James Blackshaw - The Cloud of Unknowing Julianna Barwick - Flown Brian McBride - Supposed Essay On The Piano (B Major Piano Adagietto) johnny_ripper - House VGA Host - Hatch Pauline Oliveros - Horse Sings from Cloud Anthony Braxton - Dedicated to Ann and Peter Allen Julius Eastman - Evil Nigger Kaki King - Frame Arvo Pärt - Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten Carl Stone - Banteay Srey Aerial M - Always Farewell
Track 1 from The Cloud of Unknowing (Tompkins Square, 2012) Track 2 from The Magic Place (Asthmatic Kitty, 2011) Track 3 from The Effective Disconnect (Kranky, 2010) Track 4 from soundtrack for a film that doesn't exist (s/r, 2011) Track 5 from Copper Lemon Zinc (direct download; ilkae, 2005). RIP Walter Carpenter. You are missed. Track 6 from Accordion and Voice (Important, 2007) Track 7 from For Alto (Delmark, 1970) Track 8 from Unjust Malaise (New World, 2005). Read more of Eastman's extraordinary story on fellow composer Mary Jane Leach's website and in Kyle Gann'sliner notes to this near-exhaustive compilation. Track 9 from Legs to Make Us Longer (Red Ink, 2004) Track 10 from Tabula Rasa (EMI, 1998). Played by the Bournemouth Sinfonietta. Track 11 from Mom's (New Albion, 1992). Also seek out the album, if only to read this great piece on the title track and to marvel at the fact that it was made in 1992. Track 12 from As Performed by... (Domino, 1997)
Do Make Say Think - When Day Chokes the Night Frearson Howe - You Will Be Mine, Mr Frankenstein Fake Limbs - Balding But Angry Full Toilet - Keys, Wallet, Phone, Gun Sax Ruins - Zurna Taksim Men's Recovery Project - E-Mail Is A Men's Room Georgia Fife & Drum Band - Why Sorrow Done Passed Me Around Madison County Senior Center Singers - Wasn't That A Mystery Glen Francis - All My Days Are Numbered Warcloud - Ghost Pirates (Old Los Angeles) feat. Skarekrow Blockhead - Tools of the Industry Screaming Females - It All Means Nothing Petra Haden - Cuckoo Clock Mika Vainio - Magnetosense Bruce Springsteen - Atlantic City A Silver Mt Zion - For Wanda
Track 1 from Goodbye Enemy Airship The Landlord Is Dead (Constellation, 2000) Track 2 from Bad Brain Call. lyrics by Annabel Frearson, from the work of Mary Shelley; music by Joe Howe; vocals by Julia Scott Track 3 from Man Feelings (2012) Track 4 from Full Toilet (Sub Pop, 2011) Track 5 from Yawiquo (Ipecac, 2009) Track 6 from The Golden Triumph of Naked Hostility (Vermiform, 1998) Tracks 7 and 8 from Fire in My Bones (Tompkins Square, 2009) Track 9 from Jamaican gospel compilation Noah Found Grace (Social Music Records, 2010) Track 10 from Nightmares That Surface from Shallow Sleep (Skarekrow Music, 2002) Track 11 from Interludes After Midnight (Ninja Tune, 2012) Track 12 from Ugly (Don Giovanni, 2012) Track 13 from Imaginaryland (WIN, 1999) Track 14 from Fe₃O₄ - Magnetite (Touch, 2012) Track 15 from Nebraska (Columbia, 1982) Track 16 from the album He Has Left Us Alone but Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corner of Our Rooms... (Constellation, 2000)
Jesco White - This First Dance earthtone9 - Wolverine Blues Death Grips - @deathgripz Brown Bag AllStars - The League Of Intoxicated Gentlemen KEEPBULLFIGHTING - Finally Decide Y La Bamba - Juniper Marine Research - Parallel Horizontal Laura Rivers - That's Alright (Since My Soul Has Got A Seat Up In The Kingdom) Divorce - Horseheads Can't - Too Shy Arthur Collins - The Preacher And The Bear Screaming Females - Something Ugly Lois Maffeo - Davey Satellite High - 1-800 Suicide Weird Paul Petroskey - Pay For Your Tacos Quickly And Securely Rev Lonnie Farris - Peace In The Valley Anna Fermin & The Trigger Gospel - The Box It Came In Jesco White - Whole New Life Interlude Pharoah Sanders - The Gathering
