quicksilver shapeshifter is a great-looking new music weblog by ILM regular Mel W. Too early to make any kind of overview of what she’ll be talking about but a look at her top 50 2001 LPs will give you some idea of the range.
And while I sorted out the archives, I made myself a tape!
Freaky Trigger Archives: before we get onto all that, though, here is a sorted-out FT Archive. There’d been snarl-ups in the archiving of some of the restored pieces, so stuff like Sterling’s Hannah Marcus review (complete with awful editorial typo!!) weren’t indexed. Now they are so you can explore.
And for an extra New Year treat we’ve resurrected four favourite archive pieces – 1981 vs 2000, my review of Godspeed You Black Emperor!, my review of Foreigner, and by POPULAR DEMAND the notorious ‘Why I Hate Indie Kids’.
POLL TRAX
This year the Village Voice sent me a Pazz And Jopp poll ballot, which was surprising and kind of them. I’m not a professional rock critic, after all, and I’ve hardly even been keeping my end in as a hobbyist this year. I felt excited about it and bad about it – I was presumably getting the ballot because of Freaky Trigger, or I Love Music, but I started both those things because I wanted to read music writing that was more personal and small-scale and not all weights-and-measures like the Pazz and Jopp poll. If I was getting a ballot, so should everyone else I know. On the other hand the Village Voice music section under Chuck Eddy’s editorship is the best print pop-zine in the world, and I’d feel a bit stupid if I didn’t show some respect by sending in the votes. So ideologically speaking that was that.
The only problem was I had to come up with a list.
I’ve bought about thirty albums this year and liked most of them. This isn’t usual – normally I’m disappointed by most LPs I buy and would struggle to come up with ten really good ones. That’s why I don’t make these kind of lists most years. So now my problem was to work out which ten were my favourites. Or rather, now my problem was to try and work out what on earth “my favourites” means.
What makes you love a record? Apart from what it sounds like, I mean – you like records for the sounds, you can appreciate them. But loving a record is something different. Right now – as part of my sifting through Pop 2001 – I’m listening to Since I Left You by The Avalanches. I like it. I appreciate it. But I don’t love it – actually it’s rather irritating me with its eagerness to please. I think it’s beautifully packaged but I don’t look at it and think about it and feel that kind of absolute rightness that I do with my “favourite” records.
Records you fall head over heels for do have to sound brilliant, at least in flashes. They don’t have to sound brilliant all the time – in fact you can love a record without ever playing it much, as long as the thought of it makes you feel better about yourself. The records you love you can say that you love, out loud, and revel in.
When you love a record, after all, you want to flaunt it. It’s not posing, or trying to look cool: your sense of kinship with this record has burned questions of pose or cool away. And yet at the same time you know there is nothing cooler in the world than to love the records you do right now. Those records make your world a brighter place, because they share their own worlds with yours, and the worlds they share are both sharply new and comfortingly complete.
And what makes a great year in pop is the way all these worlds rub up and spill over into one another and into your own. So ranking the records you’ve loved feels like ranking the ingredients in a stew: the wonder lies in how the flavours work together. Would I be so enchanted by the way Bob Dylan tells his old man’s stories if I didn’t hear hints in it of Jay-Z’s impeccable flows? Would I feel as drained and happy after hearing Pulp’s “Sunrise” if I didn’t feel the exact same way after hearing “Digital Love”? Would any single UK MC or crew – Roots Manuva, So Solid, The Streets – sound as exciting without the perspectives the others bring?
2001, on those terms, was a fantastic year: it defied summary, and the attempts to summarise I’ve seen have looked pretty cheap because of that. But a Top 10 list is not only a summary-by-default, it’s also one which leaves too much out. What to do? I found myself wishing I’d kept some kind of listening diary, so I could just list the ten most-played 2001 records and be done with it. But what about “important” albums? What about albums that were “important” to me? What about albums – like Pulp’s – which I love more because they give me something to share with my girlfriend? What about albums – like Prefuse 73′s – that I enjoyed once one autumn afternoon and have sounded drab every other time? Does that one great experience count for less because I can’t recapture it?
