yukihiro Takahashi cover that I love from 1984). Enjoy and I'll see you in April!

A World Within Itself/A Language We All Understand: On Miles Davis and Stevie Wonder (part one)

 Miles Davis, Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970)

---. Live Evil (Columbia, 1971)

---. On the Corner (Columbia 1972)

---. Get Up With It (Columbia 1974)

---. Agharta (Columbia 1975)

---. The Columbia Years 1955-1985 (Columbia 1988)

Various, CBS Jazz Masterpieces Volume I (Columbia 1986)

Stevie Wonder, Innervisions (Tamala Motown 1972)

---. Songs In the Key of Life (Tamala Motown 1976)

Miles

I love jazz. I've often thought that if I had to stop listening to either jazz or pop (just to reduce these things to their most constituent parts) I would probably stop listening to pop before jazz. I only have a vague memory of why it is that I started listening to jazz regularly: my parents had some jazz records growing up. My dad was a big George Benson fan and my mother had a soft spot for Chuck Mangione's live record Land of Make Believe. I remember hearing both of those records early on in my listening life, although both were quite different than the jazz I would go on to love as I became a teenager. The first decade of my life coincided with the last period in which jazz had an impact on popular music. Grover Washington Jr., the aforementioned Benson and Mangione, the CTI label, Quincy Jones, jazz vocalist Al Jareau all of them, and many others, had charting albums often played on radio stations that didn't regularly play jazz music. As I came to find out, jazz fans didn't particularly like this music. An artist like Freddie Hubbard was obviously deeply respected by jazz fans, but not for the albums he made on CTI by the late 70s. It was the same for Quincy Jones, who would eventually leave jazz entirely to make world historically successful records with Michael Jackson. So when I started getting into "real" jazz around the age of 14, I had to convince myself that I fell in love with the music in spite of these jazz records from the 70s, 

My first exposure to the history of jazz came from a series of samplers released by CBS/Columbia records (https://www.discogs.com/master/467848-Various-Columbia-Jazz-Masterpieces-Sampler-Volume-I) on cassette. Looking at the track listing, it's as good an overview of one label's jazz catalog as could be expected. It's lucky that the label happened to have one of the greatest jazz catalogs in history. The only piece of music I recognized was "Take Five" from the Dave Brubeck Quartet, due to the fact that one of the local TV stations used it as background music to announce school closings on snow days (ergo, happy memories from childhood). I've always loved Dave Brubeck, even though he can be seen as a middle of the road jazz composer and musician. It was particularly significant for me that David Lynch decided to soundtrack one of the more moving and happy scenes in Twin Peaks: the Return with "Take Five." Like Vince Guaraldi's jazz soundtrack to the Charlie Brown specials, Brubeck might be the first jazz musicians someone like me would have heard growing up in the 1970s and 80s. 

Though familiar, "Take Five" wasn't my favorite piece on the sampler. There are two Miles Davis pieces on the release. I'm sure I was taken with the opening track "So What," an undeniably catchy piece that doesn't really go anywhere for most of its runtime, showcasing the soloing capabilities of each player. It serves its premier spot well, offering a tutorial on what jazz is: a musical foundation upon which players can solo on their instrument until the main theme is repeated. Again, as brilliant as "So What" is, it wasn't my favorite Miles on the sampler. That was "Saeta," the piece of music which followed "Take Five." "Saeta" opens with a drone on a series of brass instruments, a gentle cymbal crash and what sounded like an "exotic" instrument mournfully winding its way around a melody. However, in the background drums start to quietly be heard, marching along side of other percussion, until they overwhelm the other music. Accompanying the marching drums is much louder, harsher brass instruments that eventually overwhelm everything. The only thing I could compare it to was hearing an imaginary movie. A solitary figure wandering through the desert, only to be overtaken by a marching army. Once the march had established itself in the foreground another solitary voice, this time played by Davis' trumpet, announces itself. Is this part of the marching army, still lurking in the background with the droning brass? A new solitary figure emerging from the landscape? It was unclear but that also made it thrilling. I hadn't heard music like this before: and after all of these voices, instruments, scenes play out before the listener in the span of five or so minutes, they all recede into the background, vanishing, once again, over the horizon from whence they came. 

I enjoyed most of the other music on the sampler, especially Billie Holliday's "You've Changed," but I couldn't shake "Saeta." I had to hear more of Davis' music. The sampler was part of a reissue campaign that CBS/Columbia did of jazz records that had been out of print for a while. I don't know the whole story about the campaign (jazz fans have very strong negative opinions about the series) but as someone who had a limited budget and spotty access to original pressings of these albums (it probably wouldn't have meant anything to me then anyways) the Columbia Jazz Masterpieces Series ("Digitally Remastered Direct from the Original Analog Tapes" as each bordered cover let the listener know) was a godsend for getting into jazz. As part of this series, as well as marking his move from Columbia to Warner Brothers, Columbia records released a box set of Miles Davis' music for the label in 1988. I got it for the holidays that year. I still think it's one of the best box sets that has ever been released. 

