Saturday, January 10, 2004
Next Year's Best This Year's Jam From Last Year (Last Year's Edition)
Justified and Dutty Rock were both given the plaudits they deserve, both throughout the course of the year generally and also through being included in various 2003 'best of' lists, despite being released in 2002; but an album that should also have had people scrabbling to get it remembered at the denoument of the cycle, and which seemed to be either purposefully or accidentally ignored/overlooked is Stripped.
Aguilera's behemothic trip through the pop landscape takes in hip hop, power ballads, filthy shagrock, funky techpop, clumsy drum'n'bass, overwrought dramatics, overt sexuality, pointless interludes, incongruous guest spots and just about everything else you can imagine. It's at least the equal of Justified in terms of quality (if not style - Xtina regularly chooses full-on histrionics and melodrama over cool-quotient image-manipulation [i.e. no Neptunes or Timbaland here to make her look relaxed and credible]), with at least as many hits (which cover more bases), and it continues to sell by the bucketload; so why's it not been as inspiring of critical laudation?
And to actually engage with the header for a second - what's gonna be this year's Best This Year's Jam From Last Year? I suspect Busted at the moment, with a few appearances from Kelis perhaps...
NJS
1/10/2004 09:17:00 am
Friday, January 09, 2004
Bear Gets Electric Shock (or something)
NJS
1/09/2004 11:13:00 pm
Braindeath
I've just had a five-hour struggle to remember one word which I absolutely needed in order to complete a Perfect Moments In Pop article for Stylus. The word in question? Subversive. I think I may be suffering from dementia.
NJS
1/09/2004 01:58:00 pm
Random Man
iTunes has picked two Britney tunes from her new album this morning, first "Toxic" and just now "Breathe On Me". Immediately after "Breathe On Me" though it's selected "Soar" by Xtina. It can't know, can it?!
NJS
1/09/2004 10:40:00 am
Dave Douglas
I just had two Dave Douglas albums arrive after ordering them from the HMV website (who seem to be ridiculously fast in terms of getting stuff out - I ordered Scott Walker's Tilt from there at about 3pm one afternoon last year, and it arrived the following morning), and the packaging on these albums (Songs For Wandering Souls and Charms Of The Night Sky) is absolutely exquisite. They're 'Artist Editions' from Winter & Winter, heavy and tactile and lovingly put together. But the thing that's really intrigued me is the inclusion in the Jiffy Bag, by HMV presumably, of a leaflet/piece of bumf advertising downloadable mobile phone ringtones and games - last week I received a couple of Plaid albums from HMV and those didn't have these leaflets in; are we therefore to assume that jazz fans are more likely to download mobile ringtones than electronica fans?
NJS
1/09/2004 10:15:00 am
Thursday, January 08, 2004
Lists
A list alone is useless. A shopping list with no recipe is just a bunch of food; what use is it to anybody except the person who wrote it? Little. Likewise a string of record titles; why these, what are they, why should I care, what should I do with them?
And to order a list... To have to choose 10 from 100, or 100 from 1,000, is already an arbitrary process. To then force them into a heirarchy of your making, ordered by your fallible mind and emotional memory... The purpose of a list is to try and attain a degree of permanancy and stability, of authority, that is just not real, that cannot be found, and what's more is not worthwhile. Doubly so if the list has no substance beyond the names of things. Any given list is only as final as the moment in which it is created, and the past is never final because it is the past, and were it final there would be no now.
I've had to concoct a list for something, a list of 100 albums which I love beyond others. Of course I cannot do it. Walking along the beach on Sunday I was stricken by the ridiculousness of one small choice, and I felt compelled to repeal it. One choice! One of a hundred of more than a thousand... A thousand? How many thousands? I don't know. I don't know. A couple of weeks past I posted a list of almost-theres. To exclude any of those is ridiculous. To exclude the unheard melodies too is also ridiculous. Heard melodies are sweet, and all, but those unheard...
And so here is the first part of the list, given some form of context, some brief, useless illusion. They are unnumbered and escaped from the order that I was obliged to force them into for their primary purpose. In a week or two I shall add the other fifty, and then later in the year I shall undertake the same exercise, only with individual songs rather than albums (why privilige one over the other, in this day and age?).