Intro and Track 18 from the PBS documentary Dancing Outlaw (1991) Track 2 is an Entombed cover available when you pledged to et9's new album campaign on Pledgemusic Track 3 from Adult Swim's singles series Track 4 i really wish i remember where this was from. Track 5 from the album Summer '08 Track 6 from the album Lupon (Tender Loving Empire) Track 7 from the album Sounds from the Gulf Stream (K) Track 8 and Track 16 from the great 3CD rare gospel set Fire in My Bones (Tompkins Square) Track 9 from the "Horseheads/Whiskey Shoes" 7" Track 10 from Jessica "Can't" Rylan's early blown-out easy listening CD Can't Vs. The World. More on the great story behind this disc at the WFMU blog Track 11 from Mac's 2012 WFMU premium Hits of the Acoustic Era. Probably still available for a station donation. Track 12 from Ugly (Don Giovanni). i've got a lot of love for Marissa Paternoster's voice Track 13 from Butterfly Kiss (K) Track 14 from sort-of covers record Sing Along With Satellite High, "the exact opposite of... dorks on youtube play[ing] rap songs on acoustic guitar" Track 15 from Medically Necessary and also Weird Paul's greatest hits record 25 Lo-Fi Years Track 17 from the Wanda Jackson tribute comp Hard Headed Woman Track 19 from Elevation (Impulse!)
i haven't blogged for hundreds of thousands of years, and so in the next few weeks i will attempt to share a bunch of old stuff that i have done and not written about in that time. Starting in reverse order, here's some notes about a new mix.
i haven't got a regular radio gig at the moment, so i've started uploading weekly mixes with Mixcloud.
Because Mixcloud has a useless 1,000-character description limit, i can't provide the proper notes that i want to, so i'm going to post them here. Here's the first, for Hosking's Consisto. Download it here.
"Hosking's Consisto" was an amazing phrase thrown up by Captcha.
"What i'm enjoying lately, and i only remember one of them off-hand, but i keep coming across aphorisms that you hear all the time and then you find you loathe when you really think about them. One of them is the Benjamin Disraeli1 quote – "anyone who is not a liberal when he is young has no heart, and anyone who is not a conservative when he is old has no head." And my thought is, when you start creating pithy little aphorisms to justify heartlessness, you already know you've wandered off the path of righteousness."
helped drove a rock band around Germany. went to America. made peace with London, went to Leeds a lot.
signed on way too many times. got A Proper Job. moved out, moved on, moved city.
saw my cousin marry her high school sweetheart. saw my awesome sister graduate uni [hi Fee]. lost a grandma.
reconnected with some amazing old friends, met some excellent new friends both IRL and OTI.
met some rad internet people IRL [hi Jesse, Ruby Kid].
graduated journalism school seemingly just as the industry caves in on itself [hi Newsies].
went to a series of excruciating job interviews [ask me about the one where i ended up talking about Skrewdriver].
continued to learn and unlearn a load of important stuff.
didn't protest awful shit enough.
developed flash crushes on way too many beautiful & awesome women both IRL and OTI [hi... no, not telling you].
started a new radio show. released two fantastic records by three artists [hi Liam, hi Arran [+Dicks]] and reached a year-end Top 50 list in a music magazine i really like [tho Not Here was robbed imho].
read some books, watched films & TV, saw some art. listened to a shitload of fantastic music, didn't actually hear that much bad music at all. saw some amazing live shows, including someone i've been waiting about 13 years to see. embraced poptimism.
didn't play enough [any given musical instrument]. bought a trumpet. started writing a rap album. helped film a music video. formed a band [hi El].
ate some great food, ate prolly way more really shitty food, drank enough coffee to poison a town's water supply.
continued to be pretty unhealthy. discovered i actually really like olives.
engaged in too many Herculean struggles with my own mood swings.
didn't blog enough. tracked the amazing rise of the Horse_ebooks phenom. did my bit to make a washed-up '90s alt-rock singer eat 2 dozen eggs on YouTube. went mildly viral tweeting about a Beefheart/Bono kerfuffle.
ran up the back of a minibus in traffic.
found a stray dog, returned the dog. sat next to a dog in church. saw some great fish and other marine life.
wore various enjoyable hats [favourites: ushanka; Yankees cap; mushroom]
plans for 2012: stop being quite so desperately unhealthy; rejuvenate this blog and get back into writing about music more; release about 5 more records; hopefully meet a load more rad people; generally get my weight up in all ways except literally.
shout out to everyone i love and everyone who loves me.
and if 2012 doesn't bring about that much-vaunted Mayan apocalypse i'ma start the shit myself.
