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The Church Of Me
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Kissing in the churchyard, I know a righteous woman
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Tuesday, November 26, 2002
HORSEPOWER PRODUCTIONS – IN SOLITARY STYLE
Of course I didn’t spend the entire week listening to Throbbing Gristle non-stop. Even stern unbending puritans need a break occasionally. I finally tracked down a copy of Horsepower Productions’ In Fine Style on CD, and road-tested it on Saturday, the sodden, drenched Saturday, using my trusty all-zone Travelcard as a makeshift talisman.
I spent most of Saturday on buses, determinedly away from central London, adhering to obscure routes on the outer edges of the south-west, seven-day Sunday services, single decker with brands no one has ever heard of. The torrent seemed to fit the day perfectly; the avenues nearly all empty, the glorified village greens round New Malden, Coulsdon; the edge of the world circumference which is Roehampton/Surbiton/Tolworth – out to the dimmest arms of Hanworth, Isleworth and the Court of Hampton. Abandoned car boot sales, forlorn netball team practices, 1974 motor showrooms. Horsepower Productions sounded pretty environmentally friendly here. Endless cul-de-sacs, circuitous bus U-turns, a complexity of nowheres – because this is suburban drum ‘n’ bass; unlike more determined operatives such as Paradox, this is not urban music. It is constructed to be heard emanating dimly from Portastudios in upstairs bedrooms in Twickenham and Cheam.
It doesn’t all work. The infallible law of d&b albums is immediately evoked; that damned Fender Rhodes chord set against birdsong. Oh for fuck Gilles Peterson’s sake, burn your fucking Herbie Hancock albums, listen to some Revolutionary Ensemble – the spaces which dot “Fist Of Fury” are the best thing about the track. That bloody flute. Pretensions to classiness which can never hope to be met. Ideal for Surbiton, of course. “HDN” is slightly harder, but I still can’t get a handle on it.
(and the cover; we don’t want to see your workroom, your PC, your drinks cabinet – transport us elsewhere! show us not the nuts and bolts!)
The sequence of tracks 3-7 is the crux of the album. “Gorgon Sound” introduces unresolved minor/major keys, distancing themselves from each other like the tower blocks of West Croydon. When the JA voice roars in: “’Cause when it comes to MUSIC” it is thrust shockingly into your face. These guys know about dimensionality.
“Django’s Revenge” is based on a mournful synth-mandolin refrain which reminds me on one hand of a well-behaved 187 Lockdown and a barely tangible infinity derived from the Cocteau Twins’ “Otterley.” You notice how smartly the post-2step beats wind their way around your ears with great purpose and power. The sound is clean and demonstrable.
“The Swindle” samples an indie black music record company type ranting about the majors “wanting to sell rubbish” but the spaciousness here is fantastically concave; hear the contrast between the Fairlight string chords and the echoing ska/dub guitar slashes. Here, as on “What We Do” (the vocal sample of the latter appears to go “what I’ve got, I sold”) I am reminded of a very Detroit kind of space, that unutterable poignancy we recognise from Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson; the latter is much more palpable on “Classic Deluxe.”
“Stone Cold Soul Vibes” is a soprano sax-sampling groove which goes nowhere in particular, and “Rude Boyz” never quite seems to get going, despite the harp/blues slide guitar motif which surfaces intermittently. “To The Beat Y’All” sees them back on form, however; this sounds like a marriage between late ‘80s Todd Terry and Boards of Canada (the maximalism of those poignant chord changes! that Portastudio minimalism!). “Pimp Flavors” essays a great slalom of beats which seem to ski their way around your head, but sadly runs out of ideas after the introduction of a hackneyed “American dream” sample. “Fat Larry’s Skank,” too, shucks and jives to sub-David Holmes effect, while on “Log On (Dub),” you are essentially waiting for Mike Skinner to come in – slightly too spacious.
But the emptiness is, it seems to me, a vital component of what makes In Fine Style worth 76 minutes of your time. There is something desolate, something anti-danceable, at its core – and it is that mystery, like the great yawning vistas in Sans Soleil, which is likely to draw me back to further days spent riding almost alone in buses in the rain. I have to enter myself more deeply before I can come out at the other end and re-enter the world.
. . .
Monday, November 25, 2002
A DAY IN YOUR LIFE OF THROBBING GRISTLE
I wonder whether anyone actually listens to Throbbing Gristle any more. Oh, we continue to cite them – often lazily – as an influence on everything from Industrial to Techno, but how much of this is due to the fact of their past existence, as opposed to what they in fact produced when they existed?
Perhaps their most apparent influence was their presentation – the concept of a self-reliant group, capable of its own ideologies, manifestos and marketing; an “image” which inverted, examined and subverted capitalist models. This strand of theirs soon became diluted and commercialised for real by intelligent New Pop operatives like Heaven 17/BEF and Scritti Politti; not to mention its indirect influence on the Factory operation (Genesis P-Orridge was another son of Manchester, though subsequently brought up in Solihull). They came to prominence as supposed art terrorists; in particular with their ICA “COUM” exhibition of clippings from porno mags, used tampons, etc., in the autumn of 1976 which so scandalised the ertswhile surrealist and then ICA chairman Roland Penrose. So the concept of outrage has become more important now than the content.
What of TG’s music? As with Erwartung, Finnegan’s Wake and Spiritual Unity, it continues to stand as a border post of its particular aesthetic field. There is a very real argument for saying that we have progressed no further since. For concrete proof of this argument, I must direct you to Twenty Four Hours of Throbbing Gristle. This was originally a 24-cassette box set released in 1981 after TG had split, and consisted of the majority of their live performances – 24 concerts, one hour each; a day’s worth. To mark TG’s 25th anniversary, Chris Carter has remastered the tapes, and the package is to be reissued next month as a strictly limited edition 24-CD box set with deluxe packaging and a file sealed in wax (what a touch!) containing unspecified miscellaneous material from all four members (P-Orridge, Carter, Cosey Fanni Tutti and Peter Christopherson).
The construction of the box is not yet complete, so I only have the CDs themselves on which to base my assessment. They cover the period 1976-80 and, even on one concentrated listening, may well turn out to be the most powerful music ever to be discussed on this website.
It is shockingly contemporary in its sound, never more so than on the first track of the first CD, recorded at the ICA in October 1976, an electronic squall of a ballad, “Very Friendly,” which concerns itself with Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, and describes in gruesomely minute detail one of their murders (remember that P-Orridge was a potential victim). G P-O’s strangely childlike wail-meets-sneer of a voice is particularly suited to TG’s methodology; it can throw tantrums and yet be as cold as a tombstone. This was already as far away from punk as you could imagine, yet truer to punk than much else of what was being produced at the time. It was already ahead of the game. The as yet barely regulated counterpoint between electronic noise and primitive electrobeats with occasional violin interjections (by Chris and Cosey) set TG in a limboland somewhere between Cale’s Velvets and AMM, the latter influence being especially noticeable in Peter Christopherson’s barrage of TV/film/radio cut-up samples which, throughout TG’s career, acted as a second voice to harmonise with/argue against P-Orridge’s polemics.
P-Orridge was certainly determined to rub the consumer’s face in the degradation of humanity, to say the then unsayable. The next song on CD1, “Dead Heads,” hardly offers any succour; a Hammer horror scenario where the progenitor breaks into a married couple’s house, cuts the husband’s balls off with a carving knife and forces him to eat them, and then slices up the pregnant wife, cutting her womb open, extracting the baby and eating its head. Although fairly par for the course 300 years previously (check your Webster, Marlowe and Jonson for similar bloodletting), the seemingly a-passionate delivery and relentlessness of the musical backing still makes this a shocking listen; not to mention of course the multiple metaphors which P-Orridge brings into the narrative (emasculation, abortion, etc.). Only Eminem at his most nihilist even begins to approach the horror of this performance.
It is, I have to say, the most shocking thing here; thereafter TG’s world develops organically. On some gigs (CD2, CD5) vocals are absent altogether, in favour of AMM-esque electro-improv explorations. On other gigs, notably the Nag’s Head, High Wycombe (CD3) and Brighton Polytechnic (CD4), the audiences are hostile, wanting the Pistols, wanting “music,” and P-Orridge seems to relish baiting them, rubbishing “punk” though still wanting to go on TOTP. CD3 in particular is a tense document of audience hatred, though unlike Metallic KO the singer doesn’t get bottled into unconsciousness, and unlike 23 Minutes Over Brussels the microphone doesn’t get nicked and the threat of riot remains only a threat.
But there was no need to prolong this primary-level confrontation; TG opted to concentrate on developing their sound, refining it, opening up more to the world, incorporating greater proportions of cut-up material, almost enjoying the crassness of what they are recycling (Christopherson was at the time still working at his day job as an advertising exec). As we progress through 1977-8, the rhythms gradually become more tactile, the songs more approachable (though it’s all relative; this was hardly the Ramones). The audience reaction becomes almost irrelevant, and for the most part inaudible, as if there were no one there, or they had all been stunned into an astonished silence. Their best-known song “United” makes its first appearance on a return visit to Brighton Polytechnic in February 1978 (CD10), indeed takes up most of the gig. Note almost throwaway touches like the backward strings which conclude CD9, which in their brief appearance presage trip hop.
After this, P-Orridge’s voice becomes more processed and electronically modified, less “clear”; the middle-ground of the music was more important, but the extremities also became more pronounced. The gig at the Filmmakers’ Co-Op in London commemorated on CD14 is a dervish dance of fevered yells, plaintive wails and unrelenting industry. There are hostile crowd sounds, but it’s now impossible to tell what is audience and what is recorded; they have been absorbed into their own spectacle. The April 1979 performance at the Ajanta Cinema in Derby (CD17) (for which P-Orridge apologies to the audience for the projector not working) presents TG at their most approachable; here we finally have what can fairly be described as proto-Techno – there is definitely the space and purpose which evolved further (if deliberately depoliticised) in Detroit in the ‘80s, but here used to quite different ends.
By the time we reach Northampton Guild Hall one month later (CD20) the audience are now cheering and shouting “More!” They have fulfilled their potential; they were now well-known through their rather stealthy albums like 20 Jazz-Funk Greats, and similarly-motivated operatives like Cabaret Voltaire were now making themselves known. By now the trumpets and tribal beats have made their entrance, sounding absolutely like a prelude to Jon Hassell’s Fourth World adventures from the ’80s onwards, not to mention a presage of the strange nocturnal rites of TG’s final album, 1981’s Heathen Earth, and a clear passage towards the dualities of Psychic TV, Coil and Chris & Cosey into which the components of TG subsequently de-merged.
But there is one final ace in the pack, CD22, recorded at London’s Butler’s Wharf (pre-yuppiefication, when it still was disused industrial wasteland) at Christmas 1979. Its 60 minutes are powerful enough to make an aesthetic mockery of all other “pop” and “rock” music, yet it could not exist without either. It begins with a full-length tape of an American ‘phone sex chat-up line (Bill Hicks’ “Girl Of My Dreams” – someone else whose life depended on challenging his audience) with a idyllic Love Unlimited Orchestra-style backing track. It ends and TG’s music gradually escalates with a terrible and inevitable beauty, as if to sum up everything they were ever about; the deregulated orgasm taken to its logical artistic conclusion. It cumulates in the awful grandeur of what (along with the climax of Mike Westbrook’s Marching Song) is likely to be the most violent and uncompromising music ever to be discussed in these pages; so much more astonishing because the musicians appear to know exactly what they are doing. You think Unknown Pleasures and Metal Box are pushing the envelope, they are saying to the audience of 1979, well try this, suckers. And they have the architectural knowhow to take the music back down to a dignified murmur, and then silence. P-Orridge announces that there’s a special TG gift for everyone in the audience to collect on their way out (we don’t learn what this is) and then, from the PA, the parallel pop of 1979 starts to play; Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff” (a clean-up job on the gig’s first seven minutes), Chic’s “Le Freak.” TG were always working parallel to pop, and never forgot the existence of the latter.
So what have I learned about TG, having spent most of the last week absorbing this music? Really I ought to have listened to it all in one go, taken a day out of my life to enter their world fully. Instead I listened in a variety of environments; on the bus, in the kitchen, in bed, in an outpatient clinic waiting room. It may well be that Camus’ theory of art as rebellion against nature applies here – but also the instinctive awareness that even this is a romantic notion as it places a false frame upon infinity. Is Twenty Four Hours Of Throbbing Gristle “real”? Again, Camus reminds us that there is no such thing as realism in art; in other words, the description of a character in a novel, in order to be real, would have to be endless. Similarly, the documentarian recording an arrested moment (even 24 of them) is false insofar as, in “reality,” this is only part of another, greater movement. “Reality” would show us everything, every breath, every chip eaten, every piss taken, not just a fragment which is completely dependent upon the bias of the selector. So you would have to be Throbbing Gristle to understand them properly. But this is not concomitant with Benjamin’s argument that great art should never be viewed. So an expensive luxury it may be, but this collection needs to be heard – heard and listened to; it might come nearer to showing us a mirror of our own consumption of art than anything else I can think of at present.
. . .
Thursday, November 21, 2002
WHY BOW WOW WOW NEEDED TO BE PUPPETS
For Adorno, autonomy in music can only be attained when all traces of the human imprint upon form have been completely dissolved: "The purer the forms and the greater the autonomy of works, the more horrible they are. Appeals calling for a more humane attitude by works of art, for a greater degree of adjustment toward human beings as their virtual public regularly tend to dilute quality and weaken integrity of form." If, however, the work (as "categorical imperative" of art) is obsolete, so then is the concept of autonomy - a concept with which the Church of Me has never felt comfortable. Something is either autonomous or it is not. Gradual autonomy is conceptually a contradiction. There exist, at best, forms of dependence which can approach autonomy (Timberlake without the Neptunes or Timbaland = the guy who serves you in Starbucks).
So Annabella Lwin NEEDED to be "a 16-year-old puppet in a band called Bow Wow Wow." McLaren NEEDED to invent that launderette in which he could locate her as his point of re-connection with pop. Without the manipulation none of it would have made sense. Never mind that Neneh Cherry was, at the exact same time, doing a very similar but far more autonomous thing in Rip Rig & Panic (go and play the latter's 1981 God album back to back with See Jungle!, substitute free jazz gestures for Soweto beats and you'll see what I mean) and of course found a much more generous McLaren in Cameron McVey.
(you know, I really do wonder about what post-war music, jazz or pop, would have been without the influence of the Cherry family - it's far more widespread than you'd imagine)
And McLaren also felt obliged to nick a band - from Adam Ant. But Adam Ant nicked the sales and idolatry back - at least for a little while. Because of course steel cube idolatry was not an issue in 1981. Kings Of The Wild Frontier spoke to the kids, to the girls - Bow Wow Wow spoke to the students. You didn't necessarily need to know your Nietzsche to dig "Dog Eat Dog" or "Antmusic" (even though that whole album was lyrically peppered with his adapted aphorisms), but "Your Cassette Pet" without prior awareness of your Debord, your Foucault, your COBRA Group? Probably not. When someone shows you the joins, the consumer will usually go to music which doesn't, unless there is enough in the artist for them to extract anyway. Amongst other things, that explains why Robbie Williams prospers and Jarvis Cocker doesn't (sadly) and also why the Human League of Dare did so much better than Heaven 17 (no 21st anniversary deluxe remastering of Penthouse And Pavement). So Lwin was a puppet and McLaren wasn't ready to let you forget it. So you understood anyway, or were put off.
See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang, Yeah City All Over! Go Ape Crazy! was the title of their first and better album. Should they even have made an album (the same question could easily be asked of the Pistols)? Weren't they selling out? In our era, where the cassette has looped into redundancy, it's easy to forget that Bow Wow Wow were perhaps the most cassette-orientated pop band ever. Indeed the cassette version of See Jungle! was more luxuriously packaged than the vinyl one - and it's the one cassette you never see in the bargain basement of Music and Video Exchange. And there were EMI staff producers - Colin Thurston (who was also at the time producing Duran Duran) and Alan Tarney. The latter, though, is an unsung genius of pop, the producer behind Cliff Richard's astonishing run of classic singles between 1976-81, and was recognised as such when Saint Etienne hired him to put some Joe Meek touches to the single version of "You're In A Bad Way."
And it's a wonderful pop record, both because of and despite McLaren. Much of it sounds like a pre-electronic/pre-Trevor Horn dry run for Duck Rock; the Soweto influence is more pronounced than the Burundi. As with Haircut One Hundred, we are forcibly reminded of just how damn good these musicians were; Dave Barbarossa's continents of drums, the late Matthew Ashman's endlessly inventive and inverted basslines, Leigh Gorman's guitar almost pre-Beatles (almost Hank Marvin!) in its plaintive twang. Unthinkable, of course, without knowing of the hyperactivity which in 1981 was still spilling over from No Wave (see Lydia Lunch & 8 Eyed Spy's Live In New York ROIR cassette, if you can find it, for some interesting political and musical overlaps).
And so sad. The lament which subverts or justifies the orgasmic onrush of "Chihuahua" (a number one in a more pluralistic world) - "Don't fall in love with me." Like TLC "getting lonely too," they pretend to approach, but woe betide you if you take them literally and try to touch them. Yet again we hear the "on and on and on" leitmotif we know from PiL's "Theme" three years previously. The knowledge that the party may, even in the autumn of 1981, already be drawing to a close. It is detectable right through "Elimination Dancing" and the superficial extroversion of "King Kong," even through the Soweto-so-hyperactive-that-it-almost-presages-Acieed flow of "TV Savage" (you have to RIDE with the bassline on the latter!). "Why Are Babies So Wise?" (the unspoken counter-question "why wasn't I?") The storming instrumental of "Prince of Darkness" where Lwin's voice realises its own imminent redundancy and leaves us with an avant-Glam floorshaker worthy of RAK Records at its peak (Cozy Powell's "Dance With The Devil"). The underlying fragility which comes to the surface in "I'm Not A Know It All" - the only song on the album without McLaren input; the only place where they can finally be themselves. The rhythmical crescendi after each chorus as though they're trying to hide their dread. Note especially the end samba (yes, samba!) "Hello, Hello Daddy (I'll Sacrifice You)" where sex as a reality finally exceeds sex as a construct.
