Morvern Callar: This is Dedicated to the One I Love

Good man!

end of year list of best albums of o9 time?

Let's pretend for a moment that it wasn't that Mordant Music album, or probably the Vindicatrix album which I've yet to track down, but who I was stupid enough to not go and see in New Cross a couple of weeks ago (it was freezing, I was knackered, it was Tuesday). The Wire end of year issue was good wasn't it? Good overviews by Joe's Stannard and Muggs, lots of great stuff in the end of year chart.

so, filtering out the stuff that has appeared heavily elsewhere (ie hypnagogic, hauntologic and wonk) here are the best albums of the year for me:

The Necks: Silverwater
Wevie Stonder: The Bucket
Krallice: Dimensional Bleedthrough
Wolves in the throne room: Black Cascade
Shackleton: Three eps
Extra Golden: Thank you very quickly
Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation: Succubus
Nomo: Invisible Cities
Master Musicians of Bukkake: Totem One

In other news, 09 was the year I got into Steely Dan.

RATM Christmas no1 in 2009 is a highly unlikely reality it seems.

I’m bound to approve aren’t I as effectively it’s a massive Wyatting (and opens up some lovely possibilities in Yuletide pubs). In this sense the song is crucial.

Last year's campaigns to get Jeff Buckley’s version of Hallelujah to number one failed because its just not dissonant enough, more like an act of snobby Puritanism ( but haven’t you heard the Buckley version. Gah. I suppose you don’t even know Cohen wrote it originally. LEONARD COHEN?? No? Honestly!) a kind of middlebrow one-upmanship, pointedly the Rufus Wainright version wasn’t a contender as its in “Shrek” and the John Cale version’s too obscure, same goes for the RATM couples' Rick Astley campaign: too cheesily ironic in a culture saturated with irony.

Whereas, RATM have the necessary distance from both the rock snob and the ironist: they’re deeply in earnest and completely infra dig critically, no one is really touting Rage as “real music” in the way that Buckley can be, in other words it’s likely to piss off a sizeable chunk of society: from the Sun who today showed De La Rocha, a man who is giving the profits form the sale of the record to charity and has spent his adult life advocating leftist political positions, in a pair of Devil horns, to the tedious music connoisseur who tells you if you want to listen to funk get a George Clinton Lp, if you want rock get Led Zep, if you want politics get Gil Scott Heron, blah blah to the non-dupes who’ll harp on the triviality of culture and wish with a sigh that all that organization and enthusiasm could be put to a better use, to the REAL punks who’ll say it should be Discharge to all the X factor fans whose miserable investment in the fantasy of personal salvation through media is tripped up by the simply nasty and spiteful. RATM are exactly the right choice in this way. It’s a punk gesture because it isn’t the last pseudo chart run off we had between Blur and Oasis both releasing records on the same day, it’s a section of the public ambushing and coshing the media and the rest of the public spontaneously with a fifteen year old rap/rock tune as its weapon of choice.

I’ve liked the disavowal from Cole and Callow about being upset for Joe (as though he were simply entitled to it all by virtue of having won X-Factor) when in reality they know that the game is up, maybe not tomorrow but soon and for the rest of their lives.*

The public knows it can do it now. It isn’t chose to participate or not participate, it can set it’s own terms. This is the positive flipside of Mark’s “Conspicuous contempt” perhaps, a massive levelling of the star-system, a desire to dish out to Cowell some of the humiliating judgement of inadequacy he has served up, the web coming of age in a way, realising its reach and autonomy. Maybe the public will develop an appetite for it, maybe it’ll realise it can do all kinds of other things. Maybe it’s a flash in the pan. But it’s as much about a clash of the inherent possibilities of media and the shaking off of interpassivity as anything.

How do you Wyatt a bar full of Wire readers I wondered in my first post, the slightly trickier question, how do you Wyatt an entire nation has now been answered. So, anyway, sorry if you approve the gesture but don’t like the song: but then that’s also partly the point: once the I-pod comes off not all the interesting moments can also have that perfect soundtrack.

