This seems reasonable

This seems reasonable but I wonder how much I actually agree with Douglas Wolk’s Village Voice analysis of what we might have called, if someone hadn’t thought of this a few years ago, the new wave of new wave. Wolk says that he ‘can’t help noticing that I like some of these bands less on their own merits than because they remind me of music I already liked’: which seems fair enough. But: a) this stuff, reissues and new material is all new(s) to me; b) there is no such thing as repetition. Rather than approach events in terms of what they remind us of, shouldn’t we assess them in terms of what seems new about them?

BREAKFAST OF BANALITY 8: JELLY ROLL MORTON - Ham And Eggs

BREAKFAST OF BANALITY 8: JELLY ROLL MORTON - Ham And Eggs

I wonder if you have ever applied for a job dear reader. I know I have. Its important to be specific on ones CV - mine has the usual clauses (will work for gin, no mornings or indeed early afternoons, absolutely no music in the office) but often our success lies in our previous qualifications. So imagine if you will a CV which contained a previous job so terrible, so despicable that you would never work again. Inventor of the gas chamber would be one. Designer of Mr Blobby might be another. Voice of Woody Woodpecker would certainly be a third. But the claim on Jelly Roll Morton’s CV puts all of these into shame, shame I tell you. For even if you got past the fact that young Ferdinand for some reason prefered the moniker Jelly Roll - you would not be able to ignore this genocidical error. Clears as the gut on his oversized body it said “Inventor Of Jazz”.

Jazz is something I have talked about at length before. A musical form which is rife with contradictions - based on improvisation and yet stiflingly dull. And one of the reasons for this contradiction is the man with the foodstuff in his name. For if there is one thing worse that inventing jazz, it must surely be pretending to invent jazz. Jazz had been around for ages before Jelly Roll got on the case. Jazz had been annoying punters in New Orleans for a good twenty years before Morton decided to invent it, burbling here and there with a touch of ragtime and other easily improvised arrangements. What Morton did was to write it down. Apparently a classically trained pianist I can certainly see his desire to get away from the so-called classics. And if his idea was to write down a new form of unlistenable music to make everyone realise that al music was inherently a tissue of tat then I could applaude him. But instead this womanised, gambler and occasional piano abuse set down the “rules” for writing down boring old jazz standards.

Ham And Eggs is one such trad piece of tedium. Named after his favourite breakfast treat it was one of many songs that this unsurprisingly fat man wrote about food and eating. His sweet tooth was so bad that he had to get his gnashers replaced by a diamond, which he later pawned in the depression. Indeed there is a school of thought (Headmistress Ms T.Headon) that puts the Depression in the US wholly down to the invention of Jazz as a form. With a music so directionless, you got listeners being equally directionless or even suicidal. Hence a massive stock market crash and an inability to afford Ham And Eggs, or even a Jelly Roll. Let alone a lousy 78 rpm recording of a man named after a foodstuff singing a song about food.

diskant

diskant - “a network of websites by independent fanzines, bands and record labels”, based in Glasgow and included here because it’s doing a good thing and because I want to make more effort with my links sidebar and this serves as a handy reminder. (Also they emailed me!)

UK Garage In 2001 – Down Down BIZZNIZZ

Part 1: The Scene

I’m obsessed, I know; I bang on about it endlessly, analysing minute shifts and gradations, imagining radical mutations that only exist in my head, devoting reams of print space to nothing much in particular. And yet, despite all this, UK Garage is an awfully difficult area of music for me to write about. Difficult because I’m aware of how personally involved I am in the music’s success – an involvement that cleverer and healthier listeners tend to shy away from. Sometimes I feel like my patronage – downloading tracks, buying compilations, visiting clubs by myself if necessary, and then turning those experiences into something I can write about that might interest others – is all that keeps the style on its feet, keeps it generating delights for me in some sort of elaborate karmic feedback loop. To be obsessed with an artist is one thing, but to have such an attachment to something so abstract as a ìsceneî or ìmovementî is quite another, and even then UK Garage seems an odd choice, requiring a particularly skewed worldview. Clearly I’m not the right person for an impartial assessment.

