NICK DRAKE
When he’s consciously “English”, at least he doesn’t jump around telling us so, falling over himself in his enthusiasm to inform us how removed he is from those nasty, quasi-black-American rock’n'roll johnnies of the last 15 years, unlike pretty much everyone who was idolised in the sixth form and university common rooms of Britain in 1972 (when Drake was recording in fully deserved obscurity). The tentative praise must end there, and for good.
For Drake was *above* everyone and everything around him, and to understate things he never kept quiet about it. His entire musical output is full of self-centred, piteous whinges about his isolation from the uncaring world outside, how wonderful things had been back in the innocent 50s in his affluent home, innoculated in the heart of middle England. Try “Do you feel like a remnant of something that’s past? Do you find things are moving a little too fast” (“Hazy Jane I”)? Or how about “Forgotten while you’re here / Remembered for a while / A much updated ruin / From a much outdated style / Life is but a memory / Happened long ago” (the odiously claimed “eulogy” of “Fruit Tree”). And for a real treat, try the cringemakingly outdated rural traveller / loner / doubtless former servant analogies of “Poor Boy”: “Never sing for my supper / I never help my neighbour / Never do what is proper / For my fair share of labour / I’m a poor boy / And I’m a rover (!) / Count your coins and throw them over my shoulder / I may grow older / Nobody knows / How cold it grows / And nobody sees / How shaky my knees” … excuse me, I think I just coughed up a lung after typing out that last line.
This is pop music, Nick. It changes fast, it’s cut and thrust, it’s *modern*. If you feel left behind by the pace of the modern world, join a Tapist monastery. Why is it that this man’s exaggeratedly distant, I-want-to-slow-everything-down Romanticism is regarded with such reverence while Ian Anderson’s minstrel-in-the-gallery shtick is universally laughed at, when in truth they’re both as cowardly, reactionary and fearful of modernity (while I’m at it, fuck knows what Drake would have made of the early ’00s) as each other? Don’t believe what you read about the astonishing range and variety of Drake’s lyricism – it’s the same themes of rivers, sunsets, lost boys, lost love, life, death, with perhaps just a few more songs about sad young middle-class girls on “Bryter Layter” (the album – or specifically, the two “Hazey Jane” songs therein – which invented Belle and Sebastian, so that’s another reason to hate him) and the much-vaunted “bleakness” creeping in more on “Pink Moon”. As for the “last songs” on “Time Of No Reply”, they’re even worse, especially the blues cliche of “Black Eyed Dog”.
Drake’s virtual canonisation since his death in 1974, thousands of erstwhile prog fans kissing his grave weeping “We were wrong, we were wrong, how *could* we have thought Emerson, Lake and Palmer were more talented than you, please forgive us” is a sign of one of the great global cultural malaises of the last 25 years, the cult of the young boy who Died Too Soon, up there on his pedestal, validated forever, impossible to question, as untouchable as the Queen Mother. It’s a sad story from a culture that was still, just, above that pathetic level in the early 70s. Time for the myth to be broken: Nick Drake was a just-below-average mediocre melancholic post-hippy singer-songwriter, nothing more, nothing less. The pay-off line just has to be the sort of catchy slogan which enrages the man’s gatekeepers – Tanya Says: Drake = Fake.
Tanya Headon in I Hate Music • 848 views
Tanya, you are a massive douche.
I know it’s nine years old, but I’ve got to agree. I Say: Tanya = Whiner.
Nick Drake is by no means a sacred cow in my book. However, I’d take him and his romantic neo-luddism over some obstinate random blogger hipster bitch any day of the week. Oh, and your little slogan there at the end is one of the lamest and least witty things I’ve ever seen on FreakyTrigger, and that’s definitely saying something.
you are obviously a looser. It isn’t Nick’s fault your childhood was full of sarkastic, winey bitches like yourself, was it? for god’s sake. What do you listen to, acid death screeming mogolian music or something?
I’m not taking you to bits because you don’t appreciate what emence talent Nick had, it’s not your fault your a blind moron, I’m saying this because you are bitching about something because you think you should bitch.
drake equals fake? that’s just the single most lame thing I’ve ever, ever seen.