*There are doubtless already conspiracy theories abounding IE Cowell’s done it himself, it was set up by the Record company etc these matter not a whit even if true because they still reveal the possibility. It doesn’t matter who set it up and for what reason, the a-symmetry exists and is open to all, it simply opens up a new frontier within the Internet itself as a space for contention. Given the absolute interlacing of Web 2.0 into the fabric of our lives, the exposure of such a “plot” and inevitable argument about who owns the web and corporate incursion into public non-space etc could only be welcomed.

The Mighty Sparrow - Village Ram

an especially lewd/ hysterical version of Village Ram from the Sparrow here...she lie,,she lie, she LIE!!!!

Philip Lynott - Yellow Pearl

used as the TOTP theme at some point, co written by midge ure, i think, from lynott's really good solo album. i've listened to a lot of thin lizzy this year. this is kind of Thin LaDusseldorf. or it is to my ears, at least.

It doesn’t matter that I think “killing in the name of..” is one of the five greatest Rock songs of all time and you find it unbearably naïve funk-rock hogwash, it doesn’t matter that Rage are in the pockets of Hollywood and EMI or whatever and are sell-outs, or that EMI gets the lion’s share of the cash from both, or that it doesn’t effect Cowell’s millions or that their arguments are “authentic”, rockist bullshit. What matters is that suddenly there is contention, that culture seems to matter, that the race for Christmas number one is significant, not just in terms of some “minimal difference” of product but in who determines what occupies the mainstream. The pub-cynics will say, “yeah but how is that going to feed the starving…” It isn’t, but no-one thinks it is, what it is, is a huge upsurge of antipathy. Antipathy is vital. It’s mere acting out! But even so it wonderfully demonstrates the A-symmetrical possibilities of cultural warfare. A facebook group can potentially trump the most powerful media-machines in the world. Could you seriously have entertained the idea that this year’s Christmas number one would have been a run off between the X-Factor winner and Rage Against the Machine two months ago? They have their domain, we have ours, there are many, many of us against them. Their methods may not be more powerful. It’s the potential it reveals rather than the song itself (and if you like the song too, the delight is doubled). I mean ok next year we’ll make it Public Enemy’s “By the time I get to Arizona” or something.

Tis the season to be Merry..

UPDATE.

Rage Against The Machine: Sleep Now In The Fire

E.M.I owns the copyright to both songs blah, blah....les non- dupes errant!

I mean it's more than just the hipnagogic versus the hauntalogic right?

Thinking out loud, one.

Interesting comparison between Nick Cave and David Thomas over at K-Punk. I have to confess that any overlap between the two of them, or influence of one on the other, had never really occurred to me, but of course once the comparison is made suddenly a whole universe of relations and inter-relations spins into being. This is the beauty of the off the cuff observation in some ways, it’s germinal, generative. I’ll get back to that one shortly.

The same goes for Reynold’s recent aside on Hauntology, which sets me off thinking and prompts me to make a few equally off the cuff remarks about, errr, the failure of the Utopian promise of hyper-capital, i.e. the post-modern pro-Capitalist Utopianism of the Thatcher years on to Blair (Modern at last!). Older commentators have a (lived) before on which to Hauntologically fixate, I suppose, so it might make sense to talk about Hauntologies, the Ghost Box stuff expressing an obvious mourning for/recuperation of the public service and post war consensus and another, possibly, antagonistic Hauntology standing in for the lost euphoria/ promise of the Neo-Liberal programme. Certainly the Neo-Liberal project is repeatedly beaten with the stick of Utopianism by precisely those Leftists who used to be accused of it themselves and now relish the opportunity to attack back in the same terms: I’m not sure this dialectical reversal does the Left any favours as it continues to make Utopianism a dirty word, when, y’know, it might actually be the failure of just such an element in the Left that has stymied it