1988 was the early days of the box set boom which arose with the marketing of compact discs in the 80s and early 90s. Eventually CD box sets would take a chronological approach to cataloging the work of the respective artists and bands, but the early box sets were a bit different and, arguably, more interesting. An important, early example of this is Bob Dylan's Biograph. Rolling Stone in its original review of the box set in 1986 makes special note of its eschewing of chronology in favor of thematics (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/biograph-103365/) demonstrating that mapping the consistency of Dylan's music over the then twenty-four year long career was more interesting than chronicling its development. Columbia, also home to Davis' recordings over a thirty year period, decided to do something similar for Miles. The four CDs or cassettes are organized thematically "Blues," "Standards," "Originals," "Moods" and "Electric." The first three categories are pretty self explanatory, but it was the last two cassettes that really made an impact. "Saeta" was on the mood cassette and the volume ended with "It's About That Time," another atmospheric trip into another world of sounds. This was music to be played at night, when the barriers between objects and self become blurred. Where sounds come from both the recording you're listening to and the dark, unknowable night. I suffered from insomnia as a kid and music was my companion most nights well into the morning. After discovering Davis' music, it was more or less the soundtrack for the experience. 

The "Electric" volume was the real mind-blower and life-changer. I should say that some of the electric volume met that criteria. Now knowing Davis' catalogue as well as I do, it's noteworthy that his short 80s period on Columbia Records is overrepresented in the volume. As much as I've tried to get into them, I've never connected with the albums Miles made in the 1980s. It has as much to do with changing production and studio sounds as it does with Miles' playing or his sidemen. It's also tough because the music Miles made before taking hiatus in 1975 is so uniquely powerful that almost anything would be a disappointment. And it was the music Miles made during that period, the five years before he stepped away from music in the mid 70s, that I first heard on that cassette. The fourth volume starts off with three minutes and thirty seconds of pure fire, "Sivad." The editors made the choice of including only the opening part of the piece, perhaps thinking that anything beyond that might try the listener's patience. 

Edited or not, I had never heard music like this. I couldn't tell what most of the instruments were except for the bass and drums. I assumed the central instrument was Miles' horn but it sounded almost unrecognizable fed through, as I later found out, a wah wah pedal. There was also a repeating sound which seemed like a frog or corpse groaning that was made a Brazilian instrument named the Cuica played by Airto Moreira. There also seemed to be an over-amplified organ but it didn't matter because the whole thing became a wall of sound wherein all the instruments blended together, metamorphosing from one instrument to another as the piece went on. 

At the end of the first side of the cassette seemed to be the conclusion to "Sivad" at the beginning of the side. However, this piece was entitled "Honky Tonk" and came from a completely different album than "Sivad." I was even more intrigued. To make things even more perplexing, both Live Evil, the album which has "Sivad," and Get Up With It, the album which has "Honky Tonk" were both out of print. "Honky Tonk" was a more conventional blues number than "Sivad" but still had sounds that seemed to come out of nowhere: there was the Cuica making those sounds again, there seemed to be a guitar fed through a wah wah weaving in and out of the background and again whatever keyboards were being played sounded like they were coming from another planet. 

The real mind melt, however, came on the second side: "Thinking One Thing And Doing Another." Like the other unearthly transmissions from the other end of the universe I heard on the first side, "Thinking One Thing And Doing Another" was from a record, On the Corner, was out of print. Let me be that old man for a second: my children have no idea how good they have it with regard to music discovery. Yes, they have it bad, very, very bad in many ways, but, as old people like me who listen to a lot of music like to say, it's so easy to hear almost any piece of recorded music (released and unreleased) today. When I first discovered these pieces on the Miles Davis box set, unless you were lucky enough to live near a used record store and that place knew what to buy, it was unlikely that you would get to hear out of print records. Before the reissue of On the Corner in 1993 and the U.S. reissues of Live-Evil and Get Up With It in 1996, the only way to hear those records was through expensive Japanese import CDs. I knew what the covers of these albums looked like before I ever heard them. That wasn't uncommon. Armed with under ten minutes of music from each of these albums, I could only imagine what the rest sounded like. So what did "Thinking One Thing And Doing Another" sound like? The piece faded in as if, much like "Saeta" suggested when I first heard it, there was some group of people or army advancing towards the listener. Except, unlike "Saeta" which suggested an organized military march overwhelming the solitary voice of the trumpet, there was no solitary voice to overwhelm. This was just a mass of people, disorganized, in some ways less threatening but in other ways much more threatening. The whole beast of a sound slinking its way down a sidewalk or street, shrieking--sometimes forcefully pushing its way forward, other moments stopping to let its various auditory tentacles fly off in every direction. There was a drum, but also a tabla dribbling percussion off the side. Miles' horn embedded itself within this collective, except for three minutes in when it sounds mournful, the same as any solo from the twenty years of his career up to that point. Had Miles been swallowed by this beast? Did he need help getting out? 

