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The A-Z Of All Time Great Pop Singles: L

2011-07-05T04:35:00.000-07:00

L is for...Louie Louie, by The Kingsmen

Because it contains my favourite moment in the entire history of recorded sound.

Whole books have been written about Louie Louie. Every garage band worth their garage have recorded a version of it. More than any other song on this list, my choice for 'L' was never in any doubt. If you want to understand what this A-Z is about, and by extension what I think all the best pop music is about, listen to this record. There's probably absolutely nothing I can add to Louie Louie-ology that has not been already said by many others a million times, but, if we are to learn anything from The Kingsmen, it is that a lack of having anything original to say, or even the talent to make a reasonably accomplished copy of something wholly unoriginal, should not dissuade you from Giving It Your Best Shot Anyway.

My Favourite Moment In The Entire History Of Recorded Sound

Throughout Louie Louie, drummer Lynn Easton has potentially sounded the most clueless and deranged of all the Kingsmen, clattering wildly, exploding crazed rolls and breaks underneath the melody apparently at random - it's unconventionally effective, but you definitely wouldn't be surprised if this was the first time he's ever heard this song, or sat at a drum kit.

At 1:58, following the middle eight guitar break, the singer, Jack Ely, comes in a line too early. Recognising the error, he panics, and cuts himself short after just one word. Up until this point, the performance has been as error-free as The Kingsmen are ever going to manage. They can't get this take again. This is THE TAKE. History has reached a crossroads. Planets stop turning. ...And then, as if suddenly possessed by the holy drumming trinity of Buddy Rich, Max Roach and Elvin Jones, Lynn Easton does something remarkable - he improvises, somehow cobbling together a stumbling, but absolutely crucial, fill, vamping out of his mind for the few crucial seconds until Ely can rejoin the song at the correct point. And They Left This Epochal Moment In Western Civilisation On The Actual Record.

Often when this moment is written about, it is from the perspective of Louie Louie being the godfather of Punk Trash Pop. By leaving the 'mistake' at 1:58 in the final recording, the band are perceived as exhibiting a lack of concern with getting the 'perfect take' - indeed, perhaps the Kingsmen were incapable of a perfect take. This establishes Louie Louie as belonging to a canon that is in opposition to the classical / jazz / prog rock canon of lifeless, schooled musicianship. And while I think that this analysis is entirely fair, it's also more than that. What's incredible about this moment is not the mistake, but the correction by Lynn Easton of it. It's about triumphing over the odds, and about people transcending their limitations, for the benefit of others. The drummer summons from nowhere the ability to do something contrary to everything else he's done throughout the song - the ability, presence of mind, and skill to do exactly the right thing, at exactly the right time. This moment isn't remarkable because it's unusual to hear such an obvious blunder in a pop record - it's remarkable because Easton, in a moment of true inspiration, snatches victory from the jaws of defeat, enabling his band mates to clatter their way successfully to the finishing line. It's the raw, exhilarating humanity of this moment that makes it special.

The Kingsmen's Louie Louie is an exquisitely charming and loveable record - it is the sound of a band struggling to achieve mastery over the world's most basic song structure, wailing and faliling, persevering, and ultimately succeeding. Succeeding not because they nail a technically perfect game, but because they make it to the end, together, and having absolutely stamped their own mark on a standard - infact, against all the odds, they have recorded the Definitive Version of that standard. It is a cinema verite recording bursting with humanity. It is Alive.

The A-Z Of All Time Great Pop Singles: K

2011-07-04T05:33:00.000-07:00

K is for: 'King Tut', by Steve Martin & The Toot Uncommons

Or: The Novelty Disco Single, Post-Modernism's Black Hole And The Fall Of Western Civilisation

Or: Paul Thinks Way Too Hard About Something That May Not Justify The Analysis

So if The Avalanche's 'Frontier Psychiatrist' is an example of a great pop single that might be mistaken for a novelty song but definitely isn't one, Steve Martin's King Tut is an example of a great pop single that is absolutely 100% a novelty song...but it's more than that, too. Like much of Martin's best comedy work, it's both The Thing That It Is, and an off-kilter, deliberately dumb-ass, parody Of That Thing.

King Tut is without doubt, first and foremost, a quick-buck novelty single, released to make a dollar on the back of two coinciding late 70s phenomena - the King Tutankhamen exhibit which was touring the globe at the time, and the rapid escalation of Steve Martin's own immense, football-stadium-filling popularity (see video above). It's in a grand tradition of faddy pop-trend cash-in singles, from The Chipmunk Song to Rastamouse's (rather brilliant) 'Ice Popp'. It's also genuinely, laugh-out loud funny.

Precisely because King Tut is a Novelty Fad Cash-In Single, it cannot function entirely successfully as a parody of Novelty Cash-In Singles. King Tut was a commercial product, people made money from it, and its major selling point was Steve Martin's contemporary pop-culture currency. This, as far as I see it, is the gaping, soulless, black hole at the centre of post-modernism's universe - "we know this is trash, that's the joke, it's ironic, but we're going to make a definitely non-ironic profit off of it anyway, which is almost part of the joke too, right..." It's a difficult position to defend, and leaves King Tut - like much 'ironic' pop culture product -almost fatally compromised and conflicted.

While King Tut's general parody the Novelty Fad Cash-In Single sort-of-doesn't-quite-work, King Tut's specific parody of The Novelty Disco Single is hugely enjoyable, and executed in a smart and imaginative manner. The disco era was proved particularly fertile for the novelty-hit pop single; (the entire disco genre was regarded by many as a mere novelty, a, ahem, flash (dance) in the pan), and for a short period in 1978, whacking a four-to-the-floor beat behind something and sticking the word 'Disco' in front of the title was considered legitimate hit-making methodology. King Tut's best 'joke' is the typically Martin-ish non-sequitur that occurs during the middle eight, when the song shifts for absolutely no discernible reason from a loping cod-Egyptian skank to an up-tempo, generic disco strut, complete with inane "Dancin' by the nile - Disco Tut! The ladies love his style - Boss Tut!" lyrics. Echoing the outrageously cynical and musically jarring attempts by multiple established Classic Rock acts to suddenly and unconvincingly 'go disco' (see: Kiss, The Rolling Stones, even the Grateful Dead), this is a pretty good gag, and a far more effective and incisive pastiche of that unfortunate trend than a straight disco track would have achieved.

And if 'successfully quite funny parody of novelty disco' was King Tut's grandest achievement, that would be enough....but it has a far wider point to make. The central premise of the King Tut joke is that a novelty disco song about Tutankhamen is the natural end-game of a 20th Century culture in which everything, including the holy relics of ancient cultures, is fair game for the mass-production, mainstream capitalist-media-machine. I guess you could sum this up as "Nothing Is Sacred", or as Christian Slater observes in 'Pump Up The Volume' : "All the great themes have been used up, and turned into theme parks." History is dead, all that's left is novelty disco songs about history, and a wildly inaccurate version of history ("Born in Arizona, moved to Babylonia!") at that. It's a bleak message.

Martin's stand-up shtick was a parody of stand-up, a commentary on it, and in this way King Tut ultimately works because releasing an awful novelty disco track is precisely the sort of thing that the type of buffoonish light entertainment personality he parodied would do. It's consistent with his act, and therefore, artistically, legitimate. On the other hand - it's still product, he still charged people for it, and there's something very difficult, impossible even, to reconcile about those positions. It's very easy to shout 'irony' in a crowded market place. Smart, but very compromised: King Tut.

The A-Z Of All Time Great Pop Singles: J

2011-06-23T13:00:00.000-07:00

J is for...Johnny B Goode, by Chuck Berry / Marvin Berry & The Starlighters

"Woah...Rock 'n' Roll."

The very first line of Back To The Future. Can you think of a better first line in a movie? (Actually, The Wild Bunch's "If they move - kill 'em" is a close contender) For all the credit the Back To The Future movies get, they still don't get enough. Certainly not the first movie, which by my estimation is about as perfect a piece of popular art as has ever been produced by the Hollywood machine. Mind-bogglingly well-constructed, sublime lead performances, an endlessly quoteable script, a concept (time-travelling Delorean) so insanely, gloriously B-Movieish it's a wonder the movie ever got made, masses to say about the development of pop youth culture from the 50s Dawn Of The Teenager to the Mtv 80s, and with a love of Rock And Roll at it's heart, Back To The Future is the teen-adventure movie in excelsis. And smart? Like a fox.

.1. In 1985, the McFly family are enjoying a re-run of an old Honeymooners episode entitled 'The Man From Space'.

.2. In 1955, the Baines family are watching this episode's TV debut. Marty causes some confusion by stating that he's already seen this episode, calling it "a classic - Ralph dresses up as a man from space," and attempts to explain that he must have seen a "re-run."

.3. In the next scene, Marty and Doc are shown 're-running' the video camera footage Marty shot at Twin Pines Mall on a TV set. The notion of 're-running' situations, events and images is common to the whole trilogy, but finds it's purest expression here, where an earlier scene from the film is actually repeated on television, becoming a re-run.

.4. Marty, dressed in a radiation suit, is himself mistaken for a Man From Space earlier in the movie, and later dons the suit again to deliberately impersonate an alien.

I just think this is massively impressive; post-modern without being smart-alecy, it deals with complex ideas in a fun way, and totally integrates them into the story.

Uh...I was meant to be talking about Johnny Be Goode, wasn't I?

For people of a certain age, Marty's performance of this song at the end of BTTF defined their adolescent understanding of what Rock and Roll IS. "It's a blues riff in B, watch me for the changes, and try to keep up" is the only way anybody should ever introduce any song, regardless of whether it's actually a blues riff in B or not. The escalation of Marty's wild abandon as the spirit of rock and roll electrifies his soul, duck-walking, amp-kicking and Hendrix-wailing across the Hill Valley High School stage, remains one of the truly great celluloid evocations of pop music's almighty power. Lots of movies have great soundtracks, but few get pop music in the way BTTF does, or have done as much to engender a love of it in its audience. Like much of Berry's work, Johnny B Goode is a song about rock and roll, making it the perfect choice for this scene. From a film characterised by unparalleled attention to detail, you would expect nothing less.

The A-Z Of All Time Great Singles: I

2011-06-15T12:01:00.000-07:00

I is for: 'I Think We're Alone Now' - Tommy James & The Shondells (1967) / Tiffany (1988)*
*And also Girls Aloud, but their version was uncharacteristically woeful and pointless. For shame, Girls Aloud.

(So check this out for inter-textual pop-geekery: My choice for 'H' (Heaven Is A Place On Earth) was knocked off the Number One spot in 1988 by my choice for 'I' (I Think We're Alone Now).You might - but probably won't - be interested to learn that the song that knocked Tiffany off Number One was another 'I' record, Kylie's 'I Should Be So Lucky', completing a remarkable triple-whammy of 80s Girl Pop chart dominance during this period.)

So, I have A Bit Of A Thing for 80s / early 90s Super Pop; The Bangles, Pat Benatar, Go-Gos and Ex Go-Gos...and yes, even Tiffany. Well...not really Tiffany. But this song at least, and one good song is all that matters. I've dug Tiffany's version on some level ever since I was a kid, but only I only found out that it was a cover-version a couple of years back. I like pretty much both versions equally. They have different things going for them, but they fulfill the same remit in their respective eras, that of being Definitive Bubbblegum Pop.

Tiffany's video for this, if you recall, was filmed in a mall. If you want to know what US teen-culture looked like in 1987, watch this video. It tells you everything you need to know. If you want to know what US teen-culture looked like in 1967...go buy the Doors first album. But also take three minutes to listen to The Shondell's original version of I Think We're Alone Now, because although it couldn't have less to say about the Woodstock Nation, it's certainly a very enjoyable slice of MOR Apple Pie pop-rock, and has the edge on 'Light My Fire' in that it's like about a fith as long, and has a chirrping crickets sound effect on it, and no matter how much acid he gulped, Jim Morrison never thought to put insect sound effects on his records.**

**Tiffany had the good sense to repeat the crickets sound effect at the beginning of her version, a pretty cool nod to the original. Thus ends the nerdiest A-Z post so far.

The A-Z of All Time Great Pop Singles: "H"

2011-06-01T11:56:00.001-07:00

H is for: "Heaven Is A Place On Earth", by Belinda Carlisle

Few pop-music related things seem as wrongheaded to me as the concept of the "guilty pleasure". Nobody should feel guilty about the pop music they take pleasure from, at least not if the cause of guilt is simply the perception that the music which pleasures them is not Cool. For the pleasure someone derives from listening to a pop record to be found Guilty, we must accept that somewhere there is a judge and jury passing sentance on what is the Right Sort Of Music and what is The Wrong Sort Of Music. This sort of joy-killing fascism is the antithesis of everything pop music should be about, and is largely a construct of an entertainment industry which, in order to market it's product effectively, divides it's consumer demographic into managable sub-sections and pitches them in opposition against one another in an eternal battle of My Scene Is Better Than Your Scene.

The consequence of this tactic is that pop music becomes a tool of exclusivity, of elitism, a way of establishing who's Out and who's In. When you're a kid, this has it's uses. Maybe it's even a healthy part of growing up. But there comes a point when you're meant to out-grow that shit, and it strikes me that Babyboomer culture, with a premium placed on Cool, and Youth, and Being Hip To The Latest Groove, has prolonged the period of somebody's life where this sort of mentality is acceptable, or smart, or healthy, pretty much indefinately. I think that's a shame, because it means that people are more uptight, for longer, and feel less empowered to stand up and say "You know what. I think Gang Of Four are OK. But it's really more of an intellectual thing. What really gets my blood pumping is Heaven Is A Place on Earth by Belinda Carlisle, and Uncut Magazine can Go To Hell."

(Note: I DJ'd at the wedding of my very good friends Lee & Jud, and 'dropping' this record during my 'set' still stands as the most fun I've ever had behind a pair of decks.)

(Another Note: Belinda would have been one of two ex-Go-Go Girls to make an appearence on this A-Z, had 'R' not already been over-subscribed. Jane Wiedlin's unbelievably great 'Rush Hour', unfortunately, won't quite make the cut.)

The A-Z Of All-Time Great Pop Singles: "G"

2011-05-25T12:36:00.000-07:00

G is for 'Green Onions' by Booker T & The MGs

Simply because it never gets old, which is remarkable, because it's, like, really old. 1962, man, and those Onions sound just as fresh today as they did when Booker T first cooked 'em up.

While lacking the lyrical themes, vocal stylings and Flute Solo that California Dreamin' has somehow managed to overcome in it's avoidance of not being an irritating Babyboomer nostalgia yawnfest, this Hammond Organ instrumental (surely the most famous organ instrumental of all-time) is still Typically 60s enough, and recycled as a 60s Soundtrack Shortcut often enough, to make it astounding in itself that it hasn't become a tiresome relic. But is Absloutley Hasn't. It falls into the same category as Louie Louie - put Green Onions on in a club, any club, anywhere, and People Will Dance. I DJ'd at a Sixties Night for 5 years, and played all sortsa obscure nonsense - but not playing this was simply never an option. It has The Vibe. It creates a whole scene. It's Three Dimensional - it transports you. Smoky, slinky, COOL.

Green Onions is an example of the Good Will Out, of The Cream Rising To The Top. Of popular culture Getting It Right. Why is this the most famous Organ Instro? Because it's the best one. There are loads of other great organ instros, thousands of 'em infact, but if we gotta pick one, let's all just agree on this one. I like Jimmy Smith's Root Down pretty much more than any record on earth, but it doesn't have the whole package like Green Onions does. This is a pop record. It has hooks. You can sing along. It hits the ground...well, not running...it hits the ground grooving. And that guitar...Steve Cropper's guitar...might just be my favourite guitar part ever. SHRAK! SHRUK! He play's next to nothing, and get's it absolutely right.

Finally, Booker T. He was like 17 years old when he played on this record. How insane is that? 17 years old, and you're on a record that people will still be digging for centuries to come. The video above is simply one of my all-time fave pieces of video. Booker T's expression at 2.52 makes me laugh every time; mugging to the crowd, grinning his ass off as he plays the most insane, juddering, outrageous organ solo, like "I KNOW, RIGHT? I'M AWESOME! THIS SONG IS AWESOME! Check out what I'm doing on this organ! It's RIDICULOUS!"

The A-Z Of All-Time Great Pop Singles: "F"

2011-05-14T08:09:00.000-07:00

F is for: Frontier Psychiatrist by The Avalanches

John Lennon said of Revolution #9, the cut & paste sound collage piece regarded by many proponants of "Proper Music" as Not Being Proper Music, that he had expended more time and energy on the creation of that White Album epic than he had on much of his back catalogue, the inference being: 'I can knock out tunes on my acoustic guitar all day. It's stuff like that which is throw-away and lazy and inconsequential, not this. This took real effort. This was the challenge. And it's valid.'

But as much as I like Revolution #9, and could spend all day defending it...it sure ain't funky. It took hip-hop, maybe 7 or 8 years later, to marry the avant-garde cut-ups of postmodernist art as exemplified by Revolution #9, and the dancefloor filling RnB sensibilities of James Brown. Revolution #9 was self-conciously anti-pop - it was designed to shock and disturb and shake the squares from their bourgeois slumber. Grandmaster Flash's The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel was super-pop, designed to amuse and move and get the squares to shake their tail feathers.

And as far as bone fide hit records go, few have ever taken the model of imaginative collage + humour + grooviness and done anything with it nearly as joyfully, danceably, delightfully brilliant as Australia's The Avalanches did on their 2000 Top 20 sampledelic smasheroo, Frontier Psychiatrist. I Love This Record. I probably wouldn't have even bothered doing this list if I hadn't wanted a reason to write about Frontier Psychiatrist. Alphabet Of Pop aside, I'd still put this in my all-time Top 50 singles. Wikipedia states that it contains 37 samples; I'm gonna say I think it's higher than that, but even if it's just 37, I'm pretty sure this must be a record for a Top 20 UK single. Best of all, one of those samples is from The 'Burbs, one of my all-time favourite movies - and I'm damn certain that Frontier Psychiatrist is the only Top 20 UK hit single with a 'Burbs sample in it.

I dig the Wild West, spaghetti-western, Morricone sorta vibe; I dig how daft it all is...it's really a comedy record, and certainly The Avalanches spoke in interviews around the time that they feared being percieved as a novelty act. Now, there's nothing wrong with novelty songs - I like Doctorin' The Tardis as much as the next man - but this isn't a novelty song. It's funny, sure, and fun, and definately unusual - but nothing this artfully constructed can be called a novelty. I'm a real sucker this sort of sample-heavy fare; it appeals to the record-geek in me, the crate-digger mentality that has you thinking "Ohh - where'd they nick this bit from, and where can I find it?" As a pop-culture junkie, a song composed entirely of pop-culture junk is just right it my street.

Oh, and the video is potentially my favourite video of all time.

The A-Z Of All-Time Great Pop Singles: "E"

2011-04-11T13:23:00.000-07:00

E is for "Everybody Loves Somebody" by Dean Martin

This was the first song I heard as a Married Man. It played as I walked back down the eisle hand-in-hand with my new wife, and it will forever bring back memories of that magical, snow-blesssed day in late December 2009. My & my wife chose it as the day's We Just Got Married Song because it makes sense lyrically, because it set the tone for the Wedding's evening party theme (50s cocktail party), because I'm a big Dean Martin fan, because it's a great freakin' record, and because when those drums kick in after the opening spiral of strings and Disney-esque female choir, it meant we had a cue to start walking. So yeah - I guess you could say this song is sort of a Big Deal for me.

While I am a big Dean Martin fan, I'm happy to admit that the dude didn't make hundreds of Great Records. But he did make some - and this is one of them. Mainly it just has more OOMPH than alotta his stuff. Dean couldn't have cared less about recording "serious" music, or trying to be an "important" "artist". Not like Sinatra. For Dean, the whole song & dance thing was a hustle, and anybody who thought it was anything more than that was a shmuck. Part of me really likes that. I'm a big believer in irreverence, especially when it comes to pop music (a medium I've always understood as being essentially irreverent by nature, but which babyboomers have managed to turn into something which has deified more holy saints in 50 years than the Catholic Church have managed in thousands), and nobody had less reverence for Pop Music than Dean Martin. Even here, with the benefit of having an Actually Good Song to Sing, he gives up really trying after about a minute and a half. This careless, sloppy-drunk half-assedness didn't hurt the song at the Cashbox of course - careless, sloppy-drink half-assedness is precisely what he was paid for. Irked by Beatlemania, legend has it that Martin promised his Fabs idolising 11 year old son that ELS was "gonna knock your pallies off the charts", which is exactly what happened when it went to #1 in August 1964, 10 years since his last chart topper. Again, irreverence: screw The Beatles. I'm Dean Freakin' Martin. And I can still get Number Ones the same way I always did - without even trying.

On a personal note, there is another story connected to this song which makes it a favourite of mine. My stag do was held in the wilds of the Peak District, and at some point during the Saturday night we (about a dozen middle-class lads from various parts of Yorkshire) wound up in a very dodgy Buxton pub which had Bad Idea written all over it. They were showing WWF on the widescreen TV, and Nu Metal was thundering from the sound system. The crowd was an ugly gallery of muderous, dead-eyed goths, local Straw Dogs types and tooled-up teen hooligans. Total Mos Eisley cantina vibes. We hussled our way to the darkest corner of the pub we could find, and while my friends busied themselves avoiding eye contact with the other patrons and nervously peeling strips from their beer bottle labels, I started pumping cash into the jukebox. By this point in the weekend two days of near constant low-level drinking may have thrown my intuition off somewhat, but quite frankly my ability to "sense the tone" has always been suspect; the Australian's have a word for The Guy Who Always Picks The Wrong Record To Put On At A Party - I forget what the term is now, but I definately have a tendancy in that direction. I found the first track I wanted. "Nailed it," I thought, supremely confident of the awesomeness of my selection, the song that was gonna blow everybody's tiny minds and unite the pub in some epic, spontaneous dance sequence. The harsh Nu Metal ground to a halt. A pause. The opening, saccharine strings of "Everybody Loves Somebody" drifed surreally through the musty, dead air. "Everybody....loves somebody....sometime". I span triumphantly around to my stag party, expecting to be greeted with manic Stag whoops and a sea of raised hands desperate to High Five this act of genius. Instead, I turned to greet 12 open-mouthed, ashen faces starring back at me, frozen in abject terror and nauseous disbelief, expressions which collectively stated one thing: "We're gonna die."

Fortunately, the Buxton Massive must be slightly more tolerant of mushy, campy old lounge music than my friends feared, because as it turned out we weren't actually murdered. Infact, we weren't even murdered when the next song that came on, chosen by my friend Wardy, was some Bon Jovi song nobody has ever heard before that was about 15 minutes long or something, which is probably about 12 minutes longer than any Bon Jovi record should be, I mean, I like Livin' On A Prayer as much as the next guy (unless the next guy is Wardy), but seriously...that said, I guess the insanity of Wardy's choice did distract attention away from the insanity of my choice, so really I should thank him for this act of Stag Party heroism. This post, then, is for Stephen M Ward.

The A-Z of All-Time Great Pop Singles: "D"

2011-04-09T12:12:00.000-07:00

D is for "Dance To The Music", by Sly & The Family Stone

Like Funkadelic, I guess Sly & The Family Stone act as a gateway funk band for rock orientated teenagers - they've been fulfilling that role ever since their show-stealing performance at Woodstock 40 years ago, when they got thousands of peacenik long-hairs up on their feet and grooving in the mud. The footage of the Family Stone at that concert is simply mind-boggling; a firestorm of full-throttle funk. Takes no prisoners. KICKS. ALMIGHTY. ASS.

The Family Stone were the first "cross-over" act; their music an explosive cocktail of white rock and black soul - but, unlike so much (good & bad) soul-does-psyche experiments, there is nothing remotely self-conscious, artificial or exploitative about this fusion. I love a lot of psychedelic soul, but even the very best stuff, at least the commercially successful stuff, (Norman Whitfield-era Temptations, say) has some element of "lets give this whole hippy thing a go". (To be fair, that's often a big part of it's charm.) But The Family Stone's sound works because it's totally natural, and, crucially, it was their idea first. And it wasn't just their sound that was "integrated". Consisting of men and women, white folks and black folks, The Family Stone lived the Woodstock Nation ideal of interracial, inter-gender harmony, where so many others just talked a good game.

Dance To The Music, their break-out hit, is an example of how a big single can be used by a band as a calling card, a statement of intent - everything you need to know about the Family Stone philosophy is here. The phrase "melting pot of influences" is a cliche, but it applies perfectly here - it is a bubbling gumbo of Doo-Wop, Motown pop, and fuzzed-acid rock. It has one of the all time great first lines - the exhortation to "Get up - and dance to the music!" is impossible to refuse, and I dig how it makes their music The Music, the definite article, the only music that matters. From thereon, it's just your regular arrangement of accapella doo-wop, drum solos, fuzz bass solos, about five different vocalists, introductions to the band members, and an instruction for "squares" to leave. Dance To The Music: the sound of somebody spiking King Curtis's Memphis Soul Stew with LSD.

