Blog ‘92: PUT ON MY RAVING SHOES

19. Shut Up And Dance - I’m Ravin’ I’m Ravin’

How many times has a melody stalled on the tip of your tongue? Na-nur-na-nur NAH-ah NAAA. Dammit, what is it? Where on earth is that from? Na-nur-nah wee-woo-WEEEE-urr-wooo. You can’t remember what comes next, but if someone could *just* give you the first bit of the chorus you’d surely be able to hum the whole thing, even though you don’t know what the song’s called. Or who it’s by. … read on …

The Poptimist Files

This post is simply a way of getting all my Pitchfork columns linked to in one place so I can put it on the sidebar.

Poptimist #1: Music Hall, the Beatles, the power of the crowd.
Poptimist #2: Spoilers in music, MP3 blogs, the delights of conversation.
Poptimist #3: Thrill-Power Overload! 2000AD at 30.
Poptimist #4: What I like in music writing (Eshun, McDonald, Sinker, Kogan, Robinson)
Poptimist #5: ABBA - the story of a band that grew up.
Poptimist #6: Are The Smiths funny? How Big Facts come to control bands’ stories.
Poptimist #7: How to get rid of your record collection and what to do next.
Poptimist #8: POPTIMIST ALL-GORILLA SPECIAL!
Poptimist #9: Good taste and the slow death of British pop music.
Poptimist #10: In which Britney Spears makes the best album of the last five years.
Poptimist #11: Use other tests please.
Poptimist #12: Of Pop and Polls and Peel!
Poptimist #13: Marketing is nothing to be scared of.
Poptimist #14: The moment before punk: experiments in antediluvian archaeology.
Poptimist #15: A life in favourite albums.
Poptimist #16: Speculation vs Annotation, Final Crisis vs Secret Invasion
Poptimist #17: What might a history of pop be like?
Poptimist #18: 45 Things I Love About Pop
Poptimist #19: Triangulation, drug of the nation.

The Broken World - Tim Etchells

When I found out my favourite theatre director in the world had written his first novel I was intrigued, but also somewhat trepidacious. Tim’s theatre writing (which I talked about a bit here) is so strongly of and about theatre itself, would he trip up in an entirely different mode of writing? Would what he produces that makes forced ents such a theatrical force work on the page?

So I was in borders with a gift voucher, unsure of what to spend it on, when I remembered and picked it up, not quite out of duty, but frankly without any great expectation (not unlike when i got the new girls aloud alBUM).

It is ASTONISHING. I can’t remember the last time a book, a BOOK, has hit me like this, it might have been shampoo planet (yes, i read it before generation x, because waterstones in cheltenham didn’t have gen x) or My Idea of Fun, fifteen years ago. You might think “ah fanboy, bound to like it” but it’s so far away from his theatrical writing, and yet contains hints of all his beautiful little linguistic ticks that made me cheer inside when I spotted one.

Anyway, it may be the best novel yet written about blogging, the argot is so spot-on, the way the unnamed narrator, like all bloggers, moves away from the Proper Subject At Hand (a walkthrough of mindbogglingly complex computer game) to talk about himself, his friends (who are all referred to by their internet names throughout), his crappy job making Cooked Circular Food (a beautiful neologism that i intend to use at Every Appropriate Point) and everything else in his real life. There’s clearly a deep love for the subject matter, alienation and distance has always a key driver in forced ents work, but an embrace of distance, that it’s a good thing, and this links so strongly with how people immerse themselves in MMORPGs that it was kind of inevitable that Tim would see the potential in them.

Really, I can’t recommend it highly enough, and am worried that i’m doing a shocking job of describing how great this book is, but I HAD to tell you about it.

ARCHIVE ALLLLLLLLLLIIIIIIIIIUUUUUUMS!!!!!