Friday, 9 December 2011
"I wish a rock guy would cover an R&B song. That way I could learn that underneath
all that popularity and blackness there's something great." ~ Jesse Thorn
Ahahahaha
Nice one, Leona. A+ trolling of all those metal/punk/rock groups and fans that still think pop/R'n'B covers are hilarious and novel i.t.y.o.o.l. 2011.
Anyway, this version doesn't sound any worse to me than Reznor's painfully teenage original (he was nearly 30 years old when The Downward Spiral came out) or Johnny Cash's curiously-revered-but-nonetheless-drab-by-his-high-standards take. Actually, if you're gonna do a song this laughably bombastic and self-regarding, it strikes me that big stadium-pop production, clunking cardboard-box snares, melodramatic vocal dive-bombing, and artificial string sections are by far the most honest ways of approaching it.
Clearance Sale, the new album from Desert Island Dicks and Where Woodwose Walk, sees the two noise groups reflecting on the ongoing global financial crisis that started in the late 2000s.
Across ten tracks (including one collaboration) named after British retail chains that went into administration following the crisis, the two groups use noise, drones, field recordings, sampling and live instrumentation to explore connections between the current malaise and the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Train sounds, Cisco Houston, news reports, Woolworths, Zavvi, "Buddy, Can You Spare A Dime?", corporate malfeasance and T.S. Eliot all come together for the first time in what critics are already calling "Capitalist Realism in a disused arms factory".
The album is available from Amoebic Industries as pay-what-you-want digital download or CDr priced at £3 plus p&p. The two groups have pledged to make an accompanying follow-up album in the event of a double-dip recession.
Desert Island Dicks are an anonymous international plunderphonic noise collective. No-one is certain who is in the group nor even how many of them there are. Their 2009 album The Shades of Jazz to Come was named in Marina Rosenfeld and Raz Mesinai's "Top 15 Albums of 2009" list in The Wire.
Where Woodwose Walk is the one-man project of Brighton, UK resident Arran Jones. When not composing, he enjoys allotment gardening, snail collecting and incorrect music.
Amoebic Industries is a jenky DIY label based out of a Glasgow flat.
They have released records by 30KB, Aurist and Desert Island Dicks.
In preparation for this year's customary wheeling out of the widespread media lie [backed by attention-seeking politicians and clergy] about how some authority or other is trying to "ban" or "rename" or "rebrand" or "prevent people from celebrating" Christmas, usually "because it might offend [Muslims/ethnic minorities/whoever is the current scapegoat du jour]", i've been reading The Winterval Myth,Kevin Arscott's excellent and forensic analysis of a falsehood that has now been repeated by the British press at least 283 times since 1998. [If only it came in a physical form which could be used to knock people who perpetuate such garbage about the head with.]
There's a particularly telling passage with regards to the state of British [Western?] journalism on page 9 of the PDF, concerning Kelvin MacKenzie's experiment soon after he began editing The Sun to only hire Oxbridge graduates as reporters, and why this 'failed' [his assessment].
"Satisfied that my bold move would take The Sun to a higher plain I waited for the results. They were not forthcoming. In fact, very little emerged from my new hirelings. Most disappointing.
I had to get to the bottom of this. It became clear that with their keen and analytical minds they had made a fatal mistake – they had continued investigating every story to the point where they had satisfied themselves that there was no story at all. This would not do.
I called in one of the super-brains and explained a philosophy that had served me well over the years. The reporter leant forward with an earnest look as I told him the secret: if a story sounded true it probably was true and should therefore appear in the paper or there would be lots of white, unexplained spaces."