And, of course, out of nowhere, the one thing that wasn't supposed to happen/happened too late to be of any use - they fluked a hit. "Go Wild In The Country" is a deconstruction of capitalism which postdates Debord but predates Naomi Klein by a generation ("I don't need no hamburgers/No takeaways") and even the coldness of post-Aaliyah R&B under its exuberance ("I don't WANNA want you...I'll shop around" - which would of course be impossible without the existence of capitalism). So there you have it - Michael Moore and Destiny's Child, both foreseen and pre-scripted. As grey 1981 became shiny yellow 1982 - that extraordinary period when ANYTHING could just WALK into the top 40 out of NOWHERE - the door opened a little, and "Go Wild" soared into the top ten. Another top ten hit followed with a cover of "I Want Candy" which significantly ISN'T on the album; they had by then exhausted McLaren's point, and sadly couldn't think of a better one of their own. Thus was autonomy unworkable for Bow Wow Wow, but thankfully autonomy on the part of the listener is a cornerstone of why we love music, and you should deploy yours to love their 39 great minutes.
. . .
Wednesday, November 20, 2002
SONGS FOR AND OF THE BEREAVED
In my TLC piece last week I commented that musicians shouldn't make records when they have been bereaved. The results tend to be messy and over-sentimental, and are usually regretted by the artist subsequently. One exception has sprung to mind since then, however - Older by George Michael; his last proper album, released six years ago.
Forget that it's George Michael. Forget Wham! Overlook the overbaked "soul" and "passion" of Faith and Listen Without Prejudice Vol 1 (both of which sound as if he's still scaling the walls of the Camden Town Good Music Society). Think of his expressed admiration for Joy Division's Closer and view Older as an extension of this sort of aesthetic post mortem. Because his lover died of Aids not long before this album was recorded, as did Antonio Carlos Jobim, who Michael says on the sleevenote "changed the way I listened to music." Indeed, the regretful and poignant haze which wafts throughout the album could be considered a depoliticised extension of what Jobim achieved on 1973's Matita Pere; instead of the massed ranks of "disappeared," this record is concerned with two disappearances only - that of the Other, and that of the artist.
The moment when Michael's alto floats in, embracing the word "kindness" over the aching minor keys of "Jesus To A Child," is worthy of Art Garfunkel or Green Gartside. A song of devastation sung by a ruined soul of a voice over the most delicate of Claus Ogerman-esque orchestrations. He is praying more to himself than to his lover. Eventually, as must always happen, the Other can only survive by being absorbed into himself: "So the words you could not say/I'll sing them for you/And the love we would have made/I'll make it for two."
He is looking for excuses not to die. The gut reaction is to satisfy his crassest cravings, thinking that this will push the grief down to a manageable level. Thus "Fastlove" where his desperation for penetration (without love) is palpable ("In the absence of security...I miss my baby") and made all the more shattering by the closing juxtaposition of Patrice Rushen's "Forget Me Nots" - a remembrance of better times, of 1982 when Wham! were just starting up. You could always view it as the consequence of the outlook which he purveyed on "Young Guns" - this is what happens when you don't commit or get married. Your BMW cannot embrace you back.
Then he looks even further backwards for salvation, seeking refuge with a former Other in "Older" the song. But this is likewise doomed because he cannot fail to see him/her as a replacement/substitute for the lover who has just died. It is a mistake which the muted trumpet subtly admits ("I never should have looked back/In your direction").
The album is less successful, as such records tend to be, when Michael looks to adopt then-current trends. Thus the post-Portishead trip hop FX on "Spinning The Wheel" sound forced, pasted on (though one incidentally notes the presence of ex-Haircut One Hundred saxophonist Phil Smith in the horn section). It's six o'clock in the morning and this particular Other is never coming home, nor does the singer particularly want them to. As he goes on to muse bitterly in the Stevie Wonder-esque "It Doesn't Really Matter," it's all pointless; the Other doesn't exist anymore, he can't just die, well yes he could just die because that's actually what he wants to do, doesn't want to spend the next 50 years in the waiting room, oh boy is he trying to convince himself that it's all nothing, it's all over, it is spent, it is history, no it is part of him and if you throw that away, best throw yourself away too.
"The Strangest Thing" utilises an Eastern (or possibly Greek) mood with a death-laden minor chord shift in the chorus to root us in his grave. "Take my dreams/Childish and weak at the seams/Please don't analyse/Please just be there for me" because I'm not ready, might not ever be ready, to re-enter the world, to connect with humanity again - just hold me that's ALL I want, you understand, you know what's going through me, I need I need I need
"To Be Forgiven." The river - "I'm going down/Won't you help me." "The cold, cold water is rushing in...maybe the child in me/Will just let me go." Is he considering suicide? He has tried but cannot get over this obstacle, calling your lover an obstacle, the very idea, the nerve - he cannot get past the pain. WHAT HAVE I GOT TO DO OR SAY TO CONVINCE YOU?
Nothing. I have to convince myself. It's only me who's stopping me.
"Move On" he resolves in the next song, a Prince-like, queerly synthetic and Arctic synth-jazz groove complete with a fake supperclub audience. His almost Gibb-like vocal fragility struggles to keep up with the decided onward motion of the bassline. Do we believe him? "Everybody thinks I'm doing AOK/They ought to know by now."
"Star People" is where he has a bitch about empty celebrity. Of course it is a torrent of self-hatred directed against himself, despite all the "girl" references - "there's a difference between...you and me." "Without all that attention you'd die...I'd die. We'd die...wouldn't we? WELL WOULDN'T WE?" The music is too Jools Holland "pure" to convince me, and it certainly doesn't convince him. "Who gives a fuck about your problems, darling/When you can pay the rent...how much is enough?"
Look out and beyond yourself. The closing "You Have Been Loved" returns to the Jobim mood, only for the first time on this album he realises that other people may be affected by the death too, and perhaps in deeper, less soluble ways. Like his mother for instance - "She just sits and counts the hours/Searching for her crime."
"Well I've no daughters, I've no sons,
Guess I'm the only one
Living in my life."
But her problems don't cancel out yours. You weren't even the worst. You didn't die. You only had to sit there and watch him die. Helplessly. Hopelessly.
A final fast-track through the album's themes (an "apres-ture"?) before Michael whispers at the album's close: "It feels good...to be free." But does this only apply to his Sony contract? Is he really free? What has he done since Older? The men's room. He may have had to install self-deprecation in his inner cupboard, but at what actual price? Since 1996, it has essentially been cover versions and novelty songs - "Have I Got News For You" or whatever the last one was called. I don't expect that Polydor are unduly worried about the one-single-at-a-time contract; they might be reluctant to take him on for an album. Despite a new partner, one wonders if he still cannot get past what happened.
If he can't do it, then what hope is there for ...?
Did I ever pretend that this weblog was EVER about anything else?
. . .
Tuesday, November 19, 2002
WHY FEEL GUILTY ABOUT THE PAST?
My first instinct after listening to, and hugely enjoying, Light & Magic, the second album by Ladytron, was that this was a guilty pleasure. Guilt in that every sound on this record could have been produced before 1989; guilt that this record is in its own way as much of a consolidation of an old form of music as anything by all those guitar bands with five letters in their name.
But why should guilt even be an issue? Is this the unwanted side-effect of becoming a professional music writer, the feeling that "nowness" is all that counts, that anything which doesn't tell you something you didn't already know is by definition worthless? David S Ware's Cryptology could have been recorded in 1965; it doesn't make it any less of an emotionally staggering record than it already is. Should I feel guilty about loving Ladytron and not loving Horsepower Productions or the new Missy Elliott? Why can't critics in general shake this aesthetic monkey off their backs?
With me, it's simply that (a) some forms of musical consolidation are, by dint of personal taste, more acceptable to me than others; and (b) of course the other worthwhile art is that which does tell you something you already know, but in a new and interesting way. And Light & Magic is a great pop album which sadly will probably sell diddly-squat in the "soulful" noughties.
Observe the cover (or at least the cover of the US import version which I have); four black-clad individuals, photographed in close-up against a stark white background. On the rear cover, two men, one Japanese, the other looking like the drummer out of Swinging Blue Jeans, The. On the front cover, two women, one of Eastern European, slightly exotic appearance, the other English. None of the faces expresses any emotion or gives anything away.
The vocals, too, are delivered in that post-Grace Jones/pre-Laetitia Sadier deadpan/dispassionate manner. This will obviously curry no favour with today's pop music templates, which command (as they have done for the best part of 15 years) that voices must be "soulful," must tear themselves apart in their emotional peaks, in their over-noted howling. Look at Popstars and Fame Academy; they've all been forced at bayonet point to squeal, holler, howl in best post-Houston/Carey/Dion style, because this is now the lingua franca of pop; what Reynolds rightly termed "the totalitarianism of passion." Which also now extends into real life; Louise Woodward, essentially jailed for not displaying the correct set of emotions, for not playing a role.
Do not make the mistake of thinking that Ladytron (despite the Roxy-derived name, they are far better than that rather overblown post-prog song) deal in kitsch; this is deadly serious stuff. "True Mathematics" sets the tone; named after a particularly austere late '80s group of hip hop operatives, this has an unforgiving electrobeat and a pared-down, processed, purposely a-emotional voice, issuing what sound like diktats, like a Home Counties Gina X. But there is humanity too: "Seventeen," the imminent single and a guaranteed top five hit 20 years ago, states baldly over and over "they only want you when you're 17/when you're 21, there's no fun" sung from beneath a cheese grater as the petrol station synths sing a poignant song over the "Fade to Grey" rhythm. The punctum in this song occurs on the two occasions when the vocalist is left alone and the keyboards start a descending augmented jazz chord sequence, only to be pitilessly cut off by the beat and main riff coming back in after the third chord.
But this record does not stay in 1982. It is a reverie of the 1980s in general, as evinced by "Flicking Your Switch" and "Black Plastic" which are basically Acieed House grooves. "Turn It On" is Streetsounds electro redirected by Chris & Cosey; Salt'-n-Pepa's "Push It" riff warped into different contortions. "Fire" is a slower sexual grind which recalls MBV's "Cigarette In Your Bed" remixed by Front 242 with Kim Deal on vocals.
And out of all this "futurism" they produce the fantastic "Blue Jeans," a '60s teen ballad but with intensely magnified drums and correspondingly compressed strings; the Shangri-La's meet early Art of Noise. "Startup Chime" marches down the same path - a Spectorised Saint Etienne, the singer audibly swooning amidst the sonic haze, an epic threnody which seems lyrically to stem from nothing more than "a weekend away."
Did I say Chris & Cosey? While I don't agree with my Uncut colleague Stephen Dalton that "Evil" sounds like the Sugababes on smack, it is an immensely poignant electro-ballad (more like Kim Wilde on Lemsip disguised as E, I'd say) and comes with a completely unexpected coda of repeated screams which could have come straight off Throbbing Gristle's D.O.A. And "Nuhorizons" recaptures the lo-fi urgency of Cabaret Voltaire circa Voice Of America. There is plenty of acknowledgement of the grey area as well as the shiny yellow cloisters of New Pop. "Cease2Exist" is driven by a noticeably tougher beat and asks awkward if fatalistic questions about dying ("would you really be missed?"). "Re-Agents" starts off as a post-Joy Division low-to-mid range workout before stepping up a startling gear into a more alien environment with a now sinisterly echoed vocal. It ultimately returns to the beginning motif, but now equipped with foreknowledge. The title track is a waltz with grand minor chord changes (probably nearer to John Foxx than John Barry, but that is not necessarily a bad thing) while the closing track "The Reason Why" achieves the feat of penetrating the limbo land between comfort and alienation which Black Box Recorder never quite achieved (too knowing, too aware).
It is an insanely danceable record and you could easily sing along to most of it. It exists in a different spectrum to that of electroclash; like Saint Etienne, Ladytron put their collective finger precisely on the nerve where the peculiarly British strand of fatalistic futurism in pop achieves its most phenomenal results.
. . .
Monday, November 18, 2002
NICE ELECTRONICA
Bought Whole Numbers Play The Basics by Casino Versus Japan on Simon R's recommendation. I agree that there seems to be something of a resistance in current electronica towards factors such as poignancy, melodicism and rapture; stark and pointillistic seem to be the bywords of the day.
So how affecting are/is CVJ? I can see the thread stretching back to SAW2 and Global Communications' "14.31" but also a considerably longer thread stretching back to Vangelis; and not just the Vangelis of Blade Runner, but further back to his mid-'70s concept albums like Heaven And Hell (not quite as far back, admittedly, as his semi-improv days with the later Aphrodite's Child or his early, considerably more brutal solo work, frequently with Tony Oxley on drums). That wavering high-pitched synth, an electronic approximation of a Brothers Gibb vocal tremolo, mixed with the unrepentant quasi-orchestral grandeur, is highly evident on tracks such as "Summer Clip" and "Manic Thru Tone." There are BOC-style moments of quiescence as well; the unhurried perambulations of "Aquarium" and "Trad Velecido," as well as the outright minor-key poignancy of "The Possible Light" and "Em Essey," the latter worthy of heartbreaking electronica peaks like Mu-Ziq's "sick porter" or Leila's "Young Ones." The music is largely benign, though punctuated by beats as heavy and forceful as those found on Amon Tobin's new album (reviewed last week), hear especially "Moonlupe."
It's lovely, but is that all it is, and if so, is it enough? There is tragedy somewhere...CVJ is one Erik Kowalski, and on the sleeve there is a fatalistic quote from Justin Kowalski, who I assume was his brother, who died in 2000, aged 28. So again we see that there can be no true beauty without an underlying pain.
As fine as this record is, it doesn't quite top Ming Star by Jon Brooks, aka King of Woolworths, in the poignancy stakes. This latter was one of the many records from the summer of 2001 which passed me by at the time for reasons which will be obvious to regular Churchgoers. The beauty of this record is the punctum added by the brutality at its centre.
The sleeve depicts a young child (presumably the young Brooks) photographed in an idyllic village setting in what looks like the early '70s (though it could of course equally be the early '80s), drenched in the orange sepia of Eastman colour. Utopia lost. We discern this immediately from the opening "Kentish Town" (the complete antithesis to the idyll on the cover) with a brutal electrothrash beat pummelling the listener. Suddenly it subsides and we are left with the delicate poignancy of "Bakerloo (Main Titles)" which uses a High Llamas guitar sample to far better effect than the High Llamas could ever have used it. Vibraphones and minor keys are always a tearjerking combination for me, anyway (residue of Northern Soul?), and this swims gracefully in best Saint Etienne fashion; indeed the whole album, from the title "Kentish Town" downwards, makes me think of what a parallel, instrumental Saint Etienne (the BEF to Cracknell's Heaven 17) could have gone. "Where Fleas Hide" continues in the same vein until it unavoidably segues into the poisoned heart of the record, the "Stalker Song." In the latter we hear (initially Vocoderised) a conversation between a stalker's victim, detailing his break-in into her house, and a police officer. The beats thud in with an immediacy which, especially on headphones, will make you gasp. This eventually subsides, and we are left with the conversation, slowly being slowed down to 16 rpm, becoming more ominous in its loop ("you have to start documenting this, or you will end up dead." "Yeah"). The aggression is maintained throughout the beat-heavy "Colcannon" and the rather too David Holmes-style '60s Britflick sample obviousness of "To The Devil A Donut." Happily, the album then settles gradually back into pastoral mood, with Peter Green's (no, not that one) string orchestration on "Kite Hill" returning us to a bucolic standpoint, an idle memory. This becomes more apparent, and more seductive, with the barely touchable beauty of "The Watchmaker's Hands" and the unutterably sad lament "Theydon." before ending with a beat-less reprise of "Bakerloo (End Credits)."
Its yearning for childhood is as poignant as the perspectives offered in the past by Beat Happening or the Bonzo Dog Band (you doubt the latter? Listen to "Ready Mades" or "Sport (The Odd Boy)" or, most devastatingly, "Slush" for cast-iron proof). Yes I want more beauty and more poignancy. I love noise and roughage as much as any punter. But every Arthur Lee needs a Bryan MacLean to balance him out. These are both fundamentally very lovely records indeed.
. . .
THE ENDING OF DONNIE DARKO
Another question might be: is it right to write when you're gutted? Suicidal ideations would be impossible without caring about what other people thought. If Donnie Darko is to be of any importance, it has to be seen as a suicidal ideation. Otherwise it would slip into the standard Lynch/American Beauty/Ghost World underbelly of suburbia/teen angst/cod surrealism.
The world failed to live up to Donnie Darko's unreasonably high expectations. He cannot have it all. Either he lives and everyone about whom he cares dies, or he dies and everyone else survives. The turnaround is made even more remarkable by the hitherto unquestioned sub-Christ vision of DD as a visionary who sees through all masks and pretences, a human battering ram against the insulated walls of affordable complacency. The sequence where DD shouts down Patrick Swayze's feelgood shyster is very "Denise Lambert" - crying out the truth which the system recognises but cannot afford to acknowledge, as it would mean the collapse of its own carefully selected mask; in the case of Swayze's character, a child porn ring.
