Month: September 2003

tHAT wAS a nAUGHTY bIT oF cRAP: “HOWEVER, I’ve always thought the way music works backs up this ‘vision’, THE PAST AINT HISTORY! In this sense ‘Enlightenment’ (and thats where I come unstuck, who’s to say what is ‘Enlightened’?) always constitutes the future, and is from time to time stretched a little further “

I think he’s critiquing his own argument before he’s finished explaining it. Clearly I would argue viz someone like Merlin Stone that the 18th century enlightentment myth of progress (and indeed its lefty descendants with their faith in one-size fits all solutions — suckers!) is based on faulty premises. In other words, the (pre-platonic, socratic) past ain’t that backward. And I say that without, I hope, falling into noble savagery. Quite the reverse actually.

What I would also say is, I thijnk, identical to what Matt is trying to articulate: that the “progress” of music, of culture, is not linear, but elliptical, fractal even.

tHAT wAS a nAUGHTY bIT oF cRAP: “Obviously a band like the Velvet Underground (like it or not Paul Meme) are still, if not bursting with vital influence, then a little pungent. “

Hehehehe! I was wondering if this was going to come up. But let’s not get side tracked. My antipathy is partly curmudgeonly and entirely subjective. There are just very few Velvets records that I think are ANY cop at all — Heroin (good indie metal track) and… oh fuck knows. They don’t do much for me. And I’ve been listening to them since I was 12, played loads of their songs in a band a few years later. The whole reverence for them I find both mystifying and irritating in a way that I don’t for a band like, say the Stooges. And yes, you could probably critique the stooges as easily as the velvets. But the stooges did funhouse and Iggy did the Idiot, while the velvets did insipid sub folk and Lou Reed did, ummm, well quite a few good pop records actually, so lets leave it at that. I still reserve my right to snarl offensively about the velkvets being the most over-rated band in music history, I mean, if I gave it to Gen with boith barrels why not the rest of you?

I tend to think hipsters treat the velvets the same way the rest of the world treats the beatles. I don’t like the velvets much but I do like the beatles so go figure. Mind you, next time the sunday telegraph uses sunday morning in a TV ad I’ll sing along.

Of course the velvets are interesting objectively because of the milieu they sprang from but you’re all bored of that line of thinking so I’ll stop.

tHAT wAS a nAUGHTY bIT oF cRAP#106258083149864339: “The Silver Records.”

Jesus, the man’s on fire!

Incredible stuff, this is the music criticism equivalent of Jeff Mills — all flashing speed, lava, and power — combined with Slip It In-standard collector nerd punk invective. “So now the goons are coming to the party I thought it was time I did a bit of the old bollocks-on-the-table. Let all you kids snapping at my heels know what you’re up against. Which is an absolute disgrace because the records I’ve chosen to perform this nasty trick with are among the most important documents of the 20th century.” Hardcore. I’ve no idea what these records sound like and I probably never will but you’ve got to read this.

Funfair For The Common Man: “(but don’t get me started… “

Just talked to the wife about this, she reckons they were a great band too. Thing with the Poppies was, lots of girls liked them, cos they were funky and they were fun, and that must really piss off the high brow fan boys…

Funfair For The Common Man: “(but don’t get me started or i’ll veer off into my stock rant about how Pop Will Eat Itself invented breakbeat and they’d be taken a lot more seriously if only they’d taken themselves seriously. and trust me, we don’t need that) “

I think we do actually. This is a position I’ve argued for many times. Never forget that PWEI played with Public Enemy and are namechecked / credited by them on “Millions”. Can U Dig It was about as good as dance music made by white people who weren’t New Order or Adrian Sherwood got in those days. But as you say, no-one took them seriously cos they didn’t. That was an enormous strength IMO.

Funfair For The Common Man: “also i’d wonder how nobody seems (i may have missed it) to have mentioned Meat Beat Manifesto yet. certainly, my initial exposure to that end of dance music came from hearing stuff like Storm The Studio from my more industrialist friends”

Absolutely right Dubversion. Of course they went on to do a fantastic double-header single with Orbital — Edge of No Control. Bit of a central linkage to dance music there…

Right, a serious point for a minute. Matt Ingram’s comics are really excellent. I think Luka might be right. For a long while I didn’t twig that they were his comics — I thought he was scanning in really cool stuff from some underground genius. And so he was — for it was him. They’re so delightfully artful with such wry humour, the pace of them is so well judged, the characters so deftly formed with such economy. They’re great, they really work, not quite as art, not quite as a comic strip, but as great stories. And I’m not much of a fan of comics.

Derek Bailey biography: “Derek Bailey”

According to the Wire this is the guy we’re all supposed to be mad keen on.

Eh?

I know (now) he’s from Sheffield, so obviously is a cut above the hoi polloi, but I’d never heard of him before. Still don’t get it. As Matt (self-deprecatingly) puts it, The Wire is “just a jazz mag” (a neat double-entendre). It’s actually done a really good job of extending itself to cover other musics but for me its undoing is that it’s just too formalist in its outlook.

Or in other words, I read it, and I can see the reviews are well written, but page after page goes by without me recognising a single name, or indeed wanting to listen to many of the records. Steve Barker’s page (not Steve Barrow’s! cheers John) doesn’t count, of course. The Wire is at its best when it forgoes the artschool musique and does high brow reinterpretations of the underground but it doesn’t do that all that often. I wonder how much of their core audience is composed of jazz / modern classical fans who’d be turned off by too much “pop” stuff.

blissblogLone White Guy Strikes Again. Never noticed it before but there is a classic one in the R. Kelly ‘Ignition (remix)’ video (one of the very few Kelly songs I’ve liked actually)

yeah I spotted this and assumed it had already been noted.

Ignition is fantastic, probably my favourite record of the year, you really want to sing along to those “boop boop, beep beep” bits in the car to get the full effect! I wonder if you can get it on vinyl. I wonder if there’s an accapella so I can do a suitably braindead jungle remix. The way some of the choruses double up to build the tension is fabulous. Wonder who wrote it?

Oh, while we’re on the subject: Timberlake. Asking if the man himself is any good as anything other than a dancer seems to me to be kind of redundant. The fact is he appears on some very good records. Rock Your Body is great. It’s all about the producer, innit?

blissblog: “come to think of it, a lot of industrial pierced-dick types ended up making techno-ravey stuff, didn’t they, so maybe it’s not so odd (remember psykick warriors of gaia?”

Very funny characterisation Simon! FWIW I think the link from industrial to acid house is seminal, as much because of the crowd as the musicians. My memory is that much of the industrial scene formed part of initial audience for acid. If you think of the milieu being more important than the leadership, which of course it is, then the industrial scene had a fair bit to do with the emergence ofdance music, a especially the Clink Street end of things — so maybe there is a conventional link to hardcore and jungle that way. Certainly the industrial / Some Bizarre crew were among the very first to get heavily into ecstasy, particularly therough Sleazy’s connections. And of course Soft Cell and Matt Johnson were making records on E long before most.

PWOG made some ace records (especially — oh the irony! the drum club remix of Exit 23) and were pretty fantastic live in a minimal techno nothing-happens-and-it’s-really-exciting-tweaking-with-their-atari sort of way.