Flash is fast, Flash is cool

It must be the first and only time that the word “sacroiliac” has ever appeared in a song lyric. On paper it’s a toweringly cheesy idea, but somehow in song it works: how else to explain the unexpected shiver down my spine on hearing in passing a bar or two from Blondie’s “Rapture”?

I don’t think it’s just pure nostalgia either. Something about the cool, easy way Debbie Harry (oh, how it used to irk me when they called her Blondie! No, that’s a category error, I should have self-importantly cried) drawls: “Fab Five Freddie told me everybody’s fly…” makes the unworkable work. Poor old Vanilla Ice, who tried the same thing to practically worldwide opprobrium just a few years later, should have learned from Debbie’s chutzpah: do it first, do it best, then henceforth keep well away from a genre you are plainly ill-suited for.

Like many things, of course, none of this bears closer analysis, least of all the lyrics (“You get in the car and you drive real far/And you drive all night till you see a light/And it comes right down and it lands on the ground/And out comes the man from Mars”, anyone?). But I’ll throw my hands in the air like I just don’t care, and that’s what music is all about.

A Little Hell

In the gym this morning they were playing Jamiroquai (as a brief respite from Nickelback: albeit not brief, and no respite) and in the shower I was musing about Jay Kay's inexplicable global success as he whinged in the background: a multi-millionaire who espouses green issues but owns dozens of cars; whose lyrics are the wrong side of doggerel (“I got candy in my heels tonight, baby” doesn't really withstand any kind of textual analysis); whose records all sound the same; a posturing, style-dodging white boy who steals everyone else’s sound and puts it through a hot wash to produce anaemic cod-funk and who’s been getting away with it for ten (10) years now.

Either he’s thick as mince or we are.

He’s always wearing a risibly oversized hat, though, so no one really knows what he looks like. Genius! He gets to make shite records and walk away incognito to his Lotus Élan.

Set this against the equally inexplicable failure of Maximo Park to make much of an impact (thus far) and you have a real travesty.

Madame Onassis Got Nothin' On You

An early rockumentary, showing where Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood, and the rest of The Faces got their raunchy and rebellious image, providing an "excess all areas" pass to the kind of backstage high-jinks that got the seventies such a bad name. Hold on to your hollyhocks!