For to immerse oneself fully within garage is not just to enjoy the odd track, but to wholeheartedly buy into - and believe in the success of - a musical narrative that stretches over a decade, encompassing whole genres (’ardkore, jungle, etc.) within a broader sound that can perhaps best be called ìthe sound of the piratesî. It’s to become so intimately associated with that story’s sonic twists and turns that the style’s constant musical characteristics actually become objective values in themselves, bestowing worth upon a track simply by being present. In fact UK Garage, much more than the sounds that preceded it, is music about that story, distilling every worthwhile element into a heady mixture that is undeniably ìpirateî music. In this way, garage is sonically more true to itself than jungle; the producers have a better instinctive understanding of the passage of the broader narrative they’re swept up within, and maybe because of that seem to know better where it should go next.

But where did garage go in 2001? The unbelievable rise of So Solid Crew excepted, from the outside it’s hard to tell that it went anywhere at all. It’s in fact arguable that by the end of 2000, garage had no sonic stories left to tell, having completed its street-to-academy progression by achieving both pop crossover (Arful Dodger, Craig David) and serious muso acclaim (MJ Cole, Wookie), not to mention its own breakaway sub-genre in the form of ìbreakbeat garageî. At any rate, it may have seemed as though garage had left itself little space to develop, and that the rise of the MC was a result of this: the areas of progression within the scene would now be vocal, lyrical and cultural, but not musical.

Garage’s chart-action less pronounced last year too, with less fabulously sparkling pop gems lighting up the higher reaches than during the Golden Age of The Artful Dodger. In truth there were probably more garage pop hits last year than prior, but their sheer diversity - from Misteeq’s enthusiastic helium-pop to Oxide & Neutrino’s angst-rave to DJ Pied Piper’s happy-go-lucky MC-vehicle to The Streets’ oddball geezers – undermined any impression of a full-frontal assault. But as any music critic will tell you, diversity and disparateness doesn’t equal interesting stories.

Instead, 2001 may go down as the year of breakbeat garage, and that would be a bit of a shame because last year this development, which had once seemed potentially invigorating, revealed itself to be a massive red herring. There were a multitude of tracks that followed the same deadening one-bar trudge of looped breakbeat + squelchy bassline, spiked with wacky noises or edgy dialogue sampled from martial arts films; a formula that quickly became played-out to the point of strong irritation. More crucially though, even at its best breakbeat garage comes across as both inessential and little more than a subtractive style: not only are creativity and invention thin on the ground, but the very stylistic foundation it rests upon – the use of a ‘funky’ and ‘natural’ looped break rather than 2-step’s trademark sub-Timbaland beats – excises the dangerousness of garage’s rhythmic excess, replacing it with a reassuring but unexciting familiarity.

At the same time, the sparkling pop-fluff vocal tracks began to lose their attraction, due to the drop in genuinely exciting productions (although as always there were exceptions like Selena’s trembling ìGive It Upî, and of course anything by Mis-Teeq) and the rise in the endless succession of useless remixes. With this radical tapering off at its extreme edges (pop vs. breakbeat), garage’s healthy diversity was beginning to resemble an Achilles’ heel. It’s easy to imagine many garage producers literally recoiling in horror from the twin dooms of over-sugared pop tracks and deeply uninteresting breakbeat dirges; consequently, instead of pulling the style into two distinct groups, these extremes actually cancelled out each other’s magnetic forces. The challenge facing producers was (and remains) discovering how to work past these two pitfalls, as opposed to simply remaining caught between them.

Why I Don’t Want Free Records

Why I Don’t Want Free Records

A while ago on an ILM thread I talked about there being two kinds of writing about music. The first is basically consumer-guide writing. You write a review of a record, grade it if you have to, and try to make the writing clear and useful for an interested consumer. Most music writing - certainly most paid-for music writing - is like this.

