quarks and charms

2004-01-10T09:48:00.000Z

On Radio 4 this morning, an interview with someone from Memphis City Council, and a writer from Tunbridge Wells- talking about the 50th Anniversary of RocknRoll celebrations in Memphis.
Elvis' first single was released 50 years ago, apparently, and a dull, dribbly converation followed about whether Elvis' record was rock'n'roll in a way that the singles by black artists before him weren't..
Its a peculiarly white preoccupation, isn't it? First this, original that, precise points of origin, the need for a master signifier-
as opposed to a continuum, a line of inheritance.
True enough, Elvis was a genius, but he didn't invent nuthin'..

2004-01-08T00:29:00.000Z

zzzzz...
huh?
what did I miss?

'Incunabula' by Autechre- imagine if the musicians locked up their studio for the weekend, but accidentally left one little computer and a sampler running..
For 48 hours in the dark the two machines are chattering away to eachother, teasing the sequencers, making offensive remarks about some of the software, making the sounds that the humans won't let them..
On Monday morning, the musicians come back, switch the lights on, and find that their equipment has written 'Incunabula' by itself..

2003-09-19T23:37:00.000Z

No big theory-mongering today, more in the way of chitchat and foolery [plus ca change].

I think it was TWANBOC [though may be wrong] who would brook no argument regarding something by the Danielson Famile containing the best recorded handclaps ever.. I can't comment on the technical quality of the recording, but 'The Weeping Song' certainly contains the most apposite handclaps of any pop song- some ghastly family gathering joins in as Cave laments about his father..

Has anyone seen the Danielson Famile? At ATP 2 years back, they struck me a perfectly good private joke, that had unwisely got told in public..

I'm not familiar with some of the Aussie rock that Worlds of Possibility compares unfavourably to Cheap Trick [who totally ruled ATP that year- a six-necked, chequer-pattern guitar, anyone?] Though ACDC are heavy rock's Id, a law unto itself, unfettered by fashion, convention, restraint, taste.. and therefore completely essential. Lets face it, they saw off the remains of 70s stadium, NWOBHM, hair metal, and thrash without remotely giving the impression they were paying attention to any of it..

Clap Clap very kindly doesn't take my rather tetchy comments about matters trans-Atlantic as the finger-pointing they may have appeared..
Perhaps the question to ask is: What happens now? Will we find 'Boy in da..' resonating through, and haunting pop for a decade, a la 'Maxinquaye'?

re: Somedisco's coverage of the asylum situation- did anyone see the ace BBC4-on-BBC2 docu about the history of Iraq the other day? Reinforced my view that we [the Brits] have been meddling in other parts of the world with highly undemocratic motives for long enough, that we shouldn't be surprised when problems we have exacerbated/created/let fester 'come home' to 'haunt' us..

2003-09-18T22:38:00.000Z

More barely-related thoughts about centres and peripheries-

My mate Mark makes blinding compilation tapes, and the most recent features 'The Curse Of Millhaven' ["Well, foul play really gets a small town going"], and some tunes from 'The Burning World', particularly the sobering, tower-blocks-and-mountain-tops, "Remember Who You Are".

My thoughts below are sadly non-dance-music focused, but only cos I don't know much about the geo-history.

Best British pop record of the last year: "Vulnerabilia" [cracking title] by My Computer [terrible band name], from Manchester, I think? Patchy in places, but has anyone else shed tears to 'No More Dealing' or 'I Don't Care How You Treat Me'?

Blissblog's fantasy documentary- great idea: Camberwell almost looks beautiful at roof level. Doesn't the appeal of it suggest further that 'London' is precisely not a centre? More an arguing, tetchy consciousness, bliss [ahem]fully unaware of its unconsciousnesses, repressed memories?

2003-09-18T22:27:00.000Z

Well, I was thinking of a way into the London/Elsewhere thing that has blown up..

And as so often, was reminded of 'Robinson in Space' [crucially, Keillor's more accomplished film after he made 'London']:

"For all JG Ballard's megacities, and for all Baudrillard's talk of hyperreality, most people still live in places like Harlesden, and West Bromwich.."

Is it not the case that the relentless digital dissolution of distance, and erasing of the visible horizon [replaced by the screen], is irrevocably altering our perceptions of:

a) The Centre. There is plainly not one any more; hence anxiety on the part of us Londoners, a frantic shoring-up of our credentials, in the way a body is dug up late at night on waste ground. A desperate overdetermining of our significance, attempting to conjure influence out of the bare facts of numbers and money.
Did anyone read about the closure of IBM's main HQ in the US? And its replacement with... nothing at all.

