WOEBOT

Gone.

How does it go? Baong baong, Tchack Tchak, baong baong, Tchack Tchak, baong baong. Umpber de de de de, umpber de de de de, umper de de de de. Or as Silver Dollar remarked the other day: "BONNNG! A clapclap clap BONNNG!"

I must say, as a chronic record collector, the current climate with regards to Grime is completely different to how it's been over the past decade. You used to be able to saunter into the second hand stores and pick up tunes from the past year or so that had been either discarded by DJs with only so much room in their boxes, or had been cast aside as unloved promos by music biz ingrates. Nowadays? Forget it. FORGET IT! Recently people have remarked to me: "Oh I have to have that tune on that CD of yours!" Well, I'm sorry but that music has gone. Forever. A victim of the tiny circulation of white labels and almost certainly of mp3s.

I was *so* delighted to pick up a copy of this brittle, jack-knifing, crudely-pressed dubplate. But nowadays the secondhand Garage bin is full of little else but major-label sorties on promo (coughs, Shystie) and old Locked On releases.

When it rains it pours!

Just picked up Alex Petridis's review of the Wiley Album in the Guardian. I shouldn't read the papers, it's not good for me. Mr Petridis has decided that in his really lightweight (read: "nothing in the way of tantalising data or interesting thoughts") review of the record it'd be fun to have a go at the Bloggers:

"Instead it's fanbase is comically polarised. At one extreme, it's sonic experimentation has attracted the kind of people who run music Blogs in which records are referred to as "texts" and lengthy essays are posted on such burning issues as the differentiation between Humean and Kantian views of motivation in the lyrics of Bonnie Prince Billy. At the other extreme, it is favoured by inner city teens who appear to communicate in an impenetrable mix of street slang and patois. "Gial like me can be flossin' of dis rite 'ere." offers one participant in a chatroom discussion about Grime" Another informs us that Wiley in "Nang standard no doubt", well of course he is."

And he goes on:

"You can only wonder what the conversation would be like if grime's two groups of fan's met up. There is such a gulf between the Bloggers and the the gials who can be flossin on dis rite ere, where mainstream acceptance lies."

Jesus wept! I dunno which cartoon-thumbnail-of-a-group would be more likely to torch Petridis's bicycle after reading this. Speaking from the perspective of the blogs I'd like to say of the Bloggers I've hung out with, who Mr Petridis is IMPLICITLY REFERRING to, that they're all open minded people. They've got messy fascinating lives, they're the sort of people who "get stuck right in there" be it at street level or otherwise.

One of the main reasons why the Bloggers have engaged with Garage is that the mainstream press (as represented here by Mr Petridis) is so hidebound and conservative that it has to wait for a major label release before it can justify picking up pen. It might surprise Mr Petridis that the connections between these two circuits which he takes such glee in opposing is infinitely closer than the one the mainstream will ever enjoy with Garage. Socially, structurally and politically.

Final thoughts.

This'll be the last time I talk about this here (blimey, sorry for being so boring!) However, with mp3 file-sharing it seems that the initial act (as in offering it up on an mp3 blog) counts for 0.1% in the eventual dissemination of that bit of data, because the file's availability across the p2p networks will always grow exponentially. Consequently this "initial act" ought to be viewed (in my opinion) as one trebly fraught with consequence, and thus trebly considered. I'm hoping my loathsome RealAudio feed will go some way to allaying this.

I followed the link through to Down Hill Battle, and was really alarmed at what they're up to, which seems to be a "rolling together" of an antipathy to the big five labels with a tactic of encouraging file-sharing. The idea being that in file-sharing one is engaged in a resonant political act which will undermine an unwelcome staus quo. I think this is preposterous. The two processes (attempting to undermine the major labels AND sharing files) should be entirely separate. I think if you don't believe in the major labels you should get off your arse and demonstrate, or set up your own independent record label, or like dance music in Britain has done (which sadly seems to be withering on the vine) set up your own circuit of distribution. To think that sharing files, a profoundly muddy gesture, is going to herald a new era of more healthy consumer relations is horseshit. It's the lazy man's politics, and presumably the slightly euphoric tone of some of the mp3 file-sharers in part stems from this.

Actually,*even* in the light of Down Hill Struggle's faintly absurd championing of "families affected by RIAA suits" (I mean, what a cynically emotive bit of phrasing, "familes"), I'm quite sympathetic to the major labels. I've heard plenty about record companies "evil" tactics (go and read the Albini article at DHS, though hang on a minute, Albini is hardly a struggling pauper!), and for sure they've shafted some very brillliant and worthy musicians, but they're not the manifestation of single evil geniuses. Without wanting to seem too politically impotent, and too accepting of them, people ought to consider that they're the product of the risks and travails of selling music. Selling music is somewhat like drilling for oil, a label will sign 50 artists and only one will make them any money. Often as not that one successful artist will fund the others.

If the current set-up of exhibition and distribution of music collapses (it wont ENTIRELY), and y'all have the "joy" of package-less dematerialised music, then it might be worth pondering the future. If lived experience and the specifics of geography make up 75% of music's power, what would music bereft of these things sound like? It would represent a music which doesn't have recourse to people's understanding of life, but which works solely in signification to other music without signification. Like Techno innit!

More Ethics.

Bishi bashi! My word some of these arguments in favour of file-sharing are extremely lame!

Tofu Hut.

Who runs the high profiling Tofu Hut Blogspot, and who may be an mp3 evangelist. We should be grateful for his comments.

Time to start looking to the future. Today's generation of thirteen year olds are going to see a computer to be as necessary an appliance as a television and internet service to be as basic as a telephone line. Any voice will have the potential to sway popular taste if the QUALITY is there.

Yeah, I mean, lets not underestimate the importance of what we're doing here ;-)

With my own blog, I'm excited about the potential of disseminating "lost" music to britney youth. Smart labels will recognize that potential and start hiring people to run "official" musicblogs. I can't believe that this isn't the right way to sell your content: WITH content.

And we'll all be riding around in hovercrafts?

Having said all that, I understand what you're getting at RE: blatant ugly artist-disrespecting piracy, but lumping Sean and Matt into those that practice that kind of behaviour is counterproductive. Obviously, that's not their (or my) tactic. It's important that we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

No I don't think ANY of the mp3 blogs are intentionally disrespectful. I never said that. I sort of struggled to give Matt P crazy props whilst owning up to my own "squeamishness" about the whole thing. I just hope no vicious label decides to make an example of you dudes, cos you represent a very bold pro-file-sharing attitude and (as clearly-defined individuals) would be PERFECT targets for an organisation bent on making an example of people. (shrugs) That seems to be their chosen tactic.

Anonymous Woebot Correspondent.

Loves ya!

the current frustration is that file-sharing allows for access to music that the market has failed to provide: there's a legal term called 'market failure' which actually involves indemnity for offenders of trade agreements in cases where the offended company has failed to provide a means of legitimate transaction (see wendy j. gordon's article on the sony v. betamax case if you're insanely curious, it's hardcore legalese but she's arguing on the right side). it'd take an incredible lawyer and shitloads of money (upwards of several million) to push a case successfully through the courts, and who's going to volunteer to do that?

Yeah this is a sexy argument.....but it's nuts.

Rambler.

Yo Rambler! Rambler tried to get away with posting this chez lui, rather than in the old Woebot comments box, it's rightful home! (wags finger) Cheeky, cheeky!

Really, the thing to remember when having discussions of this sort is that it is always the artists who we should be thinking about. They're the ones who do all the work, they're the ones who do stuff no one else can or has thought about; they're the ones who excite us. But it's almost always the record companies who do the complaining: we have to be absolutely precise about distinguishing the two. The problem that the record companies complain about is one entirely of their own making, I believe.

The thing is Rambler, as I remarked in your comments box, I quite agree. It's all about the artist. Let's for one minute strip away all the bullshit. You're a mad crazy fan of John Lee Hooker's, so you decide to do a little special on John and his music, and as an adjunct you post an mp3 of "Boogie Chillun." Six months pass. John Lee Hooker decides to Google his own name and hey presto he comes across funkychicken.blogspot.com, and, we'll I be damned if some youngster isn't offering up my music for free. Hooker scratches head. Well, you know, if he'd asked I'd probably not have minded, but he didn't ask. And he got my birth date wrong.

It'd be very fucking embarrassing wouldn't it, to get an email from John Lee Hooker saying: "Excuse me son, but would you terribly mind removing that file from your website?" It's not even that improbable! I mean, for example, Carlin gets emails from Lindsey Buckingham and John Cale.

If they were serious about selling MP3s, they'd cost maybe 20p a track. Half that could go straight to the musicians (and they'd still be better off than they are), and the record company would still make money.

Well that is true. In the rush to big up the iStore (desperate to get that link off the Apple Website!) I should have thought that through. If mp3s (or AACs!) were reasonably-priced it'd help. Somewhat elliptically I'd like to interject this:

I know everyone hates my RealPlayer feed. I don't care.

And those twinges of guilt, anyway. Look at what people feel guilty about: they feel guilty about hurting the artists' pockets. An argument that is the record companies' own first line of defence - and a pretty flimsy one at that.

BTW the Hooker scenario. Run that scene again with a white middle-class electronica artist. Yep it still works doesn't it! I don't think it's about money, it's possibly about respect.

Eppy.

I thought Eppy was lavishing me with compliments in my comments box, hence my threat to strangle him, but found (after closer-inspection, rather crest-fallen) that he was praising Matthew Perpetua.

...however; the other thing folks seem to post, i.e. obscure, out-of-print stuff, would have a wholly different legal and moral justification.

Yes, but then their widows email you. That's happened to me. Very shaming!

But I do honestly think that many MP3 blogs serve the record industry far more than they do damage to it, however. P2P's a different story, though.

I think you may be right. But to my mind it's all very simple. Downloading mp3s=A transaction.

