Music for the Road

Tunes  |  Daniel J Gerstle, Dec-Feb 2010

www.Helo-Magazine.com 

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For "West African Voodoo Funk and Other Audio Epiphanies" as well as "Crisis Zone Soundtrack", please scroll down. Here is our newest peace+war+music marrative and playlist. 

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The wake-up is the easy part. You’re groggy and full of hunger but alive and know you’ve got a gripping road trip ahead. Starting line Moscow, negative forty fucking degrees. Snow, ice, and a wicked, whipping wind. But you’re flying south to the city of Vladikavkaz, driving from there by road to Nazran, and then full-throttle to a little mountain town full of lore and passion called, Grozny, Chechnya.

It’s your first time. Although everyone and everything warns you the place is two bloody wars through a three-war cycle, you’re not afraid. Not yet anyway. Knowing full well it is a place where millions of people live normal lives despite the politics you don’t over-dramatize the trip. You’re going to work on a few post-war, sometimes bureaucratic humanitarian aid projects, after all. But for now, you just want to hit the road, think about your faraway lover, and set your headphones on “stun.”

The Who in their later years crafted the perfect song for getting psyched for the road: “Eminence Front.” They ignited the disc in 1982 with a drum beat that sounds like little Tommy playing a synthesizer he found in the attic. Sampled piano chords then chime in on the high octaves. The guitarist tickles the beat then hits his stride. The bass suddenly strikes your heart, hard, and the quartet conducts an army of sound into the night. The song builds and accelerates toward dawn on the urban landscape, conquering all as you begin your journey over the curve of the Earth.

We’ve all taken those cross-country road trips. Doesn’t matter whether you were heading to Louisville or Mazar-e-Sharif, the first time was an adventure for anyone with curiosity. For you, the first trips your family took from Cincinnati to Louisville when you were little were such drama that your parents brought survival supplies. Dad found a short-wave radio with a four-foot antenna at a garage sale. He squelched the bastard so that the low crackling voices of truck drivers calling to each other, laughing, and squawking was sure to keep you irritated in the backseat. Then he’d turn on a smooth jazz station which played low-grade melodies that sounded like rodents weeping over Christmas carols and trucker static. You’d stare out the window at the snowy farms rolling by, holding your hands over your ears, and dreaming of a day when you could choose your own road trip playlist.

When you got your own wheels, a $700 Volkswagen Scirocco at age fifteen, you could fall in love with any girl with that new girl smell, so your cassette tapes were loaded with sweet cheese—the music of Boston, “More Than a Feeling…;” Journey, “Don’t Stop Believing…;” and barely approaching rebellion with a little Motley Crue, “Kick Start My Heart…” Soon the “nos” came in from the Jennys and the Julies you thought you loved and you threw that cassette of cheesy hope songs into the back of your closet and replaced it proudly with Ozzy Osborne’s allegedly-evil “Shot in the Dark” and “Bark at the Moon.”

Road trips back then were all about crossing the Indiana state line to investigate rumors about a haunted bridge or about that Satanic cult which chased your brother’s friends out of Whitewater Township. As a teenager riding through rural Ohio, hill-hopping—getting your car in the air off the low rise hills at fifty-miles-per-hour—was worthy of Metallica’s thunderous “Master of Puppets”--Fear is living on…--or Guns ‘n’ Roses’ “Night Train”—Ready to crash and burn I never learn…

After running off the road and nearly killing yourself at seventeen, you retreat to roller coasters. The Beast at Cincinnati’s King’s Island was the biggest, baddest wooden coaster in the world for years, hurling you through the forest out of eyeshot of the rest of the park. You plunged down two steep slopes rocketing seventy-five miles per hour before being forced through a corkscrew so mad you always, always thought the railcars were going to break through the wooden railing and drop all of the passengers into the bog. It was like riding Black Sabbath’s Paranoid Album, the lightning bolts of “War Pigs” second half striking your adolescent mind with fantasies that saw you—with balls of steel—surviving what everyone in the 80’s feared, the war without end.

It wasn’t until you moved to college in Cincinnati that your older brother, John, lounging upstairs in his gargantuan mountain of compact discs, turned you on to the hallowed Indie CD shop on Short Vine Street where Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, and Smashing Pumpkins were lurking as rookies in the CD files, not yet thumbed through.

Eventually, you’d find out what was so great about independent music, like the reinvention of sixties rock by The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Their song, “Going to Hell,” was like a chorus of positive vibes, major chords celebrating the hope of the damned—that Hell was where all the fun is. “Anemone,” rang out a little darker, like discovering a lusty lover in a city’s shadowy back passages. You realized back then that the greatest music evolved out of a combination of passion, striving for a new sound, and the roll of the dice. Once bands got picked up by a corporate giant, they often lost their edge. What would happen in a region without a corporate label, where all music was independent, full of passion, new, and risky?

You wondered aloud many times what music was like in the Soviet Union. You studied Russian, but all you could predict was a little bit of that insanely regimented marching music you’d later identify with Bulat Okudzava or the sentimental violins of that soundtrack LP you found for the film, Doctor Zhivago. You never would have guessed that thirteen years later you would drive across southern Russia into troubled Chechnya for work.

Zaur, the Abkhaz-Georgian aid agency driver, meets you next to the flat by Kursk Station on the east side of Moscow. You drive fast rubbing your frozen knuckles together while soaring around the suburban loop highway across the wastelands. He ribs you. Would you like to meet a nice Russian Natasha before you get kidnapped by rebels, beheaded, and deposited across six counties of Dagestan? You scoff, snicker, and then zone out contemplating this on all levels. You think of A. waiting for you back in New York.

He drops you at Domodedovo Airport and you hop Siberian Air flying toward the snow-caps which mark Russian’s southern border with Georgia. By now, you should be crippled by cowardice, curled into a little ball and asking the brutish man with the fat mustache drowning in vodka beside you to change your diaper. But no, the music keeps you together. It makes the whole journey an interactive dream.

Stepping off the plane onto the tarmac at Vladikavkaz airport, you catch a blade of sun on your face and it fills you with optimism. From here, it’s a three-part journey. First, a nice-guy agency fixer will drive you from Vladikavkaz, the capitol of North Ossetia, to the heavily-fortified border of neighboring Ingushetia.

There, three armed Interior Ministry soldiers and your colleague, Bashir will ferry you past Russian armored personnel carriers and pill boxes into the local capitol Nazran, to the fortress subdivision of Targim where the UN and aid agencies stayed. Once you get acclimatized to the team’s humanitarian and reconstruction programs—basically spending a couple million to bring well-trained doctors, nurses and agriculturalists to areas hardest hit by the Chechen Wars—you get your chance to drive into Chechnya and finally meet all those people you’ve heard so much about.

