The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
the b-side
Thursday, December 10, 2015 — 3B
COURTESY OF DOUG COOMBE
LEFT TO RIGHT: Brad Hales, Robert Wells and Breck Bunce spin classic soul records at the Blind Pig.
Monthly event has
devoted underground
following
By RACHEL KERR
Daily Arts Writer
Don’t come yet, a message on
my phone reads at 10:04 p.m. I’m
sitting in an Uber outside of the
Blind Pig. It’s empty, the next
message says.
“Shit.”
My friend and I shimmy out of
the Uber. We’re supposed to be
meeting another friend, whom
the messages are from, inside the
venue for something called the
“Ann Arbor Soul Club.”
“It’s an event we started
coming up on nine years ago.
There was a University grad
student named Robert Wells, and
he suggested the idea of doing a
night out here,” said Brad Hales,
owner of Peoples Records in
Detroit and co-founder of the
event that occurs on the first
Friday of every month. “Basically,
it’s like a European style night,
where DJs seek out these obscure
records that were never played
on the radio. They weren’t
commercially
successful,
and
they’re really hard to find. (We
don’t play) the soul music that
Americans grew up on the radio
with.”
It’s 10:37 now. We’re eating
ice cream. We’re staring at our
phones. We’re trying to kill
time. We’re deciding when we
should go.
“From 9:30, when we begin,
until about 11, when people tend
to arrive en masse, we can play
ballads and earlier ’60s R&B
stuff to set the mood and kind of
get things started,” Hales said.
Seems we’re right on time then.
As we shuffle into the venue
at 10:45, with the masses Hales
described,
I’m
aggressively
reminded of my underaged-ness
when they mark me those fateful
Ms (for minor!). But I continue on,
unaffected. The Bling Pig, if you
haven’t been, is intimate; the space
holds only a bar, a couple circle
tables, a dance floor and a small
stage. On that stage, the DJs are
busy spinning, only a few beers and
a collection of 45s with them.
“(We have guest DJs) nearly
every other month or third month.
Soul music DJs and fans from
around the globe often travel here,
and the night can be a fun stop for
them. We’ve had friends visit and
spin from mostly the UK, but also
Germany and Switzerland, as well
as many from all over the States,”
Hales said.
Tonight, it’s Nick Soule from
the Windy City Soul Club in
Chicago, playing with resident
DJ Breck T. Bunce. Hales usually
DJs, too, but couldn’t because of
a persistent illness. Around the
bar stand a few 40-somethings,
but the dance floor is almost
exclusively full of college-aged
students.
“When we started, the night
definitely got more townies and
people that I had known from
living there in the mid-’90s. Now
none of them show up. It’s all
younger students,” Hales said.
“You can tell they’re there for
the first time if they’re saying,
‘Hey, I don’t know if you take
requests, but are you going to
play Al Green?’ ”
These students seem to know
exactly
what
they’re
doing,
though, swinging and jiving and
grooving (and any other dated
dance term I can use here) to
the song playing. But, I have no
idea how to dance to soul music.
Our generation has been trained
to just, like, bump and grind on
things. Introduce rhythm into
the equation and it gets tricky.
So my friends and I stand off to
the side at first, observing that,
contrary to Hales’ observation,
there are in fact some “townies”
sprinkled among the students:
the group of lumberjack-looking
men drinking IPAs, the old
woman
wearing
sunglasses
inside, the singular 70 year old
drinking whiskey.
When we finally make our way
onto the dance floor, the moves
begin to ooze out of us. Limbs
brush against one another, hairs
fall out of place, sweat drips
from foreheads. But we don’t
care because the music is fun.
Not until I hear “Get Ready” by
The Temptations, recognizable
only because Fergie has sampled
it, do I realize this music is also
incredibly significant: It helped
create most of today’s sounds.
“I grew up hearing rap music
and wondering what it was made
from, those little samples they
got, where those original sounds
were from. Growing up hearing
that kind of thing led me down a
path to older music,” Hales said.
And he didn’t have to look
much further than the greater
Metro Detroit area, birthplace of
Berry Gordy’s Motown Records.
