Tuesday 23 November 2010
Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad.
--------------
"Should anyone ask you,
'who composed this song?'
Should anyone ask you,
'who composed this song?'
Say, 'It was I! and
I sing it all day long.'"
Nice verse summing up the idea of folk music/all popular music from Worried Man Blues. You are the author of these thoughts, whether you know it or not.
-------------------
Interesting joke from John Lennon here. He mockingly refers to this song as being from 1822, deriding its old fashioned sound. But Johnny Burnette recorded the original in 1957, and I think this session is 1963 at the latest. Did the early 60s change the musical landscape THAT much? I can't imagine someone joking about a Girls Aloud song from 6 years ago like that.
--------------
Here's a selection of songs which are the only songs that I like by the artist that made them, if you get me. This actually means I have an unusually strong attachment to them; isolation increases passion.
I've talked about this one before and will continue to for a while. Easily in my top five videos ever. It was around the time of myspaces and full of myspace photo poses, which for a song about a fat girl being insecure is so great.
I feel like I should be ashamed of this one but that's not the way I do things like this.
I think the sentiment in this song is confused and poorly expressed, but the voice redeems it spectacularly.
I of course like Jay-Z, but this is the only time I like MOP's style of butch, macho cunt-rap. And it's all cos of that female vocal sample, which is spectacular. MOP rap clumsily and violently over the top, whilst the feminine quivers and squirms underneath the overbearing masculine, trying to seep up between the cracks of this charmless veneer with the faltering 'oh no' and 'do you believe' prayers which are offered not up to MOP, but higher still: to the listener.
"I don't claim to be no philosopher,
but I sure know, this isn't life."
A brief snippet of beauty at the start then MOP obliterate and ruin it, ignorant of the fragile distress underneath them.
Jay-Z is also on it and he is ok I guess.
--------------------
"I'll take my chances,
for romance is,
so important to me."
-------------------
Let's look at Wanda Jackson.
So that was amazing. And then:
"We think this is one of the most beautiful love songs that's ever been written"!!!!!
So, we're clearly in the presence of greatness. Wanda Jackson is exceptional for a number of reasons not least because she's absolutely fine about being completely removed of sex appeal (this will be a theme of this blog, btw nice article in the guardian recently about Polly Styrene's deliberate removal of herself from feminine sexuality) and female romantic platitude.
So:
To sing about love in a voice like that! I have two theories about it. It's either:
1) Meant to be a chain-smoker's voice; the sound of 3am end-of-a-twenty-deck heartbroken calls to no one.
or
2) Just deliberately ugly to remove oneself from emotional cliché.
They're of course not mutually exclusive, but I'm more tempted towards the second because of this:
25 seconds in, Wanda lets slip that plaintive, tender 'I love you' at the end of her shoegazings mumblings before a brutal sandpapered 'YEAHHH' comes in to affirm it. Wanda has moments of romantic normalcy bubbling underneath the surface, but covers it up with this anti-sexual voice. Which is great!
It's also assured by the fact that all her plain-singing songs about love are pretty much unexceptional and dull:
You can tell she'd rather be singing her voice in funnel of love here. The voice of battery acid, wasps and vinegar.
---------------------
'I Bid You Goodnight' by Any Old Time String Band (find it on spotify or buy it for 79p on amazon, I did both) is my favourite song right now. Here are the lyrics:
Lay down my dear sister
Won't you lay and take your rest
Won't you lay your head upon your saviours breast
And I love you but Jesus loves you the best
And I bid you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight,
And I bid you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight.
One of these mornings bright and early and fine.
Goodnight, goodnight
Not a cricket not a spirit going to shout me on
Goodnight, goodnight
I go walking in the valley of the shadow of death
Goodnight, goodnight
And his rod and his staff shall comfort me
Goodnight, goodnight
Oh John the wine he saw the sign
Goodnight, goodnight
Oh John say I seen a number of signs
Goodnight, goodnight
Tell A for the ark that wonderful boat
Goodnight, goodnight
You know they built it on the land getting water to float
Goodnight, goodnight
Tell B for the beast at the ending of the wood
Goodnight, goodnight
You know it ate all the children when they wouldn't be good
Goodnight, goodnight
I remember quite well, I remember quite well
Goodnight, goodnight
I was walking in Jerusalem just like John
Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight.
Ain't nothing I like more than Christianity for my pseudo-profundity (at a philosophy conference in Edinburgh recently I said that profundity and pseudo-profundity are the same thing when put to music and I could feel the collective intake of breath across the room).
I like it because it's about removing yourself from romantic and possibly sexual love in the aim of a higher cause (the jesus loves you the best couplet is one of my favs), which is nice. Then it's just a set of abstract, barely connected phrases which as we all know I'm very fond of as they're ripe for misinterpretation, which is where I come alive.
These aren't the exact lyrics on the original and I do recommend you seek it out but I got them from here which has some excellent poetry either end of them, which is mysterious but great.
-------------------
Gavin chastised me for liking Waugh, saying that he idealised the aristocracy that he claimed to lampoon. Martin Amis said something similar, saying Brideshead Revisited set egalitarianism as its target and unrelentingly gunned it down for 400 pages.
But I think they both miss the point and one of the reasons I really like Brideshead is it's about the idea that if you really want something, you to some extent already have/are that thing. Charles wants to be Sebastian, and when he gets his chance, he is better at being Sebastian than Sebastian ever can be. Some people, both in and out of the novel, accuse Charles of being cool and soulless, but in reality he is just calm and methodical in his acting out a life he's internally rehearsed thousands of times. Charles can seem ruthless but in reality is endeavouring to close the gulf between our private and public persona.
This song expresses a similar thing. A sexy song from the least sexy band ever. It reminds me of the Knife at points in its astonishing level of self-assurance. Fox knows what she is. Inside, we're all exactly what we want. Fox in this song is Charles around the time of his divorce: things are beginning to come apart in his plan, the world is not perfect and instead of getting upset he transcends himself to a yet higher realm, marrying Julia, and going for a more perfect union.
You know what, it comes back to I Bid You Goodnight, as everything in my life does at this moment. You spend an evening drinking and the whole world as you want it is laid out before your eyes, and you pull back and out, cos internal wranglings of the mind are better than anything he has to offer.
Internal sexual superiority and general, non-sexual romantic fantasy remains pure and intact when it's not put into use or practice.
"You thought it'd be great,
You thought it'd be great,
But a good mind does not a good fuck make"
-The Fall
---------------------
Just do not need this kind of song in my life at the moment. AND YET IT MOVES.
Tuesday 9 November 2010
Complex simplicity
Driving your pedigree dog across the country for it to have sex with another dog for money.
----------------------
Two songs which are commonly misunderstood and/or barely listened to properly.
It's a song about ringing up every guy you know and begging them for sex. Which is a great thing to write a song about. Complete, wanton, all-encompassing desperation. But people dance to this at weddings!
The Fully Monty made it a comedy song, which is so unfortunate, as it's surely one of the best disco hits. Those opening chords, sounding just like the tide coming in and out, then consolidated with that guitar, the one cohesive constant as pitch-shifted bongos drip and drop behind.
But listen! to the lyrics. Because in what way is sex the main theme here? Just saying 'you sexy thing' does not make it an anthem for impregnation.
'Yesterday,
I was one of the lonely people,
But now you're lying close to me,
Making love to me.'
Akin to:
'Wow, I can't believe yesterday morning I was trying to jerk off over Toni's answer-phone message, and this morning...!'
In both these quotes, the sex is the secondary consideration but you, you, you think otherwise, cos you don't care do you! The primary emotion, overriding all else, is the surprise and shock that someone wants you. A miracle. It's a reversal of 'Yesterday', with the same central message: nothing in the world makes sense when someone stops loving you, but when they start it is equally incomprehensible but we forget.
-------------------------
You know when you really think about it, I mean really think about it, Thomas the Tank Engine is about the Aristotelian notion of eudaimonic flourishing in both animate and inanimate objects. Think about it. Think it through.
I first noticed it when watching this which I was watching because I really like the song. I'm not sure why it exists.
-----------------------
Some recent reviews:
Tropics - Soft Vision
James Blake - Klavierwerke
Glasser - Ring
Antony and the Johnsons - Swanlights
I like my ever-growing habit of putting links to reviews of recent music in posts where I talk about songs that are 30 years old, don't you? Eh? Mate? Eh mate?
----------------------
Two songs which are commonly misunderstood and/or barely listened to properly.
It's a song about ringing up every guy you know and begging them for sex. Which is a great thing to write a song about. Complete, wanton, all-encompassing desperation. But people dance to this at weddings!
The Fully Monty made it a comedy song, which is so unfortunate, as it's surely one of the best disco hits. Those opening chords, sounding just like the tide coming in and out, then consolidated with that guitar, the one cohesive constant as pitch-shifted bongos drip and drop behind.
But listen! to the lyrics. Because in what way is sex the main theme here? Just saying 'you sexy thing' does not make it an anthem for impregnation.
'Yesterday,
I was one of the lonely people,
But now you're lying close to me,
Making love to me.'
Akin to:
'Wow, I can't believe yesterday morning I was trying to jerk off over Toni's answer-phone message, and this morning...!'
In both these quotes, the sex is the secondary consideration but you, you, you think otherwise, cos you don't care do you! The primary emotion, overriding all else, is the surprise and shock that someone wants you. A miracle. It's a reversal of 'Yesterday', with the same central message: nothing in the world makes sense when someone stops loving you, but when they start it is equally incomprehensible but we forget.
-------------------------
You know when you really think about it, I mean really think about it, Thomas the Tank Engine is about the Aristotelian notion of eudaimonic flourishing in both animate and inanimate objects. Think about it. Think it through.
I first noticed it when watching this which I was watching because I really like the song. I'm not sure why it exists.
-----------------------
Some recent reviews:
Tropics - Soft Vision
James Blake - Klavierwerke
Glasser - Ring
Antony and the Johnsons - Swanlights
I like my ever-growing habit of putting links to reviews of recent music in posts where I talk about songs that are 30 years old, don't you? Eh? Mate? Eh mate?
Monday 1 November 2010
You're not God's, you're one of mine.
Rufus Wainwright has appeared a lot doing excessively good songs on the soundtracks of reasonably bad films. Here's a quick guide.
Apparently this was for a film called Meet the Robinsons, which as far as I can tell is a pixar/psuedopixar cartoon thing. The use of extremely mature ideas of love in a kids' film is interesting. What could a child get from this other than beauty? And, as such, why did pixar/wannabepixar commission it?
'With arm pointing and the other arm holding your hand'- nice. Echoes of 'Love is not looking inwardly to one another, but looking outward in the same direction' whoever it was that said that.
This, my favourite version of Hallelujah ever, was commissioned for, of all things, a Shrek film. I haven't seen the film where it's used, but judging from the first Shrek film, which I have seen, they like to make strong use of kitschy cultural allusions to bolster the timelessness of the fairytales which they're all about. Still, it seems odd to have such a subversive version of such a subversise song for a project which involves Mike Myers.
