I heard it through the bookvine

[Lisnaholic]

If it's OK, I'm re-posting this thread from MB, and will then continue with occasional posts as I come across new references to songs in books:

Sometimes a book that is not about music mentions a song or artist. When that happened to me in the past, I used to briefly wonder what it sounded like, but then just move on with my life and/or the book. Well, thanks to the internet, that's different today, and we can quickly explore the music references that turn up in non-musical books. On MB, I don't think anyone contributed their own book+music example, but that's not to say that people aren't welcome to add any comments they like about music they've explored while reading about a different topic.

This OP and the next two long posts are all of old material: anything new will turn up in post #3.

Dec. 2016
In John Updike's novel, Couples, a guy living in a rural community 20 miles south of Boston goes into church one Sunday. (I presume the year is the year the novel was written, 1968.) Anyway, he joins in the singing of this hymn, All Hail The Power:-

 

My verdict: The full-voiced choir give a rousing, robust performance. To me it comes across as both lively and soothing at the same time. Altogether better than I expected, with its "Crown Him" chant pushing the whole thing along. (Contrary to what the composer intended, I couldn't help noticing how much the old-fashioned word "to prostrate" resembles the modern word "prostate." If we'd had to sing this in my old school, I bet me and my classmates would've sung, "Let angels' prostates fall." tee-hee)
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West of Kabul, East of New York is a memoir by Tamin Ansary, an Afghan who emmigrated to the USA. In the 1980s he hung out with his pals in San Francisco, "listening to tapes of Ahmad Zahir, the Elvis Presley of Afghanistan":-

My verdict: This has a little exotic zing and a sing-a-long hook which is a pretty good combination imo. Don't expect any trace of Elvis in this, though at 3:20, Ahmad looks exactly like Van Morrison.
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DEC. 2016:
Gabriele Eckart was born the same year as me, but grew up in the repressive totalitarian regime of East Germany when it was a satelite state of the USSR. During the decades of the Cold War, the lives of millions of people in East Germany were blighted by poverty and paranoia, controlled by the loathed Stasi police, with their sham justice and their insidious, blackmailing  recruitment of spies. "The ratio of watchers to watched was even higher than that of the Soviets under communism."

Remarkable, then, that Gabriele's book of short stories, Hitchhiking, often has a light, resigned but almost optimistic touch. (That attitude was partly forced on her, of course, as being the only way to get her work published, by charting a fine line between artistic honesty and what was politically permissible.) Anyway, in one story from 1982 a local accordion player, Uncle Benno, gets drunk at a village wedding before playing the traditional song, Mein Vogelbeerbaum (My Rowan Tree) :-

My verdict: I imagine this version of the song, recorded about ten years ago by Dorfrocker, doesn't much resemble Uncle Benno's version, but this video clip does a pretty good job of re-invigorating a traditional song. For the curious, Dorfrocker seems to be a boy-next-door boyband formed in 2005, but as their webpage is in German, we won't know more unless Grindy translates for us: DORFROCKER
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FEB. 2017:
The Life  & Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin is a  humourous novel written by Vladmir Voinovich in 1969, but is set in an earlier era. Not some great Russian classic, but it's amusing in parts, and sheds light on rural life under the collectivised system introduced by Stalin. Anyone who gets the same US translation as me will find this on page 92:-

"Evening had come. The first small stars had appeared in the sky. A radio attached to a post near the kolkhoz office was playing Dunayevsky's songs with lyrics by Lebedev-Kumach."

I found a song by that same song-writing team, who were active in the 1930s. So imagine the rural scene again, but now with this inescapable musical backdrop:-

My verdict: I have a strong aversion to enforced jollity of any kind. If I was a character in the story of Ivan Chonkin, I'd be sabotaging that radio the first night they turned it on.
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MAR. 2017:
Martin Amis, a British author whose most famous book is probably Time's Arrow, suffered  with really bad teeth from his teenage years onwards. Bad teeth is something that the Brits are famous for, so in mitigation of that unwanted reputation I'd say this:-
i) children growing up in the fifties generally had a calcium-deficient diet because of post-war rationing.
ii) the state-funded National Health Service didn't offer cosmetic dental treatment, so most people took that as verdict enough: it's not necessary.