But is DD a standard, a talisman, an absolute? Hardly. He is a fuck-up, recognises himself as such and can therefore only address the harmful world in terms of confrontation. Drew Barrymore's pissed off teacher realises this, as does Katharine Ross' psychiatrist. The rabbit is a real McGuffin; the person wearing the mask scarcely exists in the film, is nothing out of the ordinary, kills by accident caused by DD being somewhere he shouldn't be.
Towards the end one expects it to veer dangerously towards Harry Potter territory (quick, the cellar! We've only got six hours to save the world!) but no - and the death of the Other is unsentimental, abrupt; as with the progenitor in Baise-Moi, she simply suddenly stops existing.
Why is he asleep by his bike in the middle of the road at the film's beginning? Has he already met his fate? He has to stop others meeting theirs. It's the reverse of It's A Wonderful Life; the others will not only be better off if he's dead, but will actually live. So he has to stay in his bedroom as the rogue 'plane fuselage plunges into it and kills him. Otherwise he would have outlived his own uselessness.
Why set it in 1988? Surely not for the sole reason of rehabilitating Tears For Fears? Why the repeated deer motif?
Right at the end, where DD's body is loaded into the ambulance. His mother weeps. The girl whom he would, had he survived, have met, fallen in love with, made love to and ultimately killed, acknowledges her with a very deliberate raised hand. The mother returns it. It is the Kaddish. They understand, though will never understand why they understand.
So answer me this. How fucked up does someone have to make themselves, or is made, to the extent that it actually is better for them, and for those around them, that he be dead?
"I killed them. It's my fault. Their blood's on me"
(Ward Littell, who kills himself)
Get me the hell out of here.
. . .
Friday, November 15, 2002
HAIRCUT ONE HUNDRED
or: Nick Heyward, the Unknowing Alchemist
March 1982 was a particularly sunny month, not long succeeding the arcticity of February. I don't remember much about the latter apart from the pavement at St Clements being a skating rink and the train drivers being out on strike. We needed light. It was still less than two years after Ian Curtis' death. In my college, the big albums of the time were Westworld by Theatre of Hate and La Folie by the Stranglers. It wasn't the greyness which annoyed me as regards these two; but the transparent fakeness of the grey. The unentertaining fakeness of the grey, I should perhaps say. For New Pop's shiny yellowicity was scarcely less transparent or fake, but infinitely more entertaining and welcoming. And no record announced "Spring Is Here" in a less ironic way than Pelican West, the debut album from Haircut One Hundred, complete with its free stickers (collect the set!) and pastel-coloured sticker album/lyric booklet. It was a deliberate return to the idea of childhood, a return to the child's obliviousness to things like responsibility or reason. Unimaginable perhaps without the precedent of Orange Juice - and Edwyn Collins was certainly pretty bitter at the time about what he viewed as soft Southerners tidying up his carefully chaotic act. Was it worth taking sides? Only on two sides of a C90 as far as most of us were concerned - You Can't Hide Your Love Forever on one side, Pelican West on the other. Both valid. Dolphins or triangles. One could live with both.
Nick Heyward was artful about his lyrics not "meaning" anything. Of course they did. They existed to justify his life and to add punctum to the music (hear what Haircut One Hundred minus Heyward ended up sounding like a year or two later; essentially, a low-budget Shakatak). The "surrealism" worked because it was not intended to be surreal; like Billy MacKenzie, it just seemed to come out of him. It felt necessary at the time.
Listening to it 20 years later, what strikes me most about Pelican West is the almost perfect fusion which Haircut One Hundred achieved between three very separate strands of then-contemporary pop developments; firstly, the franticity inherited from the No Wave/James Chance/Ze Records mob - hear the near epilepsy of the rapid funk guitar strokes in "Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl)" complete with horn section deliberately laying back half a beat, knowing when to come in or to stay out. Secondly, the apparent effortless proficiency and attention to middle-range sonic detail which came from the still unheralded Brit-funkers of the time - Beggar and Co, Light of the World, Central Line, Freeez - and in particular the way in which ambiences from American funk/rock were appropriated and adapted easily into a British environment. Thirdly - and this is the most obvious legacy from the Orange Juice/Postcard side of things - an alert awareness of "pure pop" elements (Beatles harmonies, McGuinn guitars, even a foreshadowing of the lo-fi of Beat Happening/K) without being trapped within the Camden Town Good Music Society cul-de-sac.
Even the two elements of the title "Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl)" attend to this duality, as did the visuals - Heyward in his daintily knitted Fair Isle cardigans, one shirt collar dutifully poking out from underneath, guitar held high and at right angles to his body. No suits, no "sweat" even. Girls loved it and knew immediately what he was trying to communicate, particularly in front of what would otherwise have come across as a bunch of weekend jazz-funk scratch band. Except of course they were no scratch band - despite the artful naivety of the music, the songs demanded chops. "Love Plus One" is driven by a marimba, which always results in great romantic pop ("Just My Imagination," "And I Love You So"), and its amiable canter is counterpointed by the double-time attack of the drums and guitars. Hear in particular how Heyward's guitar excitedly speeds up into "Favourite Shirts" mode in the final chorus as he exclaims "Ring ANNA ring ANNA!" Sublime pop on at least four different levels, and deservedly their biggest single (# 3, Jan '82).
Chops? "Lemon Fire Brigade" saw to that. And the blissful spring in this track's step is what Danny Baker picked up on in his brilliant review of Pelican West in the NME. Here, at long last in British music, was a group throwing the gauntlet down to the Americans and able to compete. The lovely, largely instrumental, track is, as Baker noted, worthy of Steely Dan, and is made all the better by Heyward's sole, plaintive lyric, "Why, oh why?/Lemon Fire Brigade/WHY?" It was this element on which less astute descendents like Simply Red and Wet Wet Wet subsequently picked up and polished to the point of lifelessness, without any of the mischief or interest, of course. Not to mention, of course, Hue and Cry, who, despite borrowing an album title from Baudrillard, always came across to me as Haircut One Hundred with a Lanarkshire Ben Elton on vocals. The fascination with the showbiz Americana (sorry guys, LL Cool J was doing it much more pointedly than you even then).
The slowly-demisting "Marine Boy" initially reminds me, at least instrumentally, of Joy Division; that vague fog of uncertainty, before the skies clear, as they must. "Milk Film" is exuberant power-pop (there's no other word for it) but with a distinctly English sensibility. There's little more exhilarating in 1982 pop than Heyward singing at this song's climax "Glad that I live am I/Glad that the sky is blue/Glad for the country lanes" - and this is no John Major-misquoting-Orwell utopia either, but a more palpable one. The song tells you, in its own sweet-natured way, not to die (listen out for the brief Elvis Costello pisstake when Heyward sings "mountain").
Thereafter the album switches between pre-post modern jazz-funk and blissful 1968-as-it-never-actually-was pop. Of the former, "Kingsize," "Baked Bean" and "Love's Got Me In Triangles" are essentially a poppier Pigbag, elevated by Heyward's escalatingly bizarre non-sequiturs and untranslatable yelps. If anyone today quoted Toblerone in their lyrics (as Heyward does in "Triangles") it would be beyond the Robbie Williams-imposed pale. Here, it strikes you as entirely logical.
"Fantastic Day" is "Milk Film" as spring liquefies into summer (the "Penny Lane" trumpets). I love how Heyward always gets more excited - and the way in which the band surreptitiously speed up - the nearer he gets to the end of the song. Listen to his "'cause I'm SO in LOVE with YOU!" in the final verse of "Fantastic Day," puncturing the opiate shimmer of the saxophones in the mid-ground (excellent sax playing by Phil Smith throughout, by the way, even indulging in a few harmolodics on "Baked Bean").
"Snow Girl" would be a number one for anyone now; but would they have the arranging genius to include the orgasmic, out-of-tempo blissout which arrives unexpectedly in the middle of the song, Vincent Sullivan's trombone sliding into infinity behind Heyward's craving for the Other's "elbow"? I doubt it. And the Butterflies of Love would have to labour for several further decades of archiving before coming up with such a "perfect pop" song as "Surprise Me Again." The song is constructed as a double-bluff; initially Heyward seems to be breaking up with the Other ("At the start it was great/In the middle I stayed/But at the end I was sick" is a precis as good and acute as Costello at his hungry best), but listen to how the whole band suddenly swings up into the sunlight with him as he sings "then suddenly you smiled." Such an ecstatic chorus. Such hope. Such a future.
Nothing left to do now but to wrap everything up, which they do with "Calling Captain Autumn." Another funkout, but crucially parenthesised by mock cricket commentary, staged as though they were listening to it on the radio. So this stands as a complete redefinition of "Englishness," incorporating black elements, unimaginable without them (the Brixton riots were still fresh in everyone's memory at the time, bear in mind), and a subversion and ultimate rebuttal of what the Mail/Telegraph would want us to accept as England.
The "autumn" in "Calling Captain Autumn" was of course what the band then entered. There was one more single in August 1982, "Nobody's Fool" which already looked distinctly autumnal; and the 12-inch B-side "October Is Orange" made this abundantly clear (although the exuberance of its second half looks forward to Working Week's "Venceremos"). Then, who knows; the band were fed up with Heyward's whimsy, or vice versa; Heyward left to go solo. North Of A Miracle, his first solo album, is full of fine songs like "Club Boy At Sea" and the storming "Atlantic Monday," but the session musician feel is palpable and unavoidable, and there's a feeling that his heart just isn't in it - see for a prime example "Take That Situation," an attempt to BE Haircut One Hundred again (complete with a longer Costello impersonation). The public wasn't fooled, however, and the song as a single peaked at # 11. After that - long silences, a bizarre "rap" record ("Warning Sign", Nov '84), then pastoral (but not pastel-coloured) guitar-pop in the Lilac Time antechamber, occasional reunion gigs with Haircut One Hundred. Oh dammit, they had their moment - let's leave it at that.
(N.B.: The album is currently available on CD as Pelican West Plus, with the whole album plus B-sides, 12-inch mixes and both sides of the "Nobody's Fool"/"October Is Orange" 12-inch).
. . .
Thursday, November 14, 2002
MISPLACED NOSTALGIA
I can't stop thinking about Oxford, perhaps even yearning for it. Alan Partridge, of all chimeras, got me thinking about it - not because of him, but because of the "localness" of a Radio Norwich-type community. Oxford is only 52 miles away from London, but its sense of "localness" was very acutely evident. Perhaps it's because I led a double life, incorporating both Oxford and London; the latter was where I practised my profession and made my living, the former was where I retreated to consider and put everything into a shape with form, if not necessarily purpose. So I knew twice as much as anyone confined to just the one city. I had the garguantuan cracked gargoyle of a capital landscape, and the miniature to fit snugly into its centre-left pocket. And it was rather smugly comforting to work in and walk through London yet still be aware of Bill Heine's fibreglass shark and jumble sale cardigans, of floaters in the Mitre and chips from the Carfax chippy, of the Oxford Channel, of Abingdon shopping centre, of the Botley interchange, of Port Meadow (virtually our back garden), of the view from South Park, of the guy in the Virgin Megastore in Cornmarket who I swear ordered in one copy each of particularly peculiar records, in the full knowledge that only I would buy them, of the surprisingly hip CD stock of the Westgate Library, the Covered Market, the Botley allotments, Botley Park (virtually our front garden) which on a nice early summer evening would appear to stretch away forever, the stoned giggling of Gilles Peterson wannabe Sophie Andrews on Oxygen FM as was...
But where is this all going? This is turning into a list; it resolves nothing. Perhaps I should throw in the towel and just list you my top 100 singles as of five minutes ago. What I am trying to ask myself is why I should be overcome by so selective an amnesia and be yearning for a place and a lifestyle which were ultimately oppressive and unhealthy for me? I could no longer fit into Oxford now any more than I could fit into the ILx boards. It served its purpose at a time when it was needed, but that time has passed and it is necessary for me to move away from it. I said this in my Morse piece back in the New Year.
Because the truth is that I cannot get past what happened there last August. I cannot see beyond the Ronald Macbeth Ward (appropriate name) in the Radcliffe Infirmary. Because the umbilical cord, the anchor, which kept me attached to the place no longer exists, or only exists through me. I crave for a life which is no longer available for me. Sometimes - as I may or may not already have said before - Streatham can seem much further away from "London" than Oxford. There is, really, nothing to keep me here, nothing to keep me anywhere. I feel as though I have spent the last 12 months in a waiting room, a lobby, an antechamber. And what is being piped over the speakers as I wait? I'm not sure, but it might resemble Out From Out Where, the new album by Amon Tobin. The Chris Morris collaboration "Bad Sex" notwithstanding, Mr Tobin's previous work has been evident around my orbit but not been drawn into it. I've never been sure about the whole "soundtrack sample/cut-up" business. Barry Adamson, David Holmes, the various Lukes...it all seems like avoidance, an extension of the Camden Town Good Music Society (Soundtrack Sub-Section); let's cobble some easy signifiers together, and whoopee we're ironically appreciative, cool cats, oh beHAVE (even Jay-Z's doing Austin Powers impressions now), roll neck Jonathan Rosses...much easier than actually writing, scoring and performing something which emanates wholly from your own mind.
BUT it has to be said, when it is extremely well done, the listener can forget all the baggage and initiate his own landscape within. Thus it is with OFOW. Most of the snippets here sound tantalisingly near-familiar, just unplaceable. But it doesn't matter because Tobin sculpts the raw material into strikingly striking shapes. In truth it is one continuous piece, divided into 11 sections. The opening track "Back From Space" sets a utopian choir against a tinkling celeste; harmonies unresolved, a definite poignancy - the sort of thing which Mike Paradinas used to be able to conjure up. But the elements are turned convex and concave and echo within a pummelling d&b rhythmic drive which hurtles the listener through whole galaxies (this is definitely another album which needs headphones). The moment at 2:41 where, after a tremulous pause, we are brutally pushed into a 3D warp drive of beats, is phenomenal. "Verbal" does as Gysin and Schwitters did; over an irresistible post-Basement Jaxx acoustic guitar-propelled hook, a sampled rapper ("MC Decimal R" the sleeve jokes) is cut up into pointillistic incomprehensibility. Meaning, "soul" are questioned and buried under the fascination of what effect the sounds themselves are producing on the listener.
For "cinematic" pop (which is what this album fundamentally remains) it would be hard to beat the impact of "Chronic Tronic." The beats here are in a completely different universe to what Tobin has previously offered to us; they pummel, pound, trepanning their way through your earlobes. It's that same effect which you get on a lot of records made in or around '86 (the "watching lorries burn on the M25" soundtrack as I used to call it) - Test Dept, Janet Jackson, Tackhead, Swans, Mel & Kim, even Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Like I said, though, pop remains; another infuriatingly brief but catchy hook makes itself known.
After that "Searchers" goes into a wounded 6/8 stroll, effects still divebombing around the basic groove. "Hey Blondie" and to a lesser extent "Rosies" come across like stumbling post-Britpop rock - the sort of backing tracks with which Oasis should perhaps have come up. "Cosmo Retro Intro Outro" is P-Funk heard from a nightclub in Atlantis; distorted, free of gravity, waterlogged. "Triple Science" does the same for drum 'n' bass, with noticeably treble-accented rhythms. Again we are shoved along the track at top speed. But it is possible to keep up; particularly as, having reached a kind of peak, the music now decelerates back into Dreamland and contemplation. The forlorn post-Morricone stance of "El Wraith" starts to wind things down; the nursery-rhyme harmonic poignancies make themselves known again on "Proper Hoodidge," and the record ends with the comparatively straightforward but still punctum-strewn trip hop of "Mighty Micro People" - sounding weary, ready to lose consciousness and conjure up better dreams.
Others are nostalgic for The Stone Roses and Definitely Maybe. Me? I'm nostalgic for Selected Ambient Works Vol 2 and Bluff Limbo.
Of course I am nostalgic in such a way not for purely musical/aesthetic reasons, not just because their implications were never properly followed up (least of all by the artists who made them), but because they formed part of that perfect - or as perfect as anything could be - life which is now denied to both of us.
You can hear Radio Norwich from Swaffham to Cromer. A stretch of England we knew very well indeed.
4:45 am starts. 112-mile round trips. The expense. The fatigue. The useless buses (for every one bus to Botley, there are 90 buses to Kidlington). What Bill Bryson rightly termed the "busy squalor" of Park End Street. The refusal to embrace the future. Stuffed shirts. Out of the Oxford loop. Tourists. No decent radio. Recruitment adverts for UPS and Nuffield Hospitals. Forever November 1974 in many ways. The fucking Lewknor turnoff.
I should have been so lucky.
Now there's this horrible feeling when the National Express Victoria-Glasgow coach stops in at the Wheatley service station for refuelling SHE'S ONLY BURIED TWO MILES UP THE ROAD THIS COLD FUCKING DARK ROAD.
I need to go out again, but in a different direction.
. . .
Wednesday, November 13, 2002
BLUEPRINT 2
Rappers - hell, most artists - always make the same mistake these days. One classic album, and then they feel the need to follow it up with a double, ergo twice as good. It almost never happens. The monolithic squat that is Wu-Tang Forever stands as the most obvious example of this - you can audibly hear the aesthetic batteries running flat about a quarter of the way through CD 2. But it doesn't stop others from trying (usually the listener's patience). Has there ever been a worthwhile hip hop double album? OK, I could perhaps make an exception for 2Pac's All Eyez On Me, but even that is studded with padding - do we really need timewasters like "What'z Your Phone #" (Clinton or no Clinton) or "Thug Passion"?