And so...
NJS
1/08/2004 11:56:00 pm
100 Records In 100 Sentences; Part 1a - 50 Albums
The Buzzcocks – Singles Going Steady
The only ‘punk’ record I can really care for because the situationism and rage were tied to space and context; heartbreak never is.
Susumu Yokota – Sakura
Space, at last.
Gillian Welch – Time (The Revelator)
In which a real human being reaches the bottom of the well and then slowly begins to emerge, battered, timid, but unbeaten and unbowed.
Dave Douglas – Charms Of The Night Sky
Some kind of Sunday-morning dream, peacefully strange; accordion, acoustic bass, violin, trumpet and plenty of time.
Specials - Specials
I would dance in a club like this, piss-flavoured beer or not; Hall and Dammers heroes through and through.
Simon & Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water
Because “Keep The Customer Satisfied” rocks harder and says more about the working grind than The Sex Pistols ever did.
Morphine – Cure For Pain
Bass, drums, saxophone, voice; so simple.
PJ Harvey – Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea
Redemption of a kind, a city and a woman ablaze with something approaching love and freedom.
Scott Walker - Tilt
The disintegration of a voice, insects scratching at your cerebellum, an unrecognisable darkness that still maintains its grandeur and wealth, eating the factory-farm.
Wire – Chairs Missing
Men become insects, guitars become synthesisers, 9-5 becomes unbearable, angled like scaffolding tilted away from the sun, sweating and muttering under breath.
Cornelius - Fantasma
Reflecting and refracting ourselves back at us through a thousand fairground mirrors, not understanding the jokes but laughing anyway and enjoying it all the more.
Genius/Gza – Liquid Swords
Fearless and proud and more given to fierce intelligence and fantastical midnight flights than the others.
Talking Heads – Remain In Light
Not drowning but waving!
Primal Scream - Screamadelica
Passed now into nostalgia territory, but ten years ago this was the future.
Bark Psychosis - Independency
Only little broken things, but how beautiful, how awesome, how locked into the future.
Miles Davis – Bitches Brew
New York wakes up, and the rest of the world follows, unevenly.
Massive Attack – Protection
A thousand hours lost to a sofa in soporific idleness, even The Doors can’t (quite) spoil it.
The Pixies – Surfer Rosa
It’s (still) like being punched in the face – I fully intend, if I ever have a son, to sit him down on his thirteenth birthday and play him this.
Cocteau Twins – Treasure
In a lucid dream you cannot adjust light levels or read digital displays; Liz Fraser doesn’t even need words to take you there.
Plaid – Double Figure
An actual (microcosmic) epic, a street map, a city inside your motherboard, a dozen ways or more to travel; “Squance”!
Stevie Wonder – Songs In The Key Of Life
A record absolutely bursting with love and positivism through every second, every note, every utterance.
Charles Mingus – Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus
In which Charles takes his own essence and replays it, better than before, with a bigger, bolder swing.
Pulp – Different Class
The coach on the back cover is from the town I went to school in and the band come from the same city as my family; details like this are important.
Various Artists – The Stax Story
Almost a hundred different ways to be brilliant.
Dusty Springfield – Dusty In Memphis
Poor Dusty, distracted by sex and confused by love, holding the most sensual voice of all in her hands but having no one to sing to, no one to listen, not really.
Brian Eno – Another Green World
The silliest little pop songs and the most beautiful passings of sound, shuffled together so they make sense.
Four Tet - Pause
The outside world inside, painted with the finest stolen brush, which no longer holds a point.
Isaac Hayes – Hot Buttered Soul
“Walk On By” is stretched to twelve amazing, psychedelic-soul minutes, and “By The Time I Get To Phoenix” includes a 9-minute spoken-word preamble; how can this not be outstanding when I’m left rolling on the floor each time I listen to it?
Jeff Buckley - Grace
If for nothing else than the first 45 seconds, and the moment when, pleading to be kissed into stupor, Jeff falls away entirely in “Last Goodbye”.