Incidentally, 'Michael Myers Resplendent' was a Mountain Goats song title I adored when I thought it was about Mike Myers, and liked a lot less when I learnt that Michael Myers is the name of the serial killer from the Halloween series of horror films. It seems much less witty now, because it is.
This is from the Brokeback Mountain soundtrack. Rufus has a way with opening couplets, see the 'I pray for the power to stay/ in love with you' from Low Grade Happiness as a celestially perfect example. And this is another good example.
Silly fantasy dress-up from the soundtrack to a Howard Hughes biopic. Seems a bit trivial but consider:
"I got the blues,
And up above it's so fair,
Shoes,
Come and and carry me there."
Not dissimilar to My Sweet Lord in its cry for heaven. Or 'where is my mind' in its combination of the highest metaphysical with the lowest common experience. To bring the listener up to heaven's door, then drag them down as low as possible with the word 'shoes' in all its ludicrous, everyday tawdriness.
For a long time when I was young I thought the Beach Boys lyric, 'Wouldn't it be nice if we were older/Then we wouldn't have to wait so long?' meant wait so long to die. Which says many things.
This song as sung by Rufus wasn't in the History Boys, so I don't know what it's doing on the soundtrack. The song is in the film; Posner sings it to Dakin in a moment of all-too-often emotional honesty across a room full of sneering adolescent condescension. Later in the play, we learn that Posner eventually turns into a new and not-improved version of Hector, and thus such pathetically dogged, lowly moments like this represent the absolute high points of his entire romantic life as he prepares to spend the rest of his years continuing to stare at boys across the classroom.
"I'm not happy, but I'm not unhappy about that." says Posner, summing up Rufus' corpus of work well.
Apparently this was for a film called Meet the Robinsons, which as far as I can tell is a pixar/psuedopixar cartoon thing. The use of extremely mature ideas of love in a kids' film is interesting. What could a child get from this other than beauty? And, as such, why did pixar/wannabepixar commission it?
'With arm pointing and the other arm holding your hand'- nice. Echoes of 'Love is not looking inwardly to one another, but looking outward in the same direction' whoever it was that said that.
This, my favourite version of Hallelujah ever, was commissioned for, of all things, a Shrek film. I haven't seen the film where it's used, but judging from the first Shrek film, which I have seen, they like to make strong use of kitschy cultural allusions to bolster the timelessness of the fairytales which they're all about. Still, it seems odd to have such a subversive version of such a subversise song for a project which involves Mike Myers.
Incidentally, 'Michael Myers Resplendent' was a Mountain Goats song title I adored when I thought it was about Mike Myers, and liked a lot less when I learnt that Michael Myers is the name of the serial killer from the Halloween series of horror films. It seems much less witty now, because it is.
This is from the Brokeback Mountain soundtrack. Rufus has a way with opening couplets, see the 'I pray for the power to stay/ in love with you' from Low Grade Happiness as a celestially perfect example. And this is another good example.
Silly fantasy dress-up from the soundtrack to a Howard Hughes biopic. Seems a bit trivial but consider:
"I got the blues,
And up above it's so fair,
Shoes,
Come and and carry me there."
Not dissimilar to My Sweet Lord in its cry for heaven. Or 'where is my mind' in its combination of the highest metaphysical with the lowest common experience. To bring the listener up to heaven's door, then drag them down as low as possible with the word 'shoes' in all its ludicrous, everyday tawdriness.
For a long time when I was young I thought the Beach Boys lyric, 'Wouldn't it be nice if we were older/Then we wouldn't have to wait so long?' meant wait so long to die. Which says many things.
This song as sung by Rufus wasn't in the History Boys, so I don't know what it's doing on the soundtrack. The song is in the film; Posner sings it to Dakin in a moment of all-too-often emotional honesty across a room full of sneering adolescent condescension. Later in the play, we learn that Posner eventually turns into a new and not-improved version of Hector, and thus such pathetically dogged, lowly moments like this represent the absolute high points of his entire romantic life as he prepares to spend the rest of his years continuing to stare at boys across the classroom.
"I'm not happy, but I'm not unhappy about that." says Posner, summing up Rufus' corpus of work well.
Wednesday 27 October 2010
Sunday 10 October 2010
How I came to be.
Every lad my age has a special place in his heart for his mother. I think my mother helped me love music an awful lot and here are some of the reasons why.
----------------------
My eldest brother is ten years older than me and went to a private secondary school about 45 minutes' drive from my home town. So up until I was five years old I would sit in the car with my mother taking my brother there and back, twice a day, for three hours, five times a week.
She had two albums which she would play incessantly. First, the Talking Heads compilation Sand in the Vaseline and second, the bargain bin soul compilation Blues Brother Soul Sister.
The way soul sounds is a strange mix of the alien and the completely familiar, especially to a child. I think I was aware that these people were american and from a different time, and so they sounded like broadcasts from the abyss, but they also sounded like the only way music could be.
I forget who wrote this, but some journalist once was watching The Who smash their guitars on telly and turned to his older teenage brother and asked, 'why doesn't everyone play like that?' and his brother knowingly goes, 'yeah, why doesn't everyone play like that.' And when I listened to stuff like Aretha I didn't really understand, 'why doesn't everyone only listen to this?'
I found all of the stuff, from Sittin on the Dock of The Bay to Chain of Fools (which sounded especially alien), to be true beauty. I committed my first naturalistic fallacy and assumed that these records were music. Nothing else belonged to this higher plain. They revelled in the ecstasy of heartbreak and misery, and as the records became normality for me after their umpteenth playing, they never really lost any power. Or they did, but I found them simply amazing rather than shocking. I had a window of music in my day which enhanced the world, every day.
A lot of the Talking Heads stuff struck me as amazing but I only grasped the power of their lyrics and central message later on in my teenage years. The main thing I took from listening to them so early was an intense memory of their songs. The Remain in Light era Talking Heads especially, with its lackadaisical melodic loops, became like nursery rhymes to me; songs you don't really understand but which you remember for ever.
--------------------
One of the first things I ever asked my mother about music was, 'Is Little Richard fat?'
I assumed the name was ironic. Because Little Richard sounds like the fattest man in the world. He was my first ever favourite artist and later the first album I ever bought was one of his, a cheap Hallmark-type compilation from a stall in a hospital foyer at the age of 8, for 7 quid which is a lot for a lad with £2 pocket money a week. It is an amazing voice that opened new doors in a much better way than Elvis ever could, who was so impersonated he sounded to my 50-years-late ears like an impersonator. But Little Richard was an island on his own, unlike anything I'd ever heard. It is commonly said that the saxophone is the closest instrument, in range, tone and timbre, to the human voice. And Little Richard sounded like a saxophone. That raspy, up-and-down, bass heavy swing. The ubiquitous saxophone solos on his songs were, I thought, there to humiliate the saxophonist, as Little Richard entered the song after them and out-saxophoned the saxophone.
-------------------
The way my mother would sing would also help me personify these things and perhaps help me understand the adult emotions inside them, although I'm less sure about that last claim- I really think the emotional power of these songs is fairly obvious prima facie even to a four year old child. To this day I can't hear the opening horns of Rescue Me and not immediately recall, in one of the most powerful Proustian moments I have, sitting in the passenger seat of her black Peugeot 505 with her comically lowering her voice to sing the horns as she looked out the middle distance of the road. She would sing a lot, but with Rescue Me she for some reason only sang the horns and it was incredibly memorable.
--------------
Some songs I would take away from the car and bring into my own private world. I had a little 'den' in the hill above our house which was not a constructed den but the inside of a Rhododendron bush, often a good place for a child to have. I would take the Blues Brother/ Soul Sister tape out of the car and play it on my tape walkman (now in the possession of a Mr Gavin Leech), which was the one thing I insisted I wanted on the duty free on a cross-channel ferry, as I paced ferociously back and forth inside this bush. Dancing wasn't really something that occurred to me at the time, although I did formulate dance routines in my room to Little Richard records and the Talking Heads song 'Road to Nowhere' around the age of nine, but to begin with I didn't dance, I paced. It seemed to me to be the music of destiny, and pacing seemed like the thing that should be done to it; pretending to be a man of greatness for the duration of the song. The two songs that made me feel most like this were the original Booker T version of 'Green Onions' and the unparalleled 'Respect Yourself', which together with the New Testament is the greatest thing an 8-year-old bullying victim could ever do with his time.
I never really wanted to stop my furious pacing as it was going on and so, in order to prolong my musical self-aggrandisement, would listen to the songs over and over. I remember the song that came after Green Onions on the tape was 'Shout' by Lulu, and so whenever I heard the opening a capella 'we-e-e-e-e-ell, you know you make me wanna' at the start of 'shout' I would frantically press rewind to get to the start of green onions again. And I still don't really like the song 'Shout'. I have no doubt the two things are connected.
-------------------
My mother also instilled in me an ability to listen to the same song over and over again for hours, which came in prominently with Something Good 08 and What's It Gonna Be, both of which I listened exclusively to for weeks at a time. I feel that this is all due to one journey from Durham to Helsby after dropping the very same brother at University, when for three hours we listened to 'Stay' over and over again.
Just a little bit longer...
----------------
Probably the last thing my mother got me into was Mongo Santamaria, who she came to adore as she seriously took up dancing in her early 50s. The Mongo Santamaria album 'Watermelon Man' is probably the last record my mother revealed to me that I thought was entirely perfect, and still do to this day.
------------
The last moment of deepest musical connection I had with my mother was when I watched Stop Making Sense for the first time when I was 13- I was aware of it for years before I watched it. I watched it on my own in the living room with the door closed and went mental, dancing virtually continuously. Stop Making Sense struck me as the way dancing should be; free, ridiculous and totally removed from reality or sex appeal. So I just went crazy to it.
I came out of the room, sweaty and wild-eyed and the first thing I saw was my mother at the dining room table, just back from a shopping trip. We made eye contact and it was clear that she knew exactly how I felt. I now only get this eye contact from my mother when she wants to make it clear she knows I smoke.
-----------------
In my teenage years I got very into rock and metal as I entered a new and alien group of friends at 14, but gradually began to try to mould and bend this taste back to my old childish soul-obsessed roots, with bands like Aerosmith and The New York Dolls, but I was clutching at straws. I eventually gave up on rock music completely and accepted pop and dance as the way and the light thanks to my friend Rosie, and here I am today.
----------------------
My eldest brother is ten years older than me and went to a private secondary school about 45 minutes' drive from my home town. So up until I was five years old I would sit in the car with my mother taking my brother there and back, twice a day, for three hours, five times a week.
She had two albums which she would play incessantly. First, the Talking Heads compilation Sand in the Vaseline and second, the bargain bin soul compilation Blues Brother Soul Sister.
The way soul sounds is a strange mix of the alien and the completely familiar, especially to a child. I think I was aware that these people were american and from a different time, and so they sounded like broadcasts from the abyss, but they also sounded like the only way music could be.