In his autobiography, Experience Martin Amis laments, "I know all about the expert musicianship of toothaches, their brass, woodwind and percussion and, most predominantly, their strings, their strings (Bach's ¨Concierto for Cello¨struck me, when I recently heard it performed, as a faultless transcription of a toothache - the persistence, the irresistable persuasiveness)."

 

My verdict: I don't hear much toothache in this, but luckily I've never had many tooth probs. I suppose at a stretch, I can imagine some of the low notes in the slow movement (at about 6 mins in) reverberating unpleasantly through my gums, but I think there are plenty of more painful, excruciating pieces of music that MA could've chosen. But toothaches apart, for a piece of classical music this seems pretty good; not too cheerful and not too dramatic. Theoretically, I'd be happy to hear it again, but who am I kidding? I never listen to classical music.
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[Lisnaholic]

APR. 2017:
When Martin Luther King was a young man his father was the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and it was there that...

"...as a young child Martin loved the footstomping gospel songs that caused parishioners to rock with joy. To his mother's accompaniment, he often led the choir in stirring hymns, such as his favorite, I Want To Be More and More Like Jesus."One of the things I remember very vividly," recalls Laura Henderson, a long-time member of the Ebenezer congregation, "is he was a great solo singer as a child. He used to sing a lot of solos.""

Of course, you know that already if you have read King Remembered by Flip Schulke and Penelope McPhee, which is a short biog giving the basic facts of MLK's life. (At about 300 pages doesn't get too bogged down in detail either.)

"big pic of church"

[close]

My verdict:- This is the first version of MLK's favourite that pops up on YouTube, and I am pleasantly surprised. The lyrics may not be to everybody's taste, but the arrangement and repetitious chanting of "Just like Jesus" won me over in the end. So many artists credit gospel music as an early inspiration, and by chance I've come across a performance that conveys that inspiration, not just to the swaying congregation, but even to a jaded white stay-at-home atheist like me. Hallelujah indeed.
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APR. 2017:
In England, Joan Didion first rose to obscurity when a book of hers with an eye-catching title was published in the sixties. Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a slice of social reporting about "things falling apart" in California, with JD getting her title from a gloomy poem by W.B.Yeats about anarchy and world chaos - a poem that deflates the hope of redemption by a Second Coming of the Messiah with its ominous concluding question:-
"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

More recently, JD has written a book with a simpler title, Miami, in which she carefully picks apart the social fabric of that city with her usual perceptive, slightly off-beat style. She mentions the Cuban National anthem being played at a ceremony at the Martyrs of Girón monument in downtown Miami. Has anyone heard it before? I get the impression that in Miami it's played almost as often as its American counterpart:-

My Verdict: This version at least has some lighter musical trills, but can't entirely escape the ponderous marching dullness that afflicts all national anthems afaik.

JD's book also teaches me that Coconut Grove is a wealthy residential district of Miami, so here´s the song John Sebastian wrote about the place; a song from the album "Hums of the Lovin' Spoonful" that lifted my spirits when I was a shivering schoolboy, enduring the interminable cold of London winters but yearning for somewhere warm and sunny :-

My verdict: Like his more famous Daydream, this song sounds quite simple but is very effective at putting you in a relaxed mood. Is it good music? Who cares? My critical faculties have been completely disarmed by a mixture of nostalgia and JB's palpably good vibes.
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JUN 2017:
The great virtue of writing is, of course, its ability to transport you to a time and place you can never otherwise visit. Planet earth and human history is pretty big and I found myself transported to a rather obscure corner of it by Inga Clendinnen's memoir, Tiger's Eye. May I do for you what she did for me? Invite you to imagine her hometown, Geelong, a coastal town in New South Wales, as it was in the 1940s:-



In this setting she introduces us to her father, who she used to follow around devotedly when she was a child of about eight. He was a bee-keeper who of necessity had to chase his bees wherever they should go when they decided to swarm. This would entail tramping rough-shod through other people's gardens as he kept his eye on the sky:-

"He would climb over back fences, with the householders anxiously peering out of windows, especially if they hadn't noticed the swarm bouncing along in the sky. If he happened to see them peeping, my father would tip his hat to them and point heavenwards, which did not seem to reassure them much."
What a likeable guy he sounds! In fact his carefree attitude hid something sombre; he was leading an unambitious life after surviving the trauma of Flanders' trenches in the First World War. Perhaps that's where he first heard the song that Inga mentions:-
Quote:
"... and all the way home he would sing snatches of his only song: Where the Mountains of Mourne Sweep Down to the Sea."

