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THE FT TOP 100 SONGS OF ALL TIME No. 76

Shystie - “Woman’s World”

She was meant to be the female Dizzee, the girl who would feminise grime enough for the charts and the broadsheets alike while still holding down the scene’s realness. Instead she released an album which was acclaimed by precisely no one except me and bought by even less, and the super-scary teenage MC Lady Fury did a diss track so harsh that Shystie hasn’t been heard of since in any capacity whatsoever. Shystie could be just as harsh, too, and she was at her best when she indulged her inner Lil Kim rather than aiming for the Ms Dynamite socially conscious model. On ‘Woman’s World’, she aims her rapid-fire flow squarely at MEN - not some men, or scrub men, but ALL MEN - and pumps them full of verbal bullets. Shystie is imagining a world, possibly a utopia, in which gender roles are reversed; she starts off joking about naked studs on Page Three and ends up fantasising about keeping men “in kennels like dogs”. After climaxing with some particularly outré what-the-fuck-did-she-just-say musings on body hair she delivers the sucker punch with relish: “Yeah we crossed the line / But men do that shit all the time!” Come back Shystie!

Earwhigs

Punk is always assumed to be about making a righteous noise as soon as possible…Politically engaged,nihilistic, angry, its speed and volume is inversely proportional to its craft.

The Earwhigs upend that. It is v.v. fast–7 songs in less then 7 minutes, and the sound is tubthumping (ie bass, drums, etc. There is a rawness here that maintains less craft means more purity.

For a bunch of suburban teenagers in a basement trying to break themselves out, they have an intense amount of goofy fun with the genres earnestness. They take pleasure in the muck of chaos.

I love the Earwhigs for the pop edge, the random modulations of voice and the hyper self aware deconstruction that is maintained at the same time as making a political message about boredom and exhaustion. They are capable and shrewd critics of the same things that are so forward and important to their work.

It reminds me of the best of Tape Mountains work from Portland, or Edna Walthorpe’s albums with the Pinefox or the ambiguity in the way James Kolchaka uses the word Rock.

I do not have a hard copy of the album, but I do have mp3s, and the one that I have included here is called “Your A Jerk and I don’t like you Like You” and it does tautology like no one else can.
Earwhigs%20-%20Youre%20a%20jerk.mp3

Afrirampo

The last year has been an odd one for me in gig terms - before last night, the youngest named acts I had seen were Ann Peebles and Iggy, both 58. Ike Turner, Billy Lee Riley, Syl Johnson, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Anthony Braxton - all old people. So when I loved a CDR by Afrirampo that a friend gave me, I was very up for seeing them, not just because they are young.

The first act on (not named on the posters, no announcement, so I don’t know who they were) wanted to be a Noize version of Captain Beefheart, but kind of missed the Fall en route and ended up sounding quite like Bogshed. I assume they are very disappointed. Then we got Leopard Leg, which was mostly women hitting many drum kits as fast and hard as they could, plus screaming. I enjoyed it, though their set was short and it kind of felt about enough.

Afrirampo are two Japanese women, one on drums, one on guitar. I thought they were fantastic, mainly thanks to the guitarist. There were strange and experimental parts, inevitably, but much of the time it struck me as simply the best and most thrilling rock and roll guitar playing I have heard in years - power, energy, pace, attack, variety of sound, control, it had it all. She was a strong singer too, but the way the voice, guitar and the comparably punchy drumming all worked together was hugely impressive - this wasn’t just a case of making a lot of noise, this was calculated, and the two were very in tune with each other, very tight, even in the parts where it went beyond what standard notations deal with. I guess it’s kind of hard to see a pair of young Japanese noize women becoming major international rock gods, but I honestly haven’t seen as exciting a rock band since sometime in the ’80s. Also, it was nice to be the oldest punter at a gig again - it’s been a while.

A SECRET HISTORY OF GREBO pt.2

Will Oldham, Oldhat

Every time I listen to Will Oldham these days I have a little less pleasure. I don’t know who said it first, but there was a long discussion of him as class tourism and mobility, and fake authentic, and how all of this was a very bad thing. How if we wanted to listen to Alan Lomax, we should go back to the big red box.

I have no idea why I believed this shit. I Listened to him again today, and his voice was as dark and moving as ever, his feeling was as deep and wide. Whether he is attempting to be poor, or geographicaly different, or stranger is of little consequence.

There is a meme in certain circles, that Lomax deserves less points, because he chose the least commercially available, the weirder music, to make an ideological point.

Maybe Lomax thought that pop would ever always be pop, and we would always have the mainstream stuff, and the work that needed to be preserved was the oddities. Oldham seems the opposite, and I’m glad for it.

lord of the dance

i’m not a huge fan of james wolcott’s writing — about music, film OR more recently politics — and plus i STILL haven’t read rip it up (or finished benW’s notorious review!), but this handy rave, which then actually waxes more lyrical about cunningham and cage, reminded me i. of THIS, and ii. of a joke i made on POPTIMISTS somewhere, that simonR had NEVER IN HIS LIFE WRITTEN ABOUT DANCE (which is i think true if by “dance” you don’t mean “dance music” — which he’s written lots about obv — but like ACTUAL DANCE DO YOU SEE) (as in moving yr body in non-ordinary-language-ways

anyway it remains a massive yet strangely under-examined and shied-away-from aspect of pop, from TAPDANCING to JAMES BROWN to BRITNEY

so, shy towards it and over-examine, plz

UPDATE: “does for post-punk… what Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years did for the pre-WWI French avant-garde” — see for me this, intended as a vast compliment, is actually a bit of a slap in the face

The FT Top 100 Songs Of All Time No.77

Depeche Mode - “Just Can’t Get Enough”

But also there’s their curious early period, the Vince Clark years, which have nothing of the gloom or metaphysics or BDSM and which amp up the pop bounce at the exclusion of all else. I didn’t nominate this song and I think the OMD tribute “New Life” is quietly a lot better, but “Just Can’t Get Enough” is probably the most ruthlessly Bucks Fizz catchy record Depeche Mode ever made and hence is one of their most memorable. It comes off as a more virginal, dry run Erasure but it’s still pleasantly ticklish that the same band nominally made this and the grisly “Barrel Of A Gun”.

