For our summer mix, Paul Scott and I decided to have a conversation, or maybe an argument, thanks to one inarguable fact: I hate summer. Paul decided to take a stab at changing my mind, and so we volley competing versions of the hottest summer at each other along with the songs. We also got started a bit late, and after jokingly discussing which one of us would get to including a Los Campesinos! track first, I got the ball rolling by declaring “Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks” the opener. Events preceded, or degenerated, from there. –Ian Mathers
The warmest summer I can remember was during a war. Of course, we still are at war. The War on Terror is not something you can put on pause and forget about. No, fundamentalism will not indulge itself the luxuries of your Attention Deficit Disorder, it will not obey the caprice of your liberal individualism, it will not lay down it’s tenets as you explain “we are all the same, we all want the same things, we all want to be happy”. Theoretically. It’s all theoretical. They are over there and so far away. We have our focaccia and sun-blushed tomatoes: nothing can touch us. We have our skinny jeans and rock ‘n roll: nothing can touch us. We can’t be touched and we can’t touch. This does not mean we aren’t happy. We are happy in our worlds. This is not false consciousness. These webs are not trapping us, we really are happy, there is nothing outside.
There are other webs, though. Some webs are made of rock and stone: flexibility does not come easily to them. They gnash their teeth, we all roll our eyes and in unison ask: “is it wicked not to care?”, I try to raise my voice, I try to declaim; but all that falls to earth is a sigh. Not even a long drawn out sigh. Nothing as dramatic as terminal apathy, we do care, really we do. Just, not that much. Our principles lack fundamentals, they are liable to change; this might make us stronger, we won’t be susceptible to tyrants promising stability at all costs. That’s the hope. Audacious. Very audacious.
A pop video by a band called Terris
Gavin Godwin was the last man. The last man in history. He was the lead singer of a band called Terris. I am not sure if this is another story, but it needs to be told. He was the last British pop star to care, he was, of course defeated. Blindsided by privilege and indolence he was left looking stupid. He was brave, he said things that mattered; things that mattered so much that a younger me underlined them in magazines. His finest moment was “Fabricated Lunacy” a clenched-teeth kiss-off to the rock ‘n roll era. “Condemned to Rock ‘n Roll” with a groove. It spat half thought passion like a school talent show Joy Division. It was as anthemic as prime Bon Jovi, yet failed to chart. Then came the war and no one wanted to rage against anything anymore. Gavin went home to Wales and, I guess, that was that.
Could someone write, perform and get released a song like “Fabricated Lunacy” in the 2008? I don’t know. I really don’t know. Could someone write, perform and get released a song like “Nothing Ever Happens” (Del-Amitri) in 2008? These are the questions that in a just world would be troubling the great thinkers of our age. Have we become so flexible we can’t imagine anything above and beyond flexibility itself? Anything else is gauche and naive right? Or else you’re just Have Your Say, and no one with half a mind wants to Have Your Say, right?
Simon Reynolds is one of the best music writers I have ever read. His ’80s work, as compiled in Blissed Out, is possessed of a feverish intellect and energy. An energy which, even if you aren’t really bothered about what he’s actually talking about, is amazingly infectious. His extensive blogroll on his blog (linked in the last sentence) is a testament to his ability to get people writing. Unfortunately, this evening I’m writing for the wrong reasons. Looking trough his old website I found his round up of the decade we now like to call the nineteen nineties. Dude goes through his faves of the decade: he likes a lot of ’90s dance that I’ve not heard but is probably very good, he likes himself some Hip Hop as well. Then we get on to his unfaves. And this paragraph about Notorious BIG . A paragraph which takes wrongness to new highest:
The Notorious B.I.G.
The odd nifty catchphrase and deft rhyme, but c’mon, this man was a pig—Notorious P.I.G. more like; Piggy Smalls, heheheheh-and with a little help from his buddy Sean he almost singlehandedly set rap down its current path of spiritual bankruptcy. And he had the most unappetising vocal timbre in all of rap- asthmatic and adenoidal and mucus-bunged-up and fat-fuck wheezy all at once.
I could go through this throughly and point out what - amongst the fat gags - is wrong about the paragraph, but I think it would be best to let the great speak for himself:
The Notorious BIG - Juicy
“Spiritually bankrupt”? Goddamit man, this guy went from “negative to positive”. Sure, sure he maybe -in a sense- celebrating rampant material acquisitions over spiritual wealth but c’mon how you can begrudge the man his “super nintendo, sega genesis”? The guy claims to have grown up with only “sardines for dinner”; it’s hard to deny him a little joy at the rewards his “fat-fuck wheezy” voice has brought him. I mean sardines, man. And if you think BIG sounds “asthmatic and adenoidal and mucus-bunged-up” rather than like the coolest fucker in history with a voice which -in this case- manages to infuse brag with wisdom and charm then, there is a very real possibility you are in fact deaf. Or insane. Or listening to an incorrectly labeled mp3.