Not ironically, the Chechens who were outliving Russian artillery bombardments or running with rebels through minefields while you were back in the States wiping soda off your dashboard rarely took to the indie milk of Western alternative tunes. For Chechen, Dagestani, and Ingush women, in general, the vibe was found in local singers on the grand stage like Marina Mustafaeva or Patimat Kagirova. Either that or world music. Rarely, a Russian pop band like the two soprano beauties in t.a.T.u. would post rank on the local chart or on the hand-written tallies of local cassette tape sellers.

For Chechen men your age and younger, living the life, driving in and out of Chechnya was better set to nubile gangsta hip-hop, a Vainakh blend, if not the legendary Chechen folk crooners like Imam Alisultanov or Timur Mutsuraev. These were mean streets. Just imagine one of these otherwise diminutive white guys with chin beards showing up in New York’s Washington Heights or Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine—and with stories and scars from the 1999 New Year Battle of Grozny scaring the living shit out of some 9mm-packing gangsta. Or at least that’s the façade of the conservative Muslim men in southern Russia.

Deep down, even some of the militants were sweet hearts who loved their moms. It was the unrelenting fighting and disappearances and brutal, tense silences which led some of them into cultural isolation, knowing only war, and looking simply to die for something rather than live at home with their parents, no job, and nothing to offer a girl but bills.

Along the way, those young men tended to like music that was either violent or hallowed. The tragedy was that many—blasting DJ Vainakh or 50 Cent or Tupac—were otherwise lost. Their teachers, their parents, and in many cases God, had disappeared from their lives. There was nothing left but legend, or escape.

While you’re in Ingushetia keeping the medical and agricultural project going, you hear a few bullets fired off in the night, learn your co-worker’s neighbor was killed by a roadside bomb just outside your office, and have to freeze work when a huge car bomb killed a local politician and his guards on a main road. On another occasion, you manage to help arrange for a new roof for a family whose shack was bombed by a Russian counter-insurgent team trying to “arrest” a suspected militant hiding inside. What more could be gained by the drive to see our work in Chechnya now?

Anyone who’s been in a war zone knows that, although it’s hard not to dramatize the vibe when re-telling a story, the reality on the ground could often be dull and, in some quadrants, safer than expected. Most alarming for you riding into the region was not the guard with the sub-machine gun blocking out customers from a shop while you ran in to grab a box of pasta, it was the vague normalcy.

Gas stations there crack you up. Pulling in, you could be in Cleveland or Manchester. Pulling out, you notice the three policeman staring right back at you, right into your eyes. There is even a Nazran mall. The local market has been absorbed by a building full of Russian and Chinese-made toys, goods, and DVDs. There are shops full of salty Caucasian halal cheeses and dried meats, even salty fish.

Your morning wake-up arrives. Nazran, oh boy. The snow has melted. You should have been making excuses not to go, having loving, long-distance phone cuddles with you faraway lover A., who was still sleeping back in New York. But instead, despite the likelihood that it would be a boring trip and that everyone wanted it to be so, you’re turned on. B, your driver up to the Chechen border, has a good sense of soundtrack. He pulls his CD of Chechen country music out of the deck then slides in a CD of Los Angeles hip-hop devastation.

You’re the only foreigner riding with your co-manager, T, and resilient and empathetic assistant, Z. The guards, drivers, and you took two cars out of Targim then added one for T and Z. Three cars with drivers and four armed guards just to get you to the Chechen border.

Your convoy flies in tight formation—a subject of dispute as tight keeps other cars out but adds risk of car accident and roadside bomb damage—with stereos blaring louder than they should be. The guards are on walkies. You can’t understand a word, so you soak in the music and watch the Ingush countryside fly by; it’s like Pennsylvania, with mosques. You reach a gas station where a deadly battle broke out two years earlier. It’s named for Dwight Eisenhauer. In no time, your team slows into a minor traffic jam funneled between two fruit farms.

Your three divers pull over, the three of you making the visit ditch the Ingush ferry in exchange for four new cars with drivers, eight armed Chechen Interior Ministry guards—yes, the notorious Kadyrovtsi-- and a fuzzy tree air freshener on the rear view. The added guards were not simply to scare away rebels but were a high-priced requirement of the Chechen authorities for any foreigner travelling in. The shocking, sad truth that makes you want to plead absolution through an absurdist song by the Chechen Weird Al Yankovich was that your mission is hardly to save lives. It’s to evaluate a few new businesses including a crumby bakery and dairy farm projects, if not to encourage quality and confidence among the project participants.

Madmax on the outside, you’re all Mad Martha Stewart on the downlow. Kidnapped, you might get a cow for ransom. The bleeding, screaming out loud irony, of course, was that the rebels were not kidnapping foreigners as much anymore. These days everybody was pretty certain it was the Kadyrovtsi doing it, the same guys driving you in. Like an idiot, you run around vigorously shaking hands with your new chaperones with one hand over your heart.

T shrugs. He’d already started moving back into his flat in Grozny, so he’s more than used to his gauntlet of security though he doesn’t require escort on his own. As long as he made absolutely no political statements out loud, he figured he would be fine. Z, on the other hand, is incredibly genuine and empathetic. And she hadn’t been to neighboring Chechnya since she was a small child. It would be her first time to see the visible evidence of battle left all over the neighboring republic.

You soar through Achkoy-Martan, past leagues of old women wading into the abandoned state farm looking for the beginnings of an apple or pear. By Shaamiyurt, you begin to see whole villages under reconstruction, only the road signs remain full of bullet holes. Then you see a unique mosque, repaired but with patches of cement covering the many rocket holes like a dripping salve. You stop to meet men and mothers and rambunctious kids there, every one of them a portrait of sleeplessness, yet stocked with perseverance and vitality.

Four cars, you start up again and power finally past the “Grozny” welcome sign. There is a huge forest park. The mountains disappear below the horizon. Then bombarded factories, shells of buildings, rows and rows of them, appear out of the post-apocalyptic Western suburb. You saw entire buildings gutted by rockets in Sarajevo. But in Grozny the explosives were not only employed to strike snipers and empty the buildings. The Russians had brought out the heavy bombers to literally knock the buildings to the ground.

You pull up to a traffic light outside the notorious village of Noviye Atagi, made known to the West in Andrew Meier’s book, Black Earth, which exposed war crimes committed there. Now the edge of the village is marked by a row of newly-rebuilt houses and a pond lined with fishermen.