De La Soul – 3ft High & Rising
Ten years old; sixteen years old; twenty-four years old; it still delights, and “Eye Know” is still perfect.
Charles Mingus – The Black Saint & The Sinner Lady
Walking through a beguiling dream of someone glimpsed, so many voices all describing the same feeling, the same person, but from different times.
Can – Ege Bamyasi
Aliens making pop music, and making it better and weirder and longer than anyone else (except four Germans and a Japanese busker).
The Verve – A Northern Soul
I ran out to buy red jeans, but, finding none, settled for a red jacket instead.
Orbital – In Sides
I skipped school to listen to it and had my perspective on music, on life, vibrantly changed.
Talk Talk – Laughing Stock
Too much, too far, too sparse, like listening in on something you shouldn’t; and then there is “New Grass” and it makes sense.
Talk Talk – Spirit Of Eden
The sigh of all time, but not just that; the balm and, more importantly, the tumult.
Orbital – “Brown”
Lost in the dancefloor, after the dancefloor, never been to the dancefloor, doesn’t matter; this is extraordinary and has been with me since I was 16.
Spiritualized – Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space
Begged from my brother the day before release (he worked for the distribution company and had a dozen copies in the boot of his car) and listened to prone on the bedroom floor before I ran off to play football; I didn’t utter a single word for the duration of the kickabout match, which is unusual for me…
The Stone Roses – The Stone Roses
Laying in bed as a ten-year old, hearing this tumble from my eldest brother’s bedroom, and I hated it; I’ve listened to and enjoyed it more than anything else in the years since though.
Aphex Twin – Selected Ambient Works 85-92
The chocolate factory reborn as a disquieting daydream, childhood scares almost come back behind you.
Miles Davis – In A Silent Way
The sea from Tarkovski’s Solaris made into sound three years earlier, awakening quiet dreams and giving them substance.
Bark Psychosis - Hex
Not just urban or suburban, Hex is evocative of everything, every crepuscular glimmer and downward glance, rendered in smoke.
Primal Scream – XTRMNTR
The 21st century starts with a steel riot, burnt metal and German rhythms and laughable Scottish 40-somethings posing like teenagers.
Michael Head & The Strands – The Magical World Of The Strands
Some scouse smackhead’s strange folk dream of boats leaving port and trees waving upside-down, elementally beautiful.
The Clash – London Calling
Aged 19 and laid-up with chickenpox, this was all I could stand to listen to (very quietly through headphones); it’s all about the trumpets, and the bass, and the drums, and digging a ditch.
Tricky - Maxinquaye
Caught in a web but the spider is dead, forgotten sex and remembered emptiness.
Teenage Fanclub – Grand Prix
Three different ways to love and all of them charmed, sweet and harmonious; bought on a whim on a Christmas Eve and cherished ever since, an accidental favourite.
Public Enemy – It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back
Snotty BBC presenter: “Hammersmith Odeon? Are you ready for the Def Jam tour?!” and Hammersmith Odeon is not; the world is not.
Beastie Boys – Paul’s Boutique
I’ve never been to New York, but I want to.
My Bloody Valentine - Loveless
Simply swoonsome; there is little more to say that hasn’t already been uttered better elsewhere, by people who know what they’re talking about; it sounds exactly as the cover looks, and that is all I have to offer.
NJS
1/08/2004 11:39:00 pm
And then...
After I screamed in utter frustration at Sara Cox's fuckheadedness, I switched to Radio Two. And what was just starting? Fucking Gary Jules doing fucking "Mad World". I'm sure the success of this song is down to some kind of conspiracy by pharmaceutical companies to try and make us all think we're depressed so they can dose everyone rather than just most people. Being depressed isn't good. Don't romanticise it.
NJS
1/08/2004 08:48:00 pm
OMFG
This morning I awoke at 5.30 with pretty awful back pain, which has been a trend since before Xmas; go to bed whenever, feeling fine, and awake 6 hours later with horrible muscular pains down the right-side of my back. Get up, shower, etcetera, and feel fine after a couple of hours. My back had been better since Saturday or so, so this was a bad start to the day.