Matt Perpetua.

We'll give Matt P the last word, cos he's lovely.

I think MP3 blogs can be a valuable way of promoting records on a volunteer, grassroots level.

Download Ethics.

A few weeks back I had what might be termed (cough) an internet-related crisis. I came across, at about the same time, three instances wherein mp3 files I had encoded from vinyl and uploaded onto one or other of my sites had been re-tagged and served up anew.

I'll confess I was aghast. However it soon occurred to me that the reason I was so annoyed was that I had been taking credit for these pieces of music, and now I had been deprived the pleasure of presenting them as my own. Hang on a minute I thought, surely the musicians who put these tracks together are those who deserve adulation for this music, not me? As it happens they'll never get a penny for having afforded me the pleasure of offering them up so magnaminously! I got in a terrible funk and you might have noticed I wiped all the mp3s I was hosting off my sites. I was going to have to clear them off sooner or later (before July) because occupying the web-space has ended up being dear, but this "crisis" forced my hand.

It may have escaped your attention that the "hot boys" of the internet right now are none other than Fluxblog, Popnose, and Said the Gramophone. They represent a new hybrid of the FTP collective and the blog. They're calling themselves mp3 blogs. I must say it's a cool idea, these gents have iron balls. I've always been very nervous about hosting mp3s myself! The mp3 blog is markedly different from the shadowy cabals which make up the hardcore mp3 clubs. Upon admission to two of these organisations I was sworn to deadly secrecy. In the case of one I'm not even allowed to type it's name, pursuant my own expulsion and the possible closure of the operation. The aforementioned mp3 blogs on the other hand, presumably through claiming to be the endeavours of single people, seem to have slipped under the corporate radar which causes outfits like Gabba Pod to be shifted from server to server to survive.

Ethically speaking it's a grey area isn't it? I'd be loathe to come down on one side or the other, but I am slowly forming clearer views on the rights and wrongs of mp3 file-sharing. I got a powerful view from the musician's perspective when yesterday I was sent a batch of 4 CDs which one legend of dance-music is set to re-release. I've been asked to concoct liner notes for the reissue (I was stoked) which is going to be an exciting event. Reissue of the year stylee. All the CDs provided for promotional perusal have been been fed through some mash-up codec so the sound is thinned out and clipped. The reason being, presumably, is to protect the music from bootlegging at this early stage. On reflection I think that's fair enough. The big problem with mp3s (as I see it) is that, in spite of what people say, they do perceive owning the mp3 as being (in some measure) the same as owning the piece of music. Furthermore many of the arguments which people proffer about the validity of mp3 file-sharing don't hold water to my mind:

1) Aw it's just the same as when C90's took off the music business thought it would kill the industry but it ended up stimulating the market. Remember those "Home Taping is Killing Music Music" notices, aw how quaint!

The same parallel could be struck between blogging and fanzines. But, and this isn't just my pride talking, there's a whole lot of difference between a fanzine and a blog. With a fanzine you're lucky to shift 50 copies, with a blog (potentially) the world is your oyster. Fluxblog is HEAVING with punters! That Perpetua he's profiling!

2) People just use mp3s as a means to check out music which they then go on to buy.

I've been downloading mp3s for 4 years. I buy shed-loads of records and CDs and I reckon I've probably bought about eight tracks after hearing them as mp3s. That's quite a shocking realisation...

3) You'll find people who download mp3s are propelled into music and buying music.

Slight twist on number two this. Actually I think this ignores the growth of a new kind of music-fan. This fan is quite happy to only own music as an mp3, indeed he/she ONLY has mp3s. I reckon these folk, and I'd hazard a guess that they're more often than not they're in their teens or early twenties, are becoming practically the norm.

Pointing out all of which is almost designed to make me unpopular online. I don't care. We is the Metallica of Blogs! More positively, I do think the argument that being exposed to music you wouldn't normally come across can turn you on to it. But for me at least the mp3, as a bit of discrete "ownable" data, is not the form with which to achieve that end. I've been rooting around for methods to enable me to present music here in a manner that will mean that what is served up can't be objectified and turned into a commodity. I looked at Weed Tunes, a Windows-based method of encoding which only lets you listen to a track 3 times, but that seemed a bit too harsh. I thought QuickTime Server would be the answer to my problems (Apple has done great work with the iStore in "cleaning up the Karma of mp3 downloading" as Steve Jobs put it), but I can't install it on a remote server as far as I know. I've always been pretty suspicious of RealPlayer but examined it again and realised that reasons I didn't like it (no malleable downloadable files) were precisely what made it strong in terms of copyright protection. Added to which under Mac OS X Real have done a super job on restyling the interface (it was HORRIBLE under OS 9). So I've settled with it. One can do insane things with RealPlayer like record the playback sound and then convert it into a WAV then into an mp3, but this is strictly the terrain of techie nut-jobs (I've done it myself natch!) Under Windows it is possible to trace and convert the original .rm file into an mp3 (the sound quality would be truly terrible), but not if, as here at Woebot, it is lodged in an encrypted webspace.

Of course this is a load of self-righteous nonsense! I'm STILL going to be offering up copyright material for free, but at least now the buck stops here. I'm quietly smug about the whole thing, in fact I'm looking forward in consequence to putting more music out there, starting tomorrow with a cute 5 track sampler of slinky 2-Step wonder.

Brighter Days.

A few events have conspired to make me reflect on the glory days of Garage. One of Simon's offhand remarks was the catalyst. He noted that it was only a few years ago that Garage was ram-raiding the charts, an event which is always mirrored in my mind with Ardkore's Toy-Town Techno triumphs ("Smart E's", "Charley Says" etc), yet now the scene struggles to sell a handful of white-labels. Crikey, I thought, that pop incursion is still fresh in my memory but feels at once distant.

Thumbing through newly-acquired back issues of Deuce magazine served to bring this sensation into closer focus. The mag sprung to life at the tail-end of that boom in mainstream interest in Garage. Ms Dynamite's "Boo" and the So Solid LP must have seemed like (marketing speak) "the birth of a new demographic" whereas in reality this was the beginning of Garage's slide into obscurity. Of course the scene has a very powerful cultural currency, but in music industry terms (Raves and Pirate Radio is all black-market biznis), it must count for nothing these days. No units.

I can't help but pin the scene's demise on the vector of our worsening economic situation in the UK. Big companies with their PR budgets can prop up the impression of a perpetuating "pop" market, even though the figures tell a different story, one of shrinking sales in music; but a cottage industry like Garage's doesn't have recourse to such tactics.

What mathmatical equation is it that defines the acceptable amount of time before a past wave of the Ardkore Continuum is deemed ripe for revival? "Back to 1992" raves and "Back to 1994" raves are now jostling with "Back to 1998" raves. The pirates are still pumping with the slinky sound of 2-Step. (thinks, wish I made it down to Twice as Nice back in the day, it would have been a whole heap more fun than Eskimo Dance. I WAS buying the tunes mind, and rocking the FM dial more than I do at the moment).

One track I heard in a retro speed garage set perfectly caught the cheerful champagne optimism of the day. The lyrics went like this (and who knows maybe this is a modern tune, the sort of thing in Norris "Da Boss" Windross and MJ Cole's sets, it may even be a re-rub of new R'n'B tune, bear with me!):

"Monifa.....she was the girl with a Mercedes,
Jennifer.....she was the one in the Gucci,
But what was the name of the girl in the taxi?"

This cracked me up. Posit that sentiment against "Cockback"! What an endearing contrast! Where's that gentility and goofy upwardly-mobile optimism vanished to?

Not Pop.

I find Tom's blanket definition of Pop rather depressing. (sniff, don't worry Tom it's not your fault) Tom describes "Pop" as music for imaginary rather than real communities. I'd never really considered it in terms so crisp, but yes it works as a definition.

Within this frame of reference everything I listen to could be termed "Pop", it's just that (as far as I'm concerned) this brings everything down to it's lowest, emptiest form. You can laugh at me all you like, but I'll always feel that while often on the "demographic periphery" I belong to whatever scene I'm lurking around. I don't think people care too much about my background, in a dancehall or at a venue no-one is too bothered. Everyone has a Mum and a Dad, everyone watches TV, everyone buys baked beans. I find the self-conciousness at the heart of the Post-modern "Pop" propsition to be wholly inimical, unhelpful even in the way it acts to dispossess, separate and ultimately elevate.

I don't think being a scene surfer means you're not engaged either. Even the "die-hard" Garage crew have always got their sweet tooth for things you'd find unexpected. All that fucking hoo-ha when Dizzy says he likes Sepultura, my my.

(sighs) Let's not forget we're all people.

Poptimism Rules.

Wanted to chip in on Mark's Poptimism thread, a wholly engrossing riff on Marcello's splendid 1985 thing. With big guns like Mark Sinker roaming his comments box like Tyrannosaurus Rex I've elected to do it from the safety of my own webs(h)ite. Coward! Metaphor mixer! (Shit I'm starting to sound like Alan Titchmarsh).

While nowhere near being a Poptimist myself (I couldn't give a flying fish about the charts) I'm sympathetic to their cause. Doesn't pop thrive on blind enthusiasm? Isn't suspension of disbelief at the core of Poptimism? For Pop to do it's job don't it's audience HAVE to think year XXXX represents the best, most shiny thing yet? If you approach Pop (which I unerringly view as unredeemable tosh, the lowest common denominator which yields higher meaning only in the hands of the great and the good) with too sharp a critical eye, aren't you missing the point? That it's power lies in it's hooky intransience, that it excels much like sugar in your tea.

This isn't to say that with the benefit of hindsight we can't sit back and make sound qualitative judgements about the strength of certain years above others, just that for the Poptimist to get any pleasure from his pursuit he can't allow this kind of cynical clarity.

Post Punk Post.

