29 March 2002
DASHBOARD CONFESSIONAL – “Screaming Infidelities”
A couple of years ago, this song would have found its niche on a Post Marked Stamps record. Put amidst the, um, inspired yelping and yawping of his peers, this quite coffee-shop-talk emerges from the pit sans boot massage. Stacked up against the TRL heavy-hitters, though, all that sensitivity goes straight into the closet with the rest of the poems and the art projects. This is a straight-up booty call for the backpack set – yeah, sure, seeing your lover leave you 50 ways is tough, but it’s the lovin’, not the person, that you’re going to miss. It’s refreshing to hear an emo song cut through the whinging and whispering and talk about what truly matters – “I wish that I was anywhere…with anyone…making out…”
Gentlemen, start your engines!
David in New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
Marvin Gaye is dead and I don’t feel well myself — strictly speaking, there’s much in this article I can’t fault and so I won’t. Admittedly, Gaye’s enshrinement in The Pantheon is almost as omnipresent as Dylan’s, and therefore almost as stultifying. But whereas I can’t stand Mr. Zimmerman, I happily own a slew of Gaye’s material, though as with much else it’s an enjoyment that doesn’t need regular stoking, while much of said material doesn’t really provoke love. For Moses it does, and I’m quite taken by his descriptions of a youth confronted with horrors tangible through a TV screen and how for him Gaye captured that deep-seated unease of a kind I didn’t have to deal with at a young age, a situation I desperately try not to take for granted. When Moses speaks of wandering his house blinded by grief after Gaye’s death, I recognize my own misery at other deaths, like Charles Schulz’s, but again Moses deals with much more, with a terrible, awful pain resulting from a terrible, awful way to die. This is the voice of the passionate fan, the one who is so taken by an artist as to regard him as a friend, sibling, even a lover, and why not?
But the article still falls apart for me — not obviously so, but in ways I sense particularly. Moses suggests art lasts due to motivations of love on its creators’ part rather than rage or hate, when I’m with Neil Tennant, who says that hate can be a key motivation — wanting to do something different, despising the obvious, searching beyond it. Moses talks about soul being ‘back’ when I can’t sense it ever having gone away, though the obvious subtext is that Moses favors soul without all those nasty machines providing the backing — thus the already-tiring referencing of Alicia Keys, when Moses could more accurately note that her success is less due to Gaye and more due to Clive Davis, now happily pushing an anti-Whitney Houston as if to make up for what he did in the mid-eighties.
Most off-putting of all is the quote from the organizer behind that damned ‘tribute’ remake of “What’s Going On” last year, which probably would have been seen as nothing more than the grotesque backslap it is if it hadn’t been for certain idiocies on a September morning shortly after recording. Says the organizer, one Leigh Blake, “‘N Sync — who thought they’d know anything? But Justin really got it. So did Britney, so did Alicia Keys. People did their parts and cried.” Please. Now maybe they did cry, and maybe it was real — but the way it reads is less ‘how touching!’ and more ‘how dare you *not* love this effort,’ pure publicity shill, like all the hype around “We Are the World” sixteen years later and all the more mawkish and forced. Somewhere Gaye is completely lost in all this, a convenient dead person with a famous song to use and abuse, being spoken for in his absence by equally conveniently self-appointed keepers of a flame.
Perhaps because of this Moses would label me as a product of the eighties that he despises, perhaps he would say I don’t care like I should. To quote a key point:
I think that was when the emotional color began to drain out of American life; when people started to regard the ideals and the struggles of the ’60s with scorn. Maybe it started with Reagan’s election in 1980 and John Lennon’s murder the same year. Either way, the vibe turned cynical. We pontificate and analyze and criticize, and every day the world ends a little more.
But this misses something which is glaring in its absence, something seemingly hard for Moses to understand but which still is the case — that one can be antisentimental, or, say, that one can like ‘colorless’ or ‘cynical’ music in particular, and yet still love those ideals. I don’t need to break down and cry while singing a song about trying to rise above the filth and hate of an American society that should instead be fulfilling its best promise to agree that the message is still a good one.
Meanwhile, if analysis and criticism are to be shunned or at least suspected as something being tools that kill the beating heart of idealism, then I, for one, give up. For they are the tools that can just as easily help win someone to a cause, help move beyond simplistic statements to concrete actions and reactions, to do more than just ask what, indeed, is going on, to in fact fight against that pontification Moses equates with these approaches. Far from slaying ideals, knowledge, discussion, critique and more can make them stronger, all the more stronger as time passes.