So there you have it. If it sounds true, it's probably true. The most surprising aspect of this for me is not the fact of what MacKenzie says, which should be pretty obvious to anyone who's been paying attention, but how cheerfully, casually blasé he is about acknowledging this.
Which is how, 13 years after an event, you end up with almost 300 repetitions of a straight-up tissue of lies about that event. And with a culture where the people who have the skills actually required to do a job are considered overqualified for that job because those skills don't prop up the 'correct' financial and ideological interests. Good stuff. I await 2011's blizzard of Winterval fabrications with interest.
You better stay aloof when the troops move/ the suicide booths soothe/ the who's who of looters shoot, the bullets go 'zoom, zoom'...
Holy shit there is new El-P music, from his forthcoming LP Cancer for Cure on Fat Possum.
This has the same tangible of event as when he previewed the unmixed "Tasmanian Pain Coaster" from ISWYD on Gilles Peterson's Radio 1 show, and "Drones Over BKLYN" lives up to expectations. Beat and rhymes alike are so damn tough, instantly recognisable but still stylistically progressing from his past work. On this evidence, the album should be another massive one.
Fuck, i'm not gonna describe it, just click "play" below and see for yourself. i think i'm on my tenth or eleventh play of the day so far.
Firstly, here’s three reasons ATP-run festivals are better than other festivals.
1. No more tents. Getting lashed and watching cool music is fun. Going back to a campsite after the bands have finished, probably in the dark and with the ground churned into five different kinds of crap by bad weather and foot traffic, and sleeping inside essentially an oversized Pac-a-Mac, probably with large rocks digging into your back, most likely surrounded by loud idiots, and running the risk of having your stuff stolen, or having someone even more wasted than you are piss on your tent in the night, fall into it and demolish it, or even set it on fire (all of these things I have seen at festivals)? Well, that’s not so much my idea of fun. ATP neatly sidesteps these problems by setting most of its festivals in Butlins, with chalets and microwaves and showers and proper beds. No longer do I have to live like an unenthusiastic Duke of Edinburgh participant for three days to watch some cool bands...
My review of ATP's recent I'll Be Your Mirror fest:
Features Company Flow, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Alan Moore and Stephen O'Malley, Foot Village, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Acoustic Ladyland, PJ Harvey, (MF) DOOM, and Portishead;
Begins with one of the most ridiculous run-on sentences i've ever written;
Is now up in two parts at Never Enough Notes. (part 1, part 2)
Pleasingly, Foot Village have already expressed their approval!
My plan to blog more was slightly thwarted by travel: i'm in New England at the moment, and internet access has been a bit sporadic, so i've been doing analogue stuff like reading books and playing piano. Crazy, i know.
Anyway, i've been working out this Pharoah Sanders piece, which is tremendous fun. It's kind of a palate cleanser in the middle of the parent LP Elevation, a joyful 5-minute respite from the crazed overblown reed and piano soloing surrounding it (which, don't get me wrong, is also great). i've been listening to an ever-increasing amount of brilliant avant-garde 60s/70s jazz recently, and while some of it can sound like a challenge at first, i reckon this track could easily find its way to many people's hearts without too much difficulty. Nigerian jùjúhighlife is for lovers.
(Originally from Daniel, whose radio show i've probably recommended you before, and for good reason.)
What's Bruza up to these days? i hope he's still performing, but i'm not that in touch with the grime scene so i dunno really. But let's hope that, if he's decided to stop, he's become a motivational speaker or something, because this tune is seriously like the abstract concept of positive thinking did a load of uppers and then went round a club vigorously pumping everyone by the hand making them feel better.
With such a likeable MC, loads of lyrical gems, and of course his trademark interjections of "YEEEAAHHHHH!" and "YA GET MEEEE!" i actually don't see how it's possible not to be cheered up by this.
If i had to pick my three favourite lines, i'd probably go for:
• "put your balls in it!"
• "The feeling of success can be spine-chillin'/ people talk about they want the ice (YEEEAAHHHHH!)/ but they spend too much time chillin'/ watching someone else do what they wanna do while they're chillin'"
• and of course the amazing bit towards the end where he talks about how he hasn't eaten anything all day "...oh, apart from me cereal!"
So here's a toast to Bruza for getting me through many a crap day. Cheers mate!