Jay and Nik "hipped" me to the controversial recent issue of Mojo which has succeeded in making quite alot of folk feel old. Along the lines of: "*this* in MOJO, what next?" There is also an EXCELLENT piece on Arthur Russell in it written by my mate Dave Mandl, which manages not to double up any of David Toop's exhaustive (and also great) portrait in The Wire. I've now heard it on two personal accounts that the material which Audika is about to release (and I'm talking here about the hitherto unreleased stuff) is quite astonishing. The major domo of Audika keeps calling a friend up, practically in tears, lost in disbelief at the treasures he's sitting on. The thing about the Soul Jazz record (nifty as it was) was that nutters like me already have that material now. In my case (natch) on original 12"s, not on the admittedly enticing bootlegs which have been subsequently in circulation. The only track on there I didn't have was "Pop Your Funk," which was once only available as a 7". That Soul Jazz record should have come out in 1995 (at the very latest) and mopped up after David Toop's Ocean of Sound. At the time I remember Phillip Glass was rumored to be releasing the entire back catalogue through Point Records, but in the end all we got was "Another Thought", which (if you'll forgive me for being frank) isn't THAT great. It'll be fascinating to see Russell's cache go through the roof with all this mooted bounty; actually I can't wait, I think he's going to reach a new plateau of adulation, the kind of one Can are resting on, rather than languishing in the eaves as a highly-respected curiosity.

The main reason I wanted to pick up on the MOJO thing was to quite gently throw a little mud, to break that other of my New Year's Resolutions, that of not engaging in professional envy. You see now I've succumbed to a spot of "Bumfighting" the dam has burst! I'll try and be even-handed. Anyway, Jon Savage has just about all the respect he could possibly muster. His "England's Dreaming" account of Punk is regarded as the best book on Punk. He's even described elsewhere in the same magazine his "C-30! C-60! C-90! GO!" Post-Punk breakdown featues in as: "probably (that) movement's most astute chronicler." I'm afraid I'm not that keen on his chart which the editor's strapline rather crudely describes as "the ultimate Post-Punk Tape." In fairness Savage's own description of it is much more muted: "a companion volume to the excellent Rough Trade Shops compilation, Post Punk 01."

Firstly there's an awful lot of B-sides in there (I'd say four too many, not including Eno & Snatch's cut-up "R.A.F" which does quite justifiably merit inclusion). Sorry but this fills me with dread. Secondly, and this is really the fulcrum of my argument, WAY too much rock-ism. I 'spose this is wholly justifiable after a fact, there was a lot of rock swilling around at the time, but what made the whole phenomonen worth re-investigating in the 21st Century (as far as I was concerned) was it's NON-rockness. I'm sure The Screamers, Subway Sect, Siouxsie and The Banshees, Metal Urbain, The Sleepers, The Urinals, The Prefects, Wire and Joy Division (yes them too) are very fascinating (and I wont pretend to have heard all these tunes so am clearly talking out of my arse to a certain extent) but they seem a bit plodding and pubby to me. On reflection maybe Savage's trajectory, *though* Punk and *into* Post-Punk is what defines his angle, maybe it's MOJO's editorial line. Where's Mark Fisher when you need a helping hand? I'm afraid that the whole PP exhumation is going to leave us with two concrete things; Junior Senior on TOTP and The Face's barometer showing The Cure rising.

I think I made EXACTLY the same comments about the Messthetics series of Bootlegs last year (yay there's one New Year's Resolution I'm gonna be able to keep, repeating myself). That collection was too rockist too. You find one or two diamonds on each of those CDs, the rest of the tracks are johnny-come-lately three-chord wonders. Yikes. And while I'm having a whinge I thought it'd be worth mentioning that there was quite a stale aroma to some of the tales surrounding Post-Punk dug up elsewhere in the mag (mercifully not in the cheerful and sparking Savage piece). It felt like some accounts were not third-hand, but eighth hand, passed down as oral tradition in the tar-stained pubs of Camden. For this reason, amongst others, I'm particularly relishing Reynolds' book, which hearsay suggests is absurdly deeply researched, with an exhaustive set of new interviews conducted, most of which won't even fit in the book, so vaste is the amount of fresh material which has been generated.

I was hoping to be able to identify with confidence the track which Savage has said he's omitted from his selektion. I was SURE it was implog's "Holland Tunnel Drive", I happen to know he has a fondness for it too. I was anticipating being able to completely ruin the competition as it's been organised. But then I spotted it's one of the tracks he's confessed to not finding room for. I'm genuinely curious to find out what it is.

So are we due a musical revolution or wot?

You know the skit:
Rock'n'Roll,
The Hippies,
The Punks,
Acid House.

All those dance crazes!
So where's the latest?
(checking watch)
(tapping watch to see if it's still working)
It's not fair I want a revolution!
(or do I?)

Was musing recently (in my utterly inconsequential and uninformed way) that what characterises all these "events" is that they amount to a radicalisation of the middle-classes.

Ragga,
Grime,
Bhangra,
Hip-Hop.
Their paradigm shifts don't seem to inflame the tabloids.
They're no less significant but they exist independently of mainstream culture.

Do these "revolutions" only:
1) Come into definition teleologically when they wash up in Woolworths?
2) Acquire an inception date at the hands of lazy popcult commentators?
I don't think so.
I think they really happen.

So what's with the middle-classes?
I reckon they're cowering.
I reckon they think if they behave "well" and responsibly they can expect a comfortable existence.
So current Middle-class culture, Retro Rock and 5th Generation Dance Music, promises the same pleasures as last years model with diminishing returns. I mean do YOU believe in what Jess Harvell called "Middlebrow" culture these days?

Young people (people younger than me) still have faith in the system/sausage factory:
Education>Job>Mortgage.

If the economy goes under any further in the UK then things might change.

Its OK at the moment, but:
a) Interest rates have slipped a bit (mortgages a bit more expensive)
b) and while the housing market is still steady, some people are suggesting a collapse may be round the corner.
c) Employment, well it ain't too hot from where I'm looking!
I hope it doesn't happen.

Because:
A collapse in expectations leads to:
Misery which sometimes leads to:
Depression which can lead to:
Insanity.

And it's insanity that is the forum for a cultural upheaval (along the lines discussed...)
All dem poor Middle-class people with absolutely no chance of "self-realisation" (makes you wanna sob dunnit...)
They just cut loose. Go mental.

Slash the seats.
Drop out.
Pierce their nose.
Take MDMA.

(twiddles thumbs)

Ghosts.

Excellent discussion of book 'The Stone Tape" round at k-punk.

Interesting stuff ghosts/records...I'm sure folk don't need reminding about Konstantine Raudive's recordings of ghosts or (bit more obscure this) Queen Elizabeth I's doctor and celebrated Alchemist John Dee's circular spinning black plastic plate which he used to commune with spirits.

I've always thought some of the most meaningful (recorded) music, in the sense of music which fully explores the symbolic properties of both the recording process and the significance of the end result too, is that which pivots on this axis. The voices on a record are here spirits separated from their original bodies. Soul music. Dub Reggae. As Lee Perry said: "I put my mind into the machine."

Records (and CDs) are so often regarded as possessing a charge solely through their relationship to the "real" event. This connection perfectly epitomised by the LIVE recording, the record as souvenir of the concert. The best recorded music works in quite the opposite manner, by insisting rather on the properties of the object housing the recording, the spirits. This must mark the approach of the record-collector, he or she who values the recording above the incident, as one most inclined to the disembodied.

Mark closed with the reflection that as bloggers we are as inclined to the ghostly, the free-floating. That's fine I think as long as one is aware of this aspect of the activity, and is confident of the location of one's body.

Dis(s)claimer.

Before next week, which may be the defining one of this blog, I thought it was imperative to clear the decks.

I swear I'm not blogging to rub other people's noses in my face. I've found that for all the promises of belonging to a community with which we're lured into buying music, very little is delivered. Quite the contrary, the deeper one goes into music the lonelier an experience it becomes. All I've tried to do here is communicate how I feel about music, and actually I've found sharing what I have picked up to be a great larf. I'm not a great writer and I'm not THAT funny.

Somehow I believe I'm supposed to apologise for being an intense character, or for being narcissistic, or paranoid, or writing too much, or writing too regularily (so uncool); well screw that, I'm making no apologies. I can examine my conscience and report that I'm entirely happy with the spirit in which I've presented the blog thus far AND how I've dealt with emails in relation to it (every email answered), AND how I've behaved on meeting my fellow bloggers (keep on blogging dudes!), which is I believe to be one of honest unpatronising generosity.

Finally I'd like to give a BIG big up to everyone who's enjoyed coming here. Peace, and I hope you enjoy next week's offerings :-D

(THERE)--->(HERE)

A few more thoughts about the London_vs_Provinces thing.

Interesting to map it onto other countries:

Jamaica:
Roots Reggae famously the rise of the country boy. Treasure Isle/Early Studio One very metropolitan Kingston-centric but the innovations which blew Reggae wide-open came from the country/provinces: Lee Perry, country bwoy number one, though practising in Kingston. Burning Spear, though he voiced the tracks for the "Presenting" and "Rocking Time" LPs at Coxsone's another true provincial, indeed with "Marcus Garvey" and "Man from the Hills" he returned to Willie Lindo's studio in Ocho Rios. Also the hardcore Rasta communities perched in the Blue Mountains saying up yours Babylon. Lloyd Bradley good on this.

Germany:
Krautrock not just globally "decentric" but recall that Faust retreated to a barn in Wumme to record their mind-melting classix. I'd foreground here the need for creativity to not be blanched in the white-hot energy of the city. Which leads me to wonder if the provincial is by definition the square-root of the "Bohemian" (with all it's attendant suggestive overtones of the free-range and alien)

Brasil:
The creative wave of rootsy Brazilian music of the seventies was anti-Rio. Milton Nascimento was a proud native of the Minas Gerais region and Gilberto Gil of Bahia. Both did work out of their respective regions too.

