Category Archives: Music

MCA Still Do What You Please

RIP Adam Yauch aka MCA.

I first heard the Beastie Boys in the late 1980s (via Licensed to Ill). Their sound was unfamiliar; their sensibility seemed to peg them as immature, loud, juvenile, trash-talking ‘wiggers‘ taking the piss out of rap. (What sorts of props did they have on tour? Girls in cages and a giant motorized inflatable penis. And yes, they wore giant clocks around their necks.) But their lyrics were still catchy:

Your pops caught you smokin’ and he said “NO WAY!”/That hypocrite smokes two packs a day/Man living at home is such a drag/Now your mom threw away your best porno mag

If Paul’s Boutique reinforced that sneak peek at their musical brilliance, then Check Your Head firmly established those credentials and made me into a fan for life. Easily one of the most innovative albums of all time, it conveyed an image antithetical in many ways to that of Licensed to Ill: sonically dense, endlessly varied, featuring a bewildering array of samples, vocal styles, instrumentations, and musical genres. Yauch is ever-present in the midst of that album-length display of technical and musical virtuosity. I played Check Your Head endlessly in my pickup truck while driving to Tennessee for Thanksgiving in 1992; by the time I returned from the trip, I had the track sequences memorized. I didn’t appreciate the follow-up–Ill Communication–any less.  I can’t think of any other trio of albums–Paul’s Boutique, Check Your Head and Ill Communication–that quite so consistently coruscates. Hip-hop Heebs rule!

Yauch was one of those celebrities that I brushed up against more than once. In the summer of 1996, after returning from a hike to Point Reyes Seashore, I stopped off in San Francisco to meet a friend before catching my flight back to New York. We went to a Tibetan food restaurant to grab a quick meal and found ourselves sitting next to Yauch, clad in Tibetan garments and conversing with a monk. (My friend knew little about the Beastie Boys and was mystified by my reaction to Yauch’s presence.) Later, as I lived in Little Italy/Soho (Mulberry Street, between Prince and Spring Streets), I would often see him in a local Tibetan arts and crafts store, chatting with the owners. This sense of living in the Beastie Boys’ neighborhood was further reinforced by my finding out that the barbershop where I went to get my hair cut–just south of Canal Street on Lispenard–was featured in the photo montage on Check Your Head!

A year later, in 1997, when my brother visited the US, I took him to the Tibetan Freedom Concert that Yauch had been instrumental in organizing; we plonked down our money for a good cause; it was a siblings day out together, a chance to see a live concert, free of the scheduling worries of my brother’s vacation. Unfortunately, I had the dates wrong, and we missed seeing the Beastie Boys perform (we did see Sonic Youth though, some consolation). Little did I realize that it had been my best chance to see them live. I never did, a fact I regret bitterly to this day.

I hope the end came painlessly for MCA; thanks so much for all the good times.

RIP Levon Helm, Thanks For The Memories

Levon Helm, drummer and singer for The Band, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 71. The only live performances of his that I have witnessed were on film, or rather, in one movie, The Last Waltz. And in particular, there was one that stood out, whose memories have endured, clearly, distinctly, across the many, many years that have passed between that day and this one: Helm’s rendition of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Some of what was distinctive about that song and Helm’s take on it  is alluded to by Jon Pareles’ in yesterday’s New York Times:

In the Band, lead vocals changed from song to song and sometimes within songs, and harmonies were elaborately communal. But particularly when lyrics turned to myths and tall tales of the American South — like “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” “Ophelia” and “Rag Mama Rag” — the lead went to Mr. Helm, with his Arkansas twang and a voice that could sound desperate, ornery and amused at the same time.

