VARIOUS ARTISTS - “What’s Going On?”

VARIOUS ARTISTS - “What’s Going On?”

I should make it clear I’m no fan of “What’s Going On?” in its original form - a heartfelt and well-sung cry of anguish for the woes of humanity, but it says less to me than anything I’ve heard that Marvin Gaye did before it. Berry Gordy’s wish to scotch Gaye’s album says plenty about his insensitivity to his artists and his decline as a pop weathervane, but aesthetically I’ve got a sneaking sympathy for him. Anyway the album came out and the rest is history. All of which is just to say that I’m not one of these people who would slate the new “What’s Going On” for ‘butchering’ the original in charity’s name.

That established, it’s a really awful record. Images of Band Aid and USA For Africa come flooding back - the celebrities gathered round mics, swaying slightly, their eyes a bit scrunched up so as to look more soulful. “What’s Going On” is a backslapping schlep through a record everyone concerned thinks - no, knows - is a stone-carved ‘classic’, and so nobody takes the slightest interest in improving the song, making it their own, pushing it into places it didn’t normally go.

Until, of course, Fred Durst comes rampaging in. Now, Fred Durst is not a good rapper, is not a good songwriter, and is never a man to let a subtle thought pass when a thumpingly obvious one will do. This makes him perfect for injecting some kind of clumsy life into “What’s Going On?”. Yes, your reaction to his rap - “humans using human beings for BOMBS!” is most likely dangle-jawed horror - but it’s a reaction, at least, in amongst the usual charity autoglide.

And what’s more, his contribution isn’t just startling, it’s weirdly appropriate. He’s the only one of the celebrity crew to actually make some kind of acknowledgement of what happened on September 11, an acknowledgement that jolts you out of the song and reminds you in a way that Gaye’s lyrics have long since lost their power to do. And for once, too, Durst’s voice works. That permanent petulant edge of uncomprehending hurt he applies to every rap he tries for once has a theme - and a public mood - that suit it. Baffled, aggressive, pained and a little bit scared - with his “What’s Going On?” contribution, as stupid and trite as it is, Durst becomes the first pop star to get a bead on September 11, and to make a record which sounds like the America the rest of the world is currently, in fear or in sympathy, watching.

We are needed more than ever.

We are needed more than ever. It’s an undisputable factoid that following Pumpkin Publog’s - ahem - vacation, the pubs of Britain have slumped in quality. For example the King Of Corsica, never admittedly a nice boozer but now entirely beyond the pale. Evidence (garnered from regular attendance at KoC karaoke nights):

i. Removal of nice karaoke bird with nasty karaoke bird (evidence of nastiness - never picks our tracks, forced me to sing Crazy Town, called us “hoggers”). There is no truth in the suggestion that nice karaoke bird had a breakdown after hearing Pete sing “Yesterday Once More” in his special voice.
ii. Arrival of karaoke bloke who is even more incompetent and shares nasty k-bird’s trait of doing all the songs himself.
iii. Decline in good manners of KoC clientele, eg the one who threatened to beat the crap out of a Publog associate in the toilets. There is more chance of being approached in the toilets of the KoC than any other pub I go to. Not for anything exciting like gay sex, but just by mad drunk men. They say something completely incomprehensible in a kind of vaguely question-ish way which means you have to try and make the most non-commital noise you can, like “Ahhmmmrm”, and nod quickly and then dash back to the bar.
iv. End of 2-for-1 alcopops offer.
v. Crowd of boorish yobs standing in corner singing over the top of U2 songs. Oh wait hold on.

Cellar Bars underground

Cellar Bars underground

It would be sad if Pumpkin Publog became a graveyard for decent pubs, but I feel it only fair to erect a textual tombstone in honour of two sadly-deceased and much-missed Edinburgh pubs, both cellar bars near the uni, and both long-term refuges from the tyranny of style bar, theme pub and student pub which swamps the Southside. Yes, gentle reader, both Maxies and the No 1 Cellar Bar are no more. I drank copiously in both the night of my viva earlier in the summer, went on holiday and returned to discover both have been closed. One for redevelopment as a giant multi-level student bistro-bar (also involving the destruction of a regular lunch-time haunt on the street above); the other because the boss wanted to go for a proper restaurant, although as yet there’s no indication of whether the site will be redeveloped. Such are the times, my friends. Despite the high prices, appalling food, iffy memories and high chances of running into colleagues associated with both places, these fine examples of the licensed premises will live forever in our hearts and minds.

