2010 Review: A Year In Stuff I Liked

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.

Why The UK Should Hold It's Own Tea Party

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Club Preview: Fuzz @ Dusk 07/08/09

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.

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

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.

Allen Klein 1931-2009

"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'.

Richard Dawkins Is The Opium Of The People

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.

Barack Obama: A Promise Fulfilled

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.

Three non-brave children based observations about last night's Pudsey In Need telethon

.1. Tess Daley is so bad at presenting she makes Ferne Cotton look good. Like, Cotton is Walter Kronkite compared to Daley. I was actually relieved when Daley 'threw' (or bungled awkwardly) to Cotton. I have never experienced 'relief' when Cotton has appeared on the television before. A desire to sink into death's cold, numbing embrace, yes. But not relief.

.2. Was I dreaming, or did Steven Fry defer to somebody elses knowledge during QI last night? The Wogan / Fry Battle Of The Broadcasting Giants was always likely to produce some interesting telly, but who knew that Fry would allow himself to be corrected by the Tog-Father. Of course, the topic was Eurovision - a topic only an insane fool would question Wogan's authority on - and the show was being conducted in the spirit of Pudsy bonhomie, so one cannot presume this will set a precedent. Fry got his own back with the kangaroo thing later in the show anyway.

.3. Whoever is dressing Duffy, an engaging, likable and highly watchable young performer, as a drunk middle-aged hooker, needs to stop. (Wasn't sure about her new single at first, quite like it now.)