But let’s back up for a second. I saw The Last Waltz in the company of high-school mates, at what might be termed a pre-matinee show, the so-called “morning shows” that used to be so common in Indian movie-houses in the 1970s and 1980s (and possibly before). The tickets were often sold at marked-down prices, and many off-beat gems could be found there. So off-beat in fact that there was often little publicity or hype associated with their release. The Last Waltz saw its release in such a time-slot. We knew little about the movie; we didn’t know it had been made by Martin Scorsese, and had no idea either, that its cast included  Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Dr. John, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Ringo Starr, Muddy Waters, Ronnie Wood, and Neil Young. All we knew was that it was a concert movie featuring a band called, well, The Band. So we played hooky, scraped together the money required for the tickets, caught the right buses, traveled to the movie-house, bought our tickets, and filed in.

When Helm began singing “The Night..”, I was surprised; I had never seen a drummer do the vocals for a rock band before. And it quickly became clear to me that this was not just a fill-in gig; this man knew how to sing, and he sang with a ‘desperate’ passion that showed, in the urgency of his voice (and facial expression!), in the intensity of his pathos every time he sang “The night they drove old Dixie down/And the bells were ringing/The night they drove old Dixie down/And the people were singing.”

Truth be told, I didn’t understand what the lyrics meant, I didn’t understand, then, what time and place they had as their referents. All I knew, all I could sense, was that I was in the presence of a spirit pushed to the edge of his tether, brought to the brink of heartbreak by circumstance. That much I could somehow identify with, even if I was just a young Indian schoolboy, and the man inducing that feeling in me was from Arkansas, singing about a land, a people, and a time, very far away.

RIP Levon.

Record Albums, Artwork, and Physical Immediacy

At the corner of 7th Avenue and Flatbush in Brooklyn, a sidewalk entrepreneur has set up a vinyl LP sale. This has gone on for a few weeks now (and possibly longer). There’s a pretty wide selection on display, ranging from Johnny Mathis to Lil Wayne. I’ve never bothered to inquire about prices; I don’t own a record player any more; I’m always in a rush; and honestly, not that much in that catalog is of interest to this self of mine. But the stacked jackets and the artwork still serve to remind me of what we’ve lost in the transition from vinyl to the alphabet soup of MP3, AAC, OGG or whatever.

By this I don’t mean the standard audiophilic complaint of a loss of quality in the recorded sound and the resultant poorer listening experience. Rather, I mean the absence of a very particular kind of physical contact with the composite artefact consisting of vinyl long play record and its jacket with artwork. Part of the pleasure of purchasing an album–I purchased my last one back in mid-1980s–was the perusal, in the record shop, of a dazzling array of covers. I might only have purchased one–indeed, back in those days, I would have had to saved diligently to afford even that–but in getting to that point, I’d spent considerable time enjoying a great deal of eye-candy. (As a pre-pubescent lad, I remember staring goggle-eyed at Uriah Heep’s Fallen Angel! But do check out the ‘worst album covers of all time‘ too.) As Bill Walsh from albumcovers.net notes,

For a while, there was a true ‘marriage’ of two very distinct and different media — art and music. In their heyday, LP covers were an outlet for experimentation, art, fun, social comment, and the power of the visual image to sell you the music that was contained therein….The ‘cover’ of a CD is about 14% of the size of a record album; the artwork on the cassette box is just 7% as big. That’s barely enough space to put the name of the artist, much less some breathtaking or unusual artwork.

Now, of course, we don’t have CD’s either. (Or do we? I haven’t been to a record store in years so I have no idea whether these things are still out there or not.)

More to the point, the album was something I lovingly brought home, and then, following my father’s carefully drilled-technique (you would not believe the pristine state of his record collection back then!), removed the record from its sleeve, not touching its grooved surface, before gingerly setting the diamond-tipped stylus needle  on it. Something about that kind of physical contact with the music ensured a relationship with the music I struggle to find now, as I stare at the gigantic playlists on Grooveshark or at my list of Pandora stations. The convenience of playlists, queues, on-demand access and the like are not being disparaged here; not one bit. I’m merely noting the loss of a very particular kind of entanglement with the music that made it less remote, less ephemeral. Physical object fetishization at its worst, perhaps, but there you have it.

