Talking of Sheffield folk, Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh would be turning in their graves (if they were actually dead) if they knew about this:

London's newest night launches at the most exciting venue in the capitol, bringing the thrill, the glamour and the enchantment of seductive entertainment.
Welcome to PENTHOUSE AND PAVEMENT
At Egg this Saturday, the cream of clubland can anticipate a line up they've only dreamt of, with unique surprises, a live element, and a DJ line up that will leave London's glamourati begging for more...

The Terrace with Too Big for the Penthouse
Pumping US House

Rob Marmot (Dusted)
DJ Marble (Penge)
Hoxton Whores
Al Jay & Vinyl Richie....


"Glamourati"?!?!?! Blewaaaaghrrghghghgh....

Very nice piece by Nick Gutterbreakz on the Richard H. Kirk Earlier/Later Unreleased Projects Anthology 74/89 (Grey Area Of Mute) CD which is out anyday and which I'm panting to hear. I'm not quite as obsessive about Cabs-related output as Nick but not that far behind him. And weirdly it's quite a recent development. I really liked the Cabs at the time, had a fair few things by them, some vinyl, others taped off friends. And there were certain tracks like "Black Mask" and "Sluggin"/"Secret Agent Man" and swathes of Covenant that really stood out for me. But I wasn't like an obsessive fan by any means. But now, I dunno, through doing the book or something, in these last three years, I just really fell in love with the Cabs--as Sound and as Spirit-- to the point where I want all of it, the juvenilia and solo side project marginalia.... last year, if Methodology: Attic Tapes had been a new release it might have beaten out even Dizzee as my year's favorite listen (was amazed how little love that record got in the critpolls and blog roundups, praps most people didn't actually hear it?) ... yeah I really feel Nick's Kirkmania.... cos there's just something that imbues even the scraps and half-finished stuff... Something heroic about Cabaret Voltaire. Culture warrior bizniz innit.

PS. still looking for 1980's Disposable Half-Truths....

Talking of obsessive record collectors, I wrote this talk "Lost In Music: Obsessive Record Collecting" and delivered it at the first EMP conference a couple of years ago. And now it's reappeared, in a much longer mix, in the EMP #1 anthology which is just out on Harvard University Press. This Is Pop: In Search of the Elusive at Experience Music Project , edited by Eric Weisbard. An excellent collection. And there's an event next Thursday around the book at the New School in NYC (details below), I'll be making a rare PA along with some of the other contributors, but instead of doing the bleedin' obvious and talking about pop desire, glocality, authenticity, constructions of "the real" or any of that bollocks, this is a showcase of our other talents--Daphne A. Brooks, for instance, is a gifted juggler, Geoffry O'Brien will be doing some fire-eating, Eric Weisbard will be sawing Ann Powers in half, acrobatics from Kelefa Sanneh... you get the picture. Fun for all the family. Children welcome.

THIS IS POP
Thursday, May 13, 7:00 p.m.
$5, Free for students.
Tishman Auditorium, The New School, 66 West 12th Street, NYC
Discussion with guests: Daphne A. Brooks, Robert Christgau, Garry Giddins,
Chuck Klosterman, Geoffrey O'Brien, Robert Polito, Ann Powers, Simon
Reynolds, David Sanjek, Kelefa Sanneh, and Eric Weisbard. Presented by the
New School Graduate Writing Program.

TICKETS: By email to: Boxoffice@newschool.edu
or by calling The New School Box Office at
(212) 229-5488. For information, call (212) 229-5353, or email to:
specialprograms@newschool.edu .

It's on blud

Berkhamsted and Hemel Hempstead traditionally have an adversarial relationship. But when a threat comes from outside--like, for instance, Aylesbury--emnity gets forgot and Dacorum Council* unity prevails. Seeing as I'm "local," MurdaMan from Hemel Def Sqwad has stepped up to the mic to do battle. This goes best with a certain
Purple Haze riddim.

