!!!!!!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.
"a Simon Reynolds level culture blog" ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"my brain thinks bloglike"
Tuesday, March 30, 2004
(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.
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