And Tom has a very well-argued response to the below at NYLPM. And there is also an ILM thread worrying at fanaticism versus dilettantism and related issues: starts off somewhat bogged in people being defensive about having very eclectic record collections (well, guess what folks, so do I--that’s not really what I was getting at), survives the hiccup of a classic Frank Kogan intervention ("I’ve barely read the thread and haven’t read the original article but I’m going to offer my opinions anyway, voluminously") then opens out a bit and becomes very interesting. Needless to say it's all stirring up a shitload of further thoughts at this end which I will be depositing here in days to come. Oops, went a bit Viz with that last mixed metaphor--sorry.
Friday, March 07, 2003
Thursday, March 06, 2003
Cos we don’t play games yunno. Marc Arcadipane has a new LP out. Not a mix-CD, a full length single-artist album. The Mover’s Frontal Frustration is released by Tresor, the first time he’s put out all-new stuff on a label that wasn’t PCP-clan or his own label since R&S way back in ’92. When I first learned he was recording for Tresor, I was a bit worried that Acardipane would be subconsciously affected by being accepted back into the fold of respectability, Tresor being the home of serious techno (Berlin-Detroit alliance and all that). That coming in from the cold, metaphorically, he might be tempted to come in from the cold, literally: thaw out his sound, subtlety it up a bit. But no, Frontal Frustration is a glorious slab of doomcore, a wintry blast from the outer regions.
Acardipane is one of those figures I class as “culture warriors”. The stick-to-their-guns sort, who follow their own path regardless of fashion-cycles and fads. Unswayable, chasing their own vision, fixated to the exclusion of all other stylistic possibilities, a bit blinkered. To quote Joe Carducci (on Robin Trower!!!) you might say of Acardipane: “his colors don’t vary much but he is their master”. You are not suddenly going to get Acardipane dabbling with rhumba rhythms, or making a little foray into Eighties nu-wave.
The culture warrior is the opposite of the dilettante.
Recently in a survey of 2002’s manifold disparate pleasures
Tom Ewing suggested that “we are all dilettantes now.”
2002 was “a very, very good year to be a dilettante” and an awful one for believers, crusaders, culture-warrior appreciators. Basically reprising his founding Freakytrigger anti-manifesto, No Revolution, the idea is sorta “here’s to the small things, the small things in pop life that give pleasure” (that’s me slightly misquoting a Pere Ubu lyric, not Tom), 2002 being a year full of small delights but no Next Big Thing worth rallying around. I actually find Tom’s argument quite persuasive but more in a proof-of-the-pudding way: the grace and humor of the writing as he goes through his fave tracks of last year--sorta, if this be the fruit of dilettantism then bring it on, bring it on.
There’s no doubt that dabbling and darting all over the shop is a painless, risk-free way to engage with music. You are protected from disappointment or heartbreak, because you’ve not invested that much of yourself, and you can nimbly sidestep the cycles of dearth and famine that afflict all genres, because you’re free to flit off to some other area that’s currently coming up with the goods (as per the Theory of Vibe Migration). Which makes good pragmatic sense in a way: I remember a slightly late convert to drum’n’bass of my acquaintance writing in ’98 about how the anthem-devoid d&b scene at that moment was all about “sticking together through the dry spell”, and I thought to myself: what’s the point? If the well’s run dry, go quench thyself elsewhere, like frinstance the succulent springs of 2step garage, in ’98 at its most bubblicious.
For me there’s a big flaw in the pro-dilettantism argument, though, and it’s that while the approach works fine as a consumer aesthetic, it doesn’t generate strong work when the creator is a dabbler too. I can only think of two consistently compelling dilettantes in rock, David Bowie and Brian Eno. (And even Eno, as much as his rhetoric and theories provide a highly sophisticated validation of dilettantism, is actually quite aesthetically fixated: the same sounds, the same preoccupations, run through his work). Even Saint Etienne, who seem to fit the profile, are quite monomaniacal about chasing their pop dream. (I would class them as culture-warriors actually--see, being a warrior ain’t nececessarily anything to do with making hard-sounding music). Who else have we got? Momus? He makes a good argument for rootless cosmopolitanism, in his writing and maybe in his music too. But in a Mover versus Momus square-off, I think you know whose side I’d be on.
Actually, I think all truly great pop is made from a fanatical place. I recall Paddy MacAloon in one of the earliest Prefab interviews talking with admiration and envy about the “fanaticism” that Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones brought to the making of Off The Wall and Thriller, and how he, Paddy, was in a different, lesser league by comparison. You don’t think Max Martin or Timbaland or Pharrell Williams or -------- [insert fave pop-ist auteur] aren’t absolute fanatics about what they’re doing? That Martin Rushent or Trevor Horn weren’t utterly driven individuals?
There was another bit in Ewing’s Download This/2002. Best. Year. Ever. piece that made me go ‘hang on a minute, mate’. In the closing peroration, he says: “I think the pop writer's job is to take fads seriously, to pretend there's something important about bootlegs, or the new rock, or gutter-garridge, or whatever else you fancy, just like the people we read pretended there was something important about Romo and Elvis Presley.” The idea here reminds me of the philosopher Richard Rorty (a big fave of Eno’s, come to think of it) and his notion of “language games”; we step in and out of different discourses, and the civilised liberal-relativist thing to do is suspend believe in their ultimate truth-value; also important is to recognise that the different discourses are radically incommensurate (so you can read Bataille, but vote Liberal Democrat, listen to gangsta rap but deplore real-world violence: there’s no need to have your values all perfectly consistent and congruent across the entire surface of your life.) Rorty claims some lineage from Nietzche, if my hazy memory of his books still serves. But compared with Friedrich, ol’ Rich is such a milquetoast (awesome American rockwriter word, you can tell I’m fully naturalized now, I’ll be using ‘druthers’ and ‘savvy’ next). On a prose level, Nietzche versus Rorty is like Mover versus Momus.
The way I take the comment about “pretending” to take things seriously is not the as-intended liberating proposition that all things are equally capable of being made to seem important, but the reverse:
“all things are equally trivial”, until we decide otherwise. But fact is, the Romo-crusaders, by this point, would appear to be quite mistaken while those who think Elvis was world-historically important would so far seem to be correct. (Notwithstanding the fact that I’d rather read Price & Parkes’s Romanifesto, however delusory, than Guralnick’s two-volume Presley book, however meticulously accurate). As for the nu garage punk versus punk-garridge, the jury’s still out, but trus me blud when I say one’s trivial and the other’s crucial, that one is a waste of your time/life-force and the other’s not, I may be totally wrong but I mean it maaaan.
See, a big part of being into music entails not being into all of it but believing that certain bits of it are almost infinitely more exciting/important/urgent than other bits (In other words, that things have intrinsic qualities). That’s been part of it since at least rock’n’roll. The open-to-everything stance flattens the landscape-- turning a cultural battleground into a harvest festival.
