My friend and I were talking about the Beatles the other day. Spefically, we got fixated on 'Old Brown Shoe' for about half an hour. 'Old Brown Shoe' is not a well-known Beatles song, but it does figure on the Beatles very famous 'blue album'; which is possibly the Beatles album most people own.
It's pretty much impossible to say anything useful about the Beatles on the grounds that everything's already been said, and all of us at our age have grown up always knowing virtually all the songs. 'Old Brown Shoe' is not in this category, though. Unfortunately, it's just piss poor.
So, in looking closely, we figured that the Beatles are basically (a) a collection of songs where you can't tell whether they're good or bad, and (b) bad songs; ergo, the Beatles are shit.
Which is of course great news, because I like shit bands. I think I'll pop on Abbey Road.
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Silver Machine vs Love Me Like a Reptile
I have decided that my job is like being in Hawkwind - smelly, pointless, going nowhere. What I need is a job that equates to forming Motorhead - admittedly also smelly, but dynamic and unstoppable, like a runaway freight train shovelling speed instead of coal.
To extend the analogy, I suppose I need to meet the subtitling Philthy Animal.
Instead, I am stuck with The Worst Week of My Life, a BBC comedy series that updates the standard scenario of hapless middle class twat creating havoc and navigating his way through pandemonium.
What annoys me most about this series is its outdated assumptions, such as "it is unacceptable to talk about breastfeeding" and "inverted nipples are something to be ashamed of" and "pregnant women do not have sex" and "people called Cordelia are more worthy of attention than people with normal names".
It is a load of posh crap, and I urge you to avoid it.
To extend the analogy, I suppose I need to meet the subtitling Philthy Animal.
Instead, I am stuck with The Worst Week of My Life, a BBC comedy series that updates the standard scenario of hapless middle class twat creating havoc and navigating his way through pandemonium.
What annoys me most about this series is its outdated assumptions, such as "it is unacceptable to talk about breastfeeding" and "inverted nipples are something to be ashamed of" and "pregnant women do not have sex" and "people called Cordelia are more worthy of attention than people with normal names".
It is a load of posh crap, and I urge you to avoid it.
Monday, July 10, 2006
Keith’s University of Rock, part 2: How Punk is Suede’s Stay Together?
Recently, I’ve been re-reading John Harris’ Britpop book ‘The Last Party’ and enjoying it, though I disagree with many of its conclusions. One of these points of disagreement is the assessment that Suede’s ‘Stay Together’ is ‘pompous and overblown’. He also claims that nowadays, Bert of The Suede thinks it is too.
Am I missing something? I think it’s probably the best thing they ever did, though I don’t really know, since I pretty much lost interest after Bernard Butler left. That said, I did hear the singles and they were plums. Part of the problem here seems to me that the ambition to do something different had gone with Butler. With the arrival of Britpop that year, having the desire to produce anything other than standard issue pop/punk songs soon became spectacularly unfashionable, but that’s OK, because with mega-memorable tunes from the likes of Northern Uproar, who needs that.
In general, this sort of thing is OK for a while, but things haven’t really recovered from that period. The ‘indie’ scene, having grown out of punk, on the whole tends to maintain the status quo (not the band: it’s arcane machinery and the blood of young virgins that maintains them).
The Tweenet internet site claims that the C86 movement carries the true spirit of punk. Trouble is, Skrewdriver think the same thing and I know who I’m backing in a fight. Some of the principles are the same: keep a lid on it lads, anything longer than three minutes is rubbish; oh yeah and hurry up Harry, we’re going down the pub.
Anyway, the phrase ‘pompous and overblown’ has been overused in the extreme since punk broke in 1991. Oh no! Hold on, it was 1976, or 1977 if you’re not a member of the Sexpistols. Cowabunga! That was thirty years ago! Thirty years is, for example, the amount of time between 1957 and 1987.
It's fucking annoying that since then, musicians have had to wear straitjacket for fear of slagged off for not being ‘punk’, by the taste makers (typically, the music press and its followers). Strange thing is, fundamentally it seems to me that anything that promotes anarchy would have a stated aim not to have a well-defined view of what’s good and bad.
Wikipedia claims that anarchy means:
that all forms of rulership are undesirable and should be abolished
Though personally, I think it’s more about sticking two fingers up to grannies, but taken either way, it doesn’t mean make three minute sort-of-pop-songs. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that punk has provided the guiding principles for popular musicians for the last thirty years, but that for the most part, those adhering to these principles have been anything but anarchic; in fact, they’ve been quite ordered really, following a pretty strictly defined aesthetic. What a bunch of bobbies’ helmets!
