“One of my father’s first jobs out of high school was at a legendary rock club in New Orleans called The Warehouse. Bands showed up early to sound check, and it was my dad’s job to take them out on the town until show time. He’s full of great stories about shooting pool with Bruce Springsteen, teaching Cat Stevens to throw a frisbee, crazy stuff like that. My dad’s not a big talker so it’s taken me all my life to wrench these stories out of him; I was 31 before I ever heard he toured with Bruce Springsteen.”
“Growing up, there were unspoken but visible divisions in our family’s record collection—bands we celebrated endlessly whose records we played on repeat, and then over in a dark creepy corner there were a few records we just weren’t really…..”encouraged” to put on. Eventually I figured out this pile was kinda like a graveyard of asshole musicians, a stack of bands who’d been unsavory toward my very sweet father back when he worked at The Warehouse. It was a silent lesson my dad taught me, but a strong one: the music you put into your ears should be made by good people and good people only, with something important to say.
Having two parents from New Orleans, you’re destined to be raised on some classic RnB and zydeco—lots of NOLA names like Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, Irma Thomas, Buckwheat Zydeco—these were all on heavy rotation at the house. Other blues records like Bessie Smith “The Empress” were prominent in the collection. In the mid ’90s, my mom wrote her dissertation on racism against Algerian immigrants in France and how it was shaping french hip hop—she’d go to France and bring home a bunch of french hip hop records for me. I specifically remember a double LP soundtrack to the film Ma 6-T Va Cracker—that opened me up to political hip hop as a young person, and has stuck with me since.
There was a time when the best teenage rebellion I could come up with against my mom was to hate her beloved Joni Mitchell records—most notably Court and Spark and Blue—but damn. I fucked up!! I’m now forever indebted to my mom for exposing me to my first brilliant female guitarist.
Vinyl has always been the main way I communicate with my family about what I do. Touring can be hard for some older folks in my life to understand, but one mention of my band’s record coming out on vinyl and suddenly everyone’s on board. I’ve struggled a lot with whether or not being a musician is a “valid” life choice, but having our own records pressed to vinyl helps me bridge some kind of generational gap in my family. It’s respectable to older folks in a way that sleeping on dog beds in random squats and driving around in a shitty broke down van maybe isn’t, so big props to vinyl for keeping my family from thinking I’m a tooootal degenerate.”
—Aimée Argote
Des Ark’s Everything Dies is in stores October 9, 2015 via Graveface Records. On vinyl.