There is a clear Utopianism in Neo-Liberalism and this is basically what makes it exciting: it is oriented to the future and it does promise transformation: you can understand why people are/have been enthusiastic about it, and many newly returned to the Left will certainly have gone through a period of being entranced by Neo-Liberalism’s promise*, only to find that another revolution has failed. The question might well be where rave nostalgia stands in relation to this: doesn’t mourning the death of rave equate to a mourning of a failed post-modern Utopianism in which all the arborescent structures are ripped up once and for all no genders, no classes, no bosses and workers, no State, everybody reaching for the lazers in placeless PleasureDrome. Isn’t the problem with Capital’s ceaseless revolution that it isn’t really revolutionary enough, it promises the New but isn’t transformative on a deep level: the class structure remains intact? Just a bit of sleight of hand to keep your head spinning?

So what is to Post Modernism as Ghost Box is to Modernism seems to be the question Reynold’s aside is asking? Does some of the contention around Burial express the tensions of his being competed for by two different generations? There might be a weird parallax around Burial in that he’s being claimed for an older Hauntology when he’s expressive of a newer one, i.e. is Rave the last gasp of modernism or the first, quickly extinguished flaring of the promise of Post Modernism? The revolutionary spirit of Po-Mo naively expressing itself only to encounter the real of police crackdowns and integration into the pleasure-economy. Are two different phenomenon, the Utopian spirits on either side of a rupture being shoehorned into a continuum? I don’t know if we can say with any honesty that even if we’re now disillusioned there wasn’t a time when Post Modernism filled us with excitement and hope.

I know The Foam has recently been arguing against thinking of Burial in these terms, and I’m not going to suggest that he MUST only be thought of in this way (after all, it’s not my theory on him), except that doing so may take us off somewhere interesting.

*One of the great things about Zizek is that he makes the Left almost as exciting as Capitalism (“First as tragedy” is a barnstormer!) I confess that I’m a regular reader of The Economist, it’s so exciting, I want to BELIEVE!!!!!

Jacob’s (social) Ladder.

I haven’t seen Jacob’s Ladder for almost twenty years and wasn’t expecting much of it on a re-watch. Actually, it’s not a great film (though Adrian Lyne is underrated as a director), though it has some great moments and it is interesting in couple of respects.

First of all it’s kind of a Po-Mo Ur-text in that the shifting between two or three different worlds and time frames, the connections between which and the grounding of one as “reality” are revealed in a final scene which retroactively gives you the key to piecing the whole thing together, (in other words the film as a kind of puzzle (but not as in “ Marienbad” an enigma) that the smart viewer tries to outguess as it goes along) has become one of the central diminishing pleasures of PoMo. Also because it involves a paranoid conspiracy element in which “reality” is a byproduct of the MiIlitary-Industrial complex, blah blah.

Maybe Atom Egoyan’s fractured thrillers (variously successful: from the Adjuster through the influential Exotica and the great The Sweet Hereafter onto to the needlessly non-abc Felicia’s Journey) got there first, but Jacob’s Ladder is certainly early .

What’s most intriguing about “ Jacob’s Ladder” however is, yep, its vision of class.

Jacob fights for his life in Vietnam and the film intercuts this world, which the viewer presumes are memories, with his hallucinations of a future purgatorial existence in New York until he finally lets go and climbs up to heaven with his dead son. The hell that Jacob lives in, in the hallucinated post Vietnam America, is proletarian life and there is in this something of the nightmare anticipation of the proletarianization of the American middle classes through the Eighties (and on). Jacob has a PHD but works for the post office, he has to pull extra shifts an d falls asleep on the subway, lives in a tiny flat with a petite but vulgar Hispanic sex bomb, his neighbourhood is full of rubbish and burnt out cars, he begins to hallucinate demons that he’s assured are just the plentiful wino’s and bag ladies that litter the streets, has run-ins with unhelpful nurses in public hospitals, hangs out at parties with non-whites and sexually adventurous drug takers, has health problems and in one memorable sequence is taken into a filthy and increasingly infernal hospital to be treated.