M. Woebot loves Desi, Desi
Man got lotsa rekkids, rekkids
He'd go without food
To buy vinyl, that dude

His wife she be bitchin'
'Bout vinyl addiction
Domestic affliction
From basement to kitchen

"Obsession not healthy
Get rid of some LPs
I'm sick of the dust, see
Old covers so musty"

M. Woebot loves Desi, Desi
His house is real messy, messy
Rare records are strewn
'Cross the living room

On Woebot he natters
About obscure platters
Nuff knowledge he scatters
On riddims and chatters

Enthusiasm infector
One serious collector
Afro-doc director
Accomplished selector

M. Woebot loves Desi, Desi
His house is real messy, messy
They've run out of room
Got too many tunes

Really appropriately
And kinda symbolically
First met him in M&VE
Not sure how he recognise me
Single Column pic in Melody?
Camden branch, 94 probably
Chasing ardkore and so was he!
Through email got friendly
Sent his comics across the sea
My favorite was "Record Thief"
Veiled autobiography?
Thought “there but for God's Grace goes me!”

M. Woebot loves Desi, Desi
His house is real messy, messy
Likes music that's rude
With avant-yob attitude

Animates and draws cartoons
Hunts down bare rare grime tunes
An expert on Norse runes
Blows up Lulu's balloons

M. Woebot loves Desi, Desi
Man got lotsa rekkids, rekkids
He'd go without food
To buy vinyl, that dude


In related news, God's Gift is now on the case doing a remake called "Tribute to 32 Bloggers"

* FACT: Dacorum once had the highest homicide rate in the U.K. And they say I'm not "street" enough to write about Grime...

MC MC combines two of my favorite things--rock criticism and alternative history (as in The Man in the High Castle, Bring The Jubilee, Pavane, etc) with this witty speculation on what would have happened if Joe Meek hadn't topped himself. Hope this becomes a flourishing micro-genre of sf-meets-popcrit. And Danger Mouse and his ilk get on the case to actually make these parallel universe albums...

The grim backstory to NASA REWIND. DB shouldn’t have to walk away from throwing a great party so horrendously out of pocket. I’m just staggered he managed to play such a terrific set under the circumstances. Jason Jinx is organising a benefit event for DB, which will A/ be a blinding party B/ be a chance to show nuff love and respeck to this founding father of the US rave scene and since-day-one crusader for hardcore continuum bizniz in this country. If you’ve enjoyed DB’s deejaying over the years, the events he’s organised, mix-CDs like History of Our World, Breakbeat Science, etc, you really should come down and suppor the event, plus you'll be having a great time into the bargain. Further details to follow when they’re sorted.

the love affair between bloggs and grime

"Socially, structurally, politically": that?s how Woebot defined a secret proximity between bloggaz and grimesters. The first and third words there I wasn?t totally sure of, but the word "structurally" kept on niggling in my mind. "Structurally" seemed to hit some kind of nail on the head. Yeah, yeah, at the level of deep structure, a blogger and a grime MC basically are--if not the same, then doing the same thing.

Lemme lay down the contours of this deep structural affinity as starkly as possibly first, then elaborate later.

1/ post-media operators/narrowcast transmissions/niche audiences
2/ discourse = 50 percent "things on my mind" + 50 percent pure verbal exhibitionism
3/ ego-driven
4/ collectivity/cameraderie/cliquishness/incestuousness versus feuds/spats/battles/takedowns
5/ scenius/peer pressure dynamics
6/ code/crypticism/slanguage/ideolect
7/ cultural practice that spins around locality/globality tensions
8/ amateurism versus professionalism

1/ post-media operators/Narrowcast transmission
Well I'll bet some of the smaller pirate shows have listener figures roughly the same per show as the total weekly hits for some of the bigger bloggers. Of course they don't actually know how many people they're reaching (whereas bloggaz do) so without that reality check they can get all swollen up on the grandiosity of imagining they're broadcasting to the whole of London and surrounding counties. But I bet you for a lot of the shows "just 4 U london" boils down to a few thousand people. (When you look at the incredibly poor record sales for this music it's easy to imagine grime becoming more and more like improv and other kinds of free music--where most of the audience consists of fellow performers). But even with the reality check of the weekly sitemaster report, there is a latent grandiosity to blogging because there isn't actually any physical limit to how many people could tune in. (And of course some bloggs are radio stations of a sort--Wadio Woebot. Bet this becomes more and more common).

