CMJ IMPOSE ART FAG RECORDINGS/ZOO MUSIC NIGHT @ DON PEDRO'S NYC

     Hey everyone in NYC- As part of the official CMJ related festivities in and around the greater New York area, IMPOSE MAGAZINE is proud to present Art Fag Recordings/Zoo Music night with bands:

FLIGHT
WOVEN BONES
HEAVY HAWAII
DIRTY BEACHES
CROCODILES DJs
AND
NO JOY
COASTING
BALLERINA
ALASKAS

   That is tonight, and it's in Brooklyn...  ALL FREE--- NO BADGES NEEDED!!!!!  Go--- FUN!

Chola Empire Map

THE CHOLA DYNASTY

Meenakshi Sundareswar Temple Madurai Tamil Nadu India

20 Year Old Woman Mexican Police Chief

  

  












Marisol Valles, Police chief of Praxedis Guadalupe Guerrero. Photograph by Jesus Alcazar


   Hey, a town in Mexico made a 20 year old female college student their Police Chief this week.  Mexican War on Drugs, you KILL me.  It's a blood bath, no two ways about it.

The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era

Dionne Warwick *Do You Know the Way to San Jose?*


BOOK REVIEW

Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era
p. 2005 Viking/Penguin
by Ken Emerson

     This book tells the story of seven pairs of songwriters, all of whom worked writing pop songs starting in the late 1950s.  The subjects of Always Magic are Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, Burt Bacharach and Hal David,  Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield,  Barry Mann and Cythia Weil, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman and Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich.  Between them, they quite literally dominated the pop music charts in a period between 1959 and 1962ish.

    I think Emerson aptly sums up the role they played in the popular music world in the late 1950s and early 1960s when he says that they were "adults writing songs for teens."  A half century into the rock era, such a statement sounds obvious, but all of these writers had an opportunity to excel because their predecessors didn't "get" rock music or teen music.  The Brill Building writers (actually a misnomer since most of the worked at a nearby building, 1650 Broadway, rather then the Brill Building itself) sit on the divide between late 1950s rock and roll and the popular music of the time.  As music professionals, they were well aware of ALL the trends that were bubbling up from youth and urban culture, but they were not romantic artist poet figures, rather they more resemble the characters from Mad Men: savvy professionals looking for a way up.

   The beginning of the end for the Brill Building Era was the British Invasion.  Although the triumphant British artists like the Beatles were well aware of the great song lyrical legacy of the writers working around the Brill Building, they didn't need other people to write their songs.  Similarly, the techniques and styles popularized by the Brill Building writers were copied and imitated (and exceeded) by bit players (Phil Spector) and those further afield (Barry Gordy and Motown.)  There was also a movement towards cynicism and trickery- the Brill Building writers were wholly responsible for the rock and roll atrocity of the Monkees.

  Like so many other moment in Popular Music history, one can see the sun setting over the horizon even at high noon- that's how brief artistic/commercial triumph is.  It's a simple fact that in a capitalist economy there is always going to be twenty people gunning for number one, and the Brill Building writers were no exception. It's also worth noting that many of them worked as salaried employees at a time when their songs were selling millions.

  Personally, I find this business model attractive, but then again, I also think the patronage scheme in Renaissance Florence was pretty tight.  The most successful Brill Building writers were those who could transition between different roles in the culture industry.  The best example is Carole King, who was to become a successful solo artist in the 1970s.

     Finally, they made an enduring contribution to the sound of popular music, introducing classical and latin touches to early rock and roll.  The Brill Building writers also created the best girl group music of the period, especially if one includes the work of Phil Spector.  It's an enduring body of work, and a subject well worth hours of quiet contemplation.