And now we have Jay-Z, surely the world's most over-prolific rapper (though 2Pac posthumously runs him close), the Stereolab of hip hop, who puts out too many records for his own good. And yet the last one, The Blueprint...well, right back at the beginning of Church Of Me, I was pretty indifferent to The Blueprint, couldn't understand why such an audibly average album could gain such kudos. Well, that'll teach me. What hooked me into it at the end was Jay-Z's opulent SHOWBIZ - this was someone highly questionable who was merely doing what it says on the hip hop tin - brag yourself silly, diss all comers - but the fact was he did it better and with more colour.
Indeed, without that key element of showbiz, it's doubtful whether two minutes of Blueprint 2, never mind two CDs worth, could have been made or noticed. The album is subtitled The Gift And The Curse - so you've got it already, more braggadoccio, more token self-deprecation. Never mind token, actually - there's none of it on here, not even the faux-vanity of Michael Moore or Alan Titchmarsh. It's two hours of Jay-Z telling you how muthafuckin' great a muthafucka he is. Can you stand it?
Some of it is "standable" through the dynamics of the music. Lyrically there's nothing here which even approaches the sorry standard of his "solid water/Ice Cube" routine on Elliott's "Back In The Day" (if you have to explain a gag, fella, it ain't funny). Musically, it starts with the fantastic Max Ernst-meets-Santana technicolor guitar clench of "A Dream" which invokes BIG (indeed, samples a goodly length of his "Juicy"). Against Jay-Z's measured rhythmic acuity, Faith Evans' voice is an obtuse angle striving to break out of the structure. "Hovi Baby" is Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's "Bedazzled" restaged by Bob Fosse and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Jay-Z exults at his own mirror as an unendingly ascending jazz-rock chord crescendo thrashes itself at him over and over like a stubborn tidal wave. The sort of thing which makes you think that if he plays live he will need a full orchestra. Get more showbiz in! Get Gene Page to do you some orchestrations! Battalions of willing female backing singers! There's a sample from TLC's "Diggin' On You" buried somewhere in the debris, but Lord Lopes knows if I could detect it.
After that stunning beginning, it inevitably dips somewhat. "The Watcher 2," produced by Dr Dre, is the next "Next Episode" but not as good. "'03 Bonnie & Clyde" again enlists the Paul Ross/Joey Lawrence of R&B (as in "I'll appear on anything"), Beyonce "Grassy" Knowles, for an uninspired retread of 2Pac/Makaveli's "Me And My Girlfriend" (which coincidentally has also been recently exhumed by the increasingly desperate Toni Braxton). As sure as night follows day, we should expect a Neptunes track, and next we duly have "Excuse Me Miss." Its circulatory, hallucinatory strings are certainly addictive; the trouble is we've already heard this done, and better, on LL's "Luv U Better." As sure as Ricky Martin follows Kelsey Grammer onto the stage of a Republican fundraising jamboree, we should expect a Timbaland track, and in order not to disappoint us we duly have "What They Gonna Do," which is, pleasantly enough, slightly dirtier and more persuasive in its attack than what we've heard from Timbaland of late (as with TLC's "Dirty Dirty," his current strike rate appears to be about one track out of every ten). "All Around The World" revisits the original Blueprint of utopian soul samples set against his self-justifying "realism," and though fine in itself, he frankly did it better a year ago. "Poppin' Tags" is a semi-old school trading round of rap shots (but the triple-magnified beats therein, again, could not have been produced in '86) and its basic nature kind of works in its favour amidst its luxurious surroundings.
"Fuck All Nite" is another Neptunes offcut, and a considerably more purposeful one; both this and their "Nigga Please" on CD 2 (the latter of which I mistakenly attributed to Timbaland in yesterday's TLC piece; apologies) are definite highlights, and both achieve the feat of outdoing Timbaland at his "new" trick (i.e. fuzzed-up multilayered Numanoid basslines). However, by the time we get to the laughable "I Did It My Way" (guess what it samples?), we are exhausted and wish that some of Gabriel Oak's sturdy humility could perforate the armour of Jay-Z's self-assurance.
Alas, there is a second CD to go through, and the standard demonstrably dips; there are far too many things which should have stayed on the cutting room floor; indeed several tracks here seem to indicate a wish to be Eminem. "Diamonds Are Forever" recasts "Square Dance" without the politics, playfulness or punctum; "Meet The Parents" IS "Cleaning Out My Closet." And who would have thought that H-to the O-to the V-to the A would be reduced to hiring out Lenny Fucking Kravitz for a, ahem, rock-out entitled, double ahem, "Guns & Roses"? Over this latter it is best to pass in disrespectful silence.
"U Don't Know (Remix)" certainly gains added punctum from the contributions of M.O.P., but that's all that it does. We've already heard this. Another Timbaland effort, triple ahem, "2 Many Hoes" utilises an Eastern flavour! Well, we've never heard that before, already! "A Ballad For The Fallen Soldier," a third Neptunes track, is moderately alluring but most interesting in its musical parallels to Timberlake's ballads like "Take It From Here." The latter group of songs, I think, work better, as uncertainty (even fake, manufactured uncertainty) will always charm more than a sudden late onset of humility from an artist for whom arrogance is his vitamin B. Jay-Z needs his arrogance to survive, to stay up there. It's his selling point, his bread and bullets.
There is, however, in the penultimate track, an absolute killer of a groove, perhaps the funkiest one on the whole record. Alas it is called "Bitches & Sisters," and while it is rubberneckingly fascinating to hear Jay-Z contort himself into differentiating between the two, quadruple ahem, groups of females, protesting that, of course, some of his best friends are "sisters," the music smashes into your living room like a neurotically-programmed JCB. A great cliff of brass, endlessly fanfaring (the influence of Justin Warfield's divine "Fisherman's Grotto"?), propels the track smartly along the 2:45 of its duration. This would make a smashing pop single, but stick to fascination over meaning while you're revelling in it; it's the only way to stay sane in his world.
. . .
Tuesday, November 12, 2002
TLC - AND WHY GRIEVING PEOPLE SHOULDN'T MAKE RECORDS
OK, it wasn't their choice. The Other Two didn't ask for Lisa Left-Eye Lopez to be killed in a car crash. They had already started an album, though no doubt LaFace Records were busily counting the remaining beans on their corporate abacus. Finish it. Put it out. The new album is called 3D (the cover, unlike that of its predecessor Fanmail, is not in 3D). It stands for "three deep." On the cover the three are pictured in black shrouds; already in mourning. Left-Eye peers out from the left as though she was already a ghost.
What must it have been like in the studio? Surely not a case of stopwatches on, let's get on with it. The Man Who Was There - when we see Thornton sitting utterly alone, completely immobile, in his house after McDormand has been executed, surrounded by things which serve only to remind his already nullified soul of what he has lost. It actually doesn't matter if he goes to the chair; his "life" was long since over anyway. I want to believe that the recording studio was like that. It certainly sounds it on at least half of the record.
I don't generally believe that it's a good thing for bereaved, grieving musicians to immediately go into the studio and start recording. Not unless you are the Blue Notes, with such a common depth of experiences, tunes, creeds to call up, who went straight into the studio after Mongezi Feza's funeral in December 1975, blew their hearts out for two-and-a-half hours, edited it down slightly and released it as the double album Blue Notes For Mongezi - one of the most genuinely harrowing records ever made, almost unlistenable in its intensity and yet finally elevating in its hope. Kwela songs, chants, riffs, flow in and out of the firestorm as if they were inseparable from the bodies and souls of the musicians.
With 3D, however, TC (as they should really now be called) sound gutted but also sound as though they've had to punch the clock and get those hits out. I'm not sure how many will emanate from here.
The insoluble problem is, of course, that Left Eye was the entire punctum of TLC, the detail, the factor which lifted them from just being a slightly more switched-on SWV, or a brownstone equivalent of En Vogue. Always, the more Left Eye on a TLC album, the better the album. She immediately explodes all over their 1992 debut Ooooooohhh...On The TLC Tip - which I still consider to be far and away their best record. Directly after we hear a clip of some dumbass guy dissing their image ("maybe it's a black thing...but they're kinda cute"), Left Eye shatters the complacency with sirens, beats going every which way, sneering and hollering gleefully at us for "Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg," the most assertive and mischievous debut pop single of the '90s - everything we pretended that "Wannabe" was. Half a dozen samples criss-cross each other into an astonishingly avant-garde soundscape which yet does not lose the essential song. The lyric talks of sexual desperation - a very belated response to David Ruffin 27 years previously - but her delivery tells you that really she's the one in control. And she continually, gloriously derails everything else on the record, incluiding the near Cabaret Voltaire electroscape of "Das Da Way We Like 'Em" and the ode to masturbation "Bad To Myself" - even down to the obligatory social comment song "His Story" (whose chorus chord sequence is the same as that of ABC's "The Look Of Love" but whose lyrics reflect a reality as opposed to a deconstruction) in which she cackles "before we become his-story!" And like "The Look Of Love," the chorus repeats itself instrumentally at the end of the album, over which Left Eye issues a Public Information Announcement about the Importance of Safe Sex. She sounds as though she is ejaculating while declaiming. The delivery subverts the message and imposes one of greater dimensions in its place.
On their next album, 1995's CrazySexyCool, they were clearly advised to "mature." It's a considerably quieter album, but not necessarily without menace; the song "Creep," which remains the best song written entitledf "Creep," is a shadowplay of two two-timing partners manoeuvering to avoid each other, and perhaps cancel each other out. Generally, though, the record is far too well-behaved; there is the usual R&B album Achilles' heel of too many damn ballads, and this album's essay on social commentary, the big hit "Waterfalls," is a little too polite, though its warily stealthy girl-group approach interestingly foreshadows what All Saints would get up to a few years later. For every artfully dirty seduction like "Diggin' On You" (with its pleading/enticing slide guitar refrain) there is a pointless karaoke stroll through Prince's holy "If I Was Your Girlfriend." Significantly, Left Eye only really makes herself known towards the album's end, after an uproarious "interlude" with Busta Rhymes, and driving some much-needed nails into the track "Switch."
Eventually it was inevitable that TLC would have to face their audience. This they did in 1999's Fanmail, where they work so hard on self-belief that it turns into a fortress which imprisons them, cutting off all external feeds. Presumably this was the idea behind the fourth "virtual" member, Vic-E, symbolising what you want them to be, concealing what they actually are. They decry passion (the ironic title track, which could easily have fitted on Kid A), reject received ideas of the Other ("Silly Ho" with its insane and brilliant doorbell hook), reject those who fail to live up to the expectations imposed on them ("No Scrubs"), laugh at the possibility of the existence of "love" - "I'm Good At Being Bad," where each verse opens with a facsimile of a gloopy ballad which Left-Eye then proceeds to detonate with a terrible chuckle. No, all I want is a 20-inch dick. That's all THAT MATTERS. The rest is BULLSHIEEET.
You know what the consequences are. "I Miss You So Much" for one. "Unpretty" for an unavoidable two; perhaps the most disturbing song in the TLC canon. Consider - just who is the "you" who is/are making TLC feel so unpretty and insecure with your pressures upon them? Is it the "audience" who put them there? Is it the listener, smugly waiting for some more dick jokes? Is it a Dworkin-style assault on men in general? We play for you and you turn us into dots on a VDU screen. Despite more attempts at defiance in "My Life" and more mischief in "Shout," the desperation doesn't really retreat, and we are finally left in un-ironic ballad land with distraught bullets of self-hatred like "Dear Lie" ("Dear Lie, you suck"), and, the last humiliation, now reduced to pleading with the Other in their own terms ("Don't Pull Out On Me Yet"). Frankly it's difficult to see exactly TLC could have gone from there.
The heartbreaking thing about the four tracks on the new 13-track CD which involve Left Eye is that they seem to be so much more playful. "Quickie" for instance is one of their finest and funniest deconstructions of male flaccidity. "Girl Talk" and "Over Me" are dynamic, attacking pop. Even the closing ballad "Give It To Me While It's Hot" has enough spikes in its wheels to engage your interest. And some of this spreads over to a couple of the other post-Left Eye tracks here. The opening title track, for instance, runs on a surprisingly bouncy 2-step beat, and "So So Dumb" might well be their most pointed attack on Stupid Men on record.
But for all of this, the rest of the album does not engage. "In Your Arms Tonight" is the obligatory Neptunes track, but this is very drearily workaday by their standards. "Dirty Dirty" is the equally obligatory Timbaland track, and while terrific in itself it is simply on the wrong album; it should have been on Missy E's Under Construction, as it is an Elliott track in all but name (perhaps do a swap with the TLC track on the latter). The rest is forgettable ballad fodder; the tribute to Left Eye "Turntable," however hearffelt, does not even begin to touch me; worse, the album's other big ballad "Damage" takes its general structure from Air Supply's "All Out Of Love."
Perhaps I'm too harsh. Objectively, just over half of this album does contain music worth hearing, which even more objectively makes the album worth buying, or at least downloading. But it seems symptomatic of a mind, a group, in pieces, as if this album was something they were forced to make to meet the end-of-year seasonal quotas. It might have been a better idea to release a Greatest Hits album and add the four Left-Eye tracks on at the end, rather than just going through the record company motions. Sadly, it is through her memory that TLC as a whole will be remembered.
. . .
Monday, November 11, 2002
MISS E UNDER DECONSTRUCTION
When exalting Finisterre a few Mondays ago I mentioned that generally I was in favour of narration on albums. I should have made one exception; where narration is used to hector and/or lecture the listener. This happens particularly on hip hop and R&B albums. Why is this? Is it because, despite all the shootings, all the dodgy deals, hip hop/R&B are the last remaining mainstream music genres with any real sense of community? Certainly, listening as I have done to the new Missy Elliott, Jay-Z and TLC albums over the weekend, there is a distinct connectivity which you wouldn't get with, say, Richard Ashcroft, the Coral and Doves. The latter exist in their own universes, self-sufficient apart from a common over-reverence of the Camden Town Good Music Society.
But, like Daniel Bedingfield says, you can sometimes have too much information. The new Miss E album Under Construction befuddles me, insofar as its tracks are punctuated (studiumised?) by long, rambling discourses from Elliott about the State of Things, the need for hip hop/R&B to "reconstruct" itself, to jettison gun culture, playaz/hataz culture, after not just 9/11 but also the deaths of Aaliyah, Left-Eye, Big Pun, BIG, etc. I don't know. If I had sufficient confidence in my music I wouldn't have dragged an otherwise eminently listenable record down with aural footnotes. Imagine the Beatles interrupting Sgt Pepper with earnest two-minute lectures on how radical this record was ("and look out for the weird orchestral noises on A Day In The Life - it's supposed to resemble an acid trip! No one's ever done this before, eh Paul?" "Oh no John, we're right radical, like..."). Not to mention ruining the introduction to every track with the Chinese water torture motif of "This is a Missy Elliott exclusive." Really, Missy? Am I the only mug who bought this "special" edition of the album? Am I blind or illterate? Uh, wouldn't the name "Missy Elliott" emblazoned across the cover tell me that this was a Missy Elliott record? Or do you have such a low opinion of the intelligence of your assumed listener demographic? Missy, shut da fuck up and let the music speak for itself.
And how is the music? Like her three previous albums, it's no classic. A Missy Greatest Hits compilation will be an awesome pop thing indeed, but too much of this record simply reaffirms what we already know. Despite all the talk of an old school vibe to this record - and despite El-P having already nailed the aesthetic and mental impossibility of going back to '86 on "Squeegee Man Shooting" - there is nothing here which could have been made in '86. It is deceptive in its revivalism. Timbaland has a semi-new trick, the menacing fuzzy bass synth line (well it was Altern-8's trick a decade ago, but enough about that), which he uses here on "Go To The Floor" and "Ain't That Funny" - although it works to much better effect on Jay-Z's "Nigga Please." His other motif is the undulating undertow, like Moby on valium - the dessicated blues wail on "Bring The Pain," the similarly pitched guitar on "Slide." All very entertaining, of course, but unlike the Neptunes there is no sense either of new or old here.
By old school, one assumes that we need to refer to things like "Gossip Folks" and "Back In The Day." The former has some especially entertaining Elliott invective ("squat chested cow stumps") while the latter's thoroughly amiable faux-nostalgia about the good old peaceful fun-loving days of da '80z (tell that to Scott La Rock. Or Schoolly-D, for that matter) has punctum blasted into it by Jay-Z, whose rap pointedly ignores the '80s full stop ("nineteen ninety ought three!") and fires the track up with a real passion. Even the go-go-esque rhythms seem to double in intensity (full review of "Blueprint 2" later this week). But listen to early Salt 'n' Pepa cuts like "I'll Take Your Man" and remember that this sort of perspective was not even possible "back in the day," unless you count Sugarhill '79 as back in the day. "Funky Fresh Dressed" reverts to the Beasties' "Paul Revere" backwards track halfway through, but this is three-dimensional, as impossible in 1986 as the Pet Shop Boys' "Being Boring" would have been in 1973. "Play That Beat" and "Hot" do, I suppose, attempt to rekindle some kind of '80s feeling, but neither is sufficiently remarkable to kindle any such interest.
"Pussyfoot" and "Nothing Out There For Me" are fairly straightforward R&B; the former in particular is a luscious lubricant of a song, worthy of TLC at their most sweetly dirtiest ("Diggin' On You"). The latter plays po-mo games with guest singer Beyonce Where's My Career Gone God Only Knowles, the latter desperately trying to convince Elliott of the worthiness of her man and her life, as Elliott on the telephone unsuccessfully tries to persuade her to come to the club, that her happiness is a fake, a construct to mask incipient misery. But it's Miss E who sounds like the really desperate one here. Nothing out THERE. Nothing at all.