2/ "things on my mind"/verbal exhibitionism
Some bloggers, like some MCs--you think "God, if they didn't have this outlet, they'd explode!". As for "verbal exhibitionism"--eas it Luka who had a riff about blogging being a performance, the cultivation of a persona? The self amped up. self-revelation as theatre.

If you belong to an oral culture, a post-literate literati, then having your own pirate show basically is like having a blogg. It's your outlet, your valve for venting.

3/ "ego driven"
....and (sad but true, I'm not happy about it by any means) testosterone-driven also

4/ collectivity versus feuds
both related to testosterone of course: brothers in arms versus brothers at each others throats. (The highly active comments box as a cipher perhaps).

5/ scenius/peer pressure
That's what it all works on, MCs, bloggers--competitivity-- in the best, healthiest, most creative sense. When it's on, everyone raises their game. And there's cycles, times when it goes a bit slack, and then suddenly it's on again, and you can tell people are sparking off other people.

6/ code/crypticism
People complain: it's so incestuous, I don't know what they're on about half the time? It's all about cracking a code innit. (Reading the inkie music press when it was good used to be like that, stumbling through a foreign land, until you learned the discursive landmarks, the running jokes etc. And that's what bloggs are like, that aspect of the old music press isolated from the other more workaday (news, gig pages, interviews) aspects and amplified several times, appealing to the same minority audience (probably around 8 percent I reckon) who bought the music press for those proto-blogg reasons rather than the workaday news/reviews aspect).

7/ locality/globality
Apparently there's some new groovily ghastly cultural studies term that covers these ambiguities-- brace yourselves people!--"glocal". Yuk!!! 'S true though. Grime is yet another pirate continuum music that's tuned into vibrations from all over the Black Atlantic but the end result is totally attuned to the very specific audio-erogenous zones of da London massive and therefore not very exportable. In pirate stations case, it's literally local-- the broadcast range is limited and the territorialism has shrivelled down from London as a whole to specific postal districts in the East, or in the case of Phuture Grime plasticman-style that patch of godforsaken terrain between Croydon and West Norwood (where I once lived for a year so I know whereof I speak).

In the case of bloggs, of course, it's kind of the opposite: something that is geographically distributed but that achieves coherence through certain shared obsessions.... a set of obsessions and a range of ways of approaching and talking about them that creates a fuzzy overlap gray zone where we "meet". (I'm talking about this particularly 'hood of the 'sphere obviously). Certain basins of attraction that have caused a disparate (but not that disparate) array of discursive agents to gather in "one spot". That really is "glocal" because what it is, it's a kind of post-geographical localism: a parochialism of sensibility. So for instance Jon Dale and Tim Finney are at the fucking opposite end of the planet to me but there's a real sense in which we are "neighbours". (So that banging sound on the ceiling, Jon, is me complaining about the free folk, "give it rest mate, eh?!").

8/ amateurism versus professionalism
DJs and MCs actually pay to play on the pirates. It's potlatch culture, giving it away. Free entertainment. Same with bloggs. K-Punk, just to pick one example, is basically running a one-man micro-magazine that's better than most anything you'd likely pay money for in papers or magazines.

I bet professional radio DJs, producers etc have the exact same half-threatened/half-condescending attitude towards the pirates that professional (nonblogging) journos have towards bloggers.

And far from bloggdiscourse being all highfalutin' and spiritually bow-tied, it is of course a good deal of the time a kind of theatricalized vernacular a la Grime.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

So. There is this mirror image, reflected narcissism thing that must surely have something to do with the love affair between bloggs and grime.

Now did I just write "between"?

Of course the glaring thing is the utterly one-way, non-mutual nature of this "affinity". I mean, to say, if in some deep structural sense there's this reversibility--they're bloggers and we're MCs--then some sort of reciprocity ought to be in order, don't you think? Mean to say, I must have written many thousands of words on Dizzee by this point, you'd think he might at least devote 16 bars to the subject of me! Luka, there should be a fucking MICRO-GENRE of grime lyrics about him. After having that lovely appreciation penned on him Sticky should name a new riddim Silverdollar. Or better still get Simon Sez to do a new song called "Simon Sez" about what the other Simon actually says.