There is no city on earth which has ever been completely destroyed in war. There are always survivors to tell the tale, if not the conquerors. There will always be seeds sprouting in ashes. Grozny had survived as much as Berlin and yet huge numbers of people lasted, painfully, through the storm. The site of crowded streets amid godawful, ash-filled devastation startles your soul.

The most extreme human dualities run splattered across the road. One is compelled to laugh and cry, to be proud and ashamed, cheered and chilled. Yet you are compelled to look in, undeterred, to try to help whoever is left to rebuild what they lost. You are compelled to turn up the volume.

HELO

www.Helo-Magazine.com

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West African Voodoo Funk

and Other Audio-Epiphanies 

Tunes  |  Daniel J Gerstle, Oct-Nov 2009

www.Helo-Magazine.com 

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Reviewed here are: Voodoo Funk by Frank at The Glasslands; Skye Steele Quartet, Terese Svoboda, K Page Stuart & The Sleepwalkers' Parade, and others at the Gershwin Hotel; Those Guys Who Play Washington Square; edibleRed and Diana Hickman at Dangerous Mathematicians; and The Boxer Rebellion at The Bowery Ballroom and Southpaw.

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We soar down a trail made of orange, rain-pressed earth into a countryside dotted with dilapidated houses, each shrouded in rich green foliage. There is a thumping beat, a driving rhythm in the movement. It is disco from a parallel universe, voodoo funk possessing the stereo. We could be driving through Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ghana, Gambia, Senegal, Nigeria or some other West African nation recovering from civil war or economic malaise. Drawing us into the bush is a video of saturated footage playing end over end against a screen at the Glasslands, a warehouse club on the Williamsburg waterfront of Brooklyn.

On a second screen, another video reveals 1970’s record album cover art from West Africa; a sultry woman, curled up on the center label of a vinyl record suddenly leaps out. Frank, the DJ who conjures this show from the shadows below, spins his treasured collection of antique disco records on a hi-fi behind the dance floor. The rhythms of Afrobeat, Afro Funk, and Funky Highlife thump and roll, thump and roll; it’s a slap-happy bass that lights the soul. And it’s propelling us forward...

This summer I mined New York City for a new favorite sound. My journey covered a wide range of territory from Frank's West African voodoo funk records at the Glasslands to violin jazz poetry with Terese Svoboda and Skye Steele at the Gershwin Hotel, from rhythm and blues with Those Guys Who Play at Washington Square Park, to pop rock with edibleRed and classic jazz with Diana Hickman at Dangerous Mathematicians. Finally it landed at video rock with The Boxer Rebellion on the set of the film, Going the Distance. Listen…

[Continued below...]

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Albums collected in Nigeria by Frank...

There is something incredibly curative about discovering new music. The sound tickles the nerves. The words evoking memories of a great lover or bitter loss, it seizes you. If it’s righteous, it soothes the soul. And, if you’re coming out of a tough period of your life, it can save you from the brink.

After tense work in Iraq and Afghanistan this past winter, I came back to New York to find my romantic relationship with A. was over. For most of a decade, I had been beating my chest, diving into war zones amid the madness, filth, tension, and pockets of hope only to fly back, but not really come back.

Overseas there was eagerness, ambition, and wild hunger for story; skeptical inquiry, cynical acceptance, and drowsy boredom; horror, drunken lethargy, and lusty abandon. There was a slap-happy joy, a dark, biting humor, and everything was shadowed by the fear of losing a friend or getting a leg blown off. Few feared violent death; it was the threat of institutionalization which plagued me. Even the brightest of these low octave emotions was bound to the beat of a bass drum which imprinted man’s cruelty on the conscience.

And so with all this tension pressing against the levee in my head, the levee cracked. A safety strap which had kept me solid, guarded, and numb, finally popped open in my brain and released all kinds of squiggly tentacles of passion. It was a good thing. Starting over again with this new sensibility reopened my soul to all the other emotions I had forgotten I had.

There had been a time when Bonzo’s badass drumming summoned explosions, his symbol crashes were breaking windows. And now sniffing out the crescendo of Led Zeppelin’s operatic march, "No Quarter," got me smiling and crying at the same time. It was a delicious ecstasy I hadn’t felt in years, like celebrating months of arduous labor with an all-night bender on tequila at the Tiki lounge only to wake up a day later in a haze with the most powerful urge to suck the juice out of oranges.

It was in this context that I was re-born a believer in the new music scene in global cities, in this case, New York. Here's what I found... 

Voodoo Funk at The Glasslands in Brooklyn

West African voodoo funk blows my mind. It is a groove for laughing and forgetting, the feel of a women’s hip on a balmy night on the town. Stumbling through the rain on the Brooklyn waterfront, I half expected to find a fortyish Nigerian parlor hesitant to open its doors to hipsterville. But the Glasslands was a warehouse club in Williamsburg hammered together as a low-budget nerdster venue hosting acts like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. As it turned out, it was John Fewell, the former producer of nerdcore hip-hop singer mc chris, who first posted the idea on his Facebook update. Long curious about the region, I agreed to meet him there.

Five bucks down and six bucks for a cup of cabernet, I waltzed in to find the place empty and definitely more of an alternative scene than one of West African soul. But once Frank, the DJ, started spinning vinyl beneath the backdrop videos, I forgot about the crowd and opened my ears.

"Get down, get down with the music...Feelin' good times..." There was Tunji Oyelana and the Benders, Sha-la-la Aziza, Papa Yankson, Uhuru #1 Big Band, and Rock Town Express. The Doves, Vis-a-Vis, Tee Mac, Matata, Simigwa, Uwandile, and Jeff Lagoe sitting pretty with a wide collar polyester shirt. "Shake your body to a new dance...Disco high life..."

When a new sound hits you, you’re never know what will manifest in your imagination. I’m sure half the people who came, drank, danced, knocked heads, and met lovers that night, felt little, remembered less. But I was arriving with an open, vulnerable consciousness. Here’s what African disco evoked for me.

In Ohio in the mid-eighties, my mother’s lover’s son brought out two VHS tapes he knew would shock me. I was just thirteen. The first was a glorified, legal snuff film called, Faces of Death II, which was a compilation of real footage of people getting killed. The most memorable scene was of a West African death squad executing a dissident. His body fell limp, really limp, too limp, and it was the first time I saw it happen. Seeing the environment of the footage was also the first time I had really thought about Africa.

Later I would learn that Nigeria had just come out of a horrible civil war. The Igbo minority claimed independence for a region called, Biafra, in the late 1960's. The Nigerian dictatorship crushed them; there was a famine. So while America came out of the civil rights era and Vietnam with the heavy funk catharsis of James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, and George Clinton, then escaped to disco neverland of KC and the Sunshine Band and Kool and the Gang, Nigeria and its neighbors were pioneering their own lyrical medicine. The Godfather of West African jazz was an intense, political man everyone in the region knew called, Fela Kuti. And beyond him there were dozens of fledgling musicians trying new funk blends out of ear shot of America.