The USA(?):
Dom Laruffa had this to say as whether the same applied to the US:

"As regards USA, whatever may be said to afflict US music, it certainly is not NYC hegemony. Look first at hip hop, East Coast, West Coast, Altanta, New Orleans, Memphis, St Louis.

Then look at dance music, Detroit's still a center, Chicago's still a center, Miami still has its own thing, New York-Philly house music (even if majorly trapped in the past), the left coast scene...

Then consider indie rock, bracketing the merits of the music (which as we know is damn near meritless), you have NYC, Seattle, Detroit, San Franciso-LA, Wash DC, Boston, Chicago, Memphis, all of which operate as centers..."

Oh OK!

Outside the Green Belt.

Simon's arguments for London's centrality while compelling seem to come with a whole slew of caveats:

1) Coventry and Bristol are actually NOT provincial cities but "London-esque" by merit of their strong ethnic mix. (Such sleight of hand, Oh Master!)

2) We're asked to only consider the time-span 1990 till the present. I'm firmly of the opinion that the 50s/60s/70s/80s are still firmly on the horizon.

3) We're told that folk with any talent move to London as soon as they're aware they've something to offer. Luka also hammers this point. This is NOT true. These artists often move to London when they're knackered creatively. Certainly true with AGCG's, Simon's case history. It's ALWAYS their work out of the metropolis that generates the original spark, the distinctive flavour which would bleach away in London. Aphex in Cornwall. Tricky in Bristol.

4) We have to ignore the fact that whether or not Jungle was concieved in London or not, a huge proportion of it's talent came from outside the capital.

I love London. I've lived here for 9 years, though maybe not forever henceforth. It provides an insanely intense feedback loop of a life, but it sure as hell aint the be-all and end-all of the UK. The very best culture comes from resistance, from standing still and saying "I am here." This applies to global culture too. Think Krautrock. The argument I'm positing isn't about political-correctness. It's ironic that that is what I like in UK Garage, and yet all you lovely folks in the USA and Australia maybe (caution here) like it because it's "exotic." I wonder if you'd like Dizzy Rascal if you lived in Stratford? Cos let me assure you Grime is as ordinary and ugly as mud. Certainly none of the trendies round here like it.*

It fills me with a weird mixture of sadness and anger that people are so quick to damn the "little." If I was in a small city I'd do my own thing, set up my own club night, foster a small gang, patch the ill-fitting connections, do my best. That's what we did in Edinburgh with the club Tribal Funktion, and hey look it got a mention in "Trainspotting" (eternal pride). Why let the local be burnt out in the glare? I don't get it, surely we should be cheering from the sidelines?

*apart from me of course.

k-punk on data.

Mark has been talking interestingly in reaction to Paul Morley's 7"-vs-iPod head-to-head. Mark does alot of reacting these days, I think he's mapped it onto and perhaps invokes it as validation "the derrive" (is that spelung korect?) which is Derrida's digression wotsit. He's making an art-form out of it. I get frustrated by digressing myself. Even frustrated by feeling impelled to contribute to a debate!

I wonder what Reynolds thinks about mp3s? I have a queer feeling he's avoiding broaching the subject like an arch politician. I picked up alot of antipathy towards the digital media in Joy's recent piece on digital publishing, maybe that's the house-line? I really felt Mark's elegant point: "And will people pay for Pop if it is 'just music', without staging, spectacle?" because that's the balance I try to address here. With the evaporation of all music's attendant trappings I feel bound to vainly re-apply all that's lost. Maybe that's the drive behind all this rabid on-line theorising too? It's incredibly myopic of the music industry to assume all they're selling is music. Recent incorporations of tiny amounts of image data into mp3s doesn't really help.

However I do think mp3s are valid, though I'd naively concieve of them as a taster of "Real Product", certainly that is how i've always used them, even when sanity dictated otherwise. I've yet to develop a data fetish, and after 3 years of downloading mp3s it seems unlikely I'll foster one. Will hardware replace the content as the object of fetishisation? Unlikely given that no-one can afford to buy a string of them, you know, "keep topping up their iPod collection."

Morrissey.

Ian is probably right about Morrissey. I quote: "that he PURSUES people he idolises, and loves meeting them, and WHEN he meets them, it practically looks like HIS EYES ARE COMING..." Penman probably had some up-close industry encounters with him as twendy NME scribe, though I've a tale from quite the other side of the fence. A fanboy shard.

While never a lover of The Smiths I did swallow and wallow in "Hatful of Hollow". That record has great stripped-back production, all those renditions, while sourced from various conventional releases, were performances from the Peel shows of the day. On the LPs (The Smiths, Meat is Murder, The Queen is Dead) I found the sound a total disaster, a woeful stodgy mix when all that was needed was crisp guitars. The Hatful of Hollow's versions are brazen, bright and sharp. The perfect setting for those beatnik ululations. I used to get fairly lachrymose over "Please Please Please let me get what I want" and "Reel around the fountain". I'd shove a bunch of dahlias up my arse. However, my favourite bit of The Smiths' music was the intro to "How soon is now".

Aah that tasty reverb and those crashing chords! I even like the lyrics: "I am the son/sun, and the heir/air........of a shyness that is criminally vulgar". My very close friend of the time, the rogue who fixed me up to the spliff, was a more serious Smiths fan. He had an awesomely glamorous background, and I lay the charge at his door that it's his fault I'm a star-fucked tossbag. My friend's Dad was a famous film director, and then (1988) at the peak of his powers. He'd just completed one of those once-in-a-blue-moon movies whereupon Britain defeats Hollywood and had popped back to London where he was turning out jaw-dropping commercials which blurred that old art/commerce line. My friend and I would loll round his uber-hip batchelor appartment and rush on music with the great man. It must have been uncomfortable for my friend (who I love like a brother) to have his mates so in thrall of his Dad, especially when he could be a right bastard.

One of the adverts he'd just finished was for a brand of jeans and "How soon is now?" was the music they used on it. The opening frames,a shot from below, had a native american in eagle's wings spiralling atop a desert pillar. It was the perfect counterpoint to Johnny Marr's locked fret-throb. The ad cut a rain-dance against a bunch of London kids sheltering from a storm. My pal even had a cameo. It was a VERY beautiful commercial, and hugely celebrated. I remember one of those "History of Commercials" programmes on Channel 4 in the early nineties (damn thats a cheap programme to make, like MTV eh! Free content!) and after all Ridley Scott's Hovis micro-epics they asked "What of the future of commercials?", and they chose that ad to illustrate the poetic possibilities.

One day my friend joined us in his room, where we were scraping around the sofa's inners searching for stray roaches we could martial into something resembling a joint (that sad), and sat down with a pale face. "Morrissey is upstairs with my Dad." I was shocked. What was he doing there? Shmoozing? Dammnit he was supposed to be on the moors, or down the docks, or crying in a potting shed. Morrissey disappeared just as quickly as he showed up, prompting even more discomfort. What! Fast transport! Where's his bike? The whole thing left me mildly disillusioned. My friend, I know, felt yet more upset. What space is there for post-adolescent angst when Morrissey wants to hang with your father?

Considered Reactions to Peter Shapiro's Fela Kuti piece in The Wire.

Peter Shapiro is The Wire's secret weapon. He must have written more music journalism than any of the hallowed auteurs who occasionally contribute stuff to that mag. He's a hard-worker. However his best asset is his completely unimpeachable taste. Sure I want to read elegantly-written stuff, a nice turn of phrase, little poetic envisionings but in preference give me a nice hot tip. I'd rather a music journalist was fashioning a distinctive sound which he adhered to than a distinctive writing style. Shapiro's also written a nice wee book on Jungle, a very good spotters "Rough Guide" which performs the amazing trick of hardly doubling up any of Reynolds lightning swords of death from Energy Flash. He also did a CD compilation of the Hip-Hop/Jungle continuum on Virgin, which I'm now wishing I picked up. Prolific dude!

Listen to Shapiro from a review of the recent Ze records reissues: "Ze may have been style rag fodder both then and now, but that's only because its vision of the world was/is so seductive: that mythical place where style collides with substance, deconstruction makes a rapprochement with melody and hooks, and groove is embraced by distortion." I have tremendous sympathy with that. Certainly that's the crucial element I have found diminishing in The Wire, and it's heartening to know it's still on the agenda. Doubly important now that Muzik, which was beginning to look EXCELLENT, has gone down the tubes :-(

A perfect example of how sharp Shapiro can be came in his ginormous Fela Kuti Primer in this month's The Wire. Actually for him it was a bit rote and featured a few "Hey Daddy-O" slangings, deeply uncharacteristic in one so economic: "...if that guitar riff isn't based 100 per cent on James Brown, I'll eat the roaches from 100 of Fela's joints." From me that's a bit rich, but you EXPECT personality-obsessed guff here! I've yet to sink to Fat-Freddy-isms. Me, me, me, Ah that's better.... Back to the article, he settled on Roforofo Fight as one of the Fela Records to really check, and I slapped my forehead, (talking to myself) "You goon! THAT'S the best Fela Kuti LP." If you return to that Sunny Ade piece on June 29th I'm going on about "Open and Close" as the apogee. Typical bad research (I own both natch) because Roforofo Fight is amazing for just the same reasons, it's incredibly focused, AND it's horn charts are sorted AND there's a political agenda. It's a 15 minute wave, while so often Fela's stuff is a muddy puddle. Go seek!

Mangled Code.

That whole "I like to exploit the faults within the machine" nonsense that electronic musicians espouse has fast become one of the new interview lowlights. Up there with perennial classics like "I don't like to be pigeon-holed" and "I've got extremely eclectic tastes".