The A-Z Of All Time Great Pop Singles: "C"

2011-03-19T10:50:00.001-07:00

C is for: "California Dreamin'", by The Mamas & The Papas

When me and my kid sister used to holiday with our folks, we'd go in the car someplace like Northumberland or Norfolk or wherever, and our parents would take the opportunity of having a captive audience to educate The Kids about The Popular Music Of Their Youth. The syllabus was largely defined by whatever cheapo 60s cassette compilation my Dad could find in the first petrol station we came to, tapes called things like 'Music Inspired By Easy Rider' or 'The Best Of The Sixties'. The real mainstay, however, was a double-cassette called 'Psychedelia', 40 tracks of late 60s wig-out magic, including White Rabbit, 8 Miles High, See My Friends, and even Beefheart's Electricity. Undeniable, timeless pop records. And I heard 'em a lot. But there was one song that, despite the fact that it only apeared on the album once, just like the rest of those songs, seemed to be on in our car the whole time, every time I looked up from the Beano Summer Special, or the NME, or from playing Top Trumps with my sister - The Mamas and The Papas' California Dreamin'.

There are very few songs awesome enough to withstand the sort of maximum over-exposure that the Western World has had to this record. It's wheeled out every time a movie, TV or advert director wants to evoke 'The Sixties'. It's a shortcut, short-hand for a whole era. It should, by all rights, have become a terrible cliche, synonymous with yawnsome babyboomer nostalgia. Everybody, everywhere, should be bored to death of this song. And yet, somehow, California Dreamin's spooky, chilly glory remains entirely undiminished. Partly I think this is because, unlike, say White Rabbit, California Dreaming isn't a "hippy" record, or an "acid rock" record - it's not a record about living in sixties LA; it's a record about dreaming about living in sixties LA. This puts the protagonist in the same position as the listener, and provides the sense of longing, of yearning, for a mythical other place, which defines this song.

Beyond that , there are so many great things about this record that it's impossible to list them all here. I like how dramatic it is, and how short it is, and how it packs so much briliant stuff into those two minutes and 39 seconds that it makes you wonder why more pop records can't do it, and I love the outrageously loud backing vocals "well I got down on my knees (GOT DOWN ON MY KNEES!) / and I pretend to pray (I PRETEND TO PRAY!)", and the final, rushing "DAAAAAAYYYYYYYYY" (six seconds long!).

Maybe most of all, I love the flute break, a pristine, ghostly, yearning little melody which send shivers down my spine still. It's just one of my very favourite moments on any pop record. Bud Shank played that flute solo. Bud was a West Coast jazzman who played with Stan Kenton, and on pioneering indo-jazz fusion tracks with Ravi Shankar. Most people who've heard California Dreamin', and that's pretty much everybody everywhere, probably don't know the name Bud Shank. Truth be told, neither did I until I was reading about this song recently. His music can be heard everyday on radio stations around the globe, but his name remains a quiet footnote in the pop history books. So this post is for Bud Shank.

The A-Z Of All-Time Great Pop Singles: B

2011-03-07T14:42:00.000-08:00

B is for: "Boom! Shake The Room" - Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince

What, no Be My Baby? My choice for "B" presents the perfect
opportunity to confirm an essential aspect of this A-Z, which is that I intend to compile it instinctively, in a first-thought, best-thought sorta way - this is a list of pop songs that matter to me personally, which spring immediately to mind because they're heavily playlisted on mybrain FM, rather than an exercise in advertising what refined taste I have. So I coulda chosen the undeniably wondrous Phil Spector / Ronettes girl-group classic, and almost did...but the truth is what I always really wanted to pick was Boom! Shake The Room, by Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince. So I have.

"The f-f-f-f fresh p-p-p-prince is who I am: so tell my mother that I never wrote a wack jam."

Should an alien race ever require the people of earth to provide a sample of our best work, we would bundle William Smith up onto a rocket ship and send him hurtling off into the cosmos, with a suitcase containing the Fresh Prince of Bel Air DVD box-set, Men In Black, 'Summertime', 'Miami' and this record on 12" vinyl, and a note stapled to his t-shirt saying "Now show us what you've got." Will Smith is about as bankable a celebrity as it's possible to imagine, and B!STR is a Very Commercial Record. It's essentially LL Cool J's Momma Said Knock You Out, already a relatively pop rap single, with every pop hook turned up to 11, an explosion for a chorus, and a lead vocal performance by the most charismatic man on the planet. If hip-hop heads wanna grumble about how "sanitised" Will & Jazz's version of Rap Music is here, let 'em. One of pop music's roles is as a gateway drug to harder, more adult kicks. B!STR was a sneaky toke behind the bikesheds for a generation of Fresh Prince teens, who the very next year were probably nodding out in their bedrooms to the sounds of Cypress Hill and Snoop Dogg.

The A-Z Of All-Time Great Pop Singles: "A"

2011-01-07T08:38:00.000-08:00

A is for "ABC" - The Jackson 5

As near as dammit, the perfect pop-song, and a most appropriate place to begin my 'ABC' of all-time great singles. The Jackson 5's ABC is 2:54 of pure, unbridled, unselfconscious fun -it is a song that exists to remind everybody what pop music is. Exuberance, vitality, sheer youthful joyfulness - ABC is conceptually patterned as a lesson in love, but the real lesson here is in pop-ology. It is the York Notes of sweet soul music. Musically, it's as arresting as anything Motown ever did. ABC has the good sense to kick off with a fat, buzzing fuzz-bass line, before dropping into a steady pimp rollin' funk groove 5 seconds in; the mix is packed with loadsa conga, tambourine and jangling piano, and at some point around the 1:40 mark the J5 strip it all back to a breakdown like a kindergarten Temptations. Vocally it's just on another level; every line is delivered like it's the hook, and wildly creative things are done with the phrasing and arrangement throughout. I wonder what ever happened to that kid with the high pitched voice?

2010 Review: A Year In Stuff I Liked

2011-01-02T12:51:00.000-08:00

Album Of The Year
Enter The Magical Mystery Chambers - Wu Tang Vs The Beatles / Tom Caruana
Conceptually a weaker effort than Dangermouse's Beatles breakbeat benchmark 'Grey Album', but for my (admittedly Wu Tang fanatical) dollar this mash-up is a far more entertaining listen front-to-back. The tracks that work far outweigh those that don't, and a handful (the bludgeoning, 'I Am The Walrus' sampling "Run", a re-make of "C.R.E.A.M." almost as smooth as the original, & the centre-piece, show-stopping "Uzi (Pinky Ring)") have remained heavy rotation heavyweights on my ipod all year. Precisely the sort of post-modern irreverence that Lennon woulda loved.

Book Of The Year
Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams - Nick Tosches
Everything you need to know about mid-20th Century US pop culture is here. A serious - but never remotely dry - book, packed with punchy, profane prose, placing the vacant, solitary anti-hero figure of Dean Martin at the centre of a wide ranging cultural discourse on pop music, film, showbiz, television, sex, money etc etc...and however black the oblivion of Dino's empty megastardom gets, you still wind up with the impression of Martin as the Rat Pack's true hipster - a dispassionate, untouchable, grade-A bad-ass - "the cool guy's cool guy".

Film Of The Year
Toy Story 3 - Dir. Lee Unkrich
In which everybody is forced to recognise the shocking frailty of thier own mortality via a fiery pit-hell incinerator scene where Woody, Buzz and the Toy Story Gang take one another's hands and accept their own imminent and certain doom with quiet, heart-breaking dignity. Peerless popular art, bursting with imagination, and with an emotional depth of resonance greater than any number of the "serious" middle-brow movies with which Pixar will compete - I suspect fruitlessly, mores the pity - for a Best Picture Oscar come February.

TV Show Of The Year
The Office (An American Workplace) / Curb Your Enthusiasm
I'm gonna have to chicken outta making a definitive call on this one. Overall, these are very different shows; the former has a warm, beating heart the size of a watermelon and gets slushier by the episode, happily embracing it's position as the closest any post-Friends sit-com has come to reconciling the briefly un-cool merits of A Bunch Of Likeable People Who Actually Like Each Other mainstream comedy with the edgier, taboo-trampling brinksmanship of Gervais / Merchant's British original, while the latter is characterised by a no-holes-barred barrage of mind-boggling "WTF" moments that re-invents the Seinfeld formula of jaw-dropping social awkwardness + astonishingly tight narrative structures + self-reflexivity + people who hate themselves and everyone the know, on an operatic scale, making Gervais / Merchant's efforts seem conservatively quaint by comparison. I admire and enjoy them both equally. A dead-heat, then - The Office, for the sheer number of hours of pleasure it has given me this year, and CYE, for those spectacular, fan-pleasing Seinfeld reunion episodes.

Songs Of The Year

.1. In Tha Park - Ghostface Killah Crunching, distorted, heavily fuzzed, block-party rockin', psyche-soul, old-skool flavoured hip-hop ticks every one of my boxes. With deliberate nods to P Diddy's "Bad Boy For Life" and MC Shan, In Tha Park stands proudly along side the strongest Wu releases from any era. This is how that BlakRoc LP shoulda sounded.

.2. Groove Is In The Heart - Crocodiles Pure, unadulterated nostalgic 90s kid indulgence - shoegazing indie-rock fetishists covering a 'contemporary' 1990 pop masterpiece. About as authentic an impresssion of an ealy 90s John Peel session by some B-list sub-Chapterhouse outfit as one could possibly imagine. Smart, funny, trippy, and undeniably groovy.

.3. Boyfriend - Best Coast I guess basically like a gazillion records sounded pretty much exactly like this in 2010, but for whatever reason Best Coast's particular take on the year's ubiquitous early 60s girl-group + slacker 90s indie formula lodged itself in my skull like no other.

TheTurtles - Buzzsaw

2010-11-01T13:05:00.001-07:00

TheTurtles - Buzzsaw by Paul 'Fuzz' Lowman
Have just discovered Soundcloud, which for those of you who are even lamer with this sorta stuff than I am, is just a very hip & user-friendly way of uploading and sharing music. To celebrate, here's The Turtles, with a stoopid-fresh fuzz instro, in a Booker T "stylee", as 90s kids TV presenters used to say in a postmodern ironic way. And which I'm now using in a post-ironic, ironic way. Or whatever. Enjoy!

Why The UK Should Hold It's Own Tea Party

2010-11-01T00:54:00.000-07:00

So, The Tea Party movement. Another opportunity for liberal British commentators to 'play to their base' by taking lazy shots at white Americans. Our comedians and commentators are even more comfortable mocking Americans than they are mocking Christians. If they have a chance to mock Americans who are also Christians, as they do here, it's like all their secular winter solstice celebrations have come at once.

For what it's worth, I don't agree with the majority of what constitutes the Tea Party's incoherent, diffuse manifesto. Fuelled by a high calorie, low-brow diet of deep-fried fast food & deep-fried Fox News, most Tea Party activists seem misinformed & wrong-headed at best, deeply and dangerously bigoted at worst. But as dumb as their politics might be- and this is where the UK needs to think twice about knee-jerk reactions to the Tea Party - at least it proves that the American people remain fully engaged with their nation's political process. At least these people still care. They still believe that people have the power to alter the national political landscape. We shouldn't be sneering at a country that produces a movement like the Tea Party - we should be envious of a Western democracy whose citizen's are still motivated enough by politics to take grass-roots action.

The British public gave up on thinking they can make a difference through political action a long time ago. We are a compliant, jaded people. The coalition slice and slash away at public sector budgets, and we do nothing. We suffer, while City Bankers who caused that suffering continue to take mega-bonuses, and we do nothing. Thinking Obama is a muslim is stupid, but engagement with your nation's politics is admirable. Rather than ill, it would infact speak well for our country if we had our own UK Tea Party to ridicule.

A Few Thoughts About Toy Story, And That Incinerator Scene

2010-09-04T10:04:00.000-07:00

Upon it’s release, the original Toy Story was applauded by critics for the way in which it “worked on two levels” – in addition to the content aimed at kids (adventure, larger than life characters, broad emotional themes), Pixar had woven into the film adult-orientated content (irony, pastiche, innuendo, cultural references) aimed at their parents. It was regarded (I think with some exaggeration) as a breakthrough, and the massive commercial and critical success of Toy Story meant that the ‘two levels’ formula immediately became the hall mark of most modern blockbuster animations, notably the Ice Age and Shrek franchises.

Even if intended as such, however, the observation that a film works on “two levels” is really not much of a compliment, and indeed if applied to any work in the The Orthodox Film Canon sounds immediately redundant - the analysis that “Citizen Kane works on two levels” is pointlessly blank – “only two?!”. Such an analysis of Toy Story is equally weak, and critics peddling the ‘two levels’ theory were always guilty of underselling the many nuanced levels on which that first film ‘worked’.

At the same, the ‘two levels’ analysis overemphasizes the value placed by Pixar on the adult content, on these films being being ‘knowing’ or ‘ironic’. It is perhaps inevitable that middle-brow film critics should focus on the element that allows them to feel like they’re ‘in on the joke’, the nods and the winks. Unable to find joy in the un-ironic, old-fashioned emotional intelligence which is truly Toy Story’s greatest strength, critics instead praised what they perceived as Pixar’s ambivalence about or detachment from certain aspects of the conventional kids movie material. The truth is that the content aimed at adults is never done at the expense of the family-friendly content – there is no criticism or commentary made by the former about the latter. Toy Story’s primary achievement is not – as many critics would have it –post-modern self-reflexivity, but in being an exceptionally emotionally literate series of films which delight children without patronising them and adults without undermining the values of the family-friendly content.

(It should be noted an unfortunate consequence of the ‘two levels’ critical misreading is that it inevitably does produce rather two-dimensional and lop-sided movies when adopted by lesser filmmakers– the Shrek franchise being the case in point. While undoubtedly very funny in parts, these are entirely un-nuanced movies operating literally and strictly on two clearly defined levels - the angry, anti-Disney cynicism of the adult content, and the wacky, gonzo slapstick of the kid’s content. With the former essentially operating as a running criticism of the latter, the balance of power falls squarely with the adult content. Lacking entirely the heart or warmth of the Toy Story movies, the essential cynicism at the core of the Shrek franchise makes it impossible to love, in the way that audiences unquestionably love the Toy Story films.)

**************************************************************

As we join the Toy Story gang at the beginning of TS3, their situation is shockingly grim. Abandoned, un-loved, obsolete, their numbers massively depleted (we learn that they’ve ‘lost’ Wheezy and Bo Peep, amongst others), destined to a wholly undignified post-Andy life dumped in the attic - but labouring under the self-delusion that they may still yet recapture the glory years– the psychological state in Andy’s bedroom resembles that of a war veteran’s hospital. You’ll have probably read that Toy Story 3 is a much ‘darker’ movie than its two predecessors, but this pat description fails to adequately describe the pall of sadness and desperation which permeates much of the movie - and it certainly doesn’t prepare you for the brutal, disorientating left-turn that the tone of the franchise accelerates towards in its second act.

The Incinerator Scene in TS3 simply stands as one of the most harrowing pieces of cinema I’ve ever been witness to. It will go down in infamy. Both my wife and my kid sister were openly sobbing throughout it, and I was doing all I could to avoid the same. (In brief: after extended escape-from-evil-nursery sequence, with their situation increasingly dire – including the apparent death of the Squeeze Toy Aliens – the gang find themselves being dragged into the fiery pit-hell of a junk yard incinerator. Initial efforts to retreat are quietly abandoned. One by one, they take one another’s hand, and face their doom with dignity. The escalation of terribleness throughout the film makes this scenario seem wholly plausible at this point. Yep. It’s awful.) The Toy Story gang have entered Dante’s final circle of hell. The sequence takes the Toy Story franchise into a previously unimaginable emotional arena: 15 years after we met them, we are watching Woody and Buzz Lightyear die. Pixar sell the unspeakable horror of the scenario hard, and you buy it. The most devastating thing with the Incinerator Scene is that our heroes accept their imminent death. They stop fighting. In their abandonment of hope, in giving up on life, there is not just acceptance of, but complicity in, their own death. “You know what - we’ve given it our best shot, but it’s time we stop kidding ourselves. Most of our friends are gone, the Squeeze Toy Aliens are dead, and worst of all, life without Andy just isn’t worth living...” C’mon baby, take my hand – don’t fear the reaper. Frankly, I found this scene utterly astonishing, and I’ve been obsessing about it ever since.

The first Toy Story is pretty much a perfect 1hr20 of cinema, by my estimation. I have my reservations about TS2, but they’re really nit-picky things, and only a reflection of the high standards I hold these movies to anyway. The third film is mind-boggling in it’s emotional intensity, and in the sheer number of awesome ideas and gags Pixar pack into the 2 hours. Like many reviewers, I think it will probably come to be regarded as the best of the three films, though I’ll have to watch it again before I make that assessment for sure – it was certainly my knee-jerk analysis as I left the cinema. Pixar have topped themselves, and in doing so have achieved something neither the Star Wars or Back To The Future trilogies were able to do – finish as strongly as they started.

The Amazing World Of Star Wars Stuff Made Out Of Gingerbread

2010-01-22T06:55:00.000-08:00

Whilst munching my way through a couple of delicious homemade ginger biscuits at work the other day I offered my colleagues the following bold, rhetorical question: "You can't beat good gingerbread, can you?" Nobody disagreed. Or, y'know - cared. There's something magical about gingerbread that puts it in a different league to other biscuits. I guess it's the whole gingerbread house / gingerbread man vibe...gingerbread has the flavour of fairytales and Christmas. Gingerbread houses are so appealing that there's an actual architectural school (originated in quaint ol' Victorian New England, predictably) that mimicks their highly ornate, storybook style. There are few things more desirable, more bewitchingly mouth watering, than a gingerbread house, frosted with snow white icing.

And then there's stuff like this gingerbread AT-AT, which perhaps doesn't have quite the same appeal, at least not as Actual Food. Making Star Wars vehicles out of gingerbread takes a particular type of genius, doesn't it? Imagine you call up your friend - "Aright mate, what you up to...uh-huh...you're making what?" I think you'd be impressed, to an extent. Impressed slash bemused. Elsewhere on the internet there are pictures of gingerbread Tie-Fighters, and a gingerbread Landspeeder. I guess if you wanted you could call it Folk Art, or Outsider Art...but the reality is people just dig making Star Wars stuff out of gingerbread.

TV Review: 50 Greatest Comedy Catchphrases

2010-01-18T02:29:00.000-08:00

50 Greatest Comedy Catchphrases - 9pm, Sunday 17th Jan, E4

So this was pretty much the most pointless three hours of television ever conceived, a show whose singularly limited appeal can be summed up in one sentence:

"Oh yeah, I remember when that used to be funny."

Comedy catchphrases have an intensely short shelf life, and operate on two, and only two, settings: 'tolerably zeitgiesty' and 'hopelessly lame.' There's no middle groud, no grey area. One day they're harmlessly amusing, the next day they're obnoxious and outrageously uncool, and remain in that state for eternity. Nothing is more un-hip than the out-dated catchphrase. A drunk dad at a wedding party yelling "Yeah, baby!". A gaggle of science students guffawing at Monty Python lines. Your idiot mate who still answers the phone with a gargled "WHASSSSUP!" These are some of society's greatest ills. Ricky Gervais made two whole sit-coms about it.

The whole point of comedy catchphrases is that they're so fundementally Not Funny that once the novelty has worn off, you cannot fathom why you ever thought of them as being anything other than monumentally irritating. The only thing comedy catchphrases have going for them in the first place is their newness - consequently a three-hour TV show listing 50 old ones just made no sense at all. The regular cast of assembled talking heads had precisely nothing of value to say about any catchphrase, because there is precisely nothing to say about them. At most (Ali G's "Is it 'cos I is black?") they distill the essence of the character to whom they belong, and in most cases ("Watchoo talkin' 'bout, Willis?") they're just some random phrase that for some reason struck a popular chord at a particular time.

The Fast Show's shock & awe approach to catchphrase comedy rendered the exercise utterly obsolete anyway - you could do a Top 50 of catchphrases from Fast Show alone, and you could fill another Top 50 again with sketches from post-Fast Show efforts like Little Britain, Bo Selecta and Catherine Tate. To top it all off, the Number One Comedy Catchphrase was..."Nice to see you, to see you - nice..." which isn't even a comedy catchphrase, any more than "I've started so I'll finish" or "I have a dream" are comedy catchphrases. It's a catchphrase, sure. But it isn't funny. It isn't the punchline to a joke, or part of a comic routine. This is the second time a Channel 4 Top 50 has ended with a dull, off-beat thud - the winner of the Top 50 Kids TV Shows was revealed to be The Simpsons, which, similarly, isn't a kids TV show.

In conclusion: "D'oh."

A Tale Of Two Offices - Why 'An American Workplace' Is Better Than 'The Office'

2010-01-16T07:30:00.000-08:00

The Office: An American Workplace (Mondays, 8pm, ITV4)

"All my favorite comedies are coming out of America. Always have been, really." - Ricky Gervais

Rick Gervais & Stephen Merchant's 'The Office' remains a holy grail for fans of smart situation comedy, a watershed for British television, and a benchmark for all that came after it. Initial scepticism about how the show would translate across the Atlantic was an understandable, if depressingly predictable, response from the sort of Union Jack waving Brit-comedy fan boys whose knee-jerk to the mooted 'American Office' was generally "oh, but The Office is so dark and awkward and quintessentially British, it's exactly the sort of thing Americans could never make."

And, in the first instance, they were right. The early episodes of An American Workplace leaned way to heavily on the UK original, and they suffer in comparison to it. But as the US show has developed and moved further and further from the tone (if not the spirit) of the UK version, An American Workplace has turned into the one thing those nay-sayers could never have predicted it would do - a fundamentally better show than the BBC original. Four seasons in, An American Workplace has matured into The Office' warmer, livelier, better scripted, more consistently funny and emotionally complex cousin.

This should come as no surprise. Many Brit-comedy fans chose to understand The Office as a triumph of 'quintessentially' UK humour, a black-hearted antidote to bland, self-satisfied, formulaic US sit-comedy, and they hailed Gervais as their hero on this basis - but this reading of the situation was always fundamentally flawed. The Office is not 'quintessentially British' at all; its enormous - and thoroughly deserved - impact was due precisely to the lack of a precedent for it on British TV (except perhaps The Royle Family - discuss). If The Office was an attack on anything, it was on bad UK sit-coms (something Gervais took to nauseating, bewilderingly self-indulgent lengths with Extras). Gervais & Merchant's key influences for The Office - Seinfeld, The Larry Sanders Show, The Simpsons, and especially This Is Spinal Tap - were all American. Series-long story arches, the documentary style, the focus on social faux-pas and taboos, naturalistic & improvised performances - The Office was built on an American model, not a British one. This being the case, it makes perfect sense that the Americans should do The Office better than we did. They haven't just changed the British version (Americanised, godforbid) - they've taken it as a starting point and, with the resources, acting talent and writers available to them, improved on it. If anybody could have predicted this turnaround, it would be those all-time US comedy fan boys, Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant.

Steve Martin - A Wild & Crazy Guy (1978)

2010-01-09T09:07:00.000-08:00

Steve Martin: A Wild And Crazy Guy

I guess my favourite NYC purchase would be a lovely vinyl copy of Steve Martin's height-of-his-powers stand up LP, 1978's 'A Wild & Crazy Guy'. A well over-used superlative applies here: the sleeve is iconic. The bleached white silhouette of Martin vamping in his bunny ears, he appears to be alive with light, the enormous speaker stacks to the left of the image hinting at the size of the arena...this beautiful B&W photograph sums up everything one needs to know about Martin's act, the juxtaposition of goofball stupidity and genuine ART. The picture is so serious, the subject so wonderfully, knowingly daft. It's perfect. Popular culture has produced a huge back catalogue of images I marvel at; this photograph I love so much that if I had a copy small enough I'd keep it in my wallet.

Oh, and the record is pretty funny too. The A side (small San Francisco comedy club gig) is way better than the B side (mega-sized enormo-arena gig); the second half is lumbered down with catchphrases and skits re-hashed from his Saturday Night Live appearances - the audience (tens of thousands of people) have come expecting "Well excuuuusssse meeeeee!", and Martin has no choice but to lay it on 'em, and when he does the audience go predictably mondo nutso, and it's all nice & interesting pop history, but it pretty meaningless to 2010 ears, and without context just plain ain't funny. Many comedy albums suffer from this built-in obsolescence, and in Martin's case the problem is exaggerated by the fact that his act was hugely visual. Contemporary audiences would have been hugely disappointed if this stuff didn't appear on the LP, and for this reason impossible to criticise its inclusion. The one big bonus for 2010 listeners is that we close with Martin rolling out an SNL skit which remains hugely entertaining - 'King Tut', Martin's deliberately dumbo-cash-in disco track (and bone fide semi-hit single) about King Tutankhamun.

The first side of the LP is sheer brilliance, however. As 'clever', and 'highly original' as Martin's dumb-on-purpose, Vegas-entertainer-gone-haywire shtick undoubtedly was, I've always thought it would be equally accurate to simply say that at some point in his career Martin decided he was going to find it easier to adopt a persona, and the persona he chose was that of an unhinged lounge singer. He wasn't Steve Martin on stage, he was 'Steve Martin', and 'Steve Martin' was something to hide behind. Something funnier. With a funnier voice, and a cool suit. There are some great lines on the first side of this LP, and it musta been a blast live.