End the red button madness

End the red button madness

So there’s this pub. Native State. Well, it’s more of a bar-cafe-pub thing: food, drink, long beerhall type tables and all that. And the decor! It’s one of those theme pubs that doesn’t seem to know what its own theme is: random junk, polished metal, videos playing on big screens behind the bar, arty black and white photographs of vaguely ethnic types. (Which could fit the name, but half of them look like rock stars). The menu’s no help either, a mish-mash of Italian and Mexican cookery, all at a price which is too high for a pub, but not high enough to force you to take your custom elsewhere. Anyways, we’ll forget all that, since it’s one of the few places to be sure of getting a seat and a pint around Edinburgh University, so a blind eye will have to be turned.

But. BUT. BUT. There’s this problem, see. Come five o’clock, out comes the BIG RED BUTTON. The B.R.B is connected to a video screen on which are a set of options: Full Price (three of these, funnily enough); Half Price; Same Again; Free Drinks. Each flashes in turn (but I’m certain Full Price flashes for longer). Here’s the deal. You order your round. Before you pay, you get to push the B.R.B. and stop the flashing options. If it’s one of the good ones, wahey, if not, what a waste of time, eh? Just fun and games? A little amusement to spice up the lanquid hours between five and seven? Now I’m all for jukeboxes; quiz machines; pinball; pool; space invaders or whatever (so I’m no luddite) but this is clearly a step too far. How can one drink in peace when the very foundation of pub life, the ritual buying of the sacred round, has been pimped out to profiteering and gambling; when the necessary condition of drinking routine has been given up to the vagaries of chance and contingency.

Or it may just be that I’ve not managed to win any free booze yet.

Daphne & Celeste vs FilePile

Daphne & Celeste vs FilePile

VOX – Sing, Sing a Song

“Who has the best voice in modern music?” asked an I Love Music punter. It seemed a simple enough question and I was surprised to find myself struggling to answer it. The idea of the ‘good voice’ is central to pop music, from Sinatra to Sigur Ros - voices that “could sing the phone book”, which of course Sigur Ros might as well be doing. The question is, what is the relationship between the good voice and what it sings?

In the 90s, two tendencies moved the appreciation of the pop voice towards the abstract. At the end of the previous decade, Simon Reynolds had crystallised an opposition to the privileging of content - especially lyrics - over sound, and part of the wished-for immersion in sound came in paying attention to the “grain” of the voice (its physicality and texture, very crudely) and not its specific content. This way of listening found its way into general indie discourse thanks mostly to Jeff Buckley, who revived the wordless croon as a way of singing.

So now the tasteful end of alternative music is straddled by pained and alien castrato princes, whose use of their voices is frankly about as imaginative as the words (”angelic”, bah!) used to describe them. The high moans and the showy use of dynamics characteristic of bands as critically distant as Starsailor and Sigur Ros amount to little more than markers for an entirely unfocussed - and thus usefully undeniable - sensitivity. The keening of Sigur Ros, that band’s fans might tell you, can mean everything because it means nothing. But you may as well say that it means nothing precisely through meaning anything.

At the same time - or at least, in the same book - as Reynolds was putting forward voice-as-texture, he was damning soul music, or at least the congealed notions of it current at the waning of the 80s. Of course, soul itself had a conflicted relationship with the voice. The voice was the center of soul music in its heyday, and possession of a great voice could transform the weakest material - but the material and the voice were nonetheless interdependent.

The soul voice used the content of the song as a lens, focussing itself through meaning for the greatest emotional impact. Listen to The Four Tops’ “Baby I Need Your Loving”. The song, never covered, is a trifle. With Levi Stubbs singing it it becomes one of the most inexhaustable singles I know. And yet Levi Stubbs needs the song - however flimsy - to give his voice the minimal context it needs to operate: “Baby…” is magnificent because of what is being sung as much as how.

