Live at the Belly Up: Thievery Corporation (Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 11 my husband Charles and I watched a qu9ite interesting Live at the Belly Up TV show from 2018 featuring a band called the Thievery Corporation. There were quite a few interstitial interviews with the band’s leader, Rob Garza, in which he explained that his inspiration for starting the band came from a high-school elective he took in electronic music in the 1970’s, where among other things he got to work with the early analog syntheizers, ring modulators, drum machines and the reel-to-reel tape recorders on which electronic music was captured and preserved. The Thievery Corporation’s Wikipedia page explains, “Thievery Corporation was formed in the summer of 1995 at Washington D.C.'s Eighteenth Street Lounge.[1] Rob Garza and Lounge co-owner Eric Hilton were drawn together over their mutual love of club life, as well as dub, bossa nova and jazz records. They decided to see what would come of mixing all these in a recording studio, and from this, in 1996 the duo started their Eighteenth Street Lounge Music record label.” According to Garza, when Thievery Corporation was about to release their first self-produced CD they were uncertain whether to order 500 or 1,000 copies. They decided to go for broke and order the 1,000 – and within days they got an order from a record store in Cologne, Germany saying how well their CD was se3lling and asking for 2,000 more copies. Thievery Corporation, according to Wikipedia, has just two full members – Garza and Eric Hilton – plus four “studio and touring musicians,” at least two of whom, drummer Jeff Franca and guitarist and sitarist Ron Myers, are key contributors to their sound. The other “studio and touring musicians”: are Frank Orrall on percussion and Ashish "Hash" Vyas on bass (an instrument Garza and Hilton are also listed as playing, by the way, along with guitars and percussion,though Garza’s main instrumental contribution is as a synthesizer player),

There are also a number of singers who have been added to what Garxa calls their “family” over the last few years, including Loulou Ghelichkhani from Iran and Racquel Jones from New Orleans. Thievery Coirpooration do a lot of rap – though at least it’s the kind of positive socially conscious rap of Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy rather than the crime- and capitalist-glorifying garbage that passes foremost “hip-hop” (the euphemism used for rap by people who like it) today. On previous Live at the Belly Up programs I’ve complained that the songs sounded good individually but tended to blend together and sound pretty similar after a whole; that is certainly not a problem with Thievery Corporation! Thanks at least in part due to the sheer multiplicity of singers and the variouis national origins Garza has brought them from, Thievery Corporation's songs sound radically different from each other, though the ones both Charles and I liked best were those featuring Loulou Ghelichkhani. According to Garza, they just picked her up for a session one time and, after the results, he invited her to join the band – and her two features here, “Love Has No Heart” and “Lebanese Blonde,” were clearly the best songs on the program. I’m not sure just what “Love Has No Heart” means, but it’s a haunting sentiment and Ghelichkhani sings it beautifully and eloquently. She’s also featured on “Lebanese Blonde,” which according to Garza isThievery Corporation’s most popular song since it was used ikn the 2004 independent movie Garden State,

My husband charles and I watched Garden State in 2020 and neither of us remembered the song, but in general I had nice things to say about the movie when Charles and I watched it in 2020 via a close-out DVD (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2020/03/garden-state-camelot-pictures-jersey.html), and the song itself if great, powered by Ghelichkhani’s voice The momentsand Rob Myers’ power chords on sitar (the only song in which they used this traditional Indian instrument). Other particularly strong songs on the program included “Letter to the Editor,” sung by Racquel Jones of New Orleans, and two songs featuring a French singer, Natalia Clavier: “Le Monde” (“The World”), sung entirely in French with Clavier using a bullhorn throughout, and “Time + Space,” sung partly in French and partly in English. The luricisn of those songs featuring female singers largely made up for the rap selections, including “Fight to Survive,” “Culture of Fear,” “Ghetto Matrix” and “Warning Shots,” though at least, as I noted above, these are more or less positive rap exposing the continuing oppression of African-Americans but without glorifying the thug life the way the “gangstas” do. There are also some songs in the “dub” style, reflecting the Jamaican music that is to classic reggae what African-American rap is to classic soul. Overall, though, Thievery Corporation is a quite impressive group, truly (as fellow Washington, D.,C. native Duke Ellington liked to say) “beyond category,” and even if they did a song I didn’t particularly care for I could relax and rest assured that the next soug would be something really good and beautiful.