So the first side is really funny, and the second side can be marvelled at as a piece of comic history, but there ain't that many yocks for the modern listener. Perhaps the real value of 'A Wild and Crazy Guy' sits between the two sides, in the transition between the small gig & the enormo-dome. The LP is quite deliberately set up for the listener to 'compare & contrast' between the two sets - "wow. How did he get from there to here? What a journey!" The segue between them is cinematic in scope; Martin walks off the stage of a small club, and emerges instantaneously from the curtains of a gigantic sports arena, with tens of thousands of people screaming for him. A story is told, or at least in implied, in this brilliantly effective piece of editing. For this reason I almost don't think it matters that the second side isn't hilarious. It works conceptually. Maybe the fact that it isn't that funny is precisely the point - certainly Martin felt his act had become stale, and that playing to audiences of this size had sucked the spark and spontaneity from his act...maybe it's impossible to be truly funny in a sports arena, and maybe this is the price a comedian pays for the level of success Martin achieved. Like all of Martin's best stuff, the LP gives you something to laugh at, and something to think about, and, again, like all Martin's best stuff, the something he asks you to think about is the nature of stand-up comedy itself. I don't have many real, lasting heroes. Heroes are for kids, really. But Martin comes closer than most.

Worst. Album. Ever. (And a few thoughts about the current state of youth radio)

2009-12-02T01:04:00.000-08:00

I'd usually steer clear of attacking such obvious grist-to-the-liberal-blog-community mill - mocking Chris Moyles is like shooting angry, bullying, misogynistic fish in a barrel - but this particular dispatch from the front-line of stupidity is too awful to ignore. I mean: why?

Radio One is in a terrible state. The day-time schedule is a wasteland, a place where youth culture is institutionally treated with a lack of respect bordering on outright contempt. I have no complaint with the quality & variety of pop music pumped out by the station; I enjoy much of it and can easily ignore that which I don't. The problem is the presenters.

Chris Moyles and his gaggle of weaselly sycophants offer the laziest form of lowest common-denominator, dull shock-jockery. It's desperately sad, even insulting, that this is what the BBC think the young people of this country deserve. He isn't cool. He doesn't say anything about youth culture in the UK in 2009. He's just some boorish 36 year old bloke, chuntering away, knowing nothing about The Kids or what they want, or anything remotely zeitgeisty.

As spectacularly lame as Moyles is, he's got nothing on the presenter of the show which follows his. In Ferne Cotton we have the embodiment of everything that is wrong with mainstream pop music broadcasting today; she's been chosen as personality, clothes horse and serial dater of musicians, rather than being especially well-informed about, having a particular passion for or any sort of background in music broadcasting. Cotton is a generic 'Presenter', not a specialist music broadcaster. The BBC would not choose Ferne Cotton to present Formula One because she doesn't have an authoritative voice on the subject; it shows a lack of respect for pop music that they have not disqualified her from being a music presenter on the same basis. There appears to remain this idea across all networks with youth / music broadcasting that 'anyone can do it', and to some extent there's probably some truth to that - but it certainly isn't true to say that everyone can do it well. There must be hundreds of young people who have come through University radio etc who are (a) genuinely passionate about music in a way Cotton is not and (b) talented, intelligent, witty presenters. Give them a chance instead.

Maybe this is just a cranky rant by an out-of-touch 29 year old about a radio station whose output isn't aimed at him anyway...but I know tons of people in their late teens and early 20s -Radio One's key demographic - who feel exactly the same way I do, ie: insulted. Radio One reached a point in the Nineties when free-falling audience figures and general cultural irrelevance forced bosses to cull practically an entire generation of dinosaur DJs, and I'd suggest we've arrived at this point once more. I'm not saying we should hang all the DJs, but I can name a handful of 'em them who should be encouraged to hang up their headphones for good.

Sesame Street: Subverting Capitalism Since 1969

2009-11-09T01:15:00.000-08:00

Sesame Street was a post-modern experiment, conceived at inception as a parody of adult television, offering a knowing commentary on the conventions of the medium, then appropriating those conventions as educational tools.

By patterning the animated educational segments on TV commercials - the use of jingles, visual motifs, hip language, the repetition of snappy slogans, quick edits, entertaining characters - the Children's Television Workshop engaged in a subversion of the hard-sell techniques of consumer, capitalist culture. Sesame Street holds up a distorted circus-mirror to television, reflecting back a psychedelicised, rainbow-hued re-vision of the medium. The aim is to educate; the joke is at the expense of commercial television.

It is gentle satire, but satire nonetheless - very much a product of a late 60s. John & Yoko exploited the methods of Madison Avenue to 'sell' peace - Sesame Street exploited them to sell education. Monty Python & The Firesign Theatre ingested television whole and regurgitated a crazed version of it back into the mainstream with anarchic countercultural zeal -Sesame Street ingested television whole and regurgitated a day-glo, fuzzy-felt version of it back into the mainstream with the right-on zeal of progressive hippy educators.

Way back when, the Childrens Television Workshop could not have possibly envisioned Sesame Street becoming the global multi-billion dollar mega-industry it is today. I don't know if it has become 'part of the problem' or not, I'm not a socialist or an anti-capitalist myself, but I guess it has certainly become something different to the thing it once was. Episodes from early 70s have a loose, spontaneous vibe to them which is inevitably far less evident now. But while it continues to educate children in an entertaining and smart way, it would be churlish to regard Sesame Street as anything less than one of television's unqualified triumphs, a programme which is funny, fun, creative, and ultimately A Good Thing.

Here's my all-time favourite clip, a skit starring Cookie Monster (Who made the top 5 in my All-Time Fave TV Characters list on a post years ago) and the world's most beloved frog, Kermit. This clip is genuinely laugh-out loud funny, and appears to have absolutely no educational content whatsoever. An overused word, but what the hell: genius.

(I like to quote "Life not all guessing games, frog" every chance I get!)

Forthcoming BlakRoc / Edan LPs

2009-11-03T13:34:00.000-08:00

So this is really like a hastily scribbled Post-It note stuck to the fridge door reminding me to buy milk more than a post of any interest / use to my limited, but beloved, readership, so if you wanna skip this and wait for the next post about The Addams Family or The Harlem Globetotters, go right ahead, no hard feelings. A couple of cool looking LPs are being released before the end of the year and if I don't make a note of them somewhere permanent like I'll just forgeddabout 'em, so you'll just have to indulge / ignore me.

The first LP is by BlakRoc, a totally rad sounding collaborative project headed up by the marvellously incongruous pairing of Ohio scuzz-blues duo The Black Keys, & heavy duty hip-hop impresario Damon Dash, co-founder of Jay-Z's Roc-A-Fella empire. Basically the Black Keys are laying down the dirty fuzz RnB breaks, and a mind-bogglingly dope cast of rappers have lined up to spit knowledge all over them; Pharoahe Monch, Q-Tip, Mos Def, Ludacris, and most excitingly for a Wu nut like me, Rza, Raekwon, and - back from the grave! - ODB. I've always thought The Black Keys' sound had the necessary fat-bottomed funkiness, wide-open drum breaks & real deal geetar rawness to make perfect source material for great hip-hop (infact their very first LP had an almost hip-hop instrumental, '240 Years Before Your Time'), and I'm really looking forward to this LP (drops on 'Black Friday' 27/11). The link to the BlakRoc site is here, or you can just check out the video of RZA and the Black Keys in the studio to get a flavour of what it's all about. Can't wait.

The second LP is 'Echo Party', marking the return of DJ/MC/Producer/All Round Cool Kid Edan, aka Edan The Magnificant, the man responsible for what is possibly my very favourite LP of the past decade, 2005's 'Beauty & The Beat', an album that basically sounds like the Ultramagnetic MCs rapping over a badly warped copy of Nuggets, ie: very much my sort of thing. He hasn't put out an LP since, and I've sorta given up waiting, but in the meantime we now have this release, which is being described as a sorta psychedelicised old-skool rap mix tape, back-to-back late 70s hip-hop tracks with loadsa new stuff played by Edan himself thrown in for good measure... apparently including xylophones, moogs and kazoos...and early reports are all positive. Again, can't wait.

Them's The Breaks #2987 - Elvis Presley Edition!

2009-10-31T03:35:00.000-07:00

So this looks like a pretty terrible record, right? Just another generic El Pres Is Dead cash-in LP from those erstwhile hawkers of A1 mondo trasho compilations over at Camden Records...awful sleeve design...rubbish photo...no hit songs yadda yadda yadda. However - and this would have been a pretty redundant post had there not been a 'however'...I mean even more redundant than it already is - I was actually really stoked to pick this up for a couple of quid the other weekend. Heresforwhy.

I've written about The Funk Of The Memphis Flash before a couple of times, most expansively here at Mof Gimmer's Electric Roulette. Elvis was essentially a synthesist; overt hoodlum sexuality aside, Presley's most significant contribution to pop music was his innate, entirely effortless ability to fuse various root forms of southern rock and roll; gospel, blues, country, soul etc. Elvis did it all, and continued to internalise and adapt contemporary styles as they developed during the course of his career, with 60s-70s funk/soul no exception. Crate diggers looking for breakbeats in unusual places have long known that there are a handful of super-funky Elvis tracks, nuggets of sampleable gold packed with clattering drums and fuzz bass lines, that would come as a surprise the casual Presley fan. David Holme's use of 'A Little Less Conversation' on the Oceans 11 soundtrack (and the subsequent JXL re-mix, exponentially lamer than the original Presley track) served to shine some light on this particularly dusty corner of the Elvis archives - a classic reminder that there's treasure everywhere.

And so it proves with the 'Please Don't Stop Loving' LP, which despite being generally as dismal as the sleeve suggests, manages to contain a couple of gen-u-inely brilliant RnB tracks (the up-tempo floorfilling smasher 'Rubberneckin' - also laterly subject to a diabolical dance re-mix, and the sizzling, southern-fried country soul of 'Clean Up Your Own Backyard'), and one kitschy movie theme song ('Change Of Habit'...from a movie about, yep, nuns) which begins with a phenomenal fuzz-bass & drums break, fat enough to be sampled by DJ Format. Enjoy!

Live From New York - It's Saturday Night Live...Vs Spider Man!

2009-10-30T11:08:00.000-07:00

Yoinks! What's cooler than one cool thing? Why sir, that'd be: two cool things. And what's cooler than two cool things? Howabout two things that are already cool coming together to make a third even cooler thing! And to prove this equation, here's this exceptionally cool edition of Marvel Team Up from 1978, featuring Spiderman...and the cast of Saturday Night Live! That'd be the classic 'Not Ready For Prime Time Players' line up - Belushi, Chase, Ackroyd et al. Just ordered it from ebay for £2...a bone fide bargain for a fun piece of gen-u-ine Americana, albeit one that I'll read once, and then leave on a shelf slowly disappearing under a pile whatever other pointless crap I buy subsequently from ebay. With great buying power comes great irresponsibility.

Crazy Keith Kellard Wins 2009 World Crazy Golf Championship

2009-10-25T13:45:00.000-07:00

Word to my man Keith 'Doc' Kellard, who has romped home to first place with a massive five point victory over the field at the World Crazy Golf Championships in Hastings this weekend. For his efforts he takes home not only the the coveted WCGC trophy, but a cheque for a cool £1000 - quite a result considering he came 11th in this competition last year and only accumulated £24.38 in prize money during entire 2008 season. Dig miniaturegolfer.com for more details.

Vic Mizzy: 1916 - 2009

2009-10-21T01:36:00.000-07:00

Word to my man Vic Mizzy, who passed away at his home in Bel Air a few days ago, aged 93. Based in New York for most of his career, he wrote hit records for Doris Day & others during the 40s / 50s, before moving into TV & Movie scoring.

His most enduring piece of music, recorded over 40 years ago and revealed in the video clip below, has embedded itself more deeply and unmovably in the firmament of Western pop culture than the work of even our most revered songwriters. It is part of our DNA, it's opening riff illiciting an instinctive pavalov's dogs reaction amongst anybody who hears it, generating not just a vocal response, but two physical finger clicks. Try it today at work or college; go up to somebody and utter a"dur-dur-dur-duh". Nobody can resist the two-click answer. It's like casting a spell - mysterious and spooky, indeed.

Little Old Book Reader Me: My 2009 Reading List

2009-10-18T07:21:00.000-07:00

Nick Tosches: 'Dino - Living High In The Dirty Business Of Dreams'
Dazzling Dean Martin biog, and by a nose, the best thing I've read this year. (A+)

Andrew Chaikin: 'A Man On The Moon - The Voyages Of The Apollo Astronauts'
Spellbinding history of NASA's Apollo missions. Sci-fact that makes sci-fi redundant. (A)

Bob Woodward / Carl Bernstein: 'The Final Days'
Depressing descent into Nixon's post-Watergate heart-of-darkness. (A)

Evan Wright: 'Generation Kill'
Iraq's answer to Michael Herr's 'Nam classic 'Dispatches'...but no where near as good (B-)

Randall Sullivan: 'LAbyrinth - Corruption & Vice In The LAPD'
Shaky investigation into the murders of Biggie Smalls & Tupac Shakur (C-)

The Editors Of Rolling Stone: 'The Ballad Of John Lennon & Yoko Ono'
Brilliant anthology of RS Lennon/Ono pieces. (B)

Alan Moore: 'The Watchmen'
As good as everybody says it is. A mindblowing work of sheer genius. (A+)

Alex Ross: 'The Rest Is Noise'
Or: 'Modern Classical Music For Dummies'. (A-)

The 9/11 Commission Report
Essential Noughties text (Ungradable)

Matthew Smith: 'Victim - The Secret Tapes Of Marilyn Monroe'
OK-ish Marilyn biog. Frankly, not dirt-rakey enough for me. (C-)

Kenneth Starr: 'The Official Report of the Independent Counsel's Investigation of the President'
The Monica Lewinsky Scandal, in all it's grubby /funny / shocking glory. A great read. (B)

The 1973 Harlem Globetrotters Annual
Cheap Hannah Barbera cash-in. Fun, but basically rubbish. (D)

Suzy Kalter: 'The Complete Book Of M*A*S*H'
Glossy coffee-table 'mash'-note (ha ha) to the peerless TV comedy/drama. (B-)

Daniel Woolff: 'Dream Boogie - The Triumph Of Sam Cooke'
Serious music biog. (A)

Joan Didion: 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem'
Collection of short, down-beat, hep-cat late 60s new-journalism. (B)

Keith Badman: 'The Beatles Diary Vol.2 - After The Breakup 1970-2001'
Day-by-day accound of the Fab's post-Beatles careers. Dull, at length. (C-)

John McEnroe: 'Serious'
Wildly entertaining sports autobiog from The Mac. (B+)

Studs Terkel: 'And They All Sang'
Anthology of Terkel's encounters with popular musicians. (B-)

Phil Hardy & Dave Laing: 'The Encyclopedia Of Rock Vol. 2: From Liverpool To San Francisco'
7os Rock music encyclopedia compiled by the era's top music hacks. A nice period-piece. (B-)

Stephen E. Kercher: 'Rebel With A Cause: Liberal Satire In Postwar America'
High-brow-ish history of satire in the US. (B)

Bob Woodward: 'The Secret Man'
More Watergatery from the Washington Post's finest. Inessential, but die-hards will dig. (C+)

Lewis Carroll: 'Alice In Wonderland'
Undeniably druggy children's classic. Such an odd little story. (A)

Enid Blyton: 'Five Go To Demon's Rocks'
Lashings of ginger beer and scenes of mild peril a-go-go. Timmy the dog steals the show. (C+)

The Bible
Quas-historical self-help science fiction classic. (A)

Playlist: City Screen Basement, York, 17th October, 2009

2009-10-18T06:53:00.000-07:00

The Muppet Show Theme
Public Enemy: Public Enemy #1
Les Baxter: Hogin' Machine
Wu Tang Clan: CREAM
NBC'S Saturday Night Live Cast Recording
Victor C Lewis: Bird Sounds In Close Up
Frank Sinatra: Moonlight In Vermont
Star Wars -The Empire Strikes Back: Main Title Theme
The Shangri-Las: Leader Of The Pack
Edan: Rock & Roll
Stereo Performance Evaluator Test Record
Theme From M*A*S*H* (Suicide Is Painless)
Big Daddy Kane: Ain't No Half Steppin'
Bob Doroughs: Three Is The Magic Number
Black Sabbath: The Wizard
Steve Martin: King Tut
Jimi Hendrix: Level
Gangstarr: Just To Get A Rep
El Michaels Affair: Shimmy Shimmy Ya

Adventures In Crate Digging - A Few Records I Picked Up This Weekend

2009-10-11T13:45:00.000-07:00

Dennis Coffey - 'Gettin' It On' (45)
Typically freaked-out slice of heavily fuzzed, evil psyche-soul from the geetar supremo, as sampled on the very first track of...

Public Enemy - 'Yo! Bum Rush The Show' (LP)
Lo-fi, rough & raw, needles-in-the-red , drum-machine clattering 1987 hip-hop debut. Hits hard, relentlessly. By the time they came to record their next LP, PE's sound had become a bewilderingly complex collage of noise and layered samples, but the tough minimalism of their debut still impresses on its own uncompromising terms.

The Not Ready For Prime Time Players - NBC's Saturday Night Live (LP)
Sporadically great '76 compilation of sketches from SNL's debut season starring Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin and others. A fun document from the early days of US comedy's 70s - 80s golden age, characterised by the freewheeling, improvisational, irreverent, prepared-to-miss-as-often-as-you-hit attitude common to so much great live comedy. "Live from New York - It's Saturday Night!"

Frank Sinatra - Come Fly With Me (LP)
The Chairman of The Board's carefree, atomic-age, jet-set lifestyle concept LP. Peerless late 50s popular art. Almost ten years since I first bough this on CD, the impressionistic, pastel shaded Moonlight In Vermont ("telegraph cables, how they sing down the highway, as they travel each bend in the road") remains one of my very favourite pieces of music...

John F Kennedy - The Kennedy Wit (LP)
Probably not strictly accurate to describe this is being 'by' JFK, this is a collection of prize Kennedy-isms selected from 'speeches, press conferences and Off-The-Cuff Remarks', released the year after his assassination. An opportunistic cash-in, no doubt, but a fascinating and ultimately saddening artefact nevertheless.

Unimportant Things That Really Bug Me #237

2009-10-06T13:23:00.000-07:00

The Idea That "It's A Bit Before My Time" Is An Acceptable Explanation For A Quiz Show Contestant To Not Know The Answer To A Question About Pop Culture

Host: Who, in 1680, composed Canon In D?

Contestant: That would be Johann Pachebel.

Host: Correct. Who released the 1986 album 'The Queen Is Dead?'

Contestant: I'll have to pass. A bit before my time, I'm afraid, ha ha!

"A bit before my time." YOU JUST CORRECTLY ANSWERED A QUESTION ABOUT A PIECE OF MUSIC THAT'S OVER 300 YEARS OLD! THAT WAS PRETTY BEFORE YOUR TIME TOO, BUT YOU KNEW THAT!

Fair enough if they say 'pop music isn't my thing.' But 'before my time' isn't a valid reason for not knowing the answer about an 1986 pop album any more than it's a valid reason for not knowing about the Franco-Prussian War or the fall of the Berlin Wall. If 'before my time' was an acceptable answer for not knowing something, nobody would know about anything that occurred before their birth, or later. "Ooh, World War 2? Sorry, bit before my time."

The thing that really bugs me is that quiz show hosts tend to accept this as a reasonable excuse. The worst offender is Jeremy Paxman, who frequently sympathises with students on 'University Challenge' who get questions on pop culture from 'before their time', often excusing them entirely with a chuckle, like, yeah, why would you know who played the lead in 'Gilda'? And yet they'll have just answered a question about the invention of penicillin, or even more tellingly, Paxman will have just berated them for not knowing the answer to a question about penicillin. Like anything, if you don't know something, you just don't know it. It has nothing to do with when it happened relative to your birth.

I guess what really grinds my goat here is the barely concealed subtext that pop culture isn't important enough to learn about, that nobody is expected to have accumulated any knowledge about it outside of whatever they've happened to experience first-hand during their lifetime. It's snobbery, basically - you're expected to read re-prints of classical literature, but not watch re-runs of Dragnet. It's almost like the idea itself is ludicrous. As somebody who has dedicated much of his life to the study of pop culture, I know this idea is simply wrong. You can do it. It is perfectly possible to take modern history and 20th Century pop culture seriously, and there's no reason an intelligent 19 year old student on University Challenge should be any less knowledgeable about John Ford movies than they are about the paintings of Rembrandt.

There's Treasure Everywhere: The Hip-Hop Crate Digging Mentality Vs The Orthodox Rock Police

2009-10-05T12:32:00.000-07:00

Hip-Hop Culture and Calvin & Hobbes have both taught me alot of important lessons,pehaps the most crucial being a philosophy common to them both: there's treasure everywhere. The endless quest for that perfect break requires, first and foremost, an open mind. You've gotta un-learn what Rock Orthodoxy has told you 'bout The Canon. Diggin' in the crates is all about taking a risk. Infact, it's about having fun. Buying a re-issue of Third/Sister Lovers by Big Star for £14.99 isn't fun. You get a pretty good LP out of it, but you knew that already, 'cos Mojo Magzine gave it a 4* review. Buying a battered copy of a piece of crap lookin' Liberace LP for £2 and finding a great funk track on it...that's fun. (In a really nerdy way. It's relative.)

One of the really fun things about that hip-hop mentality is finding unusual albums, ignored albums, even maligned albums, by big-name artists (especially big-name artists deemed 'uncool' by The Orthodox Rock Police), which actually turn out to be really great. If it were up to The Orthodox Rock Police, we woulda never heard Electric Mud by Muddy Waters, or all those great psyche-fuzz 45s that Fats Domino put out, or 'I Got The' by Labi Siffre, or even Elvis' 'A Little Less Conversation'. They were saved from obscurity by open-minded, happy-go-lucky crate-diggers, people who were judging what they found by a whole different set of prejudice-free criteria, ie: "check out the drums on this", people listening in a different way. Often it is the work of big name acts which is uncharacteristic of the sound they were commercially succesful with that suffers the most disrespectful, ignorant treatment. Hip-hop has taught us better than that. It tells us that there's treasure everywhere, and that we shoud be prepared to look everywhere for it. To that ends, enjoy Sammy Davis Jr's funky-ass version of 'Hi Heel Sneakers', from his totally un-loved 1970 Motown LP,'Something For Everyone!

Paul Fuzz Raps With Charles Babbage

2009-10-05T10:52:00.000-07:00

With the BBC's 'Electric Revolution' season generating a fad for all things computery, I thought I'd interview Father Of Computing and Inventor Of The Difference Engine, Charles Babbage, (1791-1871) for my blog. Enjoy.

Paul : Word is born. I'm here chillin' with my man C-Bizzle, aka B-Dogg, aka The Babbinator, straight outta Victorian London. S'up, dog?

Babbage: I'll tell you what is up. Developing a machine which calculates mathematical tables, removing the risk of human error, is what is up. Dog.

BOOOOOM! C-Bizzle representing for polynomial functions in full effect! It's like THAT, y'all!

Yes, that is what it's like.

So, C-Bizzle. I hear your dopest invention was the Difference Engine. Why don't you hit me with some knowledge?

Very well. The Difference Engine was the first mechanical computer, built to calculate a series of values automatically. It composed of over 25,000 separate parts, and weighed 15 tons.

That's some seriously heavy shit, dog.

Yes, it was exceptionally heavy. Just like your momma.

OH -SNAP!

You may be interested to know that in my day, just as a 'conductor' conducts, so the word 'computer' simply meant an individual who computed.

You mean like a robot?

No, more like a regular human being, employed to calculate difficult sums for universities or financial institutions.

What, you mean like a robot?

Not exactly. A professional mathematician, required to perform great feats of mental arithmetic.

Mental arithmetic? I'll tell you what's mental - not using a calculator! I'd be like, dude, lets just break out the Casio and get busy!

This is my point precisely. In my day there were no calculators. Therefore all mathematical calculations had to be made purely by the human brain, and an individual employed in this profession was known as a computer.

What, like some sort of crazy robot?

Ah...yes.

You've just blown my mind dude. Well, that's all we've got time for. Peace to my man C-Bizzle, whose Difference Engine saved us all from being enslaved by evil super intelligent math-bots. I'm outta here. BOOOOOM!

Sgt Pepper's Lonely Star Wars Band

2009-09-28T12:42:00.000-07:00

Pretty cool, huh?

Now! That's What I Call A Post About Pop Music

2009-09-27T06:03:00.000-07:00

I basically believe that we close out the Noughties with chart Pop Music in an exceptionally healthy state, having emerged fully and finally from the spectacularly dire early to mid-Noughties Atomic Kitten / Westlife era. While my taste in old music has become ever wider and weirder and more esoteric as I've gotten older, my taste in contemporary music has solidified in recent years into an unashamed love of good mainstream pop music, and a general disinterest in, and suspicion of, middle-of-the-road 'alt' rock.

Maybe this is due to a greater sensitivity to (and distrust of) marketing & packaging, and a greater difficulty accepting the cynically disingenuous marketing of 'high art' rock product as 'authentic' or 'serious' or 'real' than the relatively accurate marketing of pop product as 'sexy' or 'fun' or 'new'. All (perhaps not all - certainly most) pop music is presented by its accompanying media in such a way that it appeals to a particular audience, playing on that audiences sense of identity, politics, sub-cultural allegiances etc. This is as true of The White Stripes as it is Cascada.

