ON REPEAT #5: Yura Yura Teikoku, Don Cherry, Panjabi MC, Men I Trust, PinkPantheress & Ice Spice

Boy's a le-ur

I’m enjoying writing these and I hope you’re enjoying reading them. I’m going to expand this thing to include “guest list” entries so this isn’t just an echo chamber for myself, but I encourage you to do a little Google on a song you’re into and don’t know much about. Last week I spoke in great detail about “I’ve Got The Power” so this is gonna be anything.

Yura Yura Teikoku “Ohayo Mada Yaro”

One of my favorites, not just “favorite musicians” but favorites, is Shintaro Sakamoto. I got his album, How To Live With A Phantom, at Other Music when it came out and it now hangs on my wall. I love his aesthetics, his artwork, his poofy hair. I was a regular listener to his FLAG RADIO show and I finally got to see him perform live at Terminal 5 thanks to a last-minute alert by Kevin Bannon that someone was selling a ticket on Facebook. And just stared at him in awe long after the show had ended, thinking “this is a rockstar” like a teenager seeing Mick Jagger in the 60s.

He weaves a lot of disparate elements, from 70’s AM pop and disco to steel guitar and ghostly vocals. He’s a music nerd, the way a lot of my favorite musicians are. One time, I heard someone playing Shintaro Sakamoto from a stereo on their porch as I drove by, and I made someone stop the car so I could run out and say, “Shintaro! That’s cool…” and then mosey back to the car. I can’t write poetically about how his music makes me feel or how it should make you feel, because I don’t have words for it.

I’m by no means a completionist. I’ve heard and love all of his solo albums but there is a vast catalog by his previous psych band, Yura Yura Teikoku that I have not delved into fully. They started in 1989, when Shintaro had his Japanese ghost look: long, parted hair and shaved eyebrows. Some of that is poppy garage rock, some of it harder, heavy prog. Stuff I think I’ll really like when in the right mood for it. A 1998 album turned the band into superstars in Japan, with their songs hitting karaoke booths and their fans packing huge, sold-out venues. They finally broke through to America thanks to the internet. Many songs from this album, this one included, are a blueprint of Shintaro’s forthcoming solo music after the band splits in 2010, but with a fuller sound.

Don Cherry “Benoego”

I don’t know how to write about jazz without sounding like an idiot.

Did you know in Star Wars, jazz is called jizz?

See?

I know more about Don’s progeny, Neneh and Eagle-Eye Cherry (both their real names), than the man himself. But what I’ve gleaned from a cursory search and no greater knowledge beyond, is that the Oklahoma City-born Don Cherry had worked with Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane in the ’60s, composed the soundtrack to Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain and collaborated with Alan Ginsberg in the ’70s and had established a name for himself by the early ’80s.

This album was part of a cool downtown Paris music scene and was produced by a French-Chilean producer named Ramuntcho Matta, who had spent some time in New York’s downtown scene with Talking Heads and Laurie Anderson, and returned to Paris feeling inspired.

Featuring French post-punk muse Elli Medeiros, avant-garde poet Brion Gysin, and cult Senegalese drummer Abdoulaye Prosper Niang (Xalam), this is a unique soundbite of Paris in the early '80s at its coolest when funk, jazz, and new wave were mingling with sounds from Africa, Jamaica, and Latin America.

This whole album has even more sounds than those listed above. There’s stuff that sounds like Brenton Wood, stuff that sounds like King Tubby, stuff that sounds like Tom Tom Club, and one that sounds like The Cosby Show theme. Not all of it is for me, but I enjoy “Benoego” the most.

Men I Trust “Tree Among Shrubs”

I had not heard much about them but then I walked by the Palladium and saw the name on the marquee (just like in the video!) so I guess I’m very late to the party. They’re from Montreal and seem nice!

Radiohead, Ice Spice & PinkPantheress - Weird Liars / Munch

I find myself returning to this tweet from way back in February that I bookmarked before I had this substack.

I don’t love Radiohead. I like them just fine I guess, but please don’t start a conversation with me about Radiohead unless it also mentions Ice Spice & PinkPantheress. I do love this mashup made by chillaxx, even though it takes a minute to start working fully. This comment below the thing puts it better than I could:

I like to imagine Ice Spice bossing Jonny Greenwood around while he fusses with his pedals

I love the original version of the song too but you know that one.

THE GOLD STANDARD

Panjabi MC “Mundian To Bach Ke”

Yeah, you know this one too. The version with Jay-Z, "Beware of the Boys,” is a bit more well-known, but I reconnected with this song during my aforementioned Pazz & Jop singles review and was charmed by the video, which feels like a love triangle spin on the “Sabotage” video, moved from LA to the chaotic streets of Malaysia with Nepali singer Preetee Kaur being driving a wedge between barbershop friends Angry Sikh and Blonde Travolta, whoever they are. This video is so fun and so well-edited with the zooms and the randos dancing and the hook man (which I wince at).

Panjabi MC (aka Rajinder Singh Rai) wanted to fuse the sound of bhangra, which he had heard growing up in a multi-generational household, and the sound of black America, which spoke to his present-day feelings of otherness in skinhead-infested Coventry, England.

After years of meticulously editing loose live performances to be illegally sampled, for his new record Legalised, he finally called upon live musicians: a folk singer by the name of Labh Janjua, KS Bhamrah, from 80s band Apna Sangeet who played tumbi along to a hip-hop beat. He also managed to slip in a third sound—the Knight Rider theme. The song was released in 1998, but mainly played to an insular audience of friends, desis and crate diggers. But it slowly caught on through Europe, while influencing producers like Timbaland, and catching the ear of Jay-Z at a Swiss nightclub. Punjabi MC inspired a generation of swagger-jackers, while he moved onto new genres, dabbling in everything from UK garage to drill.

I’m particularly a big fan of his song “Land of Five Rivers” which became the theme song of the real-life Groot, The Great Khali.