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Compliments of the season to you

Now it’s officially really actually December we can all start listening to Christmas songs. There had been some talk of doing a flood of Christmas posts on here, but it’s been pointed out to me that I have a list of best tracks ever to finish, so I’m going to concentrate on that instead.

People wanting some festive cheer should wander over to Poptimists, which always has a few MP3s going and is running an audio advent calendar. (You might also wish to visit Poptimists’ monstrous disowned sibling Sukrat). If that’s not enough for you, or if LiveJournal brings you out in hives, then I recommend this ILM thread for all yr Wobs greed needs.

THE FT Top 100 Tracks of All Time No.73

Smiley Culture - “Police Officer”

It has been 20 years since this simple song was released and about a dozen since I fell for it, playing it on a dare in an 80s disco. I have listened to it well over a hundred times, and I’m not tired of it, which isn’t something you can say for many records where the pleasure is in the punchlines.

Certainly more feted ’story records’ don’t come close. Dylan’s “Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts” is by one of my favourite acts, on a really good album: it’s awful. The Shangri-Las’ death ballads are sublime but I don’t listen to them as much as Smiley, and I don’t smile at them as much either. What is it about this song?

Not the story, really, especially as the ‘twist’ is dumb: Culture’s already told the coppers his name a few lines ago. No, it’s the telling that stays fresh. That slight increase in tempo at the end when he knows he’s going to get away with it, and his natural cockiness reasserts itself, “me draw out me Parker”. The venal cop, all oily mangnanimity, “a favour for a FAYvour”. The bubbling pride, while the situation’s still in the balance, “number one was its number”. And the brilliant interrogation, switching on a half-beat between eager police and weary, hassled, contemptuous Smiley, “What you got in the boot then son? Me cyassete recorder.” Right then the police are everybully, and Smiley is you.

irony as a big fat non-existent LIE!

i. a very dear friend = former drummer w.mike flowers p0ps
ii. he wz givin me a lift home after we met for his gf T’s bday meet at walthamstow dogs
iii. on his car stereo wz playin an old tape of a live show from i think 1996
iv. it wz TREMENDOUS! (partly just bcz excellent quality recording and technical performance)
v. yes yes of course you state that these songs were being performed in a “pisstakey” manner BUT
vi. this is frankly meaningless* and sez more abt YOUR DESIRE to let YOURSELF off the hook for
vii. likin these versions, and through them graspin things you never noticed abt viz various 70s bowie songs!!
viii. back to the tape: the technique wz exact and exactin (see iv.)
ix. => if the original song is any good — as wz NOT the only mf original that played — then a “non-serious” version cannot in fact dim the original’s strength, and may open it out (if you only hear the original w.automatic eras these days, as is sorely likely the case w.bowie)
x. bcz a key layer of light entertainment music showcasin had collapsed since the 60s — the val doonican/lulu continuum you could call it — it became necessary to invent a NEW SPACE**, and
xi. the way to DO this in the mid-90s (in the context of brit pop cool ew ew) was to PRETEND to be ironic
xii. but actually not, so NOT. qed. also plus hurrah!!

*(there is no material correlative as evidence, it is a face-saving assumption abt the intentionality of tambo and bones which actually indicts the prejudicial refusal to listen of mr interlocutor)
**the old space bein the one that eg scott walker and jim webb established their respective auteurdoms within; in the shrivelled*** space of the 90s both wd have had to be eg merely elvis costello and NEVER have found themselves a useable torque
***ok altered is perhaps better than shrivelled: as well as spaces that had vanished, new spaces also existed that DIDN’T in the 60s, viz the “rock press”, but there AWESOMENESS wz NO LONGER PRTOECTED BY TRIVIALITY (= there is NO equivalent in the 90s rock press to eg hendrix appearing on the lulu show)

Rave Rave Rave Murder

VIM - Maggie’s Last Party. Just a bit of Iron Lady cut-up fun for the weekend - the music on this is really familiar but I can’t quite place it.

Pop Notes

Rescued from a LJ comments box, about the Rachel Stevens album (and the Girls Aloud one):

“That is kind of the problem though, it’s a terrific album partly because it’s a series of little revived micro-genres (’the Bucks Fizz one’, ‘the Adam Ant one’ and so on) but it’s hard to sell that to a mass market and harder still if it’s going to be packaged in as dull a way as possible.

The Spice Girls got big not so much from showing off in the lad mags but because they pushed the gang-of-mates angle, dare I say it that GA’s marketing people need to be thinking more Lambrini?”