I have listened to drake now for 10 years. At first his music was important to me, because I used it as a means to deal with depression. This is drakes contribution to the popular culture. He is the patron saint of the clinically depressed after all. People see themselves through his introverted adolesent, yet clever, lyrics and amazing guitar.
You can say he was just a messed up middle-class kid – that is exactly what he was, he was a kid when he wrote these songs. At least he doesn’t try to fake “cool” like the rest of his generation.
People cry, you left us too soon, I agree, a little over the top. But I would have liked to have heard his grown up stuff. By the way, how do you know so much about someone you hate so much, esp. sinse he is not mainstream? Just stop listening to him. It’s probably the “in crowd” that you hate, not drake.
Another thing, black eyed dog was a metaphore used by churchhill to describe depression (after ww2)
Everytime I see a comment as Tanya Headon’s I recognize an envious frustrated voice screemming from the crowd. Just like being in the crowd was reason for frustration.
Selfcenterness makes one states as fake everything that doesn’t reflect their image and thoughts.
I’m sorry because it’s a lot of life and energy wasted. And this won’t changing anything on the fact that Nick Drake is a sensitive, fine artist and left a beautiful legacy. It’s probable Nick was very beyond his time, it’s understandable how he wasn’t a popstar on his years, he wouldn’t fit in minds who sees him as a fake.
Everytime I see a comment like Tanya Headon’s I recognize an envious frustrated voice screemming from the crowd. Just like being in the crowd was reason for frustration.
Selfcenterness makes one states as fake everything that doesn’t reflect their image and thoughts.
I’m sorry because it’s a lot of life and energy wasted. And this won’t changing anything on the fact that Nick Drake is a sensitive, fine artist and left a beautiful legacy. It’s probable Nick was very beyond his time, it’s understandable how he wasn’t a popstar on his years, he wouldn’t fit in minds who sees him as a fake.
He was who he was. He obviously put his finger on something vital and thousands realized his message and empathized with him.
Its easy and cheap to cite his background and laugh – but we are all the same under the skin.
Such a long time gone now.
sadly missed.
Tanya, you seem to be implying that Nick Drake was a silly boy given to egotism, narcissism, and arrogance, and I get the vibe that you are comparing him to people in today’s pop-music/Top 40 trash heap that care only for commercialism, money and/or marketability in their “songs”. While I can say that he was concerned about money, it was only that he was bewildered because he was trying to REACH people with his music, and the fact that he could not financially support himself too comfortably (which probably added to the /disease/ he had known as /depression/–don’t blame the feel of the lyrics on self-pity, the songs are not shallow) is proof that he was more concerned with putting out a message than with gaining fame.
Say whatever you want, but Nick has been quoted saying that if he’d felt his music had “helped even one person, it would have made worthwhile” (told to his mother in his later depressed years). He even became rather infuriated (yes, hard to believe Nick could ever have been angry, I know) at one John Martyn, his guitarist friend who was upset over not making enough money (and he was well above Nick success-wise at that point); “Nick said that Martyn’s music was becoming more insincere in an attempt to be more commercial…. Martyn replied that he wanted his records to be heard, not drop into an abyss as Nick’s had…. Didn’t Martyn understand that the whole point was to be popular but still authentic? He [Nick] called Martyn ‘devious’ and drove away.” Of course Nick Drake wasn’t a jerk, he felt extreme remorse over this incident only hours later, as one can see from the rest of the story should they bother to pick up the short book “A Much Updated Ruin From a Much Outdated Style” which is full of quotes and interviews, et cetera, from people who knew and worked with Nick Drake in his lifetime.
Personally, I enjoy Nick Drake’s work, particularly Black Eyed Dog and Fruit Tree, but also the lesser appreciated ones such as Mayfair, Fly, Parasite, Road, or Place to Be. So I am a little biased in defending him and all he stands for. But you can’t argue with the quotes from people who were actually there. (Of course I realize you CAN, but it’s inadvisable.)