Those ideals didn’t start in the sixties and they didn’t die with them. Gaye didn’t invent them, he just captured them as he happened to see fit, in a way that others responded to. For that let us salute him, or at least acknowledge his impact. But it seems to me that yet another saint, secular or religious, with feet of gold or feet of clay, to unquestioningly bow our heads to means a little less opportunity for all kinds of responses to a world of pain.
What’s going on? So much more than what’s in a song.
Ned Raggett in New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
28 March 2002
Billy Wilder died today. Some people say that he and Kubrick had plans to make an X-rated Hollywood porn movie with Julie Andrews lined up to play the lead. Whether it’s true or not, it’s the kind of myth he inspired just by being his own self. Billy Wilder was a deliciously nasty old man, and maybe the strongest writing talent Hollywood ever got lucky enough to call its own. I plan on watching Sabrina again (yes, the ORIGINAL, silly!) but maybe not Double Indemnity—it’s too tight a noose. What does this have to do with pop music? BW’s life is proof that great popular art isn’t necessarily about formal innovation (even if he did cut his teeth in the 20s on a French neo-Realist film that cast non-actor Parisians on their day off)—sometimes it’s about the delight of a contraption that works just right.
Elisha Sessions in New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
*NSYNC (w/ Nelly) – “Girlfriend”
Well, hot damn! They remembered how to have a good time! I can do without the love = shield ruminations (blah blah maturity blah blah; people can read poetry and NOT turn into pretentious bores, y’know), but keep those harmonies comin’, boys! (Please note that Nelly’s not-so-sly appropriation of “Liquid Dreams” does not validate O-Town in any way, shape, or form.)
David in New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
My parents are packing up and moving to a caravan!!!! Oops sorry, a park home. This means I have had to clear away some CDS. Whot??? OF COURSE I document this on NYLPM! Dere readers, shock and gasp at the revelations of “she bought THAT????” as we delve through the CDs that I term REJECTED!!!!
Exhibit 1: Hillman Minx – I’ve had enough/Heavens Above TWO PROMOS! What my preciousss, is this?? Oh I remember! Something that is instantly dated, due to namechecking Ginger Spice, Wonderbras, the Eurostar and Damien Hurst. They’ve had enough? I’ve had enough of this too, NEXT!! Quite horrifically – a lot of their HORRIFICALLY BARBED VICTIMS OF ATAK are still about – proving that crap indie as a form of protest can NEVAH match up to the bombast of Live Aid.
Exhibit 2: (dere me) David Devant and his Spirit Wife – Cookie. What on earth could haf been behind this purchase??? If I was at the height of my Manics phase, perhaps the fact that it features leopard print design and got a good review in the Melody Maker by Simon Price??? DANGER NOW. This is absolutely DIRE! Leave the vorgy squiggly basslines to YES and if you have the misfortune to come from London, NEVER try to sound ARCH. Also, I would severely recommend forbidding the Manics to anyone under the age of 20!! NEXT!
Exhibit 3: Puressence – Traffic Jam in Memory Lane. FACT: no song about traffic lights could EVAH beat ‘Tell Me When My Light Turns Green’ so why this bunch of whingers even bothered trying astounds me. COR! It’s Coldplay played at the wrong speed! Even down to the high voice (memory laaaaaayyyyyyyhhhhhhhhnnnnneeeeeeeee hemhem)!!!! Someone alert the authorities!!! Finally, we may have an excuse to get rid of them!
Right, that’s enough for now, time to listen to a Pixies bootleg which is in the UNREJECTED pile! More horror to come soon MY PRETTIES.
Sarah in New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
MOS DEF & MASSIVE ATTACK – “I Against I”
Let’s get the obvious part of this out of the way; I love this record. It has enchanted and ensnared me in its flanged hi-hat charms. If this record was a woman, I would be helpless at its feet, lovingly feeding it grapes off the vine and buying it fur coats, Fendi bags and diamond rings in a vain hope that showering it with bling-bling would prevent it from finding a suitor more worthy of its sultry charms. If I saw this record across a crowded airport terminal pulling out a pack of Virginia Slims, I would push a nun out of the way for a chance to offer it a light. I think it’s stunning piece of work. The odd thing is that I can’t really pinpoint why.