POPTIMISM #6 Giveaway CD Tracklisting

The theme this month was cover versions, so if you got a copy of this, here’s what you heard, and if you didn’t, well, you can go and make your own. Apologies for the serious lack of ‘flow’ on this disc!

1. JOAN JETT - “Little Drummer Boy”: Suggested by Mark S (who else), Joan interprets the seasonal classic.
2. THE FLYING LIZARDS - “Great Balls Of Fire”: Not quite as good as their previously-Poptimized “Sex Machine”, this is still very enjoyable in a kind of Black-Box-Recorder-But-Good way.
3. THE VENTURES - “Hawaii 5-0″: Surf bongo rewax of the TV theme.
4. LOUCHIE LOU AND MICHIE ONE - “Shout”: Suggested by the magnificent DJ Katstevens, brilliant pop-reggae indiarubber version, surely the best “Shout” ever!
5. BONEY M - “King Of The Road”: The roads are much nicer in Germany.
6. BETH DITTO out of THE GOSSIP - “Sittin On The Dock Of The Bay”: taped at a karaoke night a few years ago.
7. ULTIMATE ft SUNGIRL - “Whiter Shade Of Pale”: boshin! The only version of this I have ever enjoyed.
8. LASSIGUE BENDTHAUS - “Jealous Guy”: This guy, Uwe Schmidt, also does Senor Coconut, and this is his micro-emo alter ego. Blatantly exploitative but rather good.
9. CO.RO - “Life On Mars (Smoke And Mirrors Remix)”: Poptimism ANTHEM since its first airing in August.
10. SOME BLUEGRASS DUDES - “Mamma Mia”: As has become traditional I have forgotten the name of the band Pete put on the CD. Hoedown reading of ABBA gem.
11. ME FIRST AND THE GIMME GIMMIES - “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina”: Third best version of Rice/Webber’s second best song. The “Have I said too much?” bit is particularly good.
12. SINEAD O’CONNOR - “Chiquitita”: Scarily intense version gets to the secret emo heart of ABBA’s song.
13. THE ASSOCIATES - “Love Hangover”: Six minutes that completely justify the existence of this song, the Associates, pop music, homo sapiens, etc. Even if he sounds like he’s taking a dump at the start.
14. T.A.T.U. - “How Soon Is Now?”: One of those cover versions that is so perfect in concept you fear for the execution, except they get it right.
15. LAMBCHOP - “This Corrosion”: Shout out to all the Goths! Chosen by Pete.
16. JAMELIA - “Numb”: Why this exists, I know not, but short of Britney doing “Faint” this is the best Linkin Park cover you’re likely to encounter.

A big thankyou also to DJ Robster, who got my solicitation email too late to contribute to the CD, but would have included the Pet Shop Boys’ superb “Where The Streets Have No Name / Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” mash-up.

kd lang—Dreams of An Everyday Housewife (From the Desperate Housewives Soundtrack)

The first season of Desperate Housewives was interesting, well written and decently acted; the whole thing was a game to determine exactly how camp the producer was attempting to be. When it was nominated for Emmys in the Comedy category, it pretty much gave up any of its dramatic force.

So when the soundtrack came around, its tracks a sort of compendium of domestic pop of the last 25 years or so; there were very little surprises. Mostly country, and mostly mediocre, and frankly mostly unrelated to what desperate housewives worked as both melodrama and meta-satire of melodrama. It was a pretty banal collection. (I am willing to take arguments that the Macy Grey and the Sara Evans tracks are exceptions, but not as strong an exception as the brilliant kd lang.)

kd lang was always smarter then her material. She continues to be smarter then her material. She covers here, Glen Campbell’s Dreams of an Everyday Housewife. The way she constructs it, making it sound swoony and dangerous, attractive and banal, extending the whole thing as far as it can go, making it appear and disappear in a languor that can only be pharmaceutical (in fact much more self aware and much more pharmaceutical then Liz Phair covering Mothers Little Helper a few tracks up)….just like her album Drag was about gender, drugs, presentation and sex, this song is about gender, drugs, presentation and housework.

The best thing about this cover is that it fully recognizes, and works w/i the genre that the television is making. If Desperate Housewives is about figuring out the domestic in a post-feminist age (and I recognize how strange it is to write that, realizing that it was developed by a gay republican working while inspired by his mother), kd lang realizes the strangeness, isolation and prescriptive hyper femminity of this task and messes with it, plays with it, fucks it up royally.

She’s good at that.

Who Knew?

Why have the two words Still and Midway been drifting around the atmosphere of late? Whenever we need a straw man that encompassed much of the worst of low achieving 90’s indie, we discard the Senseless Things, run right past the Mega City Four for Midway Still. And what’s this. Somehow Midway Still have a greatest hits album.

Sorry, let me say that again. A double compilation of their finest work.

Read: weep at I Will Try. Especially at the potential cover versions on disc two (to be continued)…