It’s clear to me that in a land where the rules are that you must stick to three minute songs and have no guitar solos that releasing an eight-minute single with guitar solos and trumpets and stuff is pretty anarchic.
Strangely, if the punk aesthetic had been strictly held to in the years following the initial punk explosion, then many of the great bands from that era (Wire; Associates; Talking Heads; Television; the Dooleys; Devo etc.) would not have been allowed to exist, and yet most of these bands exhibit sounds that draw inspiration from the early ‘70s and the late ‘60s.
There was another period in the years immediately following the acid house explosion of 1988, or 1987 if you are lying, that demonstrated a significant amount of invention, largely in and around the ‘indie’ and ‘dance’ fields and quite often deviating from the rules that were laid down by punk; however, around about 1994, the world (well, the UK anyway) was ready for a change. I was ready for a change, in fact. At this time I remember dancing to Primal Scream’s ‘Rocks’ and liking the third Ride album. I think I was sick of endless ambient records by guys called Pete Namlook at the time. Steve ‘Global Chillage’ Hillage seemed to be enjoying a revival too. Funny thing is, looking back at it, the need to rock was a short-term need. I kind of wanted it to fuck off by the end of 1994 and to go back to not rocking.
Unfortunately, music has on the whole, followed this dull pattern since back then. I thoroughly enjoyed a quote by semi-celebrity dafty Louise Weiner a few years ago. I can’t remember it exactly, but the question was along the lines of ‘what had Britpop accomplished’ and as I remember, her answer was something along the lines of ‘at least it got rid of all those twenty minute guitar solos’. Hmm. Yeah, that’s a result! See you down the front in your TRUSTY DMs. It got rid of... Err.. Exactly who? Hmm. The Porcupine Tree perhaps. Maybe Ozric Tentacles, though I bet they’re still popular in Swampy’s wigwam. It’s a sad reflection of the movement, in that it seems to indicate a degree of wishful thinking; that something had actually been achieved by it all.
‘Dance music’ lives in its own world entirely. There, it’s OK to have twenty minute long track, though clearly not twenty minute guitar solos, because guitars are for neanderthals, but this is another story.
In conclusion, inspired by the great animated version of ‘Lord of the Rings’, I’m just going to finish here. In any case, conclusions are for hippies.
Am I missing something? I think it’s probably the best thing they ever did, though I don’t really know, since I pretty much lost interest after Bernard Butler left. That said, I did hear the singles and they were plums. Part of the problem here seems to me that the ambition to do something different had gone with Butler. With the arrival of Britpop that year, having the desire to produce anything other than standard issue pop/punk songs soon became spectacularly unfashionable, but that’s OK, because with mega-memorable tunes from the likes of Northern Uproar, who needs that.
In general, this sort of thing is OK for a while, but things haven’t really recovered from that period. The ‘indie’ scene, having grown out of punk, on the whole tends to maintain the status quo (not the band: it’s arcane machinery and the blood of young virgins that maintains them).
The Tweenet internet site claims that the C86 movement carries the true spirit of punk. Trouble is, Skrewdriver think the same thing and I know who I’m backing in a fight. Some of the principles are the same: keep a lid on it lads, anything longer than three minutes is rubbish; oh yeah and hurry up Harry, we’re going down the pub.
Anyway, the phrase ‘pompous and overblown’ has been overused in the extreme since punk broke in 1991. Oh no! Hold on, it was 1976, or 1977 if you’re not a member of the Sexpistols. Cowabunga! That was thirty years ago! Thirty years is, for example, the amount of time between 1957 and 1987.
It's fucking annoying that since then, musicians have had to wear straitjacket for fear of slagged off for not being ‘punk’, by the taste makers (typically, the music press and its followers). Strange thing is, fundamentally it seems to me that anything that promotes anarchy would have a stated aim not to have a well-defined view of what’s good and bad.
Wikipedia claims that anarchy means:
that all forms of rulership are undesirable and should be abolished
Though personally, I think it’s more about sticking two fingers up to grannies, but taken either way, it doesn’t mean make three minute sort-of-pop-songs. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that punk has provided the guiding principles for popular musicians for the last thirty years, but that for the most part, those adhering to these principles have been anything but anarchic; in fact, they’ve been quite ordered really, following a pretty strictly defined aesthetic. What a bunch of bobbies’ helmets!
