Funk is the opposite of magic. Funk is about rules. | | | | Brittany Howard at the Electric Picnic Music Festival, Stradbally, Ireland, Aug. 31, 2019.
(Kieran Frost/Redferns/Getty Images) | | | | | | “Funk is the opposite of magic. Funk is about rules.”
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| | rantnrave:// Quite possibly the scariest, most disturbing line about a hurricane in pop music literature is in the first verse of LIGHTNIN' HOPKINS "HURRICANE BETSY," his account of a real-life category 4 storm that ravaged Florida and Louisiana 54 years ago this week. "Betsy passed through Louisiana today," he sings. "She had people runnin' / They was trying to hide, but / Killed so many folks that the rest were left / They couldn't be satisfied." It's such an odd description of a storm's destruction, focusing on the survivors with an old blues cliché that, ripped out of the cliché's usual context, becomes terrifying. It's a hurricane of a lyric, turning itself inside out. More often, songwriters insert hurricanes into love songs, where they're usually—but not always—bad omens. In dub poet LINTON KWESI JOHNSON's "HURRICANE BLUES," the storm is a metaphor for the unrestrained passion of love's beginning. But, hurricanes being hurricanes, this particular love will ricochet back and forth between carefree and turbulent moments before finally leaving the couple awash in silt, sand and debris, and separated. And yet Johnson continues to wish for the "marvelous miracle of hurricane," perhaps not understanding how these violent storms work. A not uncommon mistake for young lovers to make. For NEIL YOUNG, a hurricane's power lies in both the fury of its wind and the calm of its eye. Between guitar squalls in "LIKE A HURRICANE," he finds himself blown away to "somewhere safer." Before he can catch his breath, he's blown away again—this time, we assume, to somewhere not safe at all. Another love bound not to last; it may, in fact, not even start. HALSEY is herself the "HURRICANE," and she means it as a warning to a poor guy who falls for her. Evacuate at once, young man. FLORENCE WELCH is on the other end of a breakup and she becomes "HURRICANE DRUNK" as an escape. Her hurricane has no eye: "No calm, nothing to keep me from the storm." JAZMINE SULLIVAN has been dumped, too, but the tempest in her "AFTER THE HURRICANE" is him, not her. Her storm metaphor comes with a measure of hope, one I'd like to extend to everyone in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas this week. "It hurts, I ain't gon' lie," she tells us. "But it doesn't hurt as bad as it could." DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE's BEN GIBBARD has a different strategy for the subject of "YOUR HURRICANE," who appears to have let a lot of people down. He's going to barricade the doors and windows. "I won't be the debris in your hurricane," Gibbard promises, as much to himself as to the wrecking ball he's ostensibly singing to. Precautions. Check. And then there are SCORPIONS, for whom a hurricane is a metaphor for the amazing, unstoppable masculine force that is they themselves. In "ROCK YOU LIKE A HURRICANE," the singer, KLAUS MEINE, has had loud sex with lots of shaking (which sounds more like an earthquake to me, just sayin'), but now he has to leave for a show, at which he will rock the audience like a hurricane while also, by the way, seeking someone else to have loud, shaky sex with. The truest hurricane in all of this may be that Scorpions concert, which will open and close with category-5-like fury, while pausing, somewhere in between, for the eye-like calm of a much-less-windy power ballad. To my sister and her wife, currently barricaded at home on Florida's Atlantic coast, I wish you a week of power ballads, and power ballads only. Be safe, everyone... Switzerland will soon say auf wiedersehen to FM radio... Petitions, they work. Giving into fans of his TV series "POWER," executive producer 50 CENT says he's ditching the remixed theme song featuring TREY SONGZ that opened the first two episodes of the current season. This week, the original version of the song, featuring JOE, returns... RIP CLORA BRYANT, PETER MATURI, CUTTY CARTEL and JOANA SAINZ GARCIA. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| | | ill wind (you're blowing me no good) |
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