During a fever Jacob slips into a third world, the life he lived prior to going to ‘Nam, waking up in bed with his ex-wife in their large, well-appointed flat. He tells her he dreamed he was living with Jezebel (all the characters have ponderously coded religious names) from the Post Office, of all people, “what a nightmare”, before putting his angelic children to bed. This is the middle-class nightmare, low pay, low status jobs, dirty areas, poorly educated partners and unsophisticated friends, the inaccessibility of decent health care, the possibility of mental health issues, of legal problems that you can’t get representation for. When Jacob finally decides to let go he is taken by the taxi driver, who won’t go to Brooklyn, back to the luxurious apartment he presumably shares with his wife and where the doorman addresses him as Professor Sringer, ushering him in to both his appropriate place in life and affirming his status. The route to heaven is up the stairs of a duplex apartment in the expensive part of town.

Jacob is released. Hell is still around the corner.

Three old records part 3.

I don’t want to mention Steve Albini again, but it is only in passing so......

Anyway, Big Black’s parting shot was a 7” that covered “The Model” by Kraftwerk, included in Songs about Fucking, the double A-side of which was a cover of Cheap Trick’s “He’s a Whore”. It’s a cracker actually and kind of offers up a possible direction for Albini’s post B.B. stuff that never materialized and in whose place we got the weird admixture of the smug irreverence and rockist-worthiness that characterised Rapeman and Shellac. Real drummers suck.

Strangely though I’d never bothered listening to Cheap Trick themselves assuming that B.B.’s version was an amped-up desecration of some wimpy soft rock abomination. For twenty years I’ve been wandering round with the entirely baseless assumption that Cheap Trick sound like Foreigner or Toto or something. I only bothered to listen to them because a work colleague with otherwise excellent tastes (although he does like the Beatles. And the Beach Boys, for that matter) goes on about how good they are.

And fuck me, he’s not wrong is he.

The first album is in by a whisker because it’s got “He’s a whore" on, the Big Black version of which is a bit graceless in comparison, though it’s possibly not as good as the second, “In Colour”, which includes a truly paint-stripping live version of “You’re All Talk”.

To say it rocks would be an understatement. Imagine a Mini Cooper with knackered suspension parked up in a lay-by somewhere outside Leighton Buzzard: Geoff Capes and Giant Haystacks are having a fisting session in the back seat. It rocks more than that.

A part of it’s rocking so gloriously is of course it’s silk-shirted, preening faginess. It’s half-glam, half-pop, half-incipient hardcore, 150 percent thrilling. Unbelievably, instantaneously memorable hooks, crotch-tinglingy propulsive riffs, stomping glitter drums, a more-ish even-MOR-ish in places, exquisitely balanced, salted and seasoned feast for the senses. It’s the sheer ranging musicality of the album (and actually almost all their stuff) from the bubblegum-disco core of “ Whore” to the hyper-bright Boogie of “Hot Love” or the billowy, pre-verbed vocals on the lovely ballad “Mandecello” every track offering up some smart but unsmug bit of wizardry without it ever getting in the way of the song’s impact.

Sexy, sophisticated, mercilessly entertaining, horribly addictive.

three old records part 2

Van Dyke Parks.

A few months ago those three words would have conjured naught but a sneer of disdain from my, admittedly rather kissable, lips. I owned a copy of “Song Cycle” and had listened to it about five times since I bought it in a moment of malnourished half-drunken recklessness in Barcelona several years ago. So, I’ve gone without food, and most importantly booze in order to own this, have I? Admittedly there’s not much cultural product that can mitigate against a lack of food and booze, but still, verily I was eating dust and ashes when I stuck it on and got some hideous candy-striped confection of whimsical fuckwittery in place of the Avant-garde meisterwerk THEY HAD PROMISED ME.