Arguably the most significant
movement in soul music, Detroit
soul introduced the world to
the infectious tunes of The
Supremes, the melodic styling
of The Temptations, the sensual
vocals of Marvin Gaye and the
all-around revolutionary music-
making of Stevie Wonder. When
Motown Records moved to Los
Angeles in 1973, Detroit’s soul
seemed to leave with it. The Ann
Arbor Soul Club just wants to
help us find it again.
“Our state served as a cultural
organ donor for the rest of the
world,”
Hales
said.
“People
here threw it away, and people
elsewhere embraced it and kind
of saved it from the trash bin of
time. So I think it’s extremely
important that we do represent
our area and give that kind of
night a presence. You should
hear it here. It’s from here.
People should definitely learn
about it.”
We leave the Bling Pig at
12:30 a.m., sweating and smiling,
aware that something great just
happened though not sure quite
what. Students continue filing
into the venue, bringing with
them both the soul and spirit
that both the music and the city
need for revival.
Check out Peoples Record’s
website for more soul sounds:
http://peoplesdetroit.com/. Hales
also suggests you watch the movie
“Northern Soul,” now available on
Netflix, to give the Ann Arbor Soul
Club some context.
Soul club unites
fans at Blind Pig
TRAILER REVIEW
Paramount’s
“The
Big
Short” trailer is reminiscent of
the “The Wolf of Wall Street”
trailer in that it’s deceptively
glamorous —
casually cut-
ting to images
of semi-nude
strippers
and
$20
bills floating
everywhere.
The people in
these trailers
really
need
to invest in
rubber bands. This is a movie
about the economy collapsing,
right?
This is probably the whit-
est movie trailer of all time.
It cuts to the core of the basic
khaki-wearing, Ruby Tues-
day-going
Caucasian
male
fantasy of wearing nice suits,
playing golf and spending time
with tall, skinny blonde girls.
It’s not that I dislike movies
with lots of slick white guys
in them on principle (though
I really hated the woefully
insincere “Black Mass”), this
just seems like a pretty egre-
gious pleasure-show aimed at
a painfully specific audience.
The “clock ticking” motif of
the trailer’s music is a bit on-
the-nose thematically, but it
provides an alright structure
in which to present the film’s
aesthetic. I can’t say I’m not
excited to see this movie —
though its cast is pretty hor-
rendously milquetoast, you
can’t deny their talent.
- JACOB RICH
PARAMOUNT
By KARL WILLIAMS
Online Arts Editor
“Prodigal: New and Selected
Poems, 1976 to 2014” collects
the best work from English
Prof. Linda Gregerson’s long
and successful career in poetry.
The book collects poems from
nearly 40 years of published
work, which has appeared in
magazines such as The New
Yorker and Poetry and in
books, including her National
Book Award Finalist “Magnetic
North.”
However, Gregerson, who
is also director of the Helen
Zell Writers Program, didn’t
begin her career as a poet.
Instead, after graduating from
Oberlin College, she lacked a
thorough sense of purpose and
wasn’t sure what to do. A love
for learning sent her into a
PhD program at Northwestern
University where she studied
Shakespeare, but after a bit of
scholarly work, she decided
to pursue theater. Working
in theater, coincidentally, led
her to write poetry between
periods of production.
“During
those
between
times, I was writing to really
keep myself going, and decided
I really needed some proper
training because I’d never taken
a creative writing course in my
life, ever,” Gregerson said. “So,
I’d had the good fortune to
publish some poems. When I
applied, miraculously I got into
the top programs I applied to
and decided to go to Iowa. But
I always had it in my head to go
back and do the PhD.”
After her time at the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop, where she
worked with notable poets
such as Louise Glück, Donald
Justice and Bill Matthews,
she
considered
returning
to
Northwestern.
But
the
academic
environment
had
changed from when she was
there, so she followed other
paths, ending up at Stanford
University.
During her initial PhD work
at Stanford, she thought she
would focus on 20th century
American lyric poetry, such as
the work of Wallace Stevens
and John Ashbery. But the
theater lured her back. She
changed
her
dissertation
work to Renaissance drama.
However — once again — a sea
change: the Renaissance epic
drew her in.
While
Gregerson
has
studied the master poets —
Shakespeare,
Milton,
Eliot,
etc. — and learned much from
them, her work reading poem
submissions at The Atlantic
during the 1980s was crucial
in her development. Poetic
missteps provided as much
insight
as
the
triumphs.
