Weekly Music Roundup: Harry Styles, Rob Burger, and RIP MF DOOM
Week of Jan 4, 2021: This week, a Kylie Minogue & Dua Lipa duet ends 2020; a Bill Callahan & Bonnie “Prince” Billy cover begins 2021; and Harry Styles has an idea for the new year.
Dua Lipa and Kylie Minogue Greet 2021 With The Future Sounds Of Disco
Kylie Minogue makes no bones about it – she’s always been a fan of dance music, and her 2020 album DISCO is steeped in the sounds of the once-maligned, now-resurrected 70s dance style of that name. She ended 2020 by releasing a collaboration with Dua Lipa: “Real Groove (Studio 2054 Remix)” rides atop a classic disco beat, and has all the swirling orchestral strings and partying lyrics of a late 70s dancefloor hit. Dua Lipa, whose own 2020 album Future Nostalgia is nominated for Grammy awards in the best album, best record, and best song categories, is relegated to a somewhat minor role here, singing backup in the chorus. Guess Kylie isn’t quite ready to hand over that “Princess of Pop” title just yet…
Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Bill Callahan Are Back, This Time With A Lou Reed Song
Singer/songwriters Bill Callahan and Bonnie “Prince” Billy began collaborating on a series of covers during the past year, and they started 2021 with a striking release: a droning, almost trance-like version of Lou Reed’s 1983 song “Rooftop Garden.” The Bill and Billy show has been full of unexpected choices of songs and unexpected guests, and here the arrangement is built around the Cretan laouto, or lute, played by Giorgos (or George, as he’s credited here) Xylouris. As with his work in Xylouris White, his duo with Australian drummer Jim White, Xylouris here creates a sonic mood that’s somehow both very ancient sounding yet contemporary in feeling. Meanwhile the two singers do their usual high/low harmonies, with Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s high tenor set against Callahan’s rich baritone, as Lou Reed’s vision of a pastoral escape in the middle of urban grime becomes something close to a prayer.
Harry Styles Starts 2021 With A Startling Idea: Treat People With Kindness
“Treat People With Kindness.” It’s such a simple idea, so no surprise that it is also a fairly simple pop song from Harry Styles. Simple but catchy, with a choir singing the song’s title. Styles released the song and video on New Year’s Day, and his transformation from One Direction bandmember to classic song-and-dance man is also not surprising. But the video does come with a big surprise – actor/writer/director Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag, Killing Eve) is his dance partner, and she is pretty good. The routine ends with Styles doing a big dip and Waller-Bridge, in a reversal of the usual gender roles, holding him up; when she gives the camera her trademark “I’m about to do something naughty” look, the video stops. While part of me wants to think that she’s about to drop him on his ass, I think the message is more likely, hey, if she can be nice, then so can we…
Rob Burger Covers Moondog’s Tribute To Charlie Parker
If you don’t know who Moondog was, well, his story beggars belief: a blind musician who for some years in the 60s/early 70s stood on a Manhattan street corner in a cape and Viking helmet selling cassettes of his music, which had a Minimalist simplicity but also reflected his interest in jazz; Moondog spent much of the latter part of his life in Germany, where ensembles and orchestras often performed his music while American audiences only had rare opportunities to see and hear him. One of his best-known works is “Bird’s Lament,” written as a tribute to his friend, the sax legend Charlie “Bird” Parker. Now Rob Burger, multi-instrumentalist and ace arranger (whom we first met as part of the Tin Hat Trio), has done a terrific version of “Bird’s Lament,” built on a steady thumping rhythm that sounds like it was sampled from a 1940s recording and featuring some smooth (but actually quite tricky) interplay of sax and clarinet. It’s part of the series of covers from the Western Vinyl label that they call Composure: Classical Reworks for Modern Relief.
And finally, RIP MF DOOM
The year ended with a bit of sad yet strange music news with the reports that the masked producer and rapper MF DOOM (born Daniel Dumile) had died at the age of 49 … in October. His wife announced the news on Instagram on December 31 – a final bit of misery in what was a largely miserable year. Immediately the questions began: what had happened? And why did it take two months for anyone outside his family to know? Neither question has been answered yet; in fact, MF DOOM just appeared on a new collaboration with the band Badbadnotgood just about a week before the announcement. But for many, his greatest collaboration was with producer Madlib on the first Madvillain record back in 2004. Full of short songs that probably took a long time to assemble, it is the collection that established him as a distinctive voice in the rap underground. Check out the kaleidoscope of samples that support MF DOOM’s stream-of-consciousness flow on this track, called “All Caps” – which is the way MF DOOM liked to spell his name.