This conception of soul was pulled apart in the early 1970s. After Vietnam and What’s Goin’ On, flimsiness was no longer fashionable and the voice became more often a vehicle for content, not vice versa. And meanwhile the sound of soul, thanks mainly to James Brown, had acquired its own literal momentum, one that increasingly could reduce voice to a flavouring. When soul-as-such revived itself in the 1980s, the delightful balance between voice and material had been forgotten in favour of an emphasis on the technical. The soul singers - the soul divas especially - of the 1990s became notorious for their ranges, their vocal power, their melisma. And the song’s ability to focus this was entirely diminished. In mainstream, as underground, a form of abstraction triumped.

The song’s great secret contribution to soul music - to any music - had been diplomatic; to introduce to even the finest singer a sense of the appropriate. In an era of abstraction, that was lost. Really there was little difference, demographics and fashion aside, between the celestial stylings of a Buckley, J. and the seven-octave blast of a Carey, M.: both were the endpoint of the textural approach to the voice, the final breaching of a song’s boundaries, the victory of effect.

I doubt I’m alone in suspecting that this approach has worn itself out, that new ways of celebrating the voice are needed. Or, maybe, that old ways need to be rediscovered. The notion of the voice as instrument, for instance, has been used to justify the turn to abstraction, without much consideration of what it might mean for a voice to be an instrument, for what such an instrument might do on a record. An instrument after all is a part in service to a whole - to the group - and once again we come back to the idea of the appropriate.

Because Mariah Carey can sing seven octaves, she does sing seven octaves. Because Sigur Ros can sound like whalesong, they do sound like whalesong. The whole, here - the song, the music - is in service to the part, and this inversion is what our ideas of the ‘good voice’ have come to rest on: voices that can bully everything else into submission. But for me, a voice-as-instrument is one that is appropriate to the material: the ‘good voice’ is a well-built bridge between what is being sung and how it is being sung.

Fittingness seems a much better way of judging a voice than the two axes - technical and textural - that vocal music is currently graded on (proficiency-to-rawness on the technical and traditionalism-to-novelty on the textural). It puts the song first, but acknowledges that the song is almost nothing without the voice to back it up. So what we should listen out for if we want to isolate a ‘good voice’ are the tiny inflections in singing - the glitches, the grunts, the inhalations, the tensions that jolt the listener out of the song and remind them that this is a performance, but that do this in such a way that the song, and the record, is enhanced.

We need to look perhaps not for good singers but for good actors. The ‘theatrical’ in pop has come to mean a particular kind of vocalising - declamatory and melodramatic, ‘hammy’ or ’stagey’. At the extreme, think Richard Harris turning “MacArthur Park” into an audition setpiece. But it needn’t mean this - there are hundreds of different ways of acting, after all, and many involve a loss-of-self much like the singer’s dissolve into the song.

So much for theorising: you want specifics. Here are what I think are the five best vocal performances I’ve heard this year - some technically are marvels, some might be texturally sublime, all of them - and this is the first and last question which should be asked - fit the song so perfectly it is impossible to imagine an alternate take.

RADIOHEAD - Packd Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box
Thom Yorke is the only one of the post-Buckley crowd worth saving because he seems to draw influence from Tim, not Jeff. What I mean is - Tim’s great and short-lived idea was that it was possible, necessary indeed, for even a ‘great’ voice to be fucked with if the song required it. From this insight comes the holy babble of Starsailor, and indirectly too it animates Amnesiac. I used to dislike Yorke’s voice - now I appreciate how all through his last few records he slurs it, shakes it, treats it, abuses it, chops it up, pulls it back through itself until you’re hardly even sure it’s there at all. On “Packd…” his impatient/impotent mumbling is occasionally shot through with a nasty electro buzz - a vocal portrait of crack-up’s approaching edge which locks perfectly with the radiator-bars klang of the music.

