Distant Relatives — Nas & Damian Marley Interviewed

interviews, music

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One of the most positive musical surprises this year for yours truly has been the recently released Distant Relatives, which sees reggae scion Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley and hip hop veteran Nas teaming up for an Afrocentric album on the theme of our common heritage.

Far from an assured success, the collaboration and the thematic focus the two have selected make for a remarkable consistent album, containing moments of vocal fire as well of spiritual oomph. The maturation Marley exhibited with last year’s remarkable Welcome to Jamrock continues on this record—his vocals are more varied and self-assured than ever—while Nas has not been this consistent on a whole album for many years.

Musically, the album could have been a little more adventurous, sounding perhaps a little too polished, but it is skillfully and melodically composed by Damian and his brother Stephen and carries the amazing vocal performances perfectly, with nary a weak track and only one or two instances of ill-advised sentimentalism.

I caught up with the two of them on their tour stop in Copenhagen the week before last, a few hours before a fantastic, sold-out show at Store Vega and got the chance to ask them some questions for Rapspot.dk. I was joined by my buddy, DubCNN’s PTA. Since we were in his hotel room, we started talking to Marley, but Nas showed up about half-way through.

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Matthias Wivel: How did the album come to be? What made you decide to work together?

Damian Marley: The album came to be because we were respecting and being fans of each other’s music. I invited Nas to be on the Welcome to Jamrock album, on a track called “Road to Zion”, and he had invited me to do some work with him on the Hip Hop Is Dead album—unfortunately, the song that we did together didn’t make it onto that album—so we always had an interest to do more work together. And then our management teams came up with the idea to do an EP of four songs based upon Africa. And when we started working on that EP, it became an album, so that’s how it happened.

Traces of Soul, Mind, and Body

commentary and criticism, pictorial arts

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In the second edition of his great collection of artists’ biographies, Le vite dei piu eccelenti pitturi, scultori ed architettori (1568), the Tuscan painter and architect Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) wrote the following about the significance of drawing:

“Seeing that Design, the parent of our three arts, Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, having its origin in the intellect, draws out from many single things a general judgement, it is like a form or idea of all the objects in nature, most marvellous in what it compasses, for not only in the bodies of men and of animals but also in plants, in buildings, in sculpture and in painting, design is cognizant of the proportion of the whole to the parts and of the parts to each other and to the whole. Seeing too that from this knowledge there arises a certain conception and judgement, so that there is formed in the mind that something, which afterwards, when expressed by the hands, is called design, we may conclude that design is not other than a visible expression and declaration of our inner conception and of that which others have imagined and given form to in their idea.”

The Italian word for drawing is disegno, a broader and more complex term than the more straightforward English ‘drawing’ and ‘design’. Disegno transcends these to encompass the very idea that emerges as drawing. As is apparent from Vasari, it is an epistemological term that unites spirit and matter.

‘Don’t Try’: The People’s Laundry

culture, current affairs, film, tv, video, hype & linkage, music, philosophy and theory

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The inimitable ‘Li Se’, in whose “extended network” I find myself, has finally opened the floodgates and is committing to writing the kind of intellectual effluvium that people in said network have come to appreciate in conversation over the years. Written on the principle, appropriated from Charles Bukowski, of ‘not trying’, it is blogging as laxative and the ongoing discharge is invariably original, inspiring and entertaining. Catch insights, amongst many other things, on contemporary China, the vagaries of contemporary theory, and eccentric music. Tune in before the trying starts.

Picks of the Week

comics and cartooning, current affairs, hype & linkage

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The picks of the week from around the web.

  • The Guardian: “The Unwanted”. Joe Sacco on African refugees in Malta in the first installment of a 48-page reportage that originally ran in the Virginia Quarterly Review.
  • Harvey Pekar. The death of the pioneering comics writer this week elicited some fine journalism around the web: Tom Spurgeon’s obituary, which features testimonies from a number of comics notabilities, is a great place to go if one wants an introduction to Pekar’s life and work; Gary Groth’s two excellent Comics Journal interviews, from 1984 and 1993, would be the next; Eric Reynolds’ personal reminiscence is an example of the writer’s important influence upon a generation of readers and cartoonists; and Vanessa Davis’ short comics tribute provides a touching note. UPDATE: David Hajdu provides a critical corrective.
  • Debate on R. Crumb’s Genesis: over at HU, Ng Suat Tong wrote an involved and thought-provoking critique of the great cartoonists recent, major book, which elicited a fine response by Ken Parille and a further post by Suat, as well as a lot of interesting discussion in the comments of the posts.

    • Who Is Harvey Pekar?

    comics and cartooning, commentary and criticism

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    The passing of pioneer comics writer Harvey Pekar yesterday made me go back and reread some of his earliest collaborations with R. Crumb, published in his self-published American Splendor #1-4 in 1976-79. The beginnings of a remarkable body of work, they are emblematic of Pekar’s originality and importance as a writer, and as good a place as any to probe his artistic sensibility.

    In “The Young Crumb Story” (1979), Pekar recounts his beginnings as a comics writer and states unequivocally his belief in the form’s potential:

    “The guys who do that animal comic an’ super-hero stuff for straight comics are really limited because they gotta try t’appeal to kids. Th’guys who do underground comics have really opened things up, but there are still plenty more things that can be done with ’em. They got great potential. You c’n do as much with comics as the novel or movies or plays or anything. Comics are words and pictures; you c’n do anything with words and pictures!”

    We almost take this for granted today, but in 1979 it was a crucial insight for the development of comics as an art form.

    Picks of the Week

    comics and cartooning, hype & linkage, pictorial arts

    museo-ideale-leonardo-cp-53.jpgThe picks of the week from around the web.

  • The New Yorker: “The Mark of a Masterpiece”. David Grann talks to and examines the colourful career of Peter Paul Biro, the art forensics man who has participated in the authentication of the pretty, so-called Leonardo drawing that surfaced out of nowhere last year. Pretty amazing reading, which cannot help but shake confidence in the attribution.
  • The Comics Detective: DC vs. Victor Fox. Ken Quattro unearths the fascinating documentation of Will Eisner’s testimony at the 1939 trial, in which Fox was being sued over plagiary of Superman. Besides being an interesting historical document, the text runs counter to Eisner’s later accounts of his testimony, most notably in his 1986 comic The Dreamer. Thanks, Hank!
  • Jim Woodring. This essay on the cartoonist’s great creation, Frank, is a fine one. And Suat’s walk-through via Hindu symbolism over at HU is a good read too.