Con-Fusion? Not according to Ashleigh Carter. She's all about fusion.
ALLENTOWN, PA (Special to TSD AfterDark) Ashleigh Carter, 15, of Allentown, Pennsylvania is confounding friends, family, psychiatrists, clergy and members of the media for what Tiger Beat Magazine® is calling “an unexpected, unprecedented and highly disturbing transformation into a world of staggering sophistication.”
“This just doesn’t happen to young girls, ever.” said Dr. Leonard Heinlein, leader of the psychiatric team studying Carter. “We’re at a complete loss as to why a young lady of fifteen would abandon a world of texting, poorly applied makeup, ending every sentence with a rising inflection and thinking everything that happened before 2005 is gay, then suddenly immerse herself into the harmonically enlightened, melodically challenging, polyrhythmic juggernaut that is fusion jazz. Why? We are just scratching the surface of the teenage female brain. The answers may be decades away.”
Carter accidentally stumbled onto several viral videos of Dirty Loops, the Swedish trio of jazz-rock fusion musicians, famous for taking the nauseating pop catalogues of Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Rihanna and others and turning them into reharmonized, sonically pleasing, tight arrangements with blistering solos and dynamic vocal stacks. This discovery led Carter to explore the boxes of albums her Uncle Jerry had in his basement – a veritable treasure trove of fusion classics from the likes of Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, Return to Forever, Michal Urbaniak, Herbie Hancock, and Brand X.
“I spent a week downloading like a beast. Then, I was like chillaxin’ yesterday and heard some of McLaughlin with Shakti of off Handful of Beauty. Shit was ill. All the subdivisions and 17 against 11 junk that Zakir Hussain was playing on top of McLaughlin’s scalloped fretboard mastery that totally isn’t gay and stuff.” Carter said. “Then I heard Bill Connors’ solo on Captain Senor Mouse off of Return to Forever’s Hymn of the Seventh Galaxy from ’73 which is like, OMG, ballin’. I know my girls would be all cross-eyed if I laid that altered scale, subdominant hoo hah played by real instruments on ‘em. They already think I’m lemenoxious and told Bobby Jenkins in Mrs. Sigworth’s fifth period algebra class I’m nada lotta.”
Wha? She likes it? Michal Urbaniak's seminal fusion masterpiece.
Carter claims that she will never return to the mind-numbing lyrics, autotuned vocals, and melodically vacant trash that her contemporaries call music.
“Fuck that shit forever.” added Carter. “Besides, I never saw Wayne Shorter pop out of giant eggshell decked out in sparkles as sexually ambiguous chess pieces dance around him, and I guaran-damn-fuckin’-tee you he wouldn’t have learned that in music school.”