Then my train was cancelled. So I had to drive, which I hate, because Exeter is a bitch of a city to get into in the mornings (it’s one of the five most polluted places in the UK, I believe, because of the traffic concentration). Then when I get into work there’s another fucking new pile of acquisitions for me to deal with, when the lot that arrived while I was on holiday over Xmas hadn’t even been halved yet. It was not a good morning.
So then I’m driving home, and I’ve worked through lunchtime so I can leave early and go to Sainsburys to buy something to chuck in a saucepan with the chorizo that Billy brought me back from Spain, and still avoid the rush hour. What happens? Sara fucking Cox. Oh bloody hell. Oh bloody, bloody hell. RadioOne have lost a million listeners between Cox and Moyles over the last 18 months. And do you know why? Because they’re both cunts. Uergh.
It appears to be Cox’s schtick that she’s not only had a talent and charisma bypass, but a fucking sincerity bypass too. It’s obviously considered amusing that she says every other sentence in the most false and annoying and flatulently obsequious patronising kiddies voice imaginable but it fucking isn’t, not if you’ve got a fucking brain. People don’t like being treated like idiots by idiots, which is why they’ve been switching off their radios.
NJS
1/08/2004 08:38:00 pm
Wednesday, January 07, 2004
I Wonder Should I Get Up, And Fix Myself A Drink?
I'm intrigued by Shattered (although not enough to find out when it's on and watch it). The idea of being bored to sleep by a group of people desperate to stay awake is somehow beautiful. Maybe on Friday, when the participants will possibly be experiencing 'dream-intrusion' into their waking-state, it might be really worth watching.
NJS
1/07/2004 03:06:00 pm
Via Chicago
Marcello has informed me that Via Chicago's header is a Nick Hornby quote. Oh bloody hell. Oh bloody, bloody hell.
This is the existential thing in a nutshell; don't let any other fucker tell you who you are. Least of all a dull idiot like Hornby.
NJS
1/07/2004 01:57:00 pm
Disappearing Acts / Sabbaticals
Two totally unrelated things. Firstly this, the tragic and strange story of a doctor who vanished from work six months ago, and who's body was discovered in the Lake District yesterday. Nobody knows why or how he vanished. All that is known is that he parked his car as normal, put his jacket over the back of his chair, and then disappeared. I remember hearing an urban myth about someone who 'disappeared' from Newcastle to Middlesborough and wasn't seen or heard of by his family for twenty years, despite extensive searching on their behalf. 30 miles for a new life?
I've always been intrigued by the idea of people just dropping things and leaving, and the more they 'drop' the more fascinated I become. The interest is increased in cases where the disappeared seems to have no reason for undertaking such drastic action; for example I'm not interested in Richey Manic's tragic flee from modern life, or whatever it was.
Obviously disappearing, like suicide, is an intensely self-centered act, emotionally damaging for anyone close to the disappeared by giving rise to guilt/doubt etcetera, not to mention the intense pain of speculation, of simply not knowing what has become of someone you loved. But at the same time I see the decision, especially the apros of nothing decision, to leave behind your life completely and utterly, almost as an an ultimate affirmation of the realisation of the existential self, the discovery that one can do anything, that one needn't be tied to place or object or even people. How powerful you must become if you realise, fearlessly, that wherever you go you will encounter people you can get along with, find a job of work that you can do in order to sustain yourself, find a new circus game to distract and entertain you? (I hesitated to use the word 'powerful' as I'm not normally concerned by it, but I really couldn't think of another, better alternative, and a synonym for 'powerful' would have been a cop-out.)
I guess this almost ties in with the whole idea/myth of the wanderer/ranger/drifter type person who is never anything more than a fleeting moment in people's lives, but it's not the same, because the wanderer is always object rather than subject; you (or one) is never a wanderer; it is always someone else, and the idea of the existential (wo)man realising his/her capability of upping sticks and leaving with nary a goodbye is a very much more personal thing. Or at least it is for me. To the family of the doctor above, and, I guess, of anyone else who has ever vanished mysteriously, the disappeared is always other.