So I guess at some point you realise that the only real, worthwhile pleasure one can take from listening to a piece of pop music is via a willingness to go with an honest, gut-reaction to it, and that an honest reaction to a piece of music has nothing to do with style or politics (either personal or global) or what subculture you identify with, or who produced it, or what type of drums they used on it, but some impossible-to-fathom, incomprehensibly complex arrangement of experiences and your DNA that generates in your soul an undeniable sensation when presented with that sound. It's entirely arbitrary, and once you've accepted that it makes life much easier. "This person looks cool / sexy / exotic. Their song has a great melody / beat / sound. It makes me want to sing / dance / cry / fight." Is it really any more complicated than that? Madonna has spent huge swathes of her career trying to 'matter' in a variety of 'serious' arenas, but her instruction of 'And you can dance!' from the beginning of 'Into The Groove' is a more important statement than anything she's ever had to say about gender politics - it is a license to let go, permission to indulge unselfconsciously in the almighty power of pop music. Maybe even a timely reminder, a nudge to po-faced Mojo Magazine orthodoxy "...uh, you can dance, y'know. This is meant to be a party."

British pop music reached the millenium in a dire state, and wallowed in this depressed funk throughout the late 90s and early Noughties. Dudes on stools ruled, and it wasn't cool. Westlife remain the single most hateful pop group of my lifetime. Indeed, one cannot describe Westlife accurately as a pop band at all, lacking as they do any of the basic qualities common to that formula, ie: exciting songs, charisma, style, a sense of humour, relevance, ideas, etc etc. They just sucked, and continue to suck. They are anti-pop.

Elsewhere we suffered through endless hi-NRG Abba covers and tinny re-hashes of the Max Martin /Jive Records sound, so effective on Britney ('Oops I Did It Again', 'Crazy') The Backstreet Boys ('Backstreet's Back') & NSyncs ('Pop!') best records, but copied so weakly by British producers, and fronted by entirely talentless, pre-programmed popbots (Billie Piper's 'Day & Night' was one notable exception to this rule, being a pretty convincing British Britney rip-off.) Many of these boy/girl groups mighta had one or two acceptable records (S Club 7 had a couple of fine Motown pastiches, and 'Don't Stop Moving' is a pretty good disco track. All Saint's 'Never Ever' was a very effective 90s redux of that old girl-group sound. Rachel Stevens put out a couple of good Goldfrapp rip-offs), but overall they churned out vast amounts of garbage. The Spice Girls & Take That were genuinely powerful pop acts, vastly exceeding the limits of their formula through force of personality and the occasional great single, but the dozens of dozy Spice-Lites & Fake Thats that appeared in their wake were largely brainless, cynical business exercises exhibiting no love of pop music whatsoever. The top pre & post millennial US acts were hugely creative RnB / Hip-Hop performers like Missy Elliott, Eminem & Destiny's Child, undeniable talents, artists producing wildly original and exciting work. We had Steps & Atomic Kitten, non-singers dancing badly to cheap sounding music.

At some point in the last two - three years British pop has shook itself off and re-energised itself as a world-leading market force, back where it should be. The emergence of MOR Alt Rock - Foo Fighters, Green Day, the diabolical Red Hot Chilli Peppers - as the preeminent mega-selling unit shifting genre of choice gave pop a kick up the arse....it allowed room for pop to be the alternative choice, to be the place where the real creativity and excitement was happening. Enter Dizzee Rascal, Amy Winehouse, The Streets, Klaxons, artists making monumentally catchy, smart, NOW music. Acts ticking lots of boxes instead of one, or none, and existing on the fringes of the mainstream seemingly for a matter of minutes before being absorbed into the charts and the tabloids. After a shaky couple of years dominated by the horribly un-cool Pussycat Dolls, the US has produced Lady GaGa, whose shtick is more provocative off-Broadway drag-act than teen pop puppet. She's like a twisted, bizzzaro-world cartoon caricature version of the Blonde American Pop Princess, like if Britney Spears had missed out all the early cheerleader stuff and cut straight to the drugs and sex breakdown bit. GaGa is the perfect End Of The Noughties act, equally at home on the main stage of Glastonbury as she is performing at some LA hipster industry hang-out, a calculating, fame-obsessed suicide blonde train-wreck, lassooed to a thumping, buzzing electro-pop beat, whose career thus far is framed more like one of those semi-scripted Mtv reality TV shows than something approaching actual reality.

I'm not here to defend mainstream pop music, because it doesn't need defening, and anybody prepared to ignore or dismiss it on principle is a moron. There have been many, many great pop singles released in the past year, and it's simply worth noting that we appear to be in the middle of a genuine golden age for exciting, intelligent, fun mainstream music. These things go in cycles, and it won't last. A new Westlife / Atomic Kitten era will inevitably befall us within a couple of years. Maybe even a couple of months. So enjoy this pop era while you can...and remember: you can dance.

LL Cool J Performing 'Mama Said Knock You Out'. On Mtv Unplugged. In 1991. And it's really good.

2009-09-24T14:21:00.000-07:00

So back in 1991 they did this MTV Unplugged Hip-Hop Special, featuring De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and LL Cool J. I guess any hip-hop fan has a sorta wierd relationship with the Rapper + Live 'Rock' Band set-up. It smacks a little of making a concession to rock orthodoxy, like there's tacit admission that until a rapper ditches the DJ and gets a real band he still has something to prove to Mojo Magazine or whatever. I'm not a purist by any stretch, but I don't like seeing daft rock prejudices pandered to, plus live band-based hip-hop usually translates as terrible jazz-funk anyway.

This video, however, is undeniable. Forget the absence of two turnatbles. This is just a stone cold killer live performance. LL tears the roof off the suckah. And check out his insanely lame looking band...who absolutely nail the heavy Marley Marl funk of the original. With acoustic guitars. And not enough clothes. And stupid hair. And a guy at the piano who looks like a biophysics student. Apparently these guys were called Pop's Cool Love, and according to their Last FM bio had 'most in common with the short-lived 'funk metal' scene'. Of course they did. Anyway, whatever, they play the hell outta this so good luck to 'em. It's all so brilliant, and brilliantly unlikely. You can find videos of the other groups performances elsewhere on youtube, but none come close to matching this fearsome rap-rock throw-down.

Chillin' With Charles Addams

2009-09-22T10:22:00.000-07:00

I've been an Addams Family fan ever since I was a kid. It's a franchise which, over 50 years, has rarely put a foot wrong; wonderful original cartoons by the mighty (and mighty spooky) Charles Addams, a brilliant TV show with a Top 5 All Time theme song, an ok-ish Hannah-Barbera adaptation, a couple of genuinely great family movies, some well-loved video games, and The Best Selling Pinball Machine Of All Time. They used to show the live action TV series 'round 6-ish during the week when I was in my teens, in that time slot which was home during the nineties to so many great cult US imports on BBC2 (Def2) & Channel 4; Mission:Impossible, Star Trek, Buck Rogers, Fresh Prince Of Bel Air, Eerie Indiana, the Waynes World sketches from SNL, Daria, Blossom, Boy Meets World, Ren & Stimpy, cartoon showcase Liquid Television etc etc. During the Summer Holidays in my late teens they'd sometimes show it mid-morning-ish on BBC2, 'round the same time they'd show re-runs of The Fugitive. I'm quite sure much of this stuff was regarded solely as cheap filler by the British networks running them, but the chance to watch classic US television shows or weird new cartoons (from that nineties Golden Age first-wave of postmodern cartoonery - you remember how good The Animaniacs was? Or The Tick?) was one I treasured greatly as a kid.

And I always thought The Addams Family were particularly cool. I've been reading alot about Charles Addams recently. Mostly his work appeared in the New Yorker (the first in 1932), occasionally in TV Guide and a couple of other publications. The creator of the the all-together ooky family was quite a character himself, living a life fogged with bizarre myth and legend. Certainly the 'wyrd', macabre Addams persona was partly an affection, but even so there enough freaky facts to satisfy a dirt-digger like myself. Addams had a tombstone for a coffee table and collected crossbows. He was known to dress for dinner in a knight's suit of armour. His last house was nicknamed The Swamp, and he used to shoot at rats from his bedroom window. He dated Greta Garbo, Joan Fontaine and Jackie Kennedy. (How crazy is that?) He got married to his third wife in a pet cemetery and wore sunglasses throughout the service. Brilliantly, he was known to his friends as 'Chill'.

The image at the top of the post is of an album packaged in Addam's artwork, a supernaturally-themed folk LP from 1957, by Dean Gitter. I have no idea whether the album is any great shakes, but a Charles Addams sleeve makes it a must-have piece of Americana. The haunted house depicted is a typical Addams image. It seems that as a kid growing up in New Jersey, Charles had a bit of a thing for sneaking into old abandoned houses, and was infact once arrested, aged 9, for doing so. The creepy, broke-down, boarded-up suburban spook-house remains a resonant image in US pop culture, from Psycho to (one of my faves) The 'Burbs...the idea that some awful darkness might be lurking behind the white picket fences and sunny Sunday bake sales of Elm Street resonates within our society still. Addams tapped into this troubled fascination, and 80 years after his first New Yorker illustration, the durability of his work suggests we remain suckers for the creepy and kooky side of the American dream.

"We're off to see The RZA..."

2009-09-08T11:52:00.000-07:00

So I just booked my tickets to see RZA...at The Duchess in York. That's right. RZA. From the Wu Tang. Playing at The Duchess. In York. I guess you could say I'm pretty psyched. To put this in context, The RZA isn't a regular Duchess booking. A regular Duchess booking would be, say, 'The ELO Experience: A Tribute To ELO' or 'Henry Priestman (Ex-Christians)'. It's that kinda place. RZA playing The Duchess is just nuts. This is a musician, a rapper, a producer, an author, a soundtrack composer, a...thinker... whose weight of influence on hip-hop culture - and by extension all pop culture - is second to none. The Wu Tang introduced a whole new vocabulary to rap music; Eastern philosophies, chess, Kung Fu movies and martial arts...they just came to the game with tons of new, interesting ideas, and The Kids & The Critics both loved 'em for it. This man produced every significant Wu Tang release, from the Clan's mind-wigging debut to solo joints like GZA's untouchable 'Liquid Swords'. He produced the soundtracks for Tarantino's Kill Bill double-feature, and Ghostdog: Way Of The Samurai, maybe my favourite movie of the Noughties, and a film totally indebted in style, tone and subject matter to the world created by RZA and the Wu Tang. He starred in Coffee & Cigarettes alongside Bill Murray. He's still putting out dope material - the recent (and strangely under-promoted) Chamber Music LP (most of which is performed live by New York soul group The Revelations) features some of this years very finest old-skool flavoured hip-hop. Few individuals have contributed more to my musical and cultural education than RZA, and I can't wait to be in the same room with him. Wu Tang Forever.

RZA's 'Tao Of Wu Tang' tour lands at the York Duchess on the 5th of October.

Jeff Simmons: Naked Angels OST

2009-08-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

So I picked this LP up a couple of weeks ago from Borderline in Brighton. It's the score to some old Roger Corman biker flick from 1969. Jeff Simmons played bass with Zappa's Mothers Of Invention at some point. Whatever. The album, it probably won't surprise you to learn, largely consists of heavily fuzzed funk-rock, in the contemporary style. Sorta sits somewhere between Dennis Coffey and Dave Allen & The Arrows. It's pretty good. Actually its really good in places. It just isn't gonna change your life. I'm a sucker for this sorta thing and happy to get suckered outta some bucks for it, but I guess you might not be. 'Naked Angels Theme' is the standout track, a full-on buzz-saw attack with a killer break. If you wanna invest in a really great biker movie soundtrack album, I'd recommend you go with Les Baxter's 1970 'Hells Belles' OST, which I already wrote about here. So I guess if you already read the 'Hells Belles' post, you didn't really need to waste your time reading this review of a less impressive album. I mean, that's two minutes of your life you're never getting back. Look, I'm sorry. If I were you, I wouldn't buy either album. You've already spent a buncha time reading about them - now you're gonna spend money on 'em and sit listening to them as well? Fergeddaboudit. Treat yourself to a nice meal or something instead. Go for a walk. Anything. Just don't sit around reading about pretty good but totally inessential biker movie soundtracks. This whole thing is my fault, really.

El Michels Affair: 'Enter The 37th Chamber'

2009-08-18T10:23:00.000-07:00

It goes without saying that hip-hop is fundamentally a postmodern experiment. It is engaged in a dialogue with all pop music which has preceded it. Hip-hop is not just pop music - it is a commentary on pop music. It exists within it, but also beyond it, outside of it. For hip-hop, the vinyl record represents not the end of the creative process, but the beginning. Hip-hop's relationship with musical history is hands-on. Hip-hop re-arranges and re-contextualizes the past. It manipulates, cuts and pastes. It deconstructs. Hip-hop is irreverent, does not recognise does accepted 'high' & 'low' categorisations of musical forms - any and every record, from every imaginable genre, is approached as a legitimate source of sampleable material. It is the end of history, and everything is up for grabs.

So dig this. New York funk outfit El Michels Affair have produced an LP which consists almost exclusively of instrumental cover versions of Wu Tang Clan tracks, tracks which themselves consist almost exclusively of samples lifted from old funk & soul LPs...and it is produced to sound largely like authentic 70s soul. Postmodern enough for ya? Theoretically this could mean that the Affair's version of 'C.R.E.A.M' (an album highlight) just sounds exactly like an instrumental version of The Charmel's majestic Stax/Volt single 'As Long As I've Got You', from which the main 'C.R.E.A.M' loop is lifted. Infact, the Affair have wisely chosen to use the specific samples lifted for the Wu Tang tracks covered here more as jumping-off points for their own experiments and jams...therefore the Affair's 'C.R.E.A.M' sounds neither exactly like the Wu's original version, or the song it samples, but references both.

More important than any of this high-brow nonsense is that 'Enter The 37th Chamber' is a super-funky LP in its own right (perfect late-night listening) and could be enjoyed by any funk fan, regardless of how much or how little interest they have in the Wu Tang - in some respects, maybe a lack of interest in the 'concept' would benefit the listener. The concept is so mind-bogglingly genius that it's quite hard for a nerd like me to judge the album objectively...the idea of a cookin' funk combo doing wild, live versions of old Wu Tang joints is so ace that the album itself inevitably struggles to live up to it's own hype. The Affair have produced what is undoubtedly a fine 'cinematic soul' (their phrase) LP, peppered with some excellent moments ('Shimmy Shimmy Ya', featuring a children's choir, is guaranteed floor-filling club madness)...but personally I've found myself too caught up in the IDEA to enjoy it on its own terms. This probably says more about me than it does about the album....which, like I say, it really pretty great...but maybe not as great as the IDEA promised it could be....you can see how I'm having trouble with this.

Look: this album's really cool, it's a cool idea, and if you're home with your feet up and a bottle of cheap red, you'll be well into it. Shoulda covered '4th Chamber' though.

Attic Records, York: A Righteous Venture In Straight Up Old Schoolness Powered By Mammoth Titanium Balls

2009-08-10T09:56:00.000-07:00

I've been totally hyped about this place opening ever since the York grapvine started buzzing 'bout it a couple of months back. This is Attic Records, a brand new vinyl emporium operating out of a third floor bedroom above a Barbers in the Ancient Cathedral City Of York. And it's just as cool as it sounds. You gotta hand it to the cats (a couple of local faces called Gaz & Foxy) who run the place - opening up a record store in the Current Economic Climate takes mammoth titanium balls. But somehow you can actually see the store really working, surviving and thriving, 'cos Attic Records has got something about it which is undeniable and un-buyable - it's got a great vibe.

The Attic ain't just a place for record junkies to score a pile of the black stuff. Attic Records is simply an exceptionally hip place to hang out. A place to rap with good folks about good music, and generally make the scene. Y'know - like a Real Record Store. Attic Records is an exercise in straight-up record store old schoolness. The suits told ya this sorta place just couldn't make it no more, not with everybody hooked on free downloads and cheap-fix mp3s. But everybody knows that this analysis is baloney - there'll always be a market for funky downhome vinyl shacks, just as long as the stock is right, the price is right, and the vibe is right. People still like going to quirky, interesting little places where they can Buy Records. With LPs displayed on the mantle piece of a cast iron victorian fireplace and the walls plastered with posters, Attic Records is literally like somebody opened a record store in their bedroom. How great is that?

Most record stores have the stench of death about 'em these days. Attic Records feels fresh, psyched, and ready to Take Care of Business. But they can't make it on their own. A righteous venture like this like this needs support. Your support. Yeah: YOU! Luckily supporting a place like this don't take no effort at all - all you gotta do is go in, shoot the breeze with the guys behind the counter, pick a couple of records, and buy the damn things. Then you can feel good about yourself all day 'cos you've contributed to A Totally Positive Thing, and have landed some new tunes to boot. I'm tellin' you, dude, I laid down some greenbacks for a pile of rekkids in there at the weekend and I feel great. Dig what I dug outta the crates!

So I was pretty knocked-out to find a top-drawer copy of Alice Cooper's 'Billion Dollar Babies'. I'm on a massive Alice Cooper kick at the moment. 2009 has been the year of my personal Glam revival. Mr Cooper was pulling his freaky guy-liner shtick back in late 60s Detroit, and his early stuff is a whole lotta wacked-out oddball Zaapa-fied wonkiness. It's OK, but when he got pop, he got better. Billion Dollar Babies is Cooper's number one all-time pop-shlock horror-show multi-million sellin' stadium slaying gatefold-sleeve concept monster, the tunes are sweet and the riffs are rockin...it's The Best Non-Stop 70s Death-Jams And Doom Rock Album In The World...Ever! S'all pantomime, of course, buy whadda performance.

Maybe even better still is the mondo-bizzaro super-heavy Glam-Psycheness of Wizzard's 'Wizzard Brew'. The whole album is like this dark, acid-fried glitter nitemare, cosmic-weirdness of a genuinely unsettling and creepy kind. Anybody expecting 'I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday' is gonna be mighty freaked by the pure hallucinogenic dirge offered here. Roy Wood made some kick-ass records in his time, from his garage-fuzz experiments with The Move to the shiny orch-pop classicism of ELO. But 'Wizzard Brew' is some whole other thang. Check out LP centre-piece 'Meet Me At The Jailhouse.' 13 minutes of buzzing, squarking, megaton-funky prog rock heaviosity. With a ridiculous backwards sax interlude. Bonkers stuff. Attic Records has my eternal gratitude for stocking this cult masterpiece of distorted scuzzadelia.

And to round out my purchases, I picked up a copy of Kylie's first LP - a definitive SAW pop album no home should be without, a nice Nutbush City Limits-era Ike & Tina collection, the deathless 'Return Of The Mack' by Mark Morrison on 12", and some budget Miracles best of. (I didn't even get a chance to look at the 45s.) Like I say - I'm just doing my bit to support a righteous venture. I invite y'all to do the same.

Check the Attic Records facebook, here.

SLAM Magazine: The NBA's Greatest 50 Players

2009-08-09T10:25:00.000-07:00

Ever since I was a kid I've had a distant, but on-going, sorta fascination with basketball. The only sports team I've ever followed in any regular way was the long-forgotten Doncaster Panthers, who played out of the Doncaster Dome in the mid '90s before disbanding in 1996 due to financial difficulties. I have hazy recollections of watching the Harlem Globetrotters on TV in my formative years, I guess on variety shows or Blue Peter or whatever, and being utterly entranced by them. These guys could fly. And they looked Bad. Ass. I even owned a 3/4 size Harlem Globetrotters basketball. And like many my age, me & my friends spent endless hours playing NBA Jam on the Megadrive - "He's on fire!" "The nail in the coffin!" "Puts up a brick!" - perfecting skills with our thumbs that in real-life looked positively super-human.

When the 1992 Barcelona Olympics came around, I had the opportunity to dig on The Dream Team...to watch the sport played at it's absolute best, by the best international team ever assembled. The Dream Team were simply off-the-hook. Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing...Coach Chuck Daly described being with the Dream Team as like "travelling with a rock band, like Elvis & The Beatles put together." It's often said that watching great basketball is like watching a great jazz concert - the improvisation, the opportunity for individual flair and moments of off-the-wall genius, the back-and-forth dialogue between the players - and sure 'nuff, watching the Dream Team play was as mesmerising as a night at Newport with Miles Davis' first Quintet.

Anyway, in the spirit of educating myself further in the ways of shooting hoops, I bought my first ever copy of SLAM magazine yesterday, which features a perfect So You Want To Get Into Basketball-type feature listing the NBA's 'Top 50 Players'. The guy pictured above left here is Julius Erving, aka Dr J, who ranks 15th. He was a spectacular slam-dunk artist, maybe the finest ever seen. He was ruthless, used the ball like deadly weapon. He defined basketball in the '70s, and ushered in the modern 'above-the-rim' era of the game. He was a stone-killer on the court, and a gentleman off it. He had a cool afro. He's my new hero.

Taxi, Season 2: The Golden Age Of US TV Comedy

2009-08-02T11:57:00.001-07:00

So I was watching the 1978 second season of Taxi this weekend with my folks. This is real Golden Age of US Comedy stuff. The quality of the cast is just mind-boggling. If this is your bag, watching Judd Hirsch, Andy Kaufman, Christopher Lloyd & Danny DeVito riff off one another in Taxi is no less than the equivalent of watching the Rat Pack swaggering on stage at the Sands or CSN&Y harmonising at Woodstock.* By all accounts relations amongst the Taxi cast were not always easy, which is hardly surprising given the highly volatile mixture of clashing creative egos on set. Kaufman alone was about as erratic and unmanageable as they come, and it's amazing he survived within the button-down constraints of Sit-Com land for as long as he did. The 'Taxi' of this era is simply magical, peerless popular art. Treat yourself to a copy of Season 2, here.

*I'm not kidding about this era being a spectacular time for US comedy. While the '78 season of Taxi aired, the Saturday Night Live cast counted Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi amongst it's number, Steve Martin was at the very height of his success, and Richard Pryor recorded his magnificant 'Live In Concert' concert film. In-sane.

Club Preview: Fuzz @ Dusk 07/08/09

2009-08-02T11:21:00.000-07:00

So how's this for some shameless self-promotion, huh? Yessir. I'll be DJ-ing at a bar in York this Friday, from around 9 'til 2am, and I'm gonna be joined on the Wheels Of Moulded Plastic by Jack Jewers, bass-player with exceptionally hip local garage-rock combo The Federals. I'll be spinning tons of old breakbeat-heavy psyche rock, funk & old-skool hip-hop. Jewers will almost certainly be playing tons of Dee-troit garage rock and dirty ol' RnB. It'll be a double-live gonzo, intensity-in-ten-cities, live at Budakon type of affair. Please join us to drink, dance, and make requests that Recent Studies have shown to have at best a 23% chance of being granted.

Re-issue this! Frank Sinatra: Watertown (1970)

2009-07-29T11:33:00.000-07:00

One time when I was working at HMV Oxford Circus some dude from Ace Records came in and pop-quizzed the staff about what out-of-print albums we would like to see re-issued. For what it's worth, I said 'Two Headed Freap', an OK-ish 70s jazz-funk album by Ronnie Foster I musta dug at the time but now seems like an utterly senseless choice. If that dude from Ace Records pop-quizzed me now, there's only one album I could possibly choose: Frank Sinatra's 'Watertown'.

I've been re-visiting 'Watertown' recently. About a year ago I wrote a a very long piece about this album for Mof Gimmer's Electric Roulette, a site which at it's best has more interesting and original things to say about pop music than most. For those who haven't got half an hour to read that article, 'Watertown' was a 1970 soft-rock / easy listening concept album, produced in the contemporary Carpenters / Glen Campbell style. The story, performed with almost method-actorly empathy by Frank Sinatra, traces the heartbreaking story of a small-town father struggling to cope with the breakdown of his marriage. 'Watertown' is not just my favourite Sinatra LP - and that's a tough call, dude-, but one of my Top Ten All Time LPs, period.

Lyrically, 'Watertown' is delightfully detailed, painting a rich portrait of life in the town and the man's life there, out-stripping almost any 'rock musical'-type concept LP of the era in terms of narrative structure and sheer quality of writing. Musically, it is as 'rock' as Sinatra ever got, with a palette of sounds including fuzz bass, RnB-lite drums, flute, electric guitar, vibraphone, scene-setting sound effects and ghostly children's choirs. The late 60s / early 70s pop music scene is littered with attempts by record companies to psychedelicise an established artist's sound in order to cash-in on the hippie dollar, sometimes with valuable musical returns, more often without - but this is not 'Electric Frank'. 'Watertown' is a serious, considered, heartfelt work, by an artist fully enagaged with the project.

I'm given to whims and obsessions, and those cultural artefacts which become totemic for me have done something special to stick around. 'Watertown' hasn't unlodged itself from my mental firmament since it crash landed there a year ago, and I don't expect it to shift any time soon. I credit the album with curing me of vertigo, which I was inexplicably struck down with last September. This post is simply another excuse to heartily recommend an album which doesn't get 10% of the recognition it should. 'Watertown' sold poorly at the time (despite Sinatra himself being very proud of the album), and remains a real cult concern. Logic dictates that one day somebody is gonna do a huge 'Watertown: Special Edition' double-disc re-issue, a la Dennis Wilson's 'Pacific Ocean Blue', and despite myself I'm probably gonna feel a little conflicted about it reaching a wider audience. At the moment I sorta feel like it's mine, and that's cool, but ultimately I guess I would really like to see it get the props it deserves. Once you visit 'Watertown', you never really leave. If you get a chance to hear this remarkable album, I guarantee you'll never want to.