I forget who wrote this, but some journalist once was watching The Who smash their guitars on telly and turned to his older teenage brother and asked, 'why doesn't everyone play like that?' and his brother knowingly goes, 'yeah, why doesn't everyone play like that.' And when I listened to stuff like Aretha I didn't really understand, 'why doesn't everyone only listen to this?'
I found all of the stuff, from Sittin on the Dock of The Bay to Chain of Fools (which sounded especially alien), to be true beauty. I committed my first naturalistic fallacy and assumed that these records were music. Nothing else belonged to this higher plain. They revelled in the ecstasy of heartbreak and misery, and as the records became normality for me after their umpteenth playing, they never really lost any power. Or they did, but I found them simply amazing rather than shocking. I had a window of music in my day which enhanced the world, every day.
A lot of the Talking Heads stuff struck me as amazing but I only grasped the power of their lyrics and central message later on in my teenage years. The main thing I took from listening to them so early was an intense memory of their songs. The Remain in Light era Talking Heads especially, with its lackadaisical melodic loops, became like nursery rhymes to me; songs you don't really understand but which you remember for ever.
--------------------
One of the first things I ever asked my mother about music was, 'Is Little Richard fat?'
I assumed the name was ironic. Because Little Richard sounds like the fattest man in the world. He was my first ever favourite artist and later the first album I ever bought was one of his, a cheap Hallmark-type compilation from a stall in a hospital foyer at the age of 8, for 7 quid which is a lot for a lad with £2 pocket money a week. It is an amazing voice that opened new doors in a much better way than Elvis ever could, who was so impersonated he sounded to my 50-years-late ears like an impersonator. But Little Richard was an island on his own, unlike anything I'd ever heard. It is commonly said that the saxophone is the closest instrument, in range, tone and timbre, to the human voice. And Little Richard sounded like a saxophone. That raspy, up-and-down, bass heavy swing. The ubiquitous saxophone solos on his songs were, I thought, there to humiliate the saxophonist, as Little Richard entered the song after them and out-saxophoned the saxophone.
-------------------
The way my mother would sing would also help me personify these things and perhaps help me understand the adult emotions inside them, although I'm less sure about that last claim- I really think the emotional power of these songs is fairly obvious prima facie even to a four year old child. To this day I can't hear the opening horns of Rescue Me and not immediately recall, in one of the most powerful Proustian moments I have, sitting in the passenger seat of her black Peugeot 505 with her comically lowering her voice to sing the horns as she looked out the middle distance of the road. She would sing a lot, but with Rescue Me she for some reason only sang the horns and it was incredibly memorable.
--------------
Some songs I would take away from the car and bring into my own private world. I had a little 'den' in the hill above our house which was not a constructed den but the inside of a Rhododendron bush, often a good place for a child to have. I would take the Blues Brother/ Soul Sister tape out of the car and play it on my tape walkman (now in the possession of a Mr Gavin Leech), which was the one thing I insisted I wanted on the duty free on a cross-channel ferry, as I paced ferociously back and forth inside this bush. Dancing wasn't really something that occurred to me at the time, although I did formulate dance routines in my room to Little Richard records and the Talking Heads song 'Road to Nowhere' around the age of nine, but to begin with I didn't dance, I paced. It seemed to me to be the music of destiny, and pacing seemed like the thing that should be done to it; pretending to be a man of greatness for the duration of the song. The two songs that made me feel most like this were the original Booker T version of 'Green Onions' and the unparalleled 'Respect Yourself', which together with the New Testament is the greatest thing an 8-year-old bullying victim could ever do with his time.
I never really wanted to stop my furious pacing as it was going on and so, in order to prolong my musical self-aggrandisement, would listen to the songs over and over. I remember the song that came after Green Onions on the tape was 'Shout' by Lulu, and so whenever I heard the opening a capella 'we-e-e-e-e-ell, you know you make me wanna' at the start of 'shout' I would frantically press rewind to get to the start of green onions again. And I still don't really like the song 'Shout'. I have no doubt the two things are connected.
-------------------
My mother also instilled in me an ability to listen to the same song over and over again for hours, which came in prominently with Something Good 08 and What's It Gonna Be, both of which I listened exclusively to for weeks at a time. I feel that this is all due to one journey from Durham to Helsby after dropping the very same brother at University, when for three hours we listened to 'Stay' over and over again.
Just a little bit longer...
----------------
Probably the last thing my mother got me into was Mongo Santamaria, who she came to adore as she seriously took up dancing in her early 50s. The Mongo Santamaria album 'Watermelon Man' is probably the last record my mother revealed to me that I thought was entirely perfect, and still do to this day.
------------
The last moment of deepest musical connection I had with my mother was when I watched Stop Making Sense for the first time when I was 13- I was aware of it for years before I watched it. I watched it on my own in the living room with the door closed and went mental, dancing virtually continuously. Stop Making Sense struck me as the way dancing should be; free, ridiculous and totally removed from reality or sex appeal. So I just went crazy to it.
I came out of the room, sweaty and wild-eyed and the first thing I saw was my mother at the dining room table, just back from a shopping trip. We made eye contact and it was clear that she knew exactly how I felt. I now only get this eye contact from my mother when she wants to make it clear she knows I smoke.
-----------------
In my teenage years I got very into rock and metal as I entered a new and alien group of friends at 14, but gradually began to try to mould and bend this taste back to my old childish soul-obsessed roots, with bands like Aerosmith and The New York Dolls, but I was clutching at straws. I eventually gave up on rock music completely and accepted pop and dance as the way and the light thanks to my friend Rosie, and here I am today.
Tuesday 5 October 2010
To suffer with the saviour
-------------------------------------
Yelle should have gone the way of Peaches.
---------------------
That Villagers guy isn't half a knobhead.
------------------
Cee-Lo Forget You/Fuck You shows so perfectly how pop music can sometimes be unsurpressably ugly.
Tuesday 8 June 2010
And he rode forth to the Wirral, where men's hearts grow black.
^^^Nice 14th century diss of West Kirby from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight there.^^^
-------------
Rufus Wainwright recorded his Rufus! Rufus! Rufus! album to come to terms with the fact he didn't really get the original Judy Garland one, and I went to California to get his version of San Francisco from it out of my head. Perhaps the most expensive way possible of getting rid of a song?
Not much to say about California which isn't clichéd, which isn't the same as not having anything to say, but I will say that it's very much like those sets of California, eg the exterior scenes in Curb Your Enthusiasm, which don't look real but are in fact incredibly accurate. Clean streets and concrete, slow-moving cars, good-looking people, just this weird a priori sense of liberalism in all around you.
---------------
On my way to California I had to spend four hours in Newark airport, and aside from pressing my nose to the glass and looking at the New York skyline like young Vito Corleone, I drifted around and listened to Dream Operator by Talking Heads as I watched the pilots having lunch with each other and sharing pilot-anecdotes in the fake diners and looked at the bitching families buy 500 cigarettes out of sheer desperation and resentment of one another. Because the Talking Heads album True Stories is, and I've said this before, the very sound of shopping centres, and airports are shopping centres.
---------------------------
There is a book called 'Oranges are not the only fruit.'
If I wrote a book about my time in California, I would call it 'Cinnamon is not the only spice.'
-------------------
Were I ever to write a book about pop music, I would call it 'Ode to Wigan Pier'.
----------------
How nice is the 'oh-oh-oh' bit at 33 seconds, and other points, in that song just above? I love it when people do that. If I were a singer I'd probably do that all the time.
One of the main reasons I like the first wild beasts album so much (and the second too but less so) is that it's basically the sound of a band doing what i always wanted, which is doing 'that' all the time just as I would in my non-existant band. my favourite bits in songs are always when singers push the melody a bit out of its boundary, as in I Touch Myself or the splendid middle 8 of this boy where lennon is on the verge of going mental. Kurt Cobain was also good at it, to the point where he did an entire performance in this undefinable way that i'm trying to define. I always wanted a band to consist solely of these bits in songs where people mess about.
Piss-taking, is what I mean, but doing it straight-faced. Aint nuttin better.
----------------------------
I was watching one of those Jonathon Dimbleby documentaries about Africa before and he said something along the lines of:
"I don't want a lie, just a small picture of something that may or may not be true."
That's a great thing to say!
-------------
Some recent reviews:
Wave Pictures- Sweetheart
Matthew Dear- I Can't Feel (I would not really give this four stars, FACT's stars are like astrological stars, they never correspond to reality)
Uffie- Sex Dreams and Denim Jeans
Arcade Fire- The Suburbs
Klaxons- Surfing the Void
Glasser- Home
Antony and the Johnsons- Thank You for Your Love
-------------
"Cos I'm so tired of waiting in restaurants,
Reading the critics and comics alone."
This couplet is the key to understanding Rufus Wainwright, I think. I don't think Rufus Wainwright is a hedonist in any real way. It's about the emptiness of trying to enjoy yourself. Eating in a restaurant, a (slightly) extravagant and decadent thing to do, especially when you're on your own, which suggests it's a regular habit, and ending up reading the easy parts of a newspaper, cos you're afraid of adulthood. And only a genius could give us so much with so little.
"With a waiter,
with a face made for currency,
like a coin in ancient Rome."
----------------
Barely anyone respected Mutya Buena's solo album at the time, but you still hear 'Song 4 Mutya' and 'Real Girl' all over the place*, and rightly so.
*in New Look but since when was that nothing?
-----------------
"We flurry quickstacks past too many hills."
Poetic genius from James Lightfoot on trains. Betjeman would be proud.
----------------
Some lyrics I've noticed recently which sound so natural and normal but would never be spoken by anyone:
"From the moment I saw him I fell"
-Judy Garland's Trolley Song. Just 'i fell', it ends there. Queer.
"Fire,
I'll take you to burn."
-That song about Fire.
-------------------
They played a country song in a branch of Spar in Germany which had the refrain:
"We could be happy,
Relatively happy."
Marvellous.
I think at one point he even sang, 'pretty relatively happy'
Double qualifiers! Amazing. For what is love without doubt? As Wittgenstein probably once said.
------------------
Good thing about country music is that it's about sin and loneliness from the point of view of fervent religiosity. So everything is connected to God, and God is connected to everything. And thus we're in double-meanings territory, my territory. Here's one of the best examples of this. Did you ever drink a cup of loneliness with him? I'm sure this can't be the only time someone's compared taking communion with a late night drink with another man (which the song is all but explicitly about), but it's so special.
Country music is inherently conservative, from the sound to the lyrics- GOD GOD GOD DRINK GOD LOVE (-VIA GOD) GOD- to the performers and especially of course the audience. Even the guy's name is 'George Jones' for heaven's sake.
But 'taint a thing to be afraid of.
'Devil got the best tunes, God got the best buildings.'
says Jonathan Meades. Perhaps true, but there are exceptions...
--------------
And the sound of country music. Simple, blocks of lyrics and sounds, with slide guitar that sounds like swaying grass weeping between them from one to the other. The sound of redemption, of being washed of sin.