I was reminded of Rorty and his “language games” when listening to some garage rap and realising there was a Stock Garage Rap Theme I’d forgotten to include in the inventory. Again and again, you get variations on “we don’t play games yunno”, “life is not a game to play”, “we don’t walk and we don’t play”. Like in Sharky Major’s song as reffed by Luke last week, “life ain't a game/nah, it's too real to be a game.” You get the same thing in hip hop: talking about his new album, DMX said "Motherf*ckers get it twisted now- it's not a game, dog. My next album is not a game, it’s my last album”. This strident insistence that something is at stake is worth taking seriously, or at least not ridiculing instantly, knee-jerk style. We’ve all learned to be embarrassed by the A-words (“authentic”, ”authenticity”), to wince inside when people use expressions like “keep it real” or “the streets”. And as an ex-postmodernist (I’m ex-pomo like some are lapsed Catholics or apostate Marxists, this stuff never really leaves you), I too used to feel reflexively squeamish about this kind of talk. But I came round to it, pragmatically rather than through theoretic readjustment, when I couldn’t help noticing that all the music that most excited me was full of these sort of utterances---“fi real’, “trus me”, “believe it’--and was underpinned by concepts like “the streets,” “hardcore,” “underground”. Not only was the music that came from this mindset approximately ten times more fired-up than your properly pomo “passionate irony” dabble-stuff with its double-quotes and concealed smirk, but those atavistic utterances themselves fair burned your ear with their intensity and conviction. So clearly the discourse of "the streets" and "the real" is not only surprisingly persistent, it still marshals massive emotive power and resonance; people believe in it. It’s something you snigger at or feel superior to, not exactly at your peril, but at your loss. For a surprisingly large number of people music is still a matter of urgency; listening to it, making it, is almost a biological need. This is even more the case with UKG/dancehall/rap, where music-making and economic livelihood are so inextricably bound together. (By contrast, dilettanteeism, is essentially, even if only in aspiration rather than actuality, an aristocratic sensibility, a form of dandyism; those who dabble are those who can afford to).
I still don’t know if I believe in any of the A-words but I believe in belief. And I think I can spot a fake (or to put it more finely, an artist who is not fully invested in whatever is their particular fantasy/delusion/performance/role). All good things in life come from seriousness--a seriousness that doesn’t preclude laughter or play, fooling around or making a fool yourself (indeed the risk of that is intrinsic to taking things/yourself [too] seriously) but equally doesn’t leave much room for semi-detachment, standing slightly outside one’s own utterances. Because life’s too short. So big up alla the culture warriors---from Marc Arcadipane to Martin Bramah, “no compromise in the name of truth”. Fi real. As the expression goes.
Acardipane is one of those figures I class as “culture warriors”. The stick-to-their-guns sort, who follow their own path regardless of fashion-cycles and fads. Unswayable, chasing their own vision, fixated to the exclusion of all other stylistic possibilities, a bit blinkered. To quote Joe Carducci (on Robin Trower!!!) you might say of Acardipane: “his colors don’t vary much but he is their master”. You are not suddenly going to get Acardipane dabbling with rhumba rhythms, or making a little foray into Eighties nu-wave.
The culture warrior is the opposite of the dilettante.
Recently in a survey of 2002’s manifold disparate pleasures
Tom Ewing suggested that “we are all dilettantes now.”
2002 was “a very, very good year to be a dilettante” and an awful one for believers, crusaders, culture-warrior appreciators. Basically reprising his founding Freakytrigger anti-manifesto, No Revolution, the idea is sorta “here’s to the small things, the small things in pop life that give pleasure” (that’s me slightly misquoting a Pere Ubu lyric, not Tom), 2002 being a year full of small delights but no Next Big Thing worth rallying around. I actually find Tom’s argument quite persuasive but more in a proof-of-the-pudding way: the grace and humor of the writing as he goes through his fave tracks of last year--sorta, if this be the fruit of dilettantism then bring it on, bring it on.
There’s no doubt that dabbling and darting all over the shop is a painless, risk-free way to engage with music. You are protected from disappointment or heartbreak, because you’ve not invested that much of yourself, and you can nimbly sidestep the cycles of dearth and famine that afflict all genres, because you’re free to flit off to some other area that’s currently coming up with the goods (as per the Theory of Vibe Migration). Which makes good pragmatic sense in a way: I remember a slightly late convert to drum’n’bass of my acquaintance writing in ’98 about how the anthem-devoid d&b scene at that moment was all about “sticking together through the dry spell”, and I thought to myself: what’s the point? If the well’s run dry, go quench thyself elsewhere, like frinstance the succulent springs of 2step garage, in ’98 at its most bubblicious.
For me there’s a big flaw in the pro-dilettantism argument, though, and it’s that while the approach works fine as a consumer aesthetic, it doesn’t generate strong work when the creator is a dabbler too. I can only think of two consistently compelling dilettantes in rock, David Bowie and Brian Eno. (And even Eno, as much as his rhetoric and theories provide a highly sophisticated validation of dilettantism, is actually quite aesthetically fixated: the same sounds, the same preoccupations, run through his work). Even Saint Etienne, who seem to fit the profile, are quite monomaniacal about chasing their pop dream. (I would class them as culture-warriors actually--see, being a warrior ain’t nececessarily anything to do with making hard-sounding music). Who else have we got? Momus? He makes a good argument for rootless cosmopolitanism, in his writing and maybe in his music too. But in a Mover versus Momus square-off, I think you know whose side I’d be on.
Actually, I think all truly great pop is made from a fanatical place. I recall Paddy MacAloon in one of the earliest Prefab interviews talking with admiration and envy about the “fanaticism” that Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones brought to the making of Off The Wall and Thriller, and how he, Paddy, was in a different, lesser league by comparison. You don’t think Max Martin or Timbaland or Pharrell Williams or -------- [insert fave pop-ist auteur] aren’t absolute fanatics about what they’re doing? That Martin Rushent or Trevor Horn weren’t utterly driven individuals?
There was another bit in Ewing’s Download This/2002. Best. Year. Ever. piece that made me go ‘hang on a minute, mate’. In the closing peroration, he says: “I think the pop writer's job is to take fads seriously, to pretend there's something important about bootlegs, or the new rock, or gutter-garridge, or whatever else you fancy, just like the people we read pretended there was something important about Romo and Elvis Presley.” The idea here reminds me of the philosopher Richard Rorty (a big fave of Eno’s, come to think of it) and his notion of “language games”; we step in and out of different discourses, and the civilised liberal-relativist thing to do is suspend believe in their ultimate truth-value; also important is to recognise that the different discourses are radically incommensurate (so you can read Bataille, but vote Liberal Democrat, listen to gangsta rap but deplore real-world violence: there’s no need to have your values all perfectly consistent and congruent across the entire surface of your life.) Rorty claims some lineage from Nietzche, if my hazy memory of his books still serves. But compared with Friedrich, ol’ Rich is such a milquetoast (awesome American rockwriter word, you can tell I’m fully naturalized now, I’ll be using ‘druthers’ and ‘savvy’ next). On a prose level, Nietzche versus Rorty is like Mover versus Momus.