Moon - 'Clangers-esque'

2009-07-22T02:06:00.000-07:00

Caught Moon at the cinema the other night. You can find a buncha reviews elsewhere if you really wanna read up on it. I just thought it was an exceptionally cool film, with a hugely impressive one-man-show performance by Sam Rockwell, and enjoyed the spectacular moon-buggy / lunar landscape 'exterior shots' 'cos they look sorta Clangers-esque, which comes as something of a relief after having billions of dollars worth of CGI rammed down your throat by the likes of Transformers et al. Moon is about ideas, not explosions, and there are moments that I can see becoming cultishly iconic - if 'Spaced' was still being made, you can bet your ass there woulda been a Moon pastiche in the next series.

I've seen a few reviews that have criticised how heavily Moon leans on that 70s cycle of working-stiff-in-space movies; Silent Runnings, Soylent Green, Dark Star etc. I guess this is a preference, but I'm not sure whether 'derivative' is a valid criticism in itself. 'Bad copy of' is a fair criticism, but 'copy of' maybe isn't. Moon wears its influences (most obviously 2001) on it's sleeve, deliberately references them in parts, and makes a convincing stab at placing itself as a worthy successor to those movies. So I don't really see what the problem is - it's not like multiplexes are over-flowing with quiet, thoughtful sci-fi, and I'm just glad somebody has had the good taste to rip off some cool old films rather than a current Cartoon Network franchise.

And that's the way it was: Walter Cronkite, 1916-2009

2009-07-19T09:39:00.000-07:00

Few words have been as undermined and devalued by the relentless, hyperbolic, exaggerated mis-use of language which characterises so much rolling news as the word 'legend'. Walter Cronkite was a newsman known for his precise, honest and measured use of the English language. And few media figures deserve the correctly applied epitaph 'legend' as he.

Anchorman for the CBS Nightly News between 1962 and 1981, Cronkite's voice was the authoritative, humanitarian voice of every major news story in America during some of the nation's most troubled and uncertain times. He is admired not only for having been a reassuring voice, but for being an honest voice, a straight-shooter, from the Ed Murrow-era old school of TV news - he was known simply as 'the most honest man in America'. When he felt the American people deserved to know that he no longer considered Vietnam to be winnable war, he told them so, and President Johnson famously responded that 'if I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America'. Johnson did not seek re-election for a second term.

Having watched Network recently and noted how the movie must surely endure as a constant touchstone for Jon Stewart and the Daily Show team, obituary assessments of Cronkite's reputation confirm once again how powerful the image of 'the honest anchorman' remains in US mainstream media - largely because there appears to be so few of them left. American TV News now wallows in a weird dichotomy - shockingly blatant partisanship in endemic, while a lack of plainly spoken, honest journalism is cowardly explained away as the consequence of fearing repercussions from the regulators for exhibiting 'bias'...as if 'the truth' can be biased.

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams confirmed during a (hugely entertaining) interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show this week that he knew Cronkite was unhappy with slipping journalistic standards on TV, and that he thought 24 hour news had created a situation where being first was more important than being right. The reality is that the 24 hour news cycle is here to stay, and consequently Cronkite's passing is particularly sad because in 2009 we need honest TV newsmen like Cronkite, newsmen who value basic integrity and independence of the press over 'access' at any cost, more than ever. One hopes that he was not the last of his kind.

The Empire Strikes Back: The Adventures Of Luke Skywalker (LP)

2009-07-12T06:18:00.000-07:00

It's become such a cliche to say that 'Empire' is your favourite Star Wars movie that you almost feel obliged to express a preference for 'The Phantom Menace' just to break with orthodoxy...but goddammit, even I'm not that perverse. In all honesty it's a close call for me between 'Empire' and 'A New Hope', but that moment when the AT-ATs first lumber into view over the horizen of Hoth (seen initially through the grainy, shaky viewfinder of the rebel recon guy's electro-binoculars, just one robo-elephantine foot filling the whole screen, until the image zooms-out to take in the terrifying size of the thing...only to reveal there's actually three of the bastards!) and the subsequent arctic wasteland battle just about tips it in Empire's favour. And that's before we get to Boba Fett.

Anyways, I picked this LP up from a record stall on York market this weekend. I just liked the cover art, am a sucker for pretty much anything Star Wars related, and thought it'd be sweet to spin when I DJ. It's actually better than I hoped, 'cos in addition to John William's score it features full narration by some cat called Malachi Throne (including the introductory crawl - "It was a dark time for the rebellion...") and lots of dialogue from the movie. All-in-all, perfect DJ-nerd type stuff, I picked it up for a fiver and you can probably do the same if you hunt around. May the crate-digging force be with you.

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In Other Star Wars Record Collecting News, I've finally (after years of searching) landed myself a copy of 'Battle Of The Planets' by Fader Gladiator, which many folks will recognise as 'That Cool Hip-Hoppy Star Wars Instrumental From 'Spaced''. I found this video featuring the track on something called 'Youtube'.

The Plastiscines

2009-07-12T03:47:00.000-07:00

Coming hot on the heels of Vivian Girls and Poppy & The Jezabels, The Plastiscines are the latest group to be inducted into my arbitrary and pointless cycle of Quite Liking And Supporting In Theory, But Not Investing Financially In, A Bunch Of Girls Who Make Potentially Very Commercial, But In All Likelihood Doomed To Second Division Status, Indie Pop Music. They're four boho-ish young women from France, and were part of that whole Parisian Libertines-scene from a couple of years back. Their first album was a raggle-taggle collection retro-ish guitar pop in the post-Libs syle, and had some nice moments. Their new song, Barcelona, is like three parts Girls Aloud to one part Go-Gos to two parts Blondie, and actually as good as that sounds. Apparently this is the lead single from a new LP which has been recorded in LA by some dude who has worked with Katy Perry, Pink & Avril Lavinge, which explains why it sounds so magnificantly POP. So thankyou for your all your embarrassingly desperate efforts Mr & Mrs Ting-Tings, but your time is up. The Plasticines will take it from here.

The Plastiscines myspace

Ennio Morricone -'The Ecstacy Of Gold'

2009-07-09T11:43:00.000-07:00

I watched 'The Good, The Bad & The Ugly' a couple of weeks back. I've sorta half-watched it before a buncha times, but it's a long-ass movie and I've got a short attention span. This time I watched it for real, beginning-to-end, maximum attention, totally focused. I'm a sucker for quick-fix pop trash of all kinds, probably to an indulgent, unhealthy degree, I mean I can still shed a tear when I hear 'Rush Hour' by Jane Weidlin, so it's nice to be reminded now and again that I still have the ability to be emotionally and intellectually shaken by something which is just classically great...ART, something that demands of you some genuine investment of time and mental concentration, and was itself built as a labour of love and grand design. The pay-off for sticking with a movie of 'TGTB&TG's calibre is huge. The emotional weight just builds and builds. I just got a ton out of it.

It goes without saying that Ennio Morricone's score is worth the price of admission alone. I often spin the title theme when DJing. But maybe even greater than the title theme is 'Ecstasy of Gold', from the movie's climax. It's a total knock-out. In the course of Googling 'Ecstasy of Gold' I discovered that Metallica have covered it. I checked out their version on youtube, and good luck to them, but it really sucks. Jay-Z's 'The Blueprint 2' samples it pretty effectively I guess...but nothing can compare to the sweeping majesty of the original. Enjoy.

Hollywoodland: The Legend Of Albert Kothe

2009-07-08T01:20:00.000-07:00

So dig this. The Hollywood Sign, set in the rugged scrub land hills of Mount Lee in Los Angeles CA, was originally erected by real estate developers Woodruff & Shoults to advertise their Hollywoodland housing scheme. That was way back in 1923, and was never intended as a permanent landmark. The LA Chambers Of Commerce ordered the removal of the last four letters in 1949, to reflect the district rather than the development. The letters stood 50ft high, and were illuminated by some 4000 light-bulbs.

Albert Kothe was the sign's official caretaker during the twenties & thirties. He lived in a cabin behind the first 'L', and it was his job to change the bulbs when one went out. One day he got drunk and drove his 1928 Model A Ford into the 'H' and knocked it down. When Woodruff & Shoult's maintenance grant expired in 1939, Albert was dismissed. That's about as much information as I can find about Albert Kothe.

So my question is this: why haven't the Coen Brothers made a movie about this guy? His job was to change the light-bulbs in the Hollywood Sign. That was his job! How do you get a gig like that? S'far as I can see, the Legend Of Albert Kothe is a movie that must be made. It's got it all. The era - dawn of the New West, early Hollywood, the Jazz Age. 'Chinatown' vibes. A great, iconic location. The pathos of a man hired to keep a monument to fame illuminated at all times, while he himself lives in isolated anonymity. I mean, it's perfect. Granted, you'd have to pad out the narrative a little, get a little factional, maybe throw some romantic interest in there for Albert or something. Like, you've got this story about Albert getting drunk and driving into the 'H', and there's another story I read about an actress called Peg Entwistle who committed suicide by throwing herself off the same letter in 1923. Maybe you could write it like Albert and Peg were in love or something. Or maybe she didn't commit suicide at all, and like the real estate guys threw her off the 'H' to generate some publicity for their development. Anyway, whatever. I'd maybe get the cat who played Max Cherry in 'Jackie Brown' to play Albert.

I'm off to write this script right now.

Allen Klein 1931-2009

2009-07-06T13:23:00.000-07:00

"Though I walk in the shadow of the valley of evil, I have no fear, because I am the biggest bastard in the valley"

- Klein's personal adaption of the23rd Psalm

The Beatles story is populated by divisive figures, guest stars and bit-players whose role in the narrative splits the opinion of dedicated Fabs fanatics; Yoko, the Maharishi, even George Martin. But few characters were as divisive a force amongst the Beatles themselves as manager Allen Klein, who passed away aged 77 at the weekend.

By the time Klein officially entered the scene in '69 (having met Lennon informally two years earlier during the filming of the Stones' Rock & Roll Circus), the Beatles were already in meltdown. Having been essentially manger-less since Brian Epstein's passing in '67, the street-tough New Yorker, (and ex-Stones manager), was summoned to the struggling Apple Corps by Lennon as a possible replacement. Harrison & Starr supported the motion, but McCartney favoured showbiz attorney Lee Eastman - father of McCartney's wife, Linda. While Klein's ball-busting, cold-blooded methods in all likelihood saved Apple from bankruptcy, McCartney refused to sign with him, taking on Eastman as his personal manager in 1970. This split became the kernel around which the shocking bitterness and animosity of the Beatles post-breakup period formed.

No doubt about it, Klein revelled in his bad-ass status. He's up there with with Albert Grossman & Peter Grant in the premier division of heavy-duty rock managers. By all accounts he did a lot of good for The Beatles, and handled their business better, in many respects, than Epstein ever did. You can see why Lennon dug him - above all things, Lennon admired honesty, balls-out straight-forwardness, and Klein was about as straight a sharp-shooter as they came. Equally you can see why McCartney was wary; contemporary reports from New York regarding Klein's brutally 'unconventional' business methods would certainly have been enough to concern the most naturally cautious Beatle.

Like all Beatles cameo-players, Klein's legacy and reputation will be debated and re-evaluated by Fabs scholars for years to come. History may yet look kindly on the 'biggest bastard in the valley'.

Joan Didion 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' (1968)

2009-07-05T09:54:00.000-07:00

So I picked this up in some second-hand book store in York this afternoon for £1. It's a collection of essays and articles about California in the late '60s, most of which appeared originally in the Saturday Evening Post. I knew nothing about Didion, or the book, but figured a buncha journalism on this topic was unlikely to disappoint me entirely. Having Googled it, turns out 'Slouching' is kind of a big deal, and Didion has done a heap of stuff I'm now gonna try to track down. She even called one collection of essays (on Manson, Black Panthers, the acid scene etc) 'The White Album', which is pretty cool.

The revolutionary literary school of 'New Journalism' coincided with an era of US history (eary 60s - mid 70s) with which I have an enduring fascination, and this means that I have the luxury of the period having been documented in vivid, fast-paced, personal prose by many great, unconventional newspaper people, notably Tom Wolff, Norman Mailer, Micheal Herr, Hunter S Thompson, Lester Bangs and, apparently, Joan Didion. Occasionally blurring fact and fiction, and frequently pushing journalistic boundaries to place themselves at the centre of the story, these writers have provided me with a vast library of first-person reportage from the front-line of history. They take you right into the heart of darkness.

So I'm happy to have stumbled across Joan Didion. She seems like the sorta writer pseudo-intellectual types would be overheard debating at a dinner party during a late 70s Woody Allen movie . For what it's worth, her stuff is pretty 'Fear & Loathing', there's a palpable sense of End Times doom and dread underscoring most of these articles. Hunter, though, I can find exhausting - he drags you along on his rampages whether you like it or not. Reading a Hunter S Thompson novel is like being kidnapped. Didion is much cooler. She's funny, too, exceptionally dry, allowing absurd statements from her bizarre cast late 60s archetypes just hang in the air;

" 'I remember I wanted to be a veterinarian once,' Debbie says. 'But now I'm more or less working in the vein of being an artist or a model or a cosmetologist. Or something.' "

Anybody with an interest in this era should totally check out Didion's work. I can only assume a general cultural misogyny has been responsible for me not discovering her earlier, because she appears to be very much the equal of her male peers. I'll be sure to write about her again when I get the chance to enjoy more of her work.

Network (Dir. Sidney Lumet, 1976): How Jon Stewart Is A Real Life Howard Beale

2009-07-04T04:52:00.000-07:00

"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore."

So I just watched this for the first time today. It won a bunch of Oscars, stars one of my favourite actors - William Holden, you may know him as Pike 'If they move, kill 'em' Bishop from The Wild Bunch - as well as Faye Dunaway (terrifyingly good) and Peter Finch (pictured, insanely good), and I've heard Jon Stewart reference it now and again, which figures. Broadly speaking, 'Network' is a darkly comic, but deadly serious, satire of US TV news. S'bout an old-school, Ed Murrow-era type anchorman called Howard Beale, works for a failing TV network. One day, during a live broadcast, he goes nuts and starts preachin' The Truth About American Society, and instead of pulling the plug, ball-bustin', power-crazed producer Faye Dunaway thinks they might finally have A Hit Show on their hands, so they let Beale keep going on live TV being wacko and ranting and raving, and the show becomes the top-rated news show in the country, this huge cult builds around him and yadda yadda yadda, news-as-entertainment, dwindling journalistic standards in the post-Watergate era, cult of personality, you get the picture. Beale's rants are scripted brilliantly ("This tube [TV] is the gospel, the ultimate revelation; this tube is the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world!"), and performed by Finch with bug-eyed relish. The scene in the Black Panther-ish commune, where a super-bad ass Angela Davis type gets sucked into the world of TV legalese ("Don't fuck with my distribution costs!"), is just one stand-out scene in a film full of 'em. The movie is a stone-cold killer, and undoubtedly deserves every accolade it's ever had.

What I really dug was that while Beale may be 'mad as hell', 'Network' itself isn't, it doesn't come off angry, it doesn't sneer at the world it's satirising. Instead the tone is one of bewildered desperation, and black-humoured amusement. Anybody who enjoys The Daily Show should really check out Network, becuase I'm sure it's a movie Stewart and the whole team must think about alot. To some extent, Stewart's persona on the Daily Show is very similar to that of the post-breakdown Beale - the last honest anchorman, pulling his hair out, screaming at the insanity of the world and the moral vacuity of those we rely on to tell us about it, trying to get somebody's, anybody's, attention, to get people to listen. Like the fictional Beale, this persona has afforded Stewart bone-fide, international cult anti-hero status. He has become an oracle, somebody who can be trusted, somebody who is not willing to play along with the rules of a game that hurts so many people. The image of The One News Guy Telling The Truth, in a spin-dominated culture where we have come to numbly accept half-truths, quater-truths, subterfuge, gossip, dumbness, laziness and lies from our media, has a greater currency now than it did even in 1976.

The Candidate (1972)

2009-06-30T12:58:00.000-07:00

You wanna watch a good movie sometime? Try 'The Candidate'. They made it in 1972. S'all about this Bobby Kennedy-ish type kid played by Robert Redford. He's a good-looking community organiser who gets sorta dragged into running as a Democratic candidate for Senator in California. The cars and the interior design and the clothes are cool as hell. The whole vibe is pure Watergate, the whole sixties fall-out scene. The pay-off line, the last line in the movie, is a killer. I ain't even gonna spoil it for you. Natalie Wood has a cameo playing herself. So does legendary TV newsman Howard K Smith. (A dude I dig so much I named the only band I've ever been in after him.) At one point some comedian at a political roast says of Redford's chracter 'he shoots from the hip, and he's hip when he shoots', which pretty much sums up the whole film. If you wanna watch a good movie sometime, try 'The Candidate'.

Stuff They Don't Really Seem To Show On Telly Anymore #962:

2009-06-30T12:44:00.000-07:00

Those Shows Where They'd Just Show You A Bunch Of Early 90s Movie Stunts

When I was in my late teens, before satellite telly had really taken off and digi-boxes were the stuff of Jetsons-style fantasy, the mid-morning summer holiday / mid Saturday afternoon / day time bank holiday TV schedules were junkyards of US cable network trash. I used to really dig this sorta thing. My faves were Stunt Shows (I've had to come up with that genre title myself). Shows about Hollywood stunts and the 'craft' or 'art' of stunt men. D'you even remember these shows? Until I Googled 'em this week I sorta thought maybe I'd just dreamt 'em or something. Sometimes they'd do a show about the 'magic' of special effects, or animatronics, and they were OK, but not as good as the Stunt Shows. They were called things like 'Hollywood's Most Dangerous Stunts' or 'The World's Most Dangerous Stunts' or 'Hollywoods Greatest Stunt Men Do The Most Dangerous Things' or 'When Stunts Attack'.

ITV was the really daddy of this kinda programming. It was like they'd bought these shows as part of some package along with the one good show they really wanted, like Knightrider or something, and then when they found themselves with nothing else to show at 2.15 in the afternoon on August bank holiday just threw on whatever other garbage they had left in the box. Often the shows appeared to be part of a series, only you'd only ever see one episode, then you'd never hear of it ever again. Stunt Shows all started like this:

Troy McClure-type smoothie in a sports jacket who nobody in England has ever heard of is hanging out for no reason on the set of a low budget action movie in Hollywood, California. To camera:

"Hey there! I'm here on the set of Final Death Blow 3: The Deathening. Since the earliest days of Hollwood, movies have had stars. Sometimes these stars are real people, like Steve Gutenberg or Fatty Arbuckle or Free Willy. But these days the real stars are the stunts, the hold-on-to-your-popcorn feats of expert engineering, precision timing and all-out GUTS that really reduce an audience to a mindless mass of gibbering automatons willing to go see any old piece of crap just as long as there's a helicopter crashing into an oil tanker at some point in the trailer. Join me now as we go behind the scenes of...HOLLYWOOD'S MOST DANGEROUS STUNTS!"

Cue credit sequence consisting of multiple explosions, bearded men with walkie-talkies, buildings collapsing, heavy stars 'n' stripes action, more explosions, guys on fire, and HOLLYWOOD'S MOST DANGEROUS STUNTS spelt out in huge metallic block lettering. Which then explodes.

And I'm like: 'awesome'.

I don't know if they make these shows anymore, and even if they do, I imagine they lack the charming early 90s cable TV gonzoness of the classics they used to make. I bet they're all slick and CSI-ish now. I remember one where they demonstrated how they did 'The Jump' from Speed, and one where they did something with the Golden Gate bridge, and...that's about it, really. They were great. If 'Dave' wants to put one of these shows back-to-back with that old BBC show about a squirrel who runs assault courses to the Mission Impossible theme next Bank Holiday, they've got a loyal viewer in me for an hour.

Things That Never Get Boring #459

2009-06-29T14:23:00.000-07:00

Seeing a Hot Air Balloon.

They appear in the sky like this bubble of magical Victoriana floating across suburbia. You hear that deep, rumbling woosh of the burner, and your eyes instinctively turn to the heavens. You tell other people in the house which is the best window to see them from. When they're real close, it's super-exciting. They're without purpose. They're not going anywhere in particular, except up and down. They're populated by people who, for the duration of their dreamy basket-ride, have left the buzz and fuzz and noise of society far below. Those are lucky people, you think. They're just drifting.

Working For NASA Misson Control In 1969 Would Be Cool

2009-06-29T13:40:00.000-07:00

It's a scientific fact that anybody who works a 9-5 office joe-job spends 47.3% of their working life day-dreaming about other, more exciting, romantic, important and cooler ways they could be drawing a steady pay-cheque. Like working for NASA mission control in 1969, for instance. Sometimes at work my line-manager announces that we've won a new project. "Ooh," I think. "I wonder if it's the project of succesfully organising the first manned lunar-landing." But generally it's just doing some research into the use of e-commerce amongst East Midlands-based businesses or something. And not the lunar landing thing at all.

Atheism Camp: Heathens Score Own Goal With Monumentally Lame Idea

2009-06-28T08:40:00.000-07:00

From the Sunday Times, a report that that Britain's first kids 'Atheism Camp' will be held in Somerset this summer.

"The five-day retreat is being subsidised by Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion, and is intended to provide an alternative to faith-based summer camps normally run by the Scouts and Christian groups...Dawkins said it was designed to "encourage children to think for themselves"...instead of singing Kum-bi-ya, they will sit around the embers belting out 'Imagine there's no heaven...and no religion too"...there will also be a £10 prize for the child who can prove the existence of the mythical unicorn."

Ugh. Apart from sounding like the wackest 'holiday' ever, this project just seems like a major own-goal for Dawkins and his disciples. Critics of hardcore atheists often accuse them of essentially making a religion of atheism itself, pointing to the inherent hypocrisy of demanding that people reject the dogma of religion while insisting on the primacy of their personal credo. Rational sceptics typically respond that rational skepticism does not represent a point of view, it suggests a method for arriving at one - atheism is the position arrived at at on the issue of religion having followed that method.

For a number of reasons, the foundation of an 'Atheism Camp' can only serve to undermine the credibility of the Dawkinite claim on a genuine 'think for yourself' policy. For starters - you've founded a camp. A space where children are sent by parents to have their children sold on a particular way of looking at the world. How can a situation where kids are removed from society for a period of time and gathered together to be told there's a right way of engaging with the world and a wrong way of engaging with that world not damage a legitimate culture of free-thinking? And the idea is so cute. Like the Atheist Campaign's 'There's probably no God' posters, the Atheist Camp concept is sort of based on a pun, like - 'Hey. Christian kids get sent to God Camp and sold on God. So get this - we're gonna run an Atheism Camp and sell kids Atheism. And instead of Kum-bi-ya, they're gonna sing Imagine.' The whole thing is bunk. It's self-defeating and disingenuous. Finally, kids are gonna resent being sent to this dork academy just as much as they would any faith camp you could send 'em to. They're gonna leave and run straight into the arms of Jesus.

Michael Jackson 1958-2009

2009-06-27T00:54:00.000-07:00

It's like a planet dying. Michael Jackson, Indiana-born recording artist and entertainer, was undeniable. What you think of him is as irrelevant as what you think of the wind. Michael Jackson happened, and his influence on Western pop culture was a great as it is possible for any individuals to be. When he sailed a 32 foot statue of himself down the Thames many mocked the rampant egotism of the gesture. The reality is that if he had erected an edifice which truly reflected the scale of his achievements, he would have had to build a statue at least twice as tall.

I cannot claim, as so many millions can, that Jackson made a major impact on my conscious in my youth. I was aware of him, of course, because it was impossible to not be. I had 'Bad' on cassette, but it didn't get played nearly as much as the first Kylie album or my 'Collection Of Beatles Oldies' tape. I never practised moonwalking or sang Beat It into a hair brush. It seems to me, like so many things, that if you didn't get into MJ when you were a kid, you probably never really got into him. That sense of wonder, of magic...it puts a kink in your mindspace that never gets ironed out. If he got you, he got you early, and never let go.

So I can't honestly say that I've ever been a Jackson 'fan', much less a fanatic. There are elements of his career that I actively have a problem with, and his music - unlike the music of Elvis or John Lennon, whose careers are equally pot-holed with highly questionable behaviour - never held enough sway with me to temper those reservations. I am, in all instances, naturally allergic to reverence in pop culture, the deification of artists, and few artists have inspired more unquestioning, blind obsessives than Jackson, while even fewer did more to actively encourage this particular type of fanaticism, through iconography, symbols and signs, than Jackson. I find this difficult to excuse.