The second doesn’t have as easy a definition but it does have an analogue. The travel sections of bookshops stock two kinds of books - Lonely Planet style visitors’ guides, and ‘travel writing’ - books by people like Bill Bryson, or Bruce Chatwin, personalised records of experiences. You read those books to find out about a place, not in order to plan a trip or find out where to go but to get an idea of what going there is actually like. Of course that means the books are as much about the author as about the places the author visits - there’s no way of separating the experience of travel from the personality of the traveller, though the best writers use that personality to touch something in their readers too.

The other type of music writing is like that. Music is what you travel around, and you make notes on the journey. Some people who read it might be inspired to follow in your ‘footsteps’, but that’s not the point of the writing exactly. I’m not saying that this kind of music is better - it’s probably less useful and it’s generally low-audience - it’s just the type I prefer reading and writing. I do think, though, that the web, with its straight-to-publication possibilities and lack of profit-pressure, is a great place for this writing to thrive.

Which doesn’t explain why I’m not leaping at the chance to get music for free - especially since I’m big on file-sharing. To stretch the analogy a bit, though, getting free CDs from the record companies seems to be a bit like arriving in an Eastern Bloc country in the 80s and being given the official Ministry of Tourism tour. Or - a less loaded metaphor - it’s like a package holiday. So much of listening to music involves the acts of discovery, the chance encounters, the wounded feelings of the outraged consumer, the impatient wait for a long-anticipated release date. Replacing those feelings for an envelope of CDs on the doormat, for pay or otherwise, is putting too much distance between my listening and my life.

(An old piece of mine might be relevant here.)

THE CORAL — ‘Shadows Fall’

THE CORAL — ‘Shadows Fall’

British indie music saved (again)! That’s the idea, anyway — the papers (here’s one typical review) have been going mad for The Coral. They didn’t sound too bad from the write-ups, either. I like to be told what to like, sometimes — it’s very rare for a hyped new band to have nothing interesting about them. So what’s interesting about The Coral? They fit into a lazy, have-a-go Brit-psych tradition that I enjoy, with throaty beat-boom vocals on the faster tracks. ‘Shadows Fall’ breaks its own flow with a bit of vaudeville shuffle which — let’s be honest — sounds a bit like Space, and that’s a mistake, but a short one. The tunes are good; the energy is there; the swagger isn’t excessive. Ian Broudie produces and makes the band sound a little too bright, not quite hazy enough — I’m reminded of a what a cleaned-up Beta Band would sound like, or a Beta Band who cared about cleaning up.

So, yeah, I like it. I like them. Is it depressing that British guitar pop has backslid so much that even these half-steps towards an individual voice are hailed as leaps and bounds? A little bit, yes — but minor pleasures are pleasures nonetheless.

Clearly we deplore lists and polls

Clearly we deplore lists and polls here at NYLPM but let’s face it most of these singles here are bloody good. Yes there’s a nostalgist bias but the records are generally the kind of records you approach for nostalgic reasons and leave with renewed and humble respect.

Attention Jess! (And interested other parties)

Attention Jess! (And interested other parties) - the Asha Bhosle and Kishore Kumar track I wrote about here is now up on the GrokePile. As usual, you have to have a FilePile account (or have access ot one), to download. I am thinking of doing a sort-of MP3-of-the-week deal, but I’m slightly nervous of the bandwidth hassles that might ensue.

Daniel Beddingfield (aka Bedroomeyes) has finally got a new single coming out.

Daniel Beddingfield (aka Bedroomeyes) has finally got a new single coming out. And unsurprisingly it sounds a bit like Gotta Get Thru This, with its jerky garage production - this time dripped in all sorts of whizzy-banging effects noises. Its this kitchen sink approach which makes it half decent. Certainly Beddingfield’s chorus is a back of a fag packet job, his pop culture references are obvious at best and what is that voice he is singing in. I’m sure it isn’t a comedy Jamaican accent - not in 2002 - but if it isn’t then what on earth is it? The sound of a man who really, really needs a shit?

In at number nine with a bullet.

Flaskaland

Flaskaland: this looks excellent.