The way I take the comment about “pretending” to take things seriously is not the as-intended liberating proposition that all things are equally capable of being made to seem important, but the reverse:
“all things are equally trivial”, until we decide otherwise. But fact is, the Romo-crusaders, by this point, would appear to be quite mistaken while those who think Elvis was world-historically important would so far seem to be correct. (Notwithstanding the fact that I’d rather read Price & Parkes’s Romanifesto, however delusory, than Guralnick’s two-volume Presley book, however meticulously accurate). As for the nu garage punk versus punk-garridge, the jury’s still out, but trus me blud when I say one’s trivial and the other’s crucial, that one is a waste of your time/life-force and the other’s not, I may be totally wrong but I mean it maaaan.
See, a big part of being into music entails not being into all of it but believing that certain bits of it are almost infinitely more exciting/important/urgent than other bits (In other words, that things have intrinsic qualities). That’s been part of it since at least rock’n’roll. The open-to-everything stance flattens the landscape-- turning a cultural battleground into a harvest festival.
I was reminded of Rorty and his “language games” when listening to some garage rap and realising there was a Stock Garage Rap Theme I’d forgotten to include in the inventory. Again and again, you get variations on “we don’t play games yunno”, “life is not a game to play”, “we don’t walk and we don’t play”. Like in Sharky Major’s song as reffed by Luke last week, “life ain't a game/nah, it's too real to be a game.” You get the same thing in hip hop: talking about his new album, DMX said "Motherf*ckers get it twisted now- it's not a game, dog. My next album is not a game, it’s my last album”. This strident insistence that something is at stake is worth taking seriously, or at least not ridiculing instantly, knee-jerk style. We’ve all learned to be embarrassed by the A-words (“authentic”, ”authenticity”), to wince inside when people use expressions like “keep it real” or “the streets”. And as an ex-postmodernist (I’m ex-pomo like some are lapsed Catholics or apostate Marxists, this stuff never really leaves you), I too used to feel reflexively squeamish about this kind of talk. But I came round to it, pragmatically rather than through theoretic readjustment, when I couldn’t help noticing that all the music that most excited me was full of these sort of utterances---“fi real’, “trus me”, “believe it’--and was underpinned by concepts like “the streets,” “hardcore,” “underground”. Not only was the music that came from this mindset approximately ten times more fired-up than your properly pomo “passionate irony” dabble-stuff with its double-quotes and concealed smirk, but those atavistic utterances themselves fair burned your ear with their intensity and conviction. So clearly the discourse of "the streets" and "the real" is not only surprisingly persistent, it still marshals massive emotive power and resonance; people believe in it. It’s something you snigger at or feel superior to, not exactly at your peril, but at your loss. For a surprisingly large number of people music is still a matter of urgency; listening to it, making it, is almost a biological need. This is even more the case with UKG/dancehall/rap, where music-making and economic livelihood are so inextricably bound together. (By contrast, dilettanteeism, is essentially, even if only in aspiration rather than actuality, an aristocratic sensibility, a form of dandyism; those who dabble are those who can afford to).
I still don’t know if I believe in any of the A-words but I believe in belief. And I think I can spot a fake (or to put it more finely, an artist who is not fully invested in whatever is their particular fantasy/delusion/performance/role). All good things in life come from seriousness--a seriousness that doesn’t preclude laughter or play, fooling around or making a fool yourself (indeed the risk of that is intrinsic to taking things/yourself [too] seriously) but equally doesn’t leave much room for semi-detachment, standing slightly outside one’s own utterances. Because life’s too short. So big up alla the culture warriors---from Marc Arcadipane to Martin Bramah, “no compromise in the name of truth”. Fi real. As the expression goes.
Tuesday, March 04, 2003
I mean to say, that must be about as far into the heart of the mainstream anyone even remotely connected with the hardcore-continuum's got, right? Goldie on Eastenders and in the window of Top Man doesn't count 'cos that's just the U.K, plus he's not repping himself as musician, which Craig D still notionally is. Goldie has ascended to the level of pure causeless originless freefloating celebrityhood (That Lyn Barber profile last year simply left out the entire hardcore/drum'n'bass phase of his career). Who else is there? Prodigy maybe.
On the more subliminal insidious cultural-virus tip, they use Boogie Times Tribe's "The Dark Stranger", that scared-out-your-wits, heart-palpitation beat, as interstitial music on BET.
On the more subliminal insidious cultural-virus tip, they use Boogie Times Tribe's "The Dark Stranger", that scared-out-your-wits, heart-palpitation beat, as interstitial music on BET.
Overheard at K-Mart. So I'm waiting at the check-out with me Brita Water Filters and disposable razors and an increasingly restless Kieran, and this familiar British voice, dulcet verging on oily, comes over the tannoy. "Hi, I'm Craig David, don't forget to check out K-Mart's complete collection of Grammy-nominated albums in the CD section, where you can pick up my album Born To Do It featuring the Grammy-nominated single "Seven Days". And while you're there don't forget to check out my new CD Slicker Than Your Average." Blimey, he's come a long way from doing station idents on Mack FM.
Krautrock!!
1/ First off, at Stylus blog, if you scroll down a bit you get to Matthew Wiener’s entry of Feb 24, an eulogy to Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler. And true, it is a fantastic book. A real fetish object, for a start: pocket-sized, a sort of psychedelic version of the Observer Book of Birds, all those full color repros of the triptastic sleeves, yum!. As for JC's gloriously over-the-top prose-poem evocations of the music, there's a case for thinking of Cope as the Great Rockwriter Should Have Been (he did a fabulous article on garage punk in NME in 83 or so; maybe he missed his true calling, ‘Treason’ and Peggy Suicide notwithstanding). BUT I fear Mr. Wiener is distinctly mistaken when he claims that Joolz singlhandedly started the Krautrock revival. Far from KrautR bands being dismissed as longhaired loon-panted guitarwanking hippies until JC opened our eyes, I can hardly remember a time when Krautrock wasn’t hip. Maybe for a little bit in the early-mid Eighties when New Pop was all the rage it kind of dipped off the radar of cool. But otherwise from the Can/Neu!-indebted postpunk of Metal Box, Remain In Light, and Fall albums too numerous to list (remember ‘I am Damo Suzuki’?) through to late Eighties stuff like Sonic Youth (Ciccone Youth’s “Two Cool Chicks Listening to Neu!”), Loop (1988’s cover of ‘Mother Sky’) and Spacemen 3/Spiritualized (all up in that Cluster/Harmonia/Neu/Faust zone). Over in New Zealand you had The Clean drawing on the Neu! blueprint, and back in Blighty, from 1988’s Bummed through the early 90s ravey stuff Happy Mondays were churning out some dead-ringer Tago Mago/Landed type mantra-funk-with-gibbering-loon-on-vox. Critically speaking, all through the late Eighties and early Nineties, from the pages of zines like Forced Exposure to inkies like Melody Maker, Krautrock was a perennial reference point. And what about Pavement ripping off The Fall and the Krauts equally from '91 onwards? Stereolab were on the Neu! motorik route several years before Krautrocksampler came out. So, the more you think about it, the more Joolz seems to have been a bit slow off the mark. In fact, that's what I remember thinking at the time: triffic book, not exactly a timely intervention.