The second video my mother's lover's son showed me that day was a low quality porno with a slick disco soundtrack which, combined with the snuff film, turned me off of that sound for two decades. I wondered how disco could be so happy, so denying, amid humanity’s animal instincts. But now as I listened to it in its West African form, I realized that the sound pulled smiles out of your pockets by beating you senseless.

Frank’s video montage now lit up another album with an attractive African woman. This time she had a huge pink fro. She crawled hungrily toward the camera, toward me. The beat was solid. Bounce dikka bounce…

By the end of it all—though admittedly John and I were just standing there listening, not dancing—I was compelled to urge my pals overseas to play Frank’s ore at those rooftop parties in Khartoum, Nairobi, or Amman; it really fit, really matched the mood. It was the sound of resilience.

Violin Jazz Poetry at the Gershwin Hotel

Terese Svoboda hit her stride with one word. “Flow.” Skye Steele’s violin jazz quartet responded to this with a fury of notes, fluttering palm leaves, as if a cloud of dust has been turned up by passing Bradley fighting vehicles. Then as quick as they began, the band halted and Svoboda read another line of her poem, "The Convoy Never Moves."

We were in the red velvet belly of the Gershwin Hotel in lower midtown. Svoboda read from her new book, Weapons Grade. Skye Steele’s band, somewhat new to playing behind poets, was introducing new tunes this night on a set with the jazz rock band, The Sleepwalker’s Parade, poets Cornelius Eady and Wanda Phipps, and novelist Paul Gargaliano. 

About a week earlier as I was writing about voodoo funk at the Tea Lounge on Union in Park Slope, Skye Steele’s band erupted in the concert space with a sound that was entirely new to me and at the same time very familiar. Steele plays violin, composing tunes that add anything from a traditional European country bass, to a modern jazz guitar, to pounding rock and roll drums. The music was an all spice blend of fiddle, jazz, classical, and rock experiment.

"When I came to New York and immersed myself in the jazz scene here," Steele later wrote to me, "I began to learn that the violin is actually a global family...As I connected with friends from Turkey, Israel, New Orleans, and Brazil, I added vocabulary from their respective branches of the fiddling family tree to my own language...The mixture of influences and languages that you hear in my music is a concurrently historic and personal narrative..."

After the show, I met Skye and he invited me to the Gerschwin. He was a gentle guy with an active mind. I had been hearing Svoboda’s name in creative writing circles for years, so I was eager to hear how the two acts could be bonded together. The hotel turned out to be a surprise midtown art scene; the show merely ten bucks.

Back in the red velvet back room, the Steele quartet poured sweet sauce around the stage while Svoboda read about occupations and pre-occupations, “algorithms out-stepping…,” “down an electric river…,” “rabbits…,” “what is there other than I forget…” Then as Svoboda bowed off, Skye’s band tore into "Peace Child" and "Hehvonaky," as well as a cover of Radiohead’s slow number, "All I Need." “I’m an insect just trying to get out of the dark…” The music was not perfect, but it was thoroughly organic, alive and thriving in a way that reassured me.

The themes became clear. Svoboda, Steele, and each of the acts seemed to be playing on the terrors of being trapped, locked in, occupied, and building in each piece toward kinds of liberation. I could feel it in my ankles, even an off note. I hadn’t realized how much I missed, how much maybe I needed live music.

Next up came The Sleepwalker’s Parade with singer K Page Stuart. They played a bluesy jazz, an angry ballad, a somber charge. "Carnival" began with ethereal guitar effects, then K jumped up with “I’ll fly away…” As each song rose, it was as if she was pulling a great weight with all of her strength down Flatbush, the band members holding on for a ride not sure what she might do next. She seemed to be aiming for a Patti Smith sound and coming up closer to Karen O after a fist fight.

As a symbol reflected the room’s pink light against the wall with a glow behind K, she said, “This is to all the children where violent things are happening…” "Places people stay" was inspired by Lebanon. The event climaxed with K’s rock screams, but it was a liberation rage, a blue flame.  

Those Guys Who Play in Washington Square Park

On another night when I needed that live music vibe, I was crossing Washington Square Park grumbling under my breath. I was in a furious mood over something, fence-kicking annoyed and ready to crack teeth over it. But halfway to 3rd street I found a familiar horde huddling in the darkness on the edge of the fountain plaza. Many times, I had come across this band, not just a guy with a guitar but sometimes seven of them. They had smooth New York style and could sing multilayered rhythm and blues or seventies rock which you rarely heard unplugged.

There was a core of three guitarists who showed up at convenient times when the air was warm enough. Another player would bring one of those handy drum boxes. Sometimes there was a bass. And most of them could sing in harmony. The lead that night was a performing arts drop-out kind of guy with a beautiful voice, a narcissism obscuring self-doubt, and an Afro just beyond sheer. Singing with a sentimental tone, he made eye contact with a young blonde sitting on the square. The others seemed to be improvising.

Yo, man, you know this tune? Here, give it a try. It's a G minor 7 to D minor 7, then down to a C minor 7, let me hear it. Look out, "Down around the corner a half a mile from here, you see them old trains runnin' and you watch them disappear...Without love, where would you be now...?"

It was the Doobie Brothers' "Without Love", then "Listen to the Music", the Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider,” Marvin Gaye’s “What's Goin' On,” Dobie Gray’s “Drift Away,” or anything by the Beatles. People recommended sing-a-long songs with an edge to them, like Patti Smith’s “Gloria:” "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine...People said beware but I just don't care..." 

There were tourists from Italy and Spain completely swept away by these guys. The sweetest thing about this particular street band is that they welcomed anyone to join in and play or sing given the newbies didn't break their rhythm. They should have had a fire. By midnight, the cops came and we had to scram, but I found the singing had lifted my dark mood.  

Where voodoo funk had brought out the slap-happy bass laughter, violin jazz poetry had turned my imagination upside alto. And when Those Guys had me recalling the tenor days riding across Ohio with the radio blaring, I was reminded of a few other hungry nerves on the high keys. The summer’s heat had not only brought out a lustful curiosity for new melody, but also a yearn to recall old lovers and discover new.

Trawling Craigslist ads for new ideas I came across an opportunity to play a background extra in a feature film which I did on occasion. What better way to escape post-trauma drama for a while than meet someone new on the film set of a romantic comedy.