It is pointless, however, to judge Michael solely by the excesses of his adulthood. History shows that international fortune and fame on the scale experienced by Jackson is something which simply cannot be coped with entirely successfully by a child. Judy couldn't handle it, Michael couldn't handle it, and Britney is currently not handling it. The process damages people, and it is fair to say that it clearly damaged Michael, for various specific reasons I'm not going to rake over, more than most. One can only understand the excesses of his adulthood with reference to the excesses of his childhood. It doesn't make Earth Song acceptable, but it does mean many of his adult accesses were just sorta sad, pitiable, the product of a warped sense of reality and a shocking lack of self-awareness, rather than deliberate, manipulative megalomania. Look at what he did to his body, his skin, his face. These are not the actions of a well-balanced individual.

Michael Jackson was a fragile, unhappy man. He wasn't a criminal - no court ever convicted him-, and he wasn't a saint. He made some wonderful pop music. He made some awful pop music. He was a hell of a dancer, maybe the greatest ever within the pop arena. He was black, he was white. He made the biggest selling album of all time. He revolutionised music video, but made terrible movies. He was a beautiful young man, but paid surgeons to cut and slice away at his body until it became unrecognisably ugly. His band's first hit replaced the Beatles at Number One in America, and eventually he became so rich and powerful he was able to buy the Beatles. He was 50 when he died, but ageless by any regular standard. He altered the fabric of pop music at an elemental level. Where he went, millions followed. Michael Jackson was undeniable.

********************************************************************
Thanks to my fiance Rebecca and her sister Claire's childhood obsession with MJ, my indie-snob issues with Jackson have thawed in recent years, and I'm happy that when he passed away on Thursday, I had already made my peace with his place in pop history. I've always loved the Jackson 5's 'ABC', and a chance encounter with it on the radio last year ("Man. Does pop music get any better than this? Those voices. That fuzz-bass. That drum-break. This is awesome.") prompted me to start digging around his J5 material, and early solo work. I found lots to enjoy; Philly soul, pop-psyche soul, like a junior Al Green, or a mini-Temptations. They even cut some great straight soul stuff before joining Motown. For what it's worth, here are my...

Top 5 Old School MJ Fave Raves

.1. ABC (The Jackson 5, 'ABC' LP, 1970)
.2. Ain't No Sunshine (Michael Jackson, 'Got To Be There' LP, 1972)
.3. Big Boy (The Jackson 5, pre-Motown debut single, 1968)
.4. I'll Bet You (The Jackson 5, 'ABC' LP, 1970)
.5. Euphoria (Michael Jackson, 'Music And Me', 1973)

So here's the pre-Motown Jackson 5, with 'Big Boy', from 1968

Hard Rock Life: Jay-Z's 'Death Of Autotune'

2009-06-18T12:23:00.000-07:00

Taking its place alongside 'The Takeover' and '99 Problems' in an unholy trinity of fist-pumping, steady-thumping, megaton-heavy rap-rock monsters, here's Jay-Z's forthcoming single, the utterly bezerkoid 'Death Of Autotune'. Apparently people are going pretty nuts for this record. I can sure see why. It sorta reminds me of that huge skull-crushing cyber-tank thing from the start of Terminator 2.

Arresting Images - Mug Shot Aesthetics

2009-06-16T12:56:00.000-07:00

So the weird thing is that when I started writing about how the Aesthetics Of Imperfection influence popular art I actually had no intention discussing 'art' at all, but rather how the banal, practical limitations placed on the production of purely functional things can engender in that functional thing a powerful, iconic aesthetic the rival of any cultural artefact produced with an artistic intent. The reason I was thinking about this subject was because I'd been digging the rogues gallery of celebrity mug shots at thesmokinggun.com, and generally thinking how cool they were, and what a strong visual presence they have. (But mainly: "oh, man! Look at Yasmin Bleeth! Cocaine possession? Wow. And check out Shia LaBeouf! 'ignored a security guard's demand to leave a drug store?' What the hell kind of crime is that?!")

The photographs above were taken, as you can read, in Cleveland Ohio, on November 3rd, 1970. The lady throwing a defiant radical fist in the air is movie actress and political activist Jane Fonda, who had been arrested for assaulting a police officer. The main thing about these shots is that Warhol himself couldn't have done any better. Some dumb Ohio cop with an instamatic blasts off a couple of ultra-cheapo black and white snaps, and produces an image packed with more drama, sex and history than any 60s mod artist could ever hope for. Hollywood-noir? The Dark Side Of Celebrity? Pop Art? You got it, and it's the real deal, not some double-thinking post-modern pose. Check out the Man In Black, pictured here on a drugs bust in El Paso Texas on October 4th, 1965:

In some ways I guess these images capture popular figures at their lowest ebb, unguarded, un-polished, un-airbrushed, the rock-bottemest of rock bottom, as real as these unreal people get, and in an age obsessed with The Celebrity Meltdown, these images resonate strongly. On the other hand, if the celebrity's persona fits, mug shots are potentially as legend-defining as any image of them could be, brimming with outlaw romance. The man whose most famous performances were held in maximum security prisons, the man who sang that he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die...could a criminal mug shot, especially a mug shot in which he looks impeccably bad-ass (that quiff! That suit!) be any more perfect? And Fonda's reputation ('Hanoi Jane!') as bone fide queen of radical chic could hardly be better served than it is by that steely stare and the defiant, fuck-you right-on fist. No posed glamour shot could ever say more than this image.

The dimensions of the image, the grainy black & white photography, the face-forward and side-on portraits, and the criminal record board combine to produce a unique look, a consistent, instantly recognisable visual aesthetic. The repetition of the image (albeit from different angles) is I think particularly visually satisfying, and I'm sure I won't be the first to see a parallel here with Warhol's screen print repetitions.

It is not inevitable that The Mug Shot will become the definitive image of a celebrity-criminal tabloid story; there is no internationally famous OJ Simpson mug shot, for instance. But where the mug shot and the story come together perfectly, the mug shot, a picture not taken by a member of the paparazzi or Annie Leibovitz, can come to define not just the particular incident it records, but an individual's entire career. Just ask this guy.

Them's The Breaks #189: Les Baxter - Hogin' Machine (1969)

2009-06-14T09:48:00.000-07:00

Dig that break at 0.41. Makes me wanna rumble. This whole soundtrack is absolutely killer, coming fully loaded with bags of everything you want out of a 60s hammond/fuzz/breakbeat biker movie soundtrack LP. Which is basically loads of hammond, fuzz guitar and breakbeats. Check Jeff Simmon's 'Naked Angels' LP for similar fuzzy biker-flick kicks.

Kate Bush Is Stupidly Cool: A Stupid Tribute To The Coolness Of Kate Bush

2009-06-14T03:54:00.000-07:00

There really ain't a whole lot of substance to this post, and the main thrust of my rather unnecessary, slender and broadly unchallenged argument has been made by many people, many times before. Still, it bares repeating - Kate Bush is stupidly cool. This post exists because I was reading an old copy of MOJO at around 2am this morning, stumbled across an interview conducted with Ms Bush from around the release of 'Ariel', and thought, like I have done every time I've read that interview - "yep. She really is stupidly cool."

One sunny morning whilst living in London's Trendy Crouch End I bought three very dog-eared records from a charity shop on the Broadway for 50p each. These records were 'Dark Side Of The Moon' by Pink Floyd, 'Parallel Lines' by Blondie, and 'Hounds Of Love' by Kate Bush. That musta been, like, 8 years ago, and I still consider it my favourite ever charity shopping experience. I've found weirder stuff in charity shops since, more nerd-friendly Record Collector-y stuff, but look at those three albums. A triumvirate of untouchable pop brilliance. They were right next to each other in the crate. It was like God had cleared out his loft and donated his record collection to the Crouch End Broadway branch of the British Heart Foundation.

I was 21 years old when I bought 'em, and people will baulk, but I'd never heard 'Dark Side Of The Moon' until I dropped the needle on it that morning. I'd heard Pink Floyd...lots of Pink Floyd, infact, including 'Echoes' and 'Relics', and treasured my VHS copy of the hilariously overblown 'Live At Pompeii', but for whatever reason had never come into direct contact with 'DSOTM'. It pretty much wigged my mind for the next couple of months. 'Parallel Lines' is practically a perfect package, as neat, vibrant and bright a summation of American pop music from the early 60s to the late 70s as one could hope for. And Bush's 'Hounds Of Love'...is simply as good as any record released during my lifetime. It's pop, but it isn't. It's oddball, I guess, but never alienatingly so. It exists in it's own parallel dimension. Some artists make music so individualistic, so beyond any reference points other than their own, that they become a genre unto themselves. Kate Bush is like that. There's music, and then there's Kate Bush music.

Kate Bush is stupidly cool.

Imperfect Aesthetics: Lennon, Clerks, Space Invaders And Sister Ray

2009-06-13T10:22:00.000-07:00

As a fan of trashy or off-kilter pop culture, it frequently occurs to me that the most interesting, attractive and iconic features of a piece of art are often the consequence of limitations - budget, time, technology, talent - exerted on the creation of that thing, or on the artist, rather than the consequence of a vision being fully realised. It is in the gap between vision and execution that the character of a work of art is found, in the falling-short of the grand design. The sound of Strawberry Fields Forever is a combination of John Lennon's sonic ambition and the limits of available production methods. The look of Clerks is a combination of Kevin Smith's visual ambition and the fact he had no budget to make a movie and B&W film stock is cheap. Would Strawberry Fields sound closer to the sounds in John Lennon's head if he'd had the chance to make it over - undoubtedly, and he spoke about re-recording Strawberry Fields Forever right up to his death, unsatisfied with the original recordings, hearing only the sounds he didn't get on tape. I mean, that's crazy, right? To be unsatisfied with the sound of Strawberry Fields Forever.

Early in my Film studies it was drawn to our attention that the development of sound, and then colour, were treated by many serious-minded filmmakers with suspicion. They argued that the lack of sound, or the monochromatic nature of film, were what gave cinema it's otherness, were precisely what made cinema a unique art form. Colour and sound were advances only good for making film more like real life - and this is an engineer's goal, not an artist's. On one hand, the attitude is almost unarguably wrongheaded, surely informed by sheer reactionary snobbery as much as anything else. But on the other hand, in a broader sense, I can see there was a legitimacy to their fears. I would point to video games as a perfect example of how a relentless, single-minded emphasis on making the product more life-like has robbed a medium of its drive towards...anything else? Space Invaders is iconic, it has a look all of its own. The reason it has a look all of it's own, and thus the reason that it is iconic, is that it was made using bullshit technology. Clearly it was cutting-edge at the time, but that isn't the point. The point is that it is distinctive, unique, and looks un-real, because available technology permitted nothing more / less. As consumers, we have been encouraged to base our criteria for how impressive we consider a video game's graphics to be on how 'realistic' they are - "wow! It looks just like a movie!" In painting, photorealism was a particular genre largely defined by a handful of American artists operating between the late 60s and mid-70s; in video games a focus on photorealism has come to define the entire medium, at least in the mainstream. Space Invaders is abstract by default, I guess in the same way that hieroglyphics were abstract by default. Are we waiting for a Playstation Picasso to break open the medium?

So on principle, I agree that an all-consuming desire for photorealism is unhealthy for any visual art form, just a desire for sonic perfection is potentially misguided in the field of pop music. Money and time and energy can be spent just as well on other aims. But I would argue that ultimately the anti-colour film brigade actually had little to fear, just as my concerns about video games are unnecessary. At every step of technological evolution, the gap between perfect life-likeness and the technical limitations preventing perfect life-likeness exists, and wherever that gap exists, however slender, a particular aesthetic is produced. The engineer's ideal of photorealism is, I would argue, inherently unachievable, it is doomed to failure, and therefore this window of aesthetic possibilities will always be available, even unavoidable.

Finally, I think it is worth noting that the imperfections of one artist's work often become models of perfection for subsequent artists. Contemporary pop musicians can spend their entire lives trying to make records that sound the same as Strawberry Fields Forever, and this cannot be achieved by exploiting cutting edge technology. It can only be achieved by being wrong, in precisely the right way. A young garage band who want to make a record that sounds like The Velvet Underground's Sister Ray must aim for gonzo, bug-eyed sonic imperfection on a grand scale. A recording session conversation is likely go along the lines of "No! The organ isn't distorted enough! The vocals are too coherent! I don't even wanna be able to tell if there are drums on the track at all! Muddier! Muddier!" The imperfections have become fetishised, idealised. What has persisted is the abject wrongness of the Sister Ray sound.

So these things go full-circle. The Jesus & Mary Chain, for instance, may have aimed for the perfect imperfection of Sister Ray, but they missed, they fell short of that ideal. In doing so, they minted a different sound, one filtered through their own experiences, talent & technology. Now kids are trying to sound like JAMC. They will also fall short, and so it goes, around and around, ever onwards - the Aesthetics Of Imperfection is an on-going dialogue between the present and the past.

Tony Joe White - 'Black & White' (1969)

2009-06-10T10:46:00.000-07:00

Having been aware of Tony Joe White ever since I heard bits and bobs of his early 70s swamp-rock on a run of great comps that came out a few years back (the two excellent 'Country Got Soul' discs and Warner's equally aces 'Blues & Soul Power' LP), I was entirely unaware - until a Spotify session this evening - just how consistently brilliant he was. Loadsa funk drums, wicked voodoo lyrics, lashings of angry wah-wah geetar, quicksilver hammond...yessir, that's good gumbo. I just think there's a lot here that any open minded fan would enjoy, it's a real melting pot. It has an irreverence to it that appeals, it appeals because White's approach is so Catholic, so anti-purist, and yet so accomplished and determined and full-on that you don't question it. Proper country, proper Elvis-In-Memphis blue-eyed soul, proper funk, proper delta blues, and not a bit of it watered down. This is the straight dope.

So, there's a ton of mighty tasty stuff on every album he made between 1969 and 1973 - but I particularly dig his first LP, 'Black & White', and two cuts in particular. 'Willie & Laura Mae Jones' hits a home run with awesome, swirling 'Ode to Billy Joe' strings, flute flourishes, clattering drum fills, a heavenly gospel-soul choir an utterly deranged fuzz guitar coda. 'Don't Steal My Love' is a wild, all-chugging, all-frugging wah-wah wig out monster, pure menacing drone, definitive swamp rock, with added tambourine. With due respect, this is '69, and if Tony's sound was setting the benchmark for funky, get-live populist roots RnB, The Beatle's 'Let It Be' missed the mark by a mile.

Like Ike & Tina Turner, Tony has a back cat so good and so varied and so damn danceable that I can imagine going out on a DJing gig armed only with his records in my box. It would appear that he's been re-recording a bunch of his stuff recently, and good luck to him or whatever, but the new versions are lame, and it's the originals you want. If you haven't hooked yourself up with Spotify yet, do so, and treat yourself to Tony.

Evel Knievel and Expanding The Brand

2009-06-08T13:02:00.000-07:00

Continuing the Obsessing About Pinball Theme, here's an advert for the Bally company's 1977 Evel Knievel branded contraption, which looks like the height of shlocky 70s awesomeness, and is totally guaranteed to help you hook up with hot blonde chicks in denim shorts. You can land yourself one of these stone-cold babe-magnets right now on e-bay for $1250, which is really peanuts for a hunk of cool-ass kit that'll have you scoring with Farah Fawcett so often you won't even be worryin' 'bout your high-score no more.

Mr Knievel was a one-man merchandising machine, establishing the modern cross-format marketing blueprint of ruthless, exploitative, shameless, ubiquitous product endorsement - if Krusty the Clown's empire of junk ("I heartily endorse this event or product!") has a precedent, it is Knievel's. He practically invented expanding-the-brand, and he was very, very good at it. Crucially, he was able to replace words, or his own image, with a logo - the Evel Knievel italicised star-spangled '1'. This is true branding genius. How many sports stars have achieved this? A universally recognised symbol...Michael Jordan maybe? But even the Nike Jordan logo is silhouette of Jordan, so that doesn't really do business in the same way.

And still the brand sells. Even while I've been Googling Knievel this evening I've seen about a dozen different new & original '70s products (t-shirts, mugs, records etc etc) I really want, and that's beside the pinball machine, and despite the fact that I know he was basically kind of a macho blockhead, and wasn't really any sorta 'sportsman'...but he looked cool, and his merchandise looks cool, and really that's the point. You buy into an image, a concept, a look, rather than the man himself. Evel might have wanted to be remembered as a great daredevil, but his real pop cultural legacy has been Krusty Burgers.

Fans Would Probably Just Call Us MWCC

2009-06-07T07:30:00.000-07:00

Most of my free time consists of daydreaming about what name to choose for my band, a Velvet Underground meets David Axelrod meets Ultramagnetic MCs meets Girls Aloud 20 piece rock orchestra in which I play drums, electric fender rhodes piano and rap like Big Daddy Kane, whose first 7" was produced by Kevin Shields, and exists only in my mind. It is of utmost importance when choosing a band name for an imaginary band that (a) it's monumentally cool, and (b) would look humongously cool on a t-shirt. My current fave imaginary band name and t-shirt design is 'The Miracle Wonderland Carnival Company', which is the name of the company that the Wizard claims he used to work for in The Wizard Of Oz:

"I'm an old Kansas man myself. Born and bred in the heart of the Western wilderness. Premiere Balloonist par excellence for the Miracle Wonderland Carnival Company until one day while performing spectacular feats of stratospheric skill, never before attempted by civilized man, an unfortunate phenomena occurred. The balloon failed to return to the fair."

I'd also like this logo to say 'Est. Kansas, 1939' beneath it in smaller lettering. That's right.

Them's The Breaks #267: Mountain - 'Long Red (Live at Woodstock)'

2009-06-07T06:53:00.000-07:00

Sampled by...amongst many others...
Public Enemy - 'Louder Than A Bomb'
Eric B & Rakim - 'Eric B Is President'
A Tribe Called Quest - 'Jazz (We've Got)'
EPMD - 'Strictly Business'
Pete Rock & CL Smooth - 'Return Of The Mecca'

A Book Report On Evan Wright's 'Generation Kill'

2009-06-07T03:35:00.000-07:00

Evan Wright's 'Generation Kill'
Rolling Stone journalist's account of his time embedded with US marines during the 2003 Iraq invasion - NOW A MAJOR HBO SERIES OR WHATEVER

Hyped on the cover as operating on the same level as Micheal Herr's Vietnam War record 'Dispatches' - pretty much the highest accolade anybody could apply to any work of art as far as I'm concerned - I was, perhaps inevitably, sorta disappointed with Wright's book. The publishers are right - 'Dispatches' is the bench-mark for this book, I just don't think it meets that bench-mark. It's a good book, but it ain't a permenant brainscape demolisher like 'Dispatches'.

Wright had a much tougher war to write about than Herr did, no doubt about it. Both literally and figuratively Iraq is a much drier war than Vietnam, with a much smaller palette of colour and experience for a writer to draw on. I'm not a war-freak, so when I read about 'Nam I'm reading about it in terms of social history, in terms of having some sense of what the war meant both for those fighting it in the jungle, and against it America. You cannot understand Muhammad Ali, James Brown, the Chicago riots, Kent State, the MC5, The Wild Bunch etc etc without understanding the Vietnam war. It defined the tone of western popular culture, and western popular culture defined the tone of the war. As Fancis Ford Coppolla says, 'Nam was "a rock and roll war."

The Iraq war, on the other hand, is not a 'rock and roll war' on any level - WW2 was clearly way more rock and roll than Iraq, and Richard Hooker's wonderful and vastly underrated 'M*A*S*H' makes a strong case for Korea as a pretty swinging scene. This lack of rock and rollness simply makes a story about the young men fighting the war a harder sell, particularly to somebody with my particular dumb, low-brow sensibilities. There just ain't enough kicks here - and I guess that's the point. Wright's combat troops aren't hunkered out in the field for months on end smoking drugs, preparing for the black power revolution back home and grooving to Jimi Hendrix. The troops of Wright's novel have no access to alchohol even, radical politics are nowhere to be found, and the major pop music touchstone is Avril Lavigne. Instead of actual Playboy Bunnies to entertain them, they have one copy of Playboy. Clearly the lack of an energised popular culture back home, and the political vaccum the troops appear to be operating within, is kind of the point. Like - 'at least the guys out in 'Nam had The Temptations; these guys have to make do with Avril Lavigne. It's a bunkrupt culture - what are they even fighting to defend - MTV?" There's a real blankness here, and while I appreciate this is precisely Wright's point, it doesn't make it any more satisfying to read about.

The Vietnam War has been dangerously over-fetishised in books, pop songs and movies, I suppose to an ultimately unhelpful degree...but godammit, I woulda just dug it if Wright had decided to do a little myth-making of his own. He is a Rolling Stone journalist afterall. Perhaps there just isn't the latitude, the freedom, for any journalist to do this now, and moreover, perhaps the material simply isn't there, and military-press relations are just very different today etc etc. I guess I was just left thinking...how would ol' Hunter S have faired out in Iraq? That's the story I was hoping for. Fear And Loathing In Baghdad.

"We were somewhere around Basra on the edge of the desert when the drugs started to take hold..."

The bottom line is that Iraq is either still waiting for its 'Dispatches', or else it is simply not possible to write a 'Dispatches' about Iraq, it having been fought and lived so fundementally differently to previous international conflicts invloving US troops. I'm still hoping for the former, and in the meantime, 'Generation Kill' makes for an adequate stop-gap.

This Week In AT-ATs

2009-05-10T10:39:00.000-07:00

I'm on a pretty heavy Star Wars kick at the moment. I've been re-reading the annotated scripts, and I finally bought myself the original trilogy on DVD, which means I'm now sat watching the un-CGI'd 1977 theatre- release of 'A New Hope' for the first time in...what...maybe 15 years or something? It remains a magical experience. While Googling around I stumbled across this 'GRAFF-AT', produced by hella geeked-out NY art-punk project Suckadelic. It sold at auction in 2002 for like £1200 or something - not bad for a Hasbro action toy with some doodles on it. Apparently all the tags are written in 'Aurebesh', a fictional language which features in the movies. All in all, stupidly cool

...and in other stupidly cool AT-AT news, check out this:

That's right. It's an AT-AT boombox. Freakin' ridiculous. I can't quite work out what the deal is with this - whether it's like a one-off art piece, or a bone fide might-at-some-point-be-commercially-available product. I kind of get the impression it's probably the former, which sucks. More AT-AT news this time next week.

Your Mamma Wouldn't Like Her: Obsessing About Suzi Quatro

2009-04-21T13:46:00.000-07:00

I bought a buncha records last Saturday morning from independent record outlets, but I was concerned that with it being Independent Record Store Losers Day or whatever, that my purchases would be construed as a political action in support of the survival of independent record stores. So after lunch I hot-footed it to good ol' Tesco Metro where I bought the entire Motown Chartbusters series on CD for £2, downloaded Can's back cat illegally on my Blackberry and then got the train to London and burnt down Rough Trade just to be sure that nobody got the wrong idea. The best thing I bought on Saturday was Suzi Quatro's 'Greatest Hits'. I've been a casual Suzi Q fan fer years, dug 'Can The Can' and 'Devil Gate Drive' as a kid, thought she was pretty hot in Happy Days, and this sleeve was just too good to refuse. Suzi was Class A Cool. Here's for why.

Top 5 Reasons Why Suzi Quatro Is Really Really Cool

.1. Her Dad was resident organist for the Detroit Red Wings. Coolest. Job. Ever.

.2. Her first band was all-girl garage outfit The Pleasure Seekers, who churned out typically trashy Detroit girl-pop records with names like 'Never Thought You'd Leave Me' and 'What A Way To Die' during the mid 60s. The songs are OK, but I bet they were an absolute blast live. The band featured four Quatro sisters at one point, Suzi played bass, and they looked like this, ie: Girls Aloud From Outer Space.

.3. In 1969 The Pleasure Seekers sound was gettin' sorta played out, so they changed thei name to Cradle and went Heavy Rock. Their sound has to be heard to be believed; something like Tina Turner fronting Black Sabbath, a ton of Deetroit funk-rock riffs 'n' breaks, a garage-rock Power Of Zeus. I mean, really, really awesome. I can't even find out if they ever put out an LP. You can hear 'Living Machine' and 'Last Laugh', which I've been playing non-stop for the past 48 hours, here. And they looked like this:

.4. Suzi has one of the all-time great rock voices. She's double-live gonzo, intensity in ten cities, live at Budakon. I mean, she really wails. And screams. And screeches. Check out her run of mid 70s solo hits. Biker-booted mondo-stompo rock and roll killers across the board, real bad-ass chick raunch, pop in the best possible way. 'Can The Can', 'Devil Gate Drive' and 'The Wild One' are songs any contemporary UK glam rock band woulda sold their silver spandex for. And when she cut 'em, she looked like this:

.5. She played biker-chick-with-a-heart Leather Tuscadero in Happy Days. This might be the coolest thing of all. Suzi was so cool in this role that she inspired both the name of a Weezerish mid-90s slacker-pop band (Tuscadero, who put out a great LP called 'The Pink Album' ), and a whole psychological disorder listed at urbandictionary.com, 'The Leather Tuscadero Fetish': "noun: feelings of a man toward a woman who is very knowledgeable about cars and wears black leather." She appeared in seven episodes between 1977 and 1979, and when she did, she looked like this:

All in all, she's a total hero. She's like the entire history of trash pop music boiled down and poured into a leather cat suit. 60s girl-popper. Deetroit punkette. Heavy metal headbanger. Glam-rock superstar. Happy Days returning character. She did it all, had great songs, screamed liked a wolverine, and looked ace while she did it. And now, she presents a really cool show on Radio 2 (Staurdays, 9-10pm), dedicated to All The Best In American Music or whatever, which essentially works out as everything from Alice Cooper to Emmylou Harris. All hail Suzi Q. I'm off to ebay to try and find myself a t-shirt with her name on it.

