
(Abkco)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
There was an abhorrent article by David Gates in Newsweek in 2008 called "It's a White Thing" arguing that white attraction to the music (jazz, blues, rock & roll, and on down the list) made by American blacks is a detached and even self-congratulatory exotic fascination, a symptom of our Western color schism that can never be bridged. The thesis is that the young Caucasian college student who listens to Charlie Parker or Skip James is really doing so out of a combination of trad racial guilt and an impersonal infatuation with a dangerous Other and sense of gritty "authenticity" (Gates' word), a modern-day manifestation of the privileged lady checking out slaves in Stanley Kubrick's
Spartacus who wants to see "the big black one" fight to the death. The logical conclusion of writer Gates' ideas: white music is for white people, black music is for black.
Thank heavens he's wrong or we unfortunates of Euro descent would have little beyond a lot of bilge to listen to, which isn't to say white people haven't made some dandy music, but outside of classical (which frankly is beyond my depth of non-aesthetic understanding anyway), how many white musical
pioneers have we really had? If you excuse Brian Eno, they can't claim to have invented any major genre we listen to in America today. I wouldn't claim to know why this is the case but I don't see how anyone can credibly dispute it. But Gates' thinking has plenty of precedent. Up until not that long ago, Billboard monitored a "Black Music" chart week after week, and it was not unusual to enter a store and see a "Black" section marked off.
It's out of my league to argue about whether racial background factored into the actual creation of art by Miles Davis or Muddy Waters or Stevie Wonder or even Michael Jackson and Berry Gordy. I'm quite sure it did, because you cannot live in the United States without realizing that blackness, rightfully or not, has an inherent and external meaning instantly. It is well in my league, however, to tell you that beyond the entirely understandable pride and inspiration an artist may hold for their heritage, it would make little difference to me if Chuck Berry were white or John Lennon were black. It may, sadly, make a difference in their audience shares, and in a more meaningful sense it may affect the creation and cultural appreciation / appropriation of their art. But I find it obscene to suggest that my enjoyment of the music made by people of a different skintone means more or less to me for some artificial reason, be it guilt or a desire for earthiness -- itself, I would argue, a racist concept, and an absurd one, as we all ultimately originated in the same place.
That idea of universality -- the feeling of music coming from your bones, moving you down to the barest instinct -- applies very fittingly to the Animals' music. Led by the consistent goofball Eric Burdon, his later sins still far ahead, they are not generally labeled as being of a piece with the British Invasion. I would say they matter more today than the Who. To even hear a snippet of the songs on this disc today is to be knocked out, led irresistibly to dance with the world. If the British Invasion -- itself a hugely appealing (across any racial barrier) souffle and distillation of everything revealed by rock & roll in the preceding decade -- were a giant cupcake (bear with me) and the Beatles represented the frosty, flawless icing (sweet but not too sweet, the latter task left to Herman's Hermits and the Dave Clark Five), the Kinks the cream filling, the Rolling Stones the thick marble cake, and the Who (in my analogy) the wrapper, the Animals were the crusty, slightly burnt bottom of the dessert. Anyone who argues the Stones represented the dirty rock & roll of the movement is delusional. I love the Stones, but virtually anything on this compilation outmatches them for grit. And these are just the singles. There are some pop concoctions here: you will know "It's My Life," which is pure British Invasion (and brilliant), as well as "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" and "We Gotta Get Out of This Place," both of which are unmistakably undercut with the shade of dirty groove.
To go back to race for a moment, the chief reason my bringing up Gates' article is to excuse something I don't really want to say but feel I must. I think of all of the B.I. bands, the Beatles were in spirit and flavor closest to the rock & roll luminaries -- probably around three fourths of whom were black -- that led the way for them, partially because the Beatles had been playing together the longest and absorbed more of the styles and trends of the '50s than any of their peers. But in terms of raw, uninhibited rock & roll, rhythm & blues sound, the Animals had the knack above anybody else. When Little Richard saw the Beatles for the first time in 1962, he told a Liverpool reporter he was amazed they were white British guys, calling their music "authentic negro." If Richard Penniman and the world at large indeed feel safe using such a descriptor as shorthand for rock & roll (as it once existed and no longer specifically does), so be it; my only protest is that Buddy Holly, too, was pure rock & roll, and probably no one was whiter. These Animals songs are some of the raunchiest rock & roll ever recorded, so steaming they verge on entire other worlds, blues especially.