CLEARLAKE - Sunday Evening
Jason Pegg’s voice is what makes Clearlake an above-average indie proposition - but not because of its special qualities, quite the reverse. It’s because of his damp self-effacement, the mustn’t-grumble groan of a soul in peculiarly English torment, that Clearlake’s records work. With guitars like walls of grey rain and perpetually defeatist lyrics, Clearlake need Pegg and his drenched monotone to turn their drabness from, well, drabness into something like an art statement. If he ever let himself open up and HOWL in the way you sense his narrators always rather want to, the songs would be ruined.

SO SOLID CREW - 21 Seconds
‘21 Seconds’ genius is to make vocal interplay an entirely formal game. There is no reason for each member’s turn on the mic to be 21 seconds long, but the rule grips the M.Cs with implacable force. So what is appropriate for such a contrived track? Why, each vocalist running through their bag of tricks at the quickest speed possible, trying every way they can to make an impression, most of them ranting against or revelling in the absurd limitation itself. Everyone’s a winner, but my particular favourite is Romeo, with his shudderingly lustful “Ohhhhh my”, his begging for more time to praise the ladies, and his swaggering “Two multiplied by ten plus one / Romeo done”. There is more texture and subtlety in every brief turn on ‘21 Seconds” than in anything Starsailor - or Alicia Keys, for that matter - will ever put to record.

THE GOSSIP - Live on stage and at karaoke
I can’t single out tracks because I don’t know or care to know their names. Beth Ditto’s voice is as near as this list comes to a ‘good voice’ in the old sense - an impressive range, a sense of tradition, the kind of burr and purr that has Southern Soul-o-philes salivating. But the reason it’s great is because of the visual and emotional context - a fat punk girl screaming her lungs out in order to make the point that fat punk girls deserve and demand respect, recognition, revolution even. But to get that recognition she’s having to turn back to blues and gospel, the musics that shore up the traditions she’s trying to tear down. Her soul-blues sweetness can charm a bunch of beery London blokes; her punk screech can get a crowd of seen-it-all indie kids eating out of her hand - the contradiction that makes her such a terrific singer is that what you feel she really wants, needs maybe, to do is take each style to its ‘wrong’ audience.

DAFT PUNK - Digital Love
“Digital Love” is a song about unrequited love, about a love so unlikely it can exist only in dreams, about a love so absurd it has to be sung by a robot. It’s a song about unbridgeable distances - between electronic treatment and human expression, between the 80s and now, between the disco and the stadium, between a Frenchman who cannot sing and a machine who can. The reason “Digital Love” is so sweet - and its sweetness starts with the voice - is that the song finds ways to bridge all these distances after all, leaving you with the hope that the biggest distance - between dancing in your sleep and waking up alone - might be bridged one day too.

THE PLEASURES OF BASTARDS: Bran Van 3000’s Discosis

Bran Van 3000 are a Montreal nonette known primarily for a one hit wonder. In fact I am not sure how popular “Drinking in L.A.” was outside of Canada. So when I got Discosis I was shocked by it. They have managed to make one of the most complex and layered disco/funk/house albums and then add lyrics that are both exquisite in their eroticism and divine in their absurdity.

This could have been a mistake. They use so many layers of pastiche and reference that it could have been pomo bombast. They use so many prominent guest stars (one on every second track) that they could have taken over the album. There are so many members of Bran Van 3000 itself it could have been messy. But they seem to be a collective and they have made an album that seems to be a tone poem to the Future of Funk.

The record starts with a beat as steady as a pulse. It’s soon buried in electronic buzz cymbal crashes and elegant strings. Three back-up singers break the noise and clear the way for Curtis Mayfield’s trademark growl. You assume its him singing but looking at the liner notes it’s an adept use of sampling. Towards the end of this song the vocals switch to French. Three things about the first track establish a pattern for the rest of the album. A use of the female soprano interacting with a male bass, the use of prominent guests and the use of French on nearly every track. The vocals seem to be about adding texture and the guests they use have easily identifiable vocal styles. Their use of French seems to be related to the Disco Gobbling Paris House scene rather than Bran Van’s Quebecois roots.