Two completely unexpected TV appearances from Random Jon Poole (Cardiacs/Wildhearts/God Damn Whores) on prime-time telly!
In the first one, Random Jon and his mother-in-law appear in support of his wife Louise as she scoops a tidy win on a 2005 episode of BBC1's The Lottery Show. Dale Winton calls him "a bit camp", which is a pretty funny thing to be called by Dale Winton.
Then there's this appearance on Chris Tarrant vehicle It's Not What You Know in 2008, which is honestly maybe the most contrived quiz show format i've ever seen, apparently involving the contestants trying to defeat Johnny Ball, Dr Fox, Toby Young, Brian Sewell and Miranda Krestovnikoff at knowing the answer to trivia questions.
The couple seem to be doing quite well, but i have no idea how it all turns out because the uploader didn't manage to tape the whole thing. The highlight is probably Random Jon hilariously pretending to find Tarrant's crap jokes funny, and also mocking his frankly weird impersonation of Sylvester Stallone.
i alluded to Song(s) of the Year in my Jacques Greene post the other day, and this is another of my definite contenders. i keep returning to "Intruder" over and over.
Apart from just being a great record, part of what's so fun about "Intruder" is just how many layers of détournement have gone into making it what it is. In case anyone doesn't know the provenance of the music in this song, here's a brief memeology.
First there was Antoine Dodson, who went viral in July last year after a shit-talking interview with his local TV station in which he warned his sister Kelly's attempted rapist what was coming to him.
Then The Gregory Brothers, apparently a country/soul group but pretty much known for their novelty "Auto-Tune the News" series of YouTube videos, caught wind of the musical cadences of Antoine's voice (and what Wikipedia calls his "flamboyant delivery") and autotuned parts of his and his Kelly's interview and exposition from the news anchor, into an R&B song, "Bed Intruder Song".
This went even more viral, getting to number 89 in the Billboard charts on iTunes downloads alone and racking up, so far, 86 million YouTube hits. Détourne 1: from bad news story to pop smash.1 Then other performers started to do their own versions, 2,500 of them by this time last year, ranging from rubbish (the singer out of Paramore and someone from kiddy-punks New Found Glory; the human sigh that is Dane Cook) to ace (Afua's bass-based snippet; the shamisen arrangement). Then there's this brilliant version by the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University Marching Band. Détourne 2: from pop smash to parade-ground anthem.
It was probably inevitable that there'd end up being a rap interpolation of the theme, but we're lucky that it was done by someone with the skills of Isaiah Toothtaker and Wavves drummer Jacob Safari, who produced "Intruder", and that they recognised that the marching band's huge, powerful version was the best (to sample, or otherwise), and furthermore that all the song lacked was a tonne of skittering drum machines and an MC as charismatic as he is casually menacing.
Toothtaker's repurposing of the song as a snitches-get-stitches warning is détourne 3, from light-hearted YouTube meme (albeit excellently done) back to urgent street-level threat. This is only emphasised by an excellent split-screen video, in which Toothtaker's performance to camera is mixed with a creepy animation of a clenching and unclenching hand, and scenes of shootouts, car accidents, fist fights and bits of Mark Hejnar's 1996 film Affliction2 (particularly Turbo Tom's eye-gouging, and hilariously unhinged gun nut Full Force Frank) edited together by experimental filmmaker Walter Gross. And the cycle is complete, with the salvaging of something concretely decent from a shifting sea of memetics. It'd be interesting to know if Antoine Dodson, who was able to move his family out of the projects from his share of the "Bed Intruder Song" proceeds, has heard this, and if so what he made of it.
1 Although the questionable power relations of affluent white New York hipsters bolstering their rep off the back of the sincere anger of a wronged black housing project resident didn't go unnoticed. NYU music professor Jason King told NPR, "It has a really good hook, but it's problematic, too. There's a way in which the aesthetics of black poverty—the way they talk and they speak and they look — sort of becomes this fodder for humor without any interest in the context of the conditions in which people actually live", while comedian/Onion web editor Baratunde Thurston elaborated that "As the remix took off, I became increasingly uncomfortable with its separation from the underlying situation. A woman was sexually assaulted and her brother was rightfully upset. People online seemed to be laughing at him and not with him (because he wasn't laughing), as Dodson fulfilled multiple stereotypes in one short news segment. Watching the wider Web jump on this meme, all but forgetting why Dodson was upset, seemed like a form of ‘class tourism.’ Folks with no exposure to the projects could dip their toes into YouTube and get a taste." 2 Worth a watch if you're into mental underground/transgressive culture, but probably only once.