The more I thought about this disparity, the more it began to rankle. Eventually, I rung around and managed to dredge up numbers for most of the top boys. Fucking impossible trying to get hold of Wiley, his mobile's ringing off the hook. Same with most of the big guys. The ones I did get hold of were either, "blogg?! What's that then?" or I got the brush-off, none too politely I might add. Finally I got hold of DT-Eye from K2 Family, who've been keeping a bit of a low profile since the 2002 success of
"Bouncing Flow" and "Danger". I explained to him what a blogg was, how they'd been showing nuff love to Grime all this time, and he was like, "fair play, see your point". Eventually, after a bit of cajoling, he said he'd give it a go, cos it was a quiet weekend. I said just use my links bar, skip around a bit, check out the scene, whatever you can come up with, it would be much appreciated. Good for morale and all that.

When I called DT-Eye up this morning, he'd come up with some verses, and said they'd work best on Wiley's new Torvill & Dean riddim, or at a push, with some finessing, on the dubstrumental of "Danger". Here's the thing though--and I was a bit put out cos he doesn't even like Grime that much-- they're about Marcello!!! Apparently CoM and TNM, that's what really caught DT-Eye's imagination, the human element. Plus he said, that Gail, she sounds fit. So here they are anyway--he rapped them down the phone, you have to imagine them in a kinda choppy, staccato sing-song flow. And leave off the "t"s at the end of words.

MC flex best
On shorter texts
Closely inspects
David Essex
Views on Roy Wood perplex
Works for NHS
Hails from Inverness *
Longer texts can vex
Focuses on auteur
More than he oughta
Myths he'll debunk dem
Precisely pinpoints punctum
Barthes crossed with Gambaccini
His mama cook great linguini
Knowledge encyclopaedic
Style belle-lettristic
And memoiristic
(Thinks Petridis a right prick)
Tight with his links
Thinks
Junior Boys stinks
Likes
Improv a lot
Friends
Again with Woebot
Dates a gyal called Gail
Receives bare email
From Man Like John Cale
Loves Robert Wyatt
Just
Don't
Try
It

So look--it's not great, but it's a start, right?

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

* not actually true. I don't know where he came up with this one. Poetic license?

DizZE Miss Lizzy

Like a lot of Penmaniacs I totally bought the whole ZE thing at the time, and in a literal sense bought a fair amount of their stuff. And promptly sold it eighteen months later--well I kept Mutant Disco, for “Me No Pop I”, “Bustin Out” and “ Wheel Me Out” plus the I.Penman sleevenotes natch (shamefully not included on the recent reissue, although Kevin Pearce does a neat job)-- but I shed those first two Kid Creole albums and have never once regretted it, except in the last year, for research reasons more than aural pleasure. Even had a Cristina single or two. But for some reason I never checked out Lizzy Mercier Descloux at the time. And then about a month ago her Mambo Nassau turned up in the mail courtesy of Forced Exposure along with a bunch of ZE comps and Was (Not Was)’s debut album and a W(NW)remixes thing (now their stuff’s a mixed bag to put it mildly, “Wheel me Out” and the more aberrant-jazzed stuff like “Oh, Mr Friction” and “It’s An Attack” still sound quite cool but the rest of it…. well let’s say “Walk That Dinosaur” casts this huge reverse shadow over it, a pleasure-shrivelling pall), but anyway back to Ms. Descloux--I’ve been meaning to write about Mambo here for weeks. Cos it’s a revelation. Sensational stuff. Something like a New Pop version of 4th World: Claire Grogan meets Jon Hassell. Sonixly/ridmaticly, the melange is Dubfunk + AfroPop + French-artpop. A pentangle of territory whose five sides are Tom Tom Club, My Life In The Bush of Ghosts, Nightclubbing, Your Cassette Pet, and Les Ritas Mistoukos. (I swear the first three came to mind before I looked at the press release and saw it was recorded in Nassau at Compass Point under the good graces of Chris Blackwell and that her band included Wally Badarou [a Woebot fave lost 80s auteur, session keyboard guy at Compass] and also even a studio engineer called Steve Slanley who’d worked with Grace Jones and would go on to work with Tom Tom Club). Killer tracks for me are “Sports Spootnicks” (“Contort Yourself” meets “Hello Hello Daddy I’ll Sacrifice You”*) and “Payola” (Material if they somehow were The Go Gos). Inventive but joyous. Wonderfully frisky, flirty, feisty, fizzy with life.