The most interesting thing is how much they crib styles and technology to make a cohesive whole. A funk rave-up follows two straight hip-hop tracks follows a french house track using Dimitri From Paris. But the tracks seem to loop into each other. There are no spaces between tracks — for example a bass line started in “Astounded” (the first track) is picked up in “Loaded,” the ninth.

The vocals seem to be there as Freudian word play, mentioning technology and sex. They seem to relate to music in its love of fun. They add texture bubbling up with absurd word play. Sometimes they are processed to sound artificial (the use of the vocoder in “Shoppin’”) and sometimes they seem to be made cleaner and clearer (Jean de Loups’ work in “Dare I Say”). The use of technology in both instrumentation and lyrical reference seems vital but it is not cold, sterile or dystopian. It is dirty tech meant for humanist pleasure. In the Momus song he talks about “obscure protocols” to deliver such pleasure. This song perhaps is not the best to chose as indicating a purpose because it is him at his most silly. It is a call and response that starts fairly sensibly and ends up mentioning everything from Sesame Street to the Threepenny Opera. But the technology is there, meant for pleasure. It is a way to further funk in both the George Clinton sense of Utopia and the Blues Idiom.

If you listen to this you realize how erotic it is. There are mentions of Cunnalingus Kiss-a-grams (Momus on “More Shopping”) and female vocals that sound like fembots (Jean de Loups). As well, there is the song “Loaded.” The song uses the title in all its senses: drunk, transferring data and bling bling excess. She spits the words ‘party’ and ‘fun’ like pleasure bullets from a tommy gun.

The tracks following “Loaded” seemed to provide a coda. The first one is boring and repetitive until the hip-hop section. It mentions everything and it becomes a boring Beck rip off. The best of these is “Predictable,” a surprisingly moving song about the romantic consequences of the technofucking prevalent in the rest of the album. Where else can you hear the lines:

“And like you say/I can change/They can fix me/Remix me/Seduce and abandon me/Build me /like Tetris/Pile pieces around me/It’s so easy:/For once in your life/Just say I’m worthy”

The longing of the heart to remain clear and the longing of technology to be clean never seemed so clear. This is followed by a French ballad that uses Cuban piano and an understated funk bass line to extend the musical motifs, to tie them up into a discreet package. It uses a similar bass line to what is in “Astounded,” “The Answer” and “Speed.” But the phrase ‘Senegal’ reappears as a lovely reprise. The overlapping vocal that harmonise are a mainstay, created through a cappella and not ping ponging multi-channeling. The last song sounds like an Anglophile who has just found Francois Hardy. But Jean de Loups’ cutting soprano and the clutter in the corners of the music makes sure this is the same album, just afterglow.

The last listed track called “Rock Star” starts with a rolling acoustic guitar and a check list of things to be such a person. It is the least cohesive track on the album. It seems to be unrelated to the cool down of the last tracks and the funk work up of the first tracks. It is a pretty little piece but it should not have been included. For a group of people that worked so hard at making sure the album was a complex work that worked as a whole, that quoted itself in ever widening loops both musically and lyrically. the inclusion of an overly simple acoustic song at the end of it was a disappointment.

This probably explains the pure bass and orgasmic moan of the bonus track But the bonus track is nothing to be excited about. It is the motif that they use through the album without any of the complexity. Eventually you realize it is a single track remix of the initial track, so that this album continues. The stripped down Mayfield connects the two parts of the album, so again it is an interlocking whole.

Disco has been dismissed as kitsch and funk is a aficiando’s buisness. But the children they spawned are ruling the world. The pop that enthralls teeny boppers is as ubiquitous as Coca Cola. Hip-hop is the best selling genre on the Billboard charts. Clubs from Tokyo to Toronto are filled to the rafters dancing to drum loops and electronic synths. Even the guitar bands need two tables to win. Disco won but it has been a phyrric victory. Discosis reminds us how vital those sounds were and how important they are now.

But that’s where you’re wrong…

But that’s where you’re wrong…

With apologies to PUBlic Enemy (and, more relevantly, Star Turn on 45 Pints).