ALLLLLLLLLLIIIIIIIIIUUUUUUMS!!!!! Independence Day. Isn’t it marvellous? Hurrah hurrah let’s kill the stripper and those hippies! That’s the kind of morals I WANT from my films! Until the aliens bugger up by deciding just to kill EVERYBODY. Where’s the subtlety, the art, the je ne sais quoi indeed about that? Who cares when we have plucky heroes like Will Smith! He wears a vest! Jeff Goldbum! He wears glasses and is nerdy for Hollywood! And Bill Pullman as Mister President himself. Unfortunately I keep reading “Hitler” for “Hiller”, but I’m sure that’s not what the film intended. Is it? Surely not.

EITHER WAY biff kapow “oh no they have shields”! Well duh, they’re space aliens with 15 mile long ships, do you think they might have shields? We’ve grown up on Star Trek whether we like it or not and we KNOW how these things work. Implausibility in the ranks also rears it’s gooey head (why are all evil aliens gungey? ans: they are in league with Dick and Dom in da Bungalow who WE ALL KNOW are extra-terrestials) when J. Goldbum and W. Smith fly into the Alien’s Big House. We have been told the aliens are telepathic. Surely they would sense STONKING GREBT BIG BRAINWAVES not of their origin as soon as they approached the ship, surely surely? But nope, and therefore the world is saved by a computer virus. Hasn’t this happpened before? The Net with S. Bullock? Mm. *

In a nutshell, silly gooey aliens turn up and destroy everything. BUT NOT THE HUMAN SPIRIT ya ya. Some people fly about in planes and an old drunk saves the day. The only problem I have with this film is that he sobers up on strong coffee before getting into the plane. Luckily this diminishes none of his mentalism (the US army is more mental if they let him on a jet fighter in the first place I say) and off he goes to shoot alien arse. Believe it or don’t, there are moments of actual PANIC transmitted in the film which makes me glad I didn’t see it in the cinema, for danger of pants-wetting issues. Nevertheless, readers will be reassured to note that scenes of terror/fear/panic usw are then followed by ridiculously OTT scenes of American patriotism causing yucks a-go-go.

Summing up: I place it up there at least with Queen of the Dammed, although vampires > aliens. And, was the British army chap NIGEL HAVERS??

* Google also gives me The Virus but I can’t imagine anyone apart from Pete has seen that anyway.

Manga review #3: Absolute Boyfriend; I Won’t Let You Become A Star!; and Aromatics

The story in today’s Independent on manga is pretty telling about what the author thinks of “comics for girls”. Quote: “The [typical] manga reader was a man, and he probably liked SF and he could be a student. But then they decided, let’s sell these as books. And so girls could walk into a book-shop and pick up their angst-ridden pretty-boy vampire comics and not feel intimidated by the smell or the staff”. Followed by in brackets, the shocking fact that 7%-85% percent of readers of ‘yaoi’ or Boys Love comix are in fact GURLIES. Anyway yesh but now onto the “real” manga. Patronising much, o fuckwit? There’s a picture of a manga written by a female author but you immediately realise it can’t go anywhere because half of the font is COMIC SANS.

Anyway, this article reminded me that recently I picked up my first SHOUJO MANGA (manga for gurlies, typically published by Shoujo Beat over here)! My decision to Try It (given that I hates all comics) was provoked by intense lolz from recent jdrama Yasuko to Kenji, which featured boyband drummer Masahiro Matsuoka as an ex-biker gang leader turned awesome shoujo manga artiste (each episode would feature him dressing up his two goons as eg swooning schoolgirls, cheerleaders, puppy-walkers etc).

