lovely remix (MAKE IT FAST AND HIGH-PITCHED AND HE'LL LIKE IT THE DAFT LAD) of Tweet's 'Oh My', the best song about wanking ever (I know very few, and it's certainly better than 'Me and My Monkey'):



actually not that big a fan of the original, you know. and I don't like her Bootie Luv cover which broke my heart. She's exactly the kind of person I ought to adore!


xx

past immemorial

Consider 'Then He Kissed Me' by The Crystals.



Note that the titular snog comes at the end of each verse, almost an afterthought; the main event here is not the main event. The buildup, both outward and internal, is meticulously described, and the thing we've all been waiting for is left undescribed, except for the middle eight. Then we get meeting the parents, and the proposal, all events suffixed with the inevitable kiss.

It's so true as well, isn't it? This IS how people talk about getting off with others. How many times have you heard or had this conversation:

Friend: "So what happened with Jane (sic) last night?"

You/Our hero: "Oh well y'know we were in Bar till 11 and then we went for a walk and she has work today so we got something to eat and I had to get cash out so we went down Bridge Street and then sat on the benches there for a bit and I walked her home and then y'knowwekissed and I got the bus home."

Or words to that effect.

Why does this happen? Because when you love someone the good stuff feels inevitable. It's the way you get there that you worry and want to talk about. Proper great.

-------------

It's like the matter-of-fact, 'and then my wife WAS DEAD' which comes smack down slipped-in in the middle of Leadbelly's magnum opus, followed up immediately by 'that started me a grievin'', as if it's just another thing to put on the to-do list:



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The Beach Boys covered Then He Kissed Me in a reasonably mediocre version, but it does its own tucked-in-shirt nickle-for-the-jukebox-with-change-left-for-a-'shake'-baby charm, I guess:



But they only truly channelled the spirit of Then He Kissed Me in All Summer Long:



Lyrically, it is superb, meandering randomly from inner thoughts and memories to pleasantries directed at someone, someone real.

But! The harmonies make it something exceptional. 'Miniature golf and Hondas in the heat', they sing ensemble, but then the a single-voice harmony (Brian?) comes in to echo it, but never gets to the end, ever: 'Miniature golf and hondas in th...' etc. Even at the moment of recollection, the memory is already lost, or fading fast at least.

I don't care whether this was deliberate or not. That should be clear to you all by now.


-----------

The Ronettes also did Then He Kissed Me, which is fine and as with any song of there's it should be called Then He Kissed Me (At Christmas).

---------------

I would also like to draw attention to the single, isolated scream of mixed emotions at 1:56 in the original, lost amongst a flurry of strings.

"obsession is a terrible thing, does it happen to everyone?"

Further to my 'people should write more songs about mobiles, they are the romantic loci of our age' idea: What's sweeter than inputting a girl's surname into your predictive text dictionary, knowing that it's gonna be prevalently used in the future?


big post coming soon

x

Kanye West's Slo-Jams Workshop Walmart Tent 3:30PM

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Joe Meek was tone deaf. Check out the demo he made for Tel Star.



Yeahhh.

Grand old song, Telstar. The scene in Mad Men where Don catapults himself towards California as it plays is pretty stupendous.



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Here is the reggae equivalent of telstar.

2:04!!



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Some recent reviews:

Anna Calvi- Why Can't I Live in the Past?


Bjorn Torske- Kokning

Hercules and Love Affair - A Good Album with a virtually unanimously unpopular review

The Streets- I Will Be Dead Soon

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'Beauty is not a luxury. How can you say I don't deserve beauty?'

-Imelda Marcos

Meant to put this in my Romanticism paper at some point, forgot.

-------------------

I love it when people say 'I would think' when they mean 'I think'.


I dislike it when people say the weather is 'disgusting'.


---------------------------

I think what gets me about is that it's usually used to refer to misty rain, that 'fine rain that wets you right through' as Peter Kay would say, and whilst this can feel oppressive, I find something distasteful about referring to water as something unclean.


--------------

Nigel Blackwell agrees with me on this.

'I quite like a bit of drizzle so stick to the facts'



59 of those 109 views are me.

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I bet Nigel Blackwell would get on well with Karl Pilkington.

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When old people ask for coffee, just coffee in McDonalds.

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A standard family reminiscence leads to metaphysical certainty.



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Here's a piece I wrote a long time ago about The Lewis Chessmen which didn't get published. The paragraph where I use the word 'silly' six times is a deliberate attempt at AA Gill emulation:

The Lewis Chessmen exist on their own island in history (-appalling opening sentence/pun, it deserved to be binnned in retrospect). No one really knows where they came from, who they were made for, or why they disappeared for seven hundred years. It wasn’t even immediately obvious they were chess pieces upon their discovery. All we have is the pieces themselves, and the knowledge that they are for chess. That’s literally it. Oh, and we also know they’re made from Walrus ivory.

It’s hard to get an exhibition’s worth of information out of this, but of course the pieces themselves are more than enough. They are extraordinary, both now and in the context of their time. Chess was a game which originated in the East where the depiction of humans in art was a taboo, and so Chess pieces at the time were crude blocks. The Lewis Chessmen were uniquely ornate for their age in their detailed depiction of real people.

Detailed, but not realistic. Because the pieces are, and there’s no better word for them than this: silly. They look like children’s drawings of people come to silly three-dimensional life from the page. They inspired Noggin the Nog in their silliness. Not that mere silliness degrades their value in any sense. They may be the first truly silly piece of art ever, and perhaps the first deliberately silly art, which is much more important yet.