Whilst this blog may occasionally seem mainly preoccupied with verbose pontificating and righteous dismay, one has to occasionally step back and admit that, yes, viral videos of people farting are really, really funny.
Ha, ha, ha the naked man did a guff! Scientists have found that the sound of babies crying is at exactly the right frequency to irritate the human ear, sometimes, I wonder if it is simply some inescapable fact of biology that makes the sound of air being released from the anal passage so incredibly amusing…
In 1999 Luke Haines sang “I had a dream in black and white, the futures 1955″, on a bad day I’m pretty sure he was right. An everlasting 1955; perpetual stasis in squaredom. Today’s icons are self-made men (and sometimes women) with no time for idleness. I’m thinking of yer Gordon Ramseys and yer Alan Sugars. The Apprentice seems to me like a search for the ultimate conformist, the person whose lie dream is strong enough to make their very life a sales pitch. What does this country produce? We are no longer a nation of shopkeepers but a nation of salesman. From the heart of the city, to the shaky bottom rungs of the property ladder; no energy is created but the pieces are moved, the pieces are sold. It’s the stolid entropy of a sham nation. And we celebrate those who manage to heave themselves to the top of the heap. Well done, well done and you, you can to it too! There’s room at the top they’re telling you still.
It’s not that great, unfortunately - not deadpan enough, too zany, straying a little too far toward Star Stories territory - but still funnier than anything, possibly excepting Harry Hill’s TV Burp, on British TV. Then again the standards set by the “I Keep Forgetting” episode are kind of high. I maintain Dr Dre saying: “That’s gonna be some good ass banana bread” is the funniest thing anyone has said this decade. Anyway this has everyone’s favourite Scientologist Jason Lee making a cameo as Kevin Bacon of all people and the story behind the writing of the song Footloose.
Balmy May night in central London. The cusp of summer. This time last year I could have sworn it was the cusp of an era: that pause between Blair packing his bags and Gordon’s succession. I wonder if we’re in another era now, I’m not sure I feel qualified to quantify such things. The upgrading of cannabis, from class C back to class B, certainly makes me feel like we are though. I actually remember the day it went down to class C. Another of those warm nights on the cusp of summertime. This time a pub in Brighton with some art-student types, someone had left a copy of the Daily Mail on the table. I don’t remember the headline but I remember the photo splash on the front page; a sunny day in a park, some young people smoking a joint. The caption screamed disgrace, the horror of people -young middle class white people!- smoking cannabis mere inches away from impressionable children. Hell in handcart, a hiding to nothing, a country going, very swiftly and quite literally, to pot. Something like that. Anyway, the photo was almost idyllic yet the caption seemed to suggest ones reaction should be horror. It seemed so funny. The contradictory nature of the whole thing and the way it seemed the shrill gatekeepers of the silent “majority” were reduced to pointing their fingers at kids having fun in parks. We scribbled some stuff on the paper and went outside and shared a smoke.
And now, it feels like those voices have prevailed. It’s not just in the obvious symptoms -the resurgence of the Tory party-, it is Labour who, much against the advice of our nations upstanding health-care professionals, have pushed this through. I’m not going out to bat for the pleasures of pot here; hey guess what, stoners are kind of boring and monosyllabic! Drug dealers are often not very nice people! No, it’s just the feeling that the people who grimly trudge through the corridors of power are either in thrall to the whims of middle England’s noisy gatekeepers, or that they themselves might recoil in horror at the sight of people in a park on a sunny day.
Just a quick “thank you” to the many, many people who visit this humble blog in search of Lucy Pinder pictures. I think I mentioned her in this post Important Points, the accompanying picture is still there and whilst not quite the soft-core riot I imagine you’re after there is a little bit of cleavage. It’s hotlinked, I think, from a site called “Ask Men” so, uh, knock yourselves out.