The Sneaker Pimps as Accompaniment for the Morning Newspaper

I’ve written before on this blog about the ability of music to recall specific memories: working as a bartender in a jazz bar, or suffering through a hot Brooklyn summer while working on a book. Today’s recalled memories are about a  simpler time that might have felt hectic then but feels positively bucolic compared to today.

As the summer of 1997 ended, I found myself, within the confines of New York City, a nomad. A break-up with my girlfriend meant I had to find new accommodations, and it had resulted in my moving thrice in three months. Finally I settled on the Lower East Side, renting a room in an apartment still under construction. I was broke; the moving had cost me; I had lost apartment deposits and spent too much money eating out, drinking beer, whiling away my time in bars playing pool. My meager summer employment hadn’t kept pace with my reckless expenditures and I found myself skimping, saving, borrowing money from friends, just to get by and pay rent. Even more problematically, my doctoral oral examinations awaited; I had an ambitious reading list–in philosophy of language, logic, and science–to get through.

As the fall semester began, I found myself caught, willy-nilly, in a form of monastic discipline. I had wasted enough time over the summer; I had to buckle down now. I had two section of Introductory Philosophy to teach, a long list of journal articles to get through, and very little money to spend. So I did what all abstainers do: I enforced a routine. I tried to wake up at the same time everyday, avoided my old haunts, and kept my nose to the wheel. I felt isolated, cut adrift, even in the midst of the bustling Lower East Side.

There was some relief though. I had borrowed a CD from a friend: the Sneaker Pimps‘ Becoming X. (Wait, ‘borrowed’? Yes, Virginia, there was a time when people loaned and borrowed CDs, passing them around, get this, by hand!) Two tracks, in particular, got ample play-time: Six Underground and Low Place Like Home. I was captivated  by Kelli Dayton‘s voice, by the Pimps’ trip-hop, and obsessively played those two tracks again and again. (Incidentally, the Pimps’ decision to fire Kelli Dayton after this album must rank as one of the worst personnel decisions ever; compare Dayton’s version of Low Place like Home with this Chris Corner version; ’nuff said.)

And for some still unfathomable reason my favorite time to listen to them was in the mornings, shortly after waking, with my morning coffee and a newspaper. A newspaper? Yes, because back in 1997, I did not own a computer; and even if I did, I would not have had a viable Internet connection at home. So in sharp contrast to my current habit of sitting down at my desk in the morning, my cuppa Joe handy as I check emails, read blogs, (and blog), instead, I walked out onto Avenue A, bought myself a copy of the New York Times (and sometimes the Daily News when I was keen to concentrate on sports instead), a cup of low-grade fifty-cent coffee from the bodega down the street (the kitchen in my apartment was still under construction and there were no espresso bars, not that I could have afforded one), walked back to my apartment, drank my coffee, read the paper. While being serenaded by Kelli Dayton.

I’m not sure why a pair of trip-hop tracks should have been such a perfect soundtrack for these attempts of mine to calm myself before I walked out to face a day full of teaching recalcitrant undergraduates, reading alone in a dingy office, and returning late at night to that forlorn room of mine, but it worked. Thanks Kelli.

Game Not On: Santorum Exit Left

Rick Santorum is not our man any more; the Republican candidate tree has been pruned, and suddenly, we are left with Mitt Romney (and, I believe, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul). Now is the time for Rick to swallow the bile, and get on with the business of beating the Anti-Christ, er, Barack Obama, in alliance with Mitt Romney. This is bad news for the writers at the Daily Show and the Colbert show, and for those that like watching long, protracted primary campaigns, all the while fantasizing about dramatic nomination battles at party conventions. Santorum’s exit means, most visibly, an attenuation of the entertaining quasi-fratricidal disputes between Romney and Santorum.  We will now see another side of Santorum–the Supporter of the Party–as opposed to Distinctive Maverick, and this is bound to be far less likely to tickle the funny bone.

