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.

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'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




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Just do not need this kind of song in my life at the moment. AND YET IT MOVES.

Complex simplicity

Driving your pedigree dog across the country for it to have sex with another dog for money.

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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.

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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.




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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?

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.

Fucking stellar Booty Luv remix. Quiver quiver!

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.


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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...



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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.



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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.

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.

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.^^^

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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




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"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.


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