Although
the
monthly
magazine only published about
two poems a month, Gregerson
read all submissions — she
estimates that she read nearly
60,000 poems a year.
Gregerson’s career as a poet
took off when she discovered/
invented her own stanzaic
form, which all of the poems
in her collections “The Woman
Who Died in Her Sleep” and
“Waterborne”
follow.
With
variations, the form is a tercet
with five, two and four metrical
feet.
“It was really crucial. I began
writing this sort of default
form when I was in my MFA
program. Virtually everyone
was writing stanzas that were
flush left. That’s just what
poems looked like. And so they
were stanzas I think of as block
stanzas,” Gregerson said. “I
needed something more jagged
that had some asymmetry in
it, some spin that had more
resistance to syntax building,
and more syncopation. I played
around a lot, and I finally
evolved that tercet, which it had
the lines differ both because
they’re
differently
indented
and because they’re different
lengths. It was a godsend. It
gave me patterns of resistance.
It gave me momentum. It gave
me syncopation.”
Gregerson’s poetry displays
a magnificent sense of detail
and an ability to navigate
between scales. In the title
poem, “Prodigal,” Gregerson
shifts between the local and
the cosmic. The body of a
young
girl,
with
bountiful
copper hair, is both the flesh
of the individual and a text
for human life. The girl cuts
herself, and the lacerations on
her skin are a “many-layered
hieroglyphic / raw, half healed,
reopened.” These inscriptions
are a metaphor for the ways in
which human life constantly
transfigures — and pollutes
— the natural world. Here,
the personal is the ecological,
too, and Gregerson shows her
adroit ability to negotiate and
examine the particular and the
general at the same time.
Her poetry, too, revels in the
minute profundity of existence
and exhibits a wonder for the
natural world.
“I continue to be amazed by
embodiment,” she said. “I’m
amazed by living in a body. The
brilliance of the biosphere — I
can’t get over it. I am stunned
at
the
intelligence
quite
separate from us. The part we
do on purpose seems so trivial
to what is done on our behalf by
everything.”
“The Bad Physician,” from
her collection “The Woman
Who
Died
in
Her
Sleep,”
examines the genius of the
body and the cellular processes
that both maintain and destroy
human life. Gregerson writes,
“even in error the body / wields
cunning.” But the machinations
of biology are indifferent to
human life. They don’t care
if we live or die. It is this
tension, between the horror
and beauty of the life process,
that motivates the poem to its
brilliant conclusion:
“The beautiful cells dividing
have
no mind
for us, but look
what a ravishing mind
they make
and what a heart we’ve
nursed
in its shade, who love
that most
which leaves us most
behind.”
Gregerson said that there are
only two themes — love and death.
They’re themes that her poems
confront with fear and wonder.
Many have confronted these
themes before and many will do so
in the future, but few have done so
as well as Linda Gregerson.
ARTIST
PROFILE
IN
B-
The Big
Short
Paramount
December 11
COURTESY OF LINDA GREGERSON
English Prof. Linda Gregerson’s “Prodigal: New and Selected Poems” is available now.
Her poems
confront life and
death with fear
and wonder.
SINGLE REVIEW
Layers upon layers of tex-
tured, dripping sound culmi-
nate in a funky yet daunting net
to create Detroit-based Omar
S’s newest sin-
gle, “The Lost
Albatross.” The
missing
alba-
tross mentioned
in the title could
refer to many
aspects of the
track — mainly
its impossible-
to-pin-down
melodic progression. Just when
you think you have figured out
the
different,
synth-soaked
elements and how they work
together, Omar S switches up the
composition, throwing listeners
through a continual loop.
The beats and melodies build
continually upon each other,
easing in and out of the fore-
front to allow one or the other to
shine. The melody moves from
non-existent to a whisper in the
background to the most promi-
nent aspect of the piece only
to once again be swallowed by
some scratchy synth beats. The
piece is both modern and retro,
playing on the synth style of the
’80s while questioning its own
place in current music. Despite
its
constant
compositional
change, “The Lost Albatross”
consistently submerges listeners
in waves of complex, grooving
sound.
-CARLY SNIDER
FXHE
A
The Lost
Albatross
Omar S
FXHE