My Verdict: A little slow for my liking perhaps, but the words are clever; the format of the letter home, the glitter of London and the homesickness for the "dark Mourne" are all done very well. Also, to know that this was the favourite song of a long-dead Australian beekeeper makes me listen to it with extra sympathy. Thinking about it, speeding the song up wouldn't do justice to its atmosphere of nostalgia and yearning. Good call, Don McLean!
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JUL. 2017
Eye-witness accounts are often fascinating simply because of the immediacy of having a person telling it like they saw it. It's the literary equivalent of a stranger in a bar who suddenly confides to you some memorable events in his life. Travel books, memoirs and of course autobiographies all fall into this "I was there" category, as does Paul Riekhoff's book, Chasing Ghosts.

Paul Riekhoff was there, as a Lieutenant in the US infantry, when his platoon were stationed in Baghdad for a year. The year being 2003, Paul was literally on the front line during the US occupation of Iraq and the capture of Saddam Hussein. On a daily basis he and his men were patrolling a city of violent chaos, which he likened to Mogadishu in BlackHawk Down. That comparison gives some general background to this scene, which serves as a respite from the catalogue of snipers, explosives and terrified Iraqis that the soldiers were otherwise facing:-
"A local Iraqi had set up an Internet café where soldiers could get e-mail maybe once a week. We prayed for good news, baby pictures, spam, ridiculous forwards, and porn clips from home. Ten PCs were circled around a small TV that played an Egyptian music video channel. The bizarre video for the Darkness song "I believe in a Thing Called Love" blared constantly."

Paul R's opinion: "There was something especially weird about watching a retro eighties heavy metal singer with long hair and spandex pants while I sat in Iraq wearing camouflage waiting for the Hotmail home page to download at a snail's pace."
My opinion: After Paul R's description, I was pleased to hear that it wasn't that heavy metal after all. I liked the guy's falsetto vocals and the sense of humour with which the video was made. If anything, it reminded me a little of Sparks' This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us - and like the Sparks' song, this one is ok but doesn't particularly speak to me in any way.
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SEPT 2017
John Fowles' second novel The Magus made a huge impression on me when I read it as a teenager. Now I'm rereading the account of protagonist Nicholas Urfe, specifically as he spends his second weekend as a guest of the mysterious Mr. Conchis. The scene is the private villa on Phraxos, overlooking the Aegean, where so much of the action takes place:-
"I sat in his music room and listened to him play the D minor English suite. Conchis seemed to me to play as if there was no barrier between him and the music; no need to "interpret", to please an audience, to satisfy some inner vanity. He played as I suppose Bach himself would have played -I think at a rather slower tempo than most modern pianists and harpsichordists, though with no loss of rhythm or shape. I sat in the cool shuttered room and watched the slightly bowed bald head behind the shining black harpsichord. I heard the driving onwardness of Bach, the endless progressions."

My Verdict: Placed within the fascinating story that unfolds around Mr.Conchis, and given that rather exalted description, I had hoped this piece of music might be better. In my own crass opinion, it's an irritating and shrill display of proficiency for the sake of proficiency. Instead of driving onwards, I feel it to be going round in circles, destination: nowhere. To be fair though, I've only posted a 3-minute bit of a 30-min piece, and some of the slower parts don't sound too bad.

I wonder if old man Conchis played the entire thirty mins, as Nicholas sat in respectful silence?  And incidentally, isn't there sometimes an embarrassing pause to be filled when you have just been granted a personal performance by a musician? Has anyone else ever found that? Clapping is a bit weird, so you have to say something, but what? Let's see what Nicholas came up with after his half-hour endurance test:-
"Conchis had finished, was watching me.
"You make words seem shabby things."
"Bach does"
"And you."
He grimaced, but I could see he was not unpleased, though he tried to hide it by marching me off to give his vegetables their evening watering."

"You make words shabby things." Hmm, not exactly the best line in the book - in fact, possibly one of the weakest in a book that is in other respects a tour de force of intellectual mystery.
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DEC 2019!
An elite band of journalists are remembered by name for decades, and, in my experience, they are usually Americans: Mark Twain, Hunter S. Thompson, Woodward and Bernstein. Not in that pantheon, however, is Joseph Mitchell, despite being American and despite being called (by Newsday) "the best reporter ever to write for The New Yorker."

