He's back.

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Decade DONE. A good one, a top one. Song of the decade was needless to say 'I Luv U'. Top musical memory of the decade was probably dancing it to it a rubber circus tent, with the hot, slippery bass bouncing off the brightly covered walls around us, falling over, losing it, getting it back. Just heaven.



(Also: such a cool video. and really i think 'cool' is the only word i can use to describe it. just, so cool)

Other great times I've had dancing this decade:

-'I feel love' in the duracell tent. This is a massive cliché that has been hooking misty-eyed people for decades now but god it was so perfect.
-Doing the Stop Making Sense dance routines to Talking Heads in a club in Warrington when I was 17.
-And, weirdly, at my 'straight edge' Leeds, dancing to Klaxons (by no means a favourite) with my best friend in total darkness with burst glow-sticks putting little dots of light on people so they looked like frameworks for computer-generated folk.
-Also jumping arm-in-arm with Joe at the White Stripes when I was 15.
-A Wiley gig in Manchester where there were about 16 people in Sankeys so we all had loads of space and freedom. Not what I, he, or anyone was expecting.

'Something Good 08' obviously needs a mention as it means more to me than words can say, but it's much less seminal, life/genre/culture-altering and just brazenly outstanding as Dizzee.




Album of the decade is a split between White Blood Cells and Silent Shout. White Blood Cells was about equal to Panic on Sunset Strip by Johnny Thunders and Stop Making Sense in reining and certifying my personality when it was in the flux of my teenage years. So it means a lot. But Silent Shout was more slow-burning and I only really got into it after I came to Scotland; standing on a frozen street with cold, hard-faced granite all around and hearing the harsh, unforgiving voices was about as intense as music can get.









Other unfathomably wonderful albums that must be recognised are Look into the eyeball, The Blueprint (not even pretending to have been into it at time of release, obv), Trompettes de la Mort, Voices of Animals and Men, and Untrue.



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Coming soon: the return of good pop/bad pop.

(Let's just pretend it was a big thing in the first place)


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New TNJX tune.



TNJX was always so blatantly better than Wax Stag. I mean, it's the same basic idea. Joyous, MDMA-on-yr-cornflakes pop music with no room for melancholy or violence at all. But TNJX is a million times better. It's so wilfully inane and formulaic yet with such a sense of profundity and novelty. Every TNJX song ever has, for example, included that drum surge after a breakdown where it goes DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUM DUMDUMDUMDUMDUMDUDUMAHHHhhhhh, and then the melodies come back in perfect synchrony (at 40 seconds and 1:55 in this particular song). But it's all we ever want and all we'd ever ask for. It's like early Beatles or the Ramones, we know what's coming and that's fine because we love it so much when it gets here. Or a soap opera plotline might be a better comparison. TNJX songs are magical cauldrons bubbling with little melodies that enchant and bewitch every single time. Long live the king!

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Wittgenstein in pop culture no.1:

"There are holes in what we do."

-Alexis Taylor on 'Bendable Poseable'.


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Meades is back! Another chance to see a documentary about Aberdeen which I've mentioned before:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00ml5wx/Jonathan_Meades_Off_Kilter_Episode_1/

I can't express enough how good an idea it would be for you to watch this. You can see my bedroom window several times, and this is the LEAST good thing about.

It's also on youtube if you don't get to it before it's iplayer best-before date.

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Squeeeeee!aky yet hard as fuck:



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Wittgenstein in pop culture no.2

"Seems, madam? Nay 'tis madam, I know not seems."

"The rest is silence..."

-Both from Hamlet.


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One of the many failing in indie rock recently has been its inability to deal with texting.

Some of the best music throughout history has been an attempt to deal with the technology of the time. Old blues lyrics about trains, all those motown songs which talk about telephones. I don't see why texting can't be a new force in pop songs. I mean texting is SO important to nearly everyone these days. I guess bands shy away from it cos it's a bit sad to write a song about texting. But texting is really profound. It's the modern equivalent of note-passing in class but it's better than note-passing because it holds with it a greater sense of risk. Text-flirting is completely detached from the corporeal world, all it is is words hanging in the air.

Grime managed to deal with it well, though. We've already heard I Luv U which mentions mobiles, but also this:



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It's a shame that the mountain goats cover of One Fine Day by the Chiffons is not very good, because it could be AMAZING. I mean, what a song. Like 'I'll Get You' by the Beatles, you can just hear the willful self-delusion (think positive!) in every single syllable.





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Will put up a hot chip review in the next few days.

x

Here's a review I wrote about a Stewart Lee gig for my student newspaper which was rejected, presumably because of the title (it's a heckle he got on the street in Aberdeen).

“Satirical C*nt.”

Stewart Lee “If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One” at The Music Hall, 10^th November 2009.

We live in facile times. We live in times when Michael McIntyre is considered something other than merely Michael McIntyre. Top Gear presenters scurry about our landscape in unattainable aluminium crushing saplings. Our age is crying out for someone to give it to us straight, like a pear cider that’s made from 100% pears. Stewart Lee may or may not be this man. He has certainly shed the universal misanthropic anger at the world around him of his youth and replaced it with a misanthropic anger about the world around him which has been forced on him against his will, by the continuing failings of popular culture as he sees it. The set’s general theme is the inescapability of pop culture; how hard it is to avoid Clive Anderson in the modern world, basically. The influence of stand-up newcomer and all-round zealot Josie Long is clear on Lee, who himself helped her break into the circuit. He has a newfound Longesque earnestness, inspired by his new status as a parent and by his disgust at the angry-about-nothing humour of the Frankie Boyles. Throughout the set there is a sense of a desperate will to be happy and content despite the frustrating world around him, even when he stands on a table in the middle of the audience and screams unamplified improvisation about the Mark Watson pear cider adverts for fifteen minutes, climaxing in his aggressively accosting someone getting up to use the loo with, “If you’ve EVER seen ANYTHING, you’ll KNOW that this must be pretty near the end.” The whole gig has the atmosphere not of a man struggling to be heard (he’s always been popular amongst those in the know, and always will be) but to find his voice. In the parenting world he has little to complain about, and wants it to stay that way, but this just means the minor disappointments push him over the edge even more. He finishes the set by singing a straight-up, unfunny rendition of Steve Earle’s ‘Galway Girl’, his favourite song, remarking to the audience, who tense up when they see him get a guitar, that the last taboo in stand-up isn’t rape, incest or the holocaust; it is a man trying to do something sincerely and well. Too true.