But I have to admit, at this moment, my concerns lie elsewhere. More specifically they are centered around a pair of teenage girls in Oklahoma. Haley and Camille Harris must be very upset. For weeks now, they–and the rest of the Harris brood i.e., four other siblings and their pastor father–have been celebrating Rick Santorum’s efforts to put the White back into the White House, with a memorable video of a song whose lyrics, go, uh, a something little like this:

GAME ON! Join the Fight/We’ve finally got a Man who will Stand for what is Right
GAME ON! Victory’s in Sight/We’ve got a Man who Understands that God Gave the Bill of Rights
 Oh, there is Hope for our Nation again/Maybe the First time Since we Had Ronald Reagan
There will be Justice for the Unborn/Factories back on our Shores
Where the Constitution rules our land/Yes, I Believe… Rick Santorum is our Man!
GAME ON! He’s got the Plan/To Lower Taxes, Raise Morale, To Put the Power in our Hands
GAME ON! Change is at hand/Faithful to his Wife and Seven Kids – He’ll be Loyal to our land
Oh It’s crazy, What’s been slipping through our hands/When we the People are still supposed to rule this Land/Rick Understands 

If you aren’t a Santorum fan, want to understand this nation’s political diversity and get some insight into the nature of Santorum’s constituency, this song and its video are genuinely illustrative: this is what you’re up against. When I first saw the video, my mind boggled, but it did serve to inform me of why this man, who I took to have the intelligence of an anemone, was doing as well as he was in the Republican primaries.

On a more serious note, while Santorum’s divisive campaign has come to an end, and provided some relief from the endless displays of ignorance that he specialized in, it also means his energies will not be diverted any more by Romney and can now be devoted elsewhere. If anything, his campaign suspension means that his atavistic pronouncements will have more of a focus, and that is bad news for anyone that, bizarrely enough, still holds out hope for elevated political discourse once the primaries are over.

Tourism and the Invented Tradition

Ian Johnson interviews Tian Qing (New York Review of Books Blog, April 6th, 2012), the head of China’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection Center, ”an institution set up by the government to protect China’s native traditions in the performing arts, cuisine, rituals, festivals, and other forms of culture” in an attempt to figure out whether these cultural forms are “being recovered as living traditions or as objects for urbanized Chinese to enjoy as tourists in their own land?”

In the course of his interview, Johnson asks whether modernization can be reconciled with the imperatives to protect, preserve and promote culture:

Can’t one unite the two? For example, Bach’s sacral music is now more often than not performed in a concert hall. The music has been preserved but has a different function in society.

Tian replies:

It’s possible. But it can lead to horrible things too. In Yunnan Xishuangbanna [a popular tourist area in China’s far south] there’s a Water Splashing Festival of the Dai minority. It’s related to the birthday of Sakyamuni and used to be once a year. But now people splash water on you every day. As long as tourists come, they splash water. It’s lost its religious function. Or after [the director] Zhang Yimou filmed Red Sorghum and showed the bride in a sedan chair. That used to take place in a really small area of Shanxi province. Now across the country at every tourist spot are people with sedan chairs for hire—hey, for 50 yuan you can ride in it. Tourism. It’s terrible.

Here tourism has performed a function similar to mass-manufacture: it has taken an artifact, possibly one crafted and custom-made, available only to a few in particular contexts and settings and suddenly, dramatically, made it available to all, to ‘the masses.’ In doing so tourism has made it more generic; its accessibility has increased, but it has lost a placement that made it possible, for instance, to possess the “religious function” whose loss Tian is concerned about. So, ironically, the ‘preservation’ of the cultural artifact or ritual require its displacement from those ‘privileged’ locations in time and space that granted that ritual its original meaning and raison d’etre. Its displacement from those locations preserves it by granting it popularized longevity at the cost of an acquired ordinariness.