I was lucky enough, though, to come across a compendium of his collected articles, Up In The Old Hotel and have been enjoying his detailed, local reporting on a forgotten back-alley of US culture: the world of New York's Bowery district in the 1940s. It's a curious world of urban hardship, bars, and eccentrics from another era. Mazie, for instance, sold tickets from a small theatre's box-office booth but after work, "in the nickel-a-drink saloons and in the all night restaurants which specialize in pig-snouts and cabbage" she is well known for her generosity to down-and-outs. Captain Charley, is a "a relentless and indiscriminate collector" who opened his own one-man Private Museum for Intelligent People in a cluttered basement (admission 15 cents). I hope those two examples give some idea of the strange, long-gone underworld that JM describes in his forty-plus articles, each of which reads more like a short story than normal journalism.

This post is about the night in 1939 that JM went to a dance hall in Harlem which was hosting a "Trinidad Carnival Committee Picnic." That's where he met, drank with and listened to Wilmoth Houdini and his Krazy Kat Band. After a drink, JM reports:-
"Houndini went behind the bar and got a spoon and a square green gin bottle. He showed the bottle to me."I brought her from Trinidad", he said. "I beat out many a tune on her. I can make her palpitate. I call her Ol' Square Face." The bottle was one third full of water.
Houdini returned to the [musicians'] enclosure and got up on his chair. He began a rhythmic, tantalizing beat with the bottle and spoon. Soon he was making more noise than all the other musicians, and began to sing."

Houndini went behind the bar and got a spoon and a square green gin bottle. He showed the bottle to me."I brought her from Trinidad", he said. "I beat out many a tune on her. I can make her palpitate. I call her Ol' Square Face." The bottle was one third full of water.
Houdini returned to the [musicians'] enclosure and got up on his chair. He began a rhythmic, tantalizing beat with the bottle and spoon. Soon he was making more noise than all the other musicians, and began to sing.

In fact he began to sing this song, specifically mentioned by JM and luckily available on Youtube too:-

Thanks to JM's meticulous reporting, we even know how this music went down when delivered live: "Only the old women along the wall listened to the words. The men and women on the crowded dance floor minded their own business. Occasionally one of the expertly wanton dancers would shudder and let out a loud moan, and then all the others would laugh uproariously and scream, "Hold tight!" or "Please, sister!" "

My verdict: I like this track mostly for its old-time obscurity, so I wouldn't particularly enjoy the song if it wasn't for that genuine crackly texture to the recording. Calypso has a kind of immediate, spontaneous charm which probably works well live, but as it's difficult to conjure up the giddy atmosphere of a Trinidad Picnic in the privacy of my own home, I probably won't bother to listen again.
But here's another song by Wilmoth Houdini which I enjoyed much more, thanks to the backing singers and to the fact that you can hear ringing out clearly what I truly hope is Wilmoth's bottle and spoon: Ol' Square Face herself, a gin bottle from Trinidad and from 80 years ago that we can still hear today. Now that is the magic of modern recording technology!

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[Lisnaholic]

MAY  2020
If you measure these things by number of people affected over quantity of time, then the slave trade out of Africa must be one of the cruellest things ever visited on a continent. Plenty of countries were guilty of slavery and so plenty of countries have descendants of slaves in their countries today.

One ethnic group we don't hear much about are the Sheedis. Victims of the Muslim trade in slaves, they are people of African descent who now live in southern Pakistan. Because of predjudice, poverty and lack of education, the Sheedis hang on to their history by a shoestring, but little threads of evidence trace them back to slaves taken from Zimbabwe, Tanzania and/or Mali. As author Alice Albinia explored Pakistan researching her book, Empires of the Indus , she visited the impoverished village of Tando Bago where she met some Sheedis keen to preserve their historical connection to Africa:-
"...Khuda Ganj played me the music of Ali Farka Touré, which has recently become popular with Sheedis because its rhythms are considered similar to those played by Pakistan's famous Sheedi musicians such as the late Bilawal Beljium."