I’ve thought about this from several angles. At first I thought it was just the idea of a collaboration between Mos Def and Massive Attack that I found so appealing, but I really don’t own anything with Mos Def on it and, while the beat is alluring, it isn’t the best thing Massive Attack has ever written. I thought for a moment that it was the “Blade II” connection, but I bought the soundtrack before I saw the movie and was in love with this track from the first moment I heard it, unlike the rest of the soundtrack (which mostly works, but isn’t really anything that you haven’t heard before). It has taken several listens to realize that the thing that makes me nod my head when I play this song (like I am AT THIS VERY MOMENT) is the arrangement. The beat is sparse but layered, the synth fills have a very metallic-sounding filter put on them, Mos Def’s delivery manages to encapsulate urgency and languidness simultaneously and that breakdown in the middle is just genius. If this track isn’t used to promote the movie, the New Line Cinema PR department should lose their jobs.
DJP in New York London Paris Munich • 1 Comment
27 March 2002
“Producing…”
After failing to speak to the man while on special assignment in Davis, Sacramento and San Francisco, Dutch journalist Sander Kerkhof finally caught up with DJ Shadow for an interview over the phone, resulting in a half-hour long self-portrait of a man who’d normally rather let his hands do the talking. Hear Josh Davis, in his own words, about how and why he got started, hiphop in the early ’80s and where exactly he got most of the source material for ‘Endtroducing’. This one’s for the fans. Essential.
Warning: The first link has Dutch commentary. Both are Real Audio-files at 3voor12.
Ari in New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
PAUL MCCARTNEY – “From a Lover to a Friend”
ELTON JOHN – “This Train Don’t Stop There Any More”
“Hey there.”
“Hello. How’ve you been?”
“Ehh. It’s been a tough year. Yourself?”
“Not too good. Not too good at all.”
“Yeah. Can I buy you a drink?”
“Please.”
…
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Terry Bradshaw?”
“Well, at least I never dressed like Donald Duck.”
“Good point.”
David in New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
26 March 2002
Heh heh whilst the majority of publoggers are away I SHALL TURN THIS PLACE INTO A HELLISH MIASMA OF GOTHS! Bwahahahaha! Welcome, children of the night!
So, a pub in Camden then, the Oxford Arms. We found this after a gruelling return to London and trawl of the Mornington Crescent –> Camden Town charity shops. I’d seen this pub on previous trips to Camden, but tended to shun it. Evidence for doing this: it is on Camden High Street. The clientele of Camden. The potential of pub being FILLED with the clientele of Camden. (Or The Clientele, YIPES). From the outside it looks rather shabby. But this time, seeing as we’d just made it back safely from Oxford, we considered the pubs name to be an omen. And ventured in. They fleeced us THROUGH THE NOSE for two pints of coke, then we sat down. The ladies toilets were very small, and not in that good nick.
So, a regular Camden pub, you reckon.
But no! The pub wasn’t over full, and soon we moved to a seat by the window. There were plenty of seats and tables surrounding the windows, which were high up enough so as to block out the horror of the goths outside but still allowed plenty of light. The tables were unadorned wood and they had plenty of decent bitters on tap. Also CIDER on tap that wasn’t Strongbow! K-blimey, the clear and present danger of cider and black! Yet the pubs clientele seemed relatively normal. This may be due to the time of day (about 5-6pm) but yet the atmosphere was relaxed and friendly. We CRAVED IT FOR OUR LOCAL. It was the type of place I would actually feel comfortable turning up by myself, reading the paper, or perhaps a BOOK, and then leaving. They also do a pub quiz which is free to enter and has CASH PRIZES! I should imagine by quiz time the place is more packed, but you pays your price as the evening goes on. Recommended for an afternoon/early evening drink very highly if you find yourself in Camdens environs and need an escape from the horrors.
Sarah in Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
24 March 2002
Breakin in the South
When I saw Beat Street and Breakin, age 10, in Knoxville Tennessee, there was a context in the movies of a repressed liberation politics. That context may always float around movies, as an eddy in Hollywood’s vague cloud of humanism, but for a kid going to see a breakdancing movie on a hot Florida afternoon, liberation politics was a perfect fit.
In the mid-1980s it seemed as if filmmakers wanted to say something about how it was necessary for people to overcome a stifling situation in their lives, but because the terms of debate in Hollywood were becoming so narrow this impulse showed up as… dancing or riding bikes. Breakin was in the same kind of genre as Footloose and Dirty Dancing and Quicksilver but it was different. Kevin Bacon was the sissy in Footloose, and Swayze was a smoldering romantic hunk, but for me the hero of Breakin wasn’t hunk Ozone (née Orlando), it was TURBO (Tony), a real punk—he wore new-wave studded belts, weird berets, and hardly ever talked. Turbo’s the one who did the incredible stationary-bike-moonwalk thing in the opening credits and, crucially for me, he was just coolin while Ozone got in all kinds of boring “Save the Last Dance”-style adult dramatics with Kelly, our young white “modern dancer”, who later changes her name to “Special K” (the name was Ozone’s idea, which was strike three against him as far as I was concerned).
