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If Rousseau had a Walkman in 1776 he'd have bumped Buck 65's Talkin' Honky Blues on his solitary strolls. And he'd have come back inspired to pen a hell of a reverie, too. Since Jean-Jacques has shuffled off, I'll take up the slack and tell you about this inspired rumination on the mortal coil we're all wound up in.
In a moment between heartbeats I'll set fire to the sky. Or cut the devil's throat. I'm three for four with a double and two stolen bases.
My first listen comes high on decongestants, trying to sweat out a fever from a summer cold in the tub. Given that the album often deals with being embattled and broke, my weakened state primed me for what Buck is laying down. Floating with just my head above the waterline, I started to think about the nature of hip-hop, the soul within soul's stepchild. There's a bit of public oration, Duchamp's ready-mades, William S. Burroughs' cut-and-paste poetry, discreet snippets made musically large. It is the afterbirth of several generations living with information overload. It is the jazz of the new century, a banner that black and white panthers can march under, a deconstructive response to taking things as given.
I'm out for a walk and following the human currents. I'm in no hurry. I need no reassurance.
Which brings us to Buck. He's all that and a bag of chips with a flavor you've never seen on a store shelf. A sonic reducer, "a warrior monk with a month long bus pass," a riverman and a "outlaw faith healer with sock monkeys for the kids." Language is his demon and his plaything making him a lyricist beyond compare (though a Minnesota boy named Zimmerman comes to mind as do Hank Williams, Masta Ace, Del the Funky Homosapien and Kurt Cobain). He draws out the details of daily inner life, putting voice to thoughts we keep to ourselves. He's singing for everyone driving a car with a window they have roll down with a wrench. He's singing for anyone who understands the giddy joy of pocket money after being stone poor for months on end. He sings so our lives don't slowly evaporate, rendered less and less by the self-loathing that inevitably sets in when we're "drunk on loneliness." He is a pair of ragged claws that have managed to scuttle free from the floors of silent waterways.
We are the recycled, earthy, thirsty, sleazy and seaworthy.
I keep listening. Yes, there are other things to get to, chores and new music, writing projects and grocery shopping. But I can't stop myself. Three times in a row I spin it end to end and it's the first thing I slap on when I wake up the next morning. It clings to me like sap, easing into my pores, burning away an old layer of me.
As good as Square, Man Overboard and Synesthia were and are, this is a quantum leap forward, a long-legged stride across stanzas and styles. Buck himself mans the lyrics, beats and turntables. He gets help on the music from the colorfully named T.O.A.B. LaRone and a merry band of players called Savant Guard, who proffer a string-laden atmosphere that's a long way from the usual boom-bap. If these blues were found at a crossroads (as most of 'em are) then it is raindogs not hellhounds on their trail. The spirit of Frank's Wild Years flows in these notes. Plinking upright piano, the squeak of nylon strings, hot metal can rhythms and bass you can breaststroke in.
It's a shiny day and the dogshit smells like strawberries.
Different moments will find you depending on where and when you listen. One night it's the juicy mouth harp twing-twang on "Exes." Next day it'll be the pretty harpsichord figure woven through "463." For yours truly, it's the pedal steel of Dale Murray every time. A holy sound, the pedal steel, that rocks my soul. The tiny coda at the end "Wicked and Weird" makes my hair tingle. And what a fab new sound to bring to beat science! Murray plays with the genre crackin' sparkle of Red Rhodes, Michael Nesmith's longtime collaborator. In fact, Talkin' Honky Blues at times evokes Nesmith's utterly brilliant duo record with Red, ...And the hits just keep on comin'. Both wrestle country music into fresh forms, grafting poetry to desert dryness and looking for ghost riders in the sky.
What Buck finds instead is Sasquatch, talking snakes and a deaf violinist. He tells us stories about them in a gravel delivery picked up at the same yard sale where MC 900 Ft. Jesus got his, a voice box with cranky springs, a wood handle crank and a rusty needle to blast out a crackle whisper from a big plastic cone. He's a psychic surgeon, wielding a scalpel with Wallace Stevens' palm at the end of the mind, slicing out good and bad to hold them up under an unblinking light.
I figure when I make it to the heavenly gates they'll be working on my car and playing 78's.
The thing that makes Talkin' Honky Blues stand out from everything else in 2003 (which admittedly has been a stunner of a year for music) is it enriches humanity by its existence. We will understand ourselves better thanks to what Buck 65 and his cohorts have wrought. In his neuromancer poetry lies depths and shallows, the highest and lowest of brows. Life uncut, magnificent and terrifying, often at the same time. He offers us a vision of creation, complete with peace and strife that will touch anyone with a heart. Amen, brother. Keep it coming for a thousand years...
A great big bed that would be fit for a princess
Pot bellied stove, transistor radio
Roll top desk, this is the way to go
A person can dream here and write with impunity
The sunlight is proper, there is endless opportunity
The views are inspiring, bare and chameleon
Reflections and shadows play on the ceiling
Troubles are handled with propriety and no delay
All I have to do is pull the anchor up and float away.
Dennis Cook
JamBase | West Coast
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