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July 27, 2006
July 19, 2006
The view from the cave door
1) Richard Hawley "Cole's Corner". This is really nice in a Jake Thackery wordy Northern gloom, delated Morissey, Chris Isaac at the end of the pier kinda fashion.
2) Lily Allen. This is actually half OK. There must have been lots of Reggae in their household. It compares quite favorably in spirit to The Slits and unlike MIA who conjured up roughly the same mirage with a load of bullshit attached, is quite palatable. I wouldn't buy it, but I'd wrap it up nicely and give it to Tom Ewing for Christmas or if my baby girl was seven and I was one of those kinda self-consciously stylish Dad's I'd slip it under her door.
3) Some of the comments here amongst the most inane ever committed in the name of music journalism.
On Yossou N'Dour's "Immigres":
"Without this ... N'Dour wouldn't have met Peter Gabriel, there'd have been no African presence at Live 8. In fact, 'world music' would not exist as a section in Western collections."
N'Dour would never have met Peter Gabriel? And? Yes? Your point here precisely?
Who gives half a flying fuck about the African presence at Live 8? Musically speaking I was quite glad there was almost no African presence at Live 8, because if there had been it would have compromised the event's utter shiteness. I'd have had to taken the whole thing seriously, rather than just outta hand dismissing it like I did. The first time I saw any footage was this year, and boy was I glad for the 365 day buffer. If I'd been able to watch it on Pluto that'd have been slightly more agreeable.
World music existing as a "section" in Western music collections? Clearly fatuous and wrong-headed. I don't know if this makes me detest the Observer's relentlessly middle-brow aesthetic or just people in general.
On Massive Attack's "Blue Lines"
"Without this ... no Roots Manuva, no Dizzee. In fact, there would be no British urban music scene to speak of."
Jesus wept. The very idea of one LP having anything whatsoever to do....actually I give up with this one. Possibly thee most stupid thing I have ever read.
4) Quite a lot of this amounts to Observer bashing, and I thought I'd leaven it with a few words about Paul Morley. When I went to see Chris Bohn at The Wire to try and talk him into running my NDW Primer (back in the day when I gave a toss), he told me I referenced too much other music in my reviews. I always really liked it when you read a review and the reviewer said "like such'n'such rare interesting thing". Sometimes I thought that that was the only good thing about reviews, that and being told whether the record was worth investigating. To be told this was a bad thing, well it went right over my head to be honest. Bohn also seemed to think that this was me copying Paul Morley. Again I was totally baffled because I've never seen anything Morley has written. I've read one very recent piece he wrote about Brian Eno's music being used for a commercial, how we should applaud that, and that is it. I never read the NME back in the day, I was playing with my chemistry set.
I know what Bohn is referring to though because, "Words and Music" (which again I haven't read) is famous for its lists. For eventually dissolving into lists. Also I suppose the rhizome-like thing about references, who knows maybe that passed into the body of Rock Crit via Morley's influence? Maybe I've been unwittingly influenced? Nothing to be ashamed of at all in that, I suppose I may have picked it up as a habit secondhand via Simon Reynolds (who I copped practically everything off I didn't copy from Lester Bangs).
But just for the record, even though I pretty much despise the Observer and Guardian's music coverage I'd like to say that I think Paul is a righteous dude. Frankie was a supremely insane intervention and (the meat of this ramble) he has excellent taste as is visible here in this list, which Tim Finney at ilx amused me by saying was very like my own, if just a shade more middlebrow. I got some cool things out of Paul's list. I found a copy of Kevin Ayer's "Shooting At The Moon" and also Fairport Convention's "Unhalfbricking" which is indispensable. Though Neutral Milk Hotel, which I also picked up on his recommendation, was I dunno, really gruesome and Middle-American in the most banal way. And he was great on Simon's RIUASA panel. And you can see him on the telly.
July 14, 2006
Bombay Bonanza
I think I've mentioned the dudes behind eBay's hottest and heaviest Bollywood deals, the legendary Bombay Beat before? Well, you could have blown me down with a feather when just the other day I got an email from Holland's Edo Bouman, the man behind the alias, alerting me to two CDs he's putting out. I suppose they amount to recordings of the absolute cream of the Indian Soundtracks that have passed through his hands. I usually automatically delete music industry spam, but trust me people this is extremely different. As soon as I get my shit together I'll be buying these two lavishly packaged, impressively organised babies.
July 13, 2006
The Wiggles
When you have children you find that you listen to their music quite a lot of the time. At home on television, in the kitchen on CDs, on their little tape recorders in their bedrooms, in the car especially. Never buy your children CD players by the way because the CDs get mashed to fuck. I learnt this the hard way. C90s are the only way to go because they're so sturdy, OK the tape can jam in the player but you can always thread it out of the machine and if needs be splice the ends together in the event of a breakage. This is the same reason they're still big in the harsh climatic conditions of The Third World. I expect everyone will be able to cast their minds back to gluing or sellotaping cassettes back together and the ritual of correctly disassembling and reassembling the case itself, each element having to be in precisely the right slot or the cassette will fail to work and the satisfaction of a correctly repaired cassette.