Now you know as much as me about Bilawal Beljium and can judge his music for yourself:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0IUIrvfloI

My Opinion: This is a pretty good track which I'd listen to again. I like the way the instruments compliment each other by sounding like opposites: the high-pitch complexity of the strings and the low, almost random thud of the drum. Youtube has other tracks from the same album: the 10-min Rag Malkauns, in which Bilawal really plays up a storm, is excellent, but the short Dance Tune of Sheedis was disappointing imo.

Search tip: Bilawal Beljium may turn up as Ustad Bilawal Belgium as well.
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MAY 2021
I can recommend Joseph Piercy's book, The Story of English. At 180-odd pages, he has kept his historical overview short enough to stay interesting throughout, and either he or his publishers have given it the enticing subtitle: "How an Obscure Dialect Became the World's Most-Spoken Language." From Celts to Romans to a section titled "The Great Vowel Shift" it looks at how English developed and spread, ending up with the language seen on MB: lol, gr8 and milf.

Among the must-mention literature (Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc.) John Milton turns up. As I'm sure we all know , he wrote in Early Modern English, in the 1650s:
"John Milton: King of the Metal Heads
Although undoubtedly a huge influence on the Romantic movement, and particularly the work of poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelly and William Blake, one area of popular culture where Milton's work has found a surprising resonance is with purveyors of heavy rock music. Over a dozen different heavy metal bands from various parts of the world have written songs inspired by Paradise Lost, including the British band, Cradle of Filth, whose concept album, Damnation and a Day is inspired by Milton's epic poem."

Here are the two opening tracks of Damnation and a Day, an album with an hour and a quarter running time, so CoF can't be faulted for effort, which, to judge from the second video is true of their live performances too:-

My opinion: Heavy metal is too noisy and insistent for my liking, so I was pleasantly surprised by the first part of "A Bruise Apon The Silent Moon"  - that is until I realized that it was building into a piece of OTT musical  drama which I also didn't like. On the next track we have the barrage of guitars that I expected from this genre, together with the routinely "evil" voice that goes with. Nothing here that encourages me to continue listening, so no analysis of how their lyrics relate to the original poem, I'm afraid.
In fairness to the band I should mention that this is rated (allmusic.com) as one of their weaker albums – although actually, they seem to have quite a few weaker albums. Sorry guys!
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JULY 2021
J.D.Salinger has a special place in modern literature. Who else is so famous for one book and for being so reclusive? That's why I can totally recommend Ian Hamilton's attempt to puncture the myth, In Search of J.D, Salinger. To do justice to it, I'll quote what they say on the back cover: "... a sophisticated exploration of JDS's life and writing and a sustained debate about the nature of literary biography, it's ethical legitimacy.." The book's title is very accurate: it's not just about JDS, but is also about the detective-work that Hamilton did to write it,  and how he ended up fighting JDS in court, wrestling with ethical questions about research and "fair use".
As for the JDS content, this was new to me:
"It was in 1948 that [JDS] had his first direct authorial dealings with the movie industry. Darryl Zanuck bought the screen rights of "Uncle Wiggily in Conneticut" and, in 1949, turned it into a weepie of the year called My Foolish Heart. The movie was a big success. Its theme song won an Oscar and is still a nightclub standard."
 
Hamilton goes on to say that "the film was a travesty, even by Hollywood standards....the shamelessly lachrymose screenplay is barely polite to the original." If any reader of The Catcher In The Rye wonders why Holden Caulfield rants so bitterly against Hollywood phonies – well, look no further than the treatment given to JDS's short story a year or so previously.

This version of My Foolish Heart from 1955 has the advantage of giving Ethel Ennis her MB debut, afaik:-

My verdict: I'd like to say, "Let's have a round of applause for Ethel!" because she does a great job with the singing, but personally I find this kind of languid rumination about love all but unbearable. And perhaps not entirely by chance, it's a mood that reminds me of those old movies: the sophisticated, sentimental couple leaving the dance floor for the verandah, where they revel in (or agonise about) their relationship, blowing their cigarette smoke into the night air with oh such casual elegance.
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JULY 2021
However passionately we might issue death threats to each other in the Beatles vs Beach Boys threads, one thing's for sure: music isn't actually a matter of life and death for us.

Sadly, it could become so in Nazi-occupied Poland. Thomas Keneally's Schindler's List is a kind of novelized history based on 50 survivors' interviews that TK collected in 1980/81. For the pedantically minded, his book is catalogued as fiction, though it's full of facts and accounts that are uncontested afaik.