First impressions of the new Madonna album: too little variation, she’s fallen for the bangin’ pop JLC style - and who wouldn’t - but she doesn’t have many ideas what to do with it, vocally, so a lot of the time it sounds like she’s making it up as she goes along over the top of some (great) grooves. The one about “New York” takes this to an amazing/awful extreme, there is one bit where she says new york ain’t for whiny little pussies and it’s like a poptastic Lou Reed! The one with the Arabic sample shd be a single probably.

Fans of more thoughtful criticism should look at the revived Church Of Me.

I have about 200 Christmas songs sitting on my hard drive and I want to write about them.

Sarabeth–Rascall Flatts

The woman (child) this song is named for, is dying. Nothing makes people feel sadder faster then a child dying (this time of leukemia) and people like Martina McBride have made whole careers out of it (download God’s Will for a rather awful example.

So having this song starting with diagnosis and ending with her dancing at the prom–one is reminded about Wilde on Dickens (One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.) But they pull it off, its not mawkish at all.

The song features plain detail, common speech, little detail, and a touch of clinicism (actually mentioning blood flow and surrival rates) The plainness, the lack of hand wringing, the complete and pure rigor moves away (in fact refutes) domestic melodrama.

I am shocked Rascal Flatts had it in them.

Abba Should Have Waited

So Madonna’s song Frozen has been banned from Belgium. Not because of its implicit criticisms of the European policy on climate change, but rather that she has lost a plagiarism case on the song in the Belgian courts. Apparently it sounds a fair bit like Ma vie fout l’camp by Belgian songwriter Salvatore Acquavita. And he thought his life was going nowhere!

The big questions that arise from this case are:
a) Where can I hear a copy of Acquaviva’s work to judge for myself?
b) What kind of power does the Belgian court have to enforce the removal of this song from the album?
c) What exactly was Madge doing in the 90’s? Hanging around bars in Belgium it would appears, waiting for one great song: especially considering that Frozen is probably one of her best 90’s tracks.

One wonders if the prevalence of mp3’s may also allow the courts an alternative action. ie: A search and destroy function in i-Tunes which would initially completely wipe the existence of the song, much like the Chinese completely wiped the existence of their global voyages in 1421.

irony as history pt 2

other things that i liked or made me laugh:

i. gambo wipin away a tear when sabbaf were inducted
ii. the general old folks reunion small-world-intit feelin
iii. angus young in LONG PANTS AT LAST!!
iv. p.townshend sounds EXACTLY LIKE (and looks a little like) my neighbour: viz quizzical, querulous, quite high-pitched “hippie” cockney
v. the commentator who explained pink floyd’s ageless astonishingness thus: hummable tunes played by excellent musicians in refined settings

irony as history

inducting j.hendrix and b.dylan into the UK Rock Hall of Fame, the powers-that-institutionalise opted for STARS OF TODAY doing cover versions: slash (plus a winwood and some now-rotund jimi sidemen) for the former, alanis morisette for the latter

and he wz careful and serious and strangely polite really; and she wz bright-eyed and amused and comfy — and the latter worked a lot better, for the (deeply absurd) situation

UPDATE: bah, 25 years have not improved love will tear us apart; it is still JD’s worst song, weighed down by by the inadequacies of its singer then and its singer now, both of them better than OK on other songs, but hapless and crummy on this morose, structurally half-formed sales-pitch wettie

Choad my Nang etc.

I notice that the BBC has tagged us as one of the sites which writes about pop music in simple language rather than using “bloglish”, which is a tool whereby The Kids confuse The Man and stop him buying their music with his so-called “fifty quids”.

Well done Alan Connor of the BBC for a sensible reply to an absurd Observer article (look it up if you can be botherd), but now we have a reputation to live up to, so here are five great pop songs I’ve been listening to recently (i.e. that have just come up on my iPod), and a good reason why to like each of them.

FRANKIE KNUCKLES ft JAMIE PRINCIPAL - “Baby Wants To Ride”: Because it’s a paranoid early house track which mixes up sex and spirituality, Prince style, and then brings in geopolitics while the beat goes on and you-the-listener get the uneasy feeling that it’s 3am and you’ve gone home from the club with a lunatic.

RACHEL STEVENS - “Nothing Good About This Goodbye”: Because it’s the most heartfelt, bittersweet and straightforward pop song from Rachel Stevens’ second album - which is an excellent record but ‘heartfelt and straightforward’ seems to suit Rachel more than ‘clever and cool’.

THE CONTOURS - “First I Look At The Purse”: Because it’s the cousin to the more famous Motown hit “Money” and just as delightfully cynical. “Why waste time / Looking at the waistline?”

WILL SMITH - “Will 2K”: Because it’s such a perfect use of an iconic rock sample, and because squares like to party too.

BROADCAST - “Echo’s Answer”: Because it’s the sound of a winter night, and after four years I still can’t get less vague than that.

Normal gibberish can now resume.