It is easy enough, of course, to argue that whereas the Beatles were nonchalant about their color and what it meant about them, the Animals embraced it, striving obviously -- as many bands do today -- to sound as much as possible like they were recording music twenty years earlier, and that they as the artists were different people entirely. This meant something altogether different then. It is hard to imagine now a time when country, R&B, rock & roll, and pop were constantly meshing and melding in the most casual of settings. Genres were not the hard line then. Elvis was played on every station. When you hear these songs today, it's impossible to overstate how little anything about them matters except their base, undeniable appeal. Regardless of the authenticity and earthiness of the men recording them, the songs themselves are as authentic and earthy as anything can be. I suppose a case could be made that there is condescension of a kind in Burdon's attempts to mimic his black idols' vocal styles exactly, but there is probably no more pronounced illustration of the fusion of white and black sensibilities in the '60s, of the birth that continues to this day of the oblique cultural reversal, in which artistically we worship our cultural assets while politically and socially we either condemn them or try to pretend they're not there.
I did not listen to the Animals growing up; mine was a Byrds and Simon & Garfunkel household (not mentioning the Beatles, as I assume they are part of nearly every household). I do, however, remember my mom practicing "House of the Rising Sun," a song as ancient and mysterious as some murder ballads, and being intoxicated by the sense of beautiful dread and fear in its chords and melody. It still moves me in a basic and inexplicable way suggestive of enormous power and tragedy. Burdon's voice almost doesn't seem worthy of it; he certainly is more than slightly out of his league on the song, which is ironic since it is the Animals' most popular and successful track, though maybe not because Burdon's modesty adds to the charm and, to repeat a phrase, grit. He more than any electrical current is what identifies it as a record of 1964 and not some ghostly paean lifted from a lost and found 78 from an attic somewhere. You sense history in the song, no matter who plays it, and maybe there's a manner in which it is inappropriate that most of us now know it because of the Animals. The Byrds comparison is needed here; some time before the American band popularized folk rock and decades before our po-mo infatuation with history as style, the Animals electrify and fetishize a Time Before. With this as their signature, like the Byrds, the Animals would forever exist and be known primarily as interpreters, rendering them nearly alone among post-Beatles rock bands.
But the instant the second song, the delirious and rollicking "I'm Cryin'," overtakes, there is no more doubt as to the Animals' intentions. There is an astonishing purity to the songs that follow. If we are able to stretch ourselves in 2008 to make this distinction, it is like a modern take on a greatest hits by some forgotten great rock & roller of the '50s rather than a few kids from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Adding to the ingratiating toughness and rawness is the production style, which -- despite the band's considerable proficiency -- lends them a garage band feel that other B.I. denizens completely lacked, so that they sit comfortably by the down-and-dirty American proto-punk acts of the time: again the seamless fusion of past and future. For the past, you may turn to the amped-up "Around and Around" (Chuck Berry) cover or to the base sexual urges of "Boom Boom"; for the future, "Gonna Send You Back to Walker" is miraculously effective at drawing a line from Robert Johnson to the Buzzcocks. And what's more, Sam Cooke's immortal "Bring It on Home to Me" brings out Burdon's unexpected sweetness, and "I'm in Love Again" -- a Fats Domino cover -- sounds uncannily like the Rolling Stones. And their take on "Story of Bo Diddley," which contemplates the reaction of elder statesmen to the Brit Invasion, suggests they had more of a sense of humor than their doom-and-gloom Vh1 "Behind the Music" profile suggested.
If there's anything more you need out of an album, I don't know what it could possibly be; these songs refute everything about Gates' thesis -- they are pure and good rock & roll, and there is nothing strained or inauthentic about it. I don't know much of anything about the Animals' discography except it's not very big; this sequence is so addictive it may be too good to taint by investigating more, but I know I will anyway because if there's a possibility that more of this exists, I want to hear it.
[This review was written in June 2008 but never posted. My feelings about Burdon's conflicted attitude toward his sources have grown somewhat more complicated since then, and I'm not fully onboard any longer with some of the thoughts about race and music above... but I'm leaving my thoughts as they were above, with just a few edits for clarity.]
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SEE ALSO:]
Animalism (1966)