Kyp Malone

What drew you to this event?

The invitation drew me to the event, but I was happy to accept the invitation because I like Ginsberg, I like the cultural space that he occupies and what he represents, and I like D.C.

Do you have a favorite piece by Ginsberg?

The first thing I was ever introduced to was "Howl," and I've revisited it several times over the years—it's made me feel different each time. "Father Death Blues" is one I like, too. I'm also just particularly fond of the person he presented as a personality.

How so?

In interviews and arguments...I wasn't alive with him as a contemporary in the '60s, which is what period I was introduced to, but it seems like it took a lot more to stand up and live your life outside of societal norms in a loud and vocal way, especially in terms of sexuality. The queerness he identified with and celebrated is starting to be accepted more in the mainstream today. Living a creative life, it takes a form of bravery in a lot of ways. His life and how he led it—at least what I've seen in his writing and hearing him read—it's heroic in a sense to me. I only ever saw him read one time, and it was the day Kurt Cobain's body was found, so I must've been like 21 or so. It was a very weird moment in time. A lot of my friends were pretty upset. Kurt Cobain was for us in that moment a poet, and someone we identified with. Maybe not everyone, but I certainly did; his songs were undeniable to me. His death was a pretty big shock and a blow to me. To see Ginsberg that day and hear him read and speak on things in regards to mortality and death and the continuation of the spirit...it was very healing.

Did he speak purely with his work or did he talk about death outside of his poems, as well?

He, more than anyone I can think of who has a listenership, he synthesized and then translated a lot of Eastern spirituality for a lot of people. That's in a lot of his writing, and he talks about these metaphysical things in his writing. If I remember correctly, and it's hard to remember because it was a long time ago, I believe he did address the situation for a moment outside of the poetry. It was a respectful, mourning moment.

At the Ginsberg-inspired event, will you be performing Rain Machine?

Yeah, probably. I try to have a plan, but sometimes it's whatever the moment calls for.

Do you have more than is what's on Rain Machine?

I have a lot of songs that aren't on anything, and then there are some TVOTR songs I wrote that I play solo if I feel inspired.

Does Rain Machine draw inspiration from the Beats or their legacy at all?

I feel like anyone who is writing verse is connected somehow to all people who have written verse. So, I feel an affinity toward them. But also, they were doing that in their time and living their lives on those specific paths. That might not be my path. As a younger person I remember trying to emulate that and recreate those experiences. We're all given our own trips, but I'm a father and I'm pretty square now. I still like psychedelics and everything, but I'm not in a position to drop everything to go to North Africa. But of course, I find [Ginsberg] and the Beats were an inspiration.

The Beats often interacted with the social issues of their time. Do you feel like your work connects to broader social issues as well?

I know people who are living their lives as activists, but the music I make—it's a commercial endeavor. It gets tricky to combine the two. It is still what I do for my vocation, so it is still a commercial endeavor. I'm working on some things, and there are some things in embryonic stages that I don't want to talk too much about, but I'm working with some friends to organize a concert to bring attention to the perpetual trampling upon of native people's rights, particularly in regards to mining corporations and extractions in the Southwest. I'm talking to people from the band Blackfire from Arizona. People in that band are in a Navajo tribe. We're trying and protest that and raise money for people in that situation.

But lyrically, these things do come up in the context of songs that I've written. Lately, I'm writing right now for a project, and there's a lot that I feel like deserves questioning and condemnation for what's going on. In this world, and in this nation in both foreign and domestic policy. That stuff is coming up in songs, and it's easy to come up as a complaining blowhard Jeremiah...you could go hoarse telling civilization how fucked up it is, but the list of complaints would just never end. Still, I don't want to shut up about it, but I don't want to just write and just sing about it. That's not the entirety of my experience, and I don't want it to be my only reality. That would be a pretty narrow field of vision.

Kyp Malone performs for free on Saturday, July 24th at 10 p.m.  outside Busboys & Poets at 5th and K streets NW, following an 8 p.m. performance inside the venue by Anne Waldman and others ($10). "Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg" runs through Sept. 16 at the National Gallery of Art.

As history, the National Gallery's current exhibit of photographs by the beat poet Allen Ginsburg was always going to be a win. As art? Not necessarily, but our critic Louis Jacobson found himself surprised. He loved it.

"Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg" runs through Sept. 6, and while Ginsberg's photographs of luminaries like Kerouac and Burroughs are indeed lovely, the museum hasn't forgotten the man's primary mode of expression: poems.

Only it's outsourced them: The poet Anne Waldman will perform Ginsberg's signature piece, "Howl," at 8 and 10 p.m. on July 23 and 8 p.m. on July 24 at Busboys and Poets at 5th and K streets NW. These events are $10, and also feature some local poets, and a string quartet led by local baroque-popper Matthew Hemerlein that will perform a 1993 orchestral piece inspired by "Howl." (Though she came along a generation after Ginsberg, Waldman used to run in some of the same circles, if after the end of the beat era.)

After the July 24 performance at 10 p.m., TV on the Radio member Kyp Malone will perform for free outside the restaurant—the press release I received today says Malone's projects "mirror the Beats’ unrelenting pursuit of creativity." Well, I guess. To be honest, I get more of a scary Burroughs vibe from his recent Rain Machine record.

