deltasleep

I bought a copy of Future Shock when I was in high school.  I found it amusing, and at the time I found portions of it to be very true.

Now I’m not so sure,

It’s hard not to view the book differently after seeing this.  But what a great intro.

Now that it seems to be waning, I’ve been able to do a lot of thinking about the last 25 of “gangsta.”  I consider to be among the most toxic thought-viruses ever devised.

It’s easy to point fingers about what’s gone wrong in the past- and I know it’s an easy target.  It’s easy to say that if America hadn’t bought into this destructive fantasy, it might have just been another one.  But gangsta rap actively fed this delusion, it engaged constantly in trying to prove that the outrageous claims made by rappers were absolutely real- that this was truly “life in the ghetto.”  While at some stage or another, this movement might have  represented a genuine identity, or illustrated a genuine problem, I believe it did more to spread that problem than it did to ameliorate those problems.  The problems with this movement were in the subtext.

Gangsta rap screwed up America’s image of poverty- glorifying poverty and crime not just to those who lived in it, but also to people who had little to no actual exposure to it.  It created a generation of people who felt validated by failure, who idolized poverty and exploiting others to evade poverty, and a generation who felt weak and “white” when they succeeded.  They could only claim to be “hard” so long as they didn’t achieve any legitimate success, or at least as long as they didn’t leave whatever place they considered to be the “ghetto.” This generation failed to understand the fiction of the entire genre- taking the message of music completely out of context and feeling threatened by it.  This was fed by the recording industry, who saw an easy cash cow in exploiting anxiety about black culture the way that the film industry had before in blaxploitation- which you could easily consider to be the origin of the entire “gangsta” movement.  I see gangsta rappers as a generation of people who bought into a similarly screwed up fantasy created in films like “Superfly.”

Anybody who went to public school in the 90s will tell you- the new kids in school, the poor kids, the troubled kids, anybody who felt vulnerable in general, clung to being “hard.”  They tried to fake gangsta- or even more unfortunate, the succeeded at becoming gang members.  They were the target audience of gangsta promoters who sold records which competed with each other to depict the most graphic and senseless violence possible.  The movement capitalized on middle america’s fear of black people, and they did it so well that black america jumped on board- who wouldn’t want to be feared?

Gangsta rap was a humongous step backwards for America’s black culture because of the unfair and ridiculous depiction of black people that dominated television for nearly 20 years.   It also nearly destroyed rap by damaging the art form to such an extent that among many circles it was accepted that “rap” should be separated from “hip hop.”  After 20-25 years as a movement, the damage the movement caused is still readily evident.

A generation of musicians and filmakers wrote, rapped, and sang about fighting a lack of opportunity.  A lot of this was well founded, and relevant to some audience at the time.  The trouble is, a lot of people who did not have this problem- a lot of middle class people , espoused the ideas and the lifestyle portrayed to them.  I believe this was because it was simply easier for a generation to believe that  they were being persecuted than it was to believe that they were just losers.

The way I see records like this happening is as follows:
kid: Dad, I really need a hot disco record by somebody like Peter Brown.
dad: if you’re good i’ll get you one on the way home from work this friday.

Dad goes to the store, and finds that he can get this GREAT compilation of a bajillion disco hits for $3.99 and jumps on it. Then he gives it to the kid who immediately finds out that its not the original artists, its some pretty average 4 piece cover band with an upright piano. DAD!
So, without further ado, I present to you, a Friday double feature from Disco Dancin’ Fever from Pickwick records-notorious maker of children’s story and haunted house records.
Dance with Me, and Risky Changes.

If there was really such a thing as “disco standards” then this record covers them. I really like records like this, because since most of them were made right as disco was waining a little bit(1978) they illustrate the disco-house transition in a way that we seldom see done. Listen to that little bit of compression on Risky Changes as it cuts through the cheesy piano lines-thats house in the making. Records like these are a much more effective tool at looking at music history than the ones by the artists themselves because they’ve cut all the artistic quality out of the record and made it entirely as generic as possible. So I guess if you wanted the most generic possible distillation of what dance music looked like in 78, this would be a better place to look than an “original” band who is going to fill their record with “personality” – although I really can’t give disco too much credit for that.