On the other hand, with web-design it must be a comparatively rare notion. Vis a vis the goofy conclusion to that Penman/Production piece, I wanted to draw people's attention to Inglistan which is about as random, decaying and serendipititous as html gets.

Da Stab.

The stab is Dave Tompkins' conceptual invention. He's the US scribe who talks like a twenty-clawed crab walks. Tompkins is almost impossible to understand unless you've shared the same breakfast cereal, swapped hubcaps with him, seen the Reds crush the Bronx Deltas together, beaten him at craps in the park, met his mum, traded Miami Bass 12"s and daytime soap plots. He apes hip-hop's game of popcult simile. It's easy to think he's missing the point; for me it's the SOUND of rapping which makes it soar; the cadence not the content. It's a shame because with his stuff on "the stab" he isolates one of THEE most pungent sonic cliches. There is a piece in the totally classic "Tuba Frenzy" zine (the one with the Richard McGuire cover) in which he goes into it in depth. Er, I guess I got about a third of what he was on about...

DJ Premier would be one of Tompkin's "stab" idols. The way Premier wields those hard-edged concussive riffs on All City's "The Actual" and let's the space between do the work, mmm, that's stabbing. Also the "torque", feedback sounding like a playstation trial-bike, which spills off the stabs of Miami Bass, is key to his stab pantheon. Dennis Coffey's "Scorpio", and it's quavering trebly squall is classed as one of the original stab tracks, and epitomises the snug fit of the very America-centric "Story of the Stab."

The real playground of the stab is Rave. Beltram's "Mentasm" features the stab-de-stabs. In Rave one is confronted by about a billion post-mentasm stab tracks worth mentioning. Interesting here is 4Hero's "Mr.Kirk's Nightmare". I reckon Dego and Mark Mac heard the Mentasm stab through Dennis Coffey's "Scorpio". Looking at Ardkore within the context of Soul and Funk is rarely considered worthwhile, but in this instance it's illuminating. "Scorpio" was hardly a transgressive flavour for SUAD, Danny Breaks and all the other "fast hip-hop" crew. It was famously one of Afrika Bambaata's "slay 'em" tunes, well and truly factored into hip-hop by Queen Latifah and De La Soul's "Mama gave birth to the Soul Children" It's easy to see how it's dissonant stabs could be aligned to Rave. Coffey's riffs were galvanised by Rock. However 4Hero were as much into the minor key riffing of Bob James' "Nautilus" or Roy Ayers' "We live in Brooklyn baby", with their coffee-coloured ambient stabs and Jazz-Funk tuning. That's what they heard in the (Black Sabbath influenced) minor key Mentasm riff. History bears this out. People were generally baffled (and the critics disgusted) by Rave music dovetailing into Jazz-Funk-lite, all that music which followed Good Looking records and EZ Rollers "Rolled into One". We shouldn't have been so surprised, this was what the stab meant to many of the raving crew, minor-key Jazz Funk riffs. Clearly born out by 4Hero's recent trajectory too.

It's been weird hearing this new Beyonce "Crazy" track. For a while it seemed like Timbaland's stabs on Ginuwine's "What's so different", Missy's 3rd LP, and that whole gamut of BBoy's on ecstacy that Reynolds was chronicling a few years back (Jay Z's "Snoopy Track", Memphis Bleek's "Is that your chick", Ludacris's "What's your Fantasy", and Ja Rule's "6ft Underground) were a stateside rebirthing of the ecstacy mentasm stab, the connection underlined by it's synth-etic implementation. It'd be quite easy to get all Jungian and Chomskyian about the primal nature of this stab riff. Weird hearing "Crazy" because that rushy riffy stabby chorus seems like equal parts "Scorpio" and WRK's "Corker" with shades of the maximalism of Sonz of Da Loop Da Loop Era's "Far Out". Bled into the red deliberately, what's on the face of it a scratchy superfly horns/guitar blow-out smudges and blurs in the white heat of feedback. Mmm, thats stabby!

Just chillin' like Bob Dylan.

I feel sorry for all those innovators. One of the things about having ideas first (certainly in music) is that you never earn as much money as those people who are pimping your ideas to ready-assembled crowd a little bit further down the line. In terms of earning cold hard cash you're much smarter not being "ahead of the curve".

The History of Techno!

Check this nice piece by Dan S.e.l.z.e.r one of my New York chums, his name correctly spelt here. Dan's not a writer per se, he runs the Acute subsidiary of the awesome Carpark label, specialising in re-issues. The bits on Cerrone and Patrick Adams are very juicy. Acute have just put out Glen Branca's Ascension. Dan's also working on an authoratitive Arthur Russell discography, so if you have that Flying Hearts flexi disc from Aspen magazine drop him a line and screw it all up.

Thing is though "The History of Techno" as such makes me giggle. Have you noticed how everyone has their "original" Techno moment that they'll swear blind to being it's actual point of inception. Steve Barrow has that squiggly 303 intro on that King Tubby track*, my friend Gwen had This Heat's 24 track loop, Jeff Mill's had that Charivari 12", David Toop had those Lil' Louie Vega mixes of Information Society, Juan Atkins has Kraftwerk's Computer World, that dude Peter Frohmader has the John Carpenter soundtracks, Autechre (yawn) have Bernard Parmegiani, more than many folk think it's Vladimir Ussachevsky, Derrick May thought it was Herbie Hancock's Rain Dance, Kevin Martin thought it was Tod Dockstader, Cabaret Voltaire thought it was the Belleville 3, and Dan thinks it's The Silver Apples (well he doesn't, but that's where his story starts.) It's an endearingly daft pursuit that usually tells you more about the person insisting than anything else. I reckon it was Tubbs's jacket in Miami Vice.

And actually it seems no-one cares any more. That revitalising shag that Techno gave the academy is history now. The quickest way to get an egg down your neck these days is to stand on a chair in the pub and yell at the top of your voice: "John Cage invented Techno!" It's just so passe!

*really busting out with the research today.

Industrial Dilemma.

Open Letter to k-punk.

Yes I've noticed the creeping reclaimation of those lot. Throbbing Gristle first (and easiest) then Nurse with Wound (integratable first elpee) then Current 93 (such strong links to NWW) then Coil (via Penman and more "palatable" later work Love's Secret Domain onwards). And now Whitehouse.

I still have MAJOR problems with this crew. I'm sure if I was from Portugal, America or the Netherlands then I'd be more open to them than I am as a British native. Many outfits and eras bear similarities. Stapleton's link to Krautrock (didn't he roady for Guru Guru and hang out with Conny Plank as a teenager) isn't just superficial. There is a occult grotesque dimension to Krautrock that gets glossed over. My friend The Black Dog was a Coil fan first and foremost. Likewise, their mythic magick rendering of London and their electronic gnostic creation of "worlds apart" must have struck a chord with him. Throbbing Gristle get props from a whole gamut of people, Basement Jaxx (of all people) were the winners in the hotly contested competition to re-rub "Hot on the heels of Love". Trendy, innit. Everyone squabbling: "I liked them first!"

I shouldn't be so appalled by the stuff this "Industrial" crew produced. Yeah I saw the Butthole Surfers with their nood dancers and medical dissection videos. I've even stumped up ca$h for Horse Rotovator, Scatology, A Chance meeting on an Operating Table and 20 Jazz Funk Greats. But I've always failed to LIKE this music. And actually the reason is, I think, that the aforementioned lot (TBD, TBS and Krautrock) have at heart a positive HOLY vision. I can't get away from the sordid trappings evident in the Industrial lot. The idea should be (and maybe it is) to *transcend* the base materials to suggest a better world, a more kind and generous world. I see this in the humour of The Butthole Surfers or the abstraction of The Black Dog. It's evident in the aspiration, even possibly re-visioned protestantism, of Krautrock. Elsewhere at the dark heart of The Stooges, there is a sheer love for mankind, in Pop's forgiveness for the bikers who anally rape him "Dirt", in our pathos for Iggy's self-mutilation that stems for our love of him "Poor old silly Iggy, bless him poor confused child..." Actually while the Industrial crew maybe "holy" they're certainly black occult. And that's not nice. Yeah, one has to be careful to read Coil's work against John Balance's homosexuality, but you know, I'm not convinced.

It's pathetically easy to be swayed by the effects which EVIL people create. It's easy as a hipster to wear those stigmatising signs. That'd be all very well were it not that this stuff DOES have a real-world corrolory. A friend works for Glasgow City Social Services. One of her ongoing, and miserable, tasks is to try and piece together communities rent apart by ritual murder and ritual abuse, often inflicted on children. These clearly articulate people aren't listening to Girls Aloud. It's a real thing evil. Talking to my friend Jonathon Selzer this weekend about Black Metal in Norway and the attendant culture, in extremis murder. Note all these semi-hilarious stories about old women in Wales being killed by "Vampires", that's someone's Granny.

You might think I'm over-egging it, but in the Industrial (I think they call it the "Fluxus" bin) at the M&V there was, on some limited edition record cover, for ages, the most horrible picture of some naked little girl stretched into some torture device. Nice! Great cover dudes! And actually Mark's (albeit sensitive and objective) discussion of the Professor Adolf McGroot's "All hail the Blessed Sutcliffe", with it's celebration of The Yorkshire Ripper's serial murder of prostitutes, makes me come to the same conclusions. Not how "Bad" and transgressive these people are, but how weak and stupid. Sure it's not fair to colour everyone with the same brush (here goes anyway), but I believe the whole "Industrial" project, neatly tied in a bow by David Keenan in his new book is, if not corrupt in intention, then corrupt in execution.

And you know what. I'll bet that saying what I've said here will be a mite more controversial act than trying to apologise or explain what this scene is up to. Fuck 'em. Fuck the whole lot of 'em.

Oh Shit!