Attended a Noah's Ark-themed fancy dress party in Leeds on Friday, dressed as Noah himself (this basically entailed wearing a removal company delivery blanket from the back of a car, a belt made from plaited twine and some awful open-toed sandals, with shorts and t-shirt beneath for modesty). At one point i needed to go to the shops and had to debate with myself whether to go in full costume and risk either looking like a weird religious cultist, or possibly catch a furious beatdown if misinterpreted as taking the piss out of religious garb; or take off the robe and risk looking like the kind of man who wears open-toed sandals. Eventually i decided that bad style was preferable to possibly inciting a religious riot through comical misunderstanding, and left the robe behind. Still don't know if i made the right choice.
Anyway, the party was going pretty well and i kept the costume on for what i consider a heroically long time. Later on, about 30 people all seemed to turn up at once, most of whom weren't making any attempt to wear a costume, and the vibe started shifting from "Noah's Ark theme" to "regular house party with a fucking weird guy standing around wearing a sack". It was like Keith Richards in the 70s getting a complete change of blood or something. i finally bailed after most of the animals removed their face paint and i started getting the stinkeye from more people who had arrived and who apparently had no idea there even was a fancy dress theme.
But anyway, i digress a bit. Part of the crew-of-30 that arrived later included one guy who took to the decks, threw out all the Serious Bro Music For Serious Bro Parties soundtrack (= drum'n'bass, pretty much) that had prevailed before (a welcome relief for me, cuz honestly that shit bores me beyond death) and instead starting throwing on wedding party anthems like Hall & Oates' "Maneater" and Bobby Brown's "Two Can Play at That Game". One thing he dropped early on in his set was today's SOTD. i'm pretty sure when this came out i found it pretty annoying, but hearing it again i'd forgotten what a good pop record it is, despite the duo behind it doing that annoying thing where their artist name is taken from their obvious musical or personal 'selling point' (c.f. Gangstagrass; Drums and Tuba; Buke and Gass; every shit dance troupe or boy/girl group on Britain's Got Talent).
i've always liked the skipping rhythm patterns of UK garage and the way that they manage to be swinging yet urgent at the same time, added to which "Flowers"' technique of micro-cut vocal samples only seems to have got more relevant over time. Basically, a great pop tune. And, pleasingly, it turns out Sweet Female Attitude were from Stockport! Result. Now, if you'll excuse me a contrived Bill Brysonesque ending, i'ma go and listen to last.fm's UK garage station for more turn-of-the-millennium action.
Now that my American readers (i know there's at least, like, 3 of you) have access to Spodify too, i feel less bad about sharing playlists and stuff on it. Now if only the people at the far, far superior turntable.fm could sort it so you can use it outside the States (i managed 2 glorious days on there before the geoblock).
But anyway yeh, until then, here's a Spotify playlist featuring virtually the entire Dischord Records disc(h)ography, in order. For some reason, The Snakes records aren't on there – a minor shame, as a bit of relentlessly daft novelty pseudo-rap would balance out a lot of the relentless seriousness of the rest – and some of the split-label releases are also missing. But that's still a good 4 solid days' worth of hardcore, punk, and good indie rock. Dig in...
Someone in my comments section asked if i was going to do an Amy Winehouse tribute post. The answer is probably 'no' in terms of a straightforward/regular tribute, basically because i've been away this weekend, and by now everything i would want to say has been expressed better by others. i did, however, want to do a brief post about the pernicious myth of the '27 Club' – the apparently ominous cluster of musicians dying at the untimely age of 27.
Something of a minor cultural industry has built up around this idea – there's a graphic novel,1a film, a website,2 a truly crappy t-shirt,3 and article after article after article after dummkopf article. A huge amount of the media coverage of Amy W's death has included some kind of reference to this construct, which I find troubling for a number of reasons. So, briefly, here's why i hate the 27 Club.