And as Tian notes, now the ritual has a new function, that of ‘tourist-pleaser’, one that in time could acquire new significance;  future generations might view the water splashing followed by 21st century Dai residents of Yunnan Xishuangbanna as one about welcoming tourists;  presumably, this would be an interesting discovery about our times. In the case of the sedan chair ritual a cinematic force brings about the creation of a tradition; once the origins of the ritual are  forgotten, a new creation myth can come about which might ascribe that ritual a more elaborate and elevated provenance.

So tourism and cinema then most broadly can be seen as  bringing about what Hobsbawm termed the ‘invented tradition‘:

[R]esponses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition.

The interventions of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection Center are bound, then, to create new cultural forms even as they seek to preserve older ones.

Aguirre and the Rainforest: Madness in a Theater Made For It

Werner Herzog‘s Aguirre: Wrath of God is a supremely effective cinematic meditation on madness; broadly speaking, it is able to marshal several progressions–that of the cinematic narrative; the journey into, through, and hopelessly within, an alien jungle-land; the simple passage of time–and run them alongside the descent into insanity of the movie’s eponymous central character.  It is this relentless, fatal, spiraling downward into a place we wish we never will see that remains the movie’s grimmest and most compelling attraction. It is entirely unsurprising to find this movement toward the darker regions of mind and space features a soundtrack that enjoys critical acclaim; Aguirre’s journey into madness has a symphonic majesty to it that demands, and finds, an appropriate musical accompaniment.

And this journey does not just take place anywhere. It  has a very singular location: the Amazonian rainforest.

What is truly peculiar about the rainforest is that it runs the contrasts of the wild densely together in an unrelentingly claustrophobic space: here is life, thick, lush, green, omnipresent, struggling constantly for space, water, air, sustenance; here too is death, the generations of plant and animal life trodden down, buried, integrated into the flesh of the rainforests’ new inhabitants; here is open space, untouched by man; here is space colonized by the forest’s growth.  All wildernesses remind us of remoteness from human concern; the rainforest throws up perhaps the thickest barriers against the exertion of human will.  This is a theater of madness par excellence.

When Aguirre’s daughter, Flores, is told by their Indian prisoner that they will never leave the rainforest, that they are doomed, the chill the viewer feels has been building for a while; the Indian has merely articulated what has thus far remained unsaid. He has finally forced attention to the elephant in the room: this journey is doomed, not just because of its leader’s megalomania, greed, and insanity, but also because of all the places in the world that he could have chosen to exercise his fevered, misguided vision, he has done so in a place so implacably indifferent and hostile to human ambition and desire. The backdrop for Aguirre’s story is that of the conquistador’s ‘conquest’ of the Americas; here, even that unstoppable juggernaut must finally come to a grinding, muddy, watery halt, strangled in the flora and fauna of the rainforest.

Aguirre’s book-ends possess a beautiful structural perfection: the opening scene captures the descent of a chain of tiny, struggling, destined-to-be-outmatched humans into a misty valley, accompanied by the soundtrack’s haunting opening notes; the final scene shows us Aguirre’s insanity is complete; he has announced his hallucinatory vision of his promised kingdom; the forest has crept up to the edge and started picking off stragglers; the monkeys–possibly symbolic of the forces of madness set loose in Aguirre’s mind–run rampant over the raft; all is lost. And the raft floats on, toward its final union with the ocean, carrying on it the latest victims of the encounter of human hubris and nature’s indifference.

Skream’s Where You Should Be, Eight Hours in Brooklyn, and Summer

I’ve written before, on this blog, about the “fine-grained, specific recall” of memories that listening to a song can bring about. I’m inclined to think that any time I pen a note of appreciation here about a particular piece of music, I will do so by also noting and paying attention to its associations; it seems to go with the territory. (A new series, so to speak: Songs and the Things They Make Me Remember.)

Last time, it was BB King’s Thrill is Gone and remembering my time as a bartender in a small jazz bar in Newark. Today, it’s Skream‘s Where You Should Be (featuring Sam Franck) and the summer of 2011. There are two twists in this tale. For one, this song goes hand in hand with a video–but not its official music video, which comes off a distinct second-best–and secondly, the associated memory is very recent.

