Devendra Banhart - Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon
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Artist: Devendra BanhartBrand: Baker & Taylor
Edition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
CD Release Date: 2007-09-25
Model: 00634904028329
Music Label: Xl Recordings
Soundtracks:
- Cristobal
- So Long Old Bean
- Samba Vexillographica
- Seahorse
- Bad Girl
- Seaside
- Shabop Shalom
- Tonada Yanomaminista
- Rosa
- Saved
- Lover
- Carmencita
- Other Woman, The
- Freely
- I Remember
- My Dearest Friend
Music reviews of Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon
Music Review: musical pomo
Rating: 4 Stars
The advantage of working with younger generations is that they can turn you onto things you would not otherwise seek on your own. Such is the case with the music of Devendra Banhart: one of my students used to play a medley that, to my delight, included "Chinese Children" in class, and another sent me a couple of his CD's recently (Cripple Crow and Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon). I slipped them (one at a time) into the CD player and took to them immediately. My husband, on the other hand, upon hearing Cripple Crow in the car, called it "derivative boring crap".
I know what it is that I like about these records; it's comfortable music. It shape shifts among a myriad of familiar genres that make up my musical consciousness and that, for the most part, I like: the receptors in my brain are already configured to respond to it. The following is a partial list of ingredients others have invoked to describe Banhart's music: Funk, Samba, Eisenhower-era doo-wop, Tropicalia, Reggae, Beatles, Tiny Tim, Caetano Veloso, David Crosby, Donovan, Santana, Nick Drake, Skip Spence, Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, The Byrds, Conga, Groove, bossa nova, psychedelia, folk, and I definitely hear The Doors... One of the favorable reviews of "Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon" on Amazon does say the CD "has something for everyone" with the assumption that that's a good thing. It obviously does nothing for my husband who likes a more assertive kind of music; and although I love listening to the albums, one of my favorite unfavorable reviews of Cripple Crow is: Este CD e espantosamente horrible... no tiene estilo proprio. I love the word "espantosamente" (scary); but it is the phrase "no tiene estilo proprio" (has no personal style)that interests me, and brings me back to Jean Baudrillard and the `80's.
Although I first learned about the word "bricolage" from my French uncle while he tinkered around the construction site that was to be his future house, if I recall correctly, it went from fun to theory with Derrida[1], and was quite in vogue during the 80's to describe what visual artists and writers were doing with their art and texts---or was everything just "text" then (?)... Baudrillard does not seem to use the word to describe the state of the arts in the 80's; but what he describes as being postmodern in his interview "Game with Vestiges" seems to fit under its definition (gestalt being what it is, of course it would). "Art can no longer operate as radical critique or deconstructive metaphor. So art at the moment is adrift in a kind of weightlessness. It has brought about a sphere where all forms can coexist. One can play in all possible ways, but no longer against each other. It amounts to this: art is losing its specificity. ...It is becoming mosaic... it cannot do anything more than operate out of a combinatory mode..... The postmodern is characteristic of a universe where there are no more definitions possible... It has all been done. The extreme limit of these possibilities has been reached. It has deconstructed its entire universe; so all that's left are pieces. All that remains to be done is to play with the pieces." Visual Art seems to have internalized and gotten past this; but could this be what Banhart is doing consciously or not?
By the 80's Baudriallard could sound melodramatic and nostalgic, and he seems to imply a sadness to this postmodern form of play: "Postmodernism tries to bring back all past cultures, to bring back everything that one has destroyed in joy and which one is reconstructing in sadness in order to try to live, to survive...". And although I see Banhart's music as quintessentially postmodern[2] and thus utterly digestible, I don't see it as a "reconstruction in sadness" but one that is done in "joy"; it remains to be seen where he can take it from here.
[1] Well it was first used by Claude Levi Strauss (if the memories of Anthro 101 serve me well); but it r-e-a-l-l-y got s-e-r-i-o-u-s after Derrida got adopted by the visual arts critical establishment. ...and then it disappeared...
[2] weightless, combinatory, and "bricolaged"
Description of Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon
Recorded in Topanga Canyon in the Santa Monica mountains. Neil Young lived there while recording "After The Gold Rush" and the area has also been home to Emmylou Harris, Taj Mahal, Joni Mitchell, Mick Fleetwood, and members of The Doors. Those ghosts inhabit the sound and vibe of these recording sessions. Banhart's whole "freak folk" tag is gone, replaced with this classic, gorgeous rock album. Some songs are fragile and solipsistic, others have a pronounced tropicalia influence, and still others are wildly electric and epic.More from Devendra Banhart
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