2/ There I was, feeling a bit guilty about taking the piss out of David Keenan a few weeks back, but what d’yaknow, in his Wire magazine Faust cover story, he only goes and dumps all over my absolute favorite Faust album! Keenan dismisses Faust IV, with the sole exception of the opening “Krautrock” (which, immense-sounding as it is, I’d always been told was their genre pisstake/parody) as consisting “of slight pop songs and distressing reggae workouts”. Slight pop songs! Can he be talking about “Jennifer,” one of the most eerily beautiful psychedelic love-songs ever recorded, and named after my mum to boot? The lopsided frenzy of “Giggy Smile”? “It’s A Bit of A Pain”, which could be a great lost track off the third Velvet Underground album? In fact the whole of Side 2 is amazing. As for the “distressing reggae workouts”, there’s just one--“The Sad Skinhead”, whimsical and off-kilter quasi-skank for sure, but you’d have to be pretty stern of heart not to be amused by it. See, this is where J.Cope’s book is invaluable, he concedes that Faust IV is not as “brave’ or “experimental” as The Faust Tapes or the first album, but he still loves it and rates several of the songs among Faust's very greatest. To me Keenan’s brusque dismissal of this wondrous album is part of a general Wire bias which over-values innovation above all other criteria. For me innovation is only ever about 20 percent of why a record’s any good, there’s got to be emotion, sheer beauty, a bit of ‘social energy’ doesn’t hurt either. Because the quality of innovativeness is not something that lasts. By definition it’s not timeless; the world catches up, everybody starts doing it, it’s very hard to recapture that shock-of-the-new sensation. (C.f. Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel). So there have to be other things to recommend a work. Not that The Faust Tapes hasn’t got them in spades but the difference in radicalism between the first three albums and Faust IV doesn’t seem all that striking now.
1/ First off, at Stylus blog, if you scroll down a bit you get to Matthew Wiener’s entry of Feb 24, an eulogy to Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler. And true, it is a fantastic book. A real fetish object, for a start: pocket-sized, a sort of psychedelic version of the Observer Book of Birds, all those full color repros of the triptastic sleeves, yum!. As for JC's gloriously over-the-top prose-poem evocations of the music, there's a case for thinking of Cope as the Great Rockwriter Should Have Been (he did a fabulous article on garage punk in NME in 83 or so; maybe he missed his true calling, ‘Treason’ and Peggy Suicide notwithstanding). BUT I fear Mr. Wiener is distinctly mistaken when he claims that Joolz singlhandedly started the Krautrock revival. Far from KrautR bands being dismissed as longhaired loon-panted guitarwanking hippies until JC opened our eyes, I can hardly remember a time when Krautrock wasn’t hip. Maybe for a little bit in the early-mid Eighties when New Pop was all the rage it kind of dipped off the radar of cool. But otherwise from the Can/Neu!-indebted postpunk of Metal Box, Remain In Light, and Fall albums too numerous to list (remember ‘I am Damo Suzuki’?) through to late Eighties stuff like Sonic Youth (Ciccone Youth’s “Two Cool Chicks Listening to Neu!”), Loop (1988’s cover of ‘Mother Sky’) and Spacemen 3/Spiritualized (all up in that Cluster/Harmonia/Neu/Faust zone). Over in New Zealand you had The Clean drawing on the Neu! blueprint, and back in Blighty, from 1988’s Bummed through the early 90s ravey stuff Happy Mondays were churning out some dead-ringer Tago Mago/Landed type mantra-funk-with-gibbering-loon-on-vox. Critically speaking, all through the late Eighties and early Nineties, from the pages of zines like Forced Exposure to inkies like Melody Maker, Krautrock was a perennial reference point. And what about Pavement ripping off The Fall and the Krauts equally from '91 onwards? Stereolab were on the Neu! motorik route several years before Krautrocksampler came out. So, the more you think about it, the more Joolz seems to have been a bit slow off the mark. In fact, that's what I remember thinking at the time: triffic book, not exactly a timely intervention.
2/ There I was, feeling a bit guilty about taking the piss out of David Keenan a few weeks back, but what d’yaknow, in his Wire magazine Faust cover story, he only goes and dumps all over my absolute favorite Faust album! Keenan dismisses Faust IV, with the sole exception of the opening “Krautrock” (which, immense-sounding as it is, I’d always been told was their genre pisstake/parody) as consisting “of slight pop songs and distressing reggae workouts”. Slight pop songs! Can he be talking about “Jennifer,” one of the most eerily beautiful psychedelic love-songs ever recorded, and named after my mum to boot? The lopsided frenzy of “Giggy Smile”? “It’s A Bit of A Pain”, which could be a great lost track off the third Velvet Underground album? In fact the whole of Side 2 is amazing. As for the “distressing reggae workouts”, there’s just one--“The Sad Skinhead”, whimsical and off-kilter quasi-skank for sure, but you’d have to be pretty stern of heart not to be amused by it. See, this is where J.Cope’s book is invaluable, he concedes that Faust IV is not as “brave’ or “experimental” as The Faust Tapes or the first album, but he still loves it and rates several of the songs among Faust's very greatest. To me Keenan’s brusque dismissal of this wondrous album is part of a general Wire bias which over-values innovation above all other criteria. For me innovation is only ever about 20 percent of why a record’s any good, there’s got to be emotion, sheer beauty, a bit of ‘social energy’ doesn’t hurt either. Because the quality of innovativeness is not something that lasts. By definition it’s not timeless; the world catches up, everybody starts doing it, it’s very hard to recapture that shock-of-the-new sensation. (C.f. Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel). So there have to be other things to recommend a work. Not that The Faust Tapes hasn’t got them in spades but the difference in radicalism between the first three albums and Faust IV doesn’t seem all that striking now.
Job I wish I had. Whoever at VH1 Classic it is who has to descend into the stacks that I love to imagine burrow deep and far under the MTV/VH1 Tower, and dig out the glorious ancient crap with which they delight us. One-miss artists you never even heard of from the mid-Eighties. Twilight Byrds on some German TV show circa 1970, McGuinn's eyes black lost and fucked. Eddie Money's disturbing facial movements and hand gestures in the video for "Shaking". Synth-sellout era Psych Furs w/ Richard Butler dressed in a strange big-shouldered, tight-at-the-waist garment like a cross between Mikado get-up and a middle-aged lady's housecoat. Nitzer Ebb's preposterous promo for "Control I'm Here". A Greg Allmann solo single, the Wild West video featuring a posse of badge-wearing and gun-toting chicks hunting down outlaw lovermen. Heavy-rock pioneers Vanilla Fudge descerating "You Keep Me Hangin' On", every band member furiously mugging and over-projecting, like Eric Clapton in Cream to the power of a hundred. Blue Oyster Cult's "Burnin' For You", an audio-visual lame-fest, with tiny Buck Dharma's marvellously misconceived silver lame chest-hair exposing outfit, hairdo, moustache, face. I could go on, and on, and on....
Monday, March 03, 2003
Sunday, March 02, 2003
Seems like a decent enough interval has elapsed since the G-Rap Footnotes Binge. Time for some UKG+MC brief notes...
* * * * *
First up, the legendary Man like Luke’s gotta blog, with the mysterious name Heronbone. . And his mind’s crackling like a supercharged circuit. Your new first stop for all the garridge goss hot off the press, or pirates rather.
