I sometimes worry that in this age where bands spend years in the studio honing down their sound and polishing their sonics, where we have artists that exist only on the internet, never setting foot on stage, and where live gigs are slowly becoming the bastion of moneyed elites, that we have a generation of people coming through who have never really experienced live, grassroots music up close and personal in all it’s ragged glory. (Watching Taylor Swift from the back of a football stadium, half a mile from the stage, via the screens hardly counts. If you can’t count the beads of sweat on the artist’s brow, I don’t want to know.)
Franky Fugazi is the honest sound of music played live, the wilful sacrificing of polish and nuance in favor of edge and excitement. Certainly, the sound that he makes —a sort of garage-rock meets folk blues —lends itself perfectly to such a setting and such an in-the-moment, as it happens live and perhaps even dangerous, vibe. “No I Ain’t” is all about spontaneity and spice rather than planning and poise.
But that is the point: it’s not about polishing a song to death; it is about capturing a spirit, and in this excellent three and a half minutes, you can almost hear the music conjuring old blues players and resurrecting the ghost of rockers past, evoking long gone folkies and long forgotten singer-songwriters to join this joyous and jagged, delirous and delightful dance.
Yes, this is indeed music made in the moment; it’s just that Franky Fugazi was astute enough to record it so that you can keep a piece of that moment forever.
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