Once again, back is the incredible
The pub animal
The incredible PP. Pumpkin Pubs is number one
Landlord said “Time!” and I got numb
Can’t I tell ‘em that I never had a man’s rum?
But it’s the facts that the Peter Baran got some
Now they bought me a Martell, will I drink it - no, hell
‘Cause a drunkard like me said “Well
Ayingabrau’s a great drink and I think you ought to drink it
What it can do to you, what you ought to do”
Follow for now, power to the people say,
‘Get some dough and buy a cider armadillo’
P-PUBS is back, all in, we’re gonna win
Check it out, yeah y’all, here we go again

Shhhh…a PUMPKIN PUBS relaunch may be gathering momentum…

NO LANGUAGE, JUST SOUND - Looking Well Beyond the Lyric Sheet

I hear the music. Which is patently obvious, I suppose, give what I write about for both pleasure and for pay. Started with my youth, very very young days, Sesame Street, Free To Be, You and Me, that kind of seventies upbringing. And from those albums into AM radio, Madonna, the Cure and Timbaland, straightforward enough.

What I hear is the music — more so than the words. Thus the point here, I don’t hear the words, not consciously, not with focus and obsessive reading. It’s not what I need, it’s not what I want. It’s not what I desire. Thousands upon thousands of singers, lyricists and more have poured their time, thought and energy into catching the spirit of something, perhaps purely functional in their eyes, perhaps a mining of the deepest human revelations of the heart.

And generally speaking, I don’t care.

There was a phase, I realize, where in fact lyrics did mean quite a bit to me. About around 12 years old, I started collecting record for the first time on a regular basis as opposed to randomly asking for things for Christmas and the like. Hurrah for the old RCA Music Service club! Hurrah for the one penny, ten records deal! My god, what a fantasy, come to life! Hell, I could even get most everything in eight-track back then as well (but I didn’t, lacking a player, which was almost certainly a good thing in the long run). I remember of that first one-cent-gets-you-the-world batch that it was Duran Duran’s Rio that had all the lyrics printed out on the actual paper record sleeve itself (might have been others in that batch, but there’s not much thought I spend on Rick Springfield these days). I obsessively read all of them as I first listened. I had heard all of the singles before — it was about a year after the album first came out — but I seemed to finally achieve a sense of meaning. But did I? Don’t think so. I like “Hungry Like the Wolf” for the way it sounded, not for whatever words Simon Le Bon was dreaming up. I think I was as much bemused by bits like “7 UP and Broadway” in “My Own Way,” thinking “why sing about this, what does it mean?” My other fave album was Def Leppard’s Pyromania, which had no lyric sheet in the vinyl version, at least. Hell, I couldn’t figure out what Joe Elliott was singing most of the time, but it didn’t matter because it rocked. Which was the point in the end, after all.

Still, I looked for lyrics in albums, never listened for the first time without reading those lyrics, if available. I got Sgt. Pepper’s in 1986 or so, the album that apparently started this whole thing with printed lyrics included with the record, and read along with them. Yay!

Then in 1988, I picked up an issue of Musician that I still have around for some reason — I think I got it for the Pink Floyd article on the cover. Figures. Anyway, besides that, there was an informative enough article (for young me, at least) about Joy Division and New Order. New Order had released their Substance compilation the previous year, godlike assemblage that it was, and Joy Division’s own Substance collection was about to come out. New Order had on the strength of merely two singles, “Bizarre Love Triangle” and “True Faith,” had become one of my favorite bands, and I had taken the plunge into getting their CDs as quickly as possible in the last months of my high school existence. None of them had lyrics printed in their sleeves, as it happens, and I found out why in the article. Near the end, Bernard Sumner said something that turned out to be rather important:

“If you want to print your lyrics, that must mean you feel you have a message that’s very important….To us, that sets the lyrics apart from the music and makes them more important than they really are. I try to develop an atmosphere with lines that are conducive to the feeling or emotion of the song.”

