Thoughts on my Recent iTunes Purchases, Part Three

Dear Readers,

I bought some more music recently. Hooray!

Fela kuti. I’m so glad that I heard and downloaded the free discovery download Fela’s Egypt 80 and Sean Kuti track, “Many Things.” Unlike most of the free downloads on iTunes, I really dug “Many Things” and I listened to it over and over again. It introduced me to a whole new genre of music: Afrobeat. Afrobeat is part jazz, part reggae, and part love, and Fela Kuti, Sean Kuti’s father, started it all, according to the little information I’ve read about him. If you like Bob Marley, you might like Fela Kuti.

But collectors beware: Fela’s one of those artists that produced a ka-trillion records, and I have no idea which of his albums would be the best, so I just got “The Best Best of Fela Kuti” (That second “Best” is not a typo.) I’m listening to it right now and loving it. Fela can have a little bit of a potty mouth, though. I wish I could get the music without the dirty words, but sometimes the profanity and the type of music seem to go hand in hand.

Fela sounds really political, too, and I think he has a really cool life story, involving political resistance through music, but I don’t remember. He’s talking about politics I’m not familiar with, though, because Fela is African through and through- he’s singing about African politics in the 1970s, I guess.

Jimmie Rodgers. I first heard Jimmie Rodgers when he did a guest spot on a Carter Family album. He’s kind of like Hank Williams, Sr., except he yodels a lot more, and he’s more folk than Hank Williams Sr. is. I don’t think Jimmie yodels as much as Wilf Carter (aka Montana Slim) but Jimmie Rodgers sure does plenty of yodeling. Where did yodeling go anyway? I think yodeling is still cool. (Maybe it’s safe to say that yodeling is to American folk/cowboy music as scat is to jazz. Hmmm…) The Carter Family yodeled and the Carter Family is cool. So there.

Robert Johnson. I got the complete recordings of Robert Johnson. Ever heard of this guy? He’s an American blues singer who sold his soul to the devil so he could play the guitar better. Here’s the story: Robert Johnson was an aspiring blues musician back in the South in the early 1900s. Nobody in town really liked his singing or playing. In fact, people told him he ought to quit and get a different job, and he took off for a while, rambling around, still playing not that well, and then one night, according to legend, Robert Johnson went to an intersection of some dirt highways in some cotton fields in Mississippi at midnight. It was there that he met the devil. Johnson said that Satan was a large man in a black suit. Robert handed the guitar to the devil, and the devil tuned it, and gave it back to Robert. Since then, Robert played the guitar and sang the blues like a madman. People who had heard him play before and after his deal with Satan say that Robert really did transform overnight from an amateur to a professional, revolutionary musician.

Lots of music people talk about how influential Robert Johnson was to music; and some people even consider Robert Johnson the father of rock and roll. (Or maybe he was just the guy who solidified the arrangement between Satan and rock and roll. Ha ha ha.) But he didn’t live long enough to record a lot of music. His complete recordings fit on two CDs. He died really young, in fact. People swear that he would talk about the demons that were chasing him, and he sang about his deal with the devil, too. Some of the songs he wrote about it are called, “Hellhound on my Trail” “Cross Road Blues,” and “Me and the Devil Blues.” He died in a bar one night of mysterious causes, after he played an exceptional set of blues songs. People who were there when he died swear he was screaming about demons and screaming about how the devil was coming for his soul and he was gyrating and contorting all over the bar room floor and foaming at the mouth until he was died.

I think I believe the story.

Oh, and his music is good, too.

Leadbelly. One of the first times I had heard about Leadbelly was on the MTV Unplugged Nirvana album that I really like. Nirvana covered Leadbelly’s song, “In the Pines” aka “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” aka “Black Girl,” and I absolutely loved the song. Kurt Cobain called Leadbelly his favorite performer, and he wanted to buy one of Leadbelly’s guitar for some crazy amount like half a million dollars or something, but Kurt probably had other things to spend his money on. (By the way, I heard about the Meat Puppets through Nirvana too, so I think that Kurt Cobain has really good taste in music) Anyway, Leadbelly is great. He’s blues/ folk. He does a good range of stuff, too. He does old folk songs, the blues, children songs, happy songs, sad songs, etc. (It bugs me today when bands only sing one type of song or only have one type of mood. Rage Against the Machine, for example, was really good at being angry, but, that’s all they did. Anger! Anger!) Leadbelly hung around with Woody Guthrie too, so… he was just a cool guy. But he spent a lot of time in jail, too, for murder, actually, so I guess he wasn’t that cool of a guy.

Led Zeppelin. I bought Led Zeppelin IV, the album with “Stairway to Heaven” on it. I remember going into my bedroom as early as elementary or middle school and listening “Stairway to Heaven” over and over. I would blast the music and lie on my bed and just let the music work on me. It was on a tape I took from my older brother’s room. Another memorable, important time I remember listening to that song was last summer at Camp Raymond Boy Scout Camp. I was having an unpleasant time at camp and “Stairway to Heaven” came on the radio and it changed my mood dramatically. While I was serving the Kitchen Patrol scouts their lunch, and sweating in the hot kitchen, and drooping my sleepy eyelids, and scooping those beans or corn or whatever on those Styrofoam trays, my mind was somewhere else. My mind was up in the sky, and I was wrapped in a vision of transcendental sounds and transcendental images. And I thought, “Surely Led Zeppelin has come from God.”

Sincerely,
Telemoonfa.