I have a week or so, still, to work through these questions, and here seems as good a place as any to do it. So for a limited time only expect NYLPM to be talking – to itself, mostly – about the year’s LPs, and with any luck there’ll be a list at the end of it.
The holidays were particularly good to me, especially in one respect — thanks to a gift certificate and the idiocy of some crackheads in San Francisco who clearly needed some money to support their habits, I picked up three of the PSB reissues from earlier this year, along with getting two more a couple of days later. Saying that albums like Actually and Behaviour are important to me is understating the case — somehow even the suggestion of a Tennant/Lowe credit on something captures a feeling in me that few other acts can touch, and more on that, perhaps, in a future article.
“The End of the World,” the penultimate track on Behaviour, was always a favorite of mine, one of those album cuts that you have to dig a little deeper for. Reading the liner notes and seeing how the two were blown away by Depeche Mode’s Violator to the point where the guitar on the song is a specific tribute to “Enjoy the Silence” was intriguing enough, but the real revelation was the song itself, again — one I hadn’t heard for some time, but which immediately leaped again to my memory and has been staying there since. If songs are so often meant or said to soundtrack teenage melodramas, then “The End of the World” is special because it’s *about* such a melodrama, one that revels in it even as the delivery and arrangement and more are so purely, wonderfully Pet Shop Boys, that supposed dryness that covers up empathy, that call to recognize that it is ‘just a boy or a girl, it’s not the end of the world’ — but still, it IS.
It begs for a cover version, no, many cover versions, it could work so many different ways in different singers’ hands. Imagine Britney using it as a last kissoff to younger days, think of Jarvis’ jaundiced but hurt-filled croon, consider how a glitch-crumble in the ear could succeed as well as a bombastic storm. But could it top the original?
DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?
What the holidays mean to me, an avowed cynic with half-hearted aspirations of an optimistic rebirth: stress over buying Christmas gifts; traffic surround malls & other shopping areas that would shame most rotaries; wrapping paper that won’t fold the right way, damn it; sticky pine needles falling all over the carpet; water splashing out of the tree holder; rampant commercialism infecting the general consciousness right after kids finish scooping out their Jack O’Lanterns; terrible, trite ‘holiday’ music people foist onto those around them to simulate some feeling of camraderie that doesn’t really exist anymore.
Yes, all of these feelings (and many more of a severely profane nature) flowed through me as I wrestled with various gifts for my nephews and sister this evening, listening to the heavy handed Classical bombast of Bedrich Smetana’s ‘My Country’ collide with the sides of my skull. The music shifts from solemn silence to atonal shrieking as it sees fit, which, honestly, isn’t very fit at all; quite sickly, as a matter of fact. I’m sending thoughts out, I’m changing the color of my aura, I’m trying to say that you’d best not fuck with my surliness, because the holiday spirit is certainly not haunting my skeptical ass. At least, not right now, with cheap paper ripping at every inopportune moment while wrapping the medium-sized boxes, and I’m not even going to think about the hell that will be The Toaster Oven, dear God.
I don’t want to be a cranky bitch about Christmas. Yes, I’m sad that I can’t go back to the days when I was a wee lad, sneaking around my house @ 5 in the morning, taking my presents back to my room to untape a small corner (carefully, so my parents, sleeping next door, don’t hear), and then returning the gifts, trying to mime sleep for an extra couple of minutes before I rush into my parents’ room. That’s what I want under my tree more than a digital camera or (please, no, don’t give eggnog to an alcoholic) more CDs — that innocence, that sense of wonder, that sparkle subsumed by the business of getting older, learning the truth about Santa (he’s a mall employee? PART TIME?), seeing the people behind the curtain pulling the strings and pushing the buttons. I think it’s that sadness that’s drawn me to the sort of Christmas-y music I’m fond of this year — instead of celebrating what I could have, I’m celebrating what I can never have. Such music is the antithesis of Bono’s shining moment during ‘Feed The World’ — ‘Well, tonight, thank God it’s them, instead of you.’ Tonight, it IS you, and that’s not a good thing.