• Firstly, it's not a sodding club. None of its "members" filled out an application. Many probably didn't even know about it. It's a retroactive cliche applied by Rock Trivia Buffs, a smug insincere trumpeting of a stupid factoid, often for people who don't care about the subject matter beyond the superficial, and by same. Consequently, it reduces all that was great, fun, profound, meaningful, stirring, and/or important about those artists' work to the level of a cheese-wedge question in a game of Trivial Pursuit: Rock Edition™.
• It demotes complex, difficult, diverse lives down to just one detail, the coincidence of their shared death age, making no distinctions between each. But Kurt Cobain shot himself. D. Boon died when a van he was in, driven by someone else, crashed. Janis OD'd, Brian Jones drowned. Robert Johnson, Freaky Tah and Mia Zapata were murdered. What the hell do these have in common, beyond a number? It just feeds rock(ism)'s dumb obsession with The Canon in the worst possible way.
• It's as meaningless and arbitrary as, say, a "list of musicians still alive at 35". If "list of musicians still alive at 35"or "list of musicians who died at 27" were proposed even as Wikipedia articles, they'd rightly be rejected because of this. (Except, of course, in the 27 Club's case, it's now been discussed so much in 'reputable' sources that, head-shakingly, it does indeed have a legimitate Wikipedia article, as linked above.)
• Perhaps worst of all, in the case of the 'Club' members who perished self-destructively instead of completely accidentally, it shores up those other shit myths of tortured artisthood4 and "live fast die young",5 as if early death were something to aspire to, as if art or passion or any of the other great things about the work of "Club" "members" were only valid for the young. As if Ornette Coleman, 82 years old and still regularly blowing groups half or a quarter of his age off stage, isn't cooler than a pretty 27-year-old corpse. Sorry, but i'd rather Amy, Kurt, whoever, had lived.
And it's also the totally disingenuous way it's ominously, fearfully spoken of ("the curse of 27") in hushed tones by the same people whose "who will be next?" speculation (tabloids, gossip sites, internet snipers, record labels, promoters) often helps it become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the way that once that prophecy is fulfilled, the same people are just as quick to turn it round as a marketing gimmick for themselves as mythmakers or "Experts", behind a mask of "concern" or "sorrow" for the latest victim they're solemnly pretending to care about.
So yeah. If you buy into the narrative of the 27 Club, please stop. The world already has all the trite awful shit it needs.
RIP Amy.
1 "The 27 Club Now Includes Amy Winehouse", trumpets their website's new header proudly. "The 27 Club Experts predicted Amy's death in The 27s, this 2008 book". Well done guys! Must be nice to be so insightful. 2 "Depending on your preference, The 27s is a pop culture phenomenon, a weird curse, or a statistical anomaly" – or, in fact, none of the above. 3 Bearing a misquote of the Neil Young lyric quoted in Kurt Cobain's suicide note. 4 "The price for membership was more than he could handle", groans the tagline of The 27 Club, the myth's 2008 filmic incarnation. Or a quote from random American rehab centre co-founder quoted in one of the predictable Forever 27 articles linked to above, theorising, on the basis of nothing, that Amy herself may actually "have secretly wanted to be part of the 27 Club". Riiight. 5 "You know, death was always funny to me before. It was funny to all of us. I heard Joey say a thousand times "live fast, die young and leave a pretty corpse"... It was always "Oi, dead boy, this one's for you, I'll see you when I get there, motherfucker. And now I'm not even sure there is a there."
House producer Jacques Greene's been getting a lot of play recently for some Radiohead remixes he did. Can't front, Thom Yorke's obviously got some good taste. Because Radiohead remixes still have a bit too much Radiohead in there for my taste, i prefer the 20-year-old Canadian's original stuff, and "Another Girl" is a sublime highlight.
The kind of murky, subaquatic synths that have been voguish lately combine with an ace late-90s UK garage rhythm that's as funky as it is propulsive, and best of all the whole thing's topped with the kind of anthemic looped soul-ish vocals that sorta recall the breakbeat hardcore era building to a euphoric climax. Antoin, who put me on to this, has already called it as song of the year, and while i've got a few possible candidates for that title so far, "Another Girl" is definitely up there.