One anecdote is about 16-year-old Haubenstock, who "had been heard singing Volga, Volga and other banned Russian songs with the intention, according to his death sentence, of winning the Ukranian guards over to Bolshevism." (At the time, Ukranian guards, like other police/army units were implementing orders coming, ultimately, from Berlin.)
It's hard to read the details of how this innocent boy, after begging for his life, was shot by SS officer Amon Goeth, the camp commander made infamous by Spielberg's excellent movie.

My Opinion: A robust, moving song, clearly full of pride and yearning for the Volga region: a classic, apparently, of Russian folk music. If it sounds familiar, that may be because it was turned into "The Carnival Is Over" by Tom Springfield of The Seekers.
Good song, and R.I.P. poor Haubenstock (1927- 1943), shot for taking solace in music.
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NOV 2021
David Aaronovitch, author of Voodoo Histories devotes one chapter to the mysterious death of Hilda Murrell in 1984. Entitled "A Very British Plot", the chapter describes the murder of this 78-year-old expert on roses who lived alone in a Shropshire suburb. Conspiracies abound because of the strange circumstances of her death and the fact that she was actively engaged in anti-nuclear activities. Did she die because she interrupted a clumsy search of her house by British Security Forces? That's what many think, including, presumably the band Attaco Decente:
"Her posthumous celebrity came quickly. The year 1985 saw two books published about her murder......a novel....three years later the band Attaco Decente recorded a song about her murder entitled "The Rose Grower"."

Maybe it hit the charts in Shropshire, but I don't think the song has had much impact elsewhere. I've certainly never heard of it until today:

My opinion: Just based on the band name, I was expecting a completely different genre, so the gentle plucking of the intro came as an agreeable surprise. Some nice flute in the song too, but a "story song" stands or falls by the way it tells its story.
The vocals strike me as a bit weak, failing to deliver on the anger inherent in the lines "they abducted her, knifed her to death" or "we will get the bastards" In fact, the topic of the song makes the flute interlude sound a little inappropriate, and the line "Roses growers beware" is right on the edge of laughable imo.
In all, this is a very British song about a very British plot: despite the violence of her death, the song seems at pains not to offend, reluctant to intrude on the gentle rural harmony that has been the norm of Shropshire life for hundreds of years I suspect.
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MAR 2022
A lot of writers, both published and unpublished, start out with that semi-autobiographical novel that looks at a young persons coming of age or their early adult years. Colin Wilson, who went on to write some extraordinary books, did that too, with Adrift In Soho. Set in London in 1950, he describes the adventures of a young man who falls in with various beggars, artists, drunks in the pubs and cafés of a very specific part of London. One afternoon walking from the National Gallery to a rendezvous in a café, "I crossed the square, where a four-piece street band was playing Tin Roof Blues, and turned up Charing Cross Road."

The earliest Tin Roof Blues I saw on Youtube was from 1923, but this version is a bit closer to the time CW would have heard it. Usually, if CW mentions music at all, it's to make an intellectual point but that isn't the case here - which actually points to the charm of this book: we see CW as straight-forward guy absorbing the bohemian haunts of London and wondering what to do with his life.

My opinion: For once in this thread, a piece of music from a genre I like. This strikes me as agreeable rather than outstanding, but it's interesting to think that this was a tune CW could recognize in the street and that, presumably, he expected at least some readers to recognize the title.
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APR 2022
When she was 36, Monica Ali's first novel, Brick Lane, was published to great critical acclaim. Her novel is most notable for its subject matter: exploring the often hum-drum life of a Bangladeshi family living in a block of Council flats near central London. (Council flats = British version of America's "projects")
The book does a good job of shining some light on a type of person who is often overlooked: Muslim women in Western cities. It's easy enough to read, has a couple of interesting characters, but has some limitations too. Within four years the book had been turned into a movie, but along with its outward success came a fair amount of controversy as well: the community Monica A was describing felt that they were being caricatured, and in truth this Bengali/British group of Muslims might well feel defensive. They are ostracized by many other Londoners for being so foreign, and criticized by other Muslims for being impure and too Westernised.