When I showed up to a bar on Bowery that morning I discovered that not only were we to background a scene in a club with well-publicized actors Christina Applegate and Drew Barrymore but we would also see, The Boxer Rebellion, an emerging video rock band jam the film’s outro. The film was Going the Distance. Before heading to the Bowery Ballroom for the scene, I serendipitously met a new friend.

edibleRed and Diana Hickman at Dangerous Mathematicians in the Lower East Side

While in holding, a room where movie extras are stored like furniture before being screwed into place on set, I got into a conversation with a young Armenian-American dance performer named, Dave Dilsizian. We welcomed a striking red-head, a tattoed, social, and gentle woman, to our table. The red-head handed us cards and invited us to a free event at a place called, Dangerous Mathematicians.

Turns out her name was Collette McLafferty and she was the front-woman for a pop rock band called, edibleRed. They were about a month away from making a splash on MTV media. Later, I headed down to Rivington Steet in the Lower East Side to hear her sing for the first time.

I went in, smiled at the stack of math and physics text books posed as decor around the fashion wear, and found Collette in the back. Her friend Karen, just opened the place recently and had invited her and others to perform as a way of introducing the store to the neighbors. For a low-budget music miner, this turned out to be a lucky find. To my surprise, another young woman took the stage before Collette. 

Diana Hickman is an emerging singer-pianist who tours clubs in Lower Manhattan. That night at Dangerous Math, she decided to sing jazz classics a la Gershwin or Billy Holiday backed by a stand-up bass. She covered Summertime and other tunes which made it feel like you'd walked into a mid-period Woody Allen film. She was like a blue bird teasing you about your lost loves. When she finished the crowd applauded and then went in for another free glass of wine or browsed through the shelves for satin nighties. Finally, Collette took the small stage with her guitarist Sean McMechen.

Collette and Sean's casual, unplugged performance among the wine-sippers, pals, physics textbooks, and clothing racks was New York music at its least pretentious. Honestly, I spent years under-estimating pop rock like that of edibleRed. Meeting Collette gave me the opportunity to see it more intimately, the songs were so much more vital in the flesh.

Collette reminded me of a marathon runner, she had come to New York just out of high school and battled everyday to get where she was, collecting a satchel of fans, loves, kittens, broken-offers, disappointments and jerks along the way. Take a warm, packaged melody like "Hey Ya." Live, everyone can drink it down like sangria on a beach at night. But to get that track onto an MTV playlist took years of construction, networking, sweat, persistence, flights, fails, and numbers of people. After the show, I learned Collette's band was playing the New York Marathon, doing a live show at the Highline Ballroom, and when she did have free time she was nurturing her precious family of cats.

The Boxer Rebellion at the Bowery Ballroom and Southpaw

"Drawn on two sides without disguise but I don't mind," sang Nathan Nicholson over the the steady beat of drum and bass. On a pedal Bb the bass walked Bb to C to G to F. Nicholson and bassist Adam Harrison looked like they'd just gotten out of class at Harvard or Cambridge, tight British chaps, upright and dignified. Meanwhile, drummer Piers Hewitt was pounding skins with sweat mist bursting off him with every strike. Lead guitarist Todd Howe stood stage right leaning left toward his string hand, his hair wild and dripping. "And I, I spit fire on lovers and liars. And you, you don't believe me. And I find it easy, easy..."

A righteous performance it was but with a catch. We were on the set of the Hollywood film, Going the Distance, so this charge was made in two-to-four minute intervals over a period of hours as cameras were set and re-set, actors and background placed, shot, moved out, and brought in again. Paralyzing the band this first time through was director Nanette Berstein's need for cinematic professionalism on the big screen. That meant shaping the song around the actor's movements and dialogue, and it meant a bit of lipsynching as well. Fortunately, I had the chance to see the band in both of their club scenes, first limited here at the Bowery Ballroom, then later unshackled and live at Southpaw in Brooklyn.

On this first occasion, Collette, Dave, and I along with fifty other extras were brought in as groups fit around the lead actors and the band. It offered at once a behind-the-scenes look at the making of a movie and a chance to see the band as just a couple of guys by the speakers rather than some mod untouchable video stars. Granted their hype in the UK was not yet matched in the States, but with comparisons to Coldplay and with attachment to this film, they were poised to splash all over the place come summer 2010.

For me, curiosity about the band grew when I learned they had named themselves and their songs after intense emotional situations: "The Boxer Rebellion", they were more the grandsons of Guandong British merchants than veterans of a Chinese war of course. Their songs here included "Evacuate" and "Spitting Fire". Others raged, "Forces," "Semi-Automatic,"...

When I heard "Evacuate," I have to admit I had fallen for a young woman among the extras crowd. A film animator, fresh and new to New York, Kelly connected with me on favorite themes, but just as we started to get to know each other a scene was called and I got placed. Frozen in one area, I watched her across the room by the stage below the band. We had to wait in these positions forever as they set the scene, and called action. The band played "Evacuate," then "Spitting Fire" again and again.

In an awkward, but admittedly touching moment in the light show, actors Drew Barrymore and Justin Long made out in the crowd as part of the film's climactic scene. The lift of the song cycling over and over again in that tension perfectly massaged those higher keys I hadn't touched in so long. It summoned that feeling of driving through the city dreaming about someone, that bitter sweet tension which if perpetuated crystalized into one of those perfect imaginary romances unspoiled by having to play out in the real world.

After the eleven-hour day of shooting, I said goodbye to Collette and the other acquaintances then I ran after Kelly. Clumsily, I lent her a DVD of Michel Gondry films, offered some compliments, and said a warm goodbye, but I never heard from her again. In that curious way the mind preserved memory, those few sweet moments with her were forever trapped in that song. The Boxer Rebellion's "Spitting Fire" is my link back to that night, so the moment wasn't lost. That's how music is meant to work. 

Walking Home Down Bedford

After the Voodoo Funk show at the Glasslands, I bid goodbye to John and tapped out onto the waterfront looking toward Manhattan. What a great night. Then the rain began to fall in soft mists. I shrugged it off and decided to walk home. It was a long, long walk, but worth it. I left the hipsters and yupsters, the cocktails and "dive" bars, and wandered down into the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. Three a.m. and couples were up for a holiday celebration, the men with their large fur caps passing by and trying not to make eye contact while the young girls not accustomed to outsiders just stared at me. I entered Bedstuy as the hiphop clubs spilled out onto the streets, guys with metal teeth and braids taking up the side walk. I passed a Senegalese restaurant which was still filled with Africans and Arabs as the stereo blew out Michael Jackson's "Pretty Young Thing."