I’d been overflowing with inspiration in New York. I wrote huge amounts of drivel daily to my portable wotsit. On the flight back it heated up like one of those pocket-warmers and I lost yards of high-tension prose. You should have seen the stuff! (three-part falsetto chorus) Tragedy! I’d been honing those sentences like Narcissus plucking his eyebrows. I’m damned if I’m gonna do it all again, and who knows maybe you’ve been spared. Here’s a (possibly more refreshing) thumbnail of what you missed:

1) A Guide to New York’s Record Stores.

I visited a few, ahem. A1, Other Music, Sound Library, Dance Tracks, Fat Beats, Bleeker Bob’s, The World Music Institute, Academy and a Reggae shop (pissed-so missed the name). This was a pretty crap piece. I tended to veer into poorly backed-up controversial statements about Race. Hardly a comprehensive breakdown either. Best anecdote: Shinge the AfAm Heavy Metal fan asks me how long it takes to drive from London to birMINGham, then Liverpool. Drops the shop’s needle. Queues up in front of me with a Queensryche record. Runner up anecdote: Chatting with Kimmo "Finland’s answer to Tim Westwood" about his journey the previous day into the Bronx; "Man we were deep in the game"

2) A Long Essay about Reynolds' and my trip to a Greenpoint Record Emporium.

This was slightly more amusing. The tale of Tobias, Simon and I battling with 80,000 dusty records. Plenty of scope here for blowing my own horn with the other dudes coming off well, but naturally not as well as me. Much discussion over tactical approaches as to how best parse the depressing number of records. What a pleasure to hang out with Simon my hero! Best anecdote: The black couple with the Aha ringtones. Runner Up Anecdote: Reynolds on the way back to Manhatten musing that there ought to be a moratorium for vinyl eventually, it should be burnt. Smartypants tells him they don’t just version in Jamaica, they melt down and recycle their vinyl. You can see why he gets so sick of me.

3) A lengthy critique of Christagau’s attempt to come over like a World music buff.

Whipped him hard. Loaded with the usual tiresome visual gags. Started off with a thumbnail sketch of the surviving critics of the "Golden Age of American Criticism", bemoaning the standard response of music critics to encroaching age, ditch it. Degenerated into nit-picking as to whether or not Christagau knew the slightest thing about High Life and Calypso. Ended up talking about myself (of course) and how I was resisting an uncritical attempt to have a handle on EVERYTHING, preferring rather to at least have some semblance of an aesthetic. Best Anecdote: Christagau gets a small thumbs up for being aware of Sunny Ade’s Sunny Alade Nigeria-only releases like Chuck E, Bobby and The Message. Runner up anecdote: A lengthy bit of freeform waffle in which the reader confronts Christagau for coming on like a jobbing truck-driver-of-a-critic in his Village Voice office. Bob says "So the fuck what!" leaves, gets a hamburger and fries, comes back, turns on the fan, "What the fuck you still doin here Monkey Boy." Proceeding to throw a regulation 75 percent of promotional material in the bin.

4) A qualified defense of The Cinematic Orchestra’s Man with a Movie Camera.

One side of the four is good. Hey it’s fake! References to other recorded material by David Axelrod, Fifty Foot Hose, La Chanteuse Sauvage, John Fahey. BORRINGG! Best Anecdote: I charmingly and wittily suggested they repackage it with a DeChiciro-esque desert view replete with prismatised goat skull, deeply ingrain a little dust, water-damage the sleeve and wrap it in yellowing shrink-rap. Best Runner up anecdote: Soul Jazz get props for swerving out of a nose-dive and bravely venturing to expand their horizons to encompass Reggae and Electronica (!)

5) An attempt to contextualise The Animal Collective’s work within the Green Guerilla movement reclaiming lots around the Lower East Side.

Quite OK I thought. A bit more integrity to this piece than in my usual heartless waffle. I answer the question why the ILM-centred music obsessives crew seem to conjoin with the Urban Fauna Crew (Luka, Gareth, etc), we’re all a bunch of sensitive kids. Positing a potential Avant-Garde movement occurring at this nexus of Poetry/Music/Gardening. Best Anecdote: I greet the Animal Collective (again) Best Runner up anecdote: The story about the guy who bites this idea off me and I set my lawyer on him.

6) I hang out with interesting people and you all get jealous.

Namedropping. I meet a dazzling array of fascinating folks and wrote small essays about my meetings with them in the form of minutes (sad), vainly attempting to stifle my little-boy delight at being in their presence. Reynolds: ‘nuff said, The Don! Paul Kennedy: A full A4 of spiel covering our 3,000 mile per hour discussion of the Ardkore continuum, Paul’s HEAVY post-punk past and extraordinary lifepath. Dave Mandl: Genius and polymath got a thorough dissection. Dan Setzner (name spelt wrongly): Charged with releasing Branca’s Ascension and Theoretical Girls on Todd’s Carpark subsidiary. With whom I rabbited for hours about the NY/UK meltdown, a shared love for The Black Dog and unexpected connections (namely Keith from Optimo in Glasgow, who I skirted around in the days of Pure). Best Anecdote: I grin too-broadly at Arto Lindsay as he stands nearby checking out the Animal Collective’s playback at Tonic. Whooping at diachronic history. Best Runner-up anecdote: Keiron Simon’s lovely little boy approves of the Spiderman stickers I give him.

The jewel in the crown of my visit was the afternoon I spent with Stuart Argabright, but nothing on this here as I intend to sell the story and photos to the highest bidder. NYC you smiled on me! NYC I loves ya!

What’s wrong with this picture?

My delight at American electronica was that it hadn’t wandered down the blind-alley that European electronica had despite it's hardcore credentials (specifically the Blectums at Oakland). I was relying on the yanks to “keep it stoopid”. Well the rot is setting in!

It’s the blind-alley of the avant-garde. You must know my angle by now…It’s a sad thing that folks continue to equate brilliant with clever, with the academy (worthless Prix D’Arts), with old dudes with beards.

Blectum from Blechdom, Kid 606, Cex, Mathmos, and Phoenicia came at just the right moment for me when their euro counterparts were becoming dull as fuck. I think Autechre and Farmers Manual, among many other guilty parties, though they seem to represent the pinnacle, are boring and mono-dimensional. All Mego (including Fennesz), the new Oval (post-Diskont), not quite Mille Plateaux (but nearly). etc. etc. etc.

It seems like the landslide started with the whole Artificial Intelligence thing, since when there has been a fresh wave of twats every year who are just that little bit cleverer, and just a little bit fonder of recording their fridges. The instinct has even started weakening tremendous outfits like Mouse on Mars who seem desperate to keep up (not a decent record since Glam).

You meet these people and ask them what sort of music they make and they laugh in your face. “Music? Ha ha ha. Oh you are so stupid little man.” Anything worthwhile should to be easily explainable to a 7 year old. Don't make the mistake of thinking I'm anti-avant, I have A LOT of avant-garde records, I’m a tough guy too you see….

Where have all the nutters gone?

But seriously? Where'd they go? Nowadays I feel like gay men must have felt in 1979. Glam had melted all those boundaries down and Bowie was confessing to liking blokes on the side and cross-dressing was practically de rigeur. I saw that terrible TOTP2 the other night and there was this bloke from Mud who looked like a miner………in a pink chiffon dress. The Gays must have found Punk OK, get to dress as a cockatoo, that’s nice. But circa 1979 and mid-Joy Division miserabila, long grey overcoats and the cold-war fetish they must have been like: Where did all the queers go? OK I’m wheeling out the clichés, (smacks own wrist) but you know I’m making sense.

So where DID the nutters go? When I was a little smug bastard I used to like the alternative (indie) press (Melody Maker and to a lesser extent NME) and the bands and the scene because I identified with this picture of society in a mirror. I looked up to and sought out people like Thomas of Pere Ubu (who I introduced myself as a 16-year-old, in a T-shirt with my name on it), Wire (ditto on crutches!), The Butthole Surfers (aged 17 at Brixton Academy when someone tried to sell me a passport), Alex Chilton (who I gave my illustrations for The Lovesong of Alfred J.Prufrock aged 17), World Domination Enterprises (aged 17 brushing past Flea of The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, asking him for directions to the World Dom dressing room, ha ha still makes me laugh) and Mark Stewart (19 backstage at Glasgow Barrowlands, Keith LeBlanc taptapping on his digi-pads beside him, Mark head-in-hands unable to look up, tangled in some shockingly intense mental trauma, greeting me without looking up) These people all seemed to openly endorse INSANITY as a perfectly (un)acceptable means of being. Crazy was cool. It was wild. It was interesting. It was fun.

I used to love those larger than life stories, you know, Skip Spence crossing the US on a motorbike in his pyjamas, before proceeding to attack his manager with a chainsaw. Al Green shooting rats with a sawn-off mid interview. Brian Wilson making his band record in a sand-pit wearing firemans helmets. Er......I was going to say Phil Spector, but that didn't have a happy ending. These tales make me laugh, although I'm quite aware they sometimes shear off into tragedy.

On reflection things had started to get a bit tidier in Indie by the time I tuned in. The insane element was mainly a hangover from the nutters of the late 60s and 70s, those times when it was almost fashionable to ingest vast quantities of drugs, and when the already edge-of-losing-it folks went off the edge. You know the folks; people like Syd Barrett, Wild Man Fischer, Captain Beefheart, Brian Wilson, Lee Perry, Iggy Pop and all the Krautrockers. This is Sunday Supplement shit nowadays. Tee fucking Hee. Many of the above figures who I introduced myself too (what was I thinking?) were 70s figures still trucking their shit around. It always amazes me that in 1987 Pere Ubu’s The Modern Dance (a big touchstone for me) was 10 years old, that seemed like a pre-historic recording to me. Look back 10 years now, 1993. Feels like the other day (wink).