And then I hear she’s dead. Just died in fact. Been struggling with cancer for a while. How sad. And how weird to have music you’ve just fallen in love with suddenly ghosted like that.

RIP LMD.

* okay that one’s a bit gratutiously arcane: last track on Bow Wow Wow’s See Jungle lp, a sort of Jungian bossa-nova

I hold in my hand a copy of Seks Isyanlari. I was a bit flip in tone in my first post about this--mainly cos I was a bit bemused and stunned by the whole thing--but actually having a solid book brings home that it's actually quite heavy. Somebody took the trouble to slog through Joy's and my tome and translate it into Turkish. The publishers, Ayrinti, stand to lose a fair bit of money. Below is some information on books being banned in Turkey--a surprisingly common practice, and not just for "obscenity" or insulting the Turkish people (really not on our agenda back in 93 when we wrote the thing), but for political reasons too. Ayrinti seem to have a lot of run-ins, they do a fair bit of edgy material--last year they got done for translating a work by de Sade (who we reference in the chapter that also has Peter 'Childrape and Nazi Genocide's Cool' Sotos of Whitehouse infamy in it, I wonder if that set off the morality squad's alarm bells?). Joy found the following on some website, I think the writers' rights organisation PEN. Apologies
for heisting it wholesale.

"Charges of 'insulting the morals of the people'

Sex is another issue that has increasingly given rise to lawsuits. On March
19, 2003, a trial opened at the Istanbul Penal Court of First Instance
against Omer Faruk, the owner of the Ayrinti Publishing House, and Kerim
Sadi, a translator, for publishing and translating respectively a Turkish
edition of the Marquis de Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom (Yatak Odasinda
Felsefe). The two are accused under Article 426 of the Turkish Penal Code of
'insulting the morals of the people'. In 2002, similar charges were pressed
against Nermin Acar for her translation of La Terreur dans la Boudoir, a
French novel by Serge Bramly that is based on the work of Marquis de Sade.
Acar has also faced charges for her translation from French of Alina Reyes'
erotic novel, Lilith. The legislation prohibits all work with frank sexual
content and takes no account of whether the writing has literary merit. "

Book bannings in Turkey


"At present, PEN has on its records over 60 writers, publishers and
journalists who are on trial in Turkey solely for the publication of their
writings and who face heavy penalties if convicted. In 2002 alone, 77 books
were reported to have been banned... There are likely to be many more cases
than PEN has been able to record. The confiscation and banning of a piece of
writing is a major obstacle to the practice of free expression and is
censorship in its most direct form. International PEN has called on the
Turkish authorities to review once again all legislation that allows for the
penalization of those who write on or publish issues that are not in accord
with the views of those in authority, and to remove from Turkish law all
remaining impediments to the practice of the right to freedom of
expression."
- International PEN's Oral Submission to the United Nations Commission on
Human Rights, meeting in Geneva at its 59th session, March 17 to April 25,
2003


At any one time, PEN is aware of several cases of authors and their books
falling foul of Turkey's broad battery of legislation inhibiting free
expression. A recent example was the works of author Mehmet Bayrak, whose
three-volume book Kurdish Music, Dances and Songs published in September
2002 by Özgür Gelecek ('The Free Future') publishing house - was reportedly
confiscated on the orders of the Ankara State Security Court. The order
claimed that the volumes had infringed Article 312.2 of the Turkish Penal
Code because they 'in their current form oppose the unity of nation and
state. Furthermore, their content partitions the population into different
races thereby inciting hate and hostility.' Another book by Bayrak, Kurdish
Women - From the Past to the Present, was similarly confiscated. In its
February 17, 2003 letter to Turkey's Minister of Justice, PEN stated its
belief 'that the banning of these books is aimed at suppressing views on
Kurdish issues that do not comply with those held by the government.'

Other recently banned books and journals have included:

a report from the Center for Asia Minor Research in Greece entitled
Migration, Forced Departure of Anatolian Greeks from Anatolia (accused of
being an 'insult to Ataturk');

Anatolia: from Multiculturalism to Uniculturalism by Aytekin Yilmaz, which
has been accused of 'insulting the nation' by infringing Article 159 of the
Turkish Penal Code;

several journals of the Communist Party for being 'propaganda for an illegal
organization.'