My babies have always had well-stocked collections of music, it's the least I can do, right? But I've resolutely avoided pandering to my own tastes, so no Classical Avant-Garde Music. I've always tried to think what it would be that they'd like. Subsequently we listen to lots of Disney music, the divine Mary Poppins Soundtrack was a big favorite of ours, the Jungle Book Soundtrack, but also lesser drek like songs from Beauty and The Beast and The Lion King. There's a CD by this lady called Vanessa King who runs the London Symphony Orchestra Discovery Workshops which runs out of the converted St. Luke's church beside our house called "Jemma's Journey and Abi's Adventure" which they love, and which is (if you can get past the kiddie flavor) exceptionally musical and charming. Actually if you know someone with small children, or have them yourself I couldn't recommend it highly enough. The furthest I go towards indulging myself is HMV's excellent two CD collection of Children's Classics. Funnily enough the most randomly persistent emails I've got since the dawn of WOEBOT was about these songs, at least until I edited the entry.
Listening to songs like the woman's hour choir singing "All things bright and beautiful" and "The Laughing Policeman" one feels an unbearable nostalgia for times before Rock'n'Roll when life was simpler. I mean, when would a Policeman ever laugh these days? When he busted your big sister's prostitution racket or found that tiny rock of crack you tried to secrete in your shorts? That innocence is long gone. It was funny reading through Joe Boyd's excellent "White Bicycles" recently and his account of Dylan's electrification at Newport, a moment Boyd not inaccurately believes to be the birth of Rock (even if that account hardly does his own reputation any harm...). Boyd remarks that though the crowd, who until that moment had been innocently righteous folkies, were thrilled by Dylan's racket, there was apparently a strong sense in the air that something that something had been lost. I guess I think lyrical obscenity is a good thing and as for sonic barbarity, bring it on baby, but yunnuh a little piece of me would be quite happy without the likes of Chamillionaire (bad example I guess cos it's just so fucking formulaic)
We have lots of tapes by The Wiggles. The Wiggles TV show goes out on Nick Jr in the UK and we've watched it with the kids lots. I like to watch TV with my babies, I don't want to just plonk them in front of it like k-punk's archetypal pot-smoking parents plugging their children into Teletubbies. Consequently I know all about all the programs, Dora, Diego, Little Bill, Little Bear, Charlie and Lola, Boogie Beebies, Bob The Builder, Tikabilla, Balamory, The Tweenies (a personal favorite, it seems I enjoy The Tweenies more than my children), Lazytown (unbelievably catchy Euro-Trance-Pop tunes), Pingu, Clifford the Big Red Dog, Brum, Big Cook Little Cook. I know my shit, I'm telling you. The Wiggles are an Australian invention and Tim Finney and Jon Dale will be able to tell you all about them. It was as though someone re-scripted The Monkees for the under sixes but was sure to leave out anything even vaguely sexualised or culturally surreptitious (we all know what happened to The Monkees right? Head etc)
Conventional post-teen wisdom (which actually I suspect Jon and Tim don't subscribe to...) would have it that The Wiggles are a travesty. But actually I think they're wonderful. Greg, Murray, Jeff and Anthony are so unremittingly good-humoured, so cheerful in such a uncalculated manner, their songs so daftly hooky that I find them irresistible. When we found out in January that they were coming to London I was even toying with getting FACT to let me interview them for the magazine. This morning we all set off in the van to the Hammersmith Apollo to see them play their one and only UK show on their world tour. The last time I'd been to the Apollo was in 1987 when I broke out of school on my own to see The Fall on their Frenz Experiment tour and was sick on booze in the bushes. Funnily enough my wife buys underwear off Brix these days.
The place was packed in a ratio 8:4:1 (children:mothers:fathers) The band were their charming beatific selves and played all the big hits you don't know and I love. Opening with my personal favorite "Rock-A-Bye-A-Bear" and trotting through "Wags the Dog", "Quack, Quack, Quack, Cockeldoodle Do", "The Good Ship Feathersword", "Dorothy The Dinosaur", "Hot Potato". Lulu was having a wail of time, wiggling like crazy. Sam seemed to wail mostly. I sensed the adults around me were surprised when I knew all the words. My own personal highlight came three quarters of the way through the performance when Murray and Jeff ventured into the audience to collect roses for Dorothy the Dinosaur to eat (Ah ha! Your intertextual Rock knowledge just deserted you!) Catherine raced downstairs to the stalls with Lulu to meet Jeff.