For instance, Ben Folds. Ben can be a cheeky wiseass, but he can play you like a fiddle when he wants to — notice that ‘Brick’ (his breakthrough hit) takes place during Christmas, where the couple in the song spends their gift-opening time at an abortion clinic, losing a child and losing each other. A better ‘Christmas’ song is ‘Selfless, Cold, and Composed’, another break-up song abetted by weeping strings and a set of jingle bells chiming in the background. Ben’s asking for his lover to hit him, smack him around, ‘show me that you give a shit’; she doesn’t though, simply standing there, mute and withdrawn. Melodramatic, yes — the most drama we’re likely to witness during the holidays is a flare-up between relatives about old grudges — but the bathetic grandeur these songs aims for isn’t far from the joyful grandeur Phil Spector and Irving Berlin conjure in their snowglobes. At its essence, Christmas is the celebration of the birth of a child that meets a tragic end, so listening to sad music isn’t all that heretical. (And, remember — this is the cynic talking.)
Of course, what Christmas has become is a feeding frenzy for all good capitalist pigs everywhere, so Tsunami’s little ditties about the (lack of) Christmas joy (‘Ski Trip’, ‘Could Have Been Christmas’) certainly scratch that itch. Of course, such kvetching (unless handled with a bit of perspective and humor) can fall flat on its smug, righteous ass. ‘Ski Trip’ (talking tough about Mommy & Daddy neglecting the kids as they spend an upper-middle-class holiday in Aspen) gets a few yucks in at the expense of Nanooka (‘Ski mask on her head, she looks like a fucker’), but, um, it’s hard to maintian righteous indignation in the face of Nanooka. Sad fucker. The jingle-jangle of ‘Could Have Been Christmas’ is more my style, seething with anger and confusion left semi-wrapped by the narrative, but, again, it’s snowballed by the litany of charges leveled at the holiday (‘Boring ass presents / Lame TV specials that leave you untouched / Fruitcake & rum cake & milk drinks with liquor’) as the song smothers the Yule log and turns off the tree.
To be honest, I can only maintain this anti-Christmas stance for a short while — it’s really hard to stay angry & pissy when the good intentions readily apparent this time of year are numerous. For instance, listening to Jon Solomon’s 24-hour Christmas music marathon on WPRB (damn, he’s a charismatic SOB, and he’s going strong through 12 AM GMT on Christmas Day). Also, secretly buying gifts for people not expecting such things (it feels GOOD). Even receiving holiday wishes from strangers leaving a supermarket, or at any number of merchants receiving my business this holiday season — it gives me a little glow, a little smile, a whole lot of happy. Sure, I try and stay angry, but getting old (like I have), it’s hard to maintain the passion such loathing demands. And it’s pointless anyway — the songs I mentioned, they might give me reason to get all huffy & puffy about the holidays. But, when that moment passes, and I’m feeling a bit more generous and joyous, these songs are perfect in that they remind me of what I’m missing if I stay angry. There’s plenty of spirit in the holiday to be had, no matter how over-saturated and commercialized and passionless things may seem. Charlie Brown found the spirit in an anemic fir tree; Ralphie (you know, A Christmas Story’s Ralphie?) found it in a Chinese restaurant. I guess I’m finding it through the backdoor of other’s miseries — as long as we’re not late for supper and dessert, it really doesn’t matter.
Have a nice holiday, folks.
Glenn McDonald tackles the new Fugazi (in the middle of a unique look at our favourite genre): “One of the most pivotal events in the evolution of a sustainable genre, however, is when the feedback loop starts, and the artists who founded or inspired it start to sound more like the versions of themselves that their followers are following. This happened with several key bands during metal’s development (most notably Black Sabbath, who basically reached the point of self-parody in about 1989, but one could make a good case that most important metal bands have regressed towards means in exactly this way, with the notable exception of Slayer), and happened with almost a whole generation of prickly art-school post-punk bands that all discovered synth-pop and became New Wave. Fugazi, though, has betrayed no acknowledgement of, much less interest in, Braid’s retrofitting of straightedge back into a semblance of rock and roll. “
Glenn McDonald on Rush and fan loyalty: “I’m still going to buy every record they make, and if this is sort of their pension I’m funding by doing so, then I’ll send the checks without fail, and every visitors’ day will find me pushing them around the grounds in their chair, listening to them tell disorganized annecdotes that I’ll cherish as much, in their own way, as the books that made them famous.”
