WOEBOT

Considered Reactions to Peter Shapiro's Fela Kuti piece in The Wire.

Peter Shapiro is The Wire's secret weapon. He must have written more music journalism than any of the hallowed auteurs who occasionally contribute stuff to that mag. He's a hard-worker. However his best asset is his completely unimpeachable taste. Sure I want to read elegantly-written stuff, a nice turn of phrase, little poetic envisionings but in preference give me a nice hot tip. I'd rather a music journalist was fashioning a distinctive sound which he adhered to than a distinctive writing style. Shapiro's also written a nice wee book on Jungle, a very good spotters "Rough Guide" which performs the amazing trick of hardly doubling up any of Reynolds lightning swords of death from Energy Flash. He also did a CD compilation of the Hip-Hop/Jungle continuum on Virgin, which I'm now wishing I picked up. Prolific dude!

Listen to Shapiro from a review of the recent Ze records reissues: "Ze may have been style rag fodder both then and now, but that's only because its vision of the world was/is so seductive: that mythical place where style collides with substance, deconstruction makes a rapprochement with melody and hooks, and groove is embraced by distortion." I have tremendous sympathy with that. Certainly that's the crucial element I have found diminishing in The Wire, and it's heartening to know it's still on the agenda. Doubly important now that Muzik, which was beginning to look EXCELLENT, has gone down the tubes :-(

A perfect example of how sharp Shapiro can be came in his ginormous Fela Kuti Primer in this month's The Wire. Actually for him it was a bit rote and featured a few "Hey Daddy-O" slangings, deeply uncharacteristic in one so economic: "...if that guitar riff isn't based 100 per cent on James Brown, I'll eat the roaches from 100 of Fela's joints." From me that's a bit rich, but you EXPECT personality-obsessed guff here! I've yet to sink to Fat-Freddy-isms. Me, me, me, Ah that's better.... Back to the article, he settled on Roforofo Fight as one of the Fela Records to really check, and I slapped my forehead, (talking to myself) "You goon! THAT'S the best Fela Kuti LP." If you return to that Sunny Ade piece on June 29th I'm going on about "Open and Close" as the apogee. Typical bad research (I own both natch) because Roforofo Fight is amazing for just the same reasons, it's incredibly focused, AND it's horn charts are sorted AND there's a political agenda. It's a 15 minute wave, while so often Fela's stuff is a muddy puddle. Go seek!

Posted by Woebot at July 29, 2003 06:09 PM