"If there is a sin,
Then there is a sinner too,
If there is a lie,
Then there is a liar too."
I do like priestly artists, I do.
-------------------
"Shoulders and knees,
Elbows and waists,
How can you be in two places at once?
You twist yourself
All out of shape,
Whoop there it is, do it again,
The world is fiction,
Special effects,
You can't believe what is coming next,
Sparks of light,
Balls of fire,
Whoop, what are we living for?"
I do think Talking Heads write about intoxication, and the sheer existential absurdism of parties and having fun, better than any band o' lads you'll find from here to anywhere. So, Kasabian, your career's been wasted! But we already knew that.
-----------
-------------
Rufus Wainwright recorded his Rufus! Rufus! Rufus! album to come to terms with the fact he didn't really get the original Judy Garland one, and I went to California to get his version of San Francisco from it out of my head. Perhaps the most expensive way possible of getting rid of a song?
Not much to say about California which isn't clichéd, which isn't the same as not having anything to say, but I will say that it's very much like those sets of California, eg the exterior scenes in Curb Your Enthusiasm, which don't look real but are in fact incredibly accurate. Clean streets and concrete, slow-moving cars, good-looking people, just this weird a priori sense of liberalism in all around you.
---------------
On my way to California I had to spend four hours in Newark airport, and aside from pressing my nose to the glass and looking at the New York skyline like young Vito Corleone, I drifted around and listened to Dream Operator by Talking Heads as I watched the pilots having lunch with each other and sharing pilot-anecdotes in the fake diners and looked at the bitching families buy 500 cigarettes out of sheer desperation and resentment of one another. Because the Talking Heads album True Stories is, and I've said this before, the very sound of shopping centres, and airports are shopping centres.
---------------------------
There is a book called 'Oranges are not the only fruit.'
If I wrote a book about my time in California, I would call it 'Cinnamon is not the only spice.'
-------------------
Were I ever to write a book about pop music, I would call it 'Ode to Wigan Pier'.
----------------
How nice is the 'oh-oh-oh' bit at 33 seconds, and other points, in that song just above? I love it when people do that. If I were a singer I'd probably do that all the time.
One of the main reasons I like the first wild beasts album so much (and the second too but less so) is that it's basically the sound of a band doing what i always wanted, which is doing 'that' all the time just as I would in my non-existant band. my favourite bits in songs are always when singers push the melody a bit out of its boundary, as in I Touch Myself or the splendid middle 8 of this boy where lennon is on the verge of going mental. Kurt Cobain was also good at it, to the point where he did an entire performance in this undefinable way that i'm trying to define. I always wanted a band to consist solely of these bits in songs where people mess about.
Piss-taking, is what I mean, but doing it straight-faced. Aint nuttin better.
----------------------------
I was watching one of those Jonathon Dimbleby documentaries about Africa before and he said something along the lines of:
"I don't want a lie, just a small picture of something that may or may not be true."
That's a great thing to say!
-------------
Some recent reviews:
Wave Pictures- Sweetheart
Matthew Dear- I Can't Feel (I would not really give this four stars, FACT's stars are like astrological stars, they never correspond to reality)
Uffie- Sex Dreams and Denim Jeans
Arcade Fire- The Suburbs
Klaxons- Surfing the Void
Glasser- Home
Antony and the Johnsons- Thank You for Your Love
-------------
"Cos I'm so tired of waiting in restaurants,
Reading the critics and comics alone."
This couplet is the key to understanding Rufus Wainwright, I think. I don't think Rufus Wainwright is a hedonist in any real way. It's about the emptiness of trying to enjoy yourself. Eating in a restaurant, a (slightly) extravagant and decadent thing to do, especially when you're on your own, which suggests it's a regular habit, and ending up reading the easy parts of a newspaper, cos you're afraid of adulthood. And only a genius could give us so much with so little.
"With a waiter,
with a face made for currency,
like a coin in ancient Rome."
----------------
Barely anyone respected Mutya Buena's solo album at the time, but you still hear 'Song 4 Mutya' and 'Real Girl' all over the place*, and rightly so.
*in New Look but since when was that nothing?
-----------------
"We flurry quickstacks past too many hills."
Poetic genius from James Lightfoot on trains. Betjeman would be proud.
----------------
Some lyrics I've noticed recently which sound so natural and normal but would never be spoken by anyone:
"From the moment I saw him I fell"
-Judy Garland's Trolley Song. Just 'i fell', it ends there. Queer.
"Fire,
I'll take you to burn."
-That song about Fire.
-------------------
They played a country song in a branch of Spar in Germany which had the refrain:
"We could be happy,
Relatively happy."
Marvellous.
I think at one point he even sang, 'pretty relatively happy'
Double qualifiers! Amazing. For what is love without doubt? As Wittgenstein probably once said.
------------------
Good thing about country music is that it's about sin and loneliness from the point of view of fervent religiosity. So everything is connected to God, and God is connected to everything. And thus we're in double-meanings territory, my territory. Here's one of the best examples of this. Did you ever drink a cup of loneliness with him? I'm sure this can't be the only time someone's compared taking communion with a late night drink with another man (which the song is all but explicitly about), but it's so special.
Country music is inherently conservative, from the sound to the lyrics- GOD GOD GOD DRINK GOD LOVE (-VIA GOD) GOD- to the performers and especially of course the audience. Even the guy's name is 'George Jones' for heaven's sake.
But 'taint a thing to be afraid of.
'Devil got the best tunes, God got the best buildings.'
says Jonathan Meades. Perhaps true, but there are exceptions...
--------------
And the sound of country music. Simple, blocks of lyrics and sounds, with slide guitar that sounds like swaying grass weeping between them from one to the other. The sound of redemption, of being washed of sin.
"If there is a sin,
Then there is a sinner too,
If there is a lie,
Then there is a liar too."
I do like priestly artists, I do.
-------------------
"Shoulders and knees,
Elbows and waists,
How can you be in two places at once?
You twist yourself
All out of shape,
Whoop there it is, do it again,
The world is fiction,
Special effects,
You can't believe what is coming next,
Sparks of light,
Balls of fire,
Whoop, what are we living for?"
I do think Talking Heads write about intoxication, and the sheer existential absurdism of parties and having fun, better than any band o' lads you'll find from here to anywhere. So, Kasabian, your career's been wasted! But we already knew that.
-----------
Friday 4 June 2010
needs wants acts omissions
Gavin pointed out recently that the first verse of 'pretty woman' by troglodyte orbison contains the lyric, 'you are not the truth'. As someone who has based their life around finding moments of profundity and intellectual perfection in pop music, I'd never noticed this but it does merit some consideration. What it means, either semantically or philosophically, we are unsure.
Pretty Woman is a crazy song, though. At the start, it's just about seeing a fitty on the street and that's that. But by the last verse, we're suddenly talking about needs and his eternal loneliness. Wild extrapolations.
"A need can mean nothing but should be held higher."
-Hot Chip.
A lot of music from around then is good like this. I like songs about unrequited affection, and there surely must be more songs about that than any other subject. But a lot of the songs from the early 60s were about love that was TOTALLY unrequited. I like that. The Chiffons were, of course, the masters of this. Beatles songs were always about having someone, then losing them, or someone being a tease, and you get somewhere but they're never properly yours. 'I want to hold your hand' carries with it the prospect that it could actually happen. Whereas Chiffons songs were always about having NO CONNECTION whatsoever to the person of your dreams. They're just about staring and admiring, never speaking, always dreaming. My dad once dismissed Ys by Newsom as 'Dear Diary music' which is kinda accurate but the chiffons are teenage girl Dear Diary music and it's just wonderful.
"Sooner or later,
....I hope it's not later."
"If I were a queen"
------------
I remember when there were lynx adverts when I was 17 that featured a guy spraying lynx on his torso and then going out with this clicker thing that had a dial on it. Every time a woman looked at him in any vaguely positive way he'd click it. And people at my schools bought these clicker things and would click away all day. It was, so obviously, a physical manifestation of everything I have ever despised. A competitive element very quickly entered it between the guys, and this quantity not quality principle wasn't helped by the fact that they felt any glance was a sign that the woman felt he was an adonis and all she could hear was 'sweat' by inner circle' going round and round in her head non-stop. So they'd always have improbably high numbers at the end of the day, I mean in the seventies and so on. Cunts, deluded cunts.
------
"Why do I always fall in love with any woman who shows the slightest bit of interest in me?"
-That guy from eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.
"Men always think that whenever women say anything to them it means they want them. We're really just saying things."
-My mum.
--------------
If Roy Orbison had one of those counter things it'd just have one click but he'd have done it so hard the button would be snapped off.
---------------
I mean here's another example of how early 60s american pop always seemed to about distance and walls between people much more than it is now. 'You don't know how I love you' is a really common lyric from that time. You'd never get a popstar singing that these days. It's all about being a prick and imperfection. Which I like too, of course. I'm just saying.
I thought the singer of this song was a girl for a very long time. Nice and androgynous, that's how we like it.
---------------
Incidentally there's a chiffons lyric, "I don't know what I don't know."
Which is much better than Karen O's "I know what I know" if you ask me.
------
Check out that. One theme, successfully carried through the whole blog. Bang.
Pretty Woman is a crazy song, though. At the start, it's just about seeing a fitty on the street and that's that. But by the last verse, we're suddenly talking about needs and his eternal loneliness. Wild extrapolations.
"A need can mean nothing but should be held higher."
-Hot Chip.
A lot of music from around then is good like this. I like songs about unrequited affection, and there surely must be more songs about that than any other subject. But a lot of the songs from the early 60s were about love that was TOTALLY unrequited. I like that. The Chiffons were, of course, the masters of this. Beatles songs were always about having someone, then losing them, or someone being a tease, and you get somewhere but they're never properly yours. 'I want to hold your hand' carries with it the prospect that it could actually happen. Whereas Chiffons songs were always about having NO CONNECTION whatsoever to the person of your dreams. They're just about staring and admiring, never speaking, always dreaming. My dad once dismissed Ys by Newsom as 'Dear Diary music' which is kinda accurate but the chiffons are teenage girl Dear Diary music and it's just wonderful.
"Sooner or later,
....I hope it's not later."
"If I were a queen"
------------
I remember when there were lynx adverts when I was 17 that featured a guy spraying lynx on his torso and then going out with this clicker thing that had a dial on it. Every time a woman looked at him in any vaguely positive way he'd click it. And people at my schools bought these clicker things and would click away all day. It was, so obviously, a physical manifestation of everything I have ever despised. A competitive element very quickly entered it between the guys, and this quantity not quality principle wasn't helped by the fact that they felt any glance was a sign that the woman felt he was an adonis and all she could hear was 'sweat' by inner circle' going round and round in her head non-stop. So they'd always have improbably high numbers at the end of the day, I mean in the seventies and so on. Cunts, deluded cunts.
------
"Why do I always fall in love with any woman who shows the slightest bit of interest in me?"
-That guy from eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.