Murray, who dresses in red, is about seven foot tall and plays the guitar, started to make his way through the circle. Sam is too young to really appreciate their celebrity, but I used him as an excuse to schlep over and accost him in my usual star-fucked fashion. Up close Murray seemed gigantic, his hands looked like paddles, he was sweating profusely and looked unbelievably stressed-out, a very empty grin plastered on his face, his eyes, bent at the edges speaking volumes. The best I could manage was a very heartfelt: "Welcome to London Murray" to which he replied: "Thanks cobber" (actually he just said "Thank you.") I'll be honest I felt kinda disappointed. This evening I put myself in his shoes. Jet-lagged, far from home, alone in the back of a theatre he wasn't sure how to escape from, without his entourage (the legendary Big Red Car was left at home and they were working a pickup band), unsure as to the degree of cynicism of the adults around him, dressed in his standard-issue red sweater, clutching multiple huge bouquets of roses. Jeez mate, I'd be pretty fucking stressed out as well.
July 11, 2006
Whoops apocalypse
I'm in an extremely strange place vis a vis blogging at the moment. I'd even go as far as describing it as screwed-up. This may have started with my slightly nutsy decision in the Spring to ration my reading of one or two of my favorite blogs as I found I was checking in to them far too many times. I've gone as far as completely weaning myself off one particular blog I was finding too compulsive, and at once punitive to me as a reader.
At the same time my own output for WOEBOT has become crippled by my expectations for it. These days I only ever seem to write (relatively in blogging terms) deeply researched pieces which require reading books, combing the internet and tracking down impossibly hard-to-find records. The form of these conceptual essays gets more and more convoluted, I've noticed a pattern which revolves around concept pieces grouped around sets of ten exquisitely-curated records. You'll not believe it, but I have (no exaggeration at all) SEVEN of these gigantic pieces in the wings. But as soon as set out writing them, I find myself procrastinating, usually in search of greater detail, more background information, more useful theoretical tools, and ultimately (drools) more vinyl.
More worryingly, I keep finding myself drafting quite large think-pieces (this is over and above the aforementioned SEVEN) but as the weeks go by I fail to have any time to concentrate on writing them to a sufficient standard whereby they're "publishable" I gradually come to the conclusion that it'd probably be more sly and hipper not to venture to comment on their subjects at all. This is compounded by the blogosphere malaise of everyone trotting out their opinions on certain subjects with a intensely competitive desire to be, if not the first to comment on something, then at least to have the definitive opinion about something, the stragglers indulging in meta-critical sniping at the first through the gates. I've even read people attacking other people along the lines of "What right do you think you have to comment on such and such?"
This slightly stifling atmosphere has also driven me into the position of covering terrains which on the one hand I feel people maybe ought to be more interested in, but on the other kinds of music I find my way into precisely because they're unspoiled pastures, and which I then (this really is ridiculous) struggle to connect with emotionally, even as I appreciate their qualities. As a listener this is often an exhausting position to find myself in.
There's another dimension extraneous to all this. I've just worked on the core graphics systems for a certain Music Television Video brand's British *and* American forthcoming "Interactive" Cable channels. This convergence between TV and the web is often fascinating to watch close-up. I left one company where I'd done one, and was hired by another company to do the other. I've been in the thick of discussions with senior executives talking about how they can leverage the kind of hobbyist devotion that this blog represents to drive their channel. I heard a great new phrase at one meeting: "The Reputation Economy", yikes that's scary isn't it? I mean would anyone blog if some idea of their own reputation wasn't at stake? But what if you start to wonder if you care what anyone thinks about your opinion? The whole thing is kinda horrific from the perspective of the Music-Theorist-as-UNIX-programmer shtick.
From my own experience as a writer I'm beginning to suspect that both the career-led drive of "Professional" Music Journalists (I've met one...) a drive founded on the need to put bread on the table, and the accompanying apparatus of an editor to convince and practical deadlines to meet are actually central to the discipline. I already have a job, and I packed in my writing gigs because I didn't have the time, so where does that put me?
Yeah, it's not a pretty sight. At the moment WOEBOT is like the metaphorical Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, at once ever more intensely devoted to its own program but at the same time time finding that program impossible to navigate, subsequently threatening to vanish into itself. I'm not actually going to pull the plug, just wondering how the hell I'm going to get myself out of this predicament. Hoping maybe somehow to get some time to actually get all this accumulating garbage off my chest.
July 02, 2006
Franco Battiato "L'era del Cinghiale bianco"
I was hipped to Battiato by my friend Franceso at Dissensus. The seventies stuff is amazing, but I'll be going into that in some detail on my forthcoming "Italian Progressive Rock Mini-Primer". However, his eighties work is not without its highlights. "Up Patriot to Arms" is brilliant, but my absolute favourite is the stunning "L'era del Cinghiale bianco", which I was delighted to find a video of on YouTube. YouTube, I mean who needs television?
I can't do the funky YouTube link supported by Blogger and LiveJournal but you can watch it here. Franco must have the most remarkable profile in Pop. You thought Pete Townsend had a big hooter.