Watched “I’m Not There”, the Todd Haynes Bob Dylan movie. It’s good. Still think Bowie’s better, actually I think a lot of people are better, but it did get at what’s good about Dylan or at least what I like about Bob Dylan. Which, sort of boils down to a skinny dude with shades chatting bollocks-that-maybe-genius. Some of the best scenes are those where Cate Blanchett as 65-66 era Dylan (big hair, tight trousers, shades, speed, speed, speed) runs rings around the staid Mr Jones’s of the British press. He/she’s skinny mercury, the ultimate ironist, the press have their questions and their beliefs but you can’t pin Bob down. No way. Bob is everything and nothing. Bob is too damn cool to be put on the spot. Made me feel kinda worried. You see I got real in there, got in that mid sixties place, I wondered what the press would do. The genie had been let out of Pandora’s motherfucking box and didn’t look too keen on getting back in; if you can’t trust your protest singers to toe a decent line who could one trust? The pressmen would have to catch up. If they wanted to catch their prey they’d have to get some irony up in the joint asap.
I came to senses. It’s the first week of May in the year of our lord two thousand and eight and Boris Johnson is the mayor of old London town. Ah, the old forces of the old and staid have not been vanquished! All is well with the world. No, no don’t be so hasty, this affable games-show host won because he defied the system! Like Dylan you never quite know what he’s going to say, you can’t quite tell where he’s gonna land, but you’re gonna enjoy the ride and whadya know there might be some laughs along the way! He’s not like that Red Ken, man, someone should wake him up; Newport happened, we’ve gone electric. You were ahead of the pack in 1999 but now you’re at the back.
Everyone’s Bob Dylan now. Sure, Alex Zane isn’t going to write “One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)” but he’s not going to get out irony-ied by no pop star. Bob was the cosmic jester interrogated by squares, now we all know how to play that card. Nothing is to be taken serious; it’s cats in mittens jumping through hoops of Ezra Pound. It’s eating dinner before lunch and not enjoying it anyway. It’s a mercury world without substances or essences. It’s saying everything with a smirk that says you can’t touch me.
Part 2: Stuck Inside of Rock-Crit Discourse with the Liberal Justification Blues Again
The song that I kept on repeat on for two days was R.E.M.’s last single, “Supernatural Superserious”. As I said before, it’s not a really great song. It’s at best a good, solid seven-out-of-ten; a respectable effort for a twenty five year old band on the comeback trail. The thing is, it sound like The Best Band in the World. Or it sounds like The Best Band in the World would sound if they existed.
The song starts with a catchy little guitar part that sounds like the kind of I, IV, V thing that I could pull off. The guitar sound is great, for that part at least, all treble and bite but sort of playful. Reminds me, in a round about way, of “Jilted John”; pretend punk that’s about a thousand times better than “real punk”. I think “Jilted John” may have the best guitar sound of any record ever, produced by Martin Hannet y’know, they’ve made films about him, or at least films where he was a character. The important thing about this oh-so-throwaway guitar part is that it gives the lie to the assumption that the song could have been thrown together by a bunch of young punks in some North American garage. Ok, no one’s likely to actually assume these dudes are a garage band or something but it seems like an attempt to show that they still know where rock ‘n roll comes from. You know rock ‘n roll. Young dudes with nothing to lose; three chords and the truth. Something like that. If you’re going to be The Best Band in the World you probably should have at least some fidelity to the outlaw spirit; to be the acceptable face of what’s unacceptable.
It could be argued, and it has been argued, that rock music is the music of liberalism. Or at least the ideology that underpins rock is that of liberalism. Something like that. It’s the idea that rock music needs capitalism to y’ know exist, but has the power to make the individual who listens to it a slightly better person. Its core text must be the product; the record, the CD, the MP3 (actually, I’m not so sure about the MP3.) but the somehow has a worth beyond the quick fix. It’s the idea that this particular product is making the system that birthed it a little bit better. I think I’ve said this more eloquently before, or I’ve tried to say it in a less brain-numbing way before;
“Yet every few years some bunch takes the backbeat and the riff and, with a few well chosen ideas, makes the world look a little different for a few people. This is not the only thing popular music is good for, and to use it as a barometer for all music is a bit daft, but when popular music looks like simply another division of Bread and Circuses Inc, it’s records like “Condemned to Rock ‘n Roll” which, contrary to whatever Bono and the New Puritans think, makes the loopy idea that music alone can change lives seem thrillingly plausible.”
“This is not the only thing popular music is good for…” Glad I got that disclaimer in. I was looking through some old magazines and found a quote that quite succinctly showed where this kind of thinking can end up. Q magazine December 2003, Peter Buck of R.E.M. fame shares some advice on how to give ones offspring a balanced musical diet:
“They came from school recently asking me who Aaron Carter was. I told them that Aaron Carter’s music was shit. They listen to the same music as I do now: The Beatles, John Coltrane, free form ‘60s jazz…”
It’s no fun, huh.
“Hey Dad can we listen to the High School Musical soundtrack”
“No. That music is shit. We’re gonna listen to some Ornette Coleman. It’ll make you a better person.”