I eventually found a used copy of On the Corner in Key West sometime in the early 90s. In 1995 I traveled cross country by train, staying at various places while looking at graduate schools I had gotten into. In Madison, Wisconsin I stayed with a grad student who, to my shock, had a copy of Get Up With It that she had purchased for $3 and didn't really like. When I told her that I would pay her $20 for it she surprisingly said no. However, I did get a chance to hear it in her living room while she was out. Unsurprisingly, it was even better than I could have imagined. Get Up With It is essentially a compilation of various sessions Miles had recorded between 1971-1974. It was one of two records like this he released in 1974, the other being Big Fun. I like Big Fun, but for some reason I always knew that it was a compilation of various sessions and thus always seemed less important. Besides, Big Fun doesn't end side two with "Rated X." In the 90s, the rediscovery of this track by readers of the Wire and their curatorial hand in the Virgin Ambient series of CDs, specifically the Jazz Satellites series selected by Kevin Martin (https://www.robertchristgau.com/get_album.php?id=760)--about which series I will eventually write something for my other music blog (https://languageoftheonagainoffagainfuture.blogspot.com), demonstrated how "Rated X" seemed to presage any number of electronically processed confrontational pieces of music from Public Enemy to drum and bass. When I first heard it, I had to make sure something wasn't wrong with the turntable or speakers, that I was actually hearing what I was hearing and that these sounds came from planet earth in 1974. 

The second side of Get Up With It is flawless: beginning with "Maiysha," the most beautiful melody Davis wrote during his electric period and moving through the aforementioned "Honky Tonk," the music guides you through its labyrinthine sounds only to abandon you just as you feel your feet on solid ground with the blues structure of "Honky Tonk." If "Rated X" is everything within the spectrum of sound being dialed up into the red for a full aural assault, something the Bomb Squad would take from it in their 1980s productions for Public Enemy, then side one of Get Up With It is the inverse: the removal of all but the traces of sound for a half an hour. 

The title of this post comes from the opening lyrics to Stevie Wonder's song "Sir Duke" (more on that in the second part). It concretizes in words the central paradox of music: an insular world nearly impossible to easily translate from sound to words (despite words being a central part of what much music consists) that is, nonetheless, a universal language that humans (among other creatures) understand innately. "Sir Duke," in the schematic laid out by the lyrics of "Sir Duke," is as close to a language everyone can understand as can exist in music. It's Wonder's fourth biggest chart hit, behind "I Just Called to Say I Love You" (another song about a universal language and its preferred medium) and just above his first number one "Fingertips (Part II)" yet another song about a universal musical experience (clapping your hands to the beat). It's probably my favorite pop song of all time: I heard it a lot on the radio growing up and have never tired of it. But, in terms of sound, it's diametrically opposed to Miles Davis' "He Loved Him Madly." 

I bring these two pieces of music together because, of course, they are both tributes to "the king of them all, Sir Duke." The titular Duke is, again of course, Duke Ellington (I'm going to punt my Ellington discussion to the second part of this essay), a figure who looms over jazz music larger than almost any other person. In fact, Ellington looms so large over music in general that Wonder in 1976 could write a tribute to Ellington (who passed away in 1974) in a different genre of music and have one of the biggest hits of his career. Again, it goes to show the cultural imprint jazz used to have. "He Loved Him Madly" is a tribute to Duke Ellington as well. In the gatefold of Get Up With It the right side features a black and white photograph of Davis along with the musicians on each track, the left side is completely black except for "For Duke" in white letters almost engulfed by the darkness. The music on "He Loved Him Madly" is, in many ways, the complete opposite of the music Ellington made during his lifetime, which Wonder mimics in his hit song. Most of the first half of the piece consists of guitar with delay, haunting organ fed through a wah wah pedal and rolling drums which never seem to find the beat (along with percussion fills augmenting the drums). Though Davis plays trumpet on the track it's barely perceptible, with the main voice being Dave Liebman's flute. The whole piece is an ambient dirge, a musical piece designed to represent the absence felt from Ellington's death. Davis is famously reported to have said "it's not the notes you play, it's the notes you don't play" which matter. "He Loved Him Madly" is an entire piece based around the notes you don't play as a nod to Ellington's absence. How could one play music when the man for whom music was life is gone? 

This philosophy, the technique of making one's music both an extremity of sound ("Rated X") and the absence of almost any sound ("He Loved Him Madly") Davis would take with him and his bands into the first shows of 1975 after the release of Get Up With It in November (an album whose second half was almost exclusively recorded with his then touring band). It's all over Agharta, the first of two double live albums he recorded that February in Japan. They would be some of the last notes Miles would play for five years. Though it's perhaps too easy to say that the absence and the silence the listener hears on "He Loved Him Madly" anticipates Davis' own silence in the then coming years, it nonetheless is as much tied to Davis' mythos and art as Ellington's bright swagger and swing is tied to his.