There has never been less of a need for a 'head office' of pop.

b) The Horizon. There is plainly not one any more, hence anxiety on the part of localities [London or anywhere else] regarding our putative influence on anywhere "else", and regarding the visibility of all our elsewheres. Encroaching total telepresence has erased elsewheres/ provinces/dark-sides-of-the-moon, or better still, has made elsewheres of us all. Needless to say, the self-important Londoner may be finding this loss of significance more anxiogenic.

Even if this was not enough, pop is littered with cases of viruses, untranslatable shocks, Pied Pipers, dictators, arising anywhere but the centre/capital/melting pot.
[eg Butthole Surfers, REM, Young Gods, Joy Division, Aphex Twin].

[If anyone finds the above impenetrable, feel free to check the source of these badly-expressed views: 'Open Sky' by Paul Virilio.]

Freud suggests that an aesthetic temperament and aesthetic production are a means of liberating consciously unacceptable material, such that it is freed from the unconscious and is thus not able to produce hysterical/neurotic symptoms. Could we see the relationship between London/Provinces, black/white musics [I generalise wildly here], as a mesh of consciously unacceptable material, being fed toward the Other [province, black, centre, white, whichever] for translation out of subconsciousness, into... pop.

Beatles-Stones-Pistols-Smiths-Pulp.
Liverpool-London-Manchester-Sheffield.
This continuum of horizon-defying pop fireworks suggests a healthily polymorphous a-centric pop landscape.

2003-09-16T22:54:00.000Z

I'm not sure if I entirely understood Dominic at kpunk, but he certainly got under someone's skin..
[see the 'comments'- I'm only a nurse, but I'm struggling to imagine the anatomy of the catheter/prop-forward image].
But with Dominic- Is this how the UK looks from over there? I'm not clear about where appeals to 'authenticity' are taking us, to be honest.
Ah, Candy Flip.. I'll have to try to forget about them all over again, now.

2003-09-15T07:08:00.000Z

Thinking about humidity some more:
WoP is right, though I'm not familiar with the electronica he mentions; his comments brought to mind 'Consumed' by Plastikman: dense, thick [but constructed out of very few components]. The bass is almost organic- the sound of a coat of bacteria covering a petridish.
If the language use to describe Souxsie/Cocteaus etc evokes hanging gardens/ice-floes etc, then perhaps 'Consumed' is more of a morgue.

2003-09-14T10:19:00.000Z

I keep getting sent over to the tape-boxes in the corner by all the blog-talk; I should have listened more carefully to 'The Correct Use of Soap' when I was first given it. Kpunk is right to describe the guitar as pure effect/incident/map-coordinate, rather than 'chord progression' or melody. Which calls to mind Wire's laudable obsession with geology and cartography.

Likewise 'Treasure', which I'm more reimagining in the light of the 10 years since I got it. I wasn't plugged into the early 80s humidity at the time [there were Marillion shows to go to, sadly] but WoP's thought occurs to me also- is this strand/frond in pop now behind heated glass in the Kew Gardens tropical house of our pop history, or is it living on anywhere? Has its DNA been inserted somewhere else?
-----------------------------------

I find some favourites of mine in the bands-to-hate-for-their-fanbases list..
Just a couple of thoughts-

John Peel: 'hmmn, this intelligent jungle business.. I think I'd probably prefer something if they called it dumb jungle'

Wilful complexity, muso wankery [the Ganger, Trans-Am axis from awhile back] rile because they take us for granted. The best of this music pulls us into a place we weren't expecting- from the familiar to the alien. The worst of it assumes we will supply the disorientation and other-worldliness ourselves, if the packaging is sufficiently Warp[ed] and the tracktitles logo[anti]rhythmic enough.
Lazy, in other words.

Get-off-the-fence, Jonathan:

The good stuff-
Aphex [SAW 1&2, 'Windowlicker', 'Surfing on Sine Waves'],
Autechre ['Incunabula'- if only for the wet-eyed melody in "Eggshell"]
BoC ['Music Has The Right To Children' sounds as if it was made on steam-powered machines, the sound of running fingers over the ancient flock wallpaper you remember from your Gran's house]
Mr Bungle ['California'- a eye-popping reinvention: surf ballads, mountainous rock and doowop all making sense in the service of Patton's preening, leering, [self] loathing delivery]
-------------------------------------------

Haven't London and The Provinces always had a symbiotic/suspicious relationship? Not just in pop, either. We need them at least as much as they need us. London is claustrophobic, endlessly self-referential, but always able to reimagine its own myth [see Iain Sinclair's 'London Orbital' for a splendid recent instance of this. Sample chapter title: "Soothing the Seething"]. London may be variously burning, calling, squirming, or seething, but its never sleeping.