One Bangladeshi rock band that gets a mention in Brick Lane is called "Miles". Led by Shafin Ahmed, they are a pop-rock band living and recording in Bangladesh and Jala Jala was one of their bigger hits. It was released in 1996 and so falls exactly into the time period described by Monica Ali:

My verdict: This starts strong with a great guitar riff and it has the kind of easy-to-remember title that used to dominate the Eurovision Song Contest at one time.(Remember these classics of international baby-talk: La La La, Boom Bang-a-Bang, Ding-a-Dong and Diggi-Loo, Diggi-Ley? All Eurovision Song Contest winners.) I like the short interludes of synth and guitar, but for me, Miles never move far enough away from the pop format to be really interesting.
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DEC 2022
You probably won't recognise the title, Cielito Lindo, but I bet you'll recognise the swaying hook line: "Ay Ay Ay Ay, Canto y no llores":

Best known Mariachi song in the world, I should think, which is why, back in 1951, the local band in the Peruvian town of Cartavio had it on their playlist when they were hired to play by Cartavio's bigwigs. At the time, the local aristocracy were trying to diffuse tensions with the exploited workers of the town's sugar industry, and so they contrived a public party in the Main Square:


"Late one Sunday afternoon, the tables were set up on the square by the central market, the band struck its first chord, and the aroma of roasted flesh began to wind through the streets... house by house, the workers and their families began to file out in their best shirts, with lavender oil matting their hair.
The music, the food, and the rum were working their spell that night. Ay, ay, ay ay! Canta y no llores! ....Before long, Cartavio was full of belly-bouncing laughter, a roaring, squealing bacchanalia."
It's all there in Marie Arana's memoir, American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood.

My Verdict: It's a pity the song is so hackneyed that it's become a joke today. It has some sentimental lyrics about a girl identified as "Lovely Little Sky" but it's real power is in the the admonition of the chorus, "Ay, ay, ay! Sing and don't cry!". It's just the perfect drinking song for people who want to drown their sorrows. You can almost see the beer slopping out of their mugs as people sway and sing along. Highly recommended next time you are planning a roaring, squealing bacchanalia of your own
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MAR 2023
There's no way I'd go on a road trip with 51-year-old Deborah Lacks, but there is also no way in a zillion years that she ever would have invited me. It took intrepid science student and (now) published writer, Rebecca Skloot over a year of patience and sympathy to win Deborah's trust. Why was that worth doing? Well, read Rebecca Skloot's excellent book of science journalism, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and the question will be answered.

Meanwhile, back on those road trips: the starting point was Baltimore and the year was 2000/2001 :-
"For each trip, Deborah filled her jeep floor to ceiling with every kind of shoes and clothes she might need. She brought pillows and blankets in case we got stranded somewhere, an oscillating fan in case she got hot, plus all her manicure equipment from beauty school, boxes of videotapes, music CDs, office supplies, and every document she had related to Henrietta [her mom]. We always took two cars because Deborah didn't trust me enough to ride with me. I'd follow behind, watching her black driving cap bop up and down to her music. Sometimes, when we rounded curves or stopped at lights, I could here her belting out "Born To Be Wild" or her favorite William Bell song, "I Forgot To Be Your Lover"."

My Verdict: I was very surprised to hear an opening line that Van Morrison copied complete and used to make a song of his own. But after that spark of surprise, my interest in this song dwindled pretty fast, as it usually does with soul music. William Bell has a sincere-sounding, reassurring voice, but the song sounds like so many other ballads, helped along by strings and sax, in which a man sings about needing love, caring, holding on girl, etc, etc. It's a song clearly designed to win over a woman, which is perhaps why Deborah liked it and I don't. Still, in the context of a road trip, I can see this song fitting in very well: in a movie, it'll be that part where the initial excitement has passed and the people are just putting in the miles, no need for conversation, as the landscape is washed in beautiful afternoon sunlight, which slowly fades into the sadness of evening. I wonder if that was how it was for Deborah and Rebecca? Now only Rebecca knows, because Deborah died eight years after those road trips, aged 60.

R.I.P. Deborah Lacks, who, more than most people, was clearly in need of rest and peace during her lifetime

[Lisnaholic]

In 2002 New York journalist and author Mark Jacobson did something unusual: he unplugged himself, his wife and their two adolecent children from all their various obligations and took them on a trip round the world. He then wrote about it all in his book, 12,000 Miles in the Nick of Time, which is pretty entertaining.The subtitle on the cover tells you what to expect: "A Semi-Dysfunctional Family Circumnavigates the Globe". No, it's not one of those yachting marathons; they hop from one famous city to another by plane, and the real interest is in the way that modern NY teenagers react to downtown Bankok or to the startling scenes that unfold on the banks of the Ganges. He's refreshingly honest about his children, and the patchy, often frustrating relationship that he has with them; in sections labelled "Talkback" he even allows his eldest daughter to take over the narrative - and I wish these sections had been longer.

