1994: Disco Inferno - D.I. Go Pop
Disco Inferno are the alpha and omega of post-rock incarnate. This may come as a surprise to those weaned on the vanilla palette of your average Explosions in the Sky album, but it’s an unavoidable conclusion. A clearer view is held in light of this kernel of the original definition, cemented by famed critic Simon Reynolds: “using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes.” Shockingly unknown in their time and unheralded in ours, the band deserves far more visibility than history has afforded. My aim is to resuscitate interest in what’s arguably the pinnacle (and inarguably a major touchstone) of modern experimental rock.
D.I. Go Pop is the band’s second LP, issued after a string of increasingly brilliant singles and EPs saw them scaling the humble roots of second string post-punk to the heights of ecstatic invention. Although the smugly ironic title begs otherwise, it’s not a straight reaction against pop forms. Instead of rebelling against or directly subverting pop tropes, this music worked to actively reconstruct the form itself, at least as it was then known. These 33 groundbreaking minutes are the result of a scenario I can only hope went something like this: Singer Ian Crause and company spend an acid-fueled weekend battering their way through a record shop, emerging into sobriety amidst a landscape of molten vinyl, teeming with magnetic tape and jagged CD shards. Realizing the futility of attempting to rebuild or replace the stacks of broken eras and genres, they attempt to assemble something completely alien: something so new and perverse that — instead of prison — they’re rewarded with recording contracts, ample studio time, and one of those gigantic checks given out after golf tournaments. They’d break the mold, change the world, reverse the narcotic slide into sludgy nu-metal and rehashed Britpop, and bask in the light of a devoted fanbase they so urgently deserve. Unfortunately, the music business isn’t known for its reinforcement of ingenuity or its forgiving nature in the face of non-existent sales.
Yet the work survives even if Disco Inferno did not. This batch of tunes was far ahead of its time in the use of sampling, presaging everything from the cut-and-paste electronica of Matmos to Animal Collective’s pop breakthrough Merriweather Post Pavilion. Fusing non-music samples like the staccato camera shutters and pinball sirens of “Starbound: All Burnt Out and Nowhere to Go” to a warped and brittle children’s choir, the band builds a rhythm floor over which the stream-of-consciousness lyrics and languid Durutti Column-esque guitar lines dance. This peculiar melange bubbles up all over the album, increasingly unhinged, until a tipping point where the coiled mystery is unwound and a stray missive like “nobody wants to die, nobody wants to die…” spills out and hangs in the air unadorned. More often than not, the sonic apparitions actually work in service of the observable nature of a given track. Opener “In Sharkey Water” floats in a basin slowly filling from a leaky faucet, an air raid siren in “A Whole Wide World Ahead” vacillates between dread and bravery, and majestic closer “Footprints In Snow” is urged along by… the soft crush of footsteps in snow.
Occasionally swerving into harsher realms of dissonance, cuts like “A Crash At Every Speed” feel at first like each element is at war with one another, a stew full of clashing opposites. Suddenly it congeals, opening up to breathe, and a song is born. To virgin ears, the whole of this album can come across as such. Repeated listens help one ease willingly into the new territory, though that’s hardly a negative point. Remember that when natives first saw the towering sails of Europe’s exploratory ships approaching the coast of America, they simply couldn’t comprehend that they were seeing not mountains over the ocean, but the massive vessels of a culture about to turn their world upside down. The crucial difference is that unlike the conquistadors, Disco Inferno simply wanted to shine on us the light of a fundamentally strange hue, a new context in which to enjoy pop music forms. This won’t decimate society and crush your religion. It will tweak your eardrums, and may just plant a knowing grin on your face.
1990: The Fatima Mansions - "Angel's Delight"
“Really? They couldn’t choose a better song than that? There are much better sociopolitically oriented 17-year-old hard rock songs that deserve to be pushed to the top of the charts! Half of them are probably by The Fatima Mansions!”