"Men always think that whenever women say anything to them it means they want them. We're really just saying things."
-My mum.
--------------
If Roy Orbison had one of those counter things it'd just have one click but he'd have done it so hard the button would be snapped off.
---------------
I mean here's another example of how early 60s american pop always seemed to about distance and walls between people much more than it is now. 'You don't know how I love you' is a really common lyric from that time. You'd never get a popstar singing that these days. It's all about being a prick and imperfection. Which I like too, of course. I'm just saying.
I thought the singer of this song was a girl for a very long time. Nice and androgynous, that's how we like it.
---------------
Incidentally there's a chiffons lyric, "I don't know what I don't know."
Which is much better than Karen O's "I know what I know" if you ask me.
------
Check out that. One theme, successfully carried through the whole blog. Bang.
Friday 28 May 2010
Big hunk o' chunk.
Loads of recent reviews:
New Hot Club EP
Born Ruffians- Pile o' shit.
Crystal Castles- Good Stuff
David Byrne- Work of Crystalline pop genius
Roll Deep- Jus' Deppressin'
The Fall- O FFS.
Serena Maneesh- Mucky puppies.
--------------------------
Rufus Wainwright review for Gaudie:
Rufus Wainwright
All Days are Nights: Songs for Lulu
This review will avoid the two standard journalistic clichés you find nailed to Rufus Wainwright all the time: (1) that he’s a hedonistic ex-drug addict Wildean gone wild, and (2) that he makes ‘orchestral pop’. These are neither important nor particularly true; Rufus, like Joanna Newsom, uses inventive methods to create wide-ranging, idiosyncratic pop music, which doesn’t mean it’s ‘chamber pop’ or anything else. Anyway, on All Days are Nights, all this is gone and it’s Wainwright alone with piano, so close and so simple that you can hear him draw breath.
He has always been an extroverted, anti-private artist, but it’s more the case than ever on this album. It sounds like the songs are constructed as they go along. This is best expressed on ‘The Dream’, at the heart of the album, which is a five-minute drift around Rufus’ confused consciousness, like in the few moments after you awake from a dream and rapidly, second by second, it slips away from you, remembering less and less with each passing moment. As it is in life, so it is in art.
Three Shakespearean sonnets are translated into songs-sonnets 43, 20, and 10 (we’re mercifully saved from 18 ever becoming a pop song), to be exact. These are the choice cuts from a project Rufus did just before the premiere of his first opera last year (incidentally ‘Les Feux d’artifice t’appellent’ on this album is a stripped down version of the final aria from that opera), involving a wider selection of the sonnets. The sonnets he chose are about Shakespeare’s elusive ‘dark lady’, and Rufus claims that Lulu is the dark lady within us all. And the album does brood, somewhat sultry and detached, complex, perhaps even inhospitable at points. But, just like Shakespeare, we don’t find this sultriness repellent, but enticing, and so you are drawn in.
The piano is complex, soft, trailing and trawling underneath Rufus’s drawling, the songs sprawling out across his well tempered clavier. Rufus, lacking his usual constellation of instruments, uses the piano’s huge range of sounds and techniques to full effect, from swells of arpeggios to bashy chords, to plucking the strings and hitting the soundboard. Rufus sings in a low register, sometimes coming close to mumbling, for much of the time, only to break up into smooth, serene highs at the apexes of the songs.
People have said, and will say, that the album is burdensomely miserable and melancholic, yet misery is not what the album is about. The truth is that Rufus Wainwright has a slightly sad, hangdog voice, in all of his songs on all of his albums. He is always yearning for something more, it is the voice of a self-centred man, and to be self-centred is to be melancholy. But on previous albums this has been hidden underneath swathes of Ravel, or huge, bold brass. But on this album, there is nowhere to hide. It reveals what Rufus has been trying to express for a long time; the inherent sadness in wholeheartedly throwing yourself at the world. This is just a standard Rufus Wainwright album with the more fantastic parts and exotic arrangements removed, and we’re left with nothing but him. It’s not a ‘sad’ album as such, it’s just a thoughtful album, and thoughtfulness is so often confused with being miserable, or boring. But it’s neither of these things, and nor is this album.
--------------------------------
I also reviewed this Alicia Keys single not realising it wasn't gonna be released in britain and so obviously didn't get published.
Alicia Keys ft, Beyoncé
Put It In a Love Song
Let it ring out across the hills. Luscious, opulent R&B is back. Everyone’s talking about Gaga’s Telephone right now, but this is the Beyoncé cameo that deserves true attention. Beyoncé is unquestionably at the top, or approaching the top, of her game right now but whereas in Telephone she was supporting an essentially weak song, here she’s just part of what is an already beautiful song. Alicia Keys is a sporadic producer of moments of pop genius, every few years she comes along with a song that is universally adored; think of Fallin’, No One, and recently Empire State of Mind part II.
This is the next part of this series. At first it sounds simply, perhaps merely, beautiful but eventually you realise that there’s nothing conventional about it. The chorus is a series of descending pleas asking for universalised affection; if you love me, do everything that anyone has ever done when they love someone. The verse starts, and it’s insanely hyperactive-“ifyoureallyneedmelikeyousayyouneedme”- and continues the onslaught of demands and affirmations.
Beyoncé comes in, as she does in Telephone, as the robust, bolshy shadow of the song. Her range has always been small but more than enough, and her cameo is a brief stripe of aggression before the blissy, quivering chorus comes and washes everything else away. Then they sing in tandem for a burst of anger in the middle eight, before, once again, more chorus loveliness.
The song is surprisingly minimalist, musically speaking. The verses consist of just a rattling drumbeat, over which is put a trail of three or four notes on guitar or piano at occasional points throughout the song. The song is whiney but beautiful, commanding but fragile, threatening but a request for commitment.
I don’t know what pop music should sound like if not like this.
New Hot Club EP
Born Ruffians- Pile o' shit.
Crystal Castles- Good Stuff
David Byrne- Work of Crystalline pop genius
Roll Deep- Jus' Deppressin'
The Fall- O FFS.
Serena Maneesh- Mucky puppies.
--------------------------
Rufus Wainwright review for Gaudie:
Rufus Wainwright
All Days are Nights: Songs for Lulu
This review will avoid the two standard journalistic clichés you find nailed to Rufus Wainwright all the time: (1) that he’s a hedonistic ex-drug addict Wildean gone wild, and (2) that he makes ‘orchestral pop’. These are neither important nor particularly true; Rufus, like Joanna Newsom, uses inventive methods to create wide-ranging, idiosyncratic pop music, which doesn’t mean it’s ‘chamber pop’ or anything else. Anyway, on All Days are Nights, all this is gone and it’s Wainwright alone with piano, so close and so simple that you can hear him draw breath.
He has always been an extroverted, anti-private artist, but it’s more the case than ever on this album. It sounds like the songs are constructed as they go along. This is best expressed on ‘The Dream’, at the heart of the album, which is a five-minute drift around Rufus’ confused consciousness, like in the few moments after you awake from a dream and rapidly, second by second, it slips away from you, remembering less and less with each passing moment. As it is in life, so it is in art.
Three Shakespearean sonnets are translated into songs-sonnets 43, 20, and 10 (we’re mercifully saved from 18 ever becoming a pop song), to be exact. These are the choice cuts from a project Rufus did just before the premiere of his first opera last year (incidentally ‘Les Feux d’artifice t’appellent’ on this album is a stripped down version of the final aria from that opera), involving a wider selection of the sonnets. The sonnets he chose are about Shakespeare’s elusive ‘dark lady’, and Rufus claims that Lulu is the dark lady within us all. And the album does brood, somewhat sultry and detached, complex, perhaps even inhospitable at points. But, just like Shakespeare, we don’t find this sultriness repellent, but enticing, and so you are drawn in.
The piano is complex, soft, trailing and trawling underneath Rufus’s drawling, the songs sprawling out across his well tempered clavier. Rufus, lacking his usual constellation of instruments, uses the piano’s huge range of sounds and techniques to full effect, from swells of arpeggios to bashy chords, to plucking the strings and hitting the soundboard. Rufus sings in a low register, sometimes coming close to mumbling, for much of the time, only to break up into smooth, serene highs at the apexes of the songs.
People have said, and will say, that the album is burdensomely miserable and melancholic, yet misery is not what the album is about. The truth is that Rufus Wainwright has a slightly sad, hangdog voice, in all of his songs on all of his albums. He is always yearning for something more, it is the voice of a self-centred man, and to be self-centred is to be melancholy. But on previous albums this has been hidden underneath swathes of Ravel, or huge, bold brass. But on this album, there is nowhere to hide. It reveals what Rufus has been trying to express for a long time; the inherent sadness in wholeheartedly throwing yourself at the world. This is just a standard Rufus Wainwright album with the more fantastic parts and exotic arrangements removed, and we’re left with nothing but him. It’s not a ‘sad’ album as such, it’s just a thoughtful album, and thoughtfulness is so often confused with being miserable, or boring. But it’s neither of these things, and nor is this album.
--------------------------------
I also reviewed this Alicia Keys single not realising it wasn't gonna be released in britain and so obviously didn't get published.
Alicia Keys ft, Beyoncé
Put It In a Love Song
Let it ring out across the hills. Luscious, opulent R&B is back. Everyone’s talking about Gaga’s Telephone right now, but this is the Beyoncé cameo that deserves true attention. Beyoncé is unquestionably at the top, or approaching the top, of her game right now but whereas in Telephone she was supporting an essentially weak song, here she’s just part of what is an already beautiful song. Alicia Keys is a sporadic producer of moments of pop genius, every few years she comes along with a song that is universally adored; think of Fallin’, No One, and recently Empire State of Mind part II.
This is the next part of this series. At first it sounds simply, perhaps merely, beautiful but eventually you realise that there’s nothing conventional about it. The chorus is a series of descending pleas asking for universalised affection; if you love me, do everything that anyone has ever done when they love someone. The verse starts, and it’s insanely hyperactive-“ifyoureallyneedmelikeyousayyouneedme”- and continues the onslaught of demands and affirmations.
Beyoncé comes in, as she does in Telephone, as the robust, bolshy shadow of the song. Her range has always been small but more than enough, and her cameo is a brief stripe of aggression before the blissy, quivering chorus comes and washes everything else away. Then they sing in tandem for a burst of anger in the middle eight, before, once again, more chorus loveliness.
The song is surprisingly minimalist, musically speaking. The verses consist of just a rattling drumbeat, over which is put a trail of three or four notes on guitar or piano at occasional points throughout the song. The song is whiney but beautiful, commanding but fragile, threatening but a request for commitment.
I don’t know what pop music should sound like if not like this.
Thursday 27 May 2010
Wednesday 26 May 2010
Monday 24 May 2010
Dizzee does the establishment.
Let us discuss this
Recent dizzee interview:
Interviewer: What kind of music do you like?
Dizzee (quick as a flash): I like songs about sex and violence.
