reading matters / music that stutters

Chal Ravens has written a lovely in-depth review of Still In A Dream at London Review of Books

There's even an LRB playlist so you can listen as you read

Kieran Press-Reynolds has a really entertaining survey of the stutter in pop and unpop music, from "K-K-K-Katy" to "Melatonin", 1918 to 2026, over at Pitchfork

There's a playlist for that piece too

I feel like there's loadsa stutter and stammer candidates in ardkore, jungle, 2step...

Perhaps more like the vocal equivalent of facial tics... a Tourettic frenzy

 Also footwork, whose GIF-like properties have been noted...

This is probably my favorite bit of rockpop stuttering -  "b-b-b-b-baby you ain't seen n-n-n-n-nothing yet"

Used to love this song as a kid... it seemed sweetly, somehow innocently saucy... now as an all growned-up listener I dig that plaintive bit of lead guitar like a bird circling way way up high in the sky

Another classic stutter - digitally addled by Butthole Surfers into a Thai pop song - turning an innocent-in-the-original syllable into a dirty word. 

Something I read (about Karin Krog + John Surman's great Electric Element) referenced this track's electronic stutter

BoC now stirring faint memories of juddering vocal tics on My Life In Bush of Ghosts

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

There was a really touching story on the World Service yesterday... told by  a woman who has a stutter - stammer, apparently is the more common expression in the U.K. - and as a child went through a lot of anguish, bullying etc - and how, at a particularly low point in her teenage years, when she was feeling suicidal, she heard the Scatman John song, which is all about how he dealt with his own severe stutter, turned it into music,  "if I can do, so can you". It pulled her back from the brink. 

Conversely, while trawling through ancient episodes of Top of the Pops from the peak Bad Music Era - just unbelievable torrential shite that I never even knew existed, because I didn't have a TV for most of the later  Eighties and was out all the time, seeing bands, so rarely saw TOTP -  conversely, there is this horrid (s)hit single by Morris Minor & the Majors