In August 2011, Next Level Pictures released a video titled Eight Hours in Brooklyn; ostensibly a concept shoot for a commercial, it was shot using a Phantom Flex camera, and featured dizzying, super slo-mo shots of skateboarders carrying out flips and a formation ride down a road next to an elevated subway track, hydrant bathers, pickup basketball games played by tattooed teenagers, break dance moves, and a close-up of a tattoo under construction. As soundtrack, it featured Skream’s Where You Should Be.

Where You Should Be is a sophisticated piece of pop dubstep; and it is too, a breakup song. Its lyrics are simple and plaintive; they don’t aspire to high poetic levels. Consider, for instance:

How can I feel good about this life I’m living//When you’re not here//Right beside me

or,

These lonely days//Turn to lonely nights//Everything’s upside down//And I’ve lost the will to fight

But for all that, set to the bass, melody and slightly spooky vocals of the track, they work well. And Where You Should Be works especially well with Eight Hours in Brooklyn, which of course,  isn’t about breaking up with anyone. But the video’s images immediately taps into a melancholia that always seems to be associated with summers on the East Coast: the knowledge that all this cannot last, that the summer, hot, sticky, humid and kvetch-invoking as it is, is also the time for cool, T-shirted nights, barbecues, beach trips, and cold beer. And in August, the light begins to change, the shadows lengthen, and we are reminded that we had better get on with the business of making the most of it before the change of season, before, once the glories of fall have gone, we’ll be stuck with slush, snow, and the grimy greyness of winter.

In August 2011, I was working on a book, and dealing with all the frustration and self-doubt that that always seems to entail. I tried to stay sane, mostly by lifting weights, and by endlessly bitching and moaning, to anyone that would listen. And sometimes, by diversion. Watching Lost was one particularly undistinguished way, listening to music was another. Eight Hours in Brooklyn was a perfect three-minute break from editing, revising, and worrying whether anyone would give a rat’s ass about my self-indulgent reflections.

So, thank you, Skream; thank you Phantom Flex camera; and thank you, videomakers. You got at least one writer across the finish line.

Reflections on Translations – II: Music and the Superfluousness of Comprehension

Can one listen to a song, not understand its lyrics, and still appreciate it? The answer to this silly question is a straightforward ‘Yes’, and I don’t think I would be alone in saying so.

As the endearing popularity of The Best–or Most–Misunderstood Lyrics meme, and the persistent faux complaints about Incomprehensible Lyrics show, we are used to hearing and appreciating songs whose words we only dimly understand. In the case of the Misunderstood Lyric, we impose our creative–often more-satisfying and more-entertaining–interpretation on the words and carry merrily along; in the case of the Incomprehensible Lyric, we sometimes mouth substitutes, sometimes we move our lips in despair, struggling to find traction somewhere, anywhere, in that slippery mass of mumbles, moans, grunts, all in a supposedly familiar language. But we don’t stop listening; no one ever hits the ‘off’ button in frustration at incomprehension.

Sometimes, as was evident to me some twenty years ago, when I saw University of Maryland students ‘dancing’ to Ice Cube‘s  ”Wrong Nigger To Fuck With”, we can vaguely, dimly, understand the lyrics, and perhaps push their fully comprehended significance away from us so we can get on with the business at hand viz. dancing. In this case, I have in mind the last verse of WNTFW, which reads:

Don’t let me catch Daryl Gates in traffic
I gotta have it, to peel his cap backwards
I hope he wear a vest too, and his best blew
goin up against the Zulu
Break his spine like a jellyfish
Kick his ass til I’m smellin shit
Off wit the head, off wit the head I say
And watch the devil start kickin
Run around like a chicken, grand dragon finger lickin
Yo, turn him over wit a spatula
Now we got, Kentucky Fried Cracker
Mess with the Cube, you get punked quick
Pig, cause I’m the wrong nigga to fuck with!