Brother silverdollar long ago mentioned dizzee's talent for beautiful quips such as this, in a post also mentioning his predictions that he'll rise to be 'a pop star who knows EXACTLY what his point is'. This is what I wanna talk about with the above video.
I think that, really, Dizzee has done exactly what we wanted him to, but we're still disappointed like pricks. What else did we imagine would happen? Dizzee rapping (well) in a tuxedo to harps with the latest indie star feels intuitively wrong (and part of his ongoing attempt to emulate jay-z), but what else could he do?
Roll Deep were on top of the pops once, in the dying days of both institutions. They did a little dance routine (wiley's alarmingly fond of dance routines it'd seem). It were reet 'orrible. I saw Wiley live after wearing my rolex had just properly landed and he did the 'authentic' grime thing; 25 second songs before a rewind. And he was getting bottled.
Do we really want dizzee to be a pop star (which we do) and just continue to do stuff like this at the NME awards? Bloggers complaining about him going commercial are properly bullshit, let them eat vinyl. I think why we wanted dizzee to get massive is cos he was obviously a subversive genius with such a universally applicable way of looking at things that he just HAD to be massive. But he was good cos he was shocking. And this is shocking.
To do it the Wiley way, which is the idea that what's shocking and new in 2003 will just be amplified if you do it in front of a crowd of indie kids, raises less eyebrows than what dizzee's done in his dinner jacket.
Rappers need to appeal to middle class white kids to get properly massive. The NME probably matters more to dizzee than any grime publication or blog, and has done for a long time. I'm not saying this is a good thing. But I am saying that he's gone down the only path possible for him to become massive. And this performance is actually good, as well. Let's not forget that.
Recent dizzee interview:
Interviewer: What kind of music do you like?
Dizzee (quick as a flash): I like songs about sex and violence.
Brother silverdollar long ago mentioned dizzee's talent for beautiful quips such as this, in a post also mentioning his predictions that he'll rise to be 'a pop star who knows EXACTLY what his point is'. This is what I wanna talk about with the above video.
I think that, really, Dizzee has done exactly what we wanted him to, but we're still disappointed like pricks. What else did we imagine would happen? Dizzee rapping (well) in a tuxedo to harps with the latest indie star feels intuitively wrong (and part of his ongoing attempt to emulate jay-z), but what else could he do?
Roll Deep were on top of the pops once, in the dying days of both institutions. They did a little dance routine (wiley's alarmingly fond of dance routines it'd seem). It were reet 'orrible. I saw Wiley live after wearing my rolex had just properly landed and he did the 'authentic' grime thing; 25 second songs before a rewind. And he was getting bottled.
Do we really want dizzee to be a pop star (which we do) and just continue to do stuff like this at the NME awards? Bloggers complaining about him going commercial are properly bullshit, let them eat vinyl. I think why we wanted dizzee to get massive is cos he was obviously a subversive genius with such a universally applicable way of looking at things that he just HAD to be massive. But he was good cos he was shocking. And this is shocking.
To do it the Wiley way, which is the idea that what's shocking and new in 2003 will just be amplified if you do it in front of a crowd of indie kids, raises less eyebrows than what dizzee's done in his dinner jacket.
Rappers need to appeal to middle class white kids to get properly massive. The NME probably matters more to dizzee than any grime publication or blog, and has done for a long time. I'm not saying this is a good thing. But I am saying that he's gone down the only path possible for him to become massive. And this performance is actually good, as well. Let's not forget that.
Saturday 22 May 2010
Friday 7 May 2010
Here lies love.
Gavin writes on the struggle to understand love, and I respond with a history of attitudes to love, and types of love, in pop.
LOVE PART I: LOVE AS A SURVIVAL TACTIC.
Sammi Smith expresses this best. Soft, desperate, failing, falling. "Just, please...please."
LOVE PART II: LOVE AS A MERGENCE OF MINDS.
Late night silence and knowing glances. Heaven is a place where nothing, nothing, nothing ever gets said.
Hot Chip do this well on 'in the privacy of our love', which they used to segue into after a cover of nothing compares 2 u, so I'll put that version on here
'there is nothing outside our love'
and 'nothing compares 2 u' takes us nicely into...
LOVE PART III: LOVE AS ALL-ENCOMPASSING OBSESSION.
Easily the best motown song.
'My love reaches so high I can't get over it,
So wide, I can't get around it.'
LOVE PART IV: LOVE AS SELF-DELLUSION/SELF-AGGRANDISEMENT.
Chiffons express this masterfully. 'The narrative voice is unreliable' is a sentence I read about literature on a weekly basis and this, this, this, this is pop's most supremely brilliant use of a clearly delluded narrative voice on a record.
'Though I know you're the kind of boy who only wants to run around,
I'll keep waiting and,
someday, darling...'
LOVE PART V: LOVE AS AN ENHANCEMENT OF THE PHYISCAL WORLD
Ah, this classic. The only good thing to ever come out of Dundee.
LOVE PART VI: LOVE AS A SERVICE.
LOVE PART VII: LOVE AS COMING HOME TO SOMEWHERE YOU'VE NEVER BEEN.
The resumption of normality. Everything you've ever wanted and everything that actually is, combining for the first time.
'I like to write songs about small things. Paper, animals, a house. Love is kinda big. I did once write a love song, though. In this film I sing it to a lamp'
LOVE PART VIII: LOVE AS SHAKY, CONSTANTLY CHANGING, CONSTANTLY REVISIONIST, INSECURE BLISS.
Properly perfect song, this.
LOVE PART IX: LOVE AS A BATTLEGROUND
LOVE PART X: LOVE AS A SLATE-WIPING COMPROMISE.
LOVE PART XI: LOVE AS A QUEST FOR HARD-OBTAINED GOODS.
I originally thought this lyric was 'we're one collective item', taking us nicely back to Love part II.
LOVE PART XII: LOVE AS AN UNSTOPPABLE FORCE.
i cant explain this feeling,
can't you see that salvation is freedom?
LOVE PART XIII: LOVE AS A UTILITARIAN CALCULATION.
'i'm checking it out, i'm checking it, there's
good points, bad points, but it all works out,
you know i'm a little freak out.'
-talking heads, cities.
LOVE PART XIV: LOVE AS THE ACQUISITION OF AESTHETIC PERFECTION.
LOVE PART XV: LOVE AS A FAST-DISAPPEARING SPARK, HELD BACK BY CIRCUMSTANCE AND YOU BEING A SHY TIT.
LOVE PART XVI: LOVE AS A BOSSY, UNWELCOME, PRECIOUS-TIME-CONSUMING MESS INFRINGING ON AN OTHERWISE FINE LIFE.
one of the last lyrics is 'i have to catch a cab and my bags are at the carousel'. that's key.
'There is only lawlessness'
'give love a little shove and it becomes terror'
LOVE PART XVII: LOVE AS FIZZY BLISS.
This is wonderful. Just a few thoughts, repeated over and over.
LOVE PART I: LOVE AS A SURVIVAL TACTIC.
Sammi Smith expresses this best. Soft, desperate, failing, falling. "Just, please...please."
LOVE PART II: LOVE AS A MERGENCE OF MINDS.
Late night silence and knowing glances. Heaven is a place where nothing, nothing, nothing ever gets said.
Hot Chip do this well on 'in the privacy of our love', which they used to segue into after a cover of nothing compares 2 u, so I'll put that version on here
'there is nothing outside our love'
and 'nothing compares 2 u' takes us nicely into...
LOVE PART III: LOVE AS ALL-ENCOMPASSING OBSESSION.
Easily the best motown song.
'My love reaches so high I can't get over it,
So wide, I can't get around it.'
LOVE PART IV: LOVE AS SELF-DELLUSION/SELF-AGGRANDISEMENT.
Chiffons express this masterfully. 'The narrative voice is unreliable' is a sentence I read about literature on a weekly basis and this, this, this, this is pop's most supremely brilliant use of a clearly delluded narrative voice on a record.
'Though I know you're the kind of boy who only wants to run around,
I'll keep waiting and,
someday, darling...'
LOVE PART V: LOVE AS AN ENHANCEMENT OF THE PHYISCAL WORLD
Ah, this classic. The only good thing to ever come out of Dundee.
LOVE PART VI: LOVE AS A SERVICE.
LOVE PART VII: LOVE AS COMING HOME TO SOMEWHERE YOU'VE NEVER BEEN.
The resumption of normality. Everything you've ever wanted and everything that actually is, combining for the first time.
'I like to write songs about small things. Paper, animals, a house. Love is kinda big. I did once write a love song, though. In this film I sing it to a lamp'
LOVE PART VIII: LOVE AS SHAKY, CONSTANTLY CHANGING, CONSTANTLY REVISIONIST, INSECURE BLISS.
Properly perfect song, this.
LOVE PART IX: LOVE AS A BATTLEGROUND
LOVE PART X: LOVE AS A SLATE-WIPING COMPROMISE.
LOVE PART XI: LOVE AS A QUEST FOR HARD-OBTAINED GOODS.
I originally thought this lyric was 'we're one collective item', taking us nicely back to Love part II.
LOVE PART XII: LOVE AS AN UNSTOPPABLE FORCE.
i cant explain this feeling,
can't you see that salvation is freedom?
LOVE PART XIII: LOVE AS A UTILITARIAN CALCULATION.
'i'm checking it out, i'm checking it, there's
good points, bad points, but it all works out,
you know i'm a little freak out.'
-talking heads, cities.
LOVE PART XIV: LOVE AS THE ACQUISITION OF AESTHETIC PERFECTION.
LOVE PART XV: LOVE AS A FAST-DISAPPEARING SPARK, HELD BACK BY CIRCUMSTANCE AND YOU BEING A SHY TIT.
LOVE PART XVI: LOVE AS A BOSSY, UNWELCOME, PRECIOUS-TIME-CONSUMING MESS INFRINGING ON AN OTHERWISE FINE LIFE.
one of the last lyrics is 'i have to catch a cab and my bags are at the carousel'. that's key.
'There is only lawlessness'
'give love a little shove and it becomes terror'
LOVE PART XVII: LOVE AS FIZZY BLISS.
This is wonderful. Just a few thoughts, repeated over and over.
Thursday 15 April 2010
Check out this press release. Almost every sentence of it makes me think it was specifically designed to make me despise them.
"Founded at Indiana University in the fall of 1996, Straight No Chaser's goal was to expand the boundaries of the traditional college a cappella group. In 1999, the graduating members of Straight No Chaser chose their replacements, ensuring that the new tradition they had created would continue on with successive generations of IU undergrads. Then, in 2006, Indiana University decided to host a reunion concert for the original members. In honor of the event, Randy Stine posted footage from one of their 1998 concerts online.
To the group's surprise, Straight No Chaser's version of "The 12 Days of Christmas" - interpolating Toto's "Africa" - became the hottest viral video of the holiday season. Among those millions of viewers was Atlantic Records Chairman/CEO Craig Kallman, who tracked the group down and promptly signed them to the label.