* * * * *
Talking of Luke, all over his tapes is this killer tune ‘Vice Versa’ by Kano (of Nasty Crew). This must be the first post-“I Love You” track, with a sing-song robo-psycho chorus that goes “girls love boys love girls/boys love girls love boys” (echo--intentional?--of Blur’s one hot moment there) and the same sour-cynical seventeen year old boy tryna act all hardhearted to the chix vibe as Dizzee Rascal: “it’s a shame/I know the game/but every girl’s the same”. On Locked On, Luke reckons.
* * * *
Talking of Dizzee, he’s signed to XL apparently, although I heard he was being chased by even bigger fish (or maybe that’s Roll Deep--million dollar deals, Warners in the running, so the rumors go). Still, XL seems a shrewd move in terms of staying hardcore but having the muscle to go Top 5 (Prodigy, Base Jaxx etc). Over on this side of the Atlantic, Vice Recordings were looking to debut their new 7 inch single series with “I Love You” paired with More Fire’s “Oi!”, but apparently got priced out of the market.
* * * * *
And talking of Roll Deep cru, finally got to hear the Wiley presents Icerink EP (courtesy of the Man Like Luke), quite possibly UKG’s very first riddim album: one groove versioned by 12 different MCS, including Dizzee, Kano, Sharky Major and Wiley himself. Shattering stuff. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, riddimologically speaking this music has NOTHING to do with garage anymore. It’s like they’ve taken the most dementedly asymmetric elements of dancehall and bounce drum programming and merged them into this limb-dislocating robo-palsy. It’s totally denatured music, nothing in it is trying to parallel the way an acoustic drum kit is organised or sound, to give any impression of percussive events occurring in a real acoustic space. These are kids whose genetic drumcode was forged with ‘Terminator’, ‘Timestretch,’ Buju’s ‘Big It Up’, who probably aren’t even old enough to remember those tunes. They’re never known any other way beats should be. Biorhythmically speaking, there’s something real unhealthy about this music; you get the feeling that it’s made by people who inhabit an environment that’s both physically and culturally toxic, their nervous systems jangled and fogged from videogames and cable TV, high-grade hydro and sugar-choked beverages, fast food and faster beats. Chronic hyperstimulation. Air stale and thick with ions and the emissions of computers and leisure technology. So, in a sense, it’s folk music, the product of its environment. Folk, fucked.
Side note: what I’ve got on this tape is the record being aired on a pirate for the first time, in its entirety, and Wiley keeps talking over the record to discourage people from “thiefing it”. Apparently there’s scoundrels out there who will tape prerelease tunes off the pirate airwaves, burn ‘em up on CD or DAT, and then press them up as their own bootleg dubplates and DJ them. Which can’t be the best sound quality, but is appropriately dog-eat-dog.
* * * * *
Elswhere on the unofficial gutter-garridge webring, Ingram notes (an entry or two back) the current prevalence of a tracky Chicago house/Detroit techno flavor in some of the 4-beat/8-bar backing tuneage on the pirates. This made me think of this pirate tape track I’ve nicknamed “Strings of Death”. Following an Al Pacino/Scarface sample, pizzicato synth-strings twitch tensely, instilling a real cold-fever foreboding, the icicle-stab pattern is swathed with yet more Detroit-like pseudo-strings. Then the track stops dead and there’s the most most hair-raising darkness-beckons string-glissando threnody-effect, a kind of ghastly mystic shudder rises up inside you, like your spine's turning to ice. Then it drops into more par-for-the-course Swizz/Ludacris dirgey horn-fanfare groove. A great ominous tune. Help me ID it please!
* * * * *
First up, the legendary Man like Luke’s gotta blog, with the mysterious name Heronbone. . And his mind’s crackling like a supercharged circuit. Your new first stop for all the garridge goss hot off the press, or pirates rather.
* * * * *
Talking of Luke, all over his tapes is this killer tune ‘Vice Versa’ by Kano (of Nasty Crew). This must be the first post-“I Love You” track, with a sing-song robo-psycho chorus that goes “girls love boys love girls/boys love girls love boys” (echo--intentional?--of Blur’s one hot moment there) and the same sour-cynical seventeen year old boy tryna act all hardhearted to the chix vibe as Dizzee Rascal: “it’s a shame/I know the game/but every girl’s the same”. On Locked On, Luke reckons.
* * * *
Talking of Dizzee, he’s signed to XL apparently, although I heard he was being chased by even bigger fish (or maybe that’s Roll Deep--million dollar deals, Warners in the running, so the rumors go). Still, XL seems a shrewd move in terms of staying hardcore but having the muscle to go Top 5 (Prodigy, Base Jaxx etc). Over on this side of the Atlantic, Vice Recordings were looking to debut their new 7 inch single series with “I Love You” paired with More Fire’s “Oi!”, but apparently got priced out of the market.
* * * * *
And talking of Roll Deep cru, finally got to hear the Wiley presents Icerink EP (courtesy of the Man Like Luke), quite possibly UKG’s very first riddim album: one groove versioned by 12 different MCS, including Dizzee, Kano, Sharky Major and Wiley himself. Shattering stuff. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, riddimologically speaking this music has NOTHING to do with garage anymore. It’s like they’ve taken the most dementedly asymmetric elements of dancehall and bounce drum programming and merged them into this limb-dislocating robo-palsy. It’s totally denatured music, nothing in it is trying to parallel the way an acoustic drum kit is organised or sound, to give any impression of percussive events occurring in a real acoustic space. These are kids whose genetic drumcode was forged with ‘Terminator’, ‘Timestretch,’ Buju’s ‘Big It Up’, who probably aren’t even old enough to remember those tunes. They’re never known any other way beats should be. Biorhythmically speaking, there’s something real unhealthy about this music; you get the feeling that it’s made by people who inhabit an environment that’s both physically and culturally toxic, their nervous systems jangled and fogged from videogames and cable TV, high-grade hydro and sugar-choked beverages, fast food and faster beats. Chronic hyperstimulation. Air stale and thick with ions and the emissions of computers and leisure technology. So, in a sense, it’s folk music, the product of its environment. Folk, fucked.
Side note: what I’ve got on this tape is the record being aired on a pirate for the first time, in its entirety, and Wiley keeps talking over the record to discourage people from “thiefing it”. Apparently there’s scoundrels out there who will tape prerelease tunes off the pirate airwaves, burn ‘em up on CD or DAT, and then press them up as their own bootleg dubplates and DJ them. Which can’t be the best sound quality, but is appropriately dog-eat-dog.
* * * * *
Elswhere on the unofficial gutter-garridge webring, Ingram notes (an entry or two back) the current prevalence of a tracky Chicago house/Detroit techno flavor in some of the 4-beat/8-bar backing tuneage on the pirates. This made me think of this pirate tape track I’ve nicknamed “Strings of Death”. Following an Al Pacino/Scarface sample, pizzicato synth-strings twitch tensely, instilling a real cold-fever foreboding, the icicle-stab pattern is swathed with yet more Detroit-like pseudo-strings. Then the track stops dead and there’s the most most hair-raising darkness-beckons string-glissando threnody-effect, a kind of ghastly mystic shudder rises up inside you, like your spine's turning to ice. Then it drops into more par-for-the-course Swizz/Ludacris dirgey horn-fanfare groove. A great ominous tune. Help me ID it please!
Sunday, February 23, 2003
ERRATA. (Actually I think 'erratum' is grammatically correct, when you've made just the one fuck-up, but it looks odd). Below I make reference to the Streets album selling a mere 13 thousand copies in America (should have been a bit more sceptical, given the source was a Streetsphobic friend rubbing his hands with schadenfreude), well it turns out that Original Pirate Material has done a respectable 47 thousand and is still selling steadily (about 3000 a week) over three months after its release. Given the fact that it must be getting almost-zero radio play and video-rotation, given also the parlous state of the record industry thanks to file-sharing/CD-burning, and given the fact that many hipsters would have got it on import in the 8 month gap between its release in the UK and its finally coming out domestically, this is a pretty decent result. Certainly on a par with earlier successes d'estime like Size/Reprazent's New Forms, and who knows it may "catch on" like other sleepers (c.f. The Strokes). Not that I'm bothered either way: it's not the kind of record that is diminished by its failure to be popular in any given territory. But it would certainly be a nice bonus.
Don't have time to fully explore the 'critical reception of OPM in the USA' as promised, it would take a whole macro-essay. But I should at least take a moment to modify my comment about 'most Americans not fully getting it', I was really talking about the reviews I've read. And I don't mean not getting it in the sense of not being informed, like you have to do some kind of course in UK culture before you can enjoy/engage with the record. I'm talking more of the approach, which here seems to typically ignore OPM's positive attributes and worry away at its "negative" ones. Even the most favorable reviews here seem to pose the record as a problem, something to be measured against hip hop. The most extreme example being the Christgau review of course which reads like one long list of defects and ways in which it doesn't cut the mustard, such that the A minus grade comes as a complete surprise (you're expecting C-Plus). But even Sasha Frere-Jones, whose favorite album of the year is Original Pirate Material, comes over as fretful in his original Voice review, grappling with the knotty problem of its un-Americanness. Elsewhere you get the gives-compliment-with-one-hand, takes-away-with-another move: Kelefa Sanneh in The New York Times declared that surprise surprise, the best hip hop record of the year is by a white Briton but only a few sentences away opined that Skinner isn’t really a rapper at all. In Britain, the reviews don't bother with all this categorizing and compare-and-contrast with the real-American-deal nonsense, they just get straight down to what would seem the most salient thing about the album: its exceptional capacity to entertain and amuse. (And move and touch and, if you want, resonate) A good example (haven't got the url to hand but I'm sure you can work out how to get to Freakytrigger) are Tom Ewing's comments on various Streets tracks in his DOWNLOAD THIS/2002 Best. Year. Ever. epic cataloguing his favorite tuens of the year. You read the comments and you think "the guy gets it". There's no difficulty, nothing to worry about or at. Original Pirate Material has a context. for sure. but it transcends its context. It is there to be enjoyed as a stand-alone entity: a blessing, a fortune. Basically, the record is a licence to gush, and I suppose what has disappointed moi about the critical reception here is the dearth of real gushing. What use is a rave review if it doesn't actually RAVE?
Don't have time to fully explore the 'critical reception of OPM in the USA' as promised, it would take a whole macro-essay. But I should at least take a moment to modify my comment about 'most Americans not fully getting it', I was really talking about the reviews I've read. And I don't mean not getting it in the sense of not being informed, like you have to do some kind of course in UK culture before you can enjoy/engage with the record. I'm talking more of the approach, which here seems to typically ignore OPM's positive attributes and worry away at its "negative" ones. Even the most favorable reviews here seem to pose the record as a problem, something to be measured against hip hop. The most extreme example being the Christgau review of course which reads like one long list of defects and ways in which it doesn't cut the mustard, such that the A minus grade comes as a complete surprise (you're expecting C-Plus). But even Sasha Frere-Jones, whose favorite album of the year is Original Pirate Material, comes over as fretful in his original Voice review, grappling with the knotty problem of its un-Americanness. Elsewhere you get the gives-compliment-with-one-hand, takes-away-with-another move: Kelefa Sanneh in The New York Times declared that surprise surprise, the best hip hop record of the year is by a white Briton but only a few sentences away opined that Skinner isn’t really a rapper at all. In Britain, the reviews don't bother with all this categorizing and compare-and-contrast with the real-American-deal nonsense, they just get straight down to what would seem the most salient thing about the album: its exceptional capacity to entertain and amuse. (And move and touch and, if you want, resonate) A good example (haven't got the url to hand but I'm sure you can work out how to get to Freakytrigger) are Tom Ewing's comments on various Streets tracks in his DOWNLOAD THIS/2002 Best. Year. Ever. epic cataloguing his favorite tuens of the year. You read the comments and you think "the guy gets it". There's no difficulty, nothing to worry about or at. Original Pirate Material has a context. for sure. but it transcends its context. It is there to be enjoyed as a stand-alone entity: a blessing, a fortune. Basically, the record is a licence to gush, and I suppose what has disappointed moi about the critical reception here is the dearth of real gushing. What use is a rave review if it doesn't actually RAVE?
Happy hardcore thrives in the US of A. A piece by the magnificently monikered Andrew John Ignatius Vontz.
Rock Critics 4 Peace. Is what the sign I held said. Attached to the sign's handle was one end of an extremely long banner, made by some friends, which intended to declare ‘Violence Begets Violence’ (phrasing a tad Old Testament, but a valid point) but unfortunately stopped short at ‘Violence Begets Vi’. One could only hope the more rockhistorically-aware in the crowd took this as a reference to Vi Subversa (fortysomething-even-in-1979 frontperson of anarchopunx Poison Girls) and thus a celebration of the grand continuity of refusenik culture.
Shamefully, the big march eight days ago is one of the very few demonstrations I've ever participated in. Never been much of a joiner, I suppose. The only semi-excuse I can muster is that for some of my generation, the ascension of Thatcher was such a surprise, such a hope-dashing trauma, that, especially if it occurred at a formative period in one's youth when politics tend to lean towards the unfeasible (at the time I would have been oscillating between Situationism and Communism--an easy stance when you're sixteen and don't own anything), it opened up a massive chasm between ideals and politics-as-the-realm-of-the-possible. And in that chasm something close to resignation developed. Brief encounters with organized politics, whether it was anarchists (all-talk except for the really-just-up-for-a-ruck macho streetfighter types) or canvassing for Labour, merely encouraged the drift towards fatalism and quiescence. Not exactly resistance-is-futile, but biding one's time until the culture shifts again. For many of us in the Eighties, I suspect, the energy we might have in a more promising decade devoted to activism was instead channelled into music and its surrounding discourse; that was where our "battles" were fought. (Whether that was a massive diversion/waste of energy is something I'm trying to work out with this post-punk book).
At a certain point, though, regardless of whether demonstrations achieve their aims or not (and this one, as impressive as it was globally, appears to have made not a blind bit of difference to the USA and UK's headlong rush towards the geopolitical precipice), on an individual level there comes a point at which a certain better-out-than-in logic takes over. Keep on swalllowing your own anger/disgust/indignation/dismay and it turns poisonous. It was inspiring to see the creativity, humour, and high spirits of the marchers. And it was revelatory to witness--as visceral, glandular experience rather than second-hand, intellectualized concept---the police's heavy-handed and unprovoked crowd-dispersal tactics. As the cordon of mounted police started to advance down a packed 3rd Avenue--not quite a charge but more than a canter--I felt like the peasant in Monty Python & The Holy Grail: "Ah! Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Come and see the violence inherent in the system!”
Shamefully, the big march eight days ago is one of the very few demonstrations I've ever participated in. Never been much of a joiner, I suppose. The only semi-excuse I can muster is that for some of my generation, the ascension of Thatcher was such a surprise, such a hope-dashing trauma, that, especially if it occurred at a formative period in one's youth when politics tend to lean towards the unfeasible (at the time I would have been oscillating between Situationism and Communism--an easy stance when you're sixteen and don't own anything), it opened up a massive chasm between ideals and politics-as-the-realm-of-the-possible. And in that chasm something close to resignation developed. Brief encounters with organized politics, whether it was anarchists (all-talk except for the really-just-up-for-a-ruck macho streetfighter types) or canvassing for Labour, merely encouraged the drift towards fatalism and quiescence. Not exactly resistance-is-futile, but biding one's time until the culture shifts again. For many of us in the Eighties, I suspect, the energy we might have in a more promising decade devoted to activism was instead channelled into music and its surrounding discourse; that was where our "battles" were fought. (Whether that was a massive diversion/waste of energy is something I'm trying to work out with this post-punk book).
At a certain point, though, regardless of whether demonstrations achieve their aims or not (and this one, as impressive as it was globally, appears to have made not a blind bit of difference to the USA and UK's headlong rush towards the geopolitical precipice), on an individual level there comes a point at which a certain better-out-than-in logic takes over. Keep on swalllowing your own anger/disgust/indignation/dismay and it turns poisonous. It was inspiring to see the creativity, humour, and high spirits of the marchers. And it was revelatory to witness--as visceral, glandular experience rather than second-hand, intellectualized concept---the police's heavy-handed and unprovoked crowd-dispersal tactics. As the cordon of mounted police started to advance down a packed 3rd Avenue--not quite a charge but more than a canter--I felt like the peasant in Monty Python & The Holy Grail: "Ah! Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Come and see the violence inherent in the system!”
Thursday, February 13, 2003
Talking of squandered intellectual energy, it’s Pazz & Jop time!. And specifically, the annual Critics Comments fest--where the impress-your-peers pressure cooker and general meta-meta consciousness that afflicts this profession results in prose so burnished and honed and (that word again) infolded, it’s…. migraine-inducing, actually. Blinded by the insights, the droll dazzle of it all. For those who just can’t get enough, there’s a special ILM thread devoted to salvaging the comments that didn’t make the final cut (Sasha Frere-Jones's being especially entertaining, as is his Timbaland Vs Neptune essay in Pazz proper).
I suppose I should be chuffed that The Streets is Number 4 (the highest my favorite album of the year’s ever placed, it’s also the only album in my ballot that made the Top 40 this year). But I’m curiously unmoved. Being a Streets fan must be lot more fun in the U.K., where Skinner is a public figure--in the pop charts, nominated for awards, well-known enough to get slagged off by tabloid columnists like Jessica Wossname (for oh-yes-very-tenable-I-don't-think reasons like his lack of humour). In America, Original Pirate Material is--what did Christgau call it?--a success d’estime. Just thirteen thousand sold, so the rumour goes. A household name only among the hipoisie. And even those who love The Streets here, by and large, don’t fully get it. I have a whole micro-essay still hatching about the critical reception of Original Pirate Material over here, but later for that.
I suppose I should be chuffed that The Streets is Number 4 (the highest my favorite album of the year’s ever placed, it’s also the only album in my ballot that made the Top 40 this year). But I’m curiously unmoved. Being a Streets fan must be lot more fun in the U.K., where Skinner is a public figure--in the pop charts, nominated for awards, well-known enough to get slagged off by tabloid columnists like Jessica Wossname (for oh-yes-very-tenable-I-don't-think reasons like his lack of humour). In America, Original Pirate Material is--what did Christgau call it?--a success d’estime. Just thirteen thousand sold, so the rumour goes. A household name only among the hipoisie. And even those who love The Streets here, by and large, don’t fully get it. I have a whole micro-essay still hatching about the critical reception of Original Pirate Material over here, but later for that.
Wednesday, February 12, 2003
This evenly matched intellectual prize-fight (a dozen people in the ring, gloves off, fuck the Queensbury Rules) of an ILM thread started
innocuously enough on Feb 5 as a cry for help untangling a Christgau sentence that’s particularly knotty
and “infolded” (to quote Momus, everybody’s punchbag here,
more or less, but holding his own quite stoutly I reckon), raged
like a forest fire for a week, and still smoulders. So highpowered and ferociously infolded (there is no other word) is its discursive pitch that after foolishly reading the entire thing in a single sitting I had to lie down in a darkened room for a couple of hours until my brain unclenched. If only we could somehow harness the massive cranial energy rashly expended here and apply it to solving the problems of the world! Peace in the Middle East, renewable energy, and a colony on Mars would surely be within our grasp.
innocuously enough on Feb 5 as a cry for help untangling a Christgau sentence that’s particularly knotty
and “infolded” (to quote Momus, everybody’s punchbag here,
more or less, but holding his own quite stoutly I reckon), raged
like a forest fire for a week, and still smoulders. So highpowered and ferociously infolded (there is no other word) is its discursive pitch that after foolishly reading the entire thing in a single sitting I had to lie down in a darkened room for a couple of hours until my brain unclenched. If only we could somehow harness the massive cranial energy rashly expended here and apply it to solving the problems of the world! Peace in the Middle East, renewable energy, and a colony on Mars would surely be within our grasp.
Tuesday, February 11, 2003
Thought-provoking post by Ingram (and indeed let’s do the second-name thing like the public schoolboys we undoubtedly mostly are) in which he breaks down music into two opposed camps/sensibilities, Beatnik and AvantYob; this schemata in turn triggered by Dale @ Astronaut’s Notepad’s paean to the AvantFolk of Jackie-O Motherfucker, No-Neck Blues Band, Jewelled Antler Collective, et al. To keep the intertextual ball rolling, here’s some supplementary thoughts.
First off, what a great idea, using tables! I think we should all start using tables, and pie charts, and graphs, and maps. Serious!
Thought Two was that unmentioned but hovering over the whole zone of contention like an underfed ghost is the figure of David Keenan, The Wire’s great champion of all things hard-to-find and harder-still-to-listen to. No, that’s a cheap crack--in truth, my exposure to this ultra-underground has largely been limited to the odd track on the free sampler CDs you get with The Wire. Keenan’s a good writer, and in this case his writing does its job well (one of the functions of music journalism being to give the reader sufficient material with which to make their own mind up about whether they’d dig something) because it leaves me in little doubt that I’ve barely a scintilla of interest in this area: spontaneist jammed-out quasi-primitivist wish-we-were-on-ESP-in-1966 recorded-on-a-single-microphone pseudo-field recording stylee freak-form improv-acoustica folk-jazz. This is 2003, people! Nobody is threatened by your activities. The spectacular-commodity society is not being challenged. In fact, this is the ultimate commodity-fetishist micro-economy. The whole point of this music is its esoteric exclusivity. I recall the Dead C being quite upfront about this, talking with brazen cynicism in the Wire about how they exploited their particular sub-market, throwing out any old shit in tiny editions and unusual formats, ‘cos they knew there were enough “Losing My Edge” types in every city across the globe to make it profitable. I mean to say, the avatar of this sensibility is La Monte Young, a man who does not want you to hear his music.
Flicking through The Wire, I’m often prompted to marvel at the harsh and lonely furrow Mr. Keenan’s chosen to plough. I imagine him sneaking off to listen to Destiny’s Child when it all gets too much, like a Presbyterian Minister who keeps fighting and fighting the urge until he has to hop in a taxi and head straight to the Red Light District. Then there's the end of year critic’s Pros and Cons of his that caught my eye a few years back--an all-too-vivid glimpse into the lifestyle. I think he complained about both having too many records to listen to and about all the vinyl grails and talismanic arcana he coveted but couldn’t afford or find. And then in Cons, the line “flat over-run with mice” leaped out at me. Sudden vision of an apartment choked with stacks of 100-copy edition handpainted 10 inch singles, cassette-only Jap-noise tapes, 3 inch CDs of NZ drone-rock, all covered with droppings and coated with the invisible spoor-trails of rodent wee.
Every year without fail Keenan puts “squares” in his list of Cons. Sock it to ‘em, daddio! I mean, talk about using language that places you historico-culturally. In this case, Greenwich Village, 1956. The whole Beat ethos is something that just don’t resonate for me I'm afraid. Apart from Jim Morrison and Lee Ranaldo's lyrics on Daydream Nation, its influence in rock seems by and large deleterious. Patti Smith? Nuff said. Admittedly I haven’t really explored the area thoroughly. Generally I’m one of those with a compulsion to get to the end of every book I read, but about 40 pages from On The Road ’s exit ramp, the gas tank of my interest ran dry. Patches of awesome mystic poetry, granted, but alternating with interminable benzedrine-addled stretches of oh-so-dated American picaresque. And the attitude to women, it just won’t wash today--not so much ‘cos it’s offensive (you’d have to cordon off 90 percent of Western literature by those criteria) but it just exposes how flimsy and pampered this brand of male rebellion is. Like Guns N’Roses type bands in LA sponging off their rich girlfriends, On the Road’s male adventurism is subsidized entirely by helpful aunts and gullible girlfriends.
So yes, no surprise to anyone, I’m AvantYob all the way (or avant-lumpen, as I prefer it, for the Marxist precision). In his second table (luvvit!) Ingram compares and contrasts a whole bunch of artists who are either Beatnik or AvantYob. To this I would add just one extra pair. Two musicians who both appear on a lot of other people’s records but are separated by a near-infinite gulf. Jim O’Rourke versus Dizzee Rascal. No contest. Case closed.
First off, what a great idea, using tables! I think we should all start using tables, and pie charts, and graphs, and maps. Serious!
Thought Two was that unmentioned but hovering over the whole zone of contention like an underfed ghost is the figure of David Keenan, The Wire’s great champion of all things hard-to-find and harder-still-to-listen to. No, that’s a cheap crack--in truth, my exposure to this ultra-underground has largely been limited to the odd track on the free sampler CDs you get with The Wire. Keenan’s a good writer, and in this case his writing does its job well (one of the functions of music journalism being to give the reader sufficient material with which to make their own mind up about whether they’d dig something) because it leaves me in little doubt that I’ve barely a scintilla of interest in this area: spontaneist jammed-out quasi-primitivist wish-we-were-on-ESP-in-1966 recorded-on-a-single-microphone pseudo-field recording stylee freak-form improv-acoustica folk-jazz. This is 2003, people! Nobody is threatened by your activities. The spectacular-commodity society is not being challenged. In fact, this is the ultimate commodity-fetishist micro-economy. The whole point of this music is its esoteric exclusivity. I recall the Dead C being quite upfront about this, talking with brazen cynicism in the Wire about how they exploited their particular sub-market, throwing out any old shit in tiny editions and unusual formats, ‘cos they knew there were enough “Losing My Edge” types in every city across the globe to make it profitable. I mean to say, the avatar of this sensibility is La Monte Young, a man who does not want you to hear his music.
Flicking through The Wire, I’m often prompted to marvel at the harsh and lonely furrow Mr. Keenan’s chosen to plough. I imagine him sneaking off to listen to Destiny’s Child when it all gets too much, like a Presbyterian Minister who keeps fighting and fighting the urge until he has to hop in a taxi and head straight to the Red Light District. Then there's the end of year critic’s Pros and Cons of his that caught my eye a few years back--an all-too-vivid glimpse into the lifestyle. I think he complained about both having too many records to listen to and about all the vinyl grails and talismanic arcana he coveted but couldn’t afford or find. And then in Cons, the line “flat over-run with mice” leaped out at me. Sudden vision of an apartment choked with stacks of 100-copy edition handpainted 10 inch singles, cassette-only Jap-noise tapes, 3 inch CDs of NZ drone-rock, all covered with droppings and coated with the invisible spoor-trails of rodent wee.
Every year without fail Keenan puts “squares” in his list of Cons. Sock it to ‘em, daddio! I mean, talk about using language that places you historico-culturally. In this case, Greenwich Village, 1956. The whole Beat ethos is something that just don’t resonate for me I'm afraid. Apart from Jim Morrison and Lee Ranaldo's lyrics on Daydream Nation, its influence in rock seems by and large deleterious. Patti Smith? Nuff said. Admittedly I haven’t really explored the area thoroughly. Generally I’m one of those with a compulsion to get to the end of every book I read, but about 40 pages from On The Road ’s exit ramp, the gas tank of my interest ran dry. Patches of awesome mystic poetry, granted, but alternating with interminable benzedrine-addled stretches of oh-so-dated American picaresque. And the attitude to women, it just won’t wash today--not so much ‘cos it’s offensive (you’d have to cordon off 90 percent of Western literature by those criteria) but it just exposes how flimsy and pampered this brand of male rebellion is. Like Guns N’Roses type bands in LA sponging off their rich girlfriends, On the Road’s male adventurism is subsidized entirely by helpful aunts and gullible girlfriends.
So yes, no surprise to anyone, I’m AvantYob all the way (or avant-lumpen, as I prefer it, for the Marxist precision). In his second table (luvvit!) Ingram compares and contrasts a whole bunch of artists who are either Beatnik or AvantYob. To this I would add just one extra pair. Two musicians who both appear on a lot of other people’s records but are separated by a near-infinite gulf. Jim O’Rourke versus Dizzee Rascal. No contest. Case closed.
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