At one point he reminisces about a romantic, honeymoon-type trip to Florida with his wife, in 1979:-
"We slept in a tumbledown motel near the Corkscrew Swamp and woke up with a big box turtle at the foot of our bed. For Thanksgiving, we ate at the diner on US 1, outside of Homestead. The jukebox kept playing "Heaven's Just a Sin Away" by The Kendalls, which was our waitress's favourite song."

My Verdict: Like so much country music, it's a little cheesy, but has clear lyrics that set out a neat little scenario. Plus, it's the favourite song of a waitress in a diner: I can imagine her singing along to the chorus as she absent-mindedly cleans the counter-top with a cloth, and right there is every element you could possibly want to conjure up an authentic, American road-trip, Thelma-and-Louise moment.
Yeah, nice song that benefits from being short and sweet. 

 

[Lisnaholic]

On a personal note, the most exceptional thing about Blackout by Sarah Hepola is that I bought it brand-new for myself in a bookshop in England: something I haven't done for perhaps 20 years.
Turns out to be money well spent as it is an enjoyable confessional memoir about a hard-drinking Texas girl, born in Dallas in 1974. By Chapter 2, she is a lonely freshman in a college dorm: "Some nights, I lay in my prison bed and listened to U2's "One" on my CD Discman - the same anguished song, over and over, because I liked to curl up inside my own suffering and stay for a while."

My Verdict: This turns out to be a ballad from a group that I imagined was a rock band. I'm pigeon-holing it straight off as being a kind of Phil Collins clone song. That's an assessment with pros and cons: a good singing voice, lyrics that can console a broken heart and a smooth, non-intrusive sound from the band. The lyrics were at times clever, verging on profound, so I can imagine U2 and their audience getting a lot of satisfaction from the song. On the down side, it's way too sentimental for me, and if I wanted to console myself in that way, I´d prefer the voice of a female singer tbh. So, on the question of How many times will you play this song?, I'm taking the opposite position from Sarah Hepola, and opting instead to take U2's own advice: "One" (Geddit?!)

[Lisnaholic]

I wasn't expecting to find any particular musical recommendations in The Illustrated Letters of Virginia Woolf, but there, buried in Virginia's accounts of friends, books and artists, was this admission: "An old woman of seventy-one has fallen in love with me. It is at once hideous and horrid and melancholy-sad. It is like being caught by a giant crab." The old woman in question is Dame Ethel Smyth - not just a crab, it seems, but also a wolf: "What is your opinion of Ethel Smyth?" VW writes to another friend, " Her music, I mean? She has descended upon me like a wolf, teriffically strident and enthusiastic -I like her- she is as shabby as a washerwoman and shouts and sings..." Despite this fairly unkind start, the two ladies struck up a friendship, meeting and writing to each other on a regular basis from 1930 onwards.

No specific song gets mentioned, so I opted for this one, March of the Women.  A song of its time, it is a rallying cry for the suffragette movement, with bold, defiant lyrics:-

Shout, shout, up with your song!
Cry with the wind for the dawn is breaking;
March, march, swing you along,
Wide blows our banner and hope is waking.

If Ethel Smyth was banging this out at the piano in the living room of the demure Virginia, I can imagine the younger woman being taken aback !

My Verdict: Although it was a song of angry protest when it was written in 1914, one hundred and four years later (that's 2018 to you) The Glasgow Church Choir have made of it a kind of churchy, uplifting hymn: any anger has been buried in the pleasing choral voices, so it's hard to imagine anything furthur removed from the current approach to rebellion, as expressed in today's music, from rock to rap,etc,etc.
Still, I quite like this song and how it illustrates something very English: the way rebellious notions are gently absorbed, slowly won over to good old traditional English culture. It's like Pink Floyd all over again: the outrageous Arnold Layne and Saucerful of Secrets give way to Grantchester Meadows and Fat Old Sun. There's a lot to like about England, and no one can live there and fight it for long !