By the time, I got to where I was staying in Caribbean Crown Heights, the city was asleep. But I was on a sound high. What I learned in my latest search for a new favorite music was that it's easy to get over to the war zones, the tension of work whatever your work is, but it isn't so easy to come back. To find fulfillment in life sometimes takes living life more fully.  Whatever your vehicle--music, artwork, kids, rollercoasters--just don't let the dust settle.

HELO

www.Helo-Magazine.com

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The Music

Voodoo Funk and assorted Afro-sounds of the 1970's... 

• Soul Makossa—Rare Funky MooG (A nice place to start)
• Aleke Kanonu—N’gwode (Another mood-setter)
• Fela Kuti—Documentary Short—Music is the Weapon (Take some time and check out this documentary to get a closer contextual feel for the politics and style of the late seventies in Nigeria. It's far out and will give you greater appreciation for these next pieces.)
• Fela Kuti—Fela in Performance (1971) (The master at work)
• Voodoo Funk: Two Hours of Afro-Funk—sampler (Here's just one of Frank's samplers. If the first song doesn't get you skip ahead, there' so much more.)
• Voodoo Funk: Root of Evil--sampler 
• Voodoo Funk: Sahara All Stars of Jos—Take Your Soul 
• Asiko—Lagos City 
• CK Mann & Carousel 7—Funky Hilife

American funk and disco, for context. Look for the subtle differences. Arguably both have origins in West African rhythm...

• James Brown--Sex Machine 
• Sly and the Family Stone--Dance to the Music 
• George Clinton & Parliament--We Want the Funk 
• KC and the Sunshine Band--Shake Shake Shake 
• Kool and the Gang--Jungle Boogie

Here's a shout-out to John Fewell who recommended the Glasslands show. He produced this track with mc chris. It fits the themes... 

• mc chris—Hijack (Before you board the plane…)

Poets with jazz and a little rock. Here are a few of the artists from the Gershwin show...

• Cornelius Eady--Different poems delivered a cappela (For transition, here's a strong poet. Not sure if his poem about Otis Redding's death is on this, but that's the first one I would recommend you read if you like his stuff.)
• Terese Svoboda—Weapons Grade (The Trailer) (Her new book can be found at www.teresesvoboda.com. Here's an audio-visual trailer, which adds some drama not unlike the jazz backdrop at the Gershwin.
• Skye Steele Quartet—Peace Child 
• Skye Steele Quartet—Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair 
• Skye Steele Quartet—Now Move (which fit around Terese Svoboda's poem "The Convoy Never Moves")
• Skye Steele Quartet--More selections
• Radiohead—All I Need (You'll need an exposed vein for this one. Steele's version included his live violin.)
• K. Page Stuart & Sleepwalker’s Parade—MindF*cker
• K. Page Stuart & Sleepwalker’s Parade--Carnival (Link coming soon)

Here's what you might here when you stumble upon Those Guys Who Play at Washington Square Park...

• The Doobie Brothers—Long Train Runnin’ (Without Love) 
• The Doobie Brothers--Listen to the Music (So much better live unplugged than it will ever sound on some classic rock radio station)
• Allman Brothers—Midnight Rider 
• Marvin Gaye—What’s Goin’ On 
• Patti Smith—Gloria

The Dangerous Math show, quaint but real, included...

• Diana Hickman--Te Quiero (Forgive the shaky camera. It's the best song she has on YouTube. Though at the show she sang jazz classics alongside a stand up bass. Live she aspired closer to this next track. The perfect kind of music to stumble upon when you're not expecting it in New York)
• Billy Holiday--Summertime 
• edibleRed—Paralyzed (One of Collette's proud moments came when her band's version of Paralyzed landed them on the soundtrack of the television show, The L Word.)
• edibleRed—Sugar and Spring (Collette and Sean started with an unplugged version of this crowd pleaser. A fun run on the high notes.)
• edibleRed–Hey Ya (Here's their current single, a slowed down, luscious version of Outkast's original, Hey Ya.)

The Band playing on the sountrack of Going the Distance, which we saw live, partly lipsynched at The Bowery Ballroom, then later live in fuller force at Southpaw in Brooklyn. Don't you just want to jam it in your car driving through the city?

• The Boxer Rebellion—Here We Are (Link coming soon!)
• If you like the Boxer Rebellion, also consider this Icelandic band I discovered researching them: Sigur Ros--Vid Spilum Endalaust
• The Boxer Rebellion—Evacuate 
• The Boxer Rebellion—Spitting Fire

HELO

www.Helo-Magazine.com

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Crisis Zone Soundtrack

Tunes  |  Daniel J Gerstle

www.Helo-Magazine.com 

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Late at night this spring in Khartoum, Sudan, I blasted The Who through earphones into my head. Pete Townsend’s thundering guitar story, A Quick One While He’s Away (Live at Leeds), with its crashing chords and bleeding vocals powered me through the stress of working half way around the world from my girl. Like rolling down a mountainside in a barrel I could think of nothing but rock. Then came something even louder: Mppp…mppp…

I tore my headphones off and looked out the window at the oddly vacant airport road. Mppp… There it was again. The Darfur rebels had finally launched their attack.

We have to look back, sometimes. See what we did right, why we almost got killed. And the music, the music, is Gericault’s Raft of Medusa. Sometimes the music is what we did right, why we survived.

After growing up ‘none-of-the-above’ raised on classic rock, heavy metal, and grunge in Cincinnati, Ohio, I climbed into a career of humanitarian aid work in war zones overseas. I journeyed across the Balkans, Eurasia, and Africa packing one of those $15 drug store CD player headsets. And music saved my life.

For many aid workers, rights advocates, journalists, and soldiers who work on the frontlines of crisis, music is a crash helmet, an airbag, a medicine, and a massage all in one. You listen to get psyched up, to enhance the drama, to escape hardship, to deny sorrow, and to recuperate on the way home.

When you finally have the ticket in hand, you may at first deny its significance. But in the night, lying in bed with all that anticipation, you see the razor-sharp mountains, the scorched desert, the maelstrom of culture, the ruptured towns, the blood, the starvation, and the shadows.

Your pulse quickens. Your cardiac muscles throb. Your pupils dilate. Your abdomen sours. Perhaps it is adrenalin, the rock and roll of a new adventure. Maybe it is your desire to get in and do something. But somewhere inside of you there is the knowledge that you might just get your head blown off. Your diaphragm expands. Capillaries fill your limbs with oxygenated blood. Your auditory nerves become extremely sensitive.