I don't think there's any evidence of encroaching US hegemony in this- perhaps precisely the opposite: The economy of the relationship between the capital and the provinces is one means by which the necessary Brit self-doubt endures, exactly defusing the nails-down-a-blackboard [to UK ears] US cheerleading tendency. London's Ego to the Provinces' Id, anyone?

For the sources of a '51st State' possible future, we should be worrying about the 'Special Relationship' between the UK/US- is it morphing from 'Worldly Uncle/Enthusiastic Teenager' into 'Poverty Stricken Thai Woman/Fat Euro Sex Tourist'?
Is Blair finding himself trying to spin the unspinnable to a rightly suspicious/frightened world?
Adopt Ben Elton frantic gabble: 'ooh, bit of politics there... my name's jonathan, goodnight'

email: jd2@whsmithnet.co.uk

2003-09-13T09:12:00.000Z

Uh- awake too early, and further sleep eludes me.

"What's the frequency, Kenneth, Is your benzedrine? uh-oh-
I was played there, locked out, not up to speed.
I thought I'd pegged you, an idiot's dream,
Tunnel vision in the outsider scene.
I never understood the frequency-
You wore our expectations like an armoured suit"

[from REM, obviously- forgive my probably inaccurate transcription]

It seems to me that this could have been written about the fragmentation of pop culture, multiple audiences in the same cultural or critical space [or multiple critical spaces within the same audience], the reaction of a pop listener to music not 'made for them', and whether a pop critic's reactions would be any different.

This is sparked off by kpunk and clap, discussing race and critical 'distance'.

Needless to say, Mr Reynolds told us at least some of what we need to know years ago: 'Pop is clearly a riotous heap of fragments, and someone's asking us why we can't live together?'

It's true that white-lib-crits might well be aware of the race /class of an artist they're taking to task, and aware that the music wasn't 'made for them', prompting thoughts of- do I have any business airing my views?

I'd say that here in the UK, where pop is not [so] segregated, in terms of its means of production, consumption, mediatisation, we find ourselves different social/cultural audiences in the same spaces -
[anyone can tune into a pirate, anyone could buy the Melody Maker [RIP] and read Neil Kulkarni raving about hiphop, most people here in South London know [enough] about the rough-as-a-badgers-arse Battersea estates that So Solid Crew emerged from, etc etc]

Perhaps, having had the benefit of punk meeting dub and reggae, rave and jungle melding, living on a small island, and having a very different history of race relations/racism, Brits are more tolerant of our ambivalent relationships in the pop circus.

We don't live in pop like we're attending one monolithic highschool dance- more like a riotous house-party: sex in the toilets, dope in the garden, gossip in the kitchen, fights over the stereo..

I'm not claiming Britain is a nation completely at peace with itself, but you get the point. I recall reading about universities in the South of the US that are routinely holding officially separate proms for black and white students??

Pop is jammed full of musics made for a particular audience, consciously or not- race, social class, regional location, subculture. And 'black' musics are not alone in wanting to be paid for it, even if this is foregrounded sometimes. Goth bands aren't managed by social workers and don't play for free, you know.

It seems to me that the portrait Dizzee paints of life in East London is at least in part aimed at people who don't know what its like in his shoes [or skin].
The structures that mediatise him [pirates, garage clubs] have their own economy of audience, their own always-already tuning to expectations; however, it seems wilfully segregationist to assume that music cannot function as a local affirmation of identity/commonality/conflict/competition AND a newsflash for the wider culture- 'I hear about your comfy white middleclass existence everywhere else- this is what its like round my way'.

It also seems psychologically naive to deny that a bodily response [the old 'manic pop thrill'], political reaction, and cultural-critical analysis couldn't be provoked in the same person at the same time. Kpunk is right to flag up 'The Sex Revolts' as required reading here, and to point up the proletarian roots of most great pop innovation.

Surely a strength of the music Dizzee [and Tricky, and The Specials etc etc]are 'representing' in the mainstream is that it can provoke these responses simultaneously.

I'm not so sure that there is a rise of the US-style MC over here- So Solid, Heartless, Gal Flex etc etc make damn sure we know they are a crew/collective/gang. Dizzee made a point of thanking his crew [Roll Deep] at the Mercury awards.

To illustrate the transAtlantic difference: Could NWA have won a national, 'establishment' music award in the US with 'Straight Outta Compton'? Would the New York Times have printed a sympathetic interview with them? [In the Guardian, Dizzee came across as very likeable- "ah well, its the media, innit?"]