I picked up “Absolute Boyfriend”, as I have familiarity with the jdrama (‘Zettai Kareshi’) based on the manga, which turns out to come with two further ‘stand-alone’ comics, “I Won’t Let You Become A Star” and “Aromatics”. I’m not sure if each ‘book’ has one ‘serial’ in each instalment, followed by two standalones or whether this is a one off as it was the last episode of ‘Absolute Boyfriend’, mind. As AB is the finale of a long-running story, it’s actually quite hard to say anything about it without talking about the drama which is a different kettle of cream-puffs. So I shan’t bother! … read on …

JOHN LENNON - “(Just Like) Starting Over”

I don’t remember John Lennon being killed. It would be more accurate to say I don’t remember John Lennon being alive. His murder is the first thing I knew about him, a founding fact of pop music: John Lennon is dead. For me he has been dead longer than Bolan or Hendrix or Buddy Holly, who also came packaged in their deaths, but who I heard about far later. … read on …

ABBA - “Super Trouper”

The mockery of pop stars who write songs about how tough their lives are is as routinised as any of the tour grind they complain about: a reliable cue to take a celebrity down a peg. “Super Trouper” seems to have escaped this, maybe because ridicule was diverted to its silly, awkward title – or maybe because its exhausted candour rings too true. “Wishing every show was the last show”; “bored of a success that never ends”; “how can anyone be so lonely?” – as sung here these aren’t just the decadent complaints of over-indulged divas, they’re the sound of a miserable woman who’s stuck on a golden treadmill and wants off. … read on …

500: 1-16

Introduction

Several years ago I did a thing on Freaky Trigger called “Thousand“: this involved playing through the 1,000 MP3s I’d collected at that point - a very small number it seems now - and writing about them in real time: one play per song, one draft, hit publish, that’s it. It was a notebook more than anything else and not especially worth revisiting - since my blog didn’t even have comments at the time I don’t know what I was trying to achieve!

I liked the idea of that kind of on-the-hoof writing though and have looked for another opportunity to do it with a little more point and structure. The Pitchfork 500 seems like a good one: it’s a book laying out a history of pop from 1977 by way of 500 songs chosen by the editors. They’ve made every effort to make the book more than just a list - it’s implicitly also a story (of how music developed) and a statement (of what matters in music) and a musical experience (it’s sequenced as a playlist). It’s ambitious and thoughtful and if it’s wrong sometimes it deserves the honour of people working out why it is. So I think you should buy it. I also wrote a dozen of its 500 entries, so I’m not completely neutral here, but I have no inside knowledge about how the book was put together.

This series of posts - which will be intermittent, as I don’t often have uninterrupted two-hour writing/listening chunks - is simply me listening to the 500 songs, in order, and jotting down what I think. I’m also reading along, and sometimes that’s informing the notes I make. Where I’ve nothing to say about a song I will indicate that I’m skipping it.

Hope you enjoy it. … read on …

The Douglas Bader Minefield Complex

I remember the Baader-Meinhof trial. I do. I was only five but I remember it being on the ITN news (you know the one with the jaunty jingle that was on after Blue Peter gave up the ghost on the BBC). I remember it because I also remember a wet Sunday afternoon watching Reach For The Skies, the Douglas Bader story, and getting the two Ba(a)ders mixed up. Frankly it did not help that Douglas Bader flew for the RAF (Royal Air Force) and the Baader Meinhof Gang were part of the RAF (Red Army Faction). I suppose it was instructive to my later career as an inveterate liar that all it takes is some random little coincidence to make a story all the more plausible. And that piece of the jigsaw fell in to plae years later when i discovered the theory behind minefields, misremembered the word Meinhof and that explained why Douglas Bader didn’t have any legs in the first place. … read on …

BLONDIE - “The Tide Is High”

Horns pitched to sound like strings; strings played low and swinging like horns; a pot-pourri of roughly Caribbean percussion – instrumentally, “The Tide Is High” is delightful escapism. Even so it’s a little bit of a let-down. Debbie Harry gives a gentle, intimate performance, but gentle intimacy isn’t really what you go to Debbie Harry for. Once she savaged her rivals and dismissed her lovers, now she’s playing a long game – with supreme and justified confidence, of course, but the woozy, flippant Blondie on show here lack the flash and fire of previous encounters. “Tide” is a postcard from a band on holiday, something to cheer up a dreary Autumn: the holiday just ended up a little longer than anyone thought at the time.

Linkasaurus Rex

A bunch of FT writers and close associates have NEW BLOGS (or bloglike entities) which demand some of your attention: … read on …