It's Nu-Gaze Corner!

2009-04-14T11:00:00.000-07:00

Ringo Deathstarr
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart
The Manhatten Love Suicides
Soundpool
Dead Leaf Echo
Aund
The December Sound
Black Night Crash
Black Market Karma

Good Friday Skate Special: The Christ Air

2009-04-11T04:38:00.000-07:00

Couldn't let Good Friday go by without some sorta woefully misjudged Christploitation, so here's a cool-ass photograph of Christian Hosoi pulling his patented inverted-cruxifiction-tastic 'Christ Air'. Hosoi, or 'Christ', led quite a life, pinballing from god-like skating preeminence during the 80s, to incarceration for drugs offences in 1995, and finally to born-again Christianity. I guess there's a sort of cosmic logic to all that. Happy Easter, y'all.

Cobra

2009-04-09T13:12:00.000-07:00

Watching Cobra (1986) on FiveUSA. Appears to be ticking every box in the 80s Action Movie playbook with a vengance and I gotta say it's pretty enjoyable shlock so far. Infact, the genre cliches are being hammered so hard I'd almost say it was meant to be parodic, except I don't think it is and don't really want it to be either. Stallone is 'The Cobra', an outlaw, plays-by-his-own-damn rules LA cop who works for a department called The Zombie Squad. Wow! He drives a car with the license plate 'AWSOM50', has a gun with a picture of a cobra on it and lives at the beach by himself and eats cold pizza. The film is set at christmas (see also: Die Hard & Lethal Weapon), the dialogue is exceptionally hard-boiled stock stuff, and when some psycho threatens to blow up a mini-mart, Stallone says "Go ahead. I don't shop here." Which is a pretty good line. As I write this there is a music montage happening which features a v. 80s modelling shoot with robots, soundtracked by a sub-Phil Collins ballad apparently called 'Angel Of The City.' Really, this is a great movie.

Ringo Deathstarr: "That's not a moon, that's a shoegazing band from Austin Texas".

2009-04-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

Everybody knows the most important thing about being in a band is choosing a kick-ass name. This band's name is so kick-ass that I was compelled to check out their myspace page based purely on the supreme kick-assiosity of their name. Turns out they're a pretty rockin' noise- pop, My Bloody Valentine-ish sorta outfit dealing in the contemporary brand of updated late 80s whitenoise indie that I believe The Kids are calling Nu-Gaze. With A Little Help From the Force, anybody?

The Pink Floyd Panther

2009-04-09T09:25:00.000-07:00

Having worked at HMV for three years in my early twenties, (Oxford Circus & Doncaster branches) I sorta get The Fear when I enter a branch now. I find myself wandering around in an agitated mild panic, automatically re-sorting the A-Z racks and putting artist's most recent albums at the front of their 'pockets'. It's like an acid flashback, with a Ting Tings soundtrack. It's horrible. "How did I work here for three years? This is brutal. It's so loud. Why are the T-Rex albums under Marc Bolan? They don't put The Beatles under Ringo Starr do they? How can they only have one Public Enemy album? What sort of record shop is this? This sticker is on wrong. Maybe I should tell somebody. Wasn't this Ting Tings song on already? I need to get out of here."

But a visit today paid off, when I landed a DVD box set of all 120+ original Pink Panther shorts for a tenner. They're wonderful. They're not hilarious - though there is a peristant daftness which produces the odd out-loud chuckle, but they're gently off-kilter and exceptionally hip, plus Henry Mancini's score is of course flat-out beatnik cool jazz brilliance. Of particular interest are those episodes which lampoon some contemporary fad, and I imagine the cod-Filmore poster acid kelidoscopia of 'Psychedelic Pink' is a favourite amongst Pink afficionados. You can dig our rinky-dink hero's journey into his third-eye, here.

My B-Movie Life: Over The Edge With Jonathan Kaplan

2009-04-09T02:04:00.000-07:00

I have a bit of a thing for late 70s - early 80s dystopian / urban breakdown / teen rampage / post-apocalyptic wasteland sorta flicks. Assault On Precinct 13. Mad Max. The Warriors. Escape From New York. I just read about 'Over The Edge' from 1979. Looks pretty great. Turns out the guy who directed it, Jonathan Kaplan, has built a whole career on knocking out blunt, punchy exploitation movies. My kinda guy. He seems like a smart cookie, a B-Movie director in the classic sense, able to turn his hand to whatever genre was doing box office business at any time, like:

THE EARLY 70s SOFTCORE SEXPLOITATION MOVIE a la Russ Meyer: 'Night Call Nurses'(1972)
THE MID 70S BLAXPLOITATION ACTION MOVIE a la Shaft: 'Truck Turner' (1974)
THE MID 70s TRUCKER ROAD MOVIE a la Convoy: 'White Line Fever' (1975),
THE LATE 70s SOCIAL URBAN BREAKDOWN MOVIE a la The Warriors: 'Over The Edge' (1979)
THE MID 80s TEEN ADVENTURE MOVIE a la War Games: 'Project X' (1987)
THE EARLY NINETIES SEXY THRILLER MOVIE a la 'Basic Instinct': Unlawful Entry (1992)

So here's to Jon Kaplan: doing it second, and with a smaller budget.

Glam Rock Revivalism

2009-04-07T23:46:00.000-07:00

For the first time in my whole life, I'm going through a bit of a Glam period. Not wearing stack-heeled silver space boots, glitter eye shadow, or Bowie/Eno-ish mullets yet, but heavily digging into T-Rex's back cat after chancing upon the mind-blowing bongos/acid rock guitar/sirens insanity of 'Calling All Destroyers' (1976) on some old Mojo magazine comp, and hearing Bowie's awesome 'Moonage Daydream' (1971) twice in one week on Radio 2. Never quite got Bowie to be honest, infact still don't really, and it will shock many to learn I'd never heard this song in my life before last week, but...yeah, great song, and I've been inspired to put a bit more effort into my Bowie education. Kinda remember a cool looking glitter-rock Nuggets type comp coming out a few years ago collecting together the some of the scene's less-appreciated acts...but I'm struggling to recall what it was called, and Google ain't helping. Any ideas?

Skateboarding And Selling Pop Culture

2009-04-07T11:44:00.001-07:00

It seems to me that the history of US pop youth culture is the history of its ever-more rapidly executed commodification, of teenagers developing something of their own, surfing or rock and roll or comics, and subsequently having that thing taken away from them by Big Business and sold back to 'em, gutted, rebranded, and at a profit. Once upon a time, at the dawn of teen culture, this process might take years. Now Top Shop seems to sell the fashion before the fad has even been invented.

Sakteboarding culture would seem to me the perfect example of this process. I'm currently re-reading The Answer Is Never, Jocko Weyland's sparky, personalised potted history of the sport. What I dig about skateboarding, is that it really is the Local Summer Fad That Took Over The World. I mean...everybody has those games they invent over the summer holidays and play to death with their buddies, some mutation of baseball or hacky sack, the rules becoming ever more complex, the vocabulary expanding, limits and challenges met and exceeded, new records set and broken. Pop music, drinking and soft drugs may be involved. Truth be told, me and my pals have never really grown out of this impulse. Last summer three of us spent hours playing Egg In Glass, a 'sport' which initially involved taking it in turns to throw a small egg-shaped percussion instrument into a pint glass from a distance of roughly two meters. When this eventually resulted in a successful attempt shattering the pint glass, it transformed into Egg In Boot, which was basically the same, only with the glass replaced by - get this - a Boot. As the evening progressed, the rules solidified, points systems were put in place, successful throws led to bitter arguments about whether the thrower was 'far enough' away from the Boot, claims were made for particular styles and angles of trajectory, and ever more impressive levels of Egg In Bootery were attained. By morning, we were the 1992 Olympics US Basketball Dream Team of Egg In Boot, and my friend Stephen Ward was able to land The Egg in The Boot from halfway across a hotel car park, which was really something to see.

Despite its obvious appeal, Egg In Boot has not become a world-conquering phenomenon enjoyed by kids across the globe, nobody is internationally famous for it, no multinational sporting goods company has produced technologically advanced Eggs with names like The Boot Blaster 4000, Sky Sports 4 doesn't show The World Egg In Boot Championship Live From The Budokan at half 2 in the morning, there are no cash-in Egg In Boot movies, pop songs, comics, saturday morning cartoons, pinball machines, trucker caps, video games or Happy Meals, me and my friends have not become the world's first Egg In Boot billionaires, Barack Obama hasn't been 'pictured' playing Egg In Boot at some photo-op, and infact nobody has heard of Egg In Boot anywhere ever, until now, and I figure maybe about 6 people read this regularly, and one of them is one of the dudes who helped invent Egg In Boot in the first place.

But...this is essentially what did happen to skateboarding, or at least to the Dogtown, modern style of skateboarding, skateboarding as we understand it today, the style of skateboarding which turned into a multibillion dollar industry. At some point in the mid 70s, a buncha punk drop-out kids from Venice California ('Dogtown'), a ragbag of young freaks digging on Led Zep, Sabbath, beers and reefer, take a sorta lame, kiddy, faddy sorta enterprise, and get so insanely good at it that the world is forced to take notice, and the big money starts rolling in, and allofasudden..its a big deal, and it's here to stay. The Z-Boys, as the team were known, didn't plan for this. They were, as they say, Just Doin' Their Own Dang. For their own pleasure. Inventing ever-more insane stunts. For kicks. Taking it to the next level, within their own frame of reference. And it became something else. It Blew Up. Imagine that. Imagine the stoopid-ass sport you and your pals invented one summer becoming a bone fide world-wide Big Fuggin' Deal.*

(*Of course, this is simplifying The History Of Skateboarding to a ridiculous degree, but there's some truth to it.)

The Crazy World Of Crazy Golf

2009-03-29T07:04:00.000-07:00

As a number of my posts suggest, I spend a lot of my time daydreaming about junky Americana of one sort or another, from Christian acid-rock to Harlem Globetrotter pinball machines. Recently I have been obsessing for no particular reason about Miniature (or Crazy, Goofy, Adventure...) Golf. I like activities that are simple, dumb, imaginative and fun. I also like stuff that's been minaturised. (Like model villages, I dig them the most.) So mini golf ticks a lot of boxes for me. The more I've investigated, the more it seems like the best American minature golf courses are little psychedelic road-side wonderlands, self-contained junk-yard universes populated by over-sized pirates, giant skulls, windmills and pyramids.

The first trade-name course was established in 1926 at the Fairyland Inn (wow!) holiday resort on the Tennesee / Georgia border, under the name 'Tom Thumb's Golf'. In keeping with the fairy-tale theme of the resort, patrons of Tom Thumb's Golf were required to negotiate Brothers Grimm-ish obstacles like Little Red Riding Hood, elves and gnomes. By 1929, Tom Thumb golf courses were being manufactured and distributed nationally, and by mid 1930 mini golf had exploded into a bone fide national phenonemon, with an estimated 25,000-30,000 courses being enjoyed by 4 million Americans every day. Insane, huh? Like any good pointless fad, at the height of Mini golf mania there were a clutch of quick-buck pop records released to cash-in on the trend, including "I've Gone Goofy Over Miniature Golf", "Since My Wife Took Up Playing Miniature Golf", and "I'm Put-Put-Puttin' on the Dinky Links All Day".

BUT THE BOOM TIME FOR MINI GOLF WAS SHORT LIVED!

'Cos then The Depression hit and apparently most Americans didn't consider mini golf fees an essential part of their budget. Whatever, Americans.

BUT THEN TWENTY YEARS LATER, THERE WAS A SECOND GOLDEN AGE OF MINI GOLF!

The unstoppable spread of suburbia and the post-war baby boom contributed to a resurgence in mini golf popularity during the 50s and early 60s. This was when things got really crazy in terms of obstacles, hazards, stunts and themes. Courses were often attached to drive-in movie theatres or motels or mom 'n' pop road-side diners. While there was a handful of national companies servicing the mini golf industry, distributing pre-fab branded kits, most courses were home-made works of redneck ingenuity, folk-art essentially, hammered together with lumber, scrap metal and poured concrete. I cannot think of a pursuit more noble than the creation of an awesome mini golf hole. Check this out:

How ace is that?

Pinball Machines: The Best Thing Mankind Has Come Up With So Far

2009-03-26T11:35:00.000-07:00

After a period of long and careful consideration, I have decided that the Pinball Machine is the Best Thing That Mankind Has Come Up With So Far. Jukeboxes, crazy golf, Junior Kickstart and Chuck Taylor Converse All-Stars made the short list, but deep down I always knew that the pinball machine would edge it. I guess when God put us here a few thousand years ago he figured that once we were up and running with the basics, like the wheel, and fire, and clubs, and clubbing things, and clubbing each other, that we would find time between clubbing stuff to invent cooler and cooler shit, less essential than fire and wheels and clubbing stuff, but probably easier to brand as part of a movie franchise merchandising operation. The best thing we've come up with so far is the pinball machine.

Pinball machines look cool, sound cool, and are universally desirable in a way that few other objects are. Ask around. Ask people if, should the the opportunity arise, they would choose to have a pinball machine in their home. They get to pick which one. A 1960 Wagon Train pinball machine. A 1979 Rolling Stones pinball machine. A 1990 Back To The Future pinball machine. I mean, you'd have to be some sorta insane pervert to say no to a Back To The Future pinball machine, wouldn't you? If you don't want a Back To The Future pinball machine, you've lost all sense of perspective and humanity. You are, essentially, a robot.

And seeing as Pinball is the best thing mankind has come up with so far it follows that Multiball Magazine, a short lived American publication devoted to pinball, was the best thing ever published. You would have to say that the people who put this magazine together were pragmatists: "Pinball is the best thing mankind has come up with. Therefore if we are to produce a magzine, there is no point in making the magazine be about anything other than pinball." Then they made their magazine even cooler by putting split 7" records on the cover by kick-ass super-hip garage bands like The White Stripes and The Dirtbombs, singing about pinball, with song titles like Pinball City and Cave Ball and Deathball 2000. Feeble human brain...struggling to comprehend...ridiculous level of...coolness...These 45s have been collected on two compilations, Hot Pinball Rock Volumes 1 & 2. As befits a trash-as-high art endeavour like this the quality of the tracks varies pretty wildly, but the good stuff is really good. I particularly dig The Bellrays 'Mother Pinball', which is like a rough-ass James Brown number, a"there's a brand new dance...do The Pinball" sorta affair. The White Stripes' 'Hand Springs' is Route One Jack 'n' Meg patented garage punk, unremarkable in itself, but features a genuinely brilliant, laugh-out-loud funny lyric about Jack taking his girlfriend bowling, and how there's this smooth pinball wizard kid there giving her the TV eye, impressing Jack's gal with his flash flipper skills, and Jack gets all bent outta shape about it, so:

"I dropped my red bowling ball

Through the glass of his machine

I said 'are you quick enough to hit this ball, Mr. Clean?' "

Which is a pretty great lyric in anybody's book. (Note that it's a red bowling ball, natch.) Now, if somebody would just make produce a White Stripes pinball machine, we could really all just give up and go home.

Christploitation: The Jesus Movement Era

2009-02-25T01:00:00.000-08:00

I am not a Christian, but I am fascinated by The Bible, and I figure Jesus was a pretty hip guy, and anybody with any sorta interest in the arts is hardly in a position to ignore The Bible anyways. I'm interested in the life and work of Jesus Christ just like I'm interested in the life and work of Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe, I guess. It's a cult of personality thing, and I like archetypes, and the blockbuster scale of it all, and it's a great story. I've always dug The Bible, ever since I was a kid. I like the language, and the iconography, and most of all I dig all the obscure minor characters and their relationships, and all the weird inter-connecting sub-plots. The Bible is a nerd's paradise. It's better than Star Wars and Lord Of The Rings put together. You think it's hip to know the name of the band that plays at the Mos Eisley Cantina? How about knowing the names of the musicians that accompanied the Ark Of The Covenant back to Jerusalem (I Chronicles 15:16-24)? I just learnt the other day that when Judas Iscariot quit The Desciples, they replaced him with some dude called Matthias, by pulling lots (not by 'pulling' Lot, like picking him up in a cocktail bar or something.) So, like, there was this guy, this 13th Apostle, Judas betrays Jesus and dies, and this guy gets the call like "Yeah, hey, Matthias? Judas flaked on us big time. You're up, dude. " And then he gets to rep for one the twelve tribes of Israel in the Kingdom of Heaven. Crazy. I don't know whether The Bible is 5% historically accurate or 75%. I guess it's probably closer to the former. I'm not sure if I care really, though I guess I'd like at least some of it to be true, beyond the regular "well, um, yeah, there was a guy called Jesus, and he was kicking about around this time, but apart from that..." yadda yadda yadda.

Anway, part of my interest in Jesus and The Bible is the consequence of another fascination of mine, which is post-war US history. I have been aware of the (largely and predictably West Coast based) Jesus Movement of the late 60s & early 70s for some time, forming as it does part of the general background to the Nixon, Altamont, Kent State, Black Panther era that popular historians generally paint as the grim '68 -'75 post-hippie era, aka Sixties Burn-Out. Essentially, these 'Jesus People,' or 'Jesus Freaks', were dissafected long-haired acid casualties looking for The Answer, the kinda drop-outs who had tried all the drugs and all the Eastern philosophies and free-love yadda yadda that the counter-culture had pushed on 'em, and having failed to find whatever it was they were trying to find, were now willing to give ol' Jesus - a guy many young freakniks had conciously turned their back on - a shot at saving their souls. They always come crawlin' back to the J-Man. Rather than walking with the Lord, these cats we're "Truckin' With Jesus". The general tone of the Jesus Movement was very much a hybrid of hippie and early Christian ideologies, perhaps most notably the emphasis on simple / communal living, and a desire to take their message out of the churches and out into the streets. At the time, this was all pretty big news, making the cover of Time Magazine and generating a fair media frenzy. In 1972, 80,000 Christians gathered in Dallas, Texas for what is generally regarded as the movement's watershed moment, a weeklong celebration known as Explo '72.

In the process of investigating (re: "Googling") a compilation of late 60s/early 70s heavy psychedelic Christian rock called "Holy Fuzz", I have stumbled across some really fascinating websites about this subject, containing lots of great period photos, newspaper articles, info on bands and movies, wonderful poster art and so on. I guess there is an element of what I'm gonna call Christploitation to all of this. There is a kitch, camp value to record sleeves, badges and psychedelic posters containing Christian iconography. Jesus looks like a member of Creedence Clearwater Revival anyway, so his image in the late 60s was about as perfectly sell-able as it could be. I mean, I'm thinking about buying a Jesus People badge if I can find one, which - considering I ain't really a Christian of any sort - is kinda awful and disrespectful I guess, apart from I really mean no disrespect. But camp appeal aside, The Jesus Movement scene does resonate with me on some genuine level, 'cos I can see what these kids got out of it, and why they would get into it. Here's this guy, looks real hip, like one of them infact, and he's saying, y'know, hey, you can play rock music if you want, you can drop out of the rat-race if you want, keep your hair long, live off the land and I can dig it, in fact I'm gonna help you do all those things, you just gotta promise me a few things in return. So yeah, I can see it.

If you really wanna know more about this, go to the site dedicated to the LA based Hollywood Free Paper, http://www.hollywoodfreepaper.org/.

Obsessing About The Whole Schoolhouse Rock Thing

2009-02-23T02:36:00.000-08:00

While the best British kids telly of the 60s and 70s was all acid-folky wooziness a la Bagpuss and The Clangers, the equivilent Quality Educational Programming being done in America adopted a tone of street-smart funkiness a la Sesame Street, The Electric Company..and Schoolhouse Rock. First airing on ABC in 1972, Schoolhouse Rock was a series of Saturday morning animated shorts which used a broad range of pop music idioms to teach the Youth Of Nixon's America about all sortsa useful things, from politics to science. The recently re-issued Multiplication Rock LP is one of I think two LPs put out during the show's original run, and is quite simply a wonderful selection of kooky, fun, pop-folk-funk songs, including Schoolhouse Rock's 'hit record', 'Three Is A Magic Number'. After purchasing the record at the weekend and a subsequent 48 hours of obsessive Googling, I'm very happy to report that for Fans Of This Type Of Thing, 'Three Is A Magic Number' represents only the tip of an exceptionally funky iceberg.

The thing about This Type Of Thing is that in so many ways the music produced for Schoolhouse Rock and similar enterprises is more interesting, original, useful, fun, cool and witty than most anything being put out by 'legitimate' pop performers of the time. There is care and craft here, a dedication to making Good Music, but there is not an ounce of the other bullshit which rock and roll culture wades around in. There's no navel gazing, there's no ego, there's no money-drugs-girls, there's no portentous statements or leather trousers. I like the fact it has a purpose, and that the purpose is an inarguably righteous purpose, and the fact that the people who put it together had the good taste and sensibility to tie the purpose to genuinely hip music. In 1972, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell and John Lennon were releasing entirely self-regarding records about themselves, and trying to convince us that The Pop Artist can write honestly only about themselves, or else it ain't art. Bob Dorough, the key architect of the Schoolhouse Rock sound, was releasing records which featured songs as good as anything Taylor-Mitchell-Lennon were putting out, and contained about a zillion better ideas, and were - to some extent, certainly to greater extent than Taylor-Mitchell-Lennon's out-put - for somebody else's benefit.

Anyway, here are a couple of examples, I think they're pretty great, and so what. The best thing Dylan ever did was that song about God naming all the animals from 'Slow Train Coming', and that's about as Schoolhouse Rock as Zimmy ever got. Dig, y'all.

Playlist: City Screen Basement, Fri 16th Jan

2009-01-18T02:58:00.000-08:00

The Electric Mayhem: The Muppet Show Theme
The London Philharmonic Orchestra: Theme From 2001

"Ampex Stereo Performance Evaluator"

Back Garden Birds: Town Parks And Squares

(The 'Back Garden Birds' aren't a band, you understand. This is a BBC wildlife recording of actual birds. And I've copywrited 'The Back Garden Birds' as a band name now anyway, so mits off.)

Manfred Mann's Third Chapter: Snakeskin Garter

(A1 Funky Prog Rock. If the Wu haven't sampled this, they should do.)

Wu Tang Clan: C.R.E.A.M.

Dennis Coffey: Let The Sunshine In

The Electric Prunes: Gloria

Pink Floyd: Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up

(I've read this is like an alt. version of 'Be Careful With That Axe, Eugene'. This is better.)

Power Of Zeus: The Ritual Of The Mole

(Featuring the world's fattest prog-funk break)

Ultimate Force: I'm Not Playin'

David Axelrod: Overture

The Beatles: Helter Skelter

Steve Martin & The Toot Uncommons: King Tut

("Born in Arizona, got a condo made of stone-ah - King Tut!")

Jimi Hendrix: Level

(You could spend a whole even playing brilliant Hendrix bootlegs. If this track was by some unknown psyche/funk outfit, people would be nuts about it.)

Johnny Jones & The King Casuals: Purple Haze

(I think this turned up on a David Holmes compilation. A great funk cover of the Hendrix classic, recorded in 1976, but sounds ten years older)

The Premiers: Farmer John

The Barbarians: Moulty

(I think I instinctively like rowdy early 60s Frat Rock more than any other genre on earth.)

The Gun: Race With The Devil

(Thundering Sabbath-esque blues rock heaviosity, w/horns)

Black Sabbath: The Wizard

Edan: Polite Meeting / Funky Voltron

(From 'Beauty & The Beat', aka: The Best Album Of The Noughties)

Bob Newhart: Introducing Tobacco To Civilisation

(Newhart is God.)

The Velvet Underground: Sister Ray / Venus In Furs

JD & The Evil's Dynamite Band: Haaa-Sheesh

Rare Earth: Feeling Alright

Muddy Waters: I'm A Man (from 'Electric Mud')

Black Merda: Prophet

(The definition of Black Rock)

Patrizia & Jimmy: Trust Your Child (Part 1)

(From the wonderful 'Home Schooled: The ABCs Of Kid Soul' compilation)

The Mohawks: Champ

("CHAMP! Dur-duh-nuh, dur duh-nuh, duh dudda duh duh")

The C.A. Quintet: Trip Thru Hell (Part 1)

(Spooky, oddball B-Movie garage-psyche)

Jon Lord: Organ

The Shangri Las: Leader Of The Pack

Now Showing: The Not Necessarily Hip Movies Hot-Wired To Your Soul

2009-01-17T11:49:00.000-08:00

While there are some movies which burst into your life once, slam you in the subconscious and lodge 'emselves there for eternity whether you ever encounter them again or not, I guess there are others, perhaps less epochal type affairs, which influence your life on more of a rolling basis, not sacred cows or personal totems, but simply those movies which you return to, for whatever reason, again and again and again throughout your lives. Let me give you an example. I've seen The Wild Bunch, from bloody beginning to bloody end, maybe five or six times, max, in my life. The first time I saw it, lets say 8 years ago, it pretty much totally destroyed my mind. It is A Work Of Genius. Ask me what my favourite movies are, The Wild Bunch is gonna be in there, maybe Top 10, certainly Top 20. But five or six viewings in a lifetime is nothing, given that I watch Ghostbusters half a dozen times every year, or - thanks to Film4's ridiculously narrow selection of movies - that I seem to find myself sat in front of The Day After Tomorrow pretty much once a fortnight. So which has had the greater IMPACT on me? On my...subconscious? The Wild Bunch, or Ghostbusters? And the reality is, you gotta go Ghostbusters. I'm talking not about those movies which you consider to be the greatest works of art, (ie, The Wild Bunch), but simply those movies of which you have never tired, have spent the most time in the company of, and which are therefore hot-wired to your soul. The movies about which you can honestly say, without trying to be hip : "To really understand me, you've really gotta know..." I'll be updating my list on here as and when the inspiration takes me, and I'm gonna begin today by talkin' 'bout...