Back in the day, my old friend Bob and I drove through Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia visiting American civil war battlefields and reenactments, imagining one day we might play a role in history. We’d crank up Guns ‘n’ Roses’ Civil War and Metallica’s To Live is to Die and revel in all the power chords, the fake cannon fire, and the bloody dissonance. There on the healed battlefield the living museum offered only glory, no sorrow. At 18, Bob and I joined the military together anticipating a life full of intensity and sacrifice. Bob flew Air Force missions through fire over Afghanistan and Iraq while I left the Marines to take on aid work and journalism in failed states across Asia and Africa.

To get psyched, neophytes embrace the cacophony of war. In the Marines, I recall the bad-asses, the jerk-offs, and the patriots all blasting their stereos with raucous madness. White Zombie, Primus, Rage Against the Machine (ironically), Ice T, NWA, or the Beasty Boys. The Stooges’ Search and Destroy. We imagined ourselves head-banging and playing air guitar all the way into Somalia, Haiti, or Bosnia. But when we finally came to face war and lost friends, we could no longer revel in crisis, we memorialized it, and our soundtracks changed.

Aid workers, rights advocates, and journalists are a different breed. We get psyched rolling classic travel soundtracks: Canned Heat’s On the Road Again, Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, Johnny Cash singing “I’ve been everywhere, man, I’ve been everywhere…”

Russians love their drunken version of Bob Dylan, a crazy insomniac named Vladimir Visotsky who sang alone over a poorly-tuned acoustic guitar about soldiers going to the front or what it’s like to be trapped in an insane asylum. Still others actually brought with them a touch of Rakhmaninov or Chopin on piano—that was escapism at its most acute—or the heroes of world music: Brenda (South Africa), Gigi (Ethiopia), Ofra Haza (Israel), and so on.

Once you enter the crisis zone—Sarajevo, Kabul, Grozny, Bossaso, Khartoum—you start with a huge release. You see you’re in a land where children kick soccer balls, where women cluster in the market, where men debate politics at tea houses. So you put on your headphones and push play. To enhance the scene, many play tunes that match.

Bosnia’s formerly broken skyscrapers posed against snow-capped mountains deserved a local sound. Classic rock idol Kemal Monteno sang Sarajevo Ljubavi Moja. Zabranjeno Pusenje and Hari Mata Hari offered ballads to commemorate the war. Goran Bregovic mixed 70’s rock with gypsy romps.

But no Balkan journey could be complete without the Belgrade unifier, the great Djordje Balasevic. His songs were not simply singles. Everyone in the West Balkans, regardless of which side of the wars they were on, could sing melancholy torch tracks like Prica o Vasi Ladackom or Svirajte mi Jesen Stize Dunjo Moja. At some concerts Balasevic could actually set the microphone down and the crowd would croon for him. And this unified chorus was the only thing holding neutral survivors of the Balkan wars together through all that killing…

My friend Emira, a Bosnian Muslim, who had survived the Serb bombardment of Sarajevo in the 1990s, told me she loved Balasevic but could no longer listen to some songs, and even became angry when a Sarajevo café put on Belgrade pop idols because they came to represent Yugoslavia’s destroyed, un-retrievable past. Even for me, after I spent grueling weeks in the immediate post-war streets, drums became bombs, symbols were smashed windows, and for a long time I could not listen to Balasevic without reliving a harrowing night I spent in a bombed out warehouse in Sarajevo.

Afghanistan was so far beyond what many Western crisis workers knew that it hardly needed enhancement. Soaring up the desert highways, one passed ancient and contemporary ruins so atrophied that one was driving backwards through time. Here, it was, Life on Mars. David Bowie’s Space Oddity was perfectly dissonant, abstract:

“Though I’ve passed one hundred thousand miles I’m feeling very still; and I think my spaceship knows which way to go; tell my wife I love her very much she knows…”

But yet others wanted to embrace the Afghan diorama. That meant Led Zeppelin’s No Quarter “The dogs of doom are howling more…” or if you could get your hands on post-Taliban cassette tapes, an Afghan classic pop hymn from assassinated-legend Ahmad Zahir or Dari hip-hop from younger artists like “Awesome Qasim”.

Late one night in the desert town of Mazar-e-Sharif, an American aid worker named Leith and I lied on a deck outside his home trading gossip and studying the glittering canopy of stars. The songs we listened to that night helped our short-attention-span minds bounce quickly from the blistering heat, to the Milky Way galaxy, the rice pilaf we ate, the war, the hunger, the misery, and the names of the five Doctors Without Borders staff who were shot to death up the road a month earlier:

Helene, Egil, Pim, Besmillah, and Fasil. The soundtrack we heard somehow held it all together, as if the drummer brought the risk, the bass player fed us fear, the guitarist jammed the passion, and the singer wrote the story.

But the music was not only for embracing and enhancing the journey. Many listened to songs to escape the stress or to deny the sorrow of life on the frontlines. My Dutch manager Hans used to wake me up at night in Azerbaijan with his screams. Having helped to bury the dead in Burundi and Somalia, he still recalled the night outside Bujumbura a dog showed up at the door with someone’s detached hand which it dug out of a mass grave.

Hans liked to drink, that was his medicine, but the music was his life raft. Driving through burned villages on the frontline between Azerbaijan and Armenia, he would crank up Van Morrison singing, “You can’t stop us on the road to freedom…She’s as sweet as Tupelo honey…” Or he’d let our driver slip in an Azeri pop track like the cosmopolitan Aygun Kazimova’s Sevgi Gullari. Our other local partner Heydar loved to replay Turkish pop star Tarkan’s Simarik, savoring the part of the song where the singer pauses in the middle of the track to send two kisses to the girls listening.

Just before Hans retired from Azerbaijan, he brought a couple of bottles of vodka and his Oasis CD to the village house. We drank and sang all night. He bellowed Live Forever over and over again until his cheeks were red and his mind was too foggy to admit we were mortal. Our voices singing out that night must have reverberated all the way from the village where we were to the Armenian trench on the other side of the frontline. “Maybe I just want to fly, want to live, I don’t want to die…”

There was our Chechen driver Bashir, who powered us through southern Russia’s Islamic guerrilla war from the forests of Ingushetia into devastated Chechnya blasting raunchy 50 Cent hip-hop: “Lil’ mama show me how you move it; go ahead put yo back into it; do ya thang like there aint nothing to it; shake, sh, sh, shake that ass girl…”

There was Aden in Somalia who reveled in Tupac’s Dear Momma as we rumbled across the desert in search of camel-herding nomads. Benyam, an Ethiopian doctor, who crossed the same desert with me, played Shania Twain’s Still the One on a loop.  Jen, an American aid worker, rocked to Radiohead, the sound of the future clashing with her emotionally-wrought journeys through Rwanda. The band’s meditative tune Airbag has become an anthem for global crisis workers: “In the next world war, in the one you left behind, I am born again…in an interstellar burst I am back to save the universe…”

Crisis workers sometimes got killed; others lost a limb or a friend. And the music was a means to cope, to process. There was my Somali driver Dhegjar who turned his car over in the desert so far out it took three hours for a UN plane and three cars to find him and his passengers. When we heard that three of our team drove out that day and one had been killed, we spent hours trying to figure out who it had been. When we found out, there was a terrible, awful silence.