That — or something to similar effect — was what crossed my mind two months ago when I first heard about the candidates vying for the Christmas #1 single in the UK singles charts. People elsewhere in the world might have missed out on the news, but last November, a British couple started a Facebook group encouraging the British public to buy downloads of Rage Against the Machine’s repetitive and expletive-laden 1992 single “Killing in the Name” en masse in time to achieve the celebrated Christmas week #1. Riding on decidedly rockist resentment among a cross-section of the population revolted by the state of the charts, “Killing in the Name” would soon surpass its original #25 peak in 1992 and edge past The X-Factor winner Joe McElderry’s take on Miley Cyrus’s “The Climb,” outselling the latter by 50,000 votes on the week of December 20 and setting a record for the biggest download sales total for a single’s first week on the charts. The single vanished after three weeks (in its original 1992 chart run, it appeared for four) but managed to prevent another Simon Cowell-sanctioned production from maintaining its predictable annual Christmas monopoly on the top slot. (However, McElderry managed to bump up a notch a week later after the hoopla had ceased.)
Commentators have noted elsewhere the ironies in choosing a single like “Killing in the Name,” but if Facebook group administrators Jon and Tracy Morter ever decide that they are really serious about promoting a vituperative hard rock song to the top of the UK singles charts, particularly one that provides an extremely bitter counterpoint to the annual market flood of holiday schmaltz, The Fatima Mansions might be the worthiest candidate to serve such a purpose. Especially today, when the band’s oeuvre seems more scarily relevant than ever.
For some background, frontman Cathal Coughlan had already distinguished himself as a sardonic and sociopolitically-focused songwriter, a sort of Irish answer to Louis-Ferdinand Céline (sans the fascism) back in the 1980s with the deceptively gentle and ultra-melodic Microdisney. Coughlan penned songs about literal and self-imposed torture, kooks on single-minded patriotic crusades, ennui in the aftermath of nuclear holocaust, mindless veneration of wealth, demystification of the lives of pop stars, the public’s disregard for anyone afflicted by venereal diseases, and whatever else he felt like hollering and leveling insults at on any given day in his booming, snarling — and initially VERY Irish — brogue.
After forming The Fatima Mansions, the eloquent but direct incisiveness of his writing peaked as the band veered between synth-heavy pop and rock (“You’re a Rose,” “Only Losers Take the Bus”), softer numbers that hearkened back to his days with Microdisney (“Bertie’s Brochures”) or ones that seemed more reminiscent of John Cale (“The Door-to-Door Inspector”), covers that either paid tribute to Scott Walker, Sandy Denny, Leonard Cohen, and Richard and Linda Thompson or alternately sounded like vicious Public Enemy pastiches (namely the R.E.M.-sampling but completely rewritten “Shiny Happy People,” their version of The Velvet Underground’s “Lady Godiva’s Operation” and a take on “Everything I Do (I Do It for You)” that also hinted at Mark Stewart and The Wolfgang Press). There was also hard rock somewhat indebted to Ministry, The Young Gods, Swans, and Motörhead (“Go Home Bible Mike,” “Look What I Stole from Us, Darling,” “C^7/Breakfast With Bandog,” “Humiliate Me”). The range of their repertoire diminished as the hard rock aspect almost completely took over in a more streamlined fashion on the release of their fourth and final LP, 1994’s Lost in the Former West, but the effort featured Coughlan’s writing and vocals at their most compellingly hostile, covering about everything from disgruntled ex-spooks (“Brunceling’s Song”) to admonishing Pope John Paul II (something Coughlan never shied away from of doing, even when opening for U2 in Milan) on “Popemobile to Paraguay.”
However, let’s retreat back to 1990 and listen to “Angel’s Delight”, the schizophrenic opening track of their second album Viva Dead Ponies, which (in my valueless opinion) encapsulates the essence of the band, their contrasts and shifts in mood and musical styles — not to mention that it’s less publicized than the single of theirs I had considered writing about from that same year, the arguably superior “Blues for Ceauşescu.” Anyhow, keep in mind that this song came out two years before Body Count’s “Cop Killer.”