With A Twist sees the acclaimed a cappella group bringing its extraordinary vocal sound and inimitable musical approach to a wide range of pop favorites. The album features delightfully different renditions of modern classics like Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Under The Bridge," Coldplay's "Fix You," Crowded House's "Don't Dream It's Over," and Oasis' "Wonderwall." What's more, With A Twist is highlighted by a stellar take on Barry Manilow's "One Voice," featuring guest vocals from Manilow himself."
I mean ffs.
-------------------
Remember this?
-------------------
This belongs to me.
--------------
Best I feel better remix found so far:
Will soon do a long post on the history of hot chip remixes, or possibly two: one of remixes of them, other of remixes by them.
---------------------
Youtube has easily changed music and the way people share and distribute it way more than myspace ever did.
"Founded at Indiana University in the fall of 1996, Straight No Chaser's goal was to expand the boundaries of the traditional college a cappella group. In 1999, the graduating members of Straight No Chaser chose their replacements, ensuring that the new tradition they had created would continue on with successive generations of IU undergrads. Then, in 2006, Indiana University decided to host a reunion concert for the original members. In honor of the event, Randy Stine posted footage from one of their 1998 concerts online.
To the group's surprise, Straight No Chaser's version of "The 12 Days of Christmas" - interpolating Toto's "Africa" - became the hottest viral video of the holiday season. Among those millions of viewers was Atlantic Records Chairman/CEO Craig Kallman, who tracked the group down and promptly signed them to the label.
With A Twist sees the acclaimed a cappella group bringing its extraordinary vocal sound and inimitable musical approach to a wide range of pop favorites. The album features delightfully different renditions of modern classics like Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Under The Bridge," Coldplay's "Fix You," Crowded House's "Don't Dream It's Over," and Oasis' "Wonderwall." What's more, With A Twist is highlighted by a stellar take on Barry Manilow's "One Voice," featuring guest vocals from Manilow himself."
I mean ffs.
-------------------
Remember this?
-------------------
This belongs to me.
--------------
Best I feel better remix found so far:
Will soon do a long post on the history of hot chip remixes, or possibly two: one of remixes of them, other of remixes by them.
---------------------
Youtube has easily changed music and the way people share and distribute it way more than myspace ever did.
Thursday 1 April 2010
Down House.
-------------------------------------------
Here's my review of the new opera by the Knife about Darwin which I really loved. Increasingly obsessed with talking about albums in terms of their own subject matter, just as a bit of a 'lark'.
--------------------------------------------
Just got back from Paris, where to give my French a bit of revision and, of course, cos this is what you should do when you travel (there's a good David Byrne song about this, see below) I listened to the radio a fair bit.
Anyway, it was just weird hearing lyrics like 'niggers be talking shit' on daytime public radio without being bleeped. Not sure if it was utopian or dystopian.
----------------
GLORY BE GLORY GLORY HALLELUJAH BLISSY LUSCIOUS RnB IS BACK IN THE CHARTS.
Well I mean it's not really in the charts, but y'know, it's out there, 'in the public domain'.
--------------------
BIG DADDY'S BACK.
--------------------
It feels so lame linking to Twitter but I feel I have to mention to the robert popper twitterfeed. It's one of the funniest things ever written.
'A joke: "I just saw a baby driving a car". "Really?" "Yes,well he was a baby 30 years ago!" (i.e it was a man now)'
Also, apologies, but the (obv) fake one for Dr Johnson is masterful....
Five Items Or Less (adv.) Costermonger's shepherding Call to herd the forlorn Souls who would buy but one PASTIE
------------------------
Finally, to end on a slightly cooler note, this recipe by Paul is the kind of stuff that I wish I was writing.
Sunday 28 March 2010
Monday 22 March 2010
This isn't good, much as I wish it was and it probably should be. Sounds like a Shatner record.
http://pitchfork.com/news/38224-bonnie-prince-billy-remixes-hot-chip/
-------------------
Here's my review of the new white stripes live album. I wish I'd seen the film as in it apparently Jack strongly implies he hates the state the band is in at the moment, which does make sense. This really feels like a forced release, like Yellow Submarine or whatever a more hip example would be.
Also, my first ever hate comment!
-------------------
It has occurred to me that I would like very much to be in a band called 'Posh Totty'.
Thursday 18 March 2010
BIG TING
Here are three recent reviews, all for the Gaudie. I wrote all of these the same morning and so the theme of them is obscure references, subtle nods of the head, something I'm increasingly obsessed with in reviews. There are many, and I hope you spot them all. If you do, you're very good. Some are obvious, others less so. Tough ones to spot: Christina Rosetti, Alan Bennett and of course an (implicit, we're all aware of the explicit) Wittgenstein.
-------------------
First up, review of Ellie Goulding album, Lights. This was rejected because of my comments about her guitar-playing. Apparently she's an expert folk guitarist, and so I can't say that the guitar sounds like a superficial addition. I don't totally see this, but nevertheless I didn't get my revision in before the deadline.
British female solo artists are in the same position right now as British male indie bands are. They have no idea who they are. They have a mish-mash of influences with no concrete foundation or clear idea of what they want to be. Ellie Goulding is a good example of this post-Lily Allen type of songstress, who wants to be all things at all times to all people. She is at different points La Roux, Florence Welch, Laura Marling, and Shakira. You can even occasionally hear strains of The Knife. This is what you’d expect of someone who won a poll of bloggers’ views of what would be the ‘sound of 2010’, bloggers not being known for the consistency of their views.
A constant undercurrent on the album is Ellie’s amateur acoustic guitar strumming, which has synths piled on top of it, which are then stripped back in sparse moments to expose the guitar again, as if she’s afraid to just be a popstar-and what better, quicker, easier way to appear creative and quirky is there than an acoustic guitar? The acoustic is an indie comfort blanket, and it should be disposed of.
If Ellie just went off in one concise, predicated direction, she would be amazing. At times, I was reminded of bassline, that amazing genre from a few years back which no one remembers, which was all about hushed feminine voices and synths sloshing about beneath. In a Meinongian parallel universe, there is probably a bassline artist called Ellie Goulding, and a mega-popstar called Ellie Goulding, and a hard-trance artist called Ellie Goulding, and they’ll ALL be amazing. But in our grim universe, we just have the mid-point, the misty-eyed one that’s in between all of them, and satisfies no one fully by attempting to satisfy everyone a little bit.
The lyrics are generic and blunt, a reversion to pop norms; diamonds , stars and soft skin. This is no bad thing-pop lyrics are at their heartwarming best when they are generic. Like all great pop music, the lyrics look awful on paper but in the song they sound as profound as can be. But as a whole the album’s flimsy and non-committing. One thing is true though. Stuff like this probably will be the sound of 2010, and it’s at least better than a few years ago when the Kooks were the sound of our times.
-----------------------
Here's a review of the new Joanna Newsom album, Have One on Me. I'm astounded and pleased that they didn't edit out the Zen Baseballbat reference...
Every Joanna Newsom album is like a book. Along with Boy in Da Corner by Dizzee Rascal, I Am the Champion Concrete Mixer by Zen Baseballbat and Untrue by Burial, Ys, her previous album, was one of the seminal classic albums of our century so far, taking music forward in a totally new direction, giving our generation an identity of our own. It was a beautiful, pastoral expanse of lyricism, a true book of an album, which had to be appreciated in its entirety, as it lowered you into its own world.
Have One on Me similarly is no holiday paperback, it’s a huge slab of thick paper to churn through in instalments, willing yourself on, knowing it will be worth it, eventually. It’s Middlemarch. Many people talk about Newsom as if she is some Middle Ages revivalist, because she plays a harp and sings about farming. But this is the product of lack of imagination. There is nothing ‘rural’ about this music, it is not a mediaeval time capsule just because it features a harp. Rather, it is music that spans centuries of history. One moment, Elizabethan recorders are whistling out a baroque dance, next it shifts into 20s cabaret, then off into folk. Every genre, age, emotion, rhythm, and sensation is expressed at one point or another during the album.
The music itself is huge; expansive, wide open fields and rolling hills of sound over three discs. The lyrics are opulent and drawn out, the individual words, nevermind lyrics, being hard to pinpoint the beginning and end of. In Newsomland, ‘difference’ is an octosyllabic word. The lyrics are not the flurry of imagery and bewildering beauty of Ys, though. They are equally beautiful, but simpler and more personal, addressed to a lover rather than tales of animals and folktales. The overall feeling you get from the lyrics is a woman tossed about by the complexities of love, attempting to anchor herself with poetry. Her voice is clear as a bell, thawing from indignant, stroppy quacking into soft, naked whispers, rising up and thronging in the air with the cherubim and the seraphim.
I first listened to this album as I tried to walk to Aberdeen beach at night on my own, and got lost in the little hills and sodden crevices of the golf course, confused and blown about by the drawn-out songs. At first listen, it would lose anyone. But with persistent listening, it opens up its concealed charm as it spreads out into beautiful bloom. So many of these songs make you stop and stare into the middle distance with a comatose grin on your face, like when you stumble across something in a book you thought particular to you. It is a private album, one of the longest and most beautiful love letters of all time, an album of bleakness and weakness, confessions and professions of love, celebrations, joy, tantrums and screams, and it is a modern classic by a true treasure of our age.
This is so good:
-----------------------------
And lastly, the big one. Alice in Wonderland. This was brutally cropped, at the 'why does everything have to involve fighting and sex?' line they ran out of room and just didn't include the rest of the review, which is mind-blowing. But also good, as it meant they didn't cut out the stuff about Wittgenstein (which was surely prime for a cut if they didn't have room)(it isn't even strictly true, Ludder's fav book was actually Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief, but I choose to ignore that as I haven't read it and it doesn't fit in with what I want to say)(I mean he did really love Alice in Wonderland, and reread it several times, it's not like I've plucked it from nowhere)(his favourite character was the mock turtle, and it's easy and pleasurable to see why). Nevertheless.
Alice in Wonderland is a book about many things and nothing. It’s been given several critical appraisals and has been variously seen as a Freudian work, an allegory of the British Empire, a confession of Lewis Carroll’s paedophilia, and the first (and surely only) avant-garde maths book. It is an intellectually fascinating text for both children and adults as it was written by a true polymath. Lewis Carroll was a children’s writer, but Charles Dodgson was an Oxford logician, and the book predates many 20th Century ideas in philosophy of language (we don’t have time to go into these now, but trust me, it does). Ludwig Wittgenstein’s favourite book was Alice in Wonderland, for instance. It’s all sense and nonsense intertwining. He was big on that.
Really though, the book’s just mere nonsense, but if it’s about anything at all it’s about the struggle to preserve British values and etiquette in spite of unerringly confident absurdity. Alice is precocious and prickly in the face of warped insanity all around her, and when she attempts to restore order to the mad, her own manners seem even more ridiculous, pre-empting the 1960s surrealist parody of Englishness by the psychedelic movement. But largely, the book is just nonsense. It was the first children’s book to be written without any moral whatsoever, the only intention being to entertain children.