And they’re not just silly. It’s hard to connect to the art of the distant past at the best of times, but it’s never helped by the fact it seems so anti-individualistic and brutal. But the smiling, kindly, ridiculous faces of the Lewis Chessmen bring up no such barriers to the past. Look at the face of the Queen smacking her cheek in surprise, or the Bishop slumped with head in hand, or the King who just looks constipated. Never has an army appeared so harmless; nor has the distant past ever appeared so humane. Exhibition runs until 8th January.

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Here is a joint-review me and Gavin wrote for The University of Aberdeen's Gaudie of The University of Aberdeen's Gilbert and Sullivan Society's production of The Mikado. We were fairly clueless about what G&S do/are and so whilst Gavin retreats to his typical (and great) safety ground of post-theoretical reasoning, I tag along kicking my heels throughout the text with little to say other than I enjoyed it, like Phaedrus in 'Phaedrus'.


James: I’ve never seen a Gilbert and Sullivan thing before.

Gavin: Nor I.

J: They’re all about Britain, right? This one clearly was, and it was set in Japan. It could be set anywhere. The presumably hysterical jokes about Victorian British democracy shot over my head a bit, but still: so English!

G: But that’s the thing. The best, most telling thing about The Mikado - a make-believe Edo Japanese operetta – is that it has nothing to do with Japan. It's an English cartoon manhandling a tradition making fun of itself (and of foreigners; don't let it be denied). There's no hint of Asian themes or timbres in the music; instead, Sullivan just blithely plugs away at his preferred meat-and-two-veg rumpity-tum-pum pop Romanticism. The overture is stout imperial adventure, not the Otherly East.

J: There’s a certain kind of English theatrical comedy which they clearly couldn’t resist plonking in, as per. The self-important bureaucrat, the overbearingly sexual spinster, the weedy lad come good, all of these characters are standard British comic stage characters from Shakespeare to Stoppard. But this isn’t surprising. What are G&S if not establishment, traditional?

G: It’s sillier than most theatre though. We rarely talk about how very close opera is to pantomime, probably because we rarely talk about opera. This is “Buffa opera” - panto rather than dry modern Absurdism. Disney and Broadway can fairly clearly trace their heritage right through. Its humour is neither subtle nor malicious; a warm kind of satire, which we're very unfamiliar with.

J: It did drag things out, first into parody, then beyond that into self-parody. The infinite codas to a song which you got the point of in the first three lines, and such.

G: I know! You could halve the libretto and not lose any plot; there's so much repetition, antiphony, and tra-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-las that it could easily fit within an hour instead of our two plus.

J: It was self-aggrandising, certainly. But it never lost sight of its own absurdity. It revelled in its sheer, brazen-faced pomposity. Victorian society was so self-confident, did we expect anything less from a wilfully pop opera about a country on the edge of the empire? It’d be weird to cut it down to a work of Brechtian minimalism. You’ve got to go on (and on and on) about something every now and then, haven’t you?

G: Yeah, if the froth was gone it’d be missed. I’d see another one.

J: Me too, and it’s hard to imagine getting a stronger production from a student troupe. I was terrified I’d be seeing some awful work of nationalism. And, in a way, I got just that. But when it’s this self-aware and deflating, fighting silliness with silliness being produced, it’ll take on the unseemly silent dignity of all historical things, which it wouldn’t survive. It’d take a cold heart to not at least smile. Or perhaps smirk?

G: Yep; all credit to the cast and crew, particularly James Corrigan’s tenor blast and Daniel Fletcher’s pomp. It’s weird to think about G&S being the only survivor from the whole busy field of Victorian pop, but it’s a good thing they did survive.


--------------------------------

Ahh A Quoi Ca Sert L'Amour, it must be the greatest duet ever. Here La Mome's not just defending love but her entire career and raison d'etre and, bigger than that, the purpose of music/art in the widest possible sense. Music exists to put limits to rationality and say 'thereof we must not speak' when clear argument (the lad in this, who i think piaf was snogging at this point) invades the realm of ignorant beauty. "EACH TIME I CRY, AND YES I'LL ALWAYS CRY... BUT YOU YOU'RE THE FIRST, AND YOU'RE THE LAST... IT'S YOU THAT I WANT, IT'S YOU I NEED." This is nonsense! But it makes sense if you don't think about that.

And no chorus! Just relentless dialogue. A Wittgensteinian approach to argument: if it reaches no conclusions it's fine, the process is what's important, and it must be repeated over and over again lest we forget. There is no highpoint, no catchy way to bring all this to a close. To perform any art about love is to fight, and the fight must be relentless.



--------------------

WE LOSE GARY MOORE AND THE WHTIE STRIPES IN THE SAME MONTH?????!?!?! not GARY MORE!!!

The White Stripes would never have released a good album again anyway so let's just move on. And hey, The Hives are still going! Probably.

The White Stripes were as important band to me as they were to nearly anybody else (despite the relentless uphill struggle I sometimes had in demonstrating this fact) but there comes a time when you have to accept that every time they made a good record it was a bit of a miracle, and recently the invisible hand of chance has come to claim its dues, and Jack White is incapable of landing on his feet anymore. Ah well, is all you can say.

Not actually a White Stripes song but concisely conveys every good about them:



------------------

Hot Dog! That Made Him Mad.

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"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.

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?

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.