I dug it out again month or so ago, imagining that perhaps like a fine wine it had matured with the years, nestling there in the bottom of the roughly hewn (but organic!) oakum ( Hand Picked by the NEW POOR!) and recycled-diaper CD sack in which I routinely cart around the miserable burden that the pre-digitized age foisted upon us. Nowadays of course this medium sized slagheap of unwanted cds (but which tantalisingly and therefore unbinnably promises the overlooked, the undisclosed, the finally understood) could be replaced by one small memory stick. But wouldn’t you miss the materiality of the thing itself, the way it seems to anchor you in a world unmappably in flux blah blah. Not when you have to shlepp (like a nebbish!) through the rain with your shoulder gently de-socketing in yet another housemove (can’t drive, you see). Veritably the cds of the past way like a nightmare on the forearms of the living.

Still, I digress.

“Song Cycle!” It’s still fucking horrible. I love “Vine Street” but twenty seconds into Parks' egregious acid-and-helium-infused Disney-fied reworking of it I’m gagging and reaching for the superlative “Nilsson sings Newman.”

And as for all the Beach Boys stuff, who cares? The Beach Boys leave me colder than a homeless Siberian’s gangrenous legs. “Surfs up”? A cringe-making rococo folly of epic proportions. Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson’s “Orange Crate Art”? An overegged meringue of sickly sweet eupeptic whooping and warbling, made all the more awful by the prospect, in the mind’s eye, of the grizzled, turkey-wattled gizzards from whence it pipes, an abomination to the ears of all those who Dwell in the House of Righteousness. Everything from and including “Clang of the Yankee Reaper”? A welter of smugly virtuosic, wildly overproduced, smart-arsed, waxed-tash-twirling, bow-tie-whirling showtunery.

Listen to Van Dyke Parks? I’d rather watch my Mother eat out a syphilitic Latvian pole dancer for crack-money. LOL!!!!

And he arranged that Joanna Newsom LP, innit? That’s a world of wilfully idiosyncratic Kookiness that Van has dished up. Surely, his crimes are Legion, there can be no forgiveness. To the scaffold, comrades!

Except we’re missing one thing, aren’t we? Van’s Calypso album “Discover America.”

Listen to a Van Dyke Park’s Calypso Concept Album? I’d rather bugger my own mother sans Vaseline (LOL) as she ate out (etc)(LOL). (hereafter BMOMSVASAOSLPDFCM)

Or rather at this stage I’d rather BMOMSVASAOSLPDFCM than NOT hear it again. Yep, so deeply have I fallen under twinkly-eyed and fleet-footed foxy Old Uncle Dyke’s Trinidadian mojo.

Partly it’s wit, though Park’s is always clever, here he’s actually funny. The first track “Jack Palance”, a scratchy take-off of a lost calypso classic in which the singer (presumably Parks singing with a Trinidadian accent) stumble s upon an elderly female family member having it large in a dancehall with a Yankee sailor and is suitably horrified and incredulous, especially as she is “ still going about at night with a face like Jack Palance”

But is it merely funny? Does comedy, after all, belong in music? Not merely, no, it’s also as infectiously groovy as the nonunheretoforeaformentioned syphiltic Latvian pole dancer. Unlike both his later and earlier stuff, its uncluttered, almost lo-fi in the production, there’s space to breathe whereas the others are simply so obsessed with the razzle-dazzle of full pelt, full tilt orchestration and arrangement that it’s hard to get a purchase on it. There’s a certain amount of space needed for the ear to slip between the interstices and work on the sound a little, if not it just bounces of the surface.

“Discover America”, more than his other work, precisely because of its looseness and restraint offers up Park’s extravagant gift for melody and harmony to the full. It’s achingly lovely at times, (Sailing Shoes) downright funky at others (Occapella) plays with dissonance and unusual tempos (Big Wheels) but never loses its exuberance, its rosy insistence on life’s pleasures.

Generally Parks is as exhausting as he is inexhaustible, as deadeningly full-on as a Jerry Lee Lewis or Jim Carrey movie, but “Discover America’s” measured panache and its heartfelt revelling in the beauty of Calypso, married to an affecting homage to the West Indies and some of Park’s musical influences produces a work that positively tickles you all over, from cortex to instep, from the tips of your snapping fingers to the balls of your tapping toes.

Van Dyke Parks? Absolute badman.