Citizen Cope

If you aren't familiar with Clarence Greenwood aka Citizen Cope or even if you are, i encourage you to take another listen to his music. His best album (in my opinion and by far) is the Clarence Greenwood Recordings.

What makes his music so good? To the musically inclined it sounds simplistic and remedial. To the not so musically inclined, it sounds simplistic and remedial. How does he make it work? The answer is simple. Sincerity. He believes in the music he's making and that translates into great music.

Now don't get me wrong. I think there are plenty of artists out there who are sincere in the music they write and play, but Citizen Cope is special. Why? Because he's able to hone in on the emotional content of his music like a laser and doesn't get distracted by the influences that exist when creating music. A lot of musicians have a tendency to veer off course when writing a song or performing music. It's hard to stay focused. You want to impress people with your grasp of music theory or your mastery of a musical instrument that you forget why you should be making music in the first place. Citizen Cope and others like him don't make this mistake.

I get a little irritated with people who think that music has to be complex to be good. Who made up that rule? It's not the complexity of the music that's important. It is the complexity of emotion being conveyed. Without an emotional connection, you're just making noise.

That being said, i encourage you to listen to Citizen Cope with different ears especially if you're someone who thinks that his music is too "simple" to be good. It doesn't have to be hard, my friends. It just has to be real, it has to be sincere and it has to have meaning. Citizen Cope's Clarence Greenwood Recordings meet all of those requirements.

This is the first in a series of posts i'm planning to do on the topic of music so stay tuned.

Below, you will find an entry from Citizen Cope's Bio page on his website. I think the writer captures a lot of my own personal feeling about Citizen Cope and for those unfamiliar may provide some insight as to why people love his music so much.

Thanks for reading, y'all and as the cliche goes, "keep it real."

oSLo

"Something is great about this one." The phrase buzzed around in my head, mixing with the endorphins that cracked and snapped about their different relays, telling me that I liked this music. This music is good. The beer in your hand is good.* You are loving this, aren't you? Aren't you?

Singer/Song Writer, Citizen Cope recently headlined in Towson's Recher Theatre, a large dimly lit room washed in blood red drapes. Two bars, bouncers at the door who think they're funny, an entrance covered in music posters: enough ambiance to make you dream of owning rooms filled with nothing but silk pillows and feathery boas. Brilliance -- all of it.

His music is simple to the point of being stripped down, as if bearing it all was the only way to get our attention. The Spartan band behind him was made up of a drummer, a bassist, two keyboardists, and Cope on guitar. A mix of hip-hop, folk, and blues his songs are mostly beats - mix bass drum, high hat, snare, clap track and repeat - buffed smooth by a haggard, road-weary voice. Uncommon chords for texture and keyboards for lift.

I was there in the middle of a crowd that hung on Mr. Cope's every word. You have probably been in a situation like this one before. If you have seen a favorite artist live, you know the procedure. Stand elbow to elbow with lovers in varied states of decay - high school to golden years - and you reach clumsily into your bag of lyrics, struggling to throw them out in time with everybody else. Nevertheless, you dance, sway back and forth and put your chin to your chest to feel that beat and buzz in your rib cage. Somebody screams, "You're melting my face!" Artist finishes up a song and you try to guess what's coming next. You are loving this, aren't you?

But even as I enjoyed myself like everyone else, the experience unsettled me. Cope is an intensely powerful lyricist. Without useless contemplation or pretension, you sense a plain type of grief laced in his words. A grief at once deeply personal, but one that managed to untether me from the scene, causing me to think about what I was listening to. His song topics range from a laundry list of tragedy in "Let the Drummer Kick That" to exploration of danger of American jingoism in "Bullet and a Target." One of my favorites, his song "Penitentiary" taps into fears for a culture growing more trapped by fear and war: "Well I'm waiting on a time when people walk free to see/From the penitentiary in our mind/When there's no need to bleed/For your father/Or your son."

One Rolling Stone critic called him "a modern day bluesman who paints a plaintive portrait of the human condition." Another, not-so-friendly critic from music and culture website, SoundtheSirens said: "I'm sure there's some soulful guy with a guitar who can write better songs sitting in some coffee shop somewhere who deserves the exposure more than he does." This may be warranted, I just happen to disagree.

As a balding-twenty-something tapped his toe to the beat of "Sideways" against my heal, I was reminded of a perplexing moment a few months prior. I had created a Citizen Cope "station" on an Internet radio website called Pandora. If you have not used Pandora before, its program takes an artist that you give it and plays the music of similar artists based on style and genre.Normally, Pandora is right on, accurate as anyone could hope for. But the artists that Pandora surrounded Cope with -- Damien Rice, Jack Johnson, Ryan Adams, Howie Day, Beck -- sound nothing like him, perhaps Beck being the closest. I won't say that no one sounds like Citizen Cope -- that cannot be justified. However, one has serious trouble placing him in any sort of context. This frustrates me, because I need musical landmarks, but at the same time I don't want them. All the qualifiers, folk, hip-hop, blues, singer/song writer, suddenly seem vapid -- a lame attempt to conjure context out of thin air.

Good artists can recreate the high people get from good music -- that electricity that makes the crowd sway. After all, that heightened sense, so amazingly replicable across cultures, is what makes music a universal human constant. But the excitement that surrounds great artists -- painters, musicians, writers, and doers alike -- is that you as if you are in the presence of someone who is saying what no else is able to or willing to say. I felt the unsettling electricity in Cope's performance -- the feeling that I could not do this, nor would I ever want to. Who could bear being the only one for long? There's something great about this one.

This line of thinking is flawed. I argue that Citizen Cope is great, but that just makes him great to me. To you he could be anything or nothing. But he got a reaction out of me, a departure from normalcy that left me buzzing afterwards, and it's hard to find words that aren't useless contemplation. Words that avoid shameless worship to someone who does not want to be worshipped. But I knew I was doomed to fail when I started this.

Written by: Joseph Johns
Published February 12, 2008 · The Loyola Grayhound

Happy Cinco!

I know it's been a while, folks. I've been busy out here in the "real world" trying to make moves. It's a poor excuse for ignoring you for so long so my apologies. This isn't even a real post which is the worst of it.

Here's a little history behind the holiday we celebrate alongside our Mexican friends. In light of the recent outbreak of so-called "swine flu," a welcome celebration of Mexican history is definitely in order. Here is the history of this joyous holiday we celebrate on the 5th of May each and every year (Thanks to Jennifer B. for passing along the info.):

Most people don't know that back in 1912, Hellmann's mayonnaise was manufactured in England. In fact, the Titanic was carrying 12,000 jars of the condiment scheduled for delivery in Vera Cruz, Mexico, which was to be the next port of call for the great ship after its stop in New York.


This would have been the largest single shipment of mayonnaise ever delivered to Mexico. But as we know, the great ship did not make it to New York. The ship hit an iceberg and sank, and the cargo was forever lost.


The people of Mexico, who were crazy about mayonnaise, and were eagerly awaiting its delivery, were disconsolate at the loss. Their anguish was so great, that they declared a National Day of Mourning, which they still observe to this day.


The National Day of Mourning occurs each year on May 5th and is known, of course, as Sinko de Mayo.

So now you know.

Happy holidays, folks!

oSLo