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Play by play: We start out with a few dreamy keyboard chords and some almost-staccato bell tones before a pulsing, metronomic bass and simple drum machine pattern chime in. Cathal Coughlan enters and intones in a soft and mildly disturbing voice about necklacing (a popular means of summary execution in South Africa: putting gasoline-filled tires around the chests of men and women and setting them on fire), seemingly revering the practice and presenting the notion as if it were a gift for his “angel’s delight.” Additional synthesizer flourishes contrast the lyrical paranoia that sets in: “A holiday in a box […] for the rich man’s militia photographing my block.” The narrator comes to a decision: “Kill a cop? Why the Hell not?” The keyboards dissipate with two hits of a snare drum and a massive guitar crunch ensues as Coughlan screams, “YEEEEEEEEAH!” and follows up with a succession of outbursts: “BURN, MOTHERFUCKER, BURN!/ I’ve got a word for you: DEAD!/ I’ve got a trampoline – your fucking head!” The music mellows out again and the keyboards return with an additional Madchester acid-house piano line as Coughlan suavely seethes, “You roll down my street in your gleaming new car/ I’ve got no secrets, cash or time left to give you/ But I’ve got something else for you, my friend […] Burn the bailiff/ Come on, spill it, don’t save it.” The guitars eviscerate the keyboards again as Coughlan switches back to hollering mode: “You can have what you ask, but not in cash! […] You can put it where your mouth used to be!/ You can put it where your dick used to be! […] BLACKLIST! BLACKLIST! BLACKLIST! BLACKLIST!” A scorching solo swirls around him as he poses the question, “What do you do when words collapse/ And all that’s left is broken glass?” before resigning, “I know, I know I’m trapped!” The guitars grind a few more times before they evaporate, the original keyboard chord sequence returns and Coughlan sighs in satisfaction, “Oh, yes.” The outcome? “I’ve got a holiday in a big old box for my friend/ The famous P.C. Plod.” (For the non-Brits among us, P.C. Plod is slang for a beat cop, originating from the name of a policeman on the children’s television program Noddy.) The song begins to fade out as Coughlan warns, “You lay a hand on me, I’m gonna kill you, cop!” and satirically concludes, “Hey! Let’s all kill some cops!/ Some bailiffs! Assholes!”
Admittedly, the song would probably have to be remixed a bit were it to be re-released successfully, considering that the production and the acid-house piano line sound like products of their time. Considering what they did when they remixed 1992’s “Something Bad” for inclusion on the North American edition of 1994’s Lost in the Former West — reducing the reverb and removing some of the keyboard washes — such a result might bear similarities to this live version from the 1995 live promotional album Western Union Steakout:
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A few noticeable differences: The bell tones sound more rhythmic than they do on the album version, Cathal Coughlan sounds more like Julian Cope during the verses (although Cope would never have gone as far as to declare war on the police, considering that he once used a sample of Lenny Bruce declaring, “We have to separate the authority from the people who have the authority vested in them!”), and he provides a few more full-throated yells and some additional proclamations, such as, “Burn the bailiff, the bail bondsman, any of those fucks!” None of this would probably be the best advice to take unless you reside in some hellhole narco-state being run into the ground by a despot or a junta like Guinea or Guinea-Bissau or Equatorial Guinea. (Doesn’t it seem like in order to feature “Guinea” in your country’s name, it’s a prerequisite for a nation-state to resemble a panorama of the life of the tyrant that leads it?) But it would be a more entertaining change of pace to hear such acerbic sentiments in the upper echelons of the charts without making it into another insipid argument about rockism and popism. It could also show up Rage Against the Machine or anyone else who charts on the back of their vaguely rebellious tendencies as being less substantive and too innocuous to be a deserving spearhead for a Facebook movement in comparison.
2003: Nina Nastasia - Run to Ruin
In the past decade, New Weird America has produced a folk hall of fame for our times, stuffed with portraits of pitchfork-wielding weirdos and their prim, bespectacled wives — the folk power couple Joanna Newsom and Smog’s Bill Callahan spring to mind. Under its fey influence, instruments like the fiddle, ukulele, and harp challenged the electric guitar’s hegemony, but as the onslaught was mostly acoustic, New Weird America in hindsight appears less revolutionary than the term suggests, more simply explained than all those freak-folk sub-genres led us to believe. It’s easy to see it now as a folk revival with a slight atonal edge, but folk nonetheless.
Run to Ruin is the No Country for Old Men of the New Weird America movement, an artifact of beauty and mystery that unsettles these certainties. It has the same effect as the movie did, being the kind of album people at dinner parties like to ‘have a go’ at decoding, a cultural Rubik’s cube, at least to those (at the most exclusive dinner parties of course) who are aware of its existence.