Where Breakin scored with its characters, Beat Street failed miserably, but the breaking and club sections were so much harder-core than in Breakin, and they stand out vividly. The energy was so genuinely wild that at times Beat Street feels like a documentary. 10-year old me had more of an idea that there were lots of PEOPLE hanging around this scene, people who fueled it. There weren’t as many minutes of actual breaking in Beat Street, but what a rush when it was there—this wasn’t just modern dance transposed in time and space, this was a whole different THING, and I wanted to be part of it. That thing, I realized much later, was hip hop.
Breakin wanted you to believe that Orlando and Tony were “dancers” like Kelly was, just in a different style and from a different economic background, waiting for acceptance into our world of values and aspirations, and maybe teaching us a thing or two along the way, akin perhaps to the self-congratulatory insistence that graffitti writing is an “art”—okay, but does it HAVE to be? The cumbersome process of moving entire walls into museums—which has been done—invites the question not of whether graffitti writing is “art” but whether art is graffitti writing—is it accessible for anyone who wants to try? What kind of recognition does it provide? Is moving graffitti walls inside a gallery or museum perhaps the reverse of the movement that is required for art to succeed as a democratic form?
Beat Street didn’t so much confront these question as it kind of willfully avoided them. If Beat Street‘s dancers were making their own fun, uninterested in slotting in with established ideas about what dancing should be used for, the graffitti thread in the movie argued the opposite point: that “artistic” graffitti (which was created for the movie by fine artists with no graffitti background) is preferable to wildstyle tagging. Wild-style is that scribbly stuff that’s under your nose wherever you go. In Beat Street there’s a villain character named Spit—a kind of straw-man wildstyle “tagger” who paints a simple and clear cursive “Spit” (which in the movie looks nothing like actual wildstyle) directly over other people’s painstakingly drop-shadowed artworks. The implication is that Spit wants to springboard himself to fame—he’s only interested in writing his own name—and simultaneously degrade the honest and selfless work of others (work that we are allied with, because we can instantly recognize it as “artistic”).
But, aside from the fact that anyone doing this wouldn’t last more than a day or two on the street, wildstylers are totally uninterested in that kind of fame. They make their tags look more like Kanji than English. If you’re not “down with the scene” then it’s indecipherable as direct code, and that’s what you come away with: that there are movements in this area that are beyond your apprehension. This block is someone else’s territory, sometimes, even if you live here. The only message wildstyle communicates to outsiders is its own ubiquity, but to the right eyes the different tags are as recognizable as the golden arches, or other signs that litter our landscape unasked-for. No one’s going to put the McDonald’s logo in a gallery unless Andy Warhol paints it, and no gallery is going to put on a wildstyle exhibition that would have any meaning—a lot like breakdancing, which you could do anywhere, to the coolest music that your friends could find (a breakdancing show done on stage to paying theater-goers would certainly, Special K’s crossover ambitions aside, miss the point), wildstyle’s value is in its cheapness and proximity. Alas, like Breakin‘s take on breakdancing, Beat Street preferred a humanist story of graf writers as noble savages creating “outsider art” that perhaps one day would be recognized as triumphs in a traditional sense. Besides Rae Dawn Chong, these are the most glaringly dated aspects of both these movies. But even though Beat Street kind of whiffed on the specifics, I found the story of Spit instructive. I came away with an understanding that, supervised only by my own conscience, I could create amazing things for people on my own.
I coerced my parents into letting me see Breakin again, on a visit to my grandparents’ house in Florida. There was some linoleum set up outside the theater with all-day “breakdancing lessons”—sanctioned by the cinema—and I vividly remember popping and locking “against” this other 10-year-old and reminding myself that I was supposed to look tough while I did it. I got the soundtrack on that same trip. “Reckless” by Ice-T was obviously the best thing on it, so I played it on my grandparents’ record player over and over, practicing my moves for hours alone by myself. I was Julia Stiles. I could sense that there was a whole ‘nother type of scene out there where people made their own kind of fun, and these movies suggested that if I danced hard enough, and adventurously enough, I could find it, no matter who I was.
Elisha Sessions in New York London Paris Munich • No Comments
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