Actually for the nutters Dance music was the way forward. There the outsider values of LUNACY got a big thumbs up. We all had friends who lost it on the cocktail of LSD and MDMA. Nutty was just fine with Ardkore. Actually I never trusted my fragile psyche with the hard drugs. I WATCHED raving happen to my mates. I only did MDMA once (didn’t like it) but hijacked the party by smoking copious amounts of dope. Funnily enough I only truly interfaced with rave culture much more later on when the party decelerated and the zeitgeist itself was stoned (Jungle, Tricky, the RZA). Some of the truly important figures of Rave/Techno wore MENTAL like a badge. The KLF for one. I met Jimi Cauty with Ken Downie, post-million quid burning, at the Olympia exhibition centre in his tank equipped with sonic stun gun, which he’d used to incapacitate cattle. Nuff said. The Black Dog too, Ken’s first photo-shoot he did in a straight-jacket and that’s just scratching the surface. Tricky. And madness wasn’t just at the polite end of things. Ray the bass-player from AR Kane, who now runs a stall in Spitalfields market selling Drum and Bass (he said “Hi Simon”) told me, that Danny Breaks told him, that Winston “Run Tings” Meikle is in an asylum now- that’s a fucking shame.

We all know that music and madness are pretty much horse and carriage. Mozart NUTTER! Stockhausen NUTTER! (Read his brilliant Towards a Cosmic Music). John Coltrane NUTTER! (Sorry Jazzniks, there’s no getting away from it). Some of my fave writers have tackled the subject really well. Simon Reynolds in conversation with, I think, Achim “Mille Plateaux” Szepanski on the subject of auditory hallucinations induced by the white noise in Ardkore. Also David Toop, who explores the subject in tremendous detail in Ocean of Sound with regards to the musics of Brian Wilson and Lee Perry, suggesting of both of them that they were driven crazy by the quest to materialise the music in their heads. It seems like the symbiotic relationship between music and madness could only have been accelerated by the disembodying effect of the record-player (that’s Wireless for the older readers). You’re literally hearing voices.

Some of the greatest writers on music have also walked this thin line. Ben Watson, who runs the interesting Militant Esthetix site, and who was Frank Zappa’s official auto-biographer also runs an organisation called M.A.D. (they throw punky gigs, have a manifesto, lobby parliament) which to be honest with you I feel has the whiff of Bedlam about it. Madness as an organisational principle, are these people crazy? But you know, good work I guess! Another very famous writer on music (not mentioned beforehand in this article, who will remain nameless, but has written openly on the subject in the press) talked of “taking a walk on the Moebius loop to the soundtrack of John Martyn’s One World” Nice choice of music mate.

Anyway, I ain’t bonkers. I’m a little crazy (yee-hah!), but there’s plenty of it in my family I can tell you. I bet there’s a little in your family too. An uncle who’s swept under the rug. A cousin no-one mentions. But that’s just it with culture right now. It’s so squeaky-clean. Unreal. The figures for people on Anti-Depressants these days are shocking. I bet madness is bigger and badder than it ever was, and I’m sure this “pretty picture” society we live in only makes it WORSE for people. They don’t feel like they have a home, no little culturally-endorsed backwater. They feel their craziness is UNACCEPTABLE. If we’d all only open up and BREATHE. It’s more healthy like that.

That Dizzy Rascal though, he’s reassuringly "edge-of", and maybe D.E.E from Nasty Crew too, who’s gaining the reputation of being the Biz Markie of UK Garage (you can’t hear it on the records yet). Reynolds pointed out the Glossollalia thing a while back, this speaking-in-tongues on the pirate airwaves, that could be a promising thing. Lets hope everyone can hang on to their hats. A bit crazy=Good. Too crazy=Winston Meikle.

Time Lines.

Excuse me for getting all cosmic on you, but it's Easter and I'm granting myself a bit of well-earned perspective.

Been mulling over ideas like "What is Retro?", "Where is the future?", and "When was the past?", and I've found myself face-to-face with ideas I once held when I was maybe more ENLIGHTENED than I am now.

I theorised then that the true timeline, as opposed to the mysterious illusory one which makes up the progression of our day-to-day lives is the line which stretches between UNKNOWING and ENLIGHTENMENT. Unknowing here is the true past, and enlightenment is the true future. I can't have been the first person to have thought this.

This schema works well with regards to the genealogy of music. Ground-breaking influential music (and I wouldn't say anyone has a handle on this, though some prophets fare better than others with their prognostoces) is always truly ENLIGHTENED. As such, old or "Retro" music can be more current or "Futuristic" than brand-spanking new music.

Which might be another way of saying I really ought to get out more often.

Relexification?

It's a term from Linguistics. That's the study of language Paul. Pidgins and Creoles, often exhibit it. A pidgin is a makeshift basic language designed with the intention of communicating at the simplest level. Extremely weirdly many pidgins/creoles across the world have incredibly similar structures and many words in common. Some people have put this down to their descent from Portugese Mariner's dialects others point to Noam Chomsky's idea of language being innate within us, hardwired into our brains asthe cause. Linguistics is gratifyingly kooky sometimes.

Studies have shown that when we learn a pidgin we use our existing lexical structure (sentences etc) and supplant within that structure the new vocabulary. That's what Relexification is. As far as I'm concerned this is a gold nuggett of information when it comes to talking about the Ardkore continuum. Reynolds has made the point in the past that Ardkore uses the existing structure of Reggae (The DJ, the Dancehall, the Dubplate) and fills it with, well whatever.

Ardkore (and Hip-Hop), often the spawn of the Jamaican diaspora, is a Relexification of Reggae. A pidgin with which to converse with the locals.

McCartney.

What a lovely man. Ever see that pretty documentary in which he's interviewed by his daughter Mary about early life with Linda? After The Beatles melted down he had to scrape by on beans until his accountants could sort out the wreckage. He and Linda went and lived in what looked like a barn from the charming super 16mm footage they shot. Seriously....a grubby hole without windows in the highlands.

Now for the bit where I tell you about when I met him: I actually met Paul once in Soho. It was ten years ago. He was wandering down Greek Street in his tonsure of the day, remember that Mullett? Now he has what looks like a wig. Ditch the wig Paul. Anyway he was trucking down Greek Street with his hands in his trouser pockets, blazer breezing behind him (Lennon liked that same pose in his white suit, head buried somewhere in a thatch of locks and specs). I wasnt going to miss my opportunity, went up and said hi Paul. We chatted: "So what do you do?", he said "I'm a runner for Ridley Scott" I replied (because even at an early age I knew how to drop names). Paul told me that was the way to go, start at the bottom and work your way up. The Cavern, Hamburg Strip Joints and beyond.

This spiel has been prompted by seeing a truly wonderful ad featuring Paul for Radio 2 on the telly. Now there's a Radio Station, never been the same since Jimmy Young left, Radio Caroline thats my kind of Pirate. Paul does a stunning rendition of Band on the Run accompanying himself with bottles, sitars and radio feedback, and what a brilliant song that is too. Bloody magnificent. Johnny Tosspot who writes for The Wire, and who only reviews cds by "firstname"/"secondname" artists like Gunther Bernard and Arne Sondheim and Peter Wishart thinks it all very amateurish but he knows fuck all about anything (life and love included). This is lovely, do a whole cd of this stuff Paul.

Actually I've known about him doing this things for ages. He mentioned to some rock dork in Q (or was it Select) that he did "Brian Eno style experiments with elastic bands" - genius! And if you want to get all historical about it, Lennon wasnt the only one flirting with the avant-garde, McCartney was hanging with AMM.

Sign the petition!

The Right Reverend Marc Arcadipane.

Being an unbearably intense person, I'm sure if there was a club of dilletantes I would immediately be refused entry. I would be told to "take it easy", that they'd get back to me. What's referred to here as dilletante-ism, means for most people racing around the whole field of music attempting to catch up with EVERYTHING, being unable to commit to one genre wholeheartedly simply because of the volume of music. There doesn't seem to be anything disingeneous about that. Unless, that is, if you are indeed a foppish cherry-picking trendy, in which case get orf my laand!

Was worried posting the Heavy Metal thing beneath (straight after the hip-hop spiel) that I would be pegged as someone with "eclectic" tastes. I don't like the idea of that one bit, mainly because I view the field of music as one entity (I told you I was intense). To start saying, as you do when your aunt asks you what music you listen to: "...well I like Jazz and Rock and blah and blah....." always strikes me as fundamentally misleading if you're lost deep within the continuum of music.

I'm glad Reynolds made the distinction between the "dilletante-as-consumer" and the "dilletante-as-creator". For me this is the hinge of the argument. He scans the lexicon of garage for phrases expressing the seriousness and authenticity of the matter in hand, "for real", "life is not a game to play" etc. In my opinion, with regards to what he's referring to as "culture-warriors" it's more appropriate to look for the metaphors of BELIEF. Your "culture-warrior" is a believer, he's "keeping the faith" to hi-jack a term we're all familar with.

For sure The Mover, changeless monolith that he is, has more in common with other single-minded visionaries like Sun Ra, La Monte Young than your average UK Bouncer, but the same effect is present. Brian Eno, oft-quoted egg-head, spoke somewhere about music revolving fundamentally around belief. If you believe in it, it works for you. Very cynical on one hand, and possibly what prompted him to make "a believer's music for non-believers" (thats my idea, and it's patented). Ever enthusiastically bought a record to find someone's slagged it off? What do you do? You either loose faith in it, or cling to the doctrine.

I'd go further and say the "dynamics of belief" is the great reality force-field which impels us into music. The artist believes with an intensity and therefore we believe in what they are doing. Obviously at the more manic end this spirals off into kookiness even quasi-religiousity. You've got to wonder about a figure like La Monte Young, who I find fascinating more as a phenomenon than a musician. The original "Johnny-One-Note", I'm always pondering whether the "emperor has any clothes". It cracks me up that you can even pay to be a member of the MELA board, a certain fee guarantees you an audience with La Monte himself (the dude has style no?), the original Ambient Con-Man?