The best film versions of Alice keep this in mind and just allow it to be pure, silly frivolity. But not this film. Because it’s Tim Burton, everything has to be dark and nasty, everything has to be rotten and subversive, everything has to involve Helena Bonham Carter. Alice is not a child, she is a 19 year old on the verge of an arranged marriage, and at the proposal flees back to Wonderland (or ‘Underland’ as it’s needlessly called) to find it in ruins under the tyrannical rule of the Red Queen (like many things in the film, a composite of characters from both original Alice books). Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter veers constantly between two personalities and corresponding accents-English, and nice, or Scottish, and evil. There is a quasi-sexual relationship between the Queen and the Knave, and the Knave tries to get Alice to submit to his advances .There is a huge battle at the end in which Alice slays a dragon. Why does everything have to involve fighting and sex?
The film is instantly forgettable as it has no imagination and, despite being such a controversial film in many ways, takes absolutely no risks. Taking a risk would be sticking to the text in this instance, but instead what Burton and Disney have done is revert to the Hollywood archetype of an epic quest with daffy characters and a heartwarming ending. In the books, they always end with an abrupt reversion to normal life, and the fantasy is left as a dream, but here, Alice goes on to become an apprentice in a proto-colonial trading company (seriously).
The filmmakers appear to believe heavy CGI and 3D effects are synonymous with genuine magic and wonder and, if these are taken care of, the plot can just be ordinary sword-swiping nonsense. But Alice in Wonderland begs for plain old patent nonsense. They’ve missed this fact, to their peril. Also, Johnny Depp break dances to funk music at the end of the film. That says it all, really.
--------------
I don't want to post a video relating the above film, so let's just revisit this classic shall we:
-------------
Loadsa love, will post a review of the new white stripes live album sometimes around the end of the week.
x
-------------------
First up, review of Ellie Goulding album, Lights. This was rejected because of my comments about her guitar-playing. Apparently she's an expert folk guitarist, and so I can't say that the guitar sounds like a superficial addition. I don't totally see this, but nevertheless I didn't get my revision in before the deadline.
British female solo artists are in the same position right now as British male indie bands are. They have no idea who they are. They have a mish-mash of influences with no concrete foundation or clear idea of what they want to be. Ellie Goulding is a good example of this post-Lily Allen type of songstress, who wants to be all things at all times to all people. She is at different points La Roux, Florence Welch, Laura Marling, and Shakira. You can even occasionally hear strains of The Knife. This is what you’d expect of someone who won a poll of bloggers’ views of what would be the ‘sound of 2010’, bloggers not being known for the consistency of their views.
A constant undercurrent on the album is Ellie’s amateur acoustic guitar strumming, which has synths piled on top of it, which are then stripped back in sparse moments to expose the guitar again, as if she’s afraid to just be a popstar-and what better, quicker, easier way to appear creative and quirky is there than an acoustic guitar? The acoustic is an indie comfort blanket, and it should be disposed of.
If Ellie just went off in one concise, predicated direction, she would be amazing. At times, I was reminded of bassline, that amazing genre from a few years back which no one remembers, which was all about hushed feminine voices and synths sloshing about beneath. In a Meinongian parallel universe, there is probably a bassline artist called Ellie Goulding, and a mega-popstar called Ellie Goulding, and a hard-trance artist called Ellie Goulding, and they’ll ALL be amazing. But in our grim universe, we just have the mid-point, the misty-eyed one that’s in between all of them, and satisfies no one fully by attempting to satisfy everyone a little bit.
The lyrics are generic and blunt, a reversion to pop norms; diamonds , stars and soft skin. This is no bad thing-pop lyrics are at their heartwarming best when they are generic. Like all great pop music, the lyrics look awful on paper but in the song they sound as profound as can be. But as a whole the album’s flimsy and non-committing. One thing is true though. Stuff like this probably will be the sound of 2010, and it’s at least better than a few years ago when the Kooks were the sound of our times.
-----------------------
Here's a review of the new Joanna Newsom album, Have One on Me. I'm astounded and pleased that they didn't edit out the Zen Baseballbat reference...
Every Joanna Newsom album is like a book. Along with Boy in Da Corner by Dizzee Rascal, I Am the Champion Concrete Mixer by Zen Baseballbat and Untrue by Burial, Ys, her previous album, was one of the seminal classic albums of our century so far, taking music forward in a totally new direction, giving our generation an identity of our own. It was a beautiful, pastoral expanse of lyricism, a true book of an album, which had to be appreciated in its entirety, as it lowered you into its own world.
Have One on Me similarly is no holiday paperback, it’s a huge slab of thick paper to churn through in instalments, willing yourself on, knowing it will be worth it, eventually. It’s Middlemarch. Many people talk about Newsom as if she is some Middle Ages revivalist, because she plays a harp and sings about farming. But this is the product of lack of imagination. There is nothing ‘rural’ about this music, it is not a mediaeval time capsule just because it features a harp. Rather, it is music that spans centuries of history. One moment, Elizabethan recorders are whistling out a baroque dance, next it shifts into 20s cabaret, then off into folk. Every genre, age, emotion, rhythm, and sensation is expressed at one point or another during the album.
The music itself is huge; expansive, wide open fields and rolling hills of sound over three discs. The lyrics are opulent and drawn out, the individual words, nevermind lyrics, being hard to pinpoint the beginning and end of. In Newsomland, ‘difference’ is an octosyllabic word. The lyrics are not the flurry of imagery and bewildering beauty of Ys, though. They are equally beautiful, but simpler and more personal, addressed to a lover rather than tales of animals and folktales. The overall feeling you get from the lyrics is a woman tossed about by the complexities of love, attempting to anchor herself with poetry. Her voice is clear as a bell, thawing from indignant, stroppy quacking into soft, naked whispers, rising up and thronging in the air with the cherubim and the seraphim.
I first listened to this album as I tried to walk to Aberdeen beach at night on my own, and got lost in the little hills and sodden crevices of the golf course, confused and blown about by the drawn-out songs. At first listen, it would lose anyone. But with persistent listening, it opens up its concealed charm as it spreads out into beautiful bloom. So many of these songs make you stop and stare into the middle distance with a comatose grin on your face, like when you stumble across something in a book you thought particular to you. It is a private album, one of the longest and most beautiful love letters of all time, an album of bleakness and weakness, confessions and professions of love, celebrations, joy, tantrums and screams, and it is a modern classic by a true treasure of our age.
This is so good:
-----------------------------
And lastly, the big one. Alice in Wonderland. This was brutally cropped, at the 'why does everything have to involve fighting and sex?' line they ran out of room and just didn't include the rest of the review, which is mind-blowing. But also good, as it meant they didn't cut out the stuff about Wittgenstein (which was surely prime for a cut if they didn't have room)(it isn't even strictly true, Ludder's fav book was actually Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief, but I choose to ignore that as I haven't read it and it doesn't fit in with what I want to say)(I mean he did really love Alice in Wonderland, and reread it several times, it's not like I've plucked it from nowhere)(his favourite character was the mock turtle, and it's easy and pleasurable to see why). Nevertheless.
Alice in Wonderland is a book about many things and nothing. It’s been given several critical appraisals and has been variously seen as a Freudian work, an allegory of the British Empire, a confession of Lewis Carroll’s paedophilia, and the first (and surely only) avant-garde maths book. It is an intellectually fascinating text for both children and adults as it was written by a true polymath. Lewis Carroll was a children’s writer, but Charles Dodgson was an Oxford logician, and the book predates many 20th Century ideas in philosophy of language (we don’t have time to go into these now, but trust me, it does). Ludwig Wittgenstein’s favourite book was Alice in Wonderland, for instance. It’s all sense and nonsense intertwining. He was big on that.
Really though, the book’s just mere nonsense, but if it’s about anything at all it’s about the struggle to preserve British values and etiquette in spite of unerringly confident absurdity. Alice is precocious and prickly in the face of warped insanity all around her, and when she attempts to restore order to the mad, her own manners seem even more ridiculous, pre-empting the 1960s surrealist parody of Englishness by the psychedelic movement. But largely, the book is just nonsense. It was the first children’s book to be written without any moral whatsoever, the only intention being to entertain children.
The best film versions of Alice keep this in mind and just allow it to be pure, silly frivolity. But not this film. Because it’s Tim Burton, everything has to be dark and nasty, everything has to be rotten and subversive, everything has to involve Helena Bonham Carter. Alice is not a child, she is a 19 year old on the verge of an arranged marriage, and at the proposal flees back to Wonderland (or ‘Underland’ as it’s needlessly called) to find it in ruins under the tyrannical rule of the Red Queen (like many things in the film, a composite of characters from both original Alice books). Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter veers constantly between two personalities and corresponding accents-English, and nice, or Scottish, and evil. There is a quasi-sexual relationship between the Queen and the Knave, and the Knave tries to get Alice to submit to his advances .There is a huge battle at the end in which Alice slays a dragon. Why does everything have to involve fighting and sex?
The film is instantly forgettable as it has no imagination and, despite being such a controversial film in many ways, takes absolutely no risks. Taking a risk would be sticking to the text in this instance, but instead what Burton and Disney have done is revert to the Hollywood archetype of an epic quest with daffy characters and a heartwarming ending. In the books, they always end with an abrupt reversion to normal life, and the fantasy is left as a dream, but here, Alice goes on to become an apprentice in a proto-colonial trading company (seriously).
The filmmakers appear to believe heavy CGI and 3D effects are synonymous with genuine magic and wonder and, if these are taken care of, the plot can just be ordinary sword-swiping nonsense. But Alice in Wonderland begs for plain old patent nonsense. They’ve missed this fact, to their peril. Also, Johnny Depp break dances to funk music at the end of the film. That says it all, really.
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I don't want to post a video relating the above film, so let's just revisit this classic shall we:
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Loadsa love, will post a review of the new white stripes live album sometimes around the end of the week.
x
Monday 15 March 2010
rails & coots
I'm trying to get into Elizabethan music atm and, as proof that I'm far from fully conversive in it, in my head I pronounced the title of this song as 'Mistress White Ting'.
Which is a good title for a song, just not this song.
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Here's my review of the friendly fires/holy ghost split EP for Fact.
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I'm really into Hot Chip's fleetwood mac cover (in the first minute of this). So wrong and yet...
Which is a good title for a song, just not this song.
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Here's my review of the friendly fires/holy ghost split EP for Fact.
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I'm really into Hot Chip's fleetwood mac cover (in the first minute of this). So wrong and yet...
Friday 12 March 2010
Thursday 11 March 2010
shit youtube comment:
'"The road to Hell is paved with good intentions."
That's a way more succinct way to phrase this entire clunky song. '
On the song below. I mean what a dick.
Will post review of newsom album up in next few days, along with review of Ellie Goulding album and Alice in Wonderland film.
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'"The road to Hell is paved with good intentions."
That's a way more succinct way to phrase this entire clunky song. '
On the song below. I mean what a dick.
Will post review of newsom album up in next few days, along with review of Ellie Goulding album and Alice in Wonderland film.
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