Dear Novocane feat No Ones Driving, top dodgy trance bods,
first of all, come on. Now is not the time for FITES and being VERSUS! It is Christmas! Even if there is a new (ha!) Tupac single out which I am sure means that some Americans will write pomes about and no doubt cause a GRATE BIG FUSS to my bemusement, it don’t mean you should get all agressive. Just feel the peace. And one more thing, that lyric? “You drive my soul from sadness”??
BUT NO ONES DRIVING!!!!!!!!!!
Honestly, if you bad trance mewsic clones can’t cope with sticking to continuity in YORE OWN CHOONS then whot hope haf the pop publique now eh? Oh hold on, mingy Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman (who has a REALLY big CHIN) are Number One with a cover of Something Stupid. That’s the title of the song as well, bwahahahaha. Oh please, hold my humour back. Take my number one selling album and cassingle, please. Back to Virgin Megastores – the shop to me which is a record store for people who don’t really like records that much (although I am very guilty of illicit TCR Virgin Megastore trips I will admit that much). The video doesn’t even have them romping through snow! Xmas number one PISH PIE AND PROPHYLACTICS to them I say.
EAST 17 – “Stay Another Day”
The Christmas song has always been an odd part of pop – music and songs designed to represent, to evoke a specific season, a time, a place. Even if – especially if – that season is itself a social fiction. Pop after all shares modern Christmas’ uneasy compromise between hyper-commerce and private ritual and pleasure. The Christmas song, you might say, is the last outpost of exotica – music as travel, as a passport to a lost or alien world. Except here, maybe, the lost world is our own better nature.
In practise this what this actually means is jingle bells turned up to 11, a choir maybe, and that fey, quavery keyboard sound minted by Greg Lake on “I Believe In Father Christmas”. That horrible single set the tone of ‘serious’ Christmas records for another twenty years – a solemn voice, the distant ring of bells, and a soup of sound from the keyboards, coddling the listeners, making them feel as if they were in a snowstorm ball. The biggest-selling Christmas single ever, Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, was a Gothic inverse of the Lake template – the comforting sound-duvet turned into a synthetic miasma, the bells tolling and doom-drums beating. At age eleven, I hated it and drew breasts and specs on the cover’s starving orphans.
Ten years later, I found myself alone at Christmas – unexpectedly and painfully. A romantic reversal – but the records I’d thought might help, my fatalist guitar-pop faithfuls, had run out of sympathy. I got drunk and listened to anything distracting. The record at the top of the charts was by East 17, a boy band with a tough-kid image who’d not previously managed to hit number one, beaten back by cleaner-cut rivals. The Lakeian Christmas song was knackered utterly by now, and still East 17 had reached the top with one. But one that was not a Christmas song – it was a lost-love ballad with snowstorm swirl and bells. Even though it sounded a decade out of date, it affected me enormously. The song surrounded itself with the familiar trappings of Christmas and then ignored them, able to think only of its own broken heart.
The break turned out to be just a fracture, and Christmas itself was fine. I put the song on jukeboxes sometimes now and I always think of that time. Last week, coming back home at night, I listened to it on headphones and was struck by how uncomfortable the singer sounds as he tries to be tender, how out-of-place the others are as they take the place of a Christmas choir. That clumsiness is the sound of a man forced onto his best behaviour, and forced at the same time to think and say how he really feels. It’s what keeps the song just about relevant at Christmas, while hearing Greg Lake and Band Aid feels as slimy and dutiful as a great-aunt’s kiss.