Search; Grosse Point Blank.
The second thing is related, in a way, and is a simple question. What the fuck did Terence Mallick do between 1978 (and Days Of Heaven) and 1998 (The Thin Red Line)?!
NJS
1/07/2004 01:54:00 pm
I Am Human And I Need To Be Loved
Via Chicago's description reads thus;
What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?
Simple solution. Stop listening to music that makes you feel miserable. No one needs to feel miserable, and the fact that some people (I'm not saying Mr Via Chicago is or does) almost approach life as if they're obligated to be dour or melancholy (which is not the same as depressed where depressed = a clinical condition) frankly a; mystifies me and b; pisses me off slightly. Why? Because I used to feel obligated to be melancholy and now I do not, possibly.
Sub-question; are the makers of melancholy music necessarily melancholy themselves? I doubt that Jeff Tweedy spends that much of his time crying into his bourbon.
NJS
1/07/2004 10:29:00 am
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Michael Jackson & The Nation Of Islam
There's an article in The Grauniad today entitled summat like "Is Michael Jackson turning black again?" (cos obviously he's already turned black once, wtf?). And this and that and the other and the Nation Of Islam gathers round black celebrities in times of trouble (OJ Simpson, Puff Daddy, Muhammed Ali etcetera [R Kelly?]), and they need Jacko as much as he needs them and they've taken over his business affairs and they're much less anti-white than they used to be (and they have white supporters at rallies now) and they've embraced some cultural/ethnic/social groups they at first shunned, blah blah blah all quite informative, but back in November I wrote this line in a Britney Spears review; how come Britney got to be a little gurl fantasy and Beyonce didn’t? Paedophiles are all white, yeah? and it was, at the time, a pretty throwaway observation. But I can't help but feel that now Jackson has been accused of a crime that is perceived as a 'white' crime (and more specifically European - the Greeks were at it long before N4MBLA) he is feeling a need to remind people of his (ex?)race as if this will somehow make him innocent by association? He wasn't so interested in the Nation Of Islam when he was having his lips thinned and nose narrowed, and they were equally not so interested in him. So what have they got to get out of it now? Is it purely a sense of solidarity? Is what Jacko has been accused of equivalent to what R Kelly was accused of? Taking sides; 15-year-old girls vs 13-year-old boys? Where does the question of age end and the question of sexuality begin? Where do RuPaul and Dennis Rodman fit into the equation? Had Michael Jackson effectively removed his race from his persona?
I realise I'm raising a lot of semi-dangerous questions here, but this whole affair has had me thinking, and I need to ask them.
NJS
1/06/2004 04:37:00 pm
Monday, January 05, 2004
Rock n Roll
It lives.
NJS
1/05/2004 01:31:00 pm
Dub Plate Style?
Jess and I have a kind of love/hate relationship which is perhaps founded on the fact that we're probably very similar as people. He's made his antipathy for Outkast, and particularly "Hey Ya", explicit on numerous occasions over the last few months, and this recent entry at his blog points towards it being a philosophical as much as a aesthetic or visceral reaction to said tune. If it were anyone else I'd have a go; but I can understand where Jess is coming from perfectly, even if I don't agree.
If I ever get to the US we'll have to go for a beer together, Mr Harvell.
NJS
1/05/2004 10:43:00 am
Britney Weds
The question is how much is Britney going to have pissed off the Xtian right establishment by not recognising the sanctitiy of marriage? How much of her already-dwindling fanbase is going to vanish? Is the poor girl in some kind of personal/career crisis? It would certainly seem so; from weeping over Justin on national television, to being usurped by him in the charts (and usurped by Cameron Diaz [amongst others?] in his bed), things are not looking good for the Princess of Pop. Last time I checked In The Zone was languishing at about number 70 in the albums chart. Allegedly Ms. Spears wasn't drunk when she sashayed down the ailse in jeans and a trucker-cap either. I'm not sure what that says about the whole deal, and, by extension, her mental/emotional health.
NJS
1/05/2004 10:02:00 am
|
|
