Three Takes From The BPA

While housecleaning Norman Cook, better known as Fatboy Slim, found a number of forgotten tapes containing unfinished collaborations with musicians who had stopped by his studio over the years. In an effort to tie up loose ends he created The BPA as an outlet for the finished product. Without a proper band Cook has been promoting the album I Think We're Gonna Need A Bigger Boat with Iggy Pop using the house bands of a couple late night shows to bring their take on The Monochrome Set's "He's Frank" to the masses.

Here is Cook on bass with The Roots on Jimmy Fallon:



: and playing the night before with Paul Shaffer & The CBS Orchestra On Letterman:



: Then there is the official BPA version:



: Stop by The Brighton Port Authority for all the info and some entertaining fake backstory.

No Time For Dancing

David Byrne showed off Here Lies Love, his work-in-progress multimedia musical chronicling the rise of Imelda Marcos, as part of the Carnegie Hall Perspectives Series that he curated and performed last week. The first American staging of the incomplete work generated a fair amount of interest with warm reviews in the New York Times and Time Magazine. Better yet is that he did a number of interviews including one with New York Magazine that asked "what made now the right time to write a song cycle about Imelda Marcos?":

Probably the end of the CD and the end of the record business. Seriously. This is going to sound very calculated, but I just thought, If I think of a collection of songs I write as being of a piece, how do you keep that connection and continuity? And I thought, Well, this is made to be heard and seen; it doesn’t rely on a piece of plastic. Although I think the piece of plastic will be a nice-sounding thing, too.

: The Guardian found out why he decided to work with Fatboy Slim on the project:

"I imagined it being dance music, so I thought I should go to a professional for help," he says. "Norman's awfully good at that - he has played an instrument at some point, so has an innate sense of song structure that not everyone in the dance community has. He knows what a song is."

: As a side-note, it is interesting that the qualities that attracted Byrne to Cook are the same reasons Cook is distrusted in the underground electronic scene.

Here Lies Love should be a fascinating experience as the songs reportedly range from whistle sampling big beat to trip hop and pure orchestral accompaniment with archive footage and stage performance expected at the final staging. None of the press indicates that it will happen particularly soon and Byrne has implied he is still in the writing process for material to be featured in the musical. Hopefully it will be worth the wait.

Weapon Of Choice

Fatboy Slim's "The Greatest Hits: Why Try Harder" is out this week and PopMatters posted a review that argues for a reevaluation of Norman Cook's most famous alias because "the musical establishment is predisposed to dismiss artists who don't take themselves very seriously, and you've got a profound disconnect between the quality of the music on display and the disrespect accorded to Slim by critics across the globe." I've been following Fatboy Slim since my buddy starting playing "Everybody Loves A 303" off a compilation for his college radio show and I picked up the import of his first album the week it came out based on hearing it at record store listening station so it's been a bit strange to see him exploding onto the pop culture landscape with a handful of hit videos and commercial radio play. The "dance music for frat boys" insult has become synonymous with Slim, but I would agree with PopMatters that:

In a very real way, Fatboy Slim changed the rules. Even moreso than the Chemical Brothers or the Prodigy, Fatboy Slim proved that dance music could compete with pop on its own terms and more importantly, he also proved that dance music and pop weren't as far apart as most people probably believed. Whereas previous commercially successful artists such as Orbital, Leftfield and Massive Attack had sometimes gone out of their ways to seem more recondite than they actually were, Fatboy Slim could never be mistaken for aloof. He was, and remains an extremely user-friendly musician, someone who still believes his highest calling as an artist is to play fun records at parties. You've got to respect that.

: Two of Cook's mixes for other artists are included on "Why Try Harder" and the review notes that many of his remixes outshine the originals. The last few years have seen a decided shift in critical opinion on the importance of remixes as works of art and it's certainly worth considering that Cook's consistency inspired some of the attention that DFA and Ewan Pearson receive from the likes of Pitchfork as their every mix is analyzed. Would this had happened if people hadn't started collecting Fatboy Slim mixes into compilations? I doubt it.
Listen to "Why Try Harder" here.

Punk To Funk

David Byrne is writing a musical about Imelda Marcos with Fatboy Slim:

'Here Lies Love' will examine Mrs Marcos' passion for music and nightclubs. It's set to premiere in March 2006, reports the BBC.

Billed as "a timeless story with more contemporary resonances than are comfortable", it will take its bow at Australia's Adelaide Festival...

"She loved the nightlife in all parts of the world, and in New York at Studio 54, so much so that she installed a disco in her NYC townhouse," an Adelaide Festival spokesman said.

"It was a non-stop party, featuring politicians, arms dealers, financiers, artists, musicians and the international jet set."

'Here Lies Love' was the brainchild of Byrne, who has written the music with Fatboy Slim. The show will be directed by Marianne Weems, artistic director of New York ensemble The Builders' Association, as "a multimedia extravaganza".

: Byrne has been taking plenty of interest in electronic music in recent years doing vocals on "Lazy" for Xpress and writing lyrics for the recent Fischerspooner album. These moves away from the world beat sound that dominated his musical direction in the 90s couldn't come at better a time considering Byrne and Talking Heads inflence on rock-turned-dance acts like LCD Soundsystem and The Juan MacLean.

Municipalities

So my life is as boring as ever, but I've picked up a couple of new albums in the past few weeks.
The new Fatboy Slim album is a bit of a disappointment on the first few listens, but I haven't been a "Fatboy" mood as late, so that might help explain my feelings. "Don't Let The Man Get You Down" has been featured in some commercial even before the album was released and I thought it sounded tired then, so finding it opening "Palookaville" wasn't a good sign. Most of the album is along the same tempo and mood of the lead US single "The Joker," and seems to lack the drive that made the previous FBS albums so much fun. Still "Wonderful Night" is a great track, and apparently will have a video shortly. That's a good thing.
The new Client album "City" snuck up on me, because I think it got a US release a week before the UK (when does that ever happen?). It's different from the debut album, it's almost less layered but has a fuller sound (I know that doesn't make sense, but work with me). "Overdrive", the track with Martin Gore on backing vocals was an instant favorite, but I've probably overplayed it so it's lost a little of it's charm. However, the album is solid, tons of great tracks and they even added strings on a couple of tracks. Definite worth your attention if you're interested in electropop.