The off-kilter instrumentation — featuring instruments like the saw — could be dismissed as the stylings of a particular genre (folk/New Weird America), if each element were not essential. Instruments play creaking doors or whining insects, less strident voices in themselves, more sound effects in a spooky radio play. Steve Albini adds his patented touch and ensures that Run to Ruin, like the Coen brothers’ movie, creates a compellingly unique closed universe, even if it appears to do so against an impressionistic backdrop of mythic America. At times, the album plays like the soundtrack to a film noir that never was.
Each of Nastasia’s albums, but especially Run to Ruin, are really concept albums, and the songs don’t take well to mix tapes (I’ve tried). Their fragmentary nature makes Run to Ruin, at only 31 minutes, pass quickly as if it were a strip of landscape seen from the window of a car. There is no doubt that it’s an album of the road — maybe why those New Weird America atmospherics are required. Aborted conversations about the past and love scenes take place in cars. A short stay or imprisonment in a motel with thin walls is described in “Regrets.” Allusions to violence, money, and jealousy abound. “You, Her and Me” ends with sounds reminiscent of an ambulance siren fading into the distance, while the first track, “We Never Talked,” is the only one to refer directly to “that thing we witnessed.” The gloomy, tense track faces the strain of keeping secrets head-on, though the excitement of telling the story soon takes over, and the album becomes feverishly possessed with its own tale, even as its confessions remain cryptic, encoded. The last track, “While We Talk,” brings relief, describing a picnic where crumbs fall and secrets are spilled in the open, just as at the beginning of the album they’re shut up in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a car.
Although New Weird America was something of a catch-all term (uniting artists that were too diverse), what its practitioners seemed to harbor in common was an approach utilizing the poet’s strangeness, the ability to tell the truth, but tell it slant as Emily Dickinson advised. Perhaps the obtuseness of the term (sounding like it was coined at a party by stoners) was a cover, allowing artists to do interesting stuff quietly, without the hassle of explaining themselves. “It’s… New Weird America (man)…” might function very well as a reply to stump the interlocutor and let the resulting social tumbleweed obscure the question. The days of recording albums in deserted farmhouses had arrived once again, but unlike folk movements of the past, contemporary acoustic weirdness was less aligned with the idea of a folk proletariat and more with the unique vision of the artist, self-exiled (pretentious as that sounds). Run to Ruin is an example of such an album, and its greatest achievement is that it does not surrender to its own quirkiness as a Joanna Newsom might do in her weaker moments. Instead, it turns its dust-bowl strangeness into a shimmering backdrop, in the same way the classic Western uses the landscape as a blank canvas for the story it has to tell. Interestingly enough, Run to Ruin was not recorded anywhere in ‘new weird’ America; it was put down in the South of France. It’s a contradiction that could inspire a college essay: ‘the use of landscape in…’, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
1978: Magma - Attahk
Magma are 40 years old this year, and they’re still making records and still pushing their sound forward. They’ve become more operatic and ‘classical’ in their old age, which honestly isn’t something I’m feeling that much, but far be it for me to say what the oft-proclaimed ‘best drummer in the world’ Christian Vander should do with his band. Maybe I’ll like the new stuff in a few decades, I don’t know. Regardless, I’ll never feel anything less than love for Magma, and Attahk is a big part of that. It’s an album of infectious, grandiose fun and funk, and fuck me I love it.
Apparently somewhat rejected by staunch Magma fans, Attahk is distinctly different from their other output. Even allowing for their love of progression and experimentation, the album stands out, whether you like it or not. It’s more accessible, more pop, and perhaps — shock horror — less distinctly Zeuhl (the genre Magma singlehandedly invented). In the interests of good journalism, I met up with Stella Vander, singer in Magma and longest serving member of the band save for her husband, Christian Vander himself. (Christian didn’t turn up — he doesn’t speak English, and I don’t speak French or Kobaïan, so it would have probably been less than enlightening, and besides, Stella pretty much channeled him for every answer that wasn’t business related). I asked her what is the essence of the Zeuhl sound. This is what she said in her lovely French accent:
“It is about vibrations. Music that comes from vibrations…”
So, then maybe Attahk is in fact a shining example of Zeuhl. Right from the off, it’s all about the vibrations, the good vibrations, jiggling you all up and down. I asked her some more stuff, specifically about Attahk. I said, hey, “Attahk is quite different to your other stuff, more immediate even, or more dancey, or more ‘pop,’ and certainly when I play people Magma things, they often immediately like Attahk, and it takes them a little longer to get into other stuff.”
