Why i hate the "27 Club".

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,¹ a 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."

RIP Bingo Gazingo (1924 — 2010)

By all accounts, 2009 was a year full of death. i'd hoped this year was going to give us a reprieve from losing great people, but this morning i learned of the first death in 2010 of someone i admired. You'd hesitate to call him a celebrity by any stretch of the imagination, but New York street/performance poet Bingo Gazingo's obscurity likely served as an aid to his singular imagination and oddball creativity.

photo taken from The Danger Global Warming Project

With his often crude, spiky, agitated and hilarious rants¹ about sex, dementia, and, especially, popular culture,² Gazingo (born Murray Wachs in Queens in 1924³) was a Monday night regular every week at New York's Bowery Poetry Club. He was struck by a taxi on his way to one of these very events, presumably on December 28th, and died on New Year's Day.

The joy of outsider music, its celebrants often advise, is the self-contained purity offered by its enormous distance from the mainstream, and more often than not the underground, of popular culture. Outsider artists care not for the puny accolades of convention, runs the argument: they are motivated solely by their own idiosyncratic desires to make art in the way they want to. Others express scepticism about this, hinting that the artists' perceived "purity" is solely or in large part a construct of outsider fans projecting onto the practitioners their own desire to escape from modern mainstream culture or be hailed as ahead of some hipster bell-curve. A 2004 Village Voice piece by Joseph McCombs uses Bingo as an exemplar of this view:

Outsider music is uniquely valid because it's pure, the documentarians claim, untainted by rules or demands of commerce over art. Which would be fabulous if it were true. But in the 2003 U.K. documentary Outsiders, elderly New York City wordsmith Bingo Gazingo readily admits that he really just wants to make money and get write-ups in the Voice...

i don't see the two as contradictory, though. Bingo Gazingo was never less than upfront about his desire for wealth and stardom: in his younger days, he wrote the lyrics to 1955's "Eleven Roses" by New Jersey R&B group The Wrens, which received a "so-so" review from Billboard, and while his other attempts to make it as a songwriter were unsuccessful, he nonetheless continued to write "ballads, novelties, show tunes, country-and-western songs, anything he thought would sell, and left them at stage doors at the Roxy, the Paramount and the Strand, in a time-honored tradition ''to try to get my songs to the artists.''"⁴ [NYT]

His repeated insistence that he wrote songs, not poems, and that he himself should be considered a singer "despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary", was apparently neither gimmick nor eccentricity:

''I think he always insists they're songs because he knows that you can get royalties for songs,'' says a disk jockey at WFMU, 91.1 FM, who is known only as Stork. ''And he knows how royalties work. And even though he comes across as an old eccentric, I think Bingo's secret is that he really wants to be famous and make a million dollars. He knows what he's doing.''

In a sense, McCombs has got cause and effect back-to-front. BG's outsider status wasn't negated by his desire to become rich and famous, but actually confirmed and supported by his attempts to achieve this through writing songs like, say, "I Love You So Fucking Much I Can't Shit" and delivering them at 100mph through his remaining teeth. He wasn't exactly playing by the rules. The "purity" of his work, if that's what you want to call it, didn't derive from some rejection of mainstream pop culture, but from the sheer gulf between the work and any pop cultural criteria for acceptance you could care to name. The crucial factor is not intention – plenty of artists want to be rich'n'famous, after all – but the choices made in the execution of this aim. In an age of homogenised American Idol slop⁵ he simply didn't accept that his art was less interesting or viable or potentially saleable than that of Clay Aiken or Kelly Clarkson or whatever the name of the latest poppet to emerge from that sausage factory is.⁶

None of which is to suggest, as is another criticism sometimes levelled at Outsider fans,⁷ that appreciation of Gazingo's music is limited to a kind of sidelong ironic smirk. His collaboration with New York group My Robot Friend on the track "You're Out of the Computer", featured on the 2003 Outsiders doc Joseph McCombs refers to, was my introduction to him. Over a frantic electro backing, Gazingo's distorted voice harangues a cheating lover in the lexicon of the digital age (lyrics here):

i spent wonderful moments 
in your components

get out of my memory

get your digitals out of my modules

get your mish-mash out of my macintosh

or i’ll hit you with a swiss wrist watch

you showed them your modem

and as sure as my name is yahuda

you’re out of the computer
[...]
you looked in my iris

and you gave me a virus

you took away my lap desk

you took away my website

you took away my disk drive

you took away my database 

and you drove away with my jalopy 

and you scrambled my scanner

and you took away my banner 

you’re the world’s worst home shopper

you’re the world’s worst pornographer

and if you see me first
 you say hello

and if i see you first
 i’ll say hello

You probably wouldn't have thought "Aha! Clearly a reader of Wired!" on first seeing Bingo, but he surprises you with a healthy⁸ familiarity with computer vocab, allied to his facility for a great turn of phrase (the urgency with which he delivers the "iris/virus" couplet still cracks me up every time). And what of those last two lines, which seem to veer off from nowhere into an agreement about social etiquette on meeting? There's no real need for them to be there at all, but that's a favoured trick of Bingo's: start talking about one subject, and abruptly head off on a different, surprising tangent.