I think I was initially disappointed in this stance, especially since I really wanted to know more of what was being said in the songs. But it turned out to be the turning point, and while I can’t say when for sure, some little while after I stopped explicitly caring about printed lyrics, reading along with them or any such thing. I returned to square one, in ways. I just listened, and it was not only remarkably freeing, it made sense. One doesn’t have a lyric sheet when suddenly hearing a song for the first time on the radio or on TV or on computer or via a passing car or whatever.

And so I don’t care about lyrics, really. It’s harsh to say it, but it’s harsher to deny it. I have no idea how singular or common this fact might. A month and a half ago, a wide-ranging discussion on the subject came up on a private mailing list. I had given a long-overdue listen to the Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die, one of the eight million albums that I always need to get around to listening to (currently on my list — the first two Yes albums, the Paradise Garage comps that came out a few years back, most everything by Fushitsusha). It’s a truly wonderful experience, Ready to Die — blunt and crude at points, sure, but never less than compelling, one of the few albums I can truly say is cinematic both in scope and in conscious design, telling a life story from start to end as it does. Among other things it makes clear to me long after the day of its release — it’s what Tricky was in large part trying to do on his early albums, at least (check the harrowing “Suicidal Thoughts” for the truest example of same — the blueprint for Pre-Millennial Tension, right there).

And yet for all that, I wasn’t caring about what was being said, really. A few things were unavoidable, of course — I think it’s important to state right off the bat that I don’t automatically exclude lyrics from processing in my brain entirely. That would take work, to consciously exclude like that, and one shouldn’t work for musical pleasure. But for all that Biggie Smalls himself is clearly a commanding MC — his voice is a pleasure to hear, the setting for his flow equally accomplished and sharp — I wasn’t really noting much beyond that.

Ready to Die was the Macguffin for the extensive debate on the list that followed — if I retold it all, we’d be here for quite a while. To my honest surprise (I actually thought I’d be alone), the list essentially split — it wasn’t a case of two diametrically opposed opinions, but of a variety of shifting positions, where lyrical importance could sometimes change even by genre. But it was an impassioned discussion, and one that, I found out, essentially reconfirmed my own stance, however it was derived.

Because I’m not too sure where it all came from with me. When I was small, I read along with the Free to Be book while the record played (”They’re closing up Girls Town, some say it’s a crime!” — best kind of propaganda I ever went through, hurrah!). But music was and could and can always be part and parcel of a larger experience. It can be heard on its own, it can be heard while having a meal, while writing a letter, while reading a book and more. And often, quite often, this was the case for me over the years and still is now.

I felt and still feel that this did not and does not impair my enjoyment of music. Again, to clarify — I don’t say that music can only be heard in the context of something else. But it can be, and in my years of listening it is common for me. I think I ascribe part of this to my need to try and listen to lots of things, perhaps more things, more songs, more groups, more styles than I can ever comfortably experience in a lifetime, and there’s ultimately only so much time. But I must experience it all, I have to.

And to read a book requires direct attention, I read the words and then I interpret. To watch a movie requires my eyes, my ears and my direct focus. Music, I just need to hear somehow, in some fashion, in some way, there is no particular way to hear it. My ears have to hear, and maybe my body has to feel it, but in this exchange I don’t need lyrics, the clear understanding of the words, to react.

Now this debate might be and probably is as old as the hills — I honestly don’t know, but I can at least guess. I seem to recall discussion in Plato and elsewhere in the realm of Greek philosophy about the place of music and poetry, along with endless talk since then about what constitutes ‘beautiful’ music and ‘ugly’ music and the presumed social and psychological effects of both. But in my mind, late twentieth century product that it is, that particular question is increasingly irrelevant in a world where industrial noises can be musical notes in a sampler and industries themselves can pump in gentle tones to supposedly improve employee efficiency. Ultimately, what I care about is what was recently posited by a certain duo as “Music: Response.” You can complain about the Chemical Brothers as much as you want, but they’re onto something, they’ve found the heart of it. Music creates, dictates, produces the response.

So farewell then

So farewell then
Pumpkinpublog.
You provided wit
And where might be a good place
To have a nice pint.
But now time seems to have been called on you
Or your contributors are in the Priory.

byJ.D. Wetherspoon (aged 13 3/4)