"Work It" has unfortunately been so worked to death by over-analysis elsewhere that even at this early stage it would not especially bother me if I never heard it again in my life. If it hadn't been so hyped I could enthuse about the total dispersion of sense and continuity in Missy as a person and as a lyricist. It is as if unrestricted passion and intensity have removed the need for interpretation or meaning; it is a Baudrillardian fascination with the signifiers. The delivery is ecstatically nonsensical; passion cannot be sculpted into words to fit an arbitrary metre - listen to those quivering vibratos at the end of each line. It's about the fuck superseding the function. It is displaced delirium. It is Grace Jones with the central heating on. And the most SUBTLE references to "the old school" on the whole album come here - not just in the naggingly familiar '80s drum sample which begins the track, but the turntable FX which help bring it to a close.
The TLC/Aaliyah/etc tribute "Can You Hear Me" (with the two surviving members of TLC on backing vocals) is doubtless heartfelt and even more doubtlessly serves "the community" but to me it's greater evidence that you really shouldn't make records when you're gutted. See my TLC overview tomorrow for further confirmation of the latter.
. . .
Friday, November 08, 2002
TRINA! TRINA! TRINA!
Trina! She's a bad muthafucka! She knows what she wants! And she knows how to get it! She don't not take not no shit from no one nohow! She got SASS! She got CLASS! So does Missy! So has Eve! And they're both on her second album! Diamond Princess! It's a MUTHAFUCKA of an album! You should have gone out and bought it by now! It's FEMALE! But not written by MALES! Not even Trick Daddy! Even though it's on Slip 'N' Slide! It tells you nothing! You've not heard a thousand times before! But hearing something a thousand times before! Doesn't invalidate it! On the contrary! We need it to be said a thousand times MORE! The alternative! Vanessa Creaming-Myself Carlton! india.oprah.arie.ronankeating.singmeout.ofmy.coma! Norah Jones! She's sensitive! But not really!
Listen to "Hustling"! Chat show format! Deconstructed! "Tell us a little about yourself - WHAM BAM!" Socked in the jaw! "No more fuckin' questions!" This track drives! Like "Revolutionary Generation" with 20 basslines! All swirling and undercutting! Hear "Told Y'All!" Military orders! "Get back down on your ass"! Orchestral/tympani backing! Approaching menace! Rick Ross! Not Rikrok! It wasn't him! He can't do nuthin' about it! He is a slave to subtext! And loving it!
Missy E! On "Rewind That Back"! No it's not a dress rehearsal for "Work It"! She has a weird, wobbly Parkinsonian tremor of a vibrato! She is reeling in her self-induced drunken euphoria! The two ladies swoon around and beyond each other! Courtly love!
"B R Right!" With Ludacris! OPEN THE MUTHAFUCKIN' DOOR TO HEAR THIS TUNE! It is Eastern! Another one! But different in its addictiveness! The violin refrain is more lugubrious! Sadder! Lends a poignancy to the outrageous assertions of Ludacris! It ROCKS and TREADS ASTRIDE BONES!
But "U & Me"! This MF KILLS ME! It takes the The Blueprint blueprint! The O'Jays at 81 rpm! She swears devotion! To the other! It is cathartic! Goddamit listen to the way she slides with apparent rhythmic nonchalance straight into a percussively and aesthetically bang on target emotional punctum when she proclaims "you and me" as a climax directly in tandem with the sample! The backing is immense! It swirls around you! Like Blackpool Illuminations designed by Bruce Nauman!
"Nasty Bitch" whacks a couple of thousand bees on the head with its woozy but skull-piercing attack! Money Mark is on this one! Not that Money Mark! That would have versed him well in compression! Another one! "No Panties"! ARE COMING OFF! With Tweet! The artful bemusement of Tweet's innocence coupled with the KNOWING and WINKING catapult which Trina fires across scrubs' line of fire! This is another Missy production! Oh my GOD I cannot wait for the Missy album! Out on Monday! I'm having the fucker BIKED to me! I will EAT it! DIGEST it! CELEBRATE it! 'Cos man! This ain't but a warm-up! Not a substitute!
"I Wanna Holla" goes all salsa on my butt! Why the fuck salsa classes in the winter! Who be wanting to tread through sodden primary school leaves ready to trip you up and break your muthafuckin' rubber-soled ass! But this is FINE! It is GREAT POP! Don't forget that! Most pop has! "How We Do" is BRUTAL! ELECTRO! But POIGNANT too! Listen to those echoed minor chord changes! Like Inner City! Back to Detroit! "All My People"! Damn! Freestyling! Digressing! Video for "Good Life"! Paris Grey curling herself around London autumnal landmarks! Celebrating the good life! With Kevin Saunderson's ineffably sad keyboard lines and harmonies telling us that really it ISN'T! Back to the album! OK! "Kandi"! "Candy Girl" in other words! An Arthur Baker production originally! New Edition! Pretty damn avant-garde number one when you think about it! This trots along agreeably! But runs out of its idea halfway through! Damn shame! Should have got the Smart-Es to punctumise it a bit! If they can get the afternoon off at Burger King in Lewisham! Or Deutsche Bank at London Wall! What do you reckon!
"Ladies" has Eve! It's more FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE Human League electro! Major chords this time! A stroll through the park! No darkness! Miss Otis does NOT regret! She had no cheating fucker to shoot! Thank God for that! Sondheim's "Ladies Who Lunch" recasted by John Singleton!
"Get This Money" is more BRUTTTTTTTAL Phuture electro! It be about getting this money! The last three songs on this album tell us that THIS is what matters! Of course it damn does! If you want to live in Trina's mouth! Check out "100%"! The memory of Gwen Guthrie is honoured! You still GOT to have a J! O! B! And the fucker doesn't even sound desperate! The Other as lifestyle option! The music says poignant! But you are wanting to make love! She just wants to fuck! Or fly to Paris just to have breakfast! Just as the last song "Do You Want Me?" with the coolly confident confidante/sucker Bathgate on hand! No not that Bathgate! No disused car factories on the M8! No Dustin Hoffman characterisations! She wants, he is offering, but they are aware that really it's all a game! So they play with each other! Their voices tremble! They want to get on with it! It's genuine ecstasy! There's no metre, no barline! They swoon conversely towards each other! And of course BECOME each other as a result! She swallows him! Man, how she loves it!
Don't be misled into thinking this is just a stopgap until the Missy album! It's more than that! You need them both! I need as MUCH of this SHINY YELLOW NEW RAP as I can find! Because it speaks to me! Get out of the stockroom! Breathe the gloriously unpurified air of the world! And GET this joint of joints!
. . .
Thursday, November 07, 2002
"I OFTEN FIND MYSELF SWEPT DOWNSTREAM BY THE SONG'S AWE-FUL POWER HUMMING ALONG TO ITS PREVAILING TOPLINE: PAIN"
The above is part of Daniel Bedingfield's sleevenote to his debut album Gotta Get Thru This. Like all pop albums worth a damn these days, the album is about the desperation of the singer for you, the adorer, to love him, to let him in; but what is expressed here is of a different order to Justin Timberlake's appeal for us to let him grow up (and nearly everyone else who has reviewed Justified has, typically, missed the point, in other words that he "can't sing" because his voice is still breaking, he is still trying - the emotional sweep of the album would be meaningless if he sang like D'Angelo). Gotta Get Thru This - as the sleevenote's multiple dedications to God make clear - is about a crisis of faith. Superficially the theme is extrapolated from that of Sinatra's "The One I Love Belongs To Somebody Else." The Other already has another Other - perhaps even another idol (Gates? Young?). It's a marketplace, and Bedingfield wants you to spend your money on him, devote your spare time to him, rather than on Will or Gareth.
Do looks matter? Daniel's are more rough-hewn, "realer" than Justin's. On one of the sleeve photos he is eyeing himself up in what looks like a bedsit wardrobe mirror - eyes deep set, carefully nurtured stubble. You have to work at this guy; he isn't just a bit of rough.
The pop music enclosed within, however, could only be British, could only have come from 21st-century London. The song cycle starts with admirable awkwardness - the Other is leaving him. "Blown It Again" is the song. He frets over his faults, he laments his shortcomings against a skeletal hip hop backdrop with sudden crashing piano chords which seem to be falling all around him like demented debris. Space cannot be taken for granted. He has "gone and lost his one true friend" through not trusting her, because of course he cannot trust himself. Guest rapper Solid Rock invokes South Park...like Mike Skinner said, it's too late.
"You can't live a life if you don't ask why/Such a thing as too much information/Trapped under this condemnation."
"Either life is a series of significant discoveries or it is not worth having" (Max Harrison in The Wire, Christmas 1986, regarding Larkin's All What Jazz)
He's on his own now. Back in his zone. Flashback to the beginning?
"James Dean (I Wanna Know)" might be the year's best, certainly its most determined, pop single. "I could be the James Dean of the music scene" (echoing Coati Mundi in "Me No Pop I") and then, strangely. "I could be a big star/Like that man Queen." McQueen? Mercury? The Stranger? Its post-Cameo beats are brutally efficient, like sticks of celery being slapped against a pantechnicon; his vocals are exemplary, pointillistic, growling when he needs to; he's putting on an act. So much space in this song, just like its ancestor, "Rock On" by David Essex (and the latter's extraordinarily warped series of pop singles between 1973-76 needs to be re-evaluated urgently). Hear his uncertain vibrato on the word "Queen." Observe how the whole track steps up a gear when he makes his desperation apparent in the chorus: "I wanna KNOW!" with an intermittent three-note bass synth Dies Irae punctuating his sweats - because the punctum was at the end of each verse: "if she can't seem make it worth my while/then WHAT'S THE POINT NOW?"
("oh what's the bloody point?" - final words of Kenneth Williams Diaries)
It's the record George Michael should have made six months ago. No, scratch that, he could never have sung this. Because Daniel has a choice, and he opts to "make music till my brain is fried." No love on the horizon, need to do something or else die. He is facing up to the possibility of music being a substitute.
("from deep soul to symphonies, they're all substitutes" - Momus "Closer To You")
"Gotta Get Thru This" demands that we tell Daniel who he is. Beyond even the multi-mirrored narcissism of Jackson's "Who Is It?," we observe how Bedingfield's vocal is tweaked up to resemble a female, to resemble a pan-sexual satyr, just like "Camille" in Prince's "If I Was Your Girlfriend," amongst the most holy of music ever made. It's a prayer to see him through until tomorrow when he will . . .see her again. He won't be able to do anything except "pretend that you're already mine," or is he planning to lay his cards on the table to her, to present himself as an alternative and better option?
The next two songs "If You're Not The One" and "He Don't Love You, I Love You" (note the significant absence of the word "Like" as a bridge between the two parts of the latter title) are musically the most mainstream things here, but their intelligence (and indeed inclusion of discernible melody) elevates them high above the Blues and Abs's of this world. The former finds him clawing at his brain, trying to delude himself that he's not in love with you ("why am I crying on my bed?" "why do I dream of you as my wife?"). The faith expressed in this song is absolute; he is committing his entire life to her care ("I wish that you could be the one I die with" - his vulnerability and rapid breathing circling "die" are enough to inspire a little death in themselves). "Is there any way I can stay in your arms?" he asks politely, plaintively, like Oliver asking for some more, please sir. Or, as My Computer might have phrased it, "I don't care how you treat me." Just don't ignore me.
In "He Don't Love You, I Love You" he opens himself up to you, tells you that he doesn't want to build his world around you, doesn't want to have your children - Gareth Gates is a false prophet, I am the way, the truth and the life. But at the same time he's asking the Other to deny his feelings (though really he wants them confirmed) - "Tell me you're not what I know you are." Prove me wrong. It's unproveable.
The silence which follows "Tell me to silence my heart."
Then, surprisingly, we segue into a pair (everything on this album comes in pairs) of purposeful guitar-driven, almost New Wave, tunes, albeit still with a 2-step rhythm supporting both. In fact they both sound astonishingly like the Police (an unexplored link between Stewart Copeland's polyrhythms => speed garage?) and "I Can't Hear You" is essentially a pun-free, smugness-free rewrite of "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da." He is trying to communicate with the Other but is far too nervous; words, emotions come out as a jumble, and her heart is protecting and defending her against all of it. "I wish that you could see/The other, BETTER parts of me" - but of course he's not sure whether he DOES have any better parts of himself, or whether that in fact is all that there is.
"Friday" is an exhilarating cartwheel of a song whose unstoppable impetus - like the cork stopping Sting's bottle getting ready to spurt out - is worthy of the Police at their best. "She's coming back on Friday" goes the chorus. He destabilises himself with his own expectant ecstasy ("the clock says it's half past five/but the sun is still in the sky").
Then we get the big ballad, "Honest Questions (Plains Of Asia)." Now Bedingfield wants you and I to justify his own life for him. "The lives I've lived/The deaths I've died/You died them too/And all for me." The diminishing returns in direct proportion to the volume and certainty of his voice when he sings:
"Do you see a brighter day for me?
Another day?
A day?"
He wants you to protect him against his own "eternal blindness," "the whispers in my heart against your kindness." What he wants from you is made clear in the chorus: "I will pour my water down/Upon a thirsty barren land/And streams will flow from the dust of/Your bruised and broken soul...you will grow, you will grow." On the sleeve this chorus is printed in inverted commas. It's what he needs you to say to him. Turn my tears into life. Consummation = holiness. I must cling to you. Do I love you?
"Girlfriend" is ostensibly perky, upbeat post-Jacko pop where he seems to have won the Other over...but even here there is darkness. "You gotta be the one for me or else life makes no sense/So wrap your arms around me/Kiss me till I'm dead." I actually don't want to live. Can I stay and be nothing at all? I depend on you. I am a parasite. I cannot exist independently.
"WIthout The Girl" repeats the 2-step of "James Dean" but this song is much more straightforward - the one he loves does indeed belong to somebody else, and he is content for now to wait and see whether she will one day come to him as more than a friend. It looks as though he has reached a comfortable compromise with reality.
But wait...
Twist the mirrors round. See the distortion which has suddenly arisen. See the real, inedible underbelly of what Bedingfield has been saying all along.
"INFLATE MY EGO" is the title of the climactic song where he trashes all illusions and faces up to whom he really loves - himself. "There's no way I can feel about it/'Cause I don't even know how much I love her." One fatal step beyond "Just My Imagination," it has ALL been happening in his head. "I consider you so expendable," he cackles in the chorus, "I don't need you/My whole world revolves around me/INFLATE MY EGO!" A brutal candour rarely encountered in pop, bolstered up by the backing track being a beefed-up version of the Peter Gunn Theme, played with an awful euphoria. Indeed it reminds us of the genuine ecstasy of the opening section of Soulwax's 2 Many DJs, which opens with a wedding being ELP's version of "Peter Gunn" and Basement Jaxx's - well, it's appropriate for Bedingfield here - "Where's Your Head At?" - but here it's drained of all joy; you are faced with hard facts. Hear his "thank yous" to an imagined audience which sounds more like the wrong end of a wind tunnel.
(The whole song of course, from his vocal downwards, could also easily be a parody of Robbie Williams)
After the apocalyse, the reckoning: just Bedingfield, his acoustic guitar, and a restating of "Gotta Get Thru This," re-presented to us as a humble prayer to God to endeavour to help him to understand exactly how fucked up his mind is.
It's up to you to decide whether you want to take him on.
. . .
Wednesday, November 06, 2002
CLOCKWORK DERANGE
Of course Kubrick knew damn well about the final chapter, and he was right to ignore it (or spread its contents subliminally throughout his screenplay). Perhaps he should have ignored the narration, as well; Burgess' extended High Tory moan of a novel reads like bad Christopher Marlowe. Burgess was always the sort of person who gave the impression of being a great writer without actually having written anything great.
It's all very 1971, of course. The balletic tropes of the rape and murder scenes come across like a Pete and Dud sketch for which the punchline had been lost. The business with Miss Weatherby the Catwoman is straight out of Benny Hill. All very mild, all a rather laboured set-up for remaining 90 minutes of the film which concern themselves with the question of revolt.
And Kubrick films link to other Kubrick films in his own Arcades. With Clockwork Orange it seems to me that the film with which it naturally pairs is Spartacus, that other extended dissemination of a violent rebel and how "society" tames and neutralises him. Unlike Spartacus, Alex has no specific political or social reason for what he does; he does it because he cannot achieve otherness in any other way. But the repeated references to crucifixion - indeed, the line "I'd rather be crucified than crucify!" is a direct lift from the Spartacus screenplay - not to mention the final imagined graveside scene, which queerly preludes Kubrick's next work, Barry Lyndon - would suggest that we are meant to view his random violence (with its accompanying misogyny) as a greater and noble thing than that perpetuated by the State.
It of course suggests something else. As with Spartacus (famously exemplified by Olivier double-entendring away with Curtis in Hearst's old swimming pool) there is a homoerotic subtext a continent wide in this film. The Droogs fancy him, in particular Dim (Warren Clarke) - and the latter's subsequent transformation into a proto-buggery police officer indicates a degree of Iago-like estrangement and betrayal. Note the evident hard-on enthusiasm he displays when dunking Alex in the horse trough - the equivalent of Olivier's brewing rage when he finds that Curtis has vacated his life, subsequently forcing Kirk Douglas to slay him.
And throughout the film, in contrast to Alex's problems with women, nearly every manifestation of male authority makes a play for him. There's Aubrey Morris' Post-Corrective Adviser - a role which should quietly chill but which Morris, as is his wont, camps up beyond credibility. The part reads as though it was written for Kenneth Williams. The prison chaplain, the Home Secretary (a pity that Eric Portman was by that time no longer around to give that latter role its definitive performance) - and, most notoriously, Mr Alexander, the writer whose wife was raped by the Droogs and who himself was crippled in their attack.