Afterthought:
On the same LP quoted above, Stipe is singing 'I'm not commodity' in the chorus of 'King of Comedy'. At the end of the song, a backing vocal/audience? chant joins in with him, prompting a heavily sarcastic aside, low in the mix: 'All together now'..

2003-09-12T20:09:00.000Z

Movie corner:
I'm presuming y'all have seen 'Belleville Rendezvous' already?
If not- haul yerself to the flicks and catch it, if only for the soundtrack: spendidly deranged jazz-primitive, a la Tom Waits circa 'Cemetary Polka' or 'Murder In The Red Barn'. The film itself is a laugh and a half- imagine the mind behind 'Delicatessen' scripting a "kidnap at the Tour de France" story, and getting it animated by a Gallic Gerald Scarfe..

2003-09-12T10:28:00.000Z

Thanks again to Mark kpunk and Simon R for giving Q&C a heads-up on their blogs.

Reading Original Soundtrack's bit about Throbbing Gristle- are they freaky/funny/soothing?
Recently I heard the original of 'Persuasion', which did over-egg the 'ooh, scary man' vocal style. In a song that, to all intents and purposes, is about inveigling girls to have their photo taken in their underwear, and the subsequent hoarding of said garments, this vocal delivery an obvious tack to take-
The involuntary giggle reaction we might have seems to be a response to the disquiet provoked by a song with this subject matter; after all there is no sense of distance in Genesis PO's vocal- he is method-acting this character, and therefore we are invited to take seriously the contents of his head. Hence the distancing giggle/disgust reaction.

BUT does anyone know the Billie Ray Martin/DJ Spooky version of this tune? Absolutely terrifying. Bleeping, swooning electronica circa '95, and BRM belts it out like a doomed, cracked love song, utterly reimagining it in the process.

Blissblog's links to Stephen Trousse's review of Morley's book, and to the piece about pirate radio's difficult relationship with Hackney's towerblock residents, put me in mind of 'Robinson In Space'-
A film by Patrick Keillor- a road trip, psychogeographic monograph, gay unrequited-love story, pitchblack comedy in 90 awe-inspiring minutes.
A roadtrip always tells you more about the people on the journey than it does about the places they travelled through.
In a fractured, endlessly-overlapping city like London, the friction between quiet cultures [the radio4-listening pensioners- hell, that'll be me in 30 years- the Somali women gliding down Camberwell Church Street in beautiful muted-colour headscarves] and noisy ones [the guys with £2000 music systems in £500 cars].

Of course there are issues of political and social power/lessness here- does exercising the right to be heard somehow in the culture [whether on a pirate station, in the 'proper media', in the street] confer responsibilities to the rest of the culture? From whose perspective can we say 'the social cost of this particular voice getting heard are too great'? To what extent can people 'choose' the form their social expression takes?

Which brings us back to Christina, JT et al- technology and mediatisation now make it possible to totally occupy or annexe the pop landscape. The cost to pop's social fabric of these voices being heard is desperately high, to the extent of frying the threads by overlaying them with a perma-coat of sales-points and media-nodes.

2003-09-10T13:49:00.000Z

Off sick from work today.

Belated thoughts stemming from the Beyonce/Christina/JT/nowpop strands elsewhere:
[Though I have to confess I know almost nothing about these people's music. I was stood under a motorway-hoarding-sized ad billboard for Beyonce's record in HMV the other week though, paying for my pussy-ass white nerd Durutti Column CD. Maybe having reproductions of the woman's tits, the size of washing machines hanging over me tells me all I 'need' to know?]

People seem to be saying that something qualitatively new is occurring, in terms of pop's means of production and consumption.

Well- female [or male] pop stars uncovering ever-increasing percenages of skin onstage, on TV, in advertising, driven by insecurity; nakedly venal management; a culture of transparency; a migration of the node of reality to the media-sphere. Pop stars acting and looking like bored prostitutes or fashion models, co-opted willingly or not into the construction.

This isn't new. This is very old, or at least the most recent stage of decade-long processes within pop, and millenia-old processes elsewhere. Processes which the 'alternative' canon has been feeding into/influenced by also: The cover of 'Electric Ladyland', PJ Harvey in the bath, Maculloch getting his nipples out on TOTP to push 'The Cutter' a few more places up the chart, etc etc.

Simple fact #1: Sex sells. Simple fact #2: pop, if it is 'about' anything, is about sex.

Recent pop history needs to be understood in terms of its consumption by what Zygmunt Bauman calls 'homo consumens'- he/she whose status as human is guaranteed/confirmed by the fact of his/her consumption of consumer goods, of which pop is now surely only one.