There was Bettina Goislard, a young Swiss woman aiding refugees in Afghanistan, who was shot to death through her car window. There were the twenty-two diplomats and aid staff crushed when a bomb blew beside the UN’s headquarters in Iraq. Journalists were targeted around the world. And thousands of soldiers had died in the terror decade.

Many frontline workers relied on cushions beyond the music, of course. Soldiers blew shit up, got in fights, wacked off, studied photos of their girls, read magazines, ran laps, lifted weights, drank, smoked, and some even went whoring. Aid workers, rights advocates, and journalists threw parties with DJs and bars, got laid, brought in liquor even when it was illegal, got drunk, smoked weed, chewed khat, got manicure-pedicures, took a massage, shiatsu, jiu jitsu, tai chi, yoga, a conga line, a cha-cha, or a long-planned swim in the ocean.

When it finally happened to me, the attack—a Somali gunman backed by a mob actually cornered me in a building and said he would kill me—I ran dry. My brain emptied of everything except logistics. Armed guards who I had not wanted to bring overwhelmed the attacker and prevented loss of life. But that gunshot rang out, echoing for days. Back in bed that night, I rocked out. The power chords cleansed me. That was how it worked.

Ultimately for me, nothing beat The Who. Before I took off for Sudan to research solutions to hunger, I packed my computer media player full of my favorites. And they really charged me. With the writing I had to do, I needed to get psyched up, deny the stress, and get shit done.

Flying around the country, I had looked forward to the dull, lethargy of Sudan’s capitol, Khartoum. Then the Darfur rebels launched their first attack on the city. We had seen it coming. The warning was circling around the diplomatic corps for two days. But when three thousand desert boys arrived with rocket launchers and we began to hear the low woofers of grenades detonating across town, my colleagues and I pulled our headphones off.

For a little while, we scrambled to the roof to check out the rising column of smoke, the government recon jets taking off from Khartoum International, the tanks rolling up Africa Road. We all chatted about what it could mean, whether the rebels would achieve anything other than redistributing the Darfur War and its trail of fighting and injury.

We frontline workers had already been spending our years thinking about the bitter truths of war, that we crisis workers and the elite of the country had the capacity to cushion ourselves, listen to music, cope. Meanwhile, many of the city’s less fortunate, like in Darfur and so many other places, were in harm’s way.

After learning what I could through the UN and diplomatic chains, calling my Sudanese host family where I had been living on the frontline until the night before, and scouting the horizon, I reached a point where I could do nothing but wait and see. Would the bombs reach us? How many people would the fighting kill, injure or displace? Then I jogged back down to my laptop to get some work done. I poured myself some sherry.

Now what should I play? A) Get psyched (The Who, Baba O’Riley), b) enhance the drama (Sudanese country music), c) escape (Crystal Method, Dubiliscious Groove (Fly Spanish Version)), d) deny (a little ragtime jazz with Sydney Bechet), or e) recuperate and think of my girl (PJ Harvey’s A Place Called Home).

Then I found it, the song which encapsulated everything: working through crisis, embracing the tension, escaping the trauma, denying the blood spilled only streets away, and picturing home.

It was a futuristic, dolce track with a slow, persistent strum by Radiohead called Bullet Proof. “Limb by limb and tooth by tooth, crawling up inside of me; every day every hour, I wish that I was bullet proof...”

Ride the alpha wave, the long, patient wave through the bittersweet, the trail home.

END

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Links to the songs (and artwork) from the story above:

• UK. The Who, A Quick One While He’s Away (Live at Leeds)
• France. Not music. Gericault, Raft of Medusa
• USA. Guns ‘n’ Roses, Civil War (Wait for it after the solo. However, I must admit that Axel Rose's outfit almost got this song yanked.)
• USA. Metallica, To Live is to Die
• USA. The Stooges, Search and Destroy
• USA. Canned Heat, On the Road Again
• USA. Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit (includes Somebody to Love)
• South Africa. Brenda Fassie, Nomakhanjani (also try Vulindlela, one of the sweetest voices on the planet, she passed away two yrs back) 
• Ethiopia. Gigi (listen to a sample of several songs)
• Israel. Ofra Haza, Im Nin 'Alu (undoubtedly one of the most beautiful voices ever recorded; try also Elo Hi from the Yugoslav film Time of the Gypsies (Dom za vesanje)
• Yugoslavia/ Bosnia. Kemal Monteno, Sarajevo ljubavi moja (Unfortunately it's difficult for some of us not to associate this song and the next one, Fildzan viska, with the 1992-5 Siege of Sarajevo)
• Bosnia. Zabranjeno Pusenje, Fildzan viska
• Bosnia. Hari Matahari, Ja nemam snage da te ne volim 
• Yugoslavia/ Serbia. Goran Bregovic, Kalashnikov 
• Yugoslavia/ Serbia. Djordje Balasevic, Prica o vasi ladackom
• Yugoslavia/ Serbia. Svirajte mi jesen stize dunjo moja
• UK. David Bowie, Life on Mars
• UK. David Bowie, Space Oddity (Mind the hair!) 
• UK. Led Zeppelin,  No Quarter
• Afghanistan. Ahmad Zahir, Dostet Darom... (Try this Doc)
• Afghanistan. Awesome Qasim (Still isn't online but we're hoping)
• UK/N. Ireland. Van Morrison, Tupelo Honey
• Azerbaijan. Aygun Kazimova, Sevgi Gullari (not up, try Bu sevgi)
• Turkey. Tarkan, Simarik (Ah, yeah)
• UK. Oasis, Live Forever
• USA. 50 Cent, Disco Inferno (Seriously, on the Chechen highway)
• USA. Tupac, Dear Momma
• USA. Shania Twain, Still the One
• UK. Radiohead, Airbag
• UK. The Who, Baba O’Riley
• USA. Crystal Method, Dubeliscious Groove (Fly Spanish Version) (The best trip-hop song, but can't find free version, try High Roller)
• USA. Sydney Bechet, St Louis Blues (Travel back in time)
• USA. PJ Harvey, A Place Called Home
• USA. Radiohead, Bullet Proof (Our theme)

We maxed out the great potential of YouTube with this. Enjoy!