When we first encounter them in their overly spacious house (a nod to 2001 and also an alternative fate for the two protagonists of The Shining?) they enact a strange Pinteresque, deliberately banal dialogic exchange ("Well I suppose we'd better let them in"). Slowness, stiffness - there is no love or sex in this house to begin with. His wife in her womb-like pod could be a thousand miles away from him. The distance says it all; the shelves of largely unread books confirm it. It's significant that the most uninhibited act of violence in the Droogs' rampage is when Alex gleefully tips over the writer's desk and typewriter, followed by one of his bookcases; the denial of sex itself, in a very literal sense, brought to book.
(The rape scene itself is not very explicit and deliberately shot at a distance, and only in its early stages. A much more explicit refraction of the cravings of the passive viewer can be found in the genuinely brutal extended rape scene which forms the centrepiece of the 1992 Belgian flim Man Bites Dog. In the latter, the serial killer is simply going about his daily business as though it were a job; the punctum in this scene is that the camera assistants who are making a documentary about the man enthusiastically join in with the rape and murder as though they were simply adjusting cables or designing a set. Changing Rooms as hijacked by de Sade and Francis Bacon. Worse is the reaction of the audience, including this writer and his partner when they first saw it in the cinema - I regret to report that we were rolling about in laughter at the blackly comedic incongruity of the whole thing)
Even more significant is the later sequence where a reformed but societally-disowned Alex seeks refuge in the writer's house. The dialogic sequence plays itself through again, word for word. The desk, typewriter and books are all in their original place as if no damage had been done, as if the wife had never existed, for - when the camera does the same long pan from him to the spherical chair - we find reclined in the latter, not his wife (who apparently died of pneumonia some months after her rape), but an extremely camp David Prowse as his "bodyguard" - in other words, his real desire, a shapely hunk. He welcomes Alex in, as he is now apparently engaged in writing "subversive literature" (a jibe by Burgess at "liberalism") and is seemingly on his side - that is, until he overhears Alex in the bath gleefully singing "Singin' In The Rain" - the same song the Droogs sang as the rape and attack took place. Knowing who he now is, the writer sets about nullifying him, but society first nullifies the writer to save Alex and the ruling party's wafer-thin parliamentary majority.
(Alas, Patrick Magee, a distinguished Beckettian who plays the writer, also falls into the ham/camp trap. In his latter appearances you could almost be watching Kenneth Griffith!)
Alex's final courting by the Home Secretary does not of course lead to his renouncing violence - the conspiratorial closing whisper of "Oh, yes, I was cured all right!" put paid to that, not to mention keeping the sequel options open (although no sequel was made); his "rebel" self is reborn, Spartacus lives through his baby son - "he will grow up to be a Roman!" exclaims Jean Simmons, nearly as chillingly.
In truth, Clockwork Orange is a rather ropey film. The device of anti-violence propagandising/indoctrinating film footage was used to much starker and far more frightening effect in Pakula's The Parallax View three years later; the acting is generally far too camp; the jocular tone far too jocular to act as any kind of an ironic Greek chorus - and its signifiers far too easily assumed (without any understanding of the signified) by two generations' worth of dumb pop groups and denser designers.
. . .
Tuesday, November 05, 2002
LONNIE DONEGAN
Two giants gone in one week. Jam Master Jay, the effective founding father of what we now perceive as hip hop, last week; and now Lonnie Donegan, the architect - or at least the conduit - of Britpop. The man without whom, it can safely be said, virtually none of what you are listening to now from this country could have been produced, from Cliff through the Beatles right down to the Streets. And if that's a cliche, fuck it - cliches become cliches because they had meaning and impact to begin with.
It might still be hard for younger readers to visualise how seismic an impact Donegan had on popular music in this country in the '50s. When I was a youngster in the '70s, he had largely been dismissed as a joke, a London Palladium comedy MOR turn, the "Dustman" man, and in other quarters as a sell-out, a traitor (ha! the insistence of "purity" on what was a bastardisation - albeit a benign bastardisation - to begin with!). More recently, though - certainly in the last 3-4 years - he seemed determined to return to whatever the original punctum was which drove him, as if he knew that five heart bypasses was pushing it, that his remaining lifespan might not be that long, to set everything in his order.
And, as with all real innovators, he did not sit down and carefully plot out his subversion on a bar graph. In fact "Rock Island Line" was recorded under the banner of Chris Barber's band, with whom Donegan was at the time the resident banjo player, as a filler album track. Oh he knew about Leadbelly though, all right - Donegan was from Glasgow; like Liverpool, a port facing west, and therefore the first point of contact for jazz and blues records from the USA (the legacy of the 18th-centiry Tobacco Lords). OK, he might just have pointed out to the virgin listener the existence of Leadbelly, of Skip James and Woody Guthrie, but his own aural and visual impact in 1955-57 (particularly) was overwhelming.
You have to understand that this was still the era of Dickie Valentine and Alma Cogan - clean-cut, unthreatening, smiling, compromising entertainers crooning cliched songs composed and chosen by committee. The boat it was not within their job description to rock. Keep smiling. Hide the torment. Camouflage the greyness. Sound familiar? Gloop-laden love songs or novelty numbers which made you want to construct your own Columbine.
And yes, OK, nothing could have happened without Presley, without Holly, no one's denying that, but Donegan was here and had the most immediate and shattering impact. View some of his TV performances of the time and contrast his restless on-the-spot franticity and near-psychotic screwing up of the face, his band assaulting their instruments in exactly the same way that the Clash would do a generation hence - put that up against bowties and "Pickin' A Chicken For Christmas" and you might get the idea. Skiffle was Britain's punk of the '50s; also its indie. No more expensive instruments - a makeshift double bass constructed out of a tea chest, a washboard rather than a drum kit. No need even for musical expertise; three basic chords were your passport. It was how you delivered them.
My nomination for the most sonically extreme UK #1 single ever (despite competition from "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)," "Respectable," "Firestarter" and "Flat Beat") would have to be 1957's "Cumberland Gap." Lasting barely 90 seconds, taken at a minimum pace of 200 mph, words yelped and barked out which had no obvious literal or other sense, HEAR Donegan's untranscibable yell as Denny Wright launches into his equally demented monotonal guitar solo - this was the first punk number one, the equivalent of "White Riot" getting to #1 in '77 (which it didn't). And engineered, as with most of his hits, by the 29-year-old Joe Meek.
And then people say he lost it, sold out. "Chewing Gum" and "Dustman" - though Donegan argued at the time that he was simply extending the folk concepts into a British perspective, and it is possible to argue that that particular strand of Britpop (the Ray Davies to Jarvis Cocker one) could be traced from here (although Lionel Bart's work, in particular "Oliver!" and "Things Ain't What They Used To Be," the latter done for that great anti-purist Joan Littlewood, need also to be counted as crucial baptismal fonts). But most people just saw it as compromise. It is significant that his last hit single (appropriately enough, "The Party's Over") dropped out of the charts just one week before "Love Me Do" made its debut. He had done his work; it was time for the next lot to take over.
And then - writing hits for Tom Jones, living quietly in Spain (or not so quietly - three wives and a 14-year-old girffriend at various different times), serious heart trouble, a 1978 comeback album with McCartney and others which sank unnoticed beneath the New Wave. Until, in 1999, he suddenly toughened up again and unleashed Muleskinner Blues. Involving Van Morrison and others, this was a remarkable record. "Rock Island Line" was taken apart, slowed down to 16 rpm, and given a blacker, more menacing undertow. Donegan's spoken intro out-Caves Nick Cave in its dark terror. Unlike Tom Jones, there were no late-period embarrassments; no team-ups with Wyclef Jean, no sordid attempts to sex himself up; equally, unlike Johnny Cash's series of "American" recordings, there was no indication that a past-hip producer had shoehorned him into doing some of these pesky modern songs. Like Mark E Smith, he stayed to plough his own furrow determinedly; no wonder John Peel idolised him. His energy in recent concerts was apparenttly unabated ("playing with the energy of someone a quarter of his age," someone wrote to Peel just a couple of weeks ago).
Whatever British pop music you're listening to (perhaps with the exceptions of Gates, Young et al, who take us back to the days of Valentine and Cogan), this man was the founding father of all of it. Venerate and treasure his memory.
Records to listen to
Donegan's discography is a bit of a mess at the moment, but the compilation Skiffle Sensation (£6.99 from HMV) is absolutely crucial; weeding out "Chewing Gum" and "Dustman," this concentrates on the music which caused the rumpus. And to get an idea of how this came across live, Live! 1957 - The Complete Conway Hall Concert (Zircon Records) is also essential. The lengthy, ecstatic rendition of "Glory" in particular is hypnotically compelling in its power. And for evidence of how ahead of and apart from everyone else he was, check out the abovementioned Muleskinner Blues.
. . .
Monday, November 04, 2002
HE’S JUSTIFIED – I’M ANCIENT
“Justified” by Justin Timberlake
How do you progress into adulthood, into maturity, when everyone around you wants you to stay a child? Do you fight against it? Not everyone does. But a living still has to be made. You either opt simply to get old only in a biological sense, otherwise staying as you are, like Jagger, kept on the treadmill by the fear of being found out, of not having finished that degree – or you try to reconnect with the world as you mature, if of course you are allowed to mature.
This is clearly a problem with Justin Timberlake. Everyone knows from “Pop” and “Girlfriend” that he had doubts even 18 months ago. That “Pop” and “Girlfriend” were the records Michael Jackson should have made, instead of crying pantomime tears over underprivileged people whom he’d have shot if they ever strayed onto Nevermind-land.
It has already become a cliché to argue that Justified, Timberlake’s debut solo album, is the album Jacko should maybe have made right after Off The Wall. And Timberlake has that vulnerable, audibly not quite mature contralto of a voice still – the same voice Jackson had in 1975, when he was singing castoffs like “One Day In Your Life” (the sentiments of the latter song are recast in a very different and more disturbing way on the current album’s “Take It From Here,” but more of that in a moment). So this is someone who wants to become an adult but doesn’t sound quite ready yet.
Of course Timberlake has enlisted the aid of both Timbaland and the Neptunes to help him out; it has to be said that the latter pull it off far more convincingly than the former – as with Quincy Jones on Off The Wall, the Neptunes understand the importance of space and silence in pop as so few others these days do.
Justified opens with “Senorita,” an easy-going start with that “Quiz Show” electric piano again and the general aura of goofing around in the studio. He’s warming up, fretting over why his intended has not received her “prize.” He even goes as far as to initiate a studio singalong (“guys sing this part, girls that…”) with which everyone joins in enthusiastically. Timberlake signs off with a wink: “Gentleman, good night. Ladies….good morning!”
But can he see it through, or has he just gotta get through this?
“Like I Love You,” the first single, is this album’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” down to the nervous fumbling with words in the intro before the acoustic guitar and beats stealthily kick in. It’s like the belated antithesis to George Michael’s “Faith.” As with that (acoustically-driven) song, the singer’s intended passions are not directed towards a specific Other, but towards his audience, or whom he would like to be his audience. “If it were up to me, your face will change,” he remarks early on. In the chorus he sings, very meaningfully, “Late at night I talk to you…But you will know the difference when I touch you.” It’s a plea not to take him off your stereo, not to cast him from your life but rather recast him in his intended new shape. Ultimately, as the Belgian lass has already remarked elsewhere, this is a song directed towards himself – hence the album title of course – we have to justify him, as does he, to continue as a receptacle for dreams and a projector of interpretable passions. We have to think of him as a blank sheet upon which we can write what we choose – be mad and discursive, but for God’s sake don’t let him in on your agenda; even though he DEMANDS that you reinterpret him, let him punctu(M)re you rather than just please you.
His plea halfway through: “if you give me just the chance TO BE A MAN” erupting through the record like a rising iceberg.
The way in which at the fadeout, everything suddenly drops back to a plaintive synth line, sounding very close to “Trans-Europe Express.” Timberlake muses that “I used to dream about this when I was a boy…never thought it would end up this way…everybody dance,” he instructs, solemnly, uncertainly.
“(Oh No) What You Got” is agreeable enough, but demonstrates that Timbaland is still stuck in his Eastern rut – he really seems to have saved 18 months’ worth of punctum for the imminent Missy Elliott album, which is anything but a rut – and it’s left to the Neptunes to take up the theme of uncertainty/the Other again on the hymn “Take It From Here.” Here, against a warm bath of strings which could have come straight off The Lexicon Of Love, Timberlake offers himself as guardian angel/protector – but goes beyond benificence almost to the point of obsessive ownership. “I wanna be your lake…any problems that you have, I wanna wash them away.” He wants to be her sky, her air “so when you feel that you can’t breathe, I’ll be there,” her answer “all the time – when you see how I put your life before mine, with no question.” Actually there’s one hell of a question; it sounds as though he wants to suffocate the Other and obliterate her life with his. He goes on to say how much he wants “to review all your plans.” Playing God? Or is HE the one needing protection?
“I wanna be your mother…” Pause.
Right at the end: “I’ll be there MOMMY…”
You guessed it. It’s Kristeva again. He wants to escape and dominate the maternal body but cannot escape his fundamental attachment to it. He cannot reach, or become, the Stranger.
And this offer is NOT unconditional, as evinced by the following track, “Cry Me A River” – not the Julie London standard, but the same subject matter. I’ll be true to you as long as you’re true to me, but if NOT – you’re on your own, cry ME a river, dare to need me and I’ll condemn you to nothingness. Timbaland is in charge again here, and it’s a slower rewrite of “We Need A Resolution” with an unearthly vocal threnody at its intro, but with Timberlake refusing even to entertain the need of being supposed to change. He now pours out contempt, even though he hates no one more than himself. It’s a static vocal performance; as with Aaliyah at her most distant, almost inhuman in its lack of (com)passion.
A light shines again with “Rock Your Body,” the best song Chic never wrote (indeed, much of this album seems to revisit and reconstruct a selectively imagined pop 1979/80). An irreducible summer stroll of a groove wherein Timberlake tries to pull – more or less – but with hesitance (“Why are you so quick to walk away?”) and realisation of the exercise’s futility – hear the desperation underlying the assumed bravado of “I’ll have you naked before the end of this song.” There’s no evidence that he in fact succeeds.
Similarly, “Nothin’ Else” might be the best song that Stevie Wonder never wrote. It hardly raises its voice above a whisper. He imagines an ideal scenario: “I was just walking that day aimlessly/you picked a perfect day to bump into me.” He considers the options of starting a relationship but the doubts escalate as the song continues: he ends up muttering about “health regimes” and “ultimatums being no fun” and the music comes to a dead stop – only for the song to start again at the beginning; this time he is just walking aimlessly. Nil else. Like the Temptations, he may have imagined the whole thing. He is wondering whether to love himself and, if so, if he is any kind of substitute for anything.
You only notice later on that the chord sequence of the verse is identical to that of “Paint It Black.”
On “Last Night” he continues to bemoan complications which, in his perspective, ruin any love affair. “In your eyes I see a second chance” he sings (but for whom? Himself more than her?) and ends by him reminiscing about just being hand in hand, in love, and exclaiming “Can’t we just go back to being like that again?” – pause – and then he SNEERS “baby!” and sniggers. The most sardonic use of the word “baby” since the DJ/alien dialogue which begins the Carpenters’ “Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft.”
Back to Timbaland for the next three tunes: “Still On My Brain” which is as dull as any Timbaland ballad tends to be; “(And She Said) Take Me Now” which features guest Janet Jackson, though the latter is used to surprisingly little effect (the Neptunes did far better with her on Beenie’s “Feel It Boy”). The sparse DAF-type minimalist electro fadeout is quite good, though. “Right For Me” reduces the backing to fuzz synth and clattering percussion, with a cameo from Bubba Sparxxx, but again any of the mixes of “Grindin’” by the Clipse outdo it.
Thankfully the Neptunes come back on board for what should have been the closing track (let’s leave the dismal MOR ballad “Never Again” out of this – despite the fact that it may or may not be about Britney, and will probably be #1 for 85 weeks), or indeed the bonus track “Worthy Of” which continues and reinforces his self-doubt, but musically the latter seems to be based on a “Float On” sample) – “Let’s Take A Ride.” Here the Other whom he is addressing has just been laid off from her job and is feeling down. He implores her to come for a ride with him, out into the countryside, even spend a night with him, but y’know it’s not an obligation. Again the music is summery and unhurried. But is he addressing a potential partner or is he addressing YOU? Go for a spin for an hour with this CD in your car stereo; forget the world for awhile but don’t LEAVE it. Or rather, don’t leave ME. Does this make me a better human being, he is saying – does this mean that I’m an adult, that I can cross over to you? He is almost begging us to make up our own minds and form our own perspectives. Be careful you don’t tell him your answer too soon though – the next chapter might not be as interesting if we knew exactly where Justin Timberlake was going to go. Wherever it is, though, it might be worth your going with him.
. . .
Friday, November 01, 2002
IF I WERE A CARPENTER
Richard Carpenter, at his peak, was one of the few musicians to understand properly, and develop upon, the innovations of Brian Wilson. The fact that he achieved this within what was essentially MOR (though I prefer to think of it as avant-MOR; some of the Carpenters' things are decidedly uneasy listening) has of course always been held against him, even though, in his sister, singer and drummer Karen Carpenter, he had the perfect instrument through which his concept could be distilled.