While digging through my desk I bumped into a tape I’d been looking for for ages. This tape was recorded in Blackey, KY (there’s a Wiki) in 1979 and features my great uncle, Clyde Caudill. By far my favorite of the songs is “Hitler Called the Devil on the Telephone.” All titles are mine, by the way. The tape represents an interesting bit of ephemera, and features two songs written about Blackey, Kentucky itself, one telling the story of how Blackey got burnt down by fire, unincorporated and then reincorporated when someone discovered that the corporation records were stored in Frankfurt Kentucky. I consider the tape to be a really rare find so far as Appalachian history goes.  I hope that somebody else with heritage in Blackey gets to hear the tape.

Tragically, when Clyde finally gets talking(in true hillbilly fashion it’s a depressing speech) in the file I named Epilogue, the tape ends in mid sentence. On the other side someone has recorded a Hank Williams record by setting the tape player up to a victrola. I don’t really know if anything was dubbed over on the other side or not. You’ll notice in one of the songs you can hear a clock chiming in the background, and its 3 o’clock.
Here they are, in no order:
Hitler Called the Devil on the Telephone
He Was in Heaven
A City Called Heaven
A Rose that Will Never Fade
I Woke Up this Morning
Jesus Walked On this Earth
Untitled Gospel
The Story of Blackey
Mabel
Epilogue

Disco gets dismissed wholesale way too often by American musicians. There were a lot of really interesting disco records made, and they deserve to be revisited.

One such artist is Cerrone.  I’m about to contradict myself here and call the records a little campy- but there’s still something really original about a lot of the material.  Giorgio Moroder wasn’t the only person making disco records…

Cerrone’s a relative unknown to American audiences, but he sold something like 30 million records  a 5-10 year period after 1977.  So this post might be laughable to a European audience.  Disco was a passing fad to the American audience- quickly eclipsed by what we now call “classic rock,” probably for reasons relating to Cold War paranoia, homophobia, and ethnocentrism.

Download here:

deltasleep: Sound That Can Kill or Cure

I released this record in 2007, having taken my time on it. The record was made over the course of a year or two, a particularly difficult period of my life economically. I had a lot of interesting experiences during the making of the record- living in shady apartments and working low paying jobs in the Southeast I got a lot of exposure to redneck culture.  Working at a fireworks store on I-24 was particularly interesting.  During the majority of the time I worked on this record I was partially deaf in my right ear.  During the rest of the time, I was totally deaf in that ear.

My style has changed a lot since then, but I think it’s still a really fun record.

It was never popular, selling 13 copies and getting some radio play here and there on college stations.  After it had been a year since I sold a copy, I released the record for free as a download.

All works are copyright 2007, David K Caudill/deltasleep.  You may play this music anytime and anywhere for non-commercial purposes.  I only ask that if you enjoy it, or receive any feedback about it, pass it on to me.

This is the record in its entirety as a .zip file along with the graphics I was printing and attaching to the CDRs I was selling.

Awesome Tapes From Africa Mix

Mix of music from African cassettes.  All downloaded from the great blog with the same name.  Check the links section to your left.

So I’ve decided that it’s time for a big change for me artistically, and I think that a new page might be a great thing to do.  I hope you don’t mind the minimal theme- I really want the focus of my time and the site to be the content in it, not the the presentation.

Music has been a pretty absent part of my life for the last year or two, and I’m working on ways to bring it back.  One of those ways is going to be podcasting.  To that effect, I have created this blog with the intent of providing a nice and tidy way to archive and display podcasts.  I’ll be getting things up to date as I find them, and adding them to this blog.

Feels good sometimes to cut baggage loose.  At a certain point as an artist, having a history is a lot like having baggage or expectations placed on the work I do.  Like I do any work…

I’ll be making a catalog here for easy access to all the media I create.  Posts will be categorized, you can select the category to the left.