His only album was a self-titled release recorded by a cadre of DJs from superior Jersey City radio station WFMU, namely R. Stevie Moore, Bob Brainen, Dennis Diken, Dave Amels, Chris Bolger and Chris Butler, and engineered by Amels. Also released by FMU,⁹ it incorporates a wealth of sly humour, off-kilter wordplay and moments of real transcendent sweetness. Check the poignant, hazy recollections of old Westerns a nursing home resident recounts to his nurse on "Everything's OK at the OK Corral", or the blissful redemption at the end of updated Biblical revenge tale "Every Day I Leave $10 on the Table", a line with even more pathos today: "and I'm still living/Where did it ever say I died?"

Thank-you to Joe Howe, Howard Rigberg (My Robot Friend) and Bob Brainen for information.

— More poetry at BG's MySpace

mp3: My Robot Friend — "You're Out of the Computer" feat. Bingo Gazingo (YSI)
mp3: Bingo Gazingo — "Everything's OK at the OK Corral" (YSI)
mp3: Bingo Gazingo — "Every Day I Leave $10 on the Table" (YSI)


¹ Though he always characterised them as songs, of which more later.
² His WFMU-released CD includes tracks about Madonna, Beavis & Butthead, Tupac Shakur, Casablanca, and mystifyingly popular DJ Howard Stern's sidekick Gary "Baba Booey" Dell'Abate.
³ A fact that he'd rather people didn't publicise. Sometimes, his birth name was given as Murray Wachsman, Jack Wachsman or, bizarrely, Rupert Calvin Coolidge McGillicuddy, which, considering his penchant for giving his date of birth as between 2,000 and 14 billion years ago, he probably enjoyed greatly.
⁴ His day job was at the performing rights society Broadcast Music Incorporated sifting through radio playlists to determine which BMI-represented artists were due royalties. Subsequently, like fellow outsider musician Shooby Taylor, he spent several decades working for the US Postal Service in New York.
⁵ Outsider fans are "a small circle of mesmerized cognoscenti, fans not just of "bad music" -- whatever that may be in a world where Clay Aiken goes to No. 1". Nail/head, right there.
⁶ And any of my countrymen who might be about to indulge in a spot of complacent Yankee-bashing might pause to consider that this franchise is maybe our most successful cultural export of the last decade.
⁷ A good example is seen in the disappointing generalisations about Wesley Willis fans in this otherwise excellent and sympathetic article by Okkervil River frontman Will Robinson Sheff.
⁸ Though, admittedly, not always massively accurate.
⁹ On two occasions: the first time on cassette and then a reissue on CD. It remains the only single-artist album WFMU has put out.

A tribute to Tupac

Yesterday was the thirteenth anniversary of the passing of Tupac Shakur, musician, actor, one of the most widely-acclaimed rap lyricists and performers of the 1990s.

Ever ones for the obvious here at LJB, today we celebrate 'pac's life and work with a tribute song written by lunatic hyper-caffeinated octogenarian former NYC postal worker Bingo Gazingo (from his self-titled album, and accompanied by a song that sounds a little like the Beavis & Butthead theme tune, as played by R. Stevie Moore and various other WFMU DJs.)

It's ridiculous, of course, but it doesn't seem like a pisstake — more like an actually pretty heartfelt tribute. There's probably an argument to be made somewhere that this very unlikeliness says a lot about the universality of Tupac's appeal.

Rock'n'roll, the American soul
to the American dream
Hard blast to your chest
Blood all over your breast
Why didn't you wear your bulletproof vest?
You lost your left testicle
And your right lung
Why did they have to shoot yer?
And take away your future
when you were so young?
Tupac Shakur: it's a heartbreaker
It's a ballbreaker
Your mother was a Black Panther
And your father was a political criminal¹
But you had a voice as sweet as a Jewish cantor
Singing from the hymnal
On a high holy day...
I remember the words you sang which
changed the English language
Friday the 13th... you lost your dream...

And then he starts rapping. Dear lord, you have to hear this.

mp3: Bingo Gazingo — "Two Pack Shaker"

¹ Yeh, stepfather in actuality. Whatever. You better hope you're this cool when you're 70-odd.