The really early Carpenters work (1966-70) will be a complete revelation to you if you're unfamiliar with it. Here you will find elements taken from Pet Sounds and Smile - not to mention, very obliquely, elements from the Mothers of Invention - and taken in new, if un-rock-like, directions. Songs like "The Parting Of Our Ways" (1966) and "All I Can Do" (1968) are phantasms of pop; godlike chord changes, divine harmonies which overlayer each other as though they were the Tenth Dimension, never mind the Fifth. If "Don't Be Afraid" had been a Rotary Connection recording, or an Axelrod recording, Gilles Peterson would be wetting himself silly over it - it's that good.
Gradually, we hear how Karen's voice gradually settles down from its immediate Mama Cass-type timbre (I will not go into the multiple attendant ironies of that comparison) into a more comfortable and fuller contralto range. The arrangements become less trebly, more expansive. Songs like "All Of My Life" have a sophistication in their arrangements and production which belies the recording date of 1969. Unexpected "protest" songs like "Your Wonderful Parade" (1967) and "Mr Guder" (1970) wander off into all kinds of obscure musical territory, with lyrics (courtesy of John Bettis) which could have come straight off We're Only In It For The Money. "Eve" (1968) is a shattering deconstruction of a lonely and unfulfilled life gradually winding its way down to termination, comparable with anything off Walker's contemporaneous Scott 3 (especially "Rosemary"). And their first hit single, a version of the Beatles' "Ticket to Ride" decelerated to a funereal tempo, turns Lennon's aggrieved doubts into a plaintive acceptance of solitary desperation. The production here is almost 3D in its scope. Still 1969, don't forget.
"Close To You" - the response song to "This Guy's In Love" which Bacharach and David surely always intended it to be (see the sneaky reference to the former in the trumpet solo). Here, Karen is near-apostolic in her compassion and offers selfless love to the Other. It is a divine pop record because it knows how to open up its internal spaces and stand in awe before them, rather than filling them with clutter. The song, close to fadeout, reduces to a single ticking beat (the heart) before the choir (as you knew it would) sweeps hack in again. The harmonic density here is almost Ligeti-like in its intensity and surely must have been an influence on 10cc's "I'm Not In Love."
Was any female singer ever as compassionate as Karen Carpenter? Herb Alpert once remarked that listening to Karen sing was "almost like she had her head in your lap"; it was that close and personal. Certainly no one brought more out of Leon Russell's songs than the Carpenters did; the holy trilogy of "Superstar" (idolation turning to unconditional love, irrespective of whether the Other actually deserves it), "A Song For You" (only Sylvester's scandalously unfeted reading of this song compares in intensity) and the quiet desperation and buried loathing of "This Masquerade."
Yes, desperation. If Karen could be compassionate, she could also be vulnerable and doubting in what she communicated to the listener. "Rainy Days and Mondays" and "Hurting Each Other," obviously; less superficially evident is the Carpenters' gradual trend towards bleaker songs. For every jaunty, benificent singalong like "Top Of The World" there are half-a-dozen things like "I Won't Last A Day Without You," ostensibly a love song but really despairing at dependency. "Goodbye To Love" most obviously; though even here Karen doesn't entirely close the door - she refuses not to countenance some kind of a future, so Tony Peluso's guitar solo (which like Milt Bernhardt's trombone orgasm on Sinatra's "I've Got You Under My Skin" expresses the singer's real desires which the singer is too circumscribed (self or otherwise) to articulate) represents an optimism, represents an opening of the curtain.
The saddest and most disturbing song in the whole Carpenters canon is, for me, "Yesterday Once More" from 1973 - significantly, their biggest-selling single in the UK - which has to be heard in its original context of side two of their Now And Then album. Supposedly just a nice little ballad reminiscing about the good old days, and how nice it was to see the kids getting into the old songs again (with the unasked question: is that because there are no new ones? or that there are but I'm too old to understand?), this actually scrapes a much more painful nerve. 1973, remember - the OPEC crisis, the Yom Kippur war, Watergate, the Vietnam war staggering drunkenly to a close, economic markets in freefall - was nearly another 1962, a time when it seemed that everything was going to be destroyed, maybe even the world. Everything "we" knew, that is - the "we" being the middle-market baby boomers who gave up on the Beatles between Rubber Soul and Abbey Road, who just wanted easy parameters to make themselves identifiable. A prayer for the potentially dying, that's what "Yesterday Once More" was - an extremely political song when you think about it. "Every sha-la-la-la..." as if they are desperately clutching at signifiers like a lifebelt. This all still means something, DOESN'T IT? TELL ME IT DOES!
(The Buzz! GO BACK! GO BACK! GO BACKGOBBAAAAAACCCCCKKKKKK)
(Hendrix! I DON'T LIVE TODAY - EXISTING! NOTHING BUT EXISSSSTTTTINNGGGG!!!!!!)
"When it comes to the part where he's breaking her heart, IT CAN EVEN MAKE ME CRY - JUST LIKE BEFORE." Yes but it's a different intensity of crying now, isn't it? You're crying for something else.
And then on the album it segues into a whole side of songs - "Fun Fun Fun," "Our Day Will Come," "One Fine Day" (remember the placid reading of "We Shall Overcome" which follows the tumult of "Circus '68-'69" on Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, itself an attempt to portray the '68 Democratic Convention riots), flashing past like a suicide whose life flashes past their eyes as they descend towards the pavement to find the concrete beach beneath - but at the end, it's back to the song, Karen's voice now sepulchral and sinister against a static piano chord - "when I was young, I listened to the radio"
(Orson Welles' War of the Worlds. "Anybody there?" "The charred body of Carl Phillips..." Unglamorous rebuild)
They couldn't go anywhere after that. Most of their songs from 1974 onwards were off-the-peg MOR cuts, written by hacks. Karen's voice retained the compassion and vulnerability but the context was lost. By the time of the nice-try-but-no-thanks "Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft" everybody sounds alien(ated).
. . .
Thursday, October 31, 2002
STEVIE FIXED
I had to write something about Fleetwood Mac - or to be exact, the two Fleetwood Macs which have been predominant at different times, or at opposite ends of the same stretch of time.
Peter Green's Mac were responsible for perhaps the most nihilistic sequence of pop singles ever with the (distantly) possible exception of Nine Inch Nails (and without the showbiz). And yet the hits were rarely, if ever, loud - the desperation was evident with barely suppressed rawness of hurt. On "Need Your Love So Bad" Green relocates Little Willie John's hard-on to the hard concrete of Cross Deep. He is pleading for the Other. If she doesn't respond he may destroy himself. That overdubbed string refrain, curling upwards like a giant raised eyebrow (the equivalent of LL Cool J's repeated "why?" on "Born To Love You" or Van Dyke Parks' forest of question marks punctumising U2's "All I Want Is You"). Without the strings there would almost be no music.
"Albatross" was an albatross for the group, but was there ever a quieter number one? At the opposite end of the decade to the sinister idyll of its equivalent, Acker Bilk's "Stranger On The Shore," it's a quiet repose, a reminiscence sparked off by Santo and Johnny's "Sleep Walk," but as redolent of suppressed emotion as Eno's "Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960." The musicians here are trynig to playing as quietly as possible, as if not to awaken the neighbours (think also "Pink Frost" by the Chills, of which Mark Sinker once remarked that they sounded as though they had mufflers on their amplifiers). So much space; so much unsaid; Mick Fleetwood's tom-tom refrain about as un-tribal as you could get (compare with its exact contemporary, Gaye's "Grapevine").
"Man Of The World" rents the cover open for a few seconds only. Green has already mused for two verses about his much-travelled but little-learned life ("there's no one I'd rather be") when, at the last line of the second verse, he suddenly slashes his guitar as though he has just slashed his wrists and screams in unfathomable grief "BUT I JUST WISH THAT I HAD NEVER BEEN BORN!" And then, suddenly it's quiet again. Like Poltergeist, it's most frightening when it's quiet, because you're waiting for Green to erupt again. But he doesn't; he leaves you in no doubt that he could if he wanted to, but he doesn't. He just delves back into himself and grieves more deeply ("I wish I was in love" - beyond loneness). Talking to his own mirror, waiting for the blood on the glass to dry up into a makeshift mural.
"Oh Well (Part 1)" is more animated, but Green's problems are as evident and explicit as those of Richey Edwards on The Holy Bible. He pities himself ("I can't sing, I ain't pretty and my legs are thin") but repels any outside attempts to reach him ("Don't ask me what I think of you/I might not give the answer that you want me to"). The guitars are about to reach some sort of climax when suddenly they disappear, and we dissolve into Part 2; a single strummed acoustic, a medieval recorder (let's go back to your CHILDHOOD) - unresolved to fadeout.
And "The Green Manalishi," a top ten hit in 1970 (the equivalent - imagine the Manics' "4st 7lbs" being a top ten hit in 1994) is one long, lost fadeout. What is the two-pronged crown? It's his own demons which have come to devour him. The riff endlessly repeats; there's hardly a song, just an indistinct scream deep within. He is saying help me, I'm trapped, I trapped mysefl. As with "You're Holding Me Down" by the Buzz or (more literally) the closing moments of Notorious BIG's Ready To Die, it's the sound of someone committing suicide on a pop record. The band couldn't disentangle them; as with Floyd/Barrett, they weren't particularly inclined to do so either.
The second predominant Mac was that driven by Buckingham and Nicks - the polar opposite; in this group's work there is candid, exquisite neurosis. Lives, relationships collapse within them and around them as they make themselves bankable again with Fleetwood Mac and Rumours. Even in something like the former's "Landslide," Stevie nixes any notion of her own permanence ("If you see my reflection on the snow-covered hills/A landslide will bring it down"). Less overtly melodramatic than "Gold Dust Woman" but a statement of determined invulnerability set against internal collapse worthy to stand against its descendent - "Delicate Cutters" by Throwing Muses.
Oh "Dreams." To hell with the Corrs. You can't compress the emotions in this song into one chord. The whole punctum of this Nicks song is that it's unresolved. The way Stevie trembles the word "go" over six syllables in the final chorus of "women, they will come and they will go" is as unreproducable as Sinatra's ascending "IIIIIIII would sacrifice anything..." with which he charges back into "I've Got You Under My Skin." And is there a more heartbreaking or poignant final chord in any pop record than that which ends "Dreams"? You could never notate that.
In "Sara" from the Tusk album, Stevie of course elects to drown, to surrender to emotions engendered by the Other. She never quite resurfaced; her work thereafter leans more towards the studium. Maybe she was just happier. A full and unsurpassable discussion of this song can be found in the old Melody Maker booklet Unknown Pleasures, in which Simon Reynolds dissects Tusk in detail (memo to Simon: please post this on Blissout. It's a work of art).
But we mustn't forget Buckingham either. Even by 1979's advanced standards, "Tusk" the song is a queer piece of work, with its marching bands, its never-quite-a-chorus, its quiescent paranoia ("why don't you tell me who's on the 'phone?"), its climactic repeated scream of "DON'T TELL ME THAT YOU LOVE ME!" - the other end of "Oh Well"'s prism? - the freeform multiple drums which stand in for a middle-eight (as though the UCLA marching band had inadvertently walked into a John Stevens/SME workshop). In the UK this was their biggest hit single since "Oh Well."
And fifteen years of hindsight lead me to think that 1987's Tango In The Night is, sonically, rather more of an avant-garde work than it was given credit for at the time. Here Buckingham's production echoes in all kinds of strange places, like a mentholated Lee Perry. "Big Love" is a sort of sequel to "Tusk" but equally paranoid; the collective grunts which climax it sound as far away from orgasm as could be imagined. The weird varispeeded voices which lurk out of every orifice on "Family Man." The post-ZTT bliss of "Little Lies" which occupies the exact middle ground between Prefab Sprout and Bucks Fizz (and this in a Christine McVie song; very much the rational straight player in Mac, and consequently the least interesting).
Buckingham, Nicks, Fleetwood and McVie are currently recording a new album - their first as a unit since TOIN - to be released next year. Glitch input? Neptunes input? Don't rule out either.
. . .
Wednesday, October 30, 2002
LL COOL J’S BLOOD ON THE TRACKS
or: Is There Anything The Neptunes Can Do Which Isn’t Visionary?
There’s a new LL Cool J album just out. It’s called 10, because it’s his tenth album, to which he makes numerous references over the course of the record. By my count, it’s the fifth essential LL album, and the first essential one since 18 Shots To The Dome nine years ago. By temporal, if not thematic, standards (no lamenting over divorces here), this is his Blood On The Tracks.
Facile, perhaps, to say that the involvement of the Neptunes in five of the album’s 14 tracks has urged him to raise his game for this album, but it’s hard to over-emphasise just how revitalised LL sounds here. His tenth album sounds so fresh that it might as well be his first. And it’s as well that we remember how extraordinary a break with what even was then the “tradition” of rap that his actual first album Radio was back in 1985; instead of freestyle and therefore inconsistent jams (see the first Sugarhill Gang album for evidence of how turgid this could get sonically), here were sharp, punchy, to the point, song-like constructions, meticulous in their architecture but stripped of middlebrow aspirations to recapture the directness redolent in original rock and roll (Rick Rubin confirmed this in so many words). And the utterly convincing conviction of 1987’s sequel Bigger And Deffer cemented this power; hear the sheer reconstructive joy of “Go Cut Creator Go” as they uncover the original demons and reclaim them – even though, in the hit ballad “I Need Love,” there were already signs of compromise (for an astonishing whiteboy counterpart to the latter, hear Momus’ contemporaneous “Closer To You”). And the single of the same year, “Goin’ Back To Cali,” suggested new harmolodic paths down which rap could travel.
And here, on 10, LL recaptures everything. You could say that he needed to reinstate himself with this album, particularly in view of the supremely confident gauntlet laid down by Jay-Z on The Blueprint (the finest mainstream hip hop album ever?). Here he comes across as Jay-Z’s older but no less powerful brother.
We need to deal with the Neptunes tracks first. “Luv U Better,” already a top ten single, is another in their seemingly endless line of visionary masterpieces (like Trevor Horn in 1981-85, they seem to ooze punctum with everything they do). Remembering the Acieed-anticipating varispeed bells which sounded so radical on 1985’s “Rock The Bells” and distorted and readjusted all our perceptions of what hip hop could do, here the woozy psychedelic guitar wow and flutter of the Neptunes’ backing is worthy to stand beside MBV – indeed, this track could be hip hop’s “To Here Knows When.” “Niggy Nuts” is a haze of a stumble utilising a chirping cricket drone as percussion. “Clockin’ G’s” is a blissfully unresolved shuffle over which LL drunkenly enthuses about “monopoly” and “property.” The vocal refrain of “if you’ve got the time, then I’ve got the time” could almost have come off the second Talking Heads album. “U Should” is a ballad floating over burst rhythmic tyres; “Amazin’” could potentially be the most avant garde summer hit ever; guest singer Kandice Love with her repeated “baby”s is intent on driving the observer orgasmic.
(And there’s another thesis to be written; the importance of “baby” as a term of endearment for and to the Other. I’m with Julia K on this one; it all goes back to a yearning for the maternal body from which we can never fully escape)
But the invention doesn’t stop with the Neptunes. “Paradise” is a Mary Jane Girls-derived pop-soul utopia; the Shangri-Las coming at you from the other side of the River Styx. “Born To Love You” PUNCTUres the Myth of complete absorption into the Other (the uncredited female singer repeatedly attempts to give herself to LL, only to receive the repeated question: “Why?” Which could be interpreted as: what’s so hot about you, or how worthy am I really?).
There are forward thrusts which place LL back on a par with Jay-Z; the near garage punk drive of “Fa Ha,” beats echoing his boasts like hammers on anvils, and in the glorious “10 Million Stars” LL exults in his self-generated euphoria over a sampled mass choir, finding salvation in sensuality. “Throw Ya L’s Up” is old-school R&B twisted into a trellis of Gothic spindles.
And there are other aspects of love to be addressed here. “Lollipop” manages to outweird the Neptunes; over an atonal sonic carpet, LL giggles his way through his sexual fantasies, right through to an adjacent galaxy. The extraordinary “Mirror Mirror” is claustrophobic in its close-up paranoia, LL’s whispered tones conveying uncertainty and fuelled paranoia about his sexuality. Your body carries traces of the track, so closely miked are the beats.
He ends with a tribute to his grandmother “Big Mama (Unconditional Love)” backed by Dru Hill. Necessary tradition and (at)tributes, perhaps, but far easier to swallow than the perverse piety of india.arie, because of course the rest of this remarkable record sets it up as a logical payoff.
. . .
Tuesday, October 29, 2002
MARC ACARDIPANE, PCP AND THE GLOOMCORE CANON
It would be difficult to follow Simon Reynolds’ definitive article on this most elusive of microgenres in issue 173 of The Wire; indeed it was that article which alerted me to the very existence of operatives like Marc Acardipane, the Mover, Reign/Miro, and others. Almost impossible to get in the UK, where there never has been that great a market for gabba to begin with, let alone this particular sub-stratum – and yet it must be rescued from obscurity.
The 2CD compilation The Best of Marc Acardipane (1989-1997), which appeared on the ID&T Music label in 1997, is the ideal place to start. Chronologically it is best to start with disc 2, as this contains all Acardipane’s early work. Basically this music develops on the template of post-Acieed disorientation most popularly heard on things like “Dominator” by Human Resource and turned into pop by the Prodigy on “Charly.” Something like Turbulence’s 1990 “Disaster Area” creates queasy chord sequences out of tape varispeeding, drifting in and out of focus, in and out of bliss, over a pitiless beat. It is particularly interesting how rap samples/vocals are ripped out of their original macho context and thrust into an asexual limbo; hear especially the tracks by Ace The Space: “9 Is A Classic” (i.e. gun, turntable and dick) and “Go Voodo” where the unstoppable rush cancels out the boasts, turning them into simply another layer, another set of signifiers minus the signified. Masters of Rave’s “Are You With Me” brutally roughs up what could almost be “Old MacDonald Had A Farm.” Nasty Django’s “King Of FFM” (Frankfurt) and Rave Creator’s “Immortal” have the same aesthetic directness that one finds in Rocket From The Tombs or Gang of Four; this music knows exactly where it’s going.