Dunno if these are lyrics to dance by, exactly.

But most importantly, we listen to songs in other languages, whose words are all Greek–or Spanish, or French–to us. We hear the words, we respond to their sounds, their physicality; the lack of a connection with their meanings does not appear to faze the listener. Here, music ceases to be the lyrical word, and becomes purely expressive again. Sometimes this lack of connection with meaning can be a relief; we can get on with the business of simply reacting to the sounds. (I enjoyed Plastic Bertrand‘s Ca Plane Pour Moi for years before bothering to look up anything about it.) My favorite instance is Fernanda Abreu‘s Katia Flavia, which I’ve been listening to for some eight years now, all the while wrapped in utter incomprehension about the song’s lyrics, their meaning or supposed significance. I like the sound of Portugese, especially when deployed by such a strong, funky voice; I respond, immediately, to the cadence, the urgency and insistence of Abreu’s peformance. And I find no desire whatsoever to translate, to push back on the opacity of the lyric.

It’s not because I think I will be disillusioned; it’s just because, at this stage in my enjoyment of the song, comprehension seems besides the point.

Nina Paley’s “Sita Sings The Blues”

This past weekend’s viewing pleasures included a long-standing, and much-awaited, resident of my movie queue: Nina Paley‘s 2008 graphically and musically eclectic reworking of the Indian epic Ramayana, Sita Sings The Blues. The movie incorporates four elements: a reworking of the traditional narrative of the Ramayana; a Mystery Science Theater-like commentary on the Ramayana carried out by shadow puppets (in my mind, the highlight of the movie); musical episodes from the Ramayana, featuring blues classics performed by Annette Hanshaw; and an autobiographical parallel tale featuring Paley herself.

Sita Sings The Blues is musically and visually diverse. The episodes from the Ramayana resemble 18th-century Rajput painting featuring characters in profile; the shadow puppets converse in silhouette about the Ramayana’s plot; the musical episodes featuring Hanshaw’s songs featuring vector graphic animation are the most modern looking; and lastly, Paley’s autobiographical tale is told using Squigglevision. The Ramayana’s sometime-baroque narrative is simplifed to concentrate on the Rama-Sita subplot and its persistent obsessions of wifely devotion and idealization of female sexual purity; the shadow puppets with their distinctive urban Indian accents showcase the ambiguously irreverent and idiosyncratic readings that generations of Indians have carried out on their epics; the Hanshaw interludes remind us that underneath the fun and games, the story of Sita, which lies at the heart of the Ramayana, can be read as a tragedy; and lastly the contemporary tale of relationship-breakdown shows us that exile, heartbreak, and rejection are perennial features of our encounters with other human beings.

Paley’s movie is not, of course, just about animation, music, and the epics. It also constitutes a statement in the modern debate over how artistic creations in this day and age are to be distributed, consumed, and paid for; Sita Sings The Blues was released under a Creative Commons Share Alike Common Attribution License. On an extra on the DVD, Paley, in the course of an interview with WNET, offers some passionate thoughts on culture control and lockdown, and how her decision to release the movie under her chosen license came about. (Incidentally, the use of Hanshaw songs almost crippled the movie thanks to the licensing rules and fees associated with them; on this and on other aspects of the movie’s positioning within the modern ‘intellectual property’ debate, it is well worth reading some of the informational material on the movie’s website.)

Lastly, according to Paley, the movie attracted some flak from both left and right – the Indian ones, that is. From the ‘left’: Paley’s movie is an act of cultural and artistic appropriation that fails to situate the movie in its correct position in post-colonial discourse. From the ‘right’: Paley’s movie is an act of cultural and artistic appropriation, which, in suggesting that modern gender and sexual relations can enlighten us about the presuppositions that lie at the heart of religious epics, and in providing a not-so-pompously-moralistic alternative retelling of a Scripture, is insulting and disrespectful of the sentiments of millions of Hindus.

When fire is directed from both flanks, all is well. Go see the movie.