Dixie Cups – Two-Way-Poc-A-Way
The Dixie Cups on TV = Groovy…
Listen/Download – Dixie Cups – Two-Way-Poc-A-Way
Greetings all.
I don’t know about you, but I unwisely spent my Sunday evening staring at the TV set while the ‘music industry’ took a hot steaming dump.
I understand that ranting about this brings with it the possibility of being branded as old and out of touch, but honest to god, what a lot of shit.
Oh, by the way, I’m talking about the Grammy Awards.
It’s not like this is a new development, because what manifested itself on the screen this week was only the latest incremental step in a decades-long slide to the bottom.
It has been years since popular music ceased worrying about sounding good and began obsessing with spectacle, i.e. how many pyrotechnics, backup dancers and how much postmodern filigree could be wrapped around a song (and I use the term loosely) to keep the saucer-eyed worker ants tossing their hard earned money into the wood chipper, but the blending of the tabloid sensibility with what passes for music these days is scraping the street like a damaged muffler, throwing up sparks and shrapnel while revealing the finely tuned engine of commerce for the loud, greasy beast that it really is.
The really revealing thing is how much of this can be laid at the feet of old-schoolers, who allow their egos to be over-inflated by essentially empty (publicist driven) idolatry from their descendants while phoning it in in the laziest possible way.
There, on the stage next to the current crop of freshly wrapped, forgettable crap (nothing new there, just the latest version of the oily film that has always floated atop the music industry) were folks like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger (who in paying “tribute” to Brother Solomon Burke, got the first line of ‘Everybody Needs Somebody To Love’ WRONG), Aretha Franklin and Kris Kristofferson (among many others) who really ought to have known better, basically tossing dirt on top of their own caskets.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they were performing something new, of their own creation, but they allow themselves to be wrapped around all manner of contemporary awfulness, like juicy slices of bacon embracing a succession of turds (anti-Rumaki?) , while we all sit by like waterboarding subjects, gasping thankfully for that brief respite from a musical drowning like our torturers are doing us a favor.
Just awful on every conceivable level, ultimately more about the ‘red carpet’, the iconography of crass stupidity and commerce than anything that might be mistaken for art and soul.
Of course I sat there like Statler and/or Waldorf (OG Muppets represent), sneering at my TV set when the off-button was always in reach, which makes me a special brand of rube, but I was also e-commiserating with others of my ilk on the social network that will remain unnamed, so I guess it was a kind of digital anti-focus group, in which we all bonded together in hatred for those that would presume that we were stupid enough to find any of this appetizing, which is where things are in the 21st century (where’s my jet car and Martian vacation home???).
It’s the ultimate manifestation of everything bad about post-modernization (not the conceptual po-mo but what the powers of commerce have done with it).
What we need is something solid with a direct line to the soul, and what you get is Justin Beiber, dancing ninjas with fireworks shooting out of their asses and a “song of the year” (really? Bad year…) largely cribbed from a thirty year old pop song. It’s as if the recording industry, already choking to death on its own spew (and lack of foresight) decided that insulting the intelligence of its audience was a waste of time since there was no longer anything there to be insulted so why not serve up the contents of their dumpster and make believe it’s caviar and lobster?
That said, when I decided I was going to fill this space with gripe, I realized that I couldn’t very well do that without countering the suck with something especially good, representative of the kind of musical kick in the sack required to cleanse the palate in a case like this.
I have my man Dan at the Home of the Groove to thank for turning me on to today’s selection a few years back.
I – like anyone else with a radio or a seat at a wedding – was already aware of the Dixie Cups, with the ‘Chapel of Love’, and ‘People Say’ and that tip of the feathered headdress to their home in the Crescent City ‘Iko Iko’, but when I first heard ‘Two-Way-Poc-A-Way’ my hair (and my prominent ears) stood on end, as they should when presented with something so powerful.
Recorded in 1965 after they moved from Red Bird to ABC/Paramount, and produced by none other than Joe Jones, ‘Two-Way-Poc-A-Way’ is the Wild Indian chant of ‘Iko Iko’ taken to a whole ‘nother extreme, removed from the pop element and placed firmly in the Mardi Gras parade as if you were cakewalking alongside the Big Chief with a head full of spirits (liquid and deceased).
Not much more than the Dixie Cups and a grip of percussion (more than enough if you ask me) ‘Two-Way-Poc-A-Way’ was – even for 1965 when things were really starting to change – an awfully strange record to toss at AM radio – but that’s one of the many reasons (maybe the main one) why it’s so cool.
I’ve dropped this one at funk 45 fests (and in a previous mix) but I figured that in a situation like this, it deserved to be put up where it might be savored on its own.
Real stuff for an increasingly unreal world.
Peace
Larry
If you want one of the new Funky16Corners stickers (free, of course) click here for info.
Check out the Funky16Corners Store at Cafe Press
PS Head over to Iron Leg for some prime UK psyche/prog.
Funk, Funk 45, Funky16Corners, New Orleans Funk, R&B, Soul, Soul 45
| 
Funk, Funky16Corners, New Orleans, Soul
Themocracy
You need no better example of the vacancy of the contemporary scene than the fact that Rosanne Cash’s “The List” was shunted off to the Americana category when it damn well should have been nominated for Album of the Year.