At least once, Ginsberg performed "Howl" in D.C. himself, around the time his friend, photographer Robert Frank, had a retrospective at the National Gallery. From the Oct. 19, 1994 Reliable Source column in the Washington Post:

Poet Allen Ginsberg will read his poem "Howl" today on the steps of the U.S. Court of Appeals here in protest of the Federal Communications Commission's policy barring "indecent" radio broadcasts between 6 a.m. and midnight. Oral arguments on the controversial matter will be heard by the court today.

Photo courtesy the National Gallery.

Vanderslice is a talented musician who, with the help of other talented musicians, performed a repertoire rich with rollicking, smartly arranged pop-rock songs. Between songs he kept it light and affable, complimenting a blueberry pie an audience member had baked for the band and asking to check out some guy in the front row’s camera. But there was no upstaging Matsson, whose stage presence combined the quirk of a street mime with the brimstone of a tent revivalist to create something weird and very moving.

Matsson's moniker is farce; the man is exceptionally short, his Swedish blood notwithstanding. I would put him at 5'5", tops. He wore a pale-blue collared button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up high. His visage was youthful and almost Elven: high cheekbones, dark playful eyes, a fastidious little mustache clinging to his upper lip, and a carefully sculpted duck's-ass coiffuer. At first glance, Matsson appeared less a towering titan than an ex-jockey on his way to audition for Grease.

In the song "The Gardener," Matsson hinted at the origin of his superlative stage name:

I know the runner's going to tell you
There ain't no cowboy in my hair
So now he's buried by the daisies
So I could stay the tallest man in your eyes, babe

Here, size is not a measure of dimensions but of presence; and in this regard, Matsson looms large indeed. His masterful guitar-playing would be spectacle enough, but Matsson was not content to merely sit back and croon. He would march around the stage, kneel as if praying, scoop with his guitar neck as if seining a tidal pool for minnows, and gaze at individual audience members for many moments at a time as if to transmit, telekinetically, some urgent message. (This made his guitar work all the more impressive. Matsson’s compositions are extremely technical: He switched into a new tuning after—and sometimes during—most songs. That he was so precise in his finger-picking amid his theatrics was uncanny. Even the tuning was made into a droll exhibition.)

When Matsson did speak, he did so sparingly and never comprehensibly. Sometimes he would approach the mic as if to speak and then back away, like a rodent poking suspiciously at a crust of bread—an affected shyness that seemed to parody the persona that one might, on first glance, presume him to have. Then he’d start picking a bright riff and unleash a nose-full-of-brambles Delta bray, as if suddenly cohabitated by the ghosts of Mississippi John Hurt and Howlin’ Wolf. Never judge a diminutive Swedish folkie by its cover—or stature.

That brings us back to Pug and the question of folk’s inheritance. In the interest of appeasing those who might have shared my friend’s complaint, let me be clear: Folk is not a homogeneous genre. In the strictest sense, it doesn’t even have a defining sound; it needs only to be rooted in the tradition of the common people of a certain land or region. For reasons Alexis de Tocqueville might be more apt than I to explain, American folk—especially that of the 20th Century—has been heavily influenced by politics. Folk music has been vehicle for describing the plight of the common man in all its forms. But in democratic conditions, this exercise takes on new meaning: describing the plight of the common man, where it once meant merely taking ownership of one's lot, now implies a call for change. This seems to be the strain of American folk Pug has tapped into with Nation of Heat.

But there is another strain of folk, one that is tied to the land and the yeoman (both of which Tocqueville described as meticulously as Americans' political tendencies). This is where Matsson stakes his claim. His lyrics are more backwoods, full of landscapes, seasons, flora and fauna (moles, snakes, foxes, eagles—even a unicorn!), and the elements. His characters are dreamers, and his descriptions of love and loss and playfulness and unease are rooted firmly in the rural aesthetic. Consider:

I’m gonna float up in the ceiling
I built a levee of the stars
And in my field of tired horses
I built a freeway through this farce
Well if I ever get that slumber
I’ll be that mole deep in the ground
And I won’t be found

These are the sort of lyrics that are littered all over The Tallest Man on Earth’s debut LP, Shallow Grave. If Pug's folk is the poetry of association, Matsson’s is the poetry of remove.

Ironically, the highlight of his performance Tuesday (aside from an arresting cover of the Irish folk standard “Moonshiner”) was probably the song with the most political imagery: an upbeat strummer called “The King of Spain”:

…I wear my boots of Spanish leather
Oh, while I’m tightening my crown
I’ll disappear in some Flamenco
Perhaps I’ll reach the other side
Why are you stamping my illusion
Just ’cause I stole some eagle’s wings
Because you named me as your lover
Like all I could be anything
Well, if you reinvent my name
Well, if you redirect my day
I wanna be the king of Spain

The song is a celebration of masquerade and ambition: an appropriate choice for the undersized Swede to belt out at the conclusion of a show during which he transformed from a droll little sideshow to the tallest man in our eyes.

Here's Matsson performing elsewhere: