!!!!COMPETITION RESULTS!!!!
Picking a winner was very hard (traditional thing to say but true nonetheless), there were such a lot of good ideas--many MANY thanks to everybody who participated in the contest.
Titling a book is tricky, the decision's far weightier than headlining an article because books stick around so much longer than a mag. As decisions go the title is probably as crucial what a magazine decides to put on its cover any given month--it has what the biz people call "point of sale" impact. The title is your advertising slogan really. The only one of my titles I've really loved unreservedly was Blissed Out, which Joy came up with… The Sex Revolts --or Seks Isyanlari as they say it in Turkey (more on that in days to come)--is some phantasm from the recesses of Joy's subconscious (she thought she read it in a poem), Generation Ecstasy 's corny as fuck (it was only the working title but the marketing people refused to relinquish it) and Energy Flash, while having the reflected-glory factor from the Greatest Rave Anthem of All Time and containing a sort of buried drug allusion, is possibly a little too abstract if you’re not an E-nitiate.
Anyway, with the current tome, the ideal would be: find something that both connotes to the p-punk afficianodos while being literal enough to be understood by yer floating punters. The winner and runners up all have this combination to varying degrees. But before we reach the final Countdown, here’s some other notable categories, plus Honorary Mentions.
MOST POPULAR CHOICE
1/ Damaged Goods
By an absolute mile. Obviously it has high recognition with the postpunk converts but I honestly believe it would confuse everybody else.
2/ Prole Art Threat
I do like this but the whiff of unreconstructed Marxism… well let’s just say I’d like to trick people into buying the thing before plunging them into that head first! Plus, if you think about it, 75 % of postpunkers weren’t your classic industrial proletariat, they were bourgie-boho art school. Even The Fall weren’t proper proles--Mark E. Smith had a white collar job.
3/ Death Disco
Again, high recognition among Those Who Know, but not so sure about everybody else. Same applies to--
4/ Poptones
5/ The Medium Was Tedium
This garnered an amazing three votes! Now this title would just be a gift to negative reviewers wouldn't it!
MOST POPULAR SOURCE FOR TITLES
1/ The Pop Group
2/ Gang of Four
3/ Desperate Bicycles (!) (not just The Medium Is Tedium, either)
4/ PiL
5/ Buzzcocks
6/ Pere Ubu
7/ Magazine
8/ Mark Perry/Alternative TV
TRES AMUSING BUT NOT EXACTLY PRACTICAL
Lions after Slumber: from Nuissance to Jouissance in the Post-Punk Diaspora (Stephen Trousse a/k/a Jerry the Nipper)
Beyond Good and Eno (Mark Sinker)
Nerdy Rash of Funk (Steve Archer)
Blissed In (Joris @ Kindamuzik)
Bootsy Spoke to Eno (Richard Jordan)
Without a Discernable Destination (Scott McKeating)
Too Many Creeps (And I Had To Interview 120 of Them) (Geeta Dayal--now, now, G, almost all of them were very nice, actually… especially the Scottish and Sheffield ones)
Collapsing New People (Bas Van Hoof)
Drastic Measures, Drastic Movement (Bas Van Hoof waving the Dutch flag--it’s the title of the first Minny Pops LP)
Talk About Hubris, Man (Benn Barr, quoting Vivien Goldman on Keith Levene and PiL)
The Crowd in Portsmouth Wanted to Kill Us (Benn Barr, quoting Mark P on the ill-fated Pop Group/Alternative TV tour of 1979)
Misery & Splendor (David Howie--look, this ain’t no Trollope novel!)
Noises in a Swound (Stanley Whyte, from Coleridge’s "Rime of the Ancient Mariner")
Manicured Noises (Paul Kennedy)
Bad Babies (Matthew Maragno)
DOOM, said the Bass (James Parker--look, this ain't no Harlan Ellison short story!)
Pretending To See The Future (Andrew O’Donnell)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Okay, onwards to the results:
First the HONARARY MENTIONS
"From Safety to Where?", "Where to Now?" (both Dan Selzer); “It’s About Now” (Stanley Whyte); “Let’s Submerge!”, “Street Waves,” “Subterranean Moderns”, (all Paul Kennedy); “Colossal Youth” (Beppe Recchia); “After Year Zero: The History of Post-Punk” (Joe Gross); “Difficult Fun: Post-punk 1978-84” (Ged Babey); “New Dawn Fades” (Krakabash); “Harmony In A Different Kitchen” (Jonathan Dale); “Extended Play” (Stan Emmerson); “Action Time Vision” (Rebecca Rosengard)
And Now…..
[drum roll]
THE TOP TEN COUNTDOWN
10/ It's The New Thing (Sebastien Morlighem)
9/ Doubt Beat (Dan Selzer)
8/ The Outside of Everything (Gard Paulsen)
7/ Like Punk Happened! Post Punk & New Wave 1978-1984 (Paul Kennedy)
6/ The Modern Dance (Nathalie Watkins)
5/ Sense of Purpose (Gard Paulsen)
4/ We Oppose All Rock & Roll (Jess Harvell)
3/ A Different Kind of Tension (Tim Finney)
2/ Don't Sell Your Dreams (Jessica Knapp)
[just teasing ya!]
[okay i'll quit arsing around now]
1/
RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN (Jonathan O'Brien)
This was actually very close between #2 and #1--as I said, had to consult with the publisher for a tie-break as specified in the rules. Don't Sell Your Dreams really captures the era's idealism and lays it on the table in an upfront, in-your-face, and really rather ballsy way. The afficionados naturally twig the fact that it's a Pop Group song, but to non-postpunk types it communicates a timeless and universal sentiment really forcefully--plus there's a little bit of that Naomi Klein cross-synergy. However it's tone is slightly anguished and precarious, as if selling those dreams and buckling down is almost inevitable. From the Orange Juice song, Rip It Up And Start Again nicely blends the destructive/reactive and positive/renewing attitude of postpunk and New Pop, with
a sort of forward-looking, "tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life" feel that gives it the edge over Don't Sell Your Dreams. Tiny bit long maybe, but it just nails it, I feel. So hats off to Jonathan!!
Thursday, April 15, 2004
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
Woebot parries the (very mild and very veiled) ribbing re Kanye West and his samples. Actually it's just something I've noticed that people do, including me obviously, rave about the stuff KW samples--like I'm not sure how I'd quantify and breakdown the pleasure-sources in "Through The Wire" (the lyric for instance is one of the very few in the entire history of rap that I almost know by heart, and the beat is wonderfully sloppy-yet-tight) but I'd have to give at least 60 percent to Chakha, if not more. And point taken about Acen and "Trip II To The Moon" but there's at least four or five different elements in that tune and I really can't think of hardly any hardcore songs that are as utterly dependent on a single sample source the way "Through The Wire" is. An atrocious track on Boogie Beat that is basically "Careless Whispers" with a bad fastbreak under it springs to mind, and the tune based on Tasmin Archer's "Sleeping Satellite" is quite indebted I suppose. But generally hardcore is a lot more
re-creative than "through the wire" or "takeover"
With Kanye, I just think it's intriguing how he's praised for doing something that Puff Daddy was reviled for.
In fact, given KW's recent declaration that Ma$e is his favorite rapper EVER (a swerve from canonical taste worthy of Chuck ‘I like Poison, me’ Eddy), it seems that Bad Boy circa 1997 really IS the biggest influence and precursor to what Kanye W does. Which to my mind is much cooler than him going on about Ghostface Killah or Tribe Called Quest yawn yawn yawn.... actually that's another good example cos 85 percent of what's good about "bonita applebum" IS "Daylight" by Roy Ayers Music Project aka RAMP, whereas in Roni Size 'daylight' i'd say it was more like 50/50)
"Through The Wire" and "Takeover" almost approach the mash-up sensibility where there's this pride is seeing how little new material you can add to the source elements.
In "Through The Wire" the creative act of musicianship (ignoring the lyrics for now) is loving the Chakha Khan song, making the through the fire/through the wire pun, speeding up the vocal and selecting the bits you want to loop. And that's IT--apart from the drums--that's the entire musical content of the track
With the comparision to Puff and Bad Boy, I'm not implying KW doesn't deserve his praise... it just interesting the way it verges on that kind of conceptual art practise where the citation is the act of authorship, the extreme being that "painter" (help me out here somebody) who just appends his signature to reproductions of famous artworks.
It also relates to that curious syndrome familar to anyone who's ever deejayed, or in a slightly paler form, ever made a mixtape, whereby just the selection of a track somehow accrues a tiny portion of the credit properly due solely to the person or persons who made the track. I say "tiny" but the whole cult of DJ in housetechnoclub etc is based around the near-wholesale migration of applause and worship from those who made the tracks to those who re-present the tracks...
And, closer to home, criticism of course has something of that aspect... "reflected glory" isn't quite the right way of describing it because it's more intrinsic somehow, more of a deeper connection... the psychology of it entails somehow feeling like your appreciation of something is so deep and intense and righteous you almost might have been in on the making of the object of admiration yourself. A delusion of course!
(i'm sure this is the psychological process behind plagiarism (of the unwitting sort, obviously, as opposed to lazy-sod hope-no-one'll-notice sort), you become so attached to someone else's phrase, it inhabits you so intimately, that you become convinced you thought of it yourself. The guy in Chocolate Watchband thought Mick Jagger was ripping off him)
re-creative than "through the wire" or "takeover"
With Kanye, I just think it's intriguing how he's praised for doing something that Puff Daddy was reviled for.
In fact, given KW's recent declaration that Ma$e is his favorite rapper EVER (a swerve from canonical taste worthy of Chuck ‘I like Poison, me’ Eddy), it seems that Bad Boy circa 1997 really IS the biggest influence and precursor to what Kanye W does. Which to my mind is much cooler than him going on about Ghostface Killah or Tribe Called Quest yawn yawn yawn.... actually that's another good example cos 85 percent of what's good about "bonita applebum" IS "Daylight" by Roy Ayers Music Project aka RAMP, whereas in Roni Size 'daylight' i'd say it was more like 50/50)
"Through The Wire" and "Takeover" almost approach the mash-up sensibility where there's this pride is seeing how little new material you can add to the source elements.
In "Through The Wire" the creative act of musicianship (ignoring the lyrics for now) is loving the Chakha Khan song, making the through the fire/through the wire pun, speeding up the vocal and selecting the bits you want to loop. And that's IT--apart from the drums--that's the entire musical content of the track
With the comparision to Puff and Bad Boy, I'm not implying KW doesn't deserve his praise... it just interesting the way it verges on that kind of conceptual art practise where the citation is the act of authorship, the extreme being that "painter" (help me out here somebody) who just appends his signature to reproductions of famous artworks.
It also relates to that curious syndrome familar to anyone who's ever deejayed, or in a slightly paler form, ever made a mixtape, whereby just the selection of a track somehow accrues a tiny portion of the credit properly due solely to the person or persons who made the track. I say "tiny" but the whole cult of DJ in housetechnoclub etc is based around the near-wholesale migration of applause and worship from those who made the tracks to those who re-present the tracks...
And, closer to home, criticism of course has something of that aspect... "reflected glory" isn't quite the right way of describing it because it's more intrinsic somehow, more of a deeper connection... the psychology of it entails somehow feeling like your appreciation of something is so deep and intense and righteous you almost might have been in on the making of the object of admiration yourself. A delusion of course!
(i'm sure this is the psychological process behind plagiarism (of the unwitting sort, obviously, as opposed to lazy-sod hope-no-one'll-notice sort), you become so attached to someone else's phrase, it inhabits you so intimately, that you become convinced you thought of it yourself. The guy in Chocolate Watchband thought Mick Jagger was ripping off him)
Da Missus on "Info-hunk" Gideon Yago
(someone I knew a bit at Oxford is now an "info-hunk" apparently--Peter Bergen, he's wheeled onto CNN and such like as an expert on terrorism I think it is. People ooh and aah over his hair!)
(someone I knew a bit at Oxford is now an "info-hunk" apparently--Peter Bergen, he's wheeled onto CNN and such like as an expert on terrorism I think it is. People ooh and aah over his hair!)
competition update
okay, apologies for the delay, we do have a result--there was a tie in fact, and in those circumstances the publisher gets to be tie-breaker, which they did do, but I'm just waiting for a clarification from them before posting the final results complete with countdown, honorary mentions, special 'lovely but loony' category, etc. Hopefully tomorrow.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
now in book-related news, an extraordinary development:
from Turkey, I learn that Joy and I are being prosecuted by the Turkish government.
Well, slight exaggeration but The Sex Revolts--which was supposed to be coming out in translation there years ago, got held up because of a national paper shortage (honest!) causing no books to be published for a couple of years--was just about to finally hit Turkish bookstore shelves this spring when on the very eve of publication, officials arrived at the publishers and seized all copies of it, along with all copies of three other titles considered offensive. They are currently being held until the end of the legal process and will actually--I shit you not--be destroyed if the trial goes against the publisher. The grounds? "It insulted the moral feelings of the Turkish people, that it was generally against the moral standarts of the Turkish people, therefore it violated the Turkish Penal Code and it was obscene".
I was flummoxed for a while after reading this--did they take exception to our snitty appraisal of the oeuvre of Annie Lennox? Disagree with the feminist critique of Brian Eno's solo albums? Upon further reflection it did occur that some of the content could perhaps be construed a little outre--mostly stuff by other people we quote (like phallomaniac Nick Tosches on The Doors'--them again!--"Hello I Love You" as a "cold hard blue-veined cock up the tie-dyed skirt of benighted sensitivity") or the stuff on Peter 'Whitehouse' Sotos and his childmurder fanzine Pure, or the whole chapter on McLaren and The Stranglers--them again!--or even the anecdote about one of L7 pulling a bloody tampon out of her body and throwing it into the Reading Festival crowd. But, but, it's an academic book. S'got footnotes! It's had course adoptions! Students are forced to read it across America! It must be wholesome and edifying and non-salacious then, surely.
Apparently this kind of confiscate-the-books-and-burn-them thing is totally common in Turkey, despite the fact they're just about to apply again for EU membership. Still and all I must admit to getting a wee frisson out of joining the ranks of D.H. Lawrence, Salman Rushdie, et al.
Donations to the Reynolds/Press Defence Fund can be sent... [fill in the rest of the gag yourselves...]
Course it's no laughing matter for the publishers...
okay, apologies for the delay, we do have a result--there was a tie in fact, and in those circumstances the publisher gets to be tie-breaker, which they did do, but I'm just waiting for a clarification from them before posting the final results complete with countdown, honorary mentions, special 'lovely but loony' category, etc. Hopefully tomorrow.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
now in book-related news, an extraordinary development:
from Turkey, I learn that Joy and I are being prosecuted by the Turkish government.
Well, slight exaggeration but The Sex Revolts--which was supposed to be coming out in translation there years ago, got held up because of a national paper shortage (honest!) causing no books to be published for a couple of years--was just about to finally hit Turkish bookstore shelves this spring when on the very eve of publication, officials arrived at the publishers and seized all copies of it, along with all copies of three other titles considered offensive. They are currently being held until the end of the legal process and will actually--I shit you not--be destroyed if the trial goes against the publisher. The grounds? "It insulted the moral feelings of the Turkish people, that it was generally against the moral standarts of the Turkish people, therefore it violated the Turkish Penal Code and it was obscene".
I was flummoxed for a while after reading this--did they take exception to our snitty appraisal of the oeuvre of Annie Lennox? Disagree with the feminist critique of Brian Eno's solo albums? Upon further reflection it did occur that some of the content could perhaps be construed a little outre--mostly stuff by other people we quote (like phallomaniac Nick Tosches on The Doors'--them again!--"Hello I Love You" as a "cold hard blue-veined cock up the tie-dyed skirt of benighted sensitivity") or the stuff on Peter 'Whitehouse' Sotos and his childmurder fanzine Pure, or the whole chapter on McLaren and The Stranglers--them again!--or even the anecdote about one of L7 pulling a bloody tampon out of her body and throwing it into the Reading Festival crowd. But, but, it's an academic book. S'got footnotes! It's had course adoptions! Students are forced to read it across America! It must be wholesome and edifying and non-salacious then, surely.
Apparently this kind of confiscate-the-books-and-burn-them thing is totally common in Turkey, despite the fact they're just about to apply again for EU membership. Still and all I must admit to getting a wee frisson out of joining the ranks of D.H. Lawrence, Salman Rushdie, et al.
Donations to the Reynolds/Press Defence Fund can be sent... [fill in the rest of the gag yourselves...]
Course it's no laughing matter for the publishers...
Friday, April 09, 2004
I had the weirdest experience the other day--for about 35 minutes I turned into Tom Ewing.
See, most days I start like this: drink a gallon of tea chased down with strong coffee until sufficiently caffeinated to hurl myself like an attack dog on the first draft and tear great chunks of word-flab out of it… And while doing this I flick through the channels, back and forth across BET, MTV2, MTV, VH1, VH1 Classic, and usually it’s quite hard to find anything buzzworthy. The other day, though, I just hit a perfect sequence: Usher (blinding start), J-Kwon "Tipsy", "Slow Jamz", then a slight diversion to the past w/ Led Zep, a live ‘'What Is and What Should Never Be' --BUT that is probably my fave Zepsong and y'all pop-ists don’t believe in linear pop time, right?---then back to the present... Beenie Man "Dude", Yeah Yeah Yeahs "Maps" (love it, do you think those are real tears in the vid?), Switchfoot "Made to Live" (I do find that song touching for its "I Don’t Live Today"/"How Soon Is Now" sentiment especially the lyric "we want more than this world has to offer/we want more than the wars of our fathers"---although as Joy trenchantly pointed out, "Simon, you’re old enough to be that singer's father")... somewhere in all this was Jet and the D12/Eminem tune (he's like the Madness of America, what with the comedy videos and the jaunty-and-indelible sing-song melodies).... and if duty hadn’t called and I’d stuck around I’d probably have heard Britney and "This Love" by Maroon 5 and a few other current goodies... Yes, by the end of it all I was quite dizzeeeee with euphoria almost to the point of lo!-tis-verily-a-golden-age-for-popular-music... indeed I felt so not-my-normal-self that I thought of something i'd read somewhere about how inexplicable euphoria is often just the mania preceding a mental breakdown! Hopefully it's just because spring's here and the sap’s rising.
Mind you subsequent attempts to repeat this 9 to 9-30 pop epiphany have all foundered, it was back to the usual one killertune for every four blahs. Maybe it was just a fluke. I expect I'll be back to my usual curmudgeon self next week. Normal service will resume ASAP etc etc...
See, most days I start like this: drink a gallon of tea chased down with strong coffee until sufficiently caffeinated to hurl myself like an attack dog on the first draft and tear great chunks of word-flab out of it… And while doing this I flick through the channels, back and forth across BET, MTV2, MTV, VH1, VH1 Classic, and usually it’s quite hard to find anything buzzworthy. The other day, though, I just hit a perfect sequence: Usher (blinding start), J-Kwon "Tipsy", "Slow Jamz", then a slight diversion to the past w/ Led Zep, a live ‘'What Is and What Should Never Be' --BUT that is probably my fave Zepsong and y'all pop-ists don’t believe in linear pop time, right?---then back to the present... Beenie Man "Dude", Yeah Yeah Yeahs "Maps" (love it, do you think those are real tears in the vid?), Switchfoot "Made to Live" (I do find that song touching for its "I Don’t Live Today"/"How Soon Is Now" sentiment especially the lyric "we want more than this world has to offer/we want more than the wars of our fathers"---although as Joy trenchantly pointed out, "Simon, you’re old enough to be that singer's father")... somewhere in all this was Jet and the D12/Eminem tune (he's like the Madness of America, what with the comedy videos and the jaunty-and-indelible sing-song melodies).... and if duty hadn’t called and I’d stuck around I’d probably have heard Britney and "This Love" by Maroon 5 and a few other current goodies... Yes, by the end of it all I was quite dizzeeeee with euphoria almost to the point of lo!-tis-verily-a-golden-age-for-popular-music... indeed I felt so not-my-normal-self that I thought of something i'd read somewhere about how inexplicable euphoria is often just the mania preceding a mental breakdown! Hopefully it's just because spring's here and the sap’s rising.
Mind you subsequent attempts to repeat this 9 to 9-30 pop epiphany have all foundered, it was back to the usual one killertune for every four blahs. Maybe it was just a fluke. I expect I'll be back to my usual curmudgeon self next week. Normal service will resume ASAP etc etc...
Being a bit slow on the uptake, just realised that it's Kanye who "did the music" for 'Takeover', my absolute favorite track on The Blueprint -- (well "all I need" and "song cry" come damn close) but--and this is why i put the scare quotes around 'did the music' -- that track is another 'thru the wire' in so far as it pushes sampling to the edge of noncreativity/plain theft. Cos "Takeover" basically IS "Five to One" by the Doors. Slightly rearranged, but musically there's almost nothing else to the track--apart from a BDP soundbite and an interpolation from ANOTHER classic rock song, "Fame" by David Bowie.
Now "Takeover" is an amazing feat of pop intertextuality but what I've always wondered is whether the games it plays with rock history and the Sixties are in fact completely inadvertant and unintended. See, the original song is about collective emancipation: Jim Morrison's hoarsely hollered "gonna win, yeah/we takin' over", that's youth/the counterculture versus the gerontocracy/Amerikkka. But in Jay-Z's hands this undergoes a brutal privatisation: the Sixites "we" shrivels to the "wego"-mania of thug rap; a Sixties anthem of unity and hope becomes a Noughties battle-cry of disunity and cynicism: all against all, dogg pack eats dogg pack. It's even more of contrast cos "Takeover" is such an incredibly (brilliantly!) spiteful song, just an incomparably vicious takedown of two rival rappers--Nas and the little feller from Mobb Deep--pure lyrical OVERKILL, stomping on their symbolically dismembered credibility. Now you could map alla that across onto the parallel deterioration of the black Sixties--the civil rights movement's and its collective thrust for full citizenhood and racial sovereignty, shrinking down to the gangsta rap era's individualized putsch for prestige. Or at best the drastically contracted collectivity of your clan/crew/dynasty/quasi-mafia ....linguistically paralleled by reduction in hope-scope from 'brother' to 'nigga'....
I'm reasonably confident though none of this was on Jay-Z's mind when he wrote the lyrics. Mind you there's that weird echo of Morrisson's "they got the guns, but we got the numbers" in J's "you need more people"--addressed to the Mobb Deep crew being foolish enough to spar with the mighty Roc-A-Fella. Well it's almost pointed. Jim Morrison's "five to one" and "no one here gets out alive" take on a totally different meaning in the new context! Sort of ROC got the guns AND the numbers. As for Kanye, smart guy and "soulful dude" that he is, he could hardly have been aware of all these resonances because when he made the beat he can't have known what J was going to rap over it.
I wonder if Kanye's "Takeover/Five to One" transposition is what actually inspired the Danger Mouse record? Must admit I had virtually no interest in The Grey Album at first, being as The White Album is my least favorite Beatles record and I'd lost all interest in Jay-Z after The Blueprint (I asked Joe Gross if Blueprint 2 was worth getting and he said "you don't need to give this guy any more of your money" and that remark kind of lived with me!)... also Plunderphonics being 15 years old at this point and me being a mash-up un-fan. Still Marcello's piece on Grey a while back intrigued me enough to blag one off Mr Scollard (cheers Henry, the grime's in the mail-- honest!). And it's good, very clever, and Jay-Z can still wring some good lines out of his One Topic, his regal self-- "I'm a hustler homey, you a customer crony", I like that one. But again--not to get all Ian MacDonald (may he rest in peace) on yo ass-- but just the contrast between The Beatles's lyrical/spiritual scope and Jay-Z's pinched vision.... well, it a bit sad (perhaps that's what Danger Mouse intended...?). All that "wealth" but what an impoverished worldview; all that brilliance, applied to such a shabby, shallow solipsism. For some reason, the voice of Ari Up warbles through the canyons of my mind: "he who seeks only vanity with no thought of humanity shall fade away, fade away". I haven't heard The Black Album but Jay-Z sounds tired of his self--all that "why do I bother, I'm underappreciated, you'll miss me when I retire" bollocks as per "I'm supposed to be number one on everybody list/We'll see what happens when I no longer exist/Fuck this!". At times Danger Mouse's re-presentation of the lyrics seems to deliberately dramatise that, hint at the loneliness of the rap demigod surrounded by yesmen and gold-diggers.
(An aside--has anyone else noticed that weird dismissive gesture some rappers been using in videos, sort of brushing lint off their lapels -- kinda, 'away witchoo, small fry, haters, measly specks in the corner of my vision'. Now, did J start that with "Dirt off Your Shoulder" or was he just tapping into something?)
Yeah but back to Kanye and pushing sampling to limits ... it's noticeable how when people get to raving about his tracks, how it often turns into a list of the things he sampled ? "i love that Luther bit, it's so gorgeous"... it just makes me wonder, yunno?
AH but here's the final twist, despite being a massive, unrepentant, nay defiant, Doors lover, "Five to One" always used to be one of my least favorite Doors songs (after "You Want Meat, Don't Look No Further" the one and only true dud inexplicably included on Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine), and I prefer "Takeover" about 20 times over. EXCEPT that in fact "Takeover" has actually made me love the original and think it quite an amazing (and of course in retro-spect, poignant) song. So there you go: the weird creativity and inside-out alchemical logic of sampling culture strikes again!!!
Finally, and talking of twist(a)s, I've realised I don't really like Twista--"Slow Jamz" to me flat-lines rather after his entrance... I wish Kanye had kept the whole tune for himself and that singer feller. So you can rhyme very fast indeed? Big deal, ya pudge-face short-arse! And that new Twista single, "Overnight Celebrity" or summat like that, that must be a Kanye production, right? The vocal science bits are reliably good (the black Todd Edwards, in't he, KW?) but the rest, gah -- what tired old sentiments! The video with the chick squirming with almost audible wetness as he buys her money-no-object goody after goody. This "money-as-aphrodisiac" nonsense--retrograde biznis, seen? The other day this clearly quite smart kid emailed to say "don't hate on the strip clubs, Si, it's money + lust, two of the most powerful forces on the planet"--nah, nah, money and lust don't go in the same sentence. And of course these big pimpin rappers are the ones who constantly complain about ho's and gold diggers! Like "she only loved me for my money, boohoohoo"....
Now "Takeover" is an amazing feat of pop intertextuality but what I've always wondered is whether the games it plays with rock history and the Sixties are in fact completely inadvertant and unintended. See, the original song is about collective emancipation: Jim Morrison's hoarsely hollered "gonna win, yeah/we takin' over", that's youth/the counterculture versus the gerontocracy/Amerikkka. But in Jay-Z's hands this undergoes a brutal privatisation: the Sixites "we" shrivels to the "wego"-mania of thug rap; a Sixties anthem of unity and hope becomes a Noughties battle-cry of disunity and cynicism: all against all, dogg pack eats dogg pack. It's even more of contrast cos "Takeover" is such an incredibly (brilliantly!) spiteful song, just an incomparably vicious takedown of two rival rappers--Nas and the little feller from Mobb Deep--pure lyrical OVERKILL, stomping on their symbolically dismembered credibility. Now you could map alla that across onto the parallel deterioration of the black Sixties--the civil rights movement's and its collective thrust for full citizenhood and racial sovereignty, shrinking down to the gangsta rap era's individualized putsch for prestige. Or at best the drastically contracted collectivity of your clan/crew/dynasty/quasi-mafia ....linguistically paralleled by reduction in hope-scope from 'brother' to 'nigga'....
I'm reasonably confident though none of this was on Jay-Z's mind when he wrote the lyrics. Mind you there's that weird echo of Morrisson's "they got the guns, but we got the numbers" in J's "you need more people"--addressed to the Mobb Deep crew being foolish enough to spar with the mighty Roc-A-Fella. Well it's almost pointed. Jim Morrison's "five to one" and "no one here gets out alive" take on a totally different meaning in the new context! Sort of ROC got the guns AND the numbers. As for Kanye, smart guy and "soulful dude" that he is, he could hardly have been aware of all these resonances because when he made the beat he can't have known what J was going to rap over it.
I wonder if Kanye's "Takeover/Five to One" transposition is what actually inspired the Danger Mouse record? Must admit I had virtually no interest in The Grey Album at first, being as The White Album is my least favorite Beatles record and I'd lost all interest in Jay-Z after The Blueprint (I asked Joe Gross if Blueprint 2 was worth getting and he said "you don't need to give this guy any more of your money" and that remark kind of lived with me!)... also Plunderphonics being 15 years old at this point and me being a mash-up un-fan. Still Marcello's piece on Grey a while back intrigued me enough to blag one off Mr Scollard (cheers Henry, the grime's in the mail-- honest!). And it's good, very clever, and Jay-Z can still wring some good lines out of his One Topic, his regal self-- "I'm a hustler homey, you a customer crony", I like that one. But again--not to get all Ian MacDonald (may he rest in peace) on yo ass-- but just the contrast between The Beatles's lyrical/spiritual scope and Jay-Z's pinched vision.... well, it a bit sad (perhaps that's what Danger Mouse intended...?). All that "wealth" but what an impoverished worldview; all that brilliance, applied to such a shabby, shallow solipsism. For some reason, the voice of Ari Up warbles through the canyons of my mind: "he who seeks only vanity with no thought of humanity shall fade away, fade away". I haven't heard The Black Album but Jay-Z sounds tired of his self--all that "why do I bother, I'm underappreciated, you'll miss me when I retire" bollocks as per "I'm supposed to be number one on everybody list/We'll see what happens when I no longer exist/Fuck this!". At times Danger Mouse's re-presentation of the lyrics seems to deliberately dramatise that, hint at the loneliness of the rap demigod surrounded by yesmen and gold-diggers.
(An aside--has anyone else noticed that weird dismissive gesture some rappers been using in videos, sort of brushing lint off their lapels -- kinda, 'away witchoo, small fry, haters, measly specks in the corner of my vision'. Now, did J start that with "Dirt off Your Shoulder" or was he just tapping into something?)
Yeah but back to Kanye and pushing sampling to limits ... it's noticeable how when people get to raving about his tracks, how it often turns into a list of the things he sampled ? "i love that Luther bit, it's so gorgeous"... it just makes me wonder, yunno?
AH but here's the final twist, despite being a massive, unrepentant, nay defiant, Doors lover, "Five to One" always used to be one of my least favorite Doors songs (after "You Want Meat, Don't Look No Further" the one and only true dud inexplicably included on Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine), and I prefer "Takeover" about 20 times over. EXCEPT that in fact "Takeover" has actually made me love the original and think it quite an amazing (and of course in retro-spect, poignant) song. So there you go: the weird creativity and inside-out alchemical logic of sampling culture strikes again!!!
Finally, and talking of twist(a)s, I've realised I don't really like Twista--"Slow Jamz" to me flat-lines rather after his entrance... I wish Kanye had kept the whole tune for himself and that singer feller. So you can rhyme very fast indeed? Big deal, ya pudge-face short-arse! And that new Twista single, "Overnight Celebrity" or summat like that, that must be a Kanye production, right? The vocal science bits are reliably good (the black Todd Edwards, in't he, KW?) but the rest, gah -- what tired old sentiments! The video with the chick squirming with almost audible wetness as he buys her money-no-object goody after goody. This "money-as-aphrodisiac" nonsense--retrograde biznis, seen? The other day this clearly quite smart kid emailed to say "don't hate on the strip clubs, Si, it's money + lust, two of the most powerful forces on the planet"--nah, nah, money and lust don't go in the same sentence. And of course these big pimpin rappers are the ones who constantly complain about ho's and gold diggers! Like "she only loved me for my money, boohoohoo"....
“Yet she exudes carnality, a desire to please and be pleased radiating from and to the mucous membranes, and the nipples too. And thus she moves blood to the groin, where it awaits deployment in socially useful endeavors—in my case, marital relations.” Dean Christgau joins the slowjamz debate (sorta, kinda, not really) with this, ah, warm appreciation of Janet Jackson as audio-porn nonpareil.
Thursday, April 08, 2004
Dif Juz hot topic across the blogosphere shockah! Hate to shatter the mystique but one of Dif Juz once mooned Joy at another 4AD group's show. Sighed lovely Deborah the 4AD publicist, "he's always doing that when he gets drunk".
Tuesday, April 06, 2004
NASA REWIND fuller report
before we even got anywhere near the dancefloor it was just like a real ye olde rave--the attention to period detail was unstintingly accurate---they had the
horrible long queue to get in (and we came early, it was twice as bad later so I'm told, huge number turned away), fuck-ups on the door with badly managed will-call system (meaning that one of our party almost didn't get in, but luckily summoned up sufficient will-to-blag to bulldoze through), wallet-gouging coat check prices. overpriced water. Yes yes y'all--that original 92 fleece dem puntas spirit alive 'n' kicking!
But the music? well, the music was fabulous. Mostly. Here's the winners and the sinners from the main room (the second room had some good stuff going on but the sound system was pisspoor)
YOU RULE!
Moby
yes the little feller was one of the special guests as mentioned on the flyer, and he was great: tons of piano-vampy italo-style mershcore, including his own 'feel so real' and bizarre inc 'playing with knives' . 'Go' dunnarf sounds slow nowadays though. he also dropped 'Thousand' the one that goes from 0 bpm to 1000 bpm and down again and then back up again, and seem like it might actually have been lethal back in the day as the beatspasm impacts on all those overdriven metabolisms.
YOU SUPREMELY RULE!!
DB
co-founder w/ Scotto of the origina NASA manhattan's first proper rave club and stronghold of breakbeat hardcore; co-organiser of the reunion rave also with Scotto, therefore DB was de facto the sonic host as it were (scotto being the lighting jock, very nice job too) and he did not fail in his role, no sir. I don't think I've ever seen DB play a set that wasn't good--jungle, 2step , you name it--but at old skool he excels, I honestly doubt there's a better old skool deejay out there to be honest. tonight was blinding--mostly classic 91/92 breakbeat w/ a bit of fellow-traveller top tunage like ?'plastic dreams' and 'energy flash' (about as "subtle" as a lighting bolt Matos!), and through a massive sound system, w/ lots of dry ice, unbeatable. The bass'n'breaks on "don't go" by awesome 3!!!! He also dropped "higher state of consciousness" by josh wink, outside the epoch strictly speaking but accurate cos basically in 95 or whenever it came out its breaks'n'acidriff was mos defntly a throwback to early hardcore or even breakbeat house.
YOU RULE TOO!
Jason Jinx
not even sure if I've heard him before, but very very good indeed tonight--only a slight notch below DB. Pure old skool tilted slightly more to the jungalistic
than DB. I'd actually have liked it if the night had gone a bit further into the darkzone end '92/early '93 but I guess that would have been contra the spirit...
Talking of being contra the spirit.
YOU SUCK!
Frankie Bones
in between DB and Jinx, and he just totally dampened the vibe. You are one sucky dj, if you can't read a crowd Mr Bones. Instead of playing the music he would have surely played at StormRave backinthaday--mad-fer-it stampeding Belgian and German hardcore, things like Ravesignal (cj bolland) 'horsepower' and frank de wulf and mentasmic shit, Bones--as far as I could tell--was selecting out the most tracky anonymous non-anthemic kind of dj tools stuff he could find from that era in order to be able to build a set in the way he would nowadays, the way he has in fact done the last 10 years (since he gave up the drugs basically) i.e. all that horrible hard as nails acid-y type lifeless characterless worst-kind-of-techno-makes-me-ashamed-to-even-be-associated-with-dance-music type stuff they sell down at his store Sonic Groove (now moved to my neighbourhood, 6 years too late and they don't even stock gabba anymore). It was like he was going back to 91 and playing B-sides (and not the frank dewulf kind) and C-sides. So basically Bones at NASA was tracky tedious, vibe-slaying bizness and verily the crowd left the room in droves.
YOU SUPREMELY SUCK!!!
Soul Slinger
Why the fuck did he even bother to turn up, he should have just stayed in Arizona. I shit you not, some bloke comes up to me as soon as Soul Slinger takes the decks and starts rabbiting on in this wry, seen-it-all-before-way, saying "Soul Slinger, he always does this, chills out the vibe, does all this weird stuff" and I'm like nodding politely, like who is this guy but he turns out to be dead right--Soul Slinger just totally flat-lines the vibe, it went from Jason Jinx doing stuff on a level with the most intense passages of History of Our World Part One to, i dunno, mixmaster morris in the chill out room at some festival in Estonia in 97. I was amazed how goodnatured the crowd were about it to be honest. a few of the tracks were kinda interesting, there was one that sounded like strange shearing metal machine music stereopanning noises over a midtempo beat, but this is THE MAIN ROOM THE CROWD ARE UP FOR IT and Soul Slinger just pissed in their collective face with the worst kind of I-am-the-dj-I-am-impose-my-vision arrogance. Totally all over the place tempo wise and not even particularly well mixed. SS's
piece de resistance was a track that starts with this grunkling stylus reaches-end-of-dirt-encrusted-groove bass that went on, beat-less, for about 4 minutes and then this loping dub-tekno beat sets off, then it stops, then restarts -- it dawns on me about 12 minutes in it's like some Chain Reaction type track most probably, circa 1997 or thereabouts, or Pole maybe, anyway WAY outside the 90-93 remit as advertised on the flyer and WHAT WE PAID 25 BUCKS + AUTHENTIC-PERIOD-TOUCH-3-DOLLARS-EXTRA-"BOOKING FEE"- FOR. About 18 minutes in Scotto has to pull out the lazer to keep people interested, firing it at the glitterballs to send off light-rays, very pretty -- BUT HOW ABOUT SOME FOOKIN STOMPIN TUNES MAN??!?!.
That was the final straw and we headed to get our coats. Well we had to go anyway to relieve the babysitter (yes da missus was out on the town) but would rather have left on a high, not disgruntled.
BUT LET'S ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE, SHALL WE?
The vibe was great--actually much better than the original NASAs I witnessed
(although they might have been after the club's peak which apparently was quite early in its life). 6 Hubert St--soon to close--was just ram-jammed. and according to DB, roughly 75 percent people who weren't there at the original NASA, they were just young 'uns craving someplace fi rave), did see some real veterans-gone-to-flab though! Oldies and youngies alike were totally fervent, screaming, hands in the air. Interestingly the vibe didn't seem especially drugged to me (in fact hardly anyone even flouted the smoking laws, more's the pity). They were just mad for the music. In fact, to be honest I can hardly think of an actual golden era rave in the UK that had more atmosphere -- a couple maybe, odd little word of mouth parties, more house than hardcore funnily enough-- perhaps cos the ones I frequented were already getting a little bit dark and drug-wrecked--but also I think this is a side effect of a salutary illusion created by old skoolizm--which makes the music seem even better than it was. see back in the day the deejays generally used to devote perhaps 80 percent of their set to tracks that came out that week or at least that month, so inevitably the ratio of filler to killer was quite high. Old skool, of course, weeds out all the run-of-the-mix stuff--that week's white labels in the store--and by playing the absolute creme of an entire epoch just makes it wall-to-wall exhilaration. The lack of longeurs makes it quite unfaithful--not like being back in the day at all.
before we even got anywhere near the dancefloor it was just like a real ye olde rave--the attention to period detail was unstintingly accurate---they had the
horrible long queue to get in (and we came early, it was twice as bad later so I'm told, huge number turned away), fuck-ups on the door with badly managed will-call system (meaning that one of our party almost didn't get in, but luckily summoned up sufficient will-to-blag to bulldoze through), wallet-gouging coat check prices. overpriced water. Yes yes y'all--that original 92 fleece dem puntas spirit alive 'n' kicking!
But the music? well, the music was fabulous. Mostly. Here's the winners and the sinners from the main room (the second room had some good stuff going on but the sound system was pisspoor)
YOU RULE!
Moby
yes the little feller was one of the special guests as mentioned on the flyer, and he was great: tons of piano-vampy italo-style mershcore, including his own 'feel so real' and bizarre inc 'playing with knives' . 'Go' dunnarf sounds slow nowadays though. he also dropped 'Thousand' the one that goes from 0 bpm to 1000 bpm and down again and then back up again, and seem like it might actually have been lethal back in the day as the beatspasm impacts on all those overdriven metabolisms.
YOU SUPREMELY RULE!!
DB
co-founder w/ Scotto of the origina NASA manhattan's first proper rave club and stronghold of breakbeat hardcore; co-organiser of the reunion rave also with Scotto, therefore DB was de facto the sonic host as it were (scotto being the lighting jock, very nice job too) and he did not fail in his role, no sir. I don't think I've ever seen DB play a set that wasn't good--jungle, 2step , you name it--but at old skool he excels, I honestly doubt there's a better old skool deejay out there to be honest. tonight was blinding--mostly classic 91/92 breakbeat w/ a bit of fellow-traveller top tunage like ?'plastic dreams' and 'energy flash' (about as "subtle" as a lighting bolt Matos!), and through a massive sound system, w/ lots of dry ice, unbeatable. The bass'n'breaks on "don't go" by awesome 3!!!! He also dropped "higher state of consciousness" by josh wink, outside the epoch strictly speaking but accurate cos basically in 95 or whenever it came out its breaks'n'acidriff was mos defntly a throwback to early hardcore or even breakbeat house.
YOU RULE TOO!
Jason Jinx
not even sure if I've heard him before, but very very good indeed tonight--only a slight notch below DB. Pure old skool tilted slightly more to the jungalistic
than DB. I'd actually have liked it if the night had gone a bit further into the darkzone end '92/early '93 but I guess that would have been contra the spirit...
Talking of being contra the spirit.
YOU SUCK!
Frankie Bones
in between DB and Jinx, and he just totally dampened the vibe. You are one sucky dj, if you can't read a crowd Mr Bones. Instead of playing the music he would have surely played at StormRave backinthaday--mad-fer-it stampeding Belgian and German hardcore, things like Ravesignal (cj bolland) 'horsepower' and frank de wulf and mentasmic shit, Bones--as far as I could tell--was selecting out the most tracky anonymous non-anthemic kind of dj tools stuff he could find from that era in order to be able to build a set in the way he would nowadays, the way he has in fact done the last 10 years (since he gave up the drugs basically) i.e. all that horrible hard as nails acid-y type lifeless characterless worst-kind-of-techno-makes-me-ashamed-to-even-be-associated-with-dance-music type stuff they sell down at his store Sonic Groove (now moved to my neighbourhood, 6 years too late and they don't even stock gabba anymore). It was like he was going back to 91 and playing B-sides (and not the frank dewulf kind) and C-sides. So basically Bones at NASA was tracky tedious, vibe-slaying bizness and verily the crowd left the room in droves.
YOU SUPREMELY SUCK!!!
Soul Slinger
Why the fuck did he even bother to turn up, he should have just stayed in Arizona. I shit you not, some bloke comes up to me as soon as Soul Slinger takes the decks and starts rabbiting on in this wry, seen-it-all-before-way, saying "Soul Slinger, he always does this, chills out the vibe, does all this weird stuff" and I'm like nodding politely, like who is this guy but he turns out to be dead right--Soul Slinger just totally flat-lines the vibe, it went from Jason Jinx doing stuff on a level with the most intense passages of History of Our World Part One to, i dunno, mixmaster morris in the chill out room at some festival in Estonia in 97. I was amazed how goodnatured the crowd were about it to be honest. a few of the tracks were kinda interesting, there was one that sounded like strange shearing metal machine music stereopanning noises over a midtempo beat, but this is THE MAIN ROOM THE CROWD ARE UP FOR IT and Soul Slinger just pissed in their collective face with the worst kind of I-am-the-dj-I-am-impose-my-vision arrogance. Totally all over the place tempo wise and not even particularly well mixed. SS's
piece de resistance was a track that starts with this grunkling stylus reaches-end-of-dirt-encrusted-groove bass that went on, beat-less, for about 4 minutes and then this loping dub-tekno beat sets off, then it stops, then restarts -- it dawns on me about 12 minutes in it's like some Chain Reaction type track most probably, circa 1997 or thereabouts, or Pole maybe, anyway WAY outside the 90-93 remit as advertised on the flyer and WHAT WE PAID 25 BUCKS + AUTHENTIC-PERIOD-TOUCH-3-DOLLARS-EXTRA-"BOOKING FEE"- FOR. About 18 minutes in Scotto has to pull out the lazer to keep people interested, firing it at the glitterballs to send off light-rays, very pretty -- BUT HOW ABOUT SOME FOOKIN STOMPIN TUNES MAN??!?!.
That was the final straw and we headed to get our coats. Well we had to go anyway to relieve the babysitter (yes da missus was out on the town) but would rather have left on a high, not disgruntled.
BUT LET'S ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE, SHALL WE?
The vibe was great--actually much better than the original NASAs I witnessed
(although they might have been after the club's peak which apparently was quite early in its life). 6 Hubert St--soon to close--was just ram-jammed. and according to DB, roughly 75 percent people who weren't there at the original NASA, they were just young 'uns craving someplace fi rave), did see some real veterans-gone-to-flab though! Oldies and youngies alike were totally fervent, screaming, hands in the air. Interestingly the vibe didn't seem especially drugged to me (in fact hardly anyone even flouted the smoking laws, more's the pity). They were just mad for the music. In fact, to be honest I can hardly think of an actual golden era rave in the UK that had more atmosphere -- a couple maybe, odd little word of mouth parties, more house than hardcore funnily enough-- perhaps cos the ones I frequented were already getting a little bit dark and drug-wrecked--but also I think this is a side effect of a salutary illusion created by old skoolizm--which makes the music seem even better than it was. see back in the day the deejays generally used to devote perhaps 80 percent of their set to tracks that came out that week or at least that month, so inevitably the ratio of filler to killer was quite high. Old skool, of course, weeds out all the run-of-the-mix stuff--that week's white labels in the store--and by playing the absolute creme of an entire epoch just makes it wall-to-wall exhilaration. The lack of longeurs makes it quite unfaithful--not like being back in the day at all.
Da missus on "boyology" and feral children. Be interesting to cross reference the Kidd book with Jon Savage's forthcoming mega-tome on the Prehistory of the Teenager. Peter the Wild Boy, incidentally, is buried in my hometown Berkhamsted--same place the original 'wild boys' who inspired J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan grew up.
Oh and I forgot her other recent piece--on TV organise-your-life-space programmes. "Housekeeping is one of the most tedious occupations known to humankind". Like she'd know?!?!
Oh and I forgot her other recent piece--on TV organise-your-life-space programmes. "Housekeeping is one of the most tedious occupations known to humankind". Like she'd know?!?!
Sunday, April 04, 2004
NASA REWIND preliminary report
When it was good, it was unbelievably good
When it was bad, it was wretched
(proper report to follow, sooner rather than later)
When it was good, it was unbelievably good
When it was bad, it was wretched
(proper report to follow, sooner rather than later)
some unattractive-sounding but apparently genuine dance subgenres i've heard of recently:
Bouncy Scouse House
Clownstep *
* supposedly rather fun, albeit in the ‘drum’n’bass gets good again, honest, part 131’ dept
Bouncy Scouse House
Clownstep *
* supposedly rather fun, albeit in the ‘drum’n’bass gets good again, honest, part 131’ dept
^^^competition update^^^
overwhelmed, in both senses, by all the title suggestions, thanks to all, some really good ones, and others that are really amusing if totally impractical. results announced, later this week, hopefully
overwhelmed, in both senses, by all the title suggestions, thanks to all, some really good ones, and others that are really amusing if totally impractical. results announced, later this week, hopefully
Tuesday, March 30, 2004
!!!!!!COMPETITION!!!!!!
Think of a Title for my Postpunk Book. Not as easy as you'd perhaps think, summing up an extremely diverse, seven year (78 to 84) epoch in two to five words.
Help out a struggling author, eh?
The prize? A signed copy of the UK edition (i.e. the one with pix) and a thank you in the Acknowledgements Section.
Helpful Hints:
1/ Song titles are public domain. Not sure about lyrics (although England’s Dreaming is from “God Save The Queen” isn't it, so maybe they are okay. Best to avoid, on balance)
2/ Variations on Load of Old Cobblers, More Cack from that Cock etc will be disqualified.
Think of a Title for my Postpunk Book. Not as easy as you'd perhaps think, summing up an extremely diverse, seven year (78 to 84) epoch in two to five words.
Help out a struggling author, eh?
The prize? A signed copy of the UK edition (i.e. the one with pix) and a thank you in the Acknowledgements Section.
Helpful Hints:
1/ Song titles are public domain. Not sure about lyrics (although England’s Dreaming is from “God Save The Queen” isn't it, so maybe they are okay. Best to avoid, on balance)
2/ Variations on Load of Old Cobblers, More Cack from that Cock etc will be disqualified.
(risking the wrath of Geeta...)
ALT-ROCK SLOWJAMZ UPDATE
Doing the first one I was really scratching my head trying to remember who at Volume mentioned Galaxie 500 and Luna as ultimate alt-rock slowjamz, and of course it was Matos (who with a hint of querulousness brings this ommission up in Geeta’s comments box). Good call Michaelangelo (that's his new bloghome BTW, my linx sorely need updating). And of course, Dean Wareham was a bit of an indie lovegod, in those days, right, which can’t have hurt?
(On which subject presumably some of the Velvet Underground lps, like #3 and #4, belong in the carnality-canon)
Joe Gross nuances the trip hop data:
"Maxinquaye is the greatest one-night stand album in pop history, and one of the worst fucking-whilst-in-a-relationship records in that same history."
Nathan Walker is bursting with information:
“I have had sex to Godflesh quite effectively in a pounding goth/loop kind of way”. He also rates Babes in Toyland's fontanelle and says john coltrane's ascension was probably the most single amazing piece of music I ever had sex to.” Switching to other people’s proclivities, “I also cannot tell you how many people had peter gabriel's soundtrack to passion at my hippie college” and “an excellent american wing of stoned hippie sex would have to include early-nineties flaming lips (hit to death in the future head esp. except for having to turn it off before locked-groove commences- a downer) and more so mercury rev's boces which is simply unreal… in college the orb's first two albums were very effective for this sort of thing, but also the lords of acid, who prompted a kind of quasi-ironical meta-sexual-activity that still functioned. In high school the cure were most definitely a kind of eighties version of led zeppelin, especially the holy triumvirate of head on the door, kiss me, and disintegration but also the singles collection. how they were (are!) revered!!!”
Troy Loftin also mentions the Cure:
“here in small town america, where "alternative" was never even heard of until the mid-eighties gods of New Order, the Smiths, and Depeche Mode came to save us, there was one band, one man, who could get ANY goth betty in the mood. The man with the biggest, most child-like heart. So real with love and loss. Yes... Fat Bob.... Robert Smith. The Cure. From all stages of their career. Dedicated to the sound of love.”
["Goth betty", cough cough... ]
Now this is something I can confirm from the UK perspective. Not really a Cure fan in any sense (nor an un-fan, just kinda bleh for the most part, Seventeen Seconds has got a nice watery sound...) but Head On The Door (and see Geeta that's an example of the girlfriend controlling the stereo and imposing her taste) is an album I can’t fully renounce for precisely its, mmmm, associations. See also New Order circa “Thieves Like Us” although that’s more for romantic evocations, sigh....
Jim Eaton-Terry: “The rule I remember was that MBV (this is preLoveless) were too sexy to have sex to. You wanted something which didn't distract you with all that lubricousness. Psychocandy, that was popular. And Dum Dum by the Vaselines…. In those days it was an article of faith that no girl could resist Velocity Girl (the song, not the band) on a mix tape. “
Kirk DeGiorgio (yes, you could have knocked me over with a feather too!) steps forth with some cool data on slow jamz culture and Brit funk’n’soul lovegod Robbie Vincent:
“Robbie Vincent was one of the pioneers of the South East soul scene from the late 70's onwards... he played alongside Chris Hill, Bob Jones, etc at legendary clubs such as The Goldmine, The Royalty, Lacy Lady, and of course various Soul Weekenders. His radio show on Radio London - Saturday mornings from 10.30-1am - was probably the most 'cutting-edge' soul show on radio at this time until pirates like JFM, Invicta and Horizon sprang up in the South East around 81.
“The most exciting feature of the show was the occasional appearance of maverick soul DJ 'Froggy' who would specially prepare 'Froggy's Mono Monster Mixes' - 30 minute mixes of incredible skill - way ahead of their time, mixing jazz funk with
disco, etc. This would be around 1979-1980 when nobody in the UK was doing anything like this to my knowledge. (I'm hoping some of these mixes will be coming my way soon via CJ Mackintosh who has tracked down some cassettes).
[more on froggy here]
“Robbie Vincent certainly played the odd slow jam - and continued to do so in the mid-80's when he got his Radio 1 slot (his Radio London show stopped around late 81/82 I believe) - but the undoubted king of the soul ballad was Greg Edwards.
“Greg Edwards 4 hour soul show was on Capital Radio Saturdays from 6-10pm (Saturdays were a joy in those heady days of 79-81 - over 6 hours of soul with football sandwiched in between). Greg Edwards had a half hour section of the show around 9pm dedicated to slow jams called 'The Bathroom Call'. It was aimed at young women who would be in the bath getting ready to go clubbing that evening and it was he who was famous for doing Isaac Hayes style monologues over the records (having a deep, raspy American voice helped him somewhat - whereas Robbie Vincents more common tones were more suited to his many current affairs 'phone-in shows on LBC after he left Radio 1).
“When I DJ'd on Kiss FM from 98-01 I paid homage to "The Bathroom Call" by having a regular 20 minute slot dedicated to slow jamz called "The Love Zone"... thankfully I left out the monologue..."
and Kirk further offers his “Top 10 "Bathroom Call" Slow Jamz:
Atlantic Starr: Send For Me
Bobby Womack: Love Has Finally Come At Last
NyteFlyte: If You Want It
Teddy Pendergrass: Love TKO
Jones Girls: Nights Over Egypt
Gene Dunlap: It's Just the Way I Feel
Richard Dimples Fields: She's Got Papers
Isley Brothers: Footsteps In the Dark
Chic: A Warm Summer Night
Teena Marie: Portuguese Love”
Addenda/errata
1/ Luke Davis wishes to point out he’s from E15, a far more credible postal district than E5 as cited here (and which is probably Shoreditch or Hoxton or somewhere like that, horrors!)
2/ Eamon Lyrics is of course just called Eamon ( look I’m getting about 5 and a half hours sleep these days, the 2nd draft grindstone, a 66 hour week fi real, I shouldn't even be doing this you know…)
3/ Mis-attribution alert: The crunk guys sounding like men shouting at strippers is Anthony Miccio’s observation, Jess Harvell was quoting him. Apologies all round.
ALT-ROCK SLOWJAMZ UPDATE
Doing the first one I was really scratching my head trying to remember who at Volume mentioned Galaxie 500 and Luna as ultimate alt-rock slowjamz, and of course it was Matos (who with a hint of querulousness brings this ommission up in Geeta’s comments box). Good call Michaelangelo (that's his new bloghome BTW, my linx sorely need updating). And of course, Dean Wareham was a bit of an indie lovegod, in those days, right, which can’t have hurt?
(On which subject presumably some of the Velvet Underground lps, like #3 and #4, belong in the carnality-canon)
Joe Gross nuances the trip hop data:
"Maxinquaye is the greatest one-night stand album in pop history, and one of the worst fucking-whilst-in-a-relationship records in that same history."
Nathan Walker is bursting with information:
“I have had sex to Godflesh quite effectively in a pounding goth/loop kind of way”. He also rates Babes in Toyland's fontanelle and says john coltrane's ascension was probably the most single amazing piece of music I ever had sex to.” Switching to other people’s proclivities, “I also cannot tell you how many people had peter gabriel's soundtrack to passion at my hippie college” and “an excellent american wing of stoned hippie sex would have to include early-nineties flaming lips (hit to death in the future head esp. except for having to turn it off before locked-groove commences- a downer) and more so mercury rev's boces which is simply unreal… in college the orb's first two albums were very effective for this sort of thing, but also the lords of acid, who prompted a kind of quasi-ironical meta-sexual-activity that still functioned. In high school the cure were most definitely a kind of eighties version of led zeppelin, especially the holy triumvirate of head on the door, kiss me, and disintegration but also the singles collection. how they were (are!) revered!!!”
Troy Loftin also mentions the Cure:
“here in small town america, where "alternative" was never even heard of until the mid-eighties gods of New Order, the Smiths, and Depeche Mode came to save us, there was one band, one man, who could get ANY goth betty in the mood. The man with the biggest, most child-like heart. So real with love and loss. Yes... Fat Bob.... Robert Smith. The Cure. From all stages of their career. Dedicated to the sound of love.”
["Goth betty", cough cough... ]
Now this is something I can confirm from the UK perspective. Not really a Cure fan in any sense (nor an un-fan, just kinda bleh for the most part, Seventeen Seconds has got a nice watery sound...) but Head On The Door (and see Geeta that's an example of the girlfriend controlling the stereo and imposing her taste) is an album I can’t fully renounce for precisely its, mmmm, associations. See also New Order circa “Thieves Like Us” although that’s more for romantic evocations, sigh....
Jim Eaton-Terry: “The rule I remember was that MBV (this is preLoveless) were too sexy to have sex to. You wanted something which didn't distract you with all that lubricousness. Psychocandy, that was popular. And Dum Dum by the Vaselines…. In those days it was an article of faith that no girl could resist Velocity Girl (the song, not the band) on a mix tape. “
Kirk DeGiorgio (yes, you could have knocked me over with a feather too!) steps forth with some cool data on slow jamz culture and Brit funk’n’soul lovegod Robbie Vincent:
“Robbie Vincent was one of the pioneers of the South East soul scene from the late 70's onwards... he played alongside Chris Hill, Bob Jones, etc at legendary clubs such as The Goldmine, The Royalty, Lacy Lady, and of course various Soul Weekenders. His radio show on Radio London - Saturday mornings from 10.30-1am - was probably the most 'cutting-edge' soul show on radio at this time until pirates like JFM, Invicta and Horizon sprang up in the South East around 81.
“The most exciting feature of the show was the occasional appearance of maverick soul DJ 'Froggy' who would specially prepare 'Froggy's Mono Monster Mixes' - 30 minute mixes of incredible skill - way ahead of their time, mixing jazz funk with
disco, etc. This would be around 1979-1980 when nobody in the UK was doing anything like this to my knowledge. (I'm hoping some of these mixes will be coming my way soon via CJ Mackintosh who has tracked down some cassettes).
[more on froggy here]
“Robbie Vincent certainly played the odd slow jam - and continued to do so in the mid-80's when he got his Radio 1 slot (his Radio London show stopped around late 81/82 I believe) - but the undoubted king of the soul ballad was Greg Edwards.
“Greg Edwards 4 hour soul show was on Capital Radio Saturdays from 6-10pm (Saturdays were a joy in those heady days of 79-81 - over 6 hours of soul with football sandwiched in between). Greg Edwards had a half hour section of the show around 9pm dedicated to slow jams called 'The Bathroom Call'. It was aimed at young women who would be in the bath getting ready to go clubbing that evening and it was he who was famous for doing Isaac Hayes style monologues over the records (having a deep, raspy American voice helped him somewhat - whereas Robbie Vincents more common tones were more suited to his many current affairs 'phone-in shows on LBC after he left Radio 1).
“When I DJ'd on Kiss FM from 98-01 I paid homage to "The Bathroom Call" by having a regular 20 minute slot dedicated to slow jamz called "The Love Zone"... thankfully I left out the monologue..."
and Kirk further offers his “Top 10 "Bathroom Call" Slow Jamz:
Atlantic Starr: Send For Me
Bobby Womack: Love Has Finally Come At Last
NyteFlyte: If You Want It
Teddy Pendergrass: Love TKO
Jones Girls: Nights Over Egypt
Gene Dunlap: It's Just the Way I Feel
Richard Dimples Fields: She's Got Papers
Isley Brothers: Footsteps In the Dark
Chic: A Warm Summer Night
Teena Marie: Portuguese Love”
Addenda/errata
1/ Luke Davis wishes to point out he’s from E15, a far more credible postal district than E5 as cited here (and which is probably Shoreditch or Hoxton or somewhere like that, horrors!)
2/ Eamon Lyrics is of course just called Eamon ( look I’m getting about 5 and a half hours sleep these days, the 2nd draft grindstone, a 66 hour week fi real, I shouldn't even be doing this you know…)
3/ Mis-attribution alert: The crunk guys sounding like men shouting at strippers is Anthony Miccio’s observation, Jess Harvell was quoting him. Apologies all round.
dogg breath pt 2/the spiritual godfathers of crunk?
Picking up on that crunk-as-carnivore-music theme, it suddenly struck me that all that metal on their teeth must be a bit like braces--really bad for meat-shred retention. (Are rappers good about flossing? [Boom-boom!!!])
Also started wondering where I’d heard those halitosis-rasp baritones before--and then it hit me: The Stranglers! Aren’t they kinda like the godfathers of crunk? There was that infamous open-air concert in Battersea or someplace like that, where they had strippers onstage. And think of all those songs of sexual malice like the leering "Peaches" and the truly twisted “School M’Am” and the ho'-sanna “Princess of the Streets” (“she’s no lad-eee… she’s a sweet piece of meat”). “London Lady” slags off a skeez (except what she--a well-known punk scenester/journalist-- is golddigging ain’t cash, it’s cred). And let’s not forget that charm-ing B-side track “Crabs”.
The Stranglers-as-protocrunk ur-text though is “Bring On The Nubiles”--compare the title/chorus with Lil Jon’s ”all these females”: the idea is, this song is the opposite of a song for and about a special lady, it’s aimed at a faceless plurality of fuckable fleisch, a banquet of ass and gash. "Nubiles" also has the strange malicious-witholding-of-satisfaction lyric "and when the fever reaches you/I'll hide beneath my zip". Pretty fetid, pretty rank, inside Mr Hugh "I Like Dominating Women" Cornwell's skull I reckon.
Yeah, the Stranglers, they also had a whole carnivore theme--they identified with two carrion-eating creatures, first the Rat, and then the Raven. Hugh Cornwell’s gruffmale malevolence is one thing, but Jean-Jacques Burnell took it to a whole lower sewer level of nastiness: “Ugly” (“I guess I shouldn’t have strangled her to death… but she had acne”), and how about this verse from the Yukio Mishima paean “Death and Night and Blood”: “hey little baby don’t you lean down low/your brain’s exposed and it’s starting to show/your rotten thoughts, yeuuuuch”. In classic masculine abjection-projection syndrome, the “rotten thoughts” are all JJ’s. Yeah Burnel's voice simply is the pus of male self-loathing spurting free.
BUT (again like making allowances for crunk cos when all’s said it rocks, unfortunately) The Stranglers remain a favorite band of that era, I can never quite disown them like I know I should. At the time their misogyny just seemed part and parcel of punk’s equal-opportunity animosity, that really crucial part of punk's appeal that related to pure monstrous evil, c.f. “Bodies” and “Belsen”, or the icky-grody side of Devo. Plus they had this really quite idiosyncratic and odd sound, and even the Doors comparison only takes you so far (come off it Robin--Doors as “protoprogpubrock”, you got to be kidding!). “Nice ‘N Sleazy” for instance sounds like nothing else in pop. Dave Greenfield did some cool stuff with Moogs and electronic keyboards on tracks like “The Raven” where the Stranglers developed this kind of rok-disko sound picking up where the electrothrob of “Hello I Love You” left off. And Burnel did a whole electronic solo album come to think of, Euroman Cometh, with an anti-America/European-unity-as-vital-geopolitical-counterbalance concept. Never heard it though.
But yeah with crunk and Stranglers, the nub of it is: you can smell death on their breath.
Picking up on that crunk-as-carnivore-music theme, it suddenly struck me that all that metal on their teeth must be a bit like braces--really bad for meat-shred retention. (Are rappers good about flossing? [Boom-boom!!!])
Also started wondering where I’d heard those halitosis-rasp baritones before--and then it hit me: The Stranglers! Aren’t they kinda like the godfathers of crunk? There was that infamous open-air concert in Battersea or someplace like that, where they had strippers onstage. And think of all those songs of sexual malice like the leering "Peaches" and the truly twisted “School M’Am” and the ho'-sanna “Princess of the Streets” (“she’s no lad-eee… she’s a sweet piece of meat”). “London Lady” slags off a skeez (except what she--a well-known punk scenester/journalist-- is golddigging ain’t cash, it’s cred). And let’s not forget that charm-ing B-side track “Crabs”.
The Stranglers-as-protocrunk ur-text though is “Bring On The Nubiles”--compare the title/chorus with Lil Jon’s ”all these females”: the idea is, this song is the opposite of a song for and about a special lady, it’s aimed at a faceless plurality of fuckable fleisch, a banquet of ass and gash. "Nubiles" also has the strange malicious-witholding-of-satisfaction lyric "and when the fever reaches you/I'll hide beneath my zip". Pretty fetid, pretty rank, inside Mr Hugh "I Like Dominating Women" Cornwell's skull I reckon.
Yeah, the Stranglers, they also had a whole carnivore theme--they identified with two carrion-eating creatures, first the Rat, and then the Raven. Hugh Cornwell’s gruffmale malevolence is one thing, but Jean-Jacques Burnell took it to a whole lower sewer level of nastiness: “Ugly” (“I guess I shouldn’t have strangled her to death… but she had acne”), and how about this verse from the Yukio Mishima paean “Death and Night and Blood”: “hey little baby don’t you lean down low/your brain’s exposed and it’s starting to show/your rotten thoughts, yeuuuuch”. In classic masculine abjection-projection syndrome, the “rotten thoughts” are all JJ’s. Yeah Burnel's voice simply is the pus of male self-loathing spurting free.
BUT (again like making allowances for crunk cos when all’s said it rocks, unfortunately) The Stranglers remain a favorite band of that era, I can never quite disown them like I know I should. At the time their misogyny just seemed part and parcel of punk’s equal-opportunity animosity, that really crucial part of punk's appeal that related to pure monstrous evil, c.f. “Bodies” and “Belsen”, or the icky-grody side of Devo. Plus they had this really quite idiosyncratic and odd sound, and even the Doors comparison only takes you so far (come off it Robin--Doors as “protoprogpubrock”, you got to be kidding!). “Nice ‘N Sleazy” for instance sounds like nothing else in pop. Dave Greenfield did some cool stuff with Moogs and electronic keyboards on tracks like “The Raven” where the Stranglers developed this kind of rok-disko sound picking up where the electrothrob of “Hello I Love You” left off. And Burnel did a whole electronic solo album come to think of, Euroman Cometh, with an anti-America/European-unity-as-vital-geopolitical-counterbalance concept. Never heard it though.
But yeah with crunk and Stranglers, the nub of it is: you can smell death on their breath.
Contradicting the previous post, the first in a new series:
Waves of love, gratitude and admiration physically pulse from my body in the direction of:
Arthur Russell. “In The Light of The Miracle”: it’s like the missing link between Soon Over Babaluma and MJ Cole’s “Sincere,” innit.
And (so soon?!) the second instalment of the new series:
Waves of love, gratitude and admiration physically pulse from my body in the direction of:
LTJ Bukem
He was our Arthur Russell, right? “Atlantis” = the jungle “Let’s Go Swimming”. Amens smooved out on a galactic garaaaaage tip. Bongos or congas or whatever they’re called rippling like sunlight on wavecrests. That bit where the voice goes “okay, let’s take it slow and easy going in” and then the keyboards start to shimmer and that plunging porpoise-bass takes us under. The exquisite vocal science of those blissed sighs and “mmmmms” and reverbed exhalations that actually sound like a scuba-diver’s trail of bubble-breath. The strange rhapsodic quacking synth riff at the start that reappears ¾ of the way through. The frantic serenity, the deep spiritual chill of the whole piece. Is this not in fact the most sublime 7.22 of the entire Nineties? *
PS. Danny, I’m sorry I slagged “Horizons”. It was a good tune
(still not kay-razeee ‘bout the Maya Angelou bits) but it felt like there was a war on at the time and truth’s always the first casualty, innit. Anyway, nuff respeck, keep on keepin’ on, and hope you made some decent bread somewhere back there.
* you can find “Atlantis (I Need You”) on Points In Time 002, a 1999 Good Looking retro-anthology probably going cheap-ish somewhere near you (001 and 003 also worthwhile purchases). 002 is worth picking up for "Atlantis" alone plus the fabulous “Tear Into it” by Parallel World (really rarver RUFF) and the quite lovely “The Bell Tune” by The Invisible Man. The vinyl “Atlantis” was still in print the last time I checked.
Waves of love, gratitude and admiration physically pulse from my body in the direction of:
Arthur Russell. “In The Light of The Miracle”: it’s like the missing link between Soon Over Babaluma and MJ Cole’s “Sincere,” innit.
And (so soon?!) the second instalment of the new series:
Waves of love, gratitude and admiration physically pulse from my body in the direction of:
LTJ Bukem
He was our Arthur Russell, right? “Atlantis” = the jungle “Let’s Go Swimming”. Amens smooved out on a galactic garaaaaage tip. Bongos or congas or whatever they’re called rippling like sunlight on wavecrests. That bit where the voice goes “okay, let’s take it slow and easy going in” and then the keyboards start to shimmer and that plunging porpoise-bass takes us under. The exquisite vocal science of those blissed sighs and “mmmmms” and reverbed exhalations that actually sound like a scuba-diver’s trail of bubble-breath. The strange rhapsodic quacking synth riff at the start that reappears ¾ of the way through. The frantic serenity, the deep spiritual chill of the whole piece. Is this not in fact the most sublime 7.22 of the entire Nineties? *
PS. Danny, I’m sorry I slagged “Horizons”. It was a good tune
(still not kay-razeee ‘bout the Maya Angelou bits) but it felt like there was a war on at the time and truth’s always the first casualty, innit. Anyway, nuff respeck, keep on keepin’ on, and hope you made some decent bread somewhere back there.
* you can find “Atlantis (I Need You”) on Points In Time 002, a 1999 Good Looking retro-anthology probably going cheap-ish somewhere near you (001 and 003 also worthwhile purchases). 002 is worth picking up for "Atlantis" alone plus the fabulous “Tear Into it” by Parallel World (really rarver RUFF) and the quite lovely “The Bell Tune” by The Invisible Man. The vinyl “Atlantis” was still in print the last time I checked.
Woebot speaks truth -- specifically re. russell reissue-mania (Calling Out of Context is not... all that, honestly, is it?) and generally re. the fact that unreleased material more often than not was unreleased for a good reason.
Thursday, March 25, 2004
public service announcement
DB & Scotto Present
NASA REWIND
Saturday April 3, 10 PM til dawn
ARC @ 6 Hubert St at Hudson St, New York
main room
DB
SCOTT HENRY
FRANKIE BONES
SCOTT HARDKISS
KICKS LIKE A MULE
SOULSLINGER
second room
JASON JINX
MR KLEEN
ON-E (ANI)
JOESKI
KEOKI
ODI
plus
SCOTTO'S PSYCHECYBERADIANT LIGHTSHOW
ticket $25 , online only: www.DROP.com
further info 212 330 8233
NASA was America's first breakbeat hardcore club
the DJs are playing their favorite sets from 92/93
Kicks Like a FUCKING Mule!!!!!!!
DB & Scotto Present
NASA REWIND
Saturday April 3, 10 PM til dawn
ARC @ 6 Hubert St at Hudson St, New York
main room
DB
SCOTT HENRY
FRANKIE BONES
SCOTT HARDKISS
KICKS LIKE A MULE
SOULSLINGER
second room
JASON JINX
MR KLEEN
ON-E (ANI)
JOESKI
KEOKI
ODI
plus
SCOTTO'S PSYCHECYBERADIANT LIGHTSHOW
ticket $25 , online only: www.DROP.com
further info 212 330 8233
NASA was America's first breakbeat hardcore club
the DJs are playing their favorite sets from 92/93
Kicks Like a FUCKING Mule!!!!!!!
Simon Silverdollarcircle reimagines sublow/dubstep as the return of techno. Yeah like propah hard-as-nails tekkkno it only makes true sense on the dancefloor, through a big system. And i expect it's drugmusik too--but heavy weed instead of pills.
Monday, March 22, 2004
pleased to meat ya
Nicely vibe-consistent with the previous post--check these musings on the sexlessness of Grime and Crunk from strapping Jess Harvell, which despite his caveat postscript seem pretty fully-baked to me.
Re. Crunk's deep-bass growl... it's funny how when Ja Rule does it's like a thug rap update of Barry White the Walrus of Love, but w/ Crunk it's just pure leering menace, zero slowjamz potential. (Did I hallucinate this or is there actually a line in "Get Low" that goes "until the sweat runs down my balls?"). Jess's shouting-at-strippers thing is spot on, cos as Barthes said in Mythologies, striptease isn't about eroticism, it's about fear.
When I hear that bleary baleful rasp of unison baritone voices on Crunk records, it always makes me think of bad breath--you can almost smell this barking reek of chicken, beer, and stale weedsmoke hitting you in the face. Chicken.... hmmm... that's the thing about Crunk, it's carnivorous. It's all about surrendering to your basest appetities, being a predator. That's what makes it so vital... yet its vitality s intrinsically bound up with a kind of death-force, a monstrous will to make the world dead. Having mentioned Mythologies, I'm going to up the over-interpretation stakes and bring The Sadeian Woman into it, if only to get off on having a sentence that contain the names Angela Carter and Lil Jon. But in that book--whose subtitle if I recall is something like 'the pornographic imagination'-- Carter makes play of the fact that the German word for flesh-- fleisch--is the same as the word for 'meat'. She writes that every time she sees the word she shudders. She then goes on to discuss how a certain objectifying form of (male, natch) sexuality turns everything into meat, devitalized and dead. Now, ur-Crunk text 'What's Your Fantasy' I always thought had a hint of the Sadeian about, the scurrying ominousness of the music making the parade of sexual configurations Ludacris enumerates seem strangely joyless. At any rate as per Carter's fleisch thing you could pretty much summarise the lyrical universe of Crunk in two words: BEEF and RUMP. Men: i'll turn you into carcass. Women: you're just meat to me.
(Interesting too that as per recent New York Times piece Lil Jon has moved into the beating-yr-meat market and actually gotten into cross-synergy with the porn industry, etc)
Nicely vibe-consistent with the previous post--check these musings on the sexlessness of Grime and Crunk from strapping Jess Harvell, which despite his caveat postscript seem pretty fully-baked to me.
Re. Crunk's deep-bass growl... it's funny how when Ja Rule does it's like a thug rap update of Barry White the Walrus of Love, but w/ Crunk it's just pure leering menace, zero slowjamz potential. (Did I hallucinate this or is there actually a line in "Get Low" that goes "until the sweat runs down my balls?"). Jess's shouting-at-strippers thing is spot on, cos as Barthes said in Mythologies, striptease isn't about eroticism, it's about fear.
When I hear that bleary baleful rasp of unison baritone voices on Crunk records, it always makes me think of bad breath--you can almost smell this barking reek of chicken, beer, and stale weedsmoke hitting you in the face. Chicken.... hmmm... that's the thing about Crunk, it's carnivorous. It's all about surrendering to your basest appetities, being a predator. That's what makes it so vital... yet its vitality s intrinsically bound up with a kind of death-force, a monstrous will to make the world dead. Having mentioned Mythologies, I'm going to up the over-interpretation stakes and bring The Sadeian Woman into it, if only to get off on having a sentence that contain the names Angela Carter and Lil Jon. But in that book--whose subtitle if I recall is something like 'the pornographic imagination'-- Carter makes play of the fact that the German word for flesh-- fleisch--is the same as the word for 'meat'. She writes that every time she sees the word she shudders. She then goes on to discuss how a certain objectifying form of (male, natch) sexuality turns everything into meat, devitalized and dead. Now, ur-Crunk text 'What's Your Fantasy' I always thought had a hint of the Sadeian about, the scurrying ominousness of the music making the parade of sexual configurations Ludacris enumerates seem strangely joyless. At any rate as per Carter's fleisch thing you could pretty much summarise the lyrical universe of Crunk in two words: BEEF and RUMP. Men: i'll turn you into carcass. Women: you're just meat to me.
(Interesting too that as per recent New York Times piece Lil Jon has moved into the beating-yr-meat market and actually gotten into cross-synergy with the porn industry, etc)
ALT-ROCK SLOWJAMZ/ANTI-SLOWJAMZ REPORTS
Brian Miller pretty much nails it I reckon with the following lineage of ‘slow jamz preferred by white alt-rock listeners’:
Cocteau Twins -> My Bloody Valentine -> Portishead -> Sigur Ros.
Portishead got several nominations, with Francesco Brunetti noting the cunning way the group bypass traditional white indie-chick aversion to smoove black loverman ballads by sampling Isac Hayes but siphoning that vibe it into what he nicely dubs “a white accepted mood”
Francesco’s other nominations are:
kruder & dorftmeister-- the 2cd remixes
massive attack--blue lines/protection
headz--the first double compilation
I suspect Maxinquaye belongs in this company also
Interesting that such despondent music as trip hop, with lyrical themes in all those Bristol bands of dependency, addiction, retreat from reality, narcosis etc etc, should be such love-action conducive stuff -- maybe it’s just the right tempo? And nicely texturized?
Also interesting that Massive Attack have plugged into that 4AD vibe on their last two releases, Liz frazer, sinead o ‘connor etc, thus doubling their love-action conducivity
In the Loveless zone, I would suggest Seefeel are inheritors of that and mix up w/ a bit of 4AD/The Sundays vibe
Talking of 4AD, a Netherlands correspondent who ticked the box marked ‘name and address witheld by request’ nominates:
Dead Can Dance - The serpent's egg
also
Paris Texas OST
Blue Velvet OST
Betty Blue OST
Lenny Kravitz
Orcheste Baobab - Pirate's Choice
Youssou N'Dour - Immigres / Bitim Rew
Sade (not sure about that one w/ the alt-rock contingent to be honest, i think of liz frazer as their Sade)
--and--
Slayer - South of Heaven
Robin Goad chips in with the astute remark:
“surely the ultimate indie seduction music is mazzy star?”
Again w/ Hope Sandoval it’s the sadness/sensuality link -- the voluptuousness of a certain kind of melancholy
Peter Maplestoneis insistent: “whitey between the sheets thang of the 90s: slowdive "pygmalion"
Cole Gerard begs to differ: “the 90s alterna-rock slow jam par excellence is Pulp This is Hardcore”.
We're still in this exquisite-melancholy-makes-u-horny zone
An Australian gentleman who ticked the anonymity box knows people who ‘do it’ to Whitehouse. I wonder what the 'it' is though.
Based on nothing (honest!) I’d have thought Stereolab was quite sensuous and gently groovy music, insistent but feminine. See also Saint Etienne. And possibly early--first album to ‘Electric Mainline’ the single--Spiritualized, Spacemen 3 ‘Playing With Fire’, etc. But perhaps these are more romantic/lovey-dovey rather than actively carnal.
Dissent: the Grateful Dead had a surprising number of defenders.
Andrew Glass gets specific: “Have you ever tried shagging to "Dark Star"? If both parties are suitably "lubricated" (i.e. zonked to the eyeballs) it works a treat!” Erm, the answer is no, although that is one of three or four Dead songs I really dige (the others are on Aoxomoa, and I should probably give Anthem of the Sun another go). I guess I was thinking more of the stuff like ‘Truckin’. in fact when I made that crack about the dead and jam bands it was cos i'd just seen this video that’s getting shown quite regularly on VH1 Classic--the Dead circa Terrapin Station or thereabouts -- mid to late Seventies -- it starts with quite a trippy animation but there’s an awful lot of onstage footage later on and loads of shots of the Deadheads capering in bliss to this incredible anodyne and unpsychedelic (to my ears) country-rock, and really it seems like the most sexless subculture ever. The garments the deadheads wear are unbelievable. And how could anyone get it on to the accompaniment of the Dead’s feeble harmony vocals?
(The first time I ever heard of Grateful Dead was in an Elvis Costello interview in the Radio Times, he referred to the Seventies being a stagnant time for music, with only a few things to listen to like, like the Grateful Dead, “when they weren’t too disgusting”. Cos of the name Grateful Dead I assumed he meant ‘disgusting’ as in Alice Cooper-The Tubes-Devo--Stranglers shock-rock grotesquerie a go go (as opposed to what he really meant -- flaccid spineless Poco-esque). So I was quite eager to hear them and when I finally found a Dead record in the record store -- I think it was Terrapin Station actually -- saw the fucking lame cover well I could tell immediately I'd got the wrong end of the stickl. The Dead have always had a cred gap for me since then).
Going back to the subject at hand, you know what I’m certain absolute that oceans of love have been made to Dead music, they’d sort of have to have been given the size of the subculture and its duration. Perhaps the idea is more: thinking of bands whose fans you don’t even want to contemplate getting it on.
One Luke Davis of Stratford E5 chips in to inform that the spirit of Robbie Vincent is alive and well. “sundays are dedicated to the slow jam on all the pirates which aren't dance stations. like deja will defiinitely have shows with a lot of luvvers music and djs that tell the ladies to take the radio under the covers with them and just snuggle up to it, that sort of thing.” Which reminded me that even the hardhearted mannish boys of Grime get amorous sometimes -- one time I was listening to the Horra Squad show and they were having problems establishing a vibe, it was all over the place, and then they cut from some real hate-full misogynist par for the course track into… ‘Sexual Healing’. And a whole bunch of slow jamz type stuff followed. The cognitive dissoance threw me for a loop, a bit like when gangsta rappers praise God on the CD credits then rap song after song about murder, adultery, and coveting worldly goods.
Grime’s a good point to switch to:
ANTI-SLOWJAMZ
From the antipodes Aaron Goldberg:
Slim dusty's entire career (sentimental Aussie yokel country singer)
Metal Machine Music - Lou Reed
Diamanda Galas
Christian rock of all shapes and forms
early Swans
Cold Chisel
actually this weird anomaly of music we had down here called 'Oz Rock' that
existed in the early to late 80s - Uncanny X-men, Choirboys, Dragon etc...
Of this lot the only one I think he’s probably wrong about is Swans (for a certain sort of person)
nathan walkernominates newcomer
Eamon Lyrics, "Fuck It (I Don't Want You Back)"
Dave Stelfox goes all out and comes up with a Top Ten
1) Regurgitation Of Giblets - Carcass
2) I Kill Everything I Fuck - by GG Allin
3) Size Aint Shit - Geto Boys
4) Cunt - Diamanda Galas
5) I Want To Fuck Myself - Faith No More
6) Anything by Weird Al Yankovic (with the exception of Amish Paradise, which is a work of genius)
7) The Art Of Fist Fucking - House of Discipline
8) Everything ever recorded by Turbonegro
9) Nessun Dorma - Michael Bolton (this really does exist!!!)
and finally, ladies and gentlemen, I give you...
10) DJ Shitspitter – Fuck Your Face(which he says you can find on Loftgroover's Terrorcore Classics comp)
rather too much reticence from our correspondents on the subject of misjudged soundtrack choices, but
Francesco Brunetti saves the day by divulging all:
personal experience of anti-climax: scott walker Tilt
(can you turn down the volume???) and bjork, and like
you said any wonderful soul music from isaac hayes on,
the white chicks don't like it, i learn it
quickly.....
Personal experience of anticlimax for me:
Dire straits (she liked them.... sob)
Brian Miller pretty much nails it I reckon with the following lineage of ‘slow jamz preferred by white alt-rock listeners’:
Cocteau Twins -> My Bloody Valentine -> Portishead -> Sigur Ros.
Portishead got several nominations, with Francesco Brunetti noting the cunning way the group bypass traditional white indie-chick aversion to smoove black loverman ballads by sampling Isac Hayes but siphoning that vibe it into what he nicely dubs “a white accepted mood”
Francesco’s other nominations are:
kruder & dorftmeister-- the 2cd remixes
massive attack--blue lines/protection
headz--the first double compilation
I suspect Maxinquaye belongs in this company also
Interesting that such despondent music as trip hop, with lyrical themes in all those Bristol bands of dependency, addiction, retreat from reality, narcosis etc etc, should be such love-action conducive stuff -- maybe it’s just the right tempo? And nicely texturized?
Also interesting that Massive Attack have plugged into that 4AD vibe on their last two releases, Liz frazer, sinead o ‘connor etc, thus doubling their love-action conducivity
In the Loveless zone, I would suggest Seefeel are inheritors of that and mix up w/ a bit of 4AD/The Sundays vibe
Talking of 4AD, a Netherlands correspondent who ticked the box marked ‘name and address witheld by request’ nominates:
Dead Can Dance - The serpent's egg
also
Paris Texas OST
Blue Velvet OST
Betty Blue OST
Lenny Kravitz
Orcheste Baobab - Pirate's Choice
Youssou N'Dour - Immigres / Bitim Rew
Sade (not sure about that one w/ the alt-rock contingent to be honest, i think of liz frazer as their Sade)
--and--
Slayer - South of Heaven
Robin Goad chips in with the astute remark:
“surely the ultimate indie seduction music is mazzy star?”
Again w/ Hope Sandoval it’s the sadness/sensuality link -- the voluptuousness of a certain kind of melancholy
Peter Maplestoneis insistent: “whitey between the sheets thang of the 90s: slowdive "pygmalion"
Cole Gerard begs to differ: “the 90s alterna-rock slow jam par excellence is Pulp This is Hardcore”.
We're still in this exquisite-melancholy-makes-u-horny zone
An Australian gentleman who ticked the anonymity box knows people who ‘do it’ to Whitehouse. I wonder what the 'it' is though.
Based on nothing (honest!) I’d have thought Stereolab was quite sensuous and gently groovy music, insistent but feminine. See also Saint Etienne. And possibly early--first album to ‘Electric Mainline’ the single--Spiritualized, Spacemen 3 ‘Playing With Fire’, etc. But perhaps these are more romantic/lovey-dovey rather than actively carnal.
Dissent: the Grateful Dead had a surprising number of defenders.
Andrew Glass gets specific: “Have you ever tried shagging to "Dark Star"? If both parties are suitably "lubricated" (i.e. zonked to the eyeballs) it works a treat!” Erm, the answer is no, although that is one of three or four Dead songs I really dige (the others are on Aoxomoa, and I should probably give Anthem of the Sun another go). I guess I was thinking more of the stuff like ‘Truckin’. in fact when I made that crack about the dead and jam bands it was cos i'd just seen this video that’s getting shown quite regularly on VH1 Classic--the Dead circa Terrapin Station or thereabouts -- mid to late Seventies -- it starts with quite a trippy animation but there’s an awful lot of onstage footage later on and loads of shots of the Deadheads capering in bliss to this incredible anodyne and unpsychedelic (to my ears) country-rock, and really it seems like the most sexless subculture ever. The garments the deadheads wear are unbelievable. And how could anyone get it on to the accompaniment of the Dead’s feeble harmony vocals?
(The first time I ever heard of Grateful Dead was in an Elvis Costello interview in the Radio Times, he referred to the Seventies being a stagnant time for music, with only a few things to listen to like, like the Grateful Dead, “when they weren’t too disgusting”. Cos of the name Grateful Dead I assumed he meant ‘disgusting’ as in Alice Cooper-The Tubes-Devo--Stranglers shock-rock grotesquerie a go go (as opposed to what he really meant -- flaccid spineless Poco-esque). So I was quite eager to hear them and when I finally found a Dead record in the record store -- I think it was Terrapin Station actually -- saw the fucking lame cover well I could tell immediately I'd got the wrong end of the stickl. The Dead have always had a cred gap for me since then).
Going back to the subject at hand, you know what I’m certain absolute that oceans of love have been made to Dead music, they’d sort of have to have been given the size of the subculture and its duration. Perhaps the idea is more: thinking of bands whose fans you don’t even want to contemplate getting it on.
One Luke Davis of Stratford E5 chips in to inform that the spirit of Robbie Vincent is alive and well. “sundays are dedicated to the slow jam on all the pirates which aren't dance stations. like deja will defiinitely have shows with a lot of luvvers music and djs that tell the ladies to take the radio under the covers with them and just snuggle up to it, that sort of thing.” Which reminded me that even the hardhearted mannish boys of Grime get amorous sometimes -- one time I was listening to the Horra Squad show and they were having problems establishing a vibe, it was all over the place, and then they cut from some real hate-full misogynist par for the course track into… ‘Sexual Healing’. And a whole bunch of slow jamz type stuff followed. The cognitive dissoance threw me for a loop, a bit like when gangsta rappers praise God on the CD credits then rap song after song about murder, adultery, and coveting worldly goods.
Grime’s a good point to switch to:
ANTI-SLOWJAMZ
From the antipodes Aaron Goldberg:
Slim dusty's entire career (sentimental Aussie yokel country singer)
Metal Machine Music - Lou Reed
Diamanda Galas
Christian rock of all shapes and forms
early Swans
Cold Chisel
actually this weird anomaly of music we had down here called 'Oz Rock' that
existed in the early to late 80s - Uncanny X-men, Choirboys, Dragon etc...
Of this lot the only one I think he’s probably wrong about is Swans (for a certain sort of person)
nathan walkernominates newcomer
Eamon Lyrics, "Fuck It (I Don't Want You Back)"
Dave Stelfox goes all out and comes up with a Top Ten
1) Regurgitation Of Giblets - Carcass
2) I Kill Everything I Fuck - by GG Allin
3) Size Aint Shit - Geto Boys
4) Cunt - Diamanda Galas
5) I Want To Fuck Myself - Faith No More
6) Anything by Weird Al Yankovic (with the exception of Amish Paradise, which is a work of genius)
7) The Art Of Fist Fucking - House of Discipline
8) Everything ever recorded by Turbonegro
9) Nessun Dorma - Michael Bolton (this really does exist!!!)
and finally, ladies and gentlemen, I give you...
10) DJ Shitspitter – Fuck Your Face(which he says you can find on Loftgroover's Terrorcore Classics comp)
rather too much reticence from our correspondents on the subject of misjudged soundtrack choices, but
Francesco Brunetti saves the day by divulging all:
personal experience of anti-climax: scott walker Tilt
(can you turn down the volume???) and bjork, and like
you said any wonderful soul music from isaac hayes on,
the white chicks don't like it, i learn it
quickly.....
Personal experience of anticlimax for me:
Dire straits (she liked them.... sob)
Eden @ Uncarved on Big Beat Nostalgia. A hearty hear-hear to his defence of Big Beat. Norman Cook's a hero, although probably feeling a bit lost these days, as presumably the Chems are.
(And no Norman doesn't = Hitler... Hitler, that would be Paul Oakenfold cos he did the first post-Ibiza Balearic/acieeeed club just pipping to the post the Ramplings w/Shoom and thus really kicking this whole movement-that's-ceased-moving off really. And because even now w/ dance industry contracting majorly he supposedly earns 7 million a year. Plus he's PURE EVIL.)
(And no Norman doesn't = Hitler... Hitler, that would be Paul Oakenfold cos he did the first post-Ibiza Balearic/acieeeed club just pipping to the post the Ramplings w/Shoom and thus really kicking this whole movement-that's-ceased-moving off really. And because even now w/ dance industry contracting majorly he supposedly earns 7 million a year. Plus he's PURE EVIL.)
Sunday, March 21, 2004
Sorta vaguely related to the below, I thought i'd come up with a nifty new typology of revivals, dividing them into Revivals that Are Inferior to the Thing They're Reviving and Revivals that are an Improvement on the Thing They're Reviving. Unfortunately I could only think of one example in the second category: 2-Tone vis-a-vis the original ska. Every other revival was just not as good as it's precursor. Any suggestions?
Stubbs's blog off to a terrific start with entries on getting into Pseud's Corner (amazed it didn't happen during the arsequake-era output) and Where Did All the Punks In the King's Road go? Strangely, there are still a fair few of punx in the East Village, maundering around Tompkins Square and St Mark's Place, wearing Discharge and Chron-Gen and Exploited T-shirts, but they're all 16 or 17. The mystery of subcultural persistence, part 17.
Inexpressibly thrilling to learn that Jon Dale's met Maddy Prior!!
That album he singles out, Please To See The King, with Martin Carthy on guitar, is where you can really hear the Steeleye/"Skank Bloc Bologna" connection.
That album he singles out, Please To See The King, with Martin Carthy on guitar, is where you can really hear the Steeleye/"Skank Bloc Bologna" connection.
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