A*Teens and Alice Cooper in year’s most unlikely collaboration: Tom wants the rest of us to contribute more? Fine. I decided to view the NME website for the first time in months and saw this bizarre headline staring me in the face. My mind boggled as I read the article; what could this possibly sound like? Alice Cooper’s threatening-for-the-70s guitar-rock combined with shiny Abba-pop isn’t a concept I find easy to grasp. I wonder if the video will feature a sexily sadistic nurse chopping off the A*Teens’ heads with a guillotine while Cooper does a fully-choreographed dance number (complete with dancers and neat, jittery camera angles) in the background.
DJP in New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
This Is My Truth: “Unless something hugely dramatic happens before February 1, 2002 the courts will declare that Richey [Edwards] is legally dead.” (from Mojo Magazine, February 2002)
David in New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS – Come With Us – A Review
“It was Alexander Pope who said “A little learning is a dangerous thing”, and never has this been more clear than in the release of The Chemical Brothers fourth Long Player. Electronica’s darlings, the dancesmiths its okay to rock out to appear to have stumbled out into the Post World War II twilight and are unsure of what mood to kow-tow to. Somehow the skippity sledgehammer beats do not instill the euphoria of those previous days and it is unlike that Frank Capra wil be using Tod and Em Chem’s newer disc to underpin his new feelgood feelbad movie Its A Wonderful Life.
Star Guitar is their answer to The Drugs Don’t Work, which someone somewhere said. But as an answer it should only be given an F, and perhaps post the great crash of 1929 the Chemicals don’t work either. Even getting an inspirational diva of the calibre of Beth Orton in can do nothing but suggest that this – much like The Basement Jaxx and The Daft Punks of this world are the same old same old. No-one’s buying dance music in the States and all you English people do not understand the pain of walking round the Lower East Side with only a pair of headphones for company.”
What all the reviews of this album are actually saying is, this is the only album which has been released this month so I’ve got to use all of my purple prose on it even though it is the dullest slice of turgid bollocks I have ever heard. But then they pay music journalists by the word…
Tanya Headon in I Hate Music • No Comments
More pubs than you think I was amazed to discover the number of pubs in my local area that I didn’t even know existed, let alone have visited. A sign on the pub wall last night listed all the pubs in the vicinity which were affiliated to the local “pubwatch” scheme – and I hadn’t heard of most of them. The Three Compasses? The Famous Pig & Whistle? The Wishing Well? Obviously more strenuous efforts are needed to be find out whether these places are any good.
John in Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
In Defense of Ja Rule
I like Ja Rule. Not a lot. But well enough. (Meaning I don’t switch the station when he comes on.) Everyone I know – from the predictable white guys who only listen to J5 or Can Ox to hardcore hiphop self-flagellates of any color or creed – hates the guy. With a passion bordering on irrationality. He is loathed by the underground for all the usual anti-bling bling reasons, the streets for selling out by making slicked up luvva-thug r&b. Nitsuh even called him his pop nemesis, baffling me when so many other deserving targets of fruitless aggression are clogging up pop’s pores. (#1 – Scott Stapp.)
So why is he hated so, other than broader cultural concerns of “selling out” in any given milieu. And more importantly who is buying his platinum records? He’s got no flow to speak of, sure. But I don’t mind the bark so much, and he has adapted it to suit his newfound purpose as a sensitive thug who needs a hug. That “newfound purpose” is the key, I think, to both his success and to why I like him. (And conversely why everyone doesn’t.)
When he originally appeared out of nowhere (as every pop star does, more or less) on Jay-Z’s “Can I Get A?”. he looked like a baby pitbull version of Tupac, slithering around in the multi-million dollar video with his tattooed midriff, completely unmoved – as poor young turks are wont to do – by the opulence of his surroundings. Simon Reynolds praised the equally undulating electro-production on his debut single “Holla, Holla,” but he seemed bizarrely mismatched to the fluency of the music, rampaging over it like that same puppy dog in a china shop. He seemed like he was going to end up a footnote at best, and the chiming ghetto-gamelan of that second single was singularly annoying.
But in 2000, “Put It On Me” was everywhere in Philadelphia: booming out of car systems, on the radio every hour. In classic pop tradition, it assaulted you so frequently that at some point you just became abused and indemnified to it’s attacks. Your resistance dropped and you had to admit what a great single it actually was, if only to ease your fragile mind. And what a bizarre choice it was for a follow up to “Between Me and You,” where he was just espousing the tradition gangsta lexicon of love, dirty rubbers and headboard banging. Oddly tender, although not too tender of course and still laden with the questionable equation of money with love, he came off like an embarrassed, mush-mouthed high school kid trying to verbalize the first stirrings of true wuv.
It was also his biggest commercial success, and like Sugar Ray mutating from agit-metal pranksters to whatever sort of AOR schlock they are now, his whole game changed after that. (Sign of a good – or at least all conquering – pop single: my sister likes it. And she’s not too fond of, oh say, Silkk The Shocker, so there’s at least part of your answer to who’s buying the records now.) There was the duet with Jennifer Lopez on “I’m Real,” a sort of lullaby for the gangsta generation, their two voices completely mismatched throughout. There was the duet with, uh, well I didn’t catch it, on uh, well, I didn’t catch that either. Both even more mawkishly gushy up than Pac at his “Keep Ya Head Up” worst. And then there is his latest foray in willful cuddly softness, “Livin’ It Up”.
It’s a disco single, for chrissakes, right down to the Salsoul flourishes and the male-diva chorus. It’s also perhaps the furthest out a hardcore rapper has taken his music; even the glossy cushioning of Mannie Fresh’s most neuvo-riche house production wasn’t as blatantly, well, gay as this. In a genre in which homosexuals are fodder – for jokes, for lurid fantasies of abuse – and where the rumor of “so and so is gay” is the death knell of street cred, here’s Ja barking obliviously over four to the floor and strings and things about leaving his latest conquest “waking up wet, fo sheezy.” Is it an accidental mixture? Probably. That doesn’t make it any less compelling.
The reason people hate Ja Rule is because he’s a pop star now instead of merely a “rapper” and he’s so ill-suited to both roles. He’s compelling because he contradicts himself – repeatedly – on so many levels, in public. He’s a garish bore, a wrench in the glamour machine. He’s a terrible rapper who’s world famous, a growling alpha-male with a heart of, if not gold, then shined-up copper. He’s a train wreck, basically. And – morbid curiosity or not – I can’t wait to see what he does next.
Jess in New York London Paris Munich • 1 Comment
Chemical Brothers: Come with Us: Pitchfork Review: “the quick reflexes and primal urges of a cheetah hunt”!!? What is it about the record that is doing this to reviewers?
Tom in New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
Let’s text Sophie Ellis-Bextor! “Can you fit your face inside a childs activity centre” is one I would certainly like her to answer.
Sarah in New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
Collapsing New Waves: I like the sound of synthesisers, so I like the sound of this art-snob Electroclash synth revival even though the best synthdisco record I’ve heard this year is also the oldest (Sugababes/GirlsOnTop/AdinaHoward/Numan, expect review when work backlog clears). This article’s a bit in love with itself, though – Fad Gadget may feel more relevant now than they have done for a good while but the dots here don’t join up. And the piece is rife with do-you-see? lyrical analysis – “he and his sweetie snog “in the shade of a rubber tree” — possibly grown from a seed, possibly made of old tires (or, perhaps, bearing the rubbers that catch one’s seed).” Clever stuff, no?
Tom in New York London Paris Munich • No Comments