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.

The Amazing World Of Star Wars Stuff Made Out Of Gingerbread

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.

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

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)

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.

Sesame Street: Subverting Capitalism Since 1969

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

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!

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!

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.

Vic Mizzy: 1916 - 2009

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.

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

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.

Sgt Pepper's Lonely Star Wars Band

Pretty cool, huh?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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'.

Hollywoodland: The Legend Of Albert Kothe

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.

Joan Didion 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' (1968)

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.