This past week I had a chat with Brad Barrish about music and data. No ethical algorithmic personalization under capitalism. We found out that we were both “digital hoarders” (his term) - and had spent years poring over the arcane dungeon of obscure music blogs that offered up digital rips of obscure and/or out of print records that would otherwise be fully lost to time or, at best, scuttled into the depths of digital obscurity by an algorithm that prioritizes payola over personalization.
In some small way, I hope that Big Nothing helps y’all to confuse the shit out of Spotify’s algorithms, broaden some horizons, pop your listening habits out of big data ruts.
Let’s get into it.
Il n'y a rien au monde que je ne ferai pas for cette fille - Les Sultans
Quebecois proto-rock from the 60s. Back in the heyday of blogspot crate digging, you could find sites devoted to every manner of obscure genre: 50s tiki-lounge exotica, El Salvadorean guerilla dancehall, French Canada’s answer to the British Invasion. Brian and I were talking about the Kinks the other day and I’ve been slowly leafing through their prodigious catalog when I came across the song Nothin’ in the World Can Stop Me Worryin’ About that Girl. I immediately recognized the melody, but felt like something was off with the recording. Then I realized that years ago I had heard this French language cover of the song by Les Sultans.
The lyrics are not quite the same - Les Sultans changed the title to, “There’s nothing in this world that I wouldn’t do for that girl…” and the sentiment of the song is more about coming back to a woman who treats him wrong versus the Kinks’ suspicion-laced blues. “Mais pour moi elle est ma vie, je dois elle subir” or “But for me, she is my life, I must suffer her,” sings extremely Canadianly-named vocalist Bruce Huard as opposed to Ray Davies’ version, “But I think all the time, is she true to me?”
I like to imagine the journey of that song, pressed at a vinyl plant in England in 1965, shipped across the frigid North Atlantic, through the St. Lawrence seaway to the docks at Montreal, then onto a truck, then stocked in a record store in Saint-Hyacinthe where Huard and his compatriots eagerly awaited the arrival of new inspiration from across the pond. Rock and roll on the slow boat to Canada.
You Are Still Beautiful - The Bartlebees
When I was a kid, a classmate in my kindergarten brought in a piece of the recently demolished Berlin Wall. It’s one of the first moments where I can remember realizing how big the world was. That important things beyond my understanding were happening outside of the cozy walls of my parents’ home in North Dakota. Right around that time, the Bartlebees came together in Munich, about 400 miles south of Berlin.
One might read a sense of the hope that a crumbling Soviet Bloc likely brought to the neighboring western states in the Bartlebees’ naive, lo-fi power pop. Perhaps there was finally a chance for the twee to shine through in a Germany that was only a couple generations removed from the collective insanity and horror of WWII. Whatever the case, their plucky-if-amateurish approach to their instruments, landing somewhere between early K-Records bands like Beat Happening and British counterparts Television Personalities, combined with singer Patrick’s* lightly accented, often pitchy vocal delivery, paints a very particular picture. One of a simple world where falling in love is easy, and the sun always shines in the afternoon.
*There is almost no info about the Bartlebees online, I’m fairly sure that the vocalist’s name is Patrick Linsbauer, although various releases have the members names as: Toby, Less and Keith or Smokey, Randy and Bonzo.
That’s all for today, thanks for listening.