Technicolor Shuts Down.

If you didn't notice Jess Harvell's Technicolor has shut up shop. Actually I missed the party, though thanks to Google cache-ing checked out a little. Excellent superbly informed writing. Read between the lines at Jess's recent NYLPM post (Monday February 17th 2003) and worked out Jess is fed up with the whole palaver, even angry at all this open-source pettiness. He makes the point elsewhere that we should all grow up and make money from writing.

I don't intend to blog forever. I've given myself a theoretical year online, some commentators say the average blog lasts three months (of frenzied activity) then peters out, I'm not ruling that out either. Are people getting fed up with with the sheer volume of blogs? Have a look at DJ Martian's compilation and shudder. Does anyone feel that the more voices the less interesting the phenomena,? Notice that Google have bought Pyra (Makers of Blogger), we're in for alot more of this stuff.

I, despite sounding like "monsieur-le-plus-hip" am a classic Johnny-come-lately. I'm always the last one on the bandwagon. I'm exactly the kind of dork who drives true hipsters like Jess crazy. I don't want to put words into Jess's mouth but the dude is so sick of the net he aint even replied to my email. I waited and waited before posting this.

I stand by my little effort. I've no problem with thousands of music blogs. An evening spent combing through the aforementioned DJ Martian list revealed 4-5 which I rated. That's only 4 or 5 people writing about music whose writing and insights I valued. So what if everyone and their dog wants to have a bash, maybe other people like their blogs and think mine's piffle. Let's not forget that many bloggers have jobs already (I'm not about to chuck in Animation). Maybe I'm being paranoid but why do people assume that because one's not earning money from a practice that its irrelevant. I am often a victim of this thinking, I worry (obsessively) about paying the bills like everyone else.bou

Amateur has come to mean "bad", but why? Some of the greatest things of the world are the work of amateurs. A case in point, and a particulary apt example for many reasons, not least because this web page (In case you hadn't noticed this is my own URL, not hosted by Blogspot) is probably floating on it: Apache and or even Linux. These, in case you didn't know are the fruit of thousands of boffins (lost deep within the lines of UNIX) tinkering and collaborating, disagreeing, coming up with new suggestions and twists on the vision. A massive Pan-Global amateur endeavour. The virtual equivalent of thousands of potting sheds at the end of thousands of gardens. Maybe music journalism isn't so consequential, but frankly you're asking the wrong guy to give the reasons why.

Recently a remark DJ Shadow made in an interview made me stop in my tracks. He was in the basement of a record store and said referring to the records (paraphrase) "Gee this is so humbling, look at all these broken dreams." The suggestion was that all these artists suffered the tragedy of not making it in the music business. They weren't dignified like him (maybe I'm being unkind) and talented enough to make a career of it. Er hello Shadow, anyone home? Can you imagine a single Ardkore/Jungle/Garage record ever being made if the artists sincerely believed they were going to make a living out of it. More often than not they were having a laugh. Amateurs the lot of 'em.

Finally I'd point out that blogging about music circumvents grim Industry back-handing. I don't want to sound too anti-Industry but there should always be healthy contra-practices and voices. In a simiIar way I have a profound respect for those Professional critics who get their hands dirty and muck in with Amateurs like myself, gawd bless 'em. In fact I reckon the Industry progresses by consuming these practices. A recent healthy example being Richard X and the Sugababes at number one, and maybe the better bloggers will want to wind up writing professionally. While I may not always have the same burning enthusiasm for blogging, when I do get my coat I won't be slagging the whole thing off.

Oh no not more RetroRock TM stuff!

Amazed by the intensity of the response to the RetroRock idea and it's given chronology. Indeed I'd say to the characters who wrote in demanding Punk Rock to be admitted to the RetroRock TM category: "mmmmmm" (strokes chin). You fellows may be missing the point. Punk was a doomed futurism not in the least interested in the Retro impulse. You write Punk up as a chapter in the Who/Seeds/Stooges/Hell story and you strip it of it's intention and relevance. I think it's a (deliberately) artificial revisionist history which has been assembled more recently by the likes of Griel Marcus. Or in the case of Lester Bangs one written a good deal beforehand which had little bearing on the explosion which took place. I don't think the Sex Pistols cover versions ("Schools Out", "My Generation", "No Fun", "Stepping Stone", "My Way") mark them as retro, more lacking in ideas for tunes. But hey, I've been wrong before.

What I ought to be clear about is that the idea to cannibalise Rock Music was clearly a good idea at the time. There is an air of freshness and lightness, even irresponsibilty, to Rock and Indie from 1983. We heard some great music from Husker Du, The Replacements, REM, Sonic Youth in the US and The Smiths, JAMC, and Primal Scream over here (please excuse the US/UK thing) but with the benefit of hindsight I think that they suffer from the weakness of even the greatest Post-Modern art - a lack of heart. When one listens to The Smiths, even though it's affecting emotional music, one hears a surface. Bringing to mind recent stories of Moz driving around Beverly Hills in a Cadillac with a Husky in the front seat.

Music must be the least forgiving art-form with regards to the Pomo motive. You don't ask a building to make you weep. My really big problem with RetroRock (and it seems almost insanely churlish to take the aforementioned bands to task) is where it has left Rock music now. In a way I couldn't care less, there is so much else on offer. Sure some people might think Rock's pulsing with blood at the moment (your Yeah Yeah Yeahs, White Stripes, Strokes etc) but I don't. I hear some good tunes but no new feelings. Indeed I am almost dreading the inevitable moment when someone tries to devour the rotting corpse that is RetroRock. The JAMC cover band.

The only time I've felt even vaguely positive about Rock recently was the result of an interview with Mercury Rev who said what they thought was Rock's strongest card was it's ability to syncretise. I rushed out to buy their "Deserter's Songs" record and an old copy of Royal Trux's "Twin Infinitives" (which I had earmarked as "one to pick up" for 5 years and not bad in an ESP records kind of way), but was left feeling pretty despondent.

I'm not the first person to have said it, but why do other (even more cannabilistic) musics like Dancehall and Hip-Hop sound so fresh?

What's with the Avant-Garde thing?

Picking up a certain monthly periodical at the moment never fails to raise a sigh. What's with the Avant-Garde thing?

There comes a time in every record collectors life when he or she stumbles upon the Avant-Garde. It's an exciting moment for the theorist in all of us. Suddenly everything makes sense, our view of the whole field of music shifts. It becomes clear that lonely old fellows with beards had every idea a very long time before everyone else. Your favourite party music was a twinkle in their eyes as they laboured in subterranean studios keeping their tape-edits clean from cobwebs. Furthermore you realise that the only true radicals were those hardy souls with their Saxaphones. They look as bold and cool as those chaps doing messy paintings in Art class.

Some of us get lost in this particular maze for longer than others, directly proportional I believe to the amount we actually like music and admire the beauty of sound. The more insecure people are about their instinctual loves the longer it takes. The happier they are with the certainties of theory, then the more time is spent fawning over the historic Avant-Garde and by extention it's current copyists.

Sure there is some unspeakably beautiful Avant-Garde music- but I believe it tends to be wild and insane often druggy, street, religious or folk music which has transcended itself through a sheer intense love of sound. I'd put La Monte Young, Sun Ra, Bernard Parmegiani and John Coltrane in as examples of the aforementioned categories. John Cage? Not a musician mate, never said he was one. You certainly don't get there by aping Avant-Garde music itself. Indeed I think we could even institute a RetroAvantGarde TM category for all those desperate young men and women trying attain divine inspiration by proxy- suggested starting date Brian Eno's "Music for Airports" with Oval's "Diskont" as "The Year RetroAvantGarde TM broke". Going by this definition you could comfortably argue for Darkcore era Ardcore as a true Avant Garde rather than pomo street music with a curious avant twist, or even any Hip-Hop for that matter from Cannibal Ox to Jay Z (feeling generous today).

Of course the thing with RetroAvantGarde TM is that it's jolly easy to deal with. It turns up to the interview on time, wears nice clothes, flatters the editor, has it's CD in the office in time for the review staff, properly advertises it's concert in the appropriate press and is a really nice interesting chappie (though bloody rude and arrogant to everyone else who fails to understand how brill and clever and original it really is).

It makes me heartily sad to see column inches filling up with this stuff and stores choking with it's product. It also has a nasty habit of infecting "cleverer" musicians. I for one wish Herbert would stick to making gourgeous House music. So I've one thing to say: GET OVER IT!

More thoughts on RetroRock TM.

Reynolds has opined that Jesus and the Mary Chain were in fact the first RetroRock TM outfit. He's correct. I'd counter with the suggestion that Oasis are of course the mainstream manifestation of JAMC, and isn't it strange that the conservative Retro impulse filtered from the (supposedly avant-garde) underground to the mainstream. I thought the underground was supposed to provide the mainstream with unpredictable ideas which it could sanitise dammit! (Electro=====>Madonna).

In a cosy symmetry, and in a hopeless attempt to try and shore up my sagging theory I also countered that Sonic Youth had exactly the same relationship to Nirvana as JAMC do to Oasis. Creation to Geffen etc. Sonic Youth are surely the most uber-concious Rock band there ever was. I have a theory that the reason Ed Bahlman (honcho of 99 records and one the last Modernists in Rock) was suspicious about SY was that he smelt Post-Modernism on their breath, but like the simple country cat he was he couldn't figure out what that smell was. They looked like a 99 records band, Branca was sure as hell keen to sign them, but gee something just wasn't right.

Of course when Sonic Youth sloganeered with that "Year that Punk broke" shtick what they were really saying was. "The Year RetroRock TM broke" no scrub that, what they were really saying was "The Year Sonic Youth broke."