.1. Shaft (1971, Dir. Gordon Parks)

Yeah, odd one, right? I dunno. I dont suppose that it's a remarkable movie on any level really, except perhaps for the soundtrack, which - while it was undeniably very influential - I actually think is kinda overrated. But there's a quality to 'Shaft' I really enjoy, something I find really watchable. So what's 'watchable'? Well...I like Richard Roundtree's super-cool, but never cliched, performance, and I like the the clothes, and gang boss Bumpy Jonas' sweet office decor, and how the whole affair is sorta low-budget and...well, I guess the word would have to be funky. I like the pace of the thing, a steady pimp-rolling mid-tempo pace, punctuated by flashes of sudden violence. I like the fact that Bumpy is played by some cat called Moses Gunn, which is the coolest name I've ever heard, and have always fantasised about starting a band called The Moses Gunn. The jokes are monumentally lame, but otherwise the script is tight and punchy. I dig bad-ass- with-a-social-conscience Ben Buford, and his outlaw gang of grim, angry-young Panthers. And while I'm certainly interested in this period of the 20th Century, and undoubtedly share the regular white-liberal-long hair romantic fascination with the Black Power movement, I don't even think that's what appeals primarily here...I mean, if I really wanted to get a fix of genuine Black Power By Any Means Necessary socio-history, I could spend my days watching Bobby Seale documentaries or Sweet Sweetback's Bad Asssss Song or whatever, which I don't. It's damning the movie with faint praise to say that I just find it comfortably undemanding, but I mean that sincerely and as a compliment. It ticks a lot of boxes, and does so without shouting about it. Can you dig it? Right on.

In The Bleak Midwinter

2009-01-14T01:17:00.000-08:00

"In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen,
Snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter,
Long ago."

There was a poll taken over Christmas - I forget a poll of whom...Radio 2 listeners maybe? - asking people to name their favourite Christmas song, and I - along with most people I spoke to about it - expressed no small amount of incredulity at what we considered to be a surprising and undeserving Number One: Christina Rossetti's 'In The Bleak Midwinter.' Indeed, my actual response was almost certainly something like:

" 'In The Bleak Midwinter?' What the hell kind of wrongheaded kill-joy pretentiousness pushed that to Number One? Hey guys - ever heard of Slade?"

But I absolutely retract this opinion now, based on the fact that I never really gave the song itself much thought when forming this 'opinion', aside from sort of half-remembering it as old, probably a bit dull and slow, and not as good as "All I Want For Christmas Is You" by Mariah Carey. I have since fallen totally in love with it.

While taking a 'Blowing The Cobwebs Away' Walk in the North Yorkshire countryside after Christmas, strolling through as frosty a scene as I have ever encountered, I found the lyrics of 'In The Bleak Midwinter' turning around in my head, and within a few minutes and a few false-starts as we tried to get the words right, me and my girlfriend were singing it together as we jumped stiles and streams, the icy imagery perfectly describing the stunning crystallised landscape.

Rossetti's words in this first verse now stand as some of my favourite lyrics to any song. I've always enjoyed simple, stock images in lyrics...I like clarity, brevity in lyrics, ideas expressed with economy, have always liked blues and gospel lyrics filled with religious iconography. What I love about Rossetti's lyric here is that the solidness, the firmness of the images perfectly reflects the subject matter, this frozen, still landscape.

"Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone"

Earth like iron, water like stone. I love that. Not a syllable wasted. Everything that is to be expressed has been, and in the most elegantly simple manner. It's perfect.

I love equally the lines that follow:

"Snow had fallen,
Snow on snow,
Snow on snow"

So...you're describing snow, right? Lots of snow. It has snowed, then it has snowed again, and again, and now there are many layers of snow, each the same as the last. So how do you describe this? Some florid icing-cake metaphor? Something about the earth being draped in a blanket? Forget it. Rossetti goes for pure stark minimalism, repeating the word snow five times, mimicking the snow and the minimalist appearance of the landscape itself, the words piling up on top of one another on the page. It is hypnotic, it is precise, and it is a wonderful marriage of structure and image. What else needs to be said?

Allied with Gustav Holst's arrangement, 'In The Bleak Midwinter' is a spectacular piece of work, and without doubt the very finest of Christmas carols. I hope to sing it on many winter walks to come.

Richard Dawkins Is The Opium Of The People

2009-01-13T11:10:00.000-08:00

Just thought I'd contribute to the debate surrounding this campaign with the following observation: this campaign is a hopelessly self-satisfied, smirky Dave Gorman-y type gap year stunt, preaching to the happily un-converted, dealing with a complex issue in a pointlessly unhelpful manner, and I'm just as offended by it, in fact more offended by it, than I am by finger-wagging Christian messages, which at least use an entertaining vocabulary and have snappier slogans. Would suggest that atheists take a leaf out of their own heathen book, and - as they're probably right about the whole No God thing - stop worrying and enjoy their lives. Shame on anybody who has found this campaign funny or impressive on any level. Yuk.

Nixon, Watergate, Robert Redford & All The President's Men

2009-01-05T12:29:00.000-08:00

So I'm pretty much spending all my free time at the moment obsessing about Watergate and Nixon's 'Final Days' at the White House. I'm a fun guy. I read Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein's 'All The President's Men' over the Summer, understood I guess maybe 75% of it at a push, but dug the whole thing and thought it was a heck of a piece of writing. It's a complicated business, right? I've just finished watching the movie, which is, lets be straight, an awesome piece of cinema. If only for Robert Redford's sweet tan suits. I don't know what the received wisdom is on this, but for my dollar, Redford kicks Hoffman's ass in this movie. I guess he maybe has the easier ride of it. Hoffman has to be all ticky and quirky. All Hoffman-y. Redford gets to be...cool. Captain America. My Mum has been a huge Redford fan pretty much her whole life, and I gotta say he's shaping up as one of my faves too. I just caught 'The Candidate'(1972) for the second or third time on telly, and he's exceptionally cool in that. And I watched Quiz Show (1994) again recently - essential viewing in the wake of all the television phone-in scandals - which Redford directed, and that's a hell of a movie too.

"I thought we were gonna get television. The truth is...television is gonna get us."

So to sum up: Robert Redford Is Cool.

In other Obsessing About Nixon news, I'm halfway through David Frost's recollections of his 1977 interviews with the Ex-Prez - Frost/Nixon - which is fascinating, and I'll be watching the recently released DVD of those shows...later this week sometime. The movie with Michael Sheen is meant to be pretty neat too, isn't it?

VIVIAN GIRLS

2009-01-04T13:06:00.000-08:00

Sonic Youth + The Luv'd Ones + The Shop Assistants + like, early Ride or Lush or whatever + uh...The Shangri Las... =Vivian Girls
How hip are these girls? C86 indie...shoegaze...90s US slacker rock...girl groups...they tick a lot of boxes, right? I'm rarely cool enough to have heard about any genuinely hip new band, let alone one that I actually like, so was very excited to have stumbled across this lot. After some cursory Googling, I've learnt they're from NYC, and have a sort of surly NYC attitude. The whole package, then.

My 15 Point January Survival Plan

2009-01-02T08:50:00.000-08:00

.1. Barack Obama: Audacity Of Hope (Book)
.2. Frost / Nixon: Watergate (DVD)
.3. Seinfeld: Season 8 (DVD)
.4. Black turtle neck sweaters
.5. Babysham, Bombay Mix and other assorted festive leftovers
.6. Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons: 'Watchmen' (Graphic Novel)
.7. Matt Helders: 'Late Night Tales' (CD)
.8. The 9/11 Commission Report (Book)
.9. Alex Ross - 'The Rest Is Noise' (Book)
.10. Judy Garland: Judy At Carnegie Hall (CD)
.11. All The Presidents Men (DVD)
.12. Old copies of Mojo Magazine I've dug out from the loft
.13. Making a horrible racket on my Stylophone
.14. Albert King: King Of The Blues Guitar (LP)
.15. Austerity

Why I Don't Get The Whole Charlie Brooker Thing

2009-01-01T07:34:00.000-08:00

Given that there appears to be an internet-wide consensus that this guy is Like Really Good And Junk, I know I'm gonna annoy a lot of people with the following post...but here goes.

Why I Dont Get The Whole Charlie Brooker Thing

Brooker-roos dig Charlie because He Cares So Much About Stuff That Sucks, And He Totally Tells It Like It Is And Shit. The main thing Charlie really cares about is The Telly, and he made his name writing splenetic, twisted broadsides on the subject. The Brooker persona is of a man consumed by the digital age, driven to a fevered, almost hallucinatory delirium by rolling news and reality TV. He is wired, A Man On The Edge. This 'gonzo' approach to Watching Telly is at the heart of my failure to 'get' Brooker.

.1. If the 'joke' is how disproportionate his rage is in relation to the subject matter, like 'excessively passionate television criticism is inherently ridiculous because television does not matter enough to justify it', then it is a joke ultimately undermined by the fact that he has spent ten or more years writing television criticism. The parody is flawed. For the joke to work, Charlie must genuinely question the value of passionate television criticism, and if he does genuinely question the value of passionate television criticism, after a decade of producing ironically passionate television criticism I would suggest that maybe his point would be more forcibly made by just writing unironically about something he really does think is worth writing passionately about. Anything. History. Politics. That would be a brave thing to do.

.2. Alternatively, we take the gonzo shtick at face-value, and buy the idea that this guy is a dangerous insomniac loon wired 24/7 to the boob-tube. Again, I consider this to be fundamentally flawed. Gonzo is defined by interaction with the story. Watching television is defined by a lack of interaction with the story. It is the most passive, un-inolving pass time possible. You cannot be gonzo sat at home on the sofa watching telly. Or maybe you can, it's just that it's a spectacularly lame, watered-down sort of gonzo-ism, and the subject matter doesn't warrant the response, which just makes it weird. (If the gonzoness is parodic, refer back to my first point).

Either way, I find myself shrugging.

However wrongheaded I find his shtick, Brooker is undoubtedly a very talented writer. A standard of Brooker's style is the Darkly Comic Flight Of Fancy, wherein a popular mainstream television scenario is distorted into a nightmarish fantasia of disturbing sex and violence, with satirical consequences. I guess how much you dig this depends on how many times you wanna read about a fictional episode of Jeremy Kyle which ends with the host masturbating a smack-addled chimp or something, and how many times you think it's worth Brooker making the point that, "Hey, Telly Is Already Sicker And Crazier Than Anything I Come Up With Here, Right? You Think This Shit Is Weird And Twisted? You Wanna Be Offended By The Orgy Of Fucked-Up-Ness I've Imagined? If You Really Wanna Be Offended, Take A Look At The Insidious, Vacuous Amorality Endemic In The Real TV Schedules! That Shit's REALLY Fucked-Up! I'm Just Holding Up A Mirror, Buddy!"

Charlie now has the opportunity to make this point over and over again On Television, where he hosts a weekly clips show about the State Of Television. Brooker is a doughy, Mr Potato Head sorta looking dude who rocks an as-standard Kermode BBC culture critic quiff, and is an entirely charmless, almost relentlessly sneery, joy-sucking on-screen presence, whose every on-screen second undermines whatever criticism of telly he is making at that moment because he's such an unengaging presenter and he's presenting such an underwhelming show.

Anyway, my point here is just that I think Brooker's shtick is just sort of pretentious, superior and misguided. If he really wanted to piss off the Nathan Barleys of this world, he coulda just spent his time writing about how he likes Friends, or Westlife, or anything else The Alternative Mainstream, Radiohead fans, to whom Brooker is a bone fide hero, has decided isn't cool. But he couldn't do that, because his tastes are naturally pretentious and know-better. So if he has concerns about the mentality of his fan-base, if he is increasingly aware of the the depressing fact that he is essentially enjoyed by people who like Banksy and for precisely the same reasons, then he only has himself to blame. He has not been able to distance himself from that Banksy worshipping culture, and the reason he has not been able to distance himself from that culture is because there are fundamentals of his work which are sympathetic with that culture. What Brooker offers now is the hum-drummest of hum-drummery - a misanthropic old dude pointing out that a lot of mainstream popular culture is dumb and damaging, but Heroes is pretty good. Who needs it?

I'd be keen to hear what Charlie fans think of all this, 'cos I know he's a well respected writer, and I really feel like I'm missing something here.

Manfred Mann Chapter Three: Volume 1

2008-11-23T08:30:00.000-08:00

Months of badgering the Record Store Guy at Rebound Records in York paid off this weekend as I finally landed myself a very battered, but perfectly listenable copy of this top-drawer jazz / prog rock LP from 1969, Manfred Mann Chapter 3: Volume 1, the third release on Vertigo. Consistently funky (the opening bars of Snakeskin Garter - for my dollar the stand-out track -are pure hip-hop), packin' a ton of flute, Chicago Transit Authority-style brass, thudding fuzz-bass, hammond organ, and the stoned, rasping vocals of Mike Hugg, the LP has been high on my wish-list for a couple of years. Fans of modern drone / stoner rock like Black Mountain or Dead Meadow would be sure to dig it. Alotta late 60s / early 70s prog stuff I pick up is for the sake of one drum break, and the rest of the album I can pretty much take-or-leave - but this is a solid listen from beginning to end, save for occasional explosions of skronking free-jazz, which I can't even be bothered to pretend to like anymore.

Macca discusses possible release for "mythical" / "lost" / "probably a bit of a druggy mess" Beatles track

2008-11-20T10:44:00.000-08:00

All Fab Freaks, Beatle Buffs and Pepper People will be aware of "Carnival Of Light", an unreleased piece of experimental music recorded by The Beatles in 1967 duing the vocal over-dubbing session for Penny Lane. Listed in 'The Complete Beatles Chronicle' as lasting just under 14 minutes, the free-form 'freak-out' was instigated by Paul McCartney, who had been asked to contribute some avant-garde music for a festival of electronic sound (The Million Volt Light & Sound Rave) held at the Roundhouse in London. Beatles scholar Mark Lewishom reported in his 'The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions' that the track consists of "distorted, hypnotic drum and organ sounds, a distorted lead guitar, the sound of a church organ, various effects (water gargling was one) and, perhaps most intimidating of all, John Lennon and McCartney screaming dementedly and bawling aloud random phrases like 'Are you alright?' and 'Barcelona!'" Plans for 'Carnival Of Light's inclusion on Anthology Two were apparently scotched by Harrison and Starr, and it remains the numero uno lost Beatles Holy Grail. Personally I ain't holding my breath, but Macca has made noises recently about a possible release, and you can hear him discussing it, in interview with Radio 4's Front Row...HERE

Worst 'Mojo' Ever

2008-11-20T10:12:00.000-08:00

Metallica! Grace Jones! Mellencamp! A 'free' CD of some people covering Leonard Cohen! I mean, whatever, I'm sure Grace Jones did some good stuff, and I know Metallica are menna be like a big deal if you're intothatsortofthing, and John Cougar Mellencamp..well, I don't know anything about him to be honest, but I'm sure he has his fans...still, this has gotta be the luh-amest Mojo cover in the magazine's history. These 'Covered' CDs they keep going with. Who needs 'em? Who is sat at home listening to a Leonard Cohen record thinking "gee, this is pretty good, but imagine what a real singer like Josh Ritter could do with it?" Man. I don't even care about Leonard Cohen, I don't own a thing by him, but I'm sure the dude doesn't deserve Katie Melua et al trampling all over his song book.

My 15 Point Winter Survival Plan

2008-11-19T13:32:00.000-08:00

.1. GZA - 'Liquid Swords'
.2. Gin and Tonic

.3. Old Batman comics

.4. New black suede Beatle boots

.5. New Yorker magazine

.6. Bootleg Hendrix LPs

.7. Calvin & Hobbes anthologies

.8. My fiance's homemade Mexican chilli

.9. The Star Wars Trilogy on ITV

.10. Good coffee

.11. A black Pea Coat

.12. Trying to follow the Knicks

.13. The Guy Fawkes Inn, York

.14. The Ackhorne Pub, York

.15. Christmas shopping in London

Solid Wig Flippers: The Records That Changed My Life # 1

2008-11-18T10:48:00.000-08:00

Jimmy Smith - Root Down (Verve, 1972)

Jeez. Thinking 'bout how many years have passed since I bought this album has really put the spook on me. I'm 28 now. I musta got my mitts on this back in '98. Ten years, man. A lifetime ago. Well, not a lifetime. Maybe like a cat's lifetime. Whatever - it's a long-ass time, and one half of my brain is telling me it seems like a hundred years longer, and the other half is telling me it's gone in the blink of a lamb's tail. (Aside from a telescoped-perception of time, that side of my brain also has a problem with mixing its metaphors.)

I ordered this album from Track Records in Doncaster; they didn't have it in stock but the dude said they could try getting it in.Looking back, I don't even know why I'd got it into my head that this was an album I had to hear - the regular reason a young kid would set about digging in the crates for Root Down would be that they'd heard The Beastie Boys sampled it, but I didn't get into The Beastie Boys for years after I bought this. In my whole life I've only ever ordered one record from a shop, this album, so there musta been some reason why I broke with tradition here...but I don't recall what. Whatever the reason, I'm super glad I did.

Jimmy Smith's Root Down was probably the very first 'proper funk' record I ever bought, and it's a hell of a place to start. Before this I'd bought compilations - including the incredible 4 CD 'Big Payback' box on Sound & Media, which I'll cover later - and bits and bobs elsewhere, cheap Funkadelic best-ofs and the like - but this album was just on another level entirely. This was a proper, relatively obscure LP, a live album from 1972, on a jazz label I knew next to nothing about, and the (sort-of) title track was an absolute monster of an instrumental Hammond workout, over 10 minutes long, a ton of wah-wah, bongos, drums...The Real Deal. I've played 'Root Down (And Get It)' so many times I couldn't even begin to count 'em, and it's never once failed to fill me with anything less than complete, funky, head-nodding joy.

As a DJ I have found 'Root Down (And Get It)' indispensable. It's a slow-burner. If you're dealing with a hip-hop crowd, or a funk crowd, they know the score from the opening, tentative bass figure, and the reaction, the dancefloor action, is instantaneous. That's cool. But play it to Root Down virgins and it's a whole other story, and I love it - at first, there's a tentativeness - like, this is kinda groovy, but I dunno about dancing to it...Root Down always wins 'em around. It's relentless, just keeps on going and going, this hypnotic groove, ebbing and flowing, 'til the whole room is a mass of smiling faces and liquid limbs. That's the power of Root Down.

I spent alot of my teen years deep in existential introspection and self-involved heavy navel-gazing; I guess that's par for the C. Joy Division played their part, and I sort of resent them now because of it. Albums like Root Down flipped the script on me, made me realise something vitally important: dark and doomy music makes Jack a dark and doomy boy. Joy Division weren't good for me. And like bad food, fags or any other toxin, if you wanna get better, you gotta get rid. Get rid, and replace 'em with something that's good and will do you good. The fact that I can't even fathom why I decided that I needed this out-of-left-field album in my life speaks to why I love it, it's like, on some genetic level, I just knew I needed it...or maybe Root Down sensed I needed it, and found me.

Bought: Christmas 1998 /CD /Track Records, Doncaster.

Credit Crunch Fatigue And A Culture Of Hysteria: Is it me, or are we all just a little too easily distracted at the moment?

2008-11-17T11:55:00.000-08:00

The thing is, the credit crunch is not just depressing, it's dull too. My capacity for mortally depressing news has its limits, but my tolerance for news which combines the depressing with with the brain-crushingly dull is much lower. The economy is fucked: I get it. Or rather, I don't get it, however much the Today show on Radio 4 wants to bark at me about it every single morning as I struggle to drag myself from my bed into the bleak landscape of job insecurity and spiralling utility bills they're describing, and because my level of Actually Understanding It Or Whatever extends to "People Like Me Are Going To Be Poorer For The Next Few Years Because Some People In 'The City' Are Greed Crazed Douche-Bags", I really find it difficult to engage meaningfully with the story.

The way the news cycle in this country has been working recently suggests many other people are on the same page. If it isn't news about the credit crunch, we're absolutely mad for it. In hindsight, The Ross & Brand Controversy was perhaps the first of this At Least It's Not Another Story About The Credit Crunch wave. Would this ludicrous debacle have been the monster of a story it was if we weren't so eager to talk about anything other than a financial crisis we don't understand? The story became something other, something more than it really was; there was a feverishness, a wild, desperation to the whole affair which was, by any rational standard, way out of proportion with the event itself. I mean, was it really the era-defining referendum on decency it apparently became? Did people have to be forced from their jobs? Was it necessary for the Prime Minister to comment on the affair?

Then we have the case of Baby P, a story blood-chillingly awful and shocking in a variety of ways, and absolutely worthy of our attention...but again, the perceived scale of national outrage, the outpouring of grief...I heard somebody on the news today suggest that the story has brought about a period of "national soul-searching", again, as though this were some 'defining moment' in the nation's psyche, a 'Diana moment'. As terrible as the story is, history will not record Baby P and the failures of Haringey Council in such epochal terms, and rhetoric of this nature has more to do with Credit Crunch fatigue than a rational reaction to the story itself. I guess what I'm saying is that the Baby P story has taken on a significance it would not have had in a different climate.

Finally, we have the insane amount of mainstrean media coverage afforded to two stories based around reality tv shows; Laura's ejection from The X-Factor a couple of weeks back, and the failure of the public to eject John Sargeant from Strictly Come Dancing. It's not as though these are even major stories by regular reality TV 'news' standards; there was never any real question that Laura's eviction was illegitimate, there was no accusation of vote-rigging or even panto-style foul-play by the judges, and Sargent's continued success is simply the latest in a tradition of the show's token 'comedy' contestant being understandably well supported by the public. It's not like we're talking Race Row In The Big Brother House here.

What is ultimately most revealing about these stories is that they disappear from the news cycle as quickly as they appear; we forget them quickly, because such a huge part of their 'appeal' is their novelty value, the quick fix, the new-kicks-now, anything but the dreaded Crunch, they sustain themselves a matter of days beyond their natural limits and as they're stretched to breaking point, the media has hammered up some new scandal, and the nation throws itself into the next whirlwind of despair. Seems like when it comes to the Crunch, the British people, and the media, would rather talk about anything else.

Barack Obama: A Promise Fulfilled

2008-11-16T08:00:00.000-08:00

Tons of typically brilliant / insightful / East Coast elitist-communist-gay-jew stuff about Barack Obama and the final stages of the US Presidential elections in the Nov 17th issue of The New Yorker, of particular note being David Remmick's excellent article looking at the role race played in Obama's campaign:

'Speaking at a church in Selma, Obama was not a patriarch and not a prophet but the prophesied. "I'm here because somebody marched," he said. "I'm here because you all sacrificed for me."'

I like this idea, this idea that our joy at the election of Obama is, at it's core, the joy of a great promise fulfilled; that Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement promised something in the 60s, an ideal, a grand vision, and 40 years later Obama was able to step forward as the delivery of that promise...and now, here he is! Not a prophet, but the prophesied. I like that simple distinction.

What really hits home in his quote is the way he says "you all sacrificed for me"...well, of course, that isn't true in a literal sense, their sacrifices weren't made for him, their sacrifices were made so that it might be possible for somebody like him to get "here"...but his phrasing recognises that this is irrelevent: he has become The One, The Embodiment Of Their Dream. I guess the thing is, if the guy does have a bit of a Messiah complex, he has more reason than most.

Anyway, you can read Remmick's article HERE, and then go check out all the other wonderfully written, heathen, liberally biased journalism at the New Yorker while you're there.

The Pitch

2008-11-16T05:10:00.000-08:00

Nick 'Grimmy' Grimshaw

USP: He's slightly less irritating than most of the other presenters on 4Music.

USP Score: 7/10. Strong. Our basic expectations of "younghipgunslinger" music presenters have been persistantly eroded over the last few years, a trend which began with the pretty/vacant/inept/desperate Alex & Alexa "replacing" Oliver and Amstell on Pop World (a bit like "replacing" Coke with Tab Clear), and the never-ending cycle of marble-mouthed new-ravey kids who Channel 4 have hired on a strict trouser-width basis, rather than on the basis of them possessing any of the actual qualities which made Amstell & Oliver the authors of wonderful pop television. By being (a) frequently successful in his attempts to form coherent sentence structures and (b) generally tolerable in short bursts, Nick Grimshaw, or 'Grimmy', is - by current 4Music standards - a broadcasting giant. He'll be commentating on state funerals before the end of the decade, with breaks for The New Single From Kanye West and an interview with Kelly Osbourne.