It’s clear to me that in a land where the rules are that you must stick to three minute songs and have no guitar solos that releasing an eight-minute single with guitar solos and trumpets and stuff is pretty anarchic.
Strangely, if the punk aesthetic had been strictly held to in the years following the initial punk explosion, then many of the great bands from that era (Wire; Associates; Talking Heads; Television; the Dooleys; Devo etc.) would not have been allowed to exist, and yet most of these bands exhibit sounds that draw inspiration from the early ‘70s and the late ‘60s.
There was another period in the years immediately following the acid house explosion of 1988, or 1987 if you are lying, that demonstrated a significant amount of invention, largely in and around the ‘indie’ and ‘dance’ fields and quite often deviating from the rules that were laid down by punk; however, around about 1994, the world (well, the UK anyway) was ready for a change. I was ready for a change, in fact. At this time I remember dancing to Primal Scream’s ‘Rocks’ and liking the third Ride album. I think I was sick of endless ambient records by guys called Pete Namlook at the time. Steve ‘Global Chillage’ Hillage seemed to be enjoying a revival too. Funny thing is, looking back at it, the need to rock was a short-term need. I kind of wanted it to fuck off by the end of 1994 and to go back to not rocking.
Unfortunately, music has on the whole, followed this dull pattern since back then. I thoroughly enjoyed a quote by semi-celebrity dafty Louise Weiner a few years ago. I can’t remember it exactly, but the question was along the lines of ‘what had Britpop accomplished’ and as I remember, her answer was something along the lines of ‘at least it got rid of all those twenty minute guitar solos’. Hmm. Yeah, that’s a result! See you down the front in your TRUSTY DMs. It got rid of... Err.. Exactly who? Hmm. The Porcupine Tree perhaps. Maybe Ozric Tentacles, though I bet they’re still popular in Swampy’s wigwam. It’s a sad reflection of the movement, in that it seems to indicate a degree of wishful thinking; that something had actually been achieved by it all.
‘Dance music’ lives in its own world entirely. There, it’s OK to have twenty minute long track, though clearly not twenty minute guitar solos, because guitars are for neanderthals, but this is another story.
In conclusion, inspired by the great animated version of ‘Lord of the Rings’, I’m just going to finish here. In any case, conclusions are for hippies.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Nirvana - Live! Tonight! Sold Out!
My dad used to call me a bloody anti. He meant that I was a contrary little bleeder. Nirvana's 1994 VHS release Live! Tonight! Sold Out! is a masterclass in bloody anti behaviour, from the title on down. This 83 minute film documents their discomfort at "selling out" by which they seem to mean simply becoming successful. They are repeatedly shown claiming that the music is all that matters, yet a large percentage of the video's running time is taken up with extra-musical matters, and the music itself is edited in such a way as to preclude the normal enjoyment one might find in watching a performance by a favourite group. This is fine with me. Unlike most music videos or DVDs, I was not itching to switch off after ten minutes. I was fairly gripped in fact, and when I wasn't gripped, I was transfixed by a strange squirming embarrassment. There is no doubt in my mind that here was a brilliant, brilliant group, and this video does a great job of putting them in context, without spin or gloss. Television appearances are shown with the original incongruous presenters' claptrap (Jonathan Ross is a prize twat), and the original on-screen text, all of which helps to expose the absurdity of the whole circus without allowing the film to become a morose reflection on the perils of popularity. Some of the attempts to sidestep the mechansims of fame (singing in a funny voice, miming with no attempt to suspend disbelief) presage the coming of Robbie Williams, a performer whose refusal to take himself seriously has done nothing to slow down his global ascendance. There are hardly any glimpses of "the real Kurt" (unless on stage lost-in-music counts). The best bit by far is when a bouncer tries to beat Kurt up after he takes a lunge at him with his guitar whilst crowd-surfing. One telling interview clip trots out the old "we're not interested in the business side of things" line of evasion, before Kurt pipes up with "but you have to take an interest, otherwise people will take adavantage of you". So I suppose that is the difference. In the olden days, pop stars didn't mind being taken adavantage of, until it was too late. This enabled Joe Brown and the Bruvvers to develop unhindered, whereas now we have a fight, with pop stars dissipating their energy by becoming food critics or whatever they need to assuage their falling star, or rather their star that never quite comes into being, forever reamianing a ball of gas. The glory is gone, and here you can see it being flushed down the toilet.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
