Casio Bell Bottoms
Anyone who even remotely listens to rock, pop, hip hop or, hell, even country, has probably picked up on the influence that the 1980's is having on today's music. I'm thinking in particular of the resurrection of the lo-fi keyboards that were Cabbage Patch popular in the early to mid '80's. It seems that musicians nowadays are using this box of circuits not to add a dose of irony into their music (that's been done already by those such as
Beck and
The Beta Band), but to add warmth and simplicity of texture. Case in point: the Neo-Folk Movement. Now I usually hesitate to apply labels to music (I leave that to
Rolling Stone and
NME), but this one seems to hold up. Lead (in America, at least) by artists such as
Devendra Banhart and
Little Wings, neo-folk has taken on the DIY aesthetic of punk rock and applied to, well, the simplicity of acoustic guitars.
But there seems to be an increasing trend toward
synthetic simplicity as well and the only irony employed here is what we bring to it. It strikes me that there's something much more honest offered in the blips and beeps of an '80's K-Mart keyboard than there is most studio gimmickery. Reactionary, yes, but effective all the same. I remember being rather amazed by my first Casio keyboard which, along with 3 different guitar tones, had a human voice setting that I thought was incredible. I threw some batteries in it a couple of years ago and realized that it sounded more like a cross between a dying frog and
Garrison Keillor (no offense, Garrison). But enough about my issues. This track jumped out at me today. Check it out for yourself:
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Posted by marcusrp at October 21, 2004 11:37 AM
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