I’ll keep this introduction brief: This is the Hit List, a new column offering commentary on art and culture in and about South Florida. Born from the Monday Hit List, a newsletter I’ve been writing for much of the past year that shares the week’s best stories from SouthFlorida.com, this column will offer my personal take on the local arts scene. I won’t be advancing events, but instead reflecting on them. The Hit List may include an album review (as this one does), thoughts on an art exhibition (oh, they’ll be deep, I assure you), a restaurant recommendation (or warning), poetry (not mine — I’m not cruel) or even a defense of our beautifully ordinary, not-at-all-insane state (see below).
The column won’t have a theme, at least not intentionally. This first one, however, ends with a couple of goodbyes to people who left tremendous marks on music locally and abroad. Let’s get to it.
IT AIN’T OVER TILL THE FAT LADY SCREAMS
“Soundtrack to the Rat Opera” by the Rat Opera
Rat is Frank Falestra, the Miami Beach-based musician, producer and founder of the International Noise Conference, held annually at Churchill’s Pub in Little Haiti. In the ’90s, Spin magazine named one of Falestra’s intentionally terrible groups, Scraping Teeth, the worst band in America. He is a retired airline worker. He calls his music “squelching.” He worships the Ohio songwriter Robert Pollard. He hates hippies.
Do you need to know any of this going into “Soundtrack to the Rat Opera,” a studio recording of songs from a concert musical created by South Florida rock veterans Rob Elba and Brian Franklin? Not really. Elba and Franklin are sharp enough songwriters not to let their lionizing of Falestra — or at least of the character they’ve based on him — interfere much with their story of an odd boy who grows up to be an adversarial man for whom playing music is a blood sport and who holds other artists to standards only he understands. “You must look for fights,” Rat advises a musician on “All Your Tone Is Wrong.” “You’ll sell a lot of soda,” he mocks another on “You’ll Write Good Commercials,” delivering the kind of insult that would sting if it weren’t funny.
The character can make for tough company over the course of this 17-song album (it was released on Dec. 1), but other voices offer a welcome take on Rat and his noisemaking. “I’ve got scars that bleed affection/He swears that’s not his thing,” an exhausted, unnamed lover complains on “He’s My Nothing.” Torn between resignation and escape, she’s voiced by the remarkable Diane Ward, who also plays Rat’s mother. On “A Boy Called Rat,” Mrs. Falestra worries about her peculiar, sound-obsessed son: “What kind of songs play in his head?/What are those tapes under his bed?/Is he a Mozart for today?/Who can say?”
That’s a bit much, but this “love story of sorts to both a music scene and the people involved in it,” as the opera’s creators describe it, stops well short of hagiography. Elba and Franklin are more interested in understanding their character than making excuses for him, and the music — raging and impatient, but never out of breath — reaches beyond their story and their scene.
Listen: TheRatOpera.Bandcamp.com
Read: “A night at the Rat Opera”
ARTS AND LETTERS
University of Miami English professor Tim Watson responds to Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Siege of Miami,” an investigation into the threat sea-level rise poses to South Florida, on the letters page of the Jan. 18 New Yorker.
“[I]t was disheartening to read that Bruce Mowry, Miami Beach’s city engineer, said, ‘If we had poets, they’d be writing about the swallowing of Miami Beach by the sea.’ In fact, there are many writers and poets in South Florida; they are the engineers of imagination. One of them, Cherry Pickman, writes, in ‘How To Greet the Spring,’ a new work, ‘The sun was out/the flood came anyway the sea rose/to take the city plinth by plinth amarant bled red/into twitching schools of silver/buttonwoods to think.'”
Pickman, featured in Jai-Alai Books’ recently published “Eight Miami Poets,” writes vividly about other seasons, too. In “All Winter,” a poem from her 2012 chapbook “Theory of Tides,” the narrator needs to be talked through the cold, as she and another person walk near a harbor where “mornings are straw-colored and arable to wonder” and “the wind drags bodies of water to shallower places.”
We’re all going under, Pickman and Kolbert agree. How and why we can figure out. It’s not knowing when that really chills us.
Listen: “High Water (for Charley Patton)” by Bob Dylan
Read: “The Siege of Miami,” “Theory of Tides”
THE MAN WHO FELL TO FORT LAUDERDALE
“No mere Earthling: David Bowie shows he continues to grow and adapt — and can rock,” by Sean Piccoli in the Sun Sentinel, Oct. 8, 1997
Piccoli, a former Sun Sentinel music critic, reviewed the first of two concerts Bowie performed Oct. 7-8, 1997 at the Chili Pepper nightclub (now Revolution Live) in Fort Lauderdale:
“Bowie walked onstage alone at 9:15 p.m., in a simple white shirt and slacks and holding an acoustic guitar. He opened the two-hour, 23-song set with ‘Quicksand,’ an unplugged ode to end-of-empire malaise in his native England that could just as easily have been a song for today’s America. In his trembling dramatist’s baritone, he offered himself as ‘proof of Churchill’s lies,’ while lamenting, ‘I ain’t got the power anymore.’
“The band slowly filed in behind him, and it took the song to a grand, sorrowful close.
“Bowie, looking eternally young in a vampirish sort of way, followed up with two more back-of-the-rack gems, ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’ and ‘Waiting for the Man.’ Next came ‘The Jean Genie,’ done up like Muddy Waters’ blues-stomping ‘Mannish Boy,’ before it segued into his more familiar jump and jive.”
Bowie played 23 songs that night, and 36 the next. I’d settle for having heard just one of them.
Listen: “Quicksand”
Read: “No mere Earthling”
FLORIDA, MAN
“Floridada” by Animal Collective
Some jokes are funny no matter how many times you hear them. This isn’t one of them.
Listen: “Floridada”
Read: “The story behind ‘Floridada'”
CLARENCE REID, 1939-2016
As the pioneering rapper Blowfly, Clarence Reid was as nasty as he wanted to be, which was plenty. Donning a superhero’s cape and mask, Blowfly toured the world performing filthy parodies of R&B and pop songs with titles I’d reprint here if I didn’t have a mortgage to pay. “My Baby Keeps Farting in My Face” is about as gentle as Blowfly got. The music Reid wrote and performed under his own name is another matter. Reid, who died Jan. 17 at 76 in Miami, could be downright romantic on the singles and albums he released in the late 1960s and early ’70s. “Winter Man,” from 1974, finds Reid looking out a window, the woman who “keeps me warm with her sweet love” by his side, addressing Old Man Winter and feeling “sorry for the people you catch alone with no love to call their own.” It’s not John Keats, but it’s not “Porno Freak,” either.
Listen: “Winter Man”
Read: “Clarence ‘Blowfly’ Reid, R&B songwriter behind early ‘Miami Sound,’ dies at 76”
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