Stone cold Stella Vander says “No the reason wasn’t to try and be more pop; no, it’s because Christian is writing big long pieces but also things that he is calling everyday, everyday music, you know? So he had a bunch of stuff, and we thought it was a good idea to record. Eventually, it became a little more easy for people to get into… but that wasn’t the [reason].”
Well, it’s certainly true that the 20-minute-plus suites that make up a large proportion of other Magma releases are missing entirely from Attahk, the longest track here clocking in at a punchy eight minutes and two seconds. But ‘everyday music’? For Magma perhaps, but there’s nothing ordinary or quotidian for the rest of us in these mad-funk opera constructions.
I ask Stella about there being some different influences on the album. “Yes, you know, Christian likes a lot of different things like, er, rhythm and blues and Tamla Motown music and Ray Charles and all these influences, so he enjoy to play this as well.”
This would have been news to me had I not already read the Wikipedia entry for the album, but still, it’s tricky to reconcile these apparent influences with the music. One thing I can get is a gospel feel to a couple of tracks, especially “Spiritual (Negro Song)” (no shit), that’s absent from Magma’s other output. Now, I’m not a gospel music fan, but Magma’s gospel is something else altogether, an ecstatic worship that I can get behind, which is another key element that separates this album from its brothers and sisters: it’s supremely uplifting.
The theme of interplanetary war that permeates pretty much everything Magma does is still palpable (you need look no further than the HR Giger cover artwork to ascertain that, not to mention the album is called, y’know, Attahk), but the dark suspense that frequents their sound is almost entirely absent here. There are moments of tension, for sure, but good always triumphs over evil, and it’s a positivity that is infectious to say the least. As the album constantly turns and twists in unexpected directions, it keeps slapping new, ever wider grins across your face. Whether it’s an insane vocal that for the life of me sounds like a fucking duck playing a kazoo (see “Liriïk Necronomicus Kanht (In Which Our Heroes Ürgon And Gorgo Meet)”) or Satan belching (“Maahnt (The Wizard’s Fight Versus The Devil)”) or Christian Vander’s incredible wailing in the made-up language of Kobaïan, or just a ridiculously funky drum break or fuzzed-out bassline, it’s all so entertaining. Part of that is born from novelty, it’s true, but novelty wears thin pretty quickly, and this album has been a regular visitor to my record player for coming up to a decade now. So yes, there’s the whole made-up language thing and the interplanetary war stuff, and that’s all fine and dandy and wacky and whatnot. But irrespective of all that, Attahk is great simply because at its peaks it makes you want to dance like nothing else. It’s a giant helping of fun — nay, euphoria — and I defy anyone to have a bad time with it.
2001: Manic Street Preachers - “Groundhog Day”
Valentine’s Day forever placed its stamp on February as a month for love. Weeks before the holiday, boyfriends and girlfriends plan endearing tributes for their significant others while singles pine for romance. However, before the gifting of flowers and chocolates, there is a holiday seldom celebrated and often forgotten: Groundhog Day.
Every February 2nd in a sleepy Pennsylvania town, a seemingly immortal groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil emerges from his burrow to prognosticate the state of winter. The holiday is shamelessly kitsch and appreciated in a lighthearted manner, but in 1993, the Bill Murray-starring movie Groundhog Day brought a new understanding to the day (or days, depending on your philosophy of time). In short, a conceited weatherman played by Murray finds himself repeatedly living out Groundhog Day. What an existential dilemma for such a minor holiday.
Interestingly, the theme of this movie continues to inspire artists and thinkers. In a 2004 article in The Independent titled “The greatest story ever told?” it is noted that religious leaders consider Groundhog Day the most spiritual movie of all time.
A band that clearly empathizes with the film’s message is the Manic Street Preachers. Formed in 1995, the Welsh alternative rock group rose to prominence toward the end of the decade. Glam punk imagery and songs about boredom and despair gained them a cult following (they released their ninth studio album Journal For Plague Lovers last year). In 2001, on the heels of their sixth album, Know Your Enemy, the Manic Street Preachers released an EP consisting of B-sides. Strangely, Know Our B-Sides was only released in Japan and can still only be purchased as an import. But while the record on the whole isn’t particularly noteworthy — the EP opens with an Avalanches remix of “So Why So Sad,” which is something — the track “Groundhog Days” clearly stands out for its thematic content.
