Episode 2: The Subtle Art of the Punk Ballad / My Quest for Six Degrees of Separation from Doja Cat

Fast and angry goes slow and chill. / You won't believe #5.

The Subtle Art of the Punk Ballad

The big issue here: Punk, as a genre, is all about fast, energetic songs, but you can't just have a whole album of fast songs.

I mean, you could, but it would get boring. There has to be at least a bit of dynamic between fast and slow, quiet and loud, otherwise it all blends together. Think of a Kenny G ballads album - boring as shit. Brunch background music. Not to disparage brunch. This is the exact same thing, just approached from the opposite end.

Punk song forms, however, simply do not cooperate well with tempos under 120. Punk bands throughout the genre's history have had to reinvent the wheel with every album, from tapping into traditional rock to playing in entirely different genres. I'll take you on a brief tour.

The easiest-to-understand examples of punk ballads are from the earliest days of punk, when it was not especially distant from classic rock. 70s innovators like the Ramones put out songs like "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" that were simply slowed-down versions of the song structures and playing styles they used in their faster hits. This usually didn't go well. "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" only succeeds because it's a cute reprieve from the faster songs on the album, but on its own it sounds a bit odd, and most of their contemporaries, like the Damned, utterly failed at making this kind of thing sound good. 

Early punk bands also used more conventional rock ballads in their slow songs, connecting themselves to the more established genre. Here's the Clash with "Jimmy Jazz."

More interesting innovations can be found in punk music that's already been fused with other genres. The most famous example of this is perhaps the Bad Brains. While their day job was creative, super-fast hardcore punk, their Rastafarian influences led them to play full-on reggae songs as palate cleansers in between their most noisy tunes.

Elsewhere, the noted Dayton, Ohio band Brainiac, whose guitars were cut with the synthesizer playing of late frontman Tim Taylor, used creepy electronic interludes with ghostly vocals - just listen to "5trun9" and compare it to their more conventionally punk "Vincent Come On Down." These 'ballads' are so tense and moody, the loud songs become a reprieve. A quite idiosyncratic move, but in the context of the album they execute it perfectly.

Some creative bands inevitably go even further and introduce genres that are nowhere near their main body of work. '90s post-hardcore group Unwound flirted with dub ("Sensible"), sludge metal ("Feeling$ Real"), and here in "Look a Ghost," they inexplicably go goth.

That's five great examples, but countless more will reveal themselves if you explore the limitless bounds of 20th-century punk. Can you find punk with classical interludes? Jazz? How about… hip-hop?

Doja Cat, specifically.

My Quest for Six Degrees of Separation from Doja Cat

I recently saw a post that showed that the rapper Doja Cat, who recently appeared on the Barbie movie soundtrack, was raised in spiritual jazz legend Alice Coltrane's ashram. In fact, there's a photo of the two together:

https://twitter.com/dublabfrosty/status/1521620548538699776

I thought this was complete bullshit, but there's a link in the comments there to a Billboard article where she explains it in passing. 

This opened up a very interesting line of thought in my mind.

You see, my dad worked with the director George Ferencz in the 90s, and told me Ferencz had worked with the jazz musician Max Roach on a production of Sam Shepard's play "Suicide in B Flat."

This opened up the potential for a game of ‘six degrees of separation’:

Dad - Ferencz - Max Roach - ??? - Alice Coltrane - Doja Cat

At first I thought the space there could be filled by Alice Coltrane's better-known husband John, who worked with plenty of musicians. But there's no evidence him and Roach ever even met each other, let alone connected enough for me to consider them one link in the chain.

If I had one more space somewhere, there are tons of jazz musicians who worked with both Roach and John Coltrane - Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Coleman Hawkins - but I wanted to keep it down to six degrees, not seven.

I had to find someone who had played with (or at least knew) both Max Roach and Alice Coltrane. Seemingly not so hard- after all, in their era of jazz, everyone played on each other's albums- but it was shockingly almost impossible.

Joe Henderson and Ron Carter were my first ideas- both widely recorded and relatively conventional, playing a ton with Coltrane, but they never played with Roach. Same with the more avant-garde Cecil McBee and Pharoah Sanders.

Max Roach - despite having been around since the 1940s and working with just about everybody there was to work with, from conservative pre-bebop stalwarts like Sonny Greer to the most extreme free jazz artists like Anthony Braxton - as far as I could tell, never recorded an album or played a show with a musician who also recorded with Coltrane. He headed an avant-garde drumming group, M'Boom, but none of its members ever worked with her. (In fact, I misremembered her long-time drummer Rashied Ali as being in the group and started writing this piece assuming I had all the connections down.) No musician could work…

Not a musician, that is, because I found the missing link in a bizarre location. The one person who did work with both of them was the obscure Orville O'Brien, a recording engineer for Impulse Records. He sound-engineered both Coltrane's legendary Journey in Satchidananda and the obscure M'Boom album Re:Percussion.

https://www.discogs.com/artist/266798-Orville-OBrien

(Who is this Orville O'Brien? There's an obituary posted online for someone with that name, but it says he was a Canadian farmer, so I don't think that was the right guy, unless he had a studio up in distant rural Saskatchewan. No matter- he existed.)

That's that taken care of: Dad - Ferencz - Max Roach - Orville O'Brien - Alice Coltrane - Doja Cat, via the power of ‘70s jazz and sound engineering.

How far can I take this? Well - Dad also hung out with playwright Sam Shepard himself.

→ Shepard famously had an affair with Joni Mitchell in the 70s.
→ Mitchell featured on Janet Jackson's hip-hop interpolation of her classic "Big Yellow Taxi," "Got 'Til It's Gone."
→ Janet Jackson was the sister of Michael Jackson, who needs no introduction.
→ Michael Jackson gets me anywhere, and I mean anywhere, even with only one degree left. Donald Trump? Paul McCartney? Biggie Smalls? You name it. 

No, I can go even further. How about classical? My sister, a cellist in the New York Youth Symphony, played a concert (https://www.nyys.org/events/the-60th-anniversary-celebration-concert/) with the violinist Agustin Hadelich this fall. Hadelich has played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, meaning he must have met its conductor, Gustavo Dudamel. Dudamel played for Pope Benedict XVI in 2007, and Benedict obviously communicated with his successor Pope Francis I. That's only five degrees, so, you know, I got a man in the Vatican like that.

Please enjoy this horrible choral rock(?) album released under Francis' name in 2013.

Next episode: a sci-fi short story and a series of increasingly ominous interviews.