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Paul Mills' production on previous Stan Rogers albums was stripped down to the basics: good mic placement coupled with simple folk instruments. For 1984’s From Fresh Water, on the other hand, Rogers went to would-be megaproducer Daniel Lanois.
In time, Lanois would produce the like of U2 and Bob Dylan. In the early 1980s, however, he was just a moderately successful, if relatively unknown, Canadian producer. Rogers had recorded the album Fogarty’s Cove in Lanois’s basement in 1976. With funding from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Rogers wanted to give his songs the lush orchestration that many felt they deserved.
On several From Fresh Water songs, this technique worked (see the phenomenal “White Squall”), but “Man With Blue Dolphin” is not particularly one of them. There’s the awkward synth elements, and even more notably, a bizarre rock guitar solo. The sound is more pop than it is folk, and Rogers devotees were, understandably, vexed at the time of the album’s release.
Many feel that Rogers’s death just after the recording–but prior to the mixing–of the album may have given Lanois more leeway to treat the material like rock music. Whatever the reason, this “big” production remains divisive amongst fans to this day.
For the 2011 reissue of Rogers’s albums, Mills remixed and remastered the song.
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[Interviewer]
"I've heard whispers... about the financial support your government receives from the drug industry"
[Gutierrez]
"Well, the irony of this, of course, is that this money, which is in the billions, is coming from your country. You see, you are the major purchaser of our national product, which is, of course, cocaína."
[Interviewer]
"Cocaine. On one hand, you're saying the United States government is spending millions of dollars to eliminate the flow of drugs onto our streets. At the same time, we are doing business with the very same government that is flooding our streets with cocaine?"
[Gutierrez]
"Mm, mm, si, si. Let me show you a few of the other characters that are involved in this... tragicomedy." Immortal Technique (Ft. C-Rayz Walz, Diabolic, LouCipher, Poison Pen, Pumpkinhead & Tonedeff) – Peruvian Cocaine
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What is this?
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The Roots have been hip-hop’s most stalwart rock experimenters. The group claims to have been turned on to “white music” when they spent an afternoon watching MTV, waiting for one “black” video to come on. 2002’s Phrenology was a tour-de-force of genre-mashing, with the lead single, “The Seed (2.0),” hustling like Some Girls-era Rolling Stones.
In a way, a collaboration with one of rock’s biggest music obsessives seems like a natural progression or even fulfilment of that aspect of the band’s career. It’s also a telling indicator that in 2013, people are wising up to the fact that genre is just a box, and some of the best music is naturally going to think outside it!
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What is this?
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More on this phenomenal band when I write about emo.
What is this?
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The greatest of all gangster movies, Brian De Palma’s 1983 epic Scarface, features this fictional television interview. The interview might be fictional, but it deals with very real subjects. Dr. Gutierrez describes the political scene surrounding cocaine as a “tragic comedy,” and he’s not wrong. The US government is in business with the dictators and drug lords who produce cocaine, but punishes its own citizens who turn to dealing drugs out of desperation or a desire to keep up with the Joneses and accumulate material goods.
The word tragicomedy to describe a play that is both tragic and comedic, or comedic to the extent that it is tragic, dates back to the late 1500s, and playwrights like Sydney and Fletcher, who might today be loosely considered Shakespeare’s contemporaries, used it to label their own works. Tech definitely blends tragedy and comedy together in “Peruvian Cocaine”!
The beat also samples the music from the scene where Antonio goes to Bolivia the first time.
Where can I find this scene? I have been looking for it everywhere!