“Groundhog Days” is a straightforward verse-chorus-verse rock song. It begins with some nifty fingerpicking and melodic vocals, which give way to an arena-filling, distortion-drenched chorus. It feels mundane in its simple, formulaic approach — but that feels like the point. “Waking up again/ to the same old things/ To the same old songs/ To the same old pain.” Indeed, just as the movie explores the monotony of continually reliving the same day, the song examines a similar feeling but ultimately coming to more “emo” conclusions. Matched with the familiar pattern of the song, “Groundhog Days” ironically creates a condition similar to the one being described: the listener hears a predictable rock song and feels the inescapable pattern.
1964: Professor Longhair - "Big Chief"
A friend of mine once said, “The most significant thing funk will ever do is get sampled.” I want to explore that thought for a moment. It’s easy to see how the sheer volume of cuts sampled from old Rare Groove records will guarantee funk’s survival not through its original format, but in the footnotes of countless other genres (hip-hop, rap, jungle, d&b, IDM, etc). The way these samples compile and relate, sometimes even evolving autonomy on their own accord (e.g., the Amen Break), suggest that my friend’s judgment was valid. It also deserves stating that these samples aren’t solely relegated to basement DJ sets either; oftentimes they can—and do—break into the mainstream consciousness.
The motivations behind funk’s mass sampling are obvious—the breaks, beats, and melodies are all somewhat unusually constructed in comparison to, say, traditional rock and pop — but specifically, Rare Groove records are sampled because the original funky cuts are, at a basic level, novel enough to entertain the listener unaccompanied. Using myriad methodologies, these samples can be interacted with brilliantly, even though many contemporary artists are simply choosing their samples unwisely. But the whole purpose of sampling funk is compromised when the sample itself becomes a feature instead of a support.
Case in point: “Big Chief” by Professor Longhair, recently sampled by Lily Allen on “Knock ‘Em Out.”
Meagerly lauded in the 50s for his New Orleans rhythm and blues, the Professor’s funky piano remained steadfastly unique as of 1964, the year “Big Chief” was initially released. The tune kicks in with a jittery little piano line, straight up and down a blues scale; I hate to use the word ‘quirky,’ but hot damn if it doesn’t fit the bill. The progression could be reasonably drawn out for four to five minutes, but Prof. Longhair doesn’t see why he shouldn’t end it at the two-minute mark—the timeless “like it, play it again” mantra.
This sort of funk is one of the most difficult breeds a producer might sample. Often it is a song’s boldness that allows it to remain potent for minutes on end, and this is certainly the case with “Big Chief.” The track’s audacity doesn’t exactly ripen it for use in supporting traditional lead instruments or vocals, but to make the sample itself a lead is to more or less conflict with the purpose of sampling as a whole. A problematic position. (Disclaimer: This is not to say that it’s impossible to make decent music out of a sample cut from “Big Chief.” There are many other perfectly acceptable methods of creating art using precisely this aesthetic. What I am attempting to describe here is coming from a thoroughly pop/rock viewpoint and nothing else.)
Now, draw your attention to Lily Allen’s “Knock ‘Em Out,” wherein Allen employs a tasteless sample of the classic “Big Chief” progression.
Thrown beneath a punchy beat and Allen’s bratty accent, the progression—an extroverted, vivacious piece— sits awkwardly as a mere foundation. The result is almost offensive. Sure, “Knock ‘Em Out” is probably a marvelous track if the vocals were removed—the drum production is absolutely immaculate, and its rhythmic precision intermingles quite eagerly with Professor Longhair’s piano—but the additional lead, already tainted by Allen’s snide voice and immature lyricism, soils any possible merit that the track might have contained.
But Allen was doomed from the start. Longhair’s piano feels uncomfortably restless in the background, and the opposite scenario (“Big Chief” as a lead) looks to be an equally unpleasant option for the reasons I outlined above. So why did Allen use it? “It sounds cool,” says Allen. She was right about that—it does sound cool. But clearly not every “cool” sound is worth sampling.