These and other examples demonstrate that the book bannings and trials
against authors are usually initiated either when Turkey's multi-ethnic
community is explored, especially if the government's policies regarding the
many ethnicities living within its borders are criticized, or when the
authors espouse left-wing political ideology, such as views which are deemed
'Communist'. In both cases, PEN believes that the government has nothing to
gain from such bannings, and that allowing a variety of different opinions
to circulate freely will not undermine Turkey's security. On the contrary,
only by allowing free expression on such matters can the many historic
tensions within the country be eased.

Ragip Zarakolu: in the forefront of the campaign against bannings

Ragip Zarakolu, a publisher at Belge Publishing House (which among other
titles, has published Ömer Asan's book, The Culture of the Pontus ) is one
of the main campaigners against these book-bannings. Zarakolu has himself
faced charges - in fact he is seldom off the WiPC's case list. For instance,
on July 15, 2002, he was brought to trial under Article 312 of the Penal
Code for an article entitled 'The New Racist Attacks in Turkey', in which he
delivered a critique of ultra- nationalism. The trial continues. Meanwhile,
Zarakolu continues to protest against book-bannings, and publishes many
titles knowing that they may well fall foul of the law.


In a statement that he made on behalf of the Publishers Union of Turkey at
the 2002 Frankfurt Book Fair, Zarakolu acknowledged the support of the
international community. He painted a picture of a steady increase in the
number of bannings and legal cases. According to him, in 2000, 20 books from
14 publishing houses were banned or indicted; in 2001, 42 books from 23
publishing houses were banned or indicted. He later reported that by the end
of 2002, the annual figure had risen to 77 books, with 38 publishers and 57
writers finding themselves in the dock. The cases sometimes dragged on for
more than a year, so that the number of books subject to legal proceedings
at any one time could number over a hundred.

Zarakolu noted that how the books fared in the courts was 'dependent on the
personal tendencies of the jurists'. Some gave 'more tolerant or more
intolerant judgments'. Conservative tendencies in the system had given rise
to more cases against writing on sexual issues. However, discussion of
minorities still led the field in provoking lawsuits. He cited interviews
with guerrilla leaders, histories of left-wing parties, discussions of human
rights abuses and police accountability as being topics that writers
broached at their peril.

He urged the international community to campaign against these assaults on
freedom of expression. 'The support of the world's community of publishers
has given us courage and endurance,' he said. While legal preparations for
entry into the European Union are afoot, he suggested, the time to press
forward with the campaign is ripe.

This here didn't peeve me quite as much it did Matt Woebot or The Stelfox--if only cos it's such a daft caricature of blogdiscourse (most of which is pretty colloquial INNIT). The thing that IS offensive is the condescension to the hardcore Grime fans. They might mangle the Queen's grammar and use patois and sling slang and misspell words (deliberately, though, often), but surely it's OBVIOUS that the level of literacy in the better grime (or hip hop, or dancehall) lyrics is staggering? And therefore by implication and by definition the fans have extreme verbal skills. They're probably not bookworms (although that's just an assumption--for all I know D Double E's got library cards and overdue books all across East London) but they don't need to be--this is a post-literate literati, a voracious oral culture sucking in and chewing up stuff from across the mediascape. With a lot of these lyrics, the sheer comprehension skills needed to follow the twists, spot the allusions, and unravel the compressions, is staggering. You need skill to actually even ENJOY this stuff, the sheer linguistic sport of it. And that suggests to me that the people who are into it, the kids for whom it's their life, must be really sophisticated. When you read interviews with Dizzee and Wiley, they come across as very perceptive and insightful. What the Americans call EQ or emotional IQ, these guys score pretty high. I'd also venture that without having to read the Guardian or New Statesman or political blogs, the grime kids are probably pretty sussed in their grasp on what's fucked about the world. In that sense "street knowledge" is as good (or better) an education as reading Fredric Jameson or some Routledge primer on late capitalism, postcolonialism etc etc. So yeah, as Matt concludes, tweak some of the words, translate a bit between jargons and idiolects, and you'll find that the bloggaz and the grimesters are speaking the same language. Gutterlectuals unite, down with middlebrow!

!!!!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!!

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)

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!)

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...