Poetronics: Vanessa Daou's "One Thing I'm Missing" | PopMatters review

Downtempo maven Vanessa Daou offers
a sampling from her upcoming release.

By Imran Khan

A New York Times review of Chinese writer Can Xue's work asserted that reading the author’s fiction is like "running downhill in the dark; you’ve got momentum, but you don’t know where you’re headed."  Such a sentiment could be said of Vanessa Daou’s newest work; much of her recent explorations with club culture incite the chancy, dangerous thrill of experiment. Daou has already made a name for herself with her astonishing mix of spoken word and electronic beats on her six previous albums. Her voice, an eerie, peculiar sigh which brings a yielding and sensual warmth to her sultry grooves, is equally noted for its unbridled femininity. 
 
Not exactly an official single, "One Thing I’m Missing" is a taster for Daou’s upcoming release, Light, Sweet, Crude, an album that will delve into the further reaches of hip-hop and electronica after the heavily jazz-leaning offering of 2008’s Joe Sent Me. “One Thing I’m Missing” still trades on the downbeat tempos of her last album but fully engages in the atmospherics of digital paranoia, with icy sheets of synths layered upon a druggy, languid groove. Daou’s vocal, a strange, twisted call resounding from some Promethean netherworld, is essentially the hinge of which producer André Baum builds his rhythms upon, the cadence of his groove flowing with the awkward, elegant grace of a frozen river thawing. Sinuous, ghostly and poetic, this number heralds a return to Daou’s previous flirtations with DJ culture. 

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Ylvis: What Does the Fox Say? (((and it's not what you think)))

Every generation re-writes the past. We see this in fiction, in film, and in music. The changes that occur are more-often-than-not hidden and difficult to unravel.

The changes that are happening in the landscape of music are in many ways invisible. We've moved past the conversation about the merits and pitfalls of releasing digitally - legal or not - into a conversation about MEANING.

A song is, after all, a message. For a while now, the focus has been on the visuals (eg, Miley's 'Wrecking Ball'), and perhaps the dominance of YouTube as a conversation starter has lead musicians down a path of the visual as opposed to verbal. But, as in nature, the strongest forces are the invisible ones, the ones that can't be measured or monetized. Words are the one things we can all hold on to and make our own (ENTER Lorde).

Sometimes, rarely, a song comes along that both invites and defies understanding. Ylvis' 'What Does the Fox Say' is one of those songs whose message is so wrapped in irony and The Absurd, that it leaves all in its wake, befuddingly knackered.

I've always believed that resonance only takes place when the many layers are hidden and hard to decipher. 'What Does the Fox Say' is not (only) a song about the sounds various animals make. It is a re-invention, a new imagining of a post-modern fairy tale. It is a re-telling, a re-tooling, a neoteric fictive landscape which is at once freakish, fantasic and frightening.

It is a song that recruits manifold layers of sonic textures and tonalities to help tell its tale, reminding us that sound — in-and-of-itself — is a conveyor of 'MESSAGE' (eg, M-O--O-O-R-S-E code) as much as words. And let's not forget how important a role Dance & physical gestures play in the making of that message, how in synch each movement is with each moment of music, how impeccably & perfectly it conveys intention. (for more on this, visit my blog/lecture 'Dance as Analysis: Degrees of Freedom' at SVA)

Questions that are addressed are: Where is the mystery in a world where everything is known? How much can we understand when useless prattle and blather holds sway? How do we eschew Political divisions and blaze our own future/s? How do we express that ancient fear that is embedded in the human condition? How can we escape the confines of our own expectations?

'What Does the Fox Say' is not (only) about all of the things it seems to be on its surface. In many ways, it is that ever-deceptive Sheep wrapped in a Wolf's - or in this case, a Fox's - clothing. The song - words & music - go to our collective abstraction from the wild ( a must-read, Jack Turner's 'The Abstract Wild'), and speaks to a primal, pagan-like connectivity - an admixture of magic, mystery, and the sublime - that we still feel with nature: an enduring continuity that we carry in our voices, bodies and minds.

A ZIPLESS Anniversary: Erica Jong's 'Fear of Flying' turns 40

It was the only book my mother would read with the cover folded back, and the only one she carried away when she finished reading. 

Being a writer herself, she devoured books until their covers were creased and tattered, until the pages were folded and torn, bindings nearly bifurcated. 

This one particular book, having consumed it so completely, at some point it split right down the middle. She reconnected the two parts with multiple layers of Scotch tape: that's how I knew how to find it once she tucked it away in the 'J' section of the umpteen books she had alphabetized on her shelves. Of course I read the back cover, but it wasn't until my Senior year at Barnard, - coincidentally Jong's alma mater - that I read 'Fear of Flying' with my mother's same voraciousness. 

When I was just out of college, I met Erica, and felt an immediate, electric kind of connection, as I had with Isadora Wing. And as my mother had done, I would carry "Fear of Flying' with me for months, with the binding creased hard down the middle, my black inky notes scrawled in the margins. 

I would soon dive headlong into Erica's poetry, 'Half Lives', 'Fruits & Vegetables', 'Loveroot'. It was with 'Becoming Light', a collection of Jong's poetry released by Harper Collins in 1992, that I began to dig more thoroughly and fervidly into Jong's verses. I found myself within those pages.

'Zipless' was the fruit borne from that experience, an album which focused my thinking on the fact of my femininity, of my gender and sexuality, of the relationship between pen and paper, the synergies and differences between a Poem and a Song. That process of reflecting, revising, and reconstructing Erica's poems into song was a kind of rite-of-passage for me artistically. I approached the task with a zeal and exuberance that has never left me.

I think everyone who has read 'Fear of Flying' comes out of the experience changed somehow: feeling either self-affirmation — that an intuited, hidden truth has been uncloaked — or transformed — that some new truth has been uncovered. In either and both cases, the change is permanent: the world stands still, but you keep moving, and there's no returning once you've boarded that Zipless train.