[You really only need George Orwell's interpretive tool here: 'Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket'; though Campbell Scott's ad-exec character in 'Roger Dodger' bears quoting also: "Gotta go to work now. I need to think of new ways of making people feel bad about themselves"]

But: Sex, having sold before, will not sell quite as well the next time. The edge of the acceptable/visible must be approached again, orchestrating the point of consumption, with fewer modesty-preserving nipple-obscuring necklaces, with a more dignity-eroding mediatised affair with an ex-boyband clotheshorse attending the 'event', in order to shift units.

Hence we have the above parade of pop stars- projected into the visual tropes of porn to re-approch the point of titillation/shock/consumption, mediatised out of/in to existence such that the virtual concept of 'Beyonce' [no surname, usually, and significantly] will have an advertising impact greater than the 'original'.

This is the reason that the 'shark-eyes' comments are so apposite, and the use of in/transitivity as an interpretive tool is so helpful. This is also the only way in which something genuinely new is occurring. These popstars are advertisements for consumption-in-itself, for the media-sphere and its franchise-holders.

Small wonder, then, that they look dead-eyed.

jd2@whsmithnet.co.uk

2003-09-10T06:27:00.000Z

An older thought/story regarding kpunk's idea of imagined records-
David Byrne has already taken this one step further on 'Remain in Light' [come to think of it, most pop parameters were shifted on that record]. I think the story goes that he's heard about Joy Division, and was gagging to hear this magnificent, gunmetal grey, deranged artpunk.. then when Byrne actually heard the record, he was sufficiently desperately disappointed to write 'The Overload', to give himself the sound he'd wanted JD to have found.

Of course, Byrne's deadpan, almost camp delivery, and [then] peerless ability to evoke derangement dispassionately ['Memories Can't Wait' is the zenith here], harnessed to Eno soundscapery, makes for an intersting listen..
But you can't help feeling he'd missed the point, or that JD were not answering the question Byrne was asking, or that Byrne was expert at inflecting his songs with madness [or anything else], and his musical digestive system would sick up music in which madness was the chassis around which the songs were built.
[I don't want to come over all "see the madness in your area" here..]
Don't get me wrong, though; Talking Heads were a truly great band.

2003-09-09T22:58:00.000Z

Thanks to Mark at k-punk for suggesting this, presumably because he was fed up with the verbose and cantankerous emails I was sending him, and to Simon Reynolds at blissblog.
I guess the form and function of the blog will become clear after a while, as I have no particular agenda to push or axe to grind, beyond all the little local ones in my head..

Went to see 'Jumpers' at the theatre tonight- a very Englishplay- unbuttoned, shabby, erudite, frantic, bladder-emptyingly funny, capped with the line: 'And the leader of the funeral party at the graveside doffs his top hat, and impregnates the prettiest mourner, wham bam thankyou..'. A line that Morrissey, I presume, would cut his quiff off for.
The 'action' such as it is, features lurid showbiz, philandering vice-chancellors, and Freudian fantasy sequences impinging on a doomed attempt to write a moral philosophy speech, which I accede doesn't necessarily sound like a rock 'n' roll night out..
But it set me thinking- why is theatre-in-rock almost always such a ghastly idea, in principle as much as practice? Or- rock-in-theatre for that matter [all the repulsive Queen/Madness/Rent musicals for instance; while 'Tommy' features some cracking rock music, why dilute/delete the joy by plonking it all on a theatre stage in Rice/Webber trappings?]
What's the link between Peter Gabriel dressing up as Lady Brittania in 'Selling England By The Pound' [I think], and all live hiphop shows being shite? Must try to answer this question.

Mark at kpunk recently suggested a 'records we have imagined on the basis of reviews by Simon Reynolds or Kodwo Eshun'- this in turn brought to mind the 'lost records', lost opportunities, signposts that nobody noticed or could be arsed to take, pointers to a pop future that we're not ready for [yet?]-
So, a brief RIP for Warren Zevon, who died from lung cancer yesterday. His 'Sentimenal Hygeine' is without doubt one of the great lost rock records of the 80s, suggesting a means by which Neil Young's rock magnificence could be harnessed to genuinely strange lyrical concerns, or providing a tool for centrifuging the chest thumping triumphalism out of Springsteen, leaving the nugget of pathos behind ["Boom Boom Mancini"].
Hell, anyone who knows they've got cancer, and who can, with tear jerking acceptance and understatement, call their record 'My Ride's Here', deserves credit.

email:
jd2@whsmithnet.co.uk