He's back.

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



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

Other great times I've had dancing this decade:

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

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




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









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



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

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


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New TNJX tune.



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

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Wittgenstein in pop culture no.1:

"There are holes in what we do."

-Alexis Taylor on 'Bendable Poseable'.


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

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

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

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

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Squeeeeee!aky yet hard as fuck:



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Wittgenstein in pop culture no.2

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

"The rest is silence..."

-Both from Hamlet.


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

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

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



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





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

x

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

“Satirical C*nt.”

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

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

All the signs of a girl alone

I will write about Jesus and other things too very soon, I've just been busy of late.

The happiest woman among all women

"Wittgenstein, he.... took the other bus, didn't he? Yes, he surely must have. It's a woman's way of looking at things-"The world is all that is the case." Patient, accepting of things. A man would never write that. A man would write 'The world is all that I perceive it to be.'"

-Mrs Lintott in the History Boys.

Despite the iffy political correctness of comparing gay men to women, I like this a lot, because it is of course exactly right, and made me think of that ghastly macho fuck, Nietzsche. Though of course it's more Berkeleyesque than anything to insist your perception is the truth, and he wasn't quite so masculine... Nevertheless, marvellous.

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On a similar vein, here's my favourite quatrain ever:

"To act coarsely enough
to pass for one of the boys,
At least appearing to love
hard liquor, horseplay and noise."

It's from 'Atlantis' by Auden.

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And to continue this theme a bit further...

Tobi Vail once said that Bikini Kill had failed because women in music were either not taken seriously or taken too seriously, or words to that effect. I always assumed she meant it about people like Tori Amos, who most people dislike either because they find her ridiculous or because they find her depressing. But I think it's even more relevant now.

A few years ago I considered mentioning this quote in a blog because it was at the time when Amy Winehouse and Duffy and their contempories were really the only women in the charts, and it was just repulsive. It was as if women could only be popstars if they had this after-dinner jazz bar style of singing. But now it's even worse, isn't it, with Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, and all this sassy, obtusely sexy shit. Lady Sovereign, she was what the modern female pop star should be like-funny and serious, aggressively talented and easy going. There's nothing wrong with music that's connected to sex and fun, but if you took the sex and, more importantly, the jokey wink-wink-isn't-this-really-a-bit-shit side of things out of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, there would be nothing left at all. Even Susan Boyle was all about sex appeal as far as the press were concerned, but in that case it was her lack of it.

It just seems an inevitable feature of modern pop music that women are defined by either their alledgedly self-imposed gravitas, or their fun, one-of-the-lads deficiency of it, instantly dumped into one of these two joyless trenches, with the no-mans land between belonging exclusively to the.... men.

Where is the little sparrow of our time?

The same is true in poetry. Plath was the Tori Amos of the poetry world; when a male writer has eccentricities (eg Larkin), it is part of the fun, when a woman does (as Plath absolutely did), it is the first thing that's mentioned when she's brought up, an irremovable part of her identity. Even Stevie Smith, who in my opinion is often hilarious (certainly more so than Betjeman) and struck the balance just right between comedy and sincerity, is most famous for 'Not Waving but Drowning', which is so miserable a lot of people think Plath actually wrote it. And Carol-Ann Duffy, who I like a lot, is seen as a miserable lesbian cliché even by some quite serious poetry students I know.

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Anyway, back to Vail. Bikini Kill knew how to play music. What always attracted me to punk was its liberty, its piss-taking, and its feminine side. This is why I always liked the new york dolls and I never liked black flag. Punk is a music that is inherently hilarious. To try to make serious punk music is like trying to make serious happy hardcore. That's never been its purpose for me. It's just so, so stupid and ridiculous. And Bikini Kill knew this, and Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail have continued to know it after Bikini Kill. 'I wanna puke on yr stereo' by the frumpies has always been one of my favourite songs cos it's about as inane as anything can get, and anyone who takes le tigre seriously just isn't getting it.


Now, here's the way to do it.

Jonathan Meades describes the Guggenheim Bilbao as "the visual equivalent of easy listening for people who hate easy listening. Talking Heads in titanium."

Yikes!

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A proper genuine blog is coming soon I promise.

In hodden grey or scarlet goon,

There is only one brick building in all of Aberdeen, and it is a crumbled and useless shell, stared down into submission and ruin by its innumerable hard-nosed, stiff-lipped granite neighbours.


Jonathan Meades says something similar to this in this documentary and it's SO worth watching.

"Kanye's basically that knob who you only begrudgingly invite to the night-do part of your wedding. and even then he pisses against the bar."

-Grace Dent.