By the time we get to tracks like Nasty Django’s “SGE” and Tilt!’s “Sound Of Emergency” the staccato Gothic choral cut-ups which we find in brutalist rave hits of the time such as T99’s “Anaesthesia” or Quadrophonia’s “Quadrophonia” have become another essential ingredient. This particular approach reaches its climax in PCP’s phenomenal “The Phuture” recorded live in January 1994, which sounds like Hieronymus Bosch pulling down the world into his amoral pit.
Even here, the variety of approaches is remarkable; pointers to the more considered, grandiose Gloomcore such as Marshall Masters’ “Stereo Murder” and The Mover’s “The Emperor Takes Place” are solemn in their spaciousness, like 2 Unlimited drained of their primary colours and re-scored by Laibach. And at the other extreme you can find the still flattening likes of “World’s Hardest MF” by Program 1, and what can only be described as punk – “At War” by the Leathernecks, with its rapid-fire “fuck you, fuck them, fuck the muthafuckas” refrain; so much harder-hitting, even nine years after its recording, than any of the pitiful politesse which passes for “the spirit of punk” today. It is exactly what the likes of the Vines should be aiming to reproduce and develop, were they not so damned reverent of all the wrong things.
Disc 1 concentrates on more recent (1997) stuff, but with a few earlier pieces still thrown in. Certainly I find it remarkable that “I Like It Loud” by Marshall Masters (just two letters away from his successor!) with the Ultimate MC was never considered a hit; even dotted with fucks, this is a cooler DJ Otzi, or a more hardcore Scooter (“If you think it’s too loud, go listen to yr fuckin’ Walkman!”). “Hustler For Life” which finds Nasty Django guesting with Herr Masters “at Club X” is almost as admirably bullish in its approach; the latter rants as the track stops halfway through, commanding the DJ to put the fucker back on ‘COS I NEVER STOP. Generally, though, this CD contains more considered, architectural gabba; Rave Creator’s “A New Mind” slowly dismembers its female “something for your mind” sample into new patterns, although for the real punctum try and find the “Rave Creator’s Original De2001 Raveremix” which initially turns the track into pop and subsequently slows it down to the depths of avant-incomprehensibility. Nasty Django’s “Hardcore Muthafucka” is based on a sample of a young kid intoning the title; Turbulence’s “6 Million Ways To Die” starts off with the entire, unadulterated intro to Sid Vicious’ “My Way” before turning it into a jackhammer rave-down. But the stand-out track for me here is “Slaves To The Rave” by Inferno Bros. Hear how it begins with splashes of water and a distant humming choir (which could almost be “Rivers Of Babylon” by Boney M). The latter is quickly dehumanised into a beelike drone and a beat which seems to rebound from inside your skull. Eventually the whole track slows down into a watery grave, as though slipping into an aesthetic swamp.
What were others up to? Certainly a greater ethereality and sense of doom and foreboding became gradually evident; hear the near-delicacy within aggression of something like “Astral Dreams ’94 (Cold Planet Remix)” by The Mover and Rave Creator, or Trip Commando’s “3rd Trip Phase,” the latter of which could almost pass for a psychedelic lament straight outta Easter Everywhere. Also necessary to hear is Renegade Legion’s “Torsion” which may well be the one track which balances perfectly all the approaches described above; propulsive yet melodically reflective.
Above all you must hear the work of Reign (also known as Miro and various other pseudonyms) for what delicately avoids being Goth but instead introduces a terrible grandeur to Gloomcore; listen to the regretful lamenting melodies of “Light And Dark (The Next Dimension)” and “Skeletons’ March.” And his greatest achievement may well be the track “Hall,” specifically the Maximum Mix, which refracts the poignant chord changes through a screen of water (and water seems to be a recurring factor or leitmotif in a lot of these tracks), reminding one of a drowned cathedral, or a ruined 16th-century mansion, its grand debris floating in the depths, undiscovered for 400 years. A meditation on the transience of people and things. “Hall” is one of the great singles of the ‘90s.
The Mover covers much the same territory in tracks like “Final Sickness.” Other operatives to be noted include Mescalinum United, whose 1989 track “We Have Arrived,” which kicks off the second Acardipane disc, set the tone for everything which followed, but whose masterpiece is the shattering “Symphonies Of Steel (Part 1)” – the choirs of Bayreuth continuing to sing as both the roof and the floor cave in. Like much of what is being celebrated here, this is 170+ bpm (in some cases, e.g. “Symphonies Of Steel,” 200+ bpm) and not immediately danceable to those who have not understood, or at least ingested, which probably explains its micro-share of the dance market. Architecturally, however, the music is, at its best, literally awesome – with “Hall” you actually have to stand back from the speakers in vertiginous disbelief. Superpower’s “Move: Don’t Stop” takes the surface off dance cliches to find the brutal yet stunning lack of pity beneath. The camp commandant barking at you to dance for your life.
And, amongst all of this, emerges a pearl of a group (if it is a group) – The Horrorist. Would it be fair to categorise him/them as Gloomcore? In fact the seven tracks I have by them seem to indicate proto-Electroclash – but better because it takes No Wave into account as well as shiny yellow New Pop. Certainly “Wet and Shiny” with its Devo-meets-Numan filtered vocals (check that flittery “ohhhh”) and measured pauses is an Electroclash classic waiting to be discovered. Better still is “Mission Extacy” which could best be described as a cross between a psychotic Jonathan Richman and a destabilised Underworld. The deliberately juvenile vocal (ah, Supergrass, to think – you could have been capable of this had you the nerve!) narrates the story of cadging lifts and money with the ultimate aim of getting some Es “’cos I like fucking drugs,” its assumed menace contrasting nicely with the faux-naif leitmotif of “my school project.” Actually this is a very funny record as well as a powerful one – aurally it foresees the likes of LCD Soundsystem, amongst other things – and the musical gear-change ascent when they have ingested their Es into gabba heaven is particularly inspired.
Tracks like “Run For Your Life” and “Flesh Is The Fever” are very strongly reminiscent, in their hypermanic, epileptic rhythmic/vocal onslaught, of the hecticity underpinning the best of the No Wave operatives (especially James Chance and the Contortions at their best – go and buy Buy now!) (if you can find it) – the rush of drug adrenalin failing to dispel the confusion and fear beneath. And I still can’t imagine the likes of Interpol or Ladytron (given their respective merits) coming up with something as mindblowing as “One Night In NYC” which sets a tale of sordid urban seduction against a feather-light lullaby glockenspiel-led backing and within a fairy tale scenario with a deeply unsettling result, its power perhaps rivalled only in contemporary hip hop (Eminem’s “Kim” most obviously, but also Raekwon’s “Rainy Days,” the Coup’s “Me And Jesus The Pimp In A ’79 Granada Last Night,” etc.). Discover him/them now, any way you can.
(Profound thanks must go out to my good friend Simon Reynolds for his invaluable work and extremely generous assistance, without which this article would not have been possible. To get hold of at least some of this music, there’s a PCP Mailorder Worldwide telephone number listed on the sleeve of the Acardipane compilation - #49 (0) 69 440022. Bear in mind that this release is now five years old, so I’ve no idea whether this number is still valid, but it’s worth trying)
. . .
Monday, October 28, 2002
IAIN SINCLAIR’S M25 LONDON ORBITAL
Barbican, London, 25 October 2002
“A parallelist performance in three-lane theatre” we were promised. Three blue projection screens at stage right, centre and left, each showing excerpts from Chris Petit’s filmed journeys around the M25; not the same film which will be shown on C4 on Tuesday 29 October, but three ways of hypnotising the viewer into acceptance. Sequences were sometimes swift, clear; others peered out from behind a shroud of grey rain, scarcely moving. We see what we choose to see, except that if you are attentive enough the same images will recur, at different stages, at different speeds, on all the screens.
Petit had the easy part of the job; driving around the ring. Iain Sinclair walked around its perimeters, starting from the Millennium Dome (“an urge to walk away from the Teflon meteorite on Bugsby’s Marshes”), in an attempt to find an end destination in its unending circle, to find what London was protecting itself from by setting up this metaphorical barbed wire, and how those on the outside refused to see it as a barrier, but rather as an easier gate to penetrate the city fortress (more and newer targets for burglars). The absence of the city, celebrated in the epicentre of the City.
Sinclair acted as compere/Greek chorus for the evening, reading key extracts from his book London Orbital (the event sells the book, the book is a passport to the event). Dressed in carefully rumpled black, looking like how I will look in ten years’ time, undisturbed by Bruce Gilbert’s possibly non-random electronic eruptions punctuating his opening perorations, he welcomed us to this arena for his repertory company of misfits; Ed Wood as Boswell, Joe Meek as Ackroyd. He is careful to abandon.
After ten minutes or so he made way for Bill Drummond, who cheerfully ambled on stage with a painting which he’d finished at 3:00 that morning – trisectional; GIMPO black on white; below that GIMPO black on white again; at the bottom GIMPO white on black. Gimpo being the visionary who on each spring equinox weekend (except for the last one, having been detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure) started off at South Mimms service station and spent 24 hours driving ceaselessly around the M25, celebrating its implied paganism (albeit borne out of capitalism at its most market-driven). Drummond, looking more like Michael Palin every time I see him, announced that the painting on stage would be given to the estate of the first member of the audience who succeeded in committing suicide by means of a motor accident on the M25. Someday, sooner than I think, this painting will be claimed.
Then came Ken Campbell, who quite correctly ignored the entire subject matter of the evening and delivered a stirring lecture on the history of ventriloquism (classes in which he has recently been organising) stretching from its origins in ferrets (one would clamp their jaws on the first piece of meat found and imitate the voice of another ferret in the group to dissuade it from nicking said meat) and the first human vent (ancient Egyptian pygmy Bisu) to its decline in the Victorian era, succinctly described by Henry Mayhew (whom Campbell described as a Sinclair of the 19th century, though I think that Cobbett might be nearer the truth) in terms of questionable functions of the middle organs of the body. Well, you like to believe Welles’ bullfighting stories, don’t you? (except this was in Mayhew; I checked London Labour and the London Poor afterwards).
Then more Sinclair, by now edging out into the western perimeters of the M25 (the Colne Valley, Harefield Hospital, what have you). Dotted by old dopeheads uprooted from Notting Hill when the money came in; tarot cards, rituals, canal barges – displaced hangovers, in this writer’s experience all the way up the A40 to Oxford (climb up the hill populated by electronic gates and local television news presenters, make your way across the bridge, the Didcot cooling towers winking their reliable confirmation of orientation behind your left shoulder, and trawl to the only pub in Cumnor; they’re still in purple, still extolling the Principal Edwards Magic Theatre, Van Morrison’s Remington nose clippings reconstructed as post-CAMRA beermats). After some brief ambience from Scanner, Sinclair announced the arrival of Britain’s greatest poet (his perspective) Bill Griffiths, on his way down from Cowley, seeking relief from his Bartok piano runs. A matter for another book as to how many of London’s keenest and most detail-obsessed observers – Patrick Keillor, Brian Cowling – actually pitch their tents in Oxford. Like Sinclair, I too see it as an umbilical extension of London, the Thames linking the twin towers of capitalism and skullduggery, and thinking and contemplation. You couldn’t have Oxford without London; the latter breathes its kiss subtly all the way up to Witney and beyond, whispering “why aren’t you with me? you WANT to be with me.” But would we take the trouble to decamp to the cynosure? In some ways, Streatham is much further from London than Oxford will ever be.
Griffiths strolled on stage, played some slowly mutating block piano chords (to mirror the gridlock occurring on the screens at that stage) like Bill Evans trying to avoid breaking into Satie’s “Vexations,” then recited one of his poems “Rabbit Hunt,” a boyhood canal Arcady played out in the shadow of the old K-Tel building. At one point I imagined that he referred to “the Botley pass,” my former local point of entry. Perhaps I meant to imagine it; his delivery was indistinct (and maybe that’s how he likes it; his writing is endlessly revised and reissued; no edition is definitive; everything subject to alterations). He finally returned to the piano to pick out a few Oriental curlicues and wandered off.
Kevin Jackson of the Independent, who had joined Sinclair for part of his walk (the western end; he lives in Shepherd’s Bush) only to find himself trapped into 24 hours of walking and consequent foot ruination, wandered over-familiarly onstage and detonated some unamusing journalistic ramblings. It was Miles Kington wry. Jackson looked as though he’d missed the news about John Bonham. He was out of place here. But then who wasn’t?
Wire certainly weren’t; the musical highlight of the evening was their methodical yet punctum-driven reworking of “Dot Dash” as “Dim Flash,” the Krafty-werkers’ “Autobahn” restaged to symbolise the English non-movement. They stood in line. A mightily sad hymnal chord descension rebarbed again and again. Newman and Lewis intoned as they have always done. The rhythm started to pummel as they reached the familiar but recontextualised chorus. It was a motion threnody; like the M25 the members ran on the spot or decided not to move at all – the machines did all the movement we needed. A notion – 25 years on and they sound like the English Suicide; the entire audience consisting mainly of the usual mix of Dalston-residing students and middle-aged, bescarved Fulham Road tourists moved enthusiastically to the same electro that in 1977 they would have decried noisily for the more luxuriant options of Deaf School or Elkie Brooks.
Sadly, the evening’s intended star turn J G Ballard had come down with a stomach bug which had mutated into ‘flu and so wasn’t able to attend. Sinclair and Petit, undeterred, sat in the chat-show section of the stage with a cardboard cutout of Ballard in between them. Sinclair remarked that Ballard didn’t even know where the Barbican was, had probably never been west of Shepherds Bush in his life, but spoke warmly of him, even though he subtly underlined that he had been banging on about the same things since the ‘60s. Like Kraftwerk, the world has caught up with Ballard, but he doesn’t seem to mind; his poem “What I Believe” was rendered with great solemnity by Sinclair and Petit. Ballard remarked that England had always had a problem getting into the 20th century; Kensington (Cotswolds) and Dagenham, in their own ways, were as quaint as Stanley Spencer’s Cookham.
(except of course Spencer was never quaint; his particular bonding with sex and death in HIS Church of Me is never far away from Ballard’s meticulous car wrecks)
After the intermission, time to wrap things up by destabilising expectations even further. Scanner reappeared with his usual morphing of mobile ‘phone conversations (“you forgot the BRUSH!”) which quickly became subsumed by a bass arsequake. Nothing on the screens appeared to be moving; a slow-motion lorry (“BULKHAUL”) was focused upon stage right, the driver seemingly reluctant to look the camera in the eye; in the centre, a series of cones which became artworks in themselves; roadworks, or an accident (what were those odd bodies lying in the road?).
Aaron Williamson – a Ranter poet of some repute from Brighton who uttered not a word this evening, simply crawled onstage buckled under the obligation of supporting a silver chair and a large silver wheel (he himself was clad in glamrock silver Bacofoil). A reverse phallus of a saw protruding from his rear stops him from sitting down; he methodically takes the saw to the chair, and then sits on it, splitting it into two perfect halves. He then re-burdens himself with the twin chairs and wheel and crawls offstage again. “It’s the only way to travel,” remarked Sinclair at his departing rear; possibly all a reference to the Oxford Tube. His perseverance was admirable.
Jimmy Cauty was billed to come on next with his “M25 Symphony” but of course Drummond came on with him to massed cheers. Clad in full orange motorway maintenance clothing to the strains of “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the reconstituted KLF, clearly not fucked by the millennium, roared into a hammering punk-rave roar (“Who’s got the power?” appeared to be the chant; correct me if it wasn’t) somewhere in between the Extreme Noise Terror version of “3AM Eternal” and “America: What Time Is Love?” and which still managed singlehandedly to show the absolute abyss of faux-rock and roll currently perpetrated by bands with five letters in their name. The biggest reception of the evening (“MORE MORE! KLF are the Real Britpop!”) – the singles compilation/box set surely cannot be that far away; this work DEMANDS to be put back into circulation.
And then to where Sinclair had chosen to place his ending: the site of the old Carfax Abbey at Purfleet, now accessible across the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, where Stoker decided to situate Dracula’s London base, with its easy access to the sea, and supplies. Now occupied by the Proctor and Gamble headquarters/factory; blood continuing to be sucked in by dodgy fuckers, reprobates, making the invisible London possible. Brian Catling (“on day release from the University of Oxford”) strode onstage, proceeded to appear to tear out his heart and eat it (and later on another one) to massed “yeucchs,” and murmured a largely inaudible poetic lament in what one assumes was a Transylvanian accent. The delivery was what mattered; bluff, rapid, throwaway, like humanity as the M25 sees it.
Earlier on Sinclair had talked about the asylums which had turned into hospitals (the Horton triad at the Surrey end), surrogate communities for troublemaking lower orders. How Lydia Jackson 100 years ago tried to escape by walking out and failed; how Reggie Kray succeeded in escaping by driving out. Now Bluewater had replaced the old asylums; America on your doorstep without all the post-9/11 hassle. There to satisfy, to kill imagination. The perfect purpose of the M25 as Bruce Gilbert’s drone snaked underneath Sinclair’s and Petit’s voices. All the while, on the screen stage right, a slow crossing over the QEII Bridge brought us to Purfleet, the camera in the slowest of motions, relishing the forbidding towers and shadows of the Proctor and Gamble compound, lingering on them, waiting for the immortal vampire to re-emerge.
Purfleet is the same distance from central London as Hampton Court.
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