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| notes from underground - societal whispers all the news that print will fit. |
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Wednesday, December 01, 2004 np: andrew octopus - who is john titor? i've known my friend andrew for just over a decade now. we met in our AG literature and language class our 8th grade year of middle school. my teacher set him next to me so that he'd have someone to talk to on his first day. (he'd just moved to concord from south carolina. his father is a wesleyan minister who has to pull up stakes every so often.) being who i was in 8th grade, i wasn't totally thrilled with andrew at first. that was my fault. of course, andrew wasn't quite what he would become yet either. but over the next 5 years in school together, we became really good friends. although it would be another couple of years before i would appreciate it, andrew was the first to expose me both to bob dylan (blasting highway 61 revisited, on cassette, in my '88 chevy suburban diesel) and old-school hip-hop (mostly grandmaster flash and the furious five). somewhere around my room stands a lovely poem he wrote to honor our days on the quiz bowl team that mentions our stock-answer for when we had no clue: joseph saddler - grandmaster flash's real name. for the last 5 years, thanks to college and various other pursuits, our friendship has been carried on from afar. we still live in the same state (he resides up in the mountains in canton, near asheville), so we see eachother from time to time. but our respect for eachother and eachother's creative pursuits has never dampened. thusly, i am always privy to new recordings of his work. the one i'm listening to now is his second full-fledged album with the andrew octopus moniker. it's also his second seemingly fixated on the idea of time travel. his first, time travel is possible, was a loose collection of songs. but who is john titor? actually is, dare i say it, a concept/story telling album. john titor was the name of a man who claimed to be a time traveler from the year 2035. he posted on the internet for a period of a few years and then vanished. the story is laid out through excerpts from art bell's coast to coast AM talk show sprinkled as interludes througout the album. andrew's music is, in essence, hip-hop, but at times rarely resembles it. spoken word flow, spare, unusual sounds and beats. this is not music you turn the bass up on. the beats are often jerky and dis-rhythmic. sometimes, so are andrew's words. but all of it is a celebration of the disorientation of life, the future, the past, the present. andrew resembles hip-hop's answer to william gibson. as if gary numan and grandmaster flash had a love-child of some sort. his music is like the god janus of roman mythology: looking simultaneously backward, forward and in the now for inspiration. for instance: Keep my ear to the streets/keep my mind on the future/like a little girl going to school in Falluja. religion, science fiction, underground hip-hop culture and amphetamines all get equal time in the midsts of telling a story that really draws you in. the geek in me absolutely loves this stuff. -- phillip larkin (1922-1985) was a poet on a bit of a mission. according to the second edition of the norton anthology of modern poetry, larkin said: The poetry I've enjoyed has been the kind of poetry you'd associate with me -- Hardy pre-eminently, Wilfred Owen, Auden, Christina Rossetti, William Barnes; on the whole, people to whom technique seems to matter less than content, people who accept the forms they have inherited but use them to express their own content... i gave a book of eliot's poetry to rachel a while back, and in leafing through it a bit (and in the past), i understand the qualms larkin had with eliot and pound's work. it is, as the norton writer puts it, a bit akin sometimes to taking "a tour of an ethnographic museum led by a sporadically demented guide." do poets have, as larkin suggests, a responsibility to be original in their own way and to eschew relying on the elements of our past culture and heritage? -- i bring this up as a way to look at andrew's work. songs like "anti-nicene scriptures" make biblical/christian history allusions that not every person is going to recognize. but at the same time, he places them within the context of mix-tape enthusiasts and professors cooking up crystal meth in old ladies' kitchens. his work straddles the line between knowing the past and seeing the future. like janus. like the best forward thinking musicians have always been. posted by J. Neas | 12/01/2004 02:46:00 PM
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