WOEBOT

Yesterday I put some cork tiles up in my children's playroom so they could pin up their pictures. Because a lot of them needing cutting it was taking a long time and I thought some music might kill the tedium. There was no stereo in there so I logged online with their Mac Mini (they use it to go to the CBeebies site, and my daughter keeps her photos on it).

The first place I went for a bit of the ol' cheeky streaming audio was Blogariddims. Just last week I was freelancing in some design studio or other and found a shared iTunes folder which I was surprised to discover had a couple of Blogariddims mixes in it. The one I listened to was Heatwave's utterly brilliant "An England Story" mix, which is their "personal take on the history of MCing in England" and is quite un-missable. It seems as though Soul Jazz will be releasing an official compilation based on it next year. Slug's Krautrock mix doesn't contain any surprises and also manages to screw up Neu!'s majestic "Leb Wohl" by dribbling Tangerine Dream and Kluster over the top of it (thinks: "mixes" don't always make musical sense). However it is both a nicely personal take on the sound (I would choose totally different tracks myself, but like, so what?) and in its funny way something like a Primer for the totally uninitiated.

I was getting the hang of the streaming audio thing, so my next stop was Mary Anne Hobbs's "Experimental Show" at Radio 1. I'd never heard this before, I think perhaps because I knew exactly what to expect. I dunno, I suppose I feel pretty ambivalent about it. Firstly, it seems like the BBC missed a trick having an 8 foot-tall Amazon warrior covering this music. Isn't it just a little bit like reverse sexism? Surely it would be more appropriate to have some slightly dweeby, middle-class bloke pushing forty presenting (preferably with his own website, you dig). If they'd asked me I probably would have passed, but I can think of a candidate or three. MAH is alright, though she does have a slightly annoying "stoned-wow" delivery. All the artists she discusses as though they're "her boys"; it does sort of come across a bit gauchely maternal. It did make me giggle a bit.

Anyway it's not her fault I find dubstep boring, and I suppose she's doing a good job. But it isn't illegal to have a pop at Radio 1 DJs is it? Even if narrow-casting has meant there are so fucking many of them and it all feels like a bloody cottage industry.....and you're only going to be separated from them by 2 degrees, not the more satisfactory 6. I can do with all the degrees of separation I can get my hands on when it comes to Chris Moyles. On this weeks show I did think Skepta was alarmingly bad! Really if this is the best that Grime can come up with these days it's in deep trouble. Skepta just doesn't have a "voice" like for instance D Double or Wiley do. He also doesn't have any lyrics. And he also doesn't seem to have any beats. A tune I can do without, the rest not. Skepta also kept doing this crucifyingly embarrassing thing, calling MAH "the Grimey Uma Thurman". I put down my saw and cringed, thinking, "Please Skepta, don't say it again," and he bloody did. It was crap the first time.

Looking over the Radio 1 site for more entertainment my eye caught Zane Lowe promising to play the entire of Nirvana's "Nevermind". Just this week I was finishing that show "Six Feet Under" and Nirvana cropped up in the plot-line which got me thinking of them. I have never heard this record. It won't surprise regular readers to know that my brother and I were so fucking hip that we had "Bleach", Mudhoney's "Touch Me I'm Sick" and even the Green River LP before "Nevermind" came out. We were fully switched-on indie kids, with The Pixies first EP ("Caribou" I always loved that track) and Sonic Youth's "Sister" under our belts. We'd seen MBV about two hundred times, Dinosaur Jr plenty, hell I even saw Steve Albini's Rapeman back Sonic Youth once! We'd been into Husker Du for years, Meat Puppets II and even stranger, more obscure stuff like Live Skull and Die Kreuzen.

It was interesting and amusing to read Simon Reynolds's "Sub Pop 200" review in his recent "Bring The Noise" collection because it totally captures our general sense of boredom and exhaustion with Indie Rock of that era. It simply ceased to appear so interesting, just...spent as an idea. In his afterthought Simon classes the review as a "misjudgment" largely because of Nirvana's subsequent meteoric ascent but also because he has a healthy sense of self-critique. But really I'm not so sure. "Nevermind" ushered in a whole load of things which were almost ALL bad. Firstly it destroyed the playful naivety of almost all contemporary rock music. There's no better example of this than Sonic Youth who went straight from being one of the greatest bands of all time (EVOL>Sister>Daydream Nation....you can't touch this) to corporate whores chasing the dream of crossing over. I'm not one to have a go at bands for trying to reach a bigger audience, but they REALLY fucked up. There was something missing in "Goo", nearly a great record, but by "Dirty" I just didn't *believe* in them any more. I don't think I could ever look them straight in the eye after all of that scrabbling around. And that was Nirvana's fault.

And there's more. Not only were Nirvana guilty of fascinating all the borderline Heavy Metal kids and drawing them into the game, they are also the godfathers of EVERYTHING that is bad about Indie rock today. The whole Pop-melodies-meets-crunchy-feedback thing, that didn't come from the Buzzcocks or Husker Du, that came from Nirvana in the sense that they zipped it up/abstracted it so it seemed like a total option, a degree zero of music. It didn't surprise me in the least to find out in the show's pre-amble that Zane Lowe, who here in the UK is the crown-prince of Young Rock on the Telly, had been a Hip-Hop fan in New Zealand before discovering "Nevermind" and it "changing his life". I'm not trying to aggrandise my own cultural choices by framing them beside Lowe's (I am not worthy, tee hee...) but they were precisely the opposite of mine. I had to scoff really, Zane Lowe didn't know "Bleach" till later on! That guy needs a hip operation.

Anyway it was very cool to hear the record, I was really surprised to find how many of its tracks I knew from what must amount to cultural osmosis. Yeah it's OK. The cork tiles look wicked by the way. I went upstairs and stuck on The Meat Puppets "Up On The Sun". Now that IS a masterpiece. If we're going to have whole LP radio shows, AM-style, we ought to have records like that on them I reckon.