The soullessness of modern pop music has been troubling me for damn near two decades now–lack of the kind of soul epitomized by Solomon Burke on the one hand, and on the other hand, the creative integrity and independent artistic vision that is required for a person to call him/herself an artist and what he/she creates to be called art. Without that vision, what is created is just product.
Bingo.
I agree completely and hit it up like this: https://printinrichardson.blogspot.com/
WTF are the Grammys?
Thanks loads for this one. I’ve got the album it’s on, but have been fruitlessly searching for a copy of the jukebox ep Dan Phillips posted way back when because I thought that was the only 45 issue. Nice to know there was a regular issue as well. Maybe next time I should check the discography, duh.
Dan filled a major hole in the list of Mardi Gras Indian songs when brought attention to this song. Did the same again when he placed Bobby Williams’ “Boogaloo Mardi Gras” in the canon as well. Great work on his part. Obviously you got the message, I’m just not sure how many other folks did, that’s the only reason I thought to bring it up.
ana…
BTW, Have you ever heard Huey Smith’s Two-Way-Pock-Away from 1969, Instant 3297? Not that it always means very much, but no one I know can recall ever seeing a copy or for that matter having heard it.
I’m seriously curious about the recording and just wondering if you know anything.
Ana
I haven’t heard the Huey Smith, but a lot of those later (around 3300) Instant 45s are very scarce. It seems like their production runs got progressively smaller as time went on.
I do have a cool ‘Two-Way’ 45 that I’m going to post soon, by an artist from outside of NOLA.
Larry
I’m a filmmaker awho gave up writing, singing and performing pop and soul music to concentrate on directing movies because I’m 42 and have better things to do than prance on a treadmill to get my thighs the same size as Britney’s. People under 30 ask me all the time, “Why was you guys’ era’s music so good? Why does ours suck so bad?”
It’s simple: before MTV, music was made by musicians and musicians were allowed to look like musicians. Now, because every musician must look like a model, music is made by models. Models have no musical talent.
If professional football were held to these standards, and quarterbacks had to look like male models instead of Joe Namath or Michael Vick, no team would ever reach a Superbowl. If plumbers were required to pout and be under 185 pounds to twist a wrench and join a union, there’d be as much shit in people’s houses as there is right now on American radio.
Yet musicians, alone, are compelled to look like supermodels. Why is that? Because of MTV; and MTV alone.
I remember getting in a lot of trouble some years ago for saying that if — and that is if — Egyptian terrorists slammed planes into the WTC back in 2001, what we should truly condemn them for is having targeted the wrong building.
They should have hit 1515 Broadway.
I still regret nothing whatsoever about the above statement.
What a great description of something I didn’t bother to witness, although your description would probably suit the last ten years of that thing. I am genuinely saddened by the vacuum of innovation out of America since it was the original creator of all the sort of music I have ever loved. Lady Ga Ga? Yeah right. When I overheard that Ce Lo Green track, I bothered to download it thinking it represented some kind of re-birth, but a few listens revealed a bawling child man and now I hate it as much as anything. America, what happened? All the more reason that blogs like Funkycorners must continue to spread the word of the real thing.
oh . . . i’m a huge fan of what you do, dan, and will always be so, i think. but this whole “modern music’s a black hole” ranting just wears me out. all of these comments are vast over-generalizations (even, yes, as regards the grammys!) . . . cee-lo green? amazing talent. not every single song is great, but he’s a solid r&b guy, w/a clear and direct connection to all that you play here. (reminds me a lot of swamp dogg.)
arcarde fire, avett bros., mumford & sons, . . . esperanza spaulding . . . it’s a tv show, meant to be broad as heck, but there were talented people performing–and there’s a lot of great music being made.
love, love, love what you do here (and i know i’d love your live spins), but 100% diet of 60’s era soul, to me, is just asking to become one of those “you kids stay outta my yard!” cranks. . . .
doug
and i just realized, i somehow wrote the prev post addressing you as “dan” . . . apologies, Larry. I’ve only been visiting this site religiously for, oh, 5 or 6 years!
i AM 58, maybe that’s it!
dc
Thanks Larry. You know that I love your rants because they’re always so spot-on!
sorry so late to the party, here, Larry. I’d never even knew of this wonderful rekkid. Though my days of trolling the aisles and bins iws pretty much gone, the title alone would have given me the green light, AND there’s an LP from this time in short supply out there also? Just like I always used to tell my bestcrate digging customers in the used record store…it all depends on where you live most of the time…like where the record saw ANY airplay or had a good local promo man working it.; After that you have to hope SOMEBODY at some radio station either made off with tons of Top 40 ‘no-shows’ instead of letting the station dumpster them and/ or lovingly kept them until shortly before passing or gave explicit instructions to his surviving loved ones to carefully divest themselves of what was left in his collection. Timing, always timing.
For some reason I may have forgotten to subscribe to your RSS feed after I got my new computer in July. What was I (not) thinking? I’m back and furiously making up for lost time. Always great to see YOUR name on my FB page Larry.
This is a GOOD’un.
Thanks Duncan!
A righteous rant! And thanks for the tune, what a groove…