RIP John Hughes (1950 — 2009)

And so the familiar landscape of the eighties continues to seep slowly, inexorably, away.


(i know i should sort be obliged to feel a certain kinship for Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club, but Molly was like a perfect sonnet in female form in that film.)

"RIP 80s dreams of friendship crossing social strata" — Pip

RIP John Hughes.

mp3: Simple Minds — "(Don't You) Forget About Me" (YSI)

"Crap, horrible week": RIP Steven Wells, Michael Jackson

i'm not going to bother writing much about Michael Jackson since everything there is to say in the entire world has already been said, except: there goes a man so huge that when he died, he broke the internet (for a bit). Needless to say hip-hop, for one, would be massively different without him, both in terms of the amount of people he literally introduced to music and the amount that borrowed a bit of his, as this dizzying – and still incomplete ("where's The Tamperer feat. Maya?" frets Action Andy) – sample map demonstrates. Here's Large Pro juggling "Human Nature" on the closer to Nas' own classic ' Illmatic, and another prematurely deceased talent in the form of J Dilla cutting up The Jacksons' "All I Do is Think of You".

mp3: Nas — "It Ain't Hard to Tell"
mp3: J Dilla — "Time: the Donut of the Heart"
mp3: MJ tribute mix by DJ Premier

Chance to own your own Zombie Michael

Anyway. No. The main point of this post was/is to pour a little liquor out on the digital kerb for Steven Wells, a name known by a lot fewer people than that of Michael Jackson, but in his own way, a pretty influential guy himself. Ubiquitously known as Swells, he was the NME's Last Good Hack, a legendary byline name whose work could consistently be relied on to inspire fury, paroxysms of laughter, or a reaction located precisely between the two, as he spewed his characteristic CAPS-LOCK-AND-LOTS-OF-EXCLAMATION-MARKS-ATTACK-ATTACK!!! vitriol all over students, vegetarians, right-wingers, pompous musicians, shit bands, sell-outs, whiners, homophobes, affluent self-pitiers, wankers, Daily Mail readers, and anyone else that failed to meet his exacting standards. His writing was a frantic and hilarious intravenous caffeine drip of expletives, neologisms and hyperactive sincerity, and he would never settle for sub-par musical pabulum just because it was the only thing around, no matter how often the editorial policy of the publications he wrote for dictated exactly that.

i stopped reading the NME when there was no longer anything in it whose unworthiness didn't make me really cross (around the post-Strokes "every band will play ball-achingly tedious contrived retrogressive garage-rock crap and be called "The Somethings" wilderness), so i didn't know Swells was ill until very recently, and i didn't know he'd died until i saw it on Wikipedia's "Deaths in 2009" page (some pseudonymous fuckbag subsequently tried to get the article deleted as non-notable because they couldn't bothered doing a single iota of basic fucking research, an attempt which was met with the contempt it deserved, though if i'd known about it while the discussion was active i would almost certainly now be banned from Wikipedia).

It was shocking and unfair to me to conceive of such a force of nature being laid low so young by a horrible disease. The same is broadly true of MJ – he was 50, Swells, 49 – but while Mike arguably hadn't really made any good music for the last 15 years, Swells was on top form up until virtually the day he passed. The names attached to tributes in the comment section of his last column in the Philadelphia Weekly — a column which, a day prior to Jackson's own death, ended a career in music writing spectacularly with the line "Me? I blame it on sunshine. I blame it on the moonlight. I blame it on the boogie." — tell their own story. Writers and co-conspirators, both those who had written with him of old and those that say he also inspired them to want to become writers: the likes of David Quantick, Kitty Empire, Everett True, Mary Anne Hobbs, Steve Sutherland, Mark Beaumont, Tommy Udo, Dominik Diamond, Stuart Bailie, Alex Needham, Cath Carroll, James McMahon, Alexis Petridis, Hardeep Phull, Ben Myers, and current NEM editor Conor McNicholas all pay tribute. Musicians, too: Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant probably being the most famous, but also his former flatmate Jon Langford, Peter Hooton from The Farm, Swells favourites Napalm Death, Gold Blade's John Robb, old-time stage-sharer Attila the Stockbroker, Clint Mansell and Daniel Wylie. Gareth from Los Campesinos!, a band Swells loved to rip to shreds in his print, also posted a truly classy tribute on their blog. And Everett True has compiled a pretty much exhaustive list at his own blog.

Swells wrote his absolute arse off, and to a pissed-off, disaffected 14-year-old music obsessive he was often the coolest writer in the world. It was only in reading the samples of his work quoted back in tributes that i realised how much of my own style i've bitten/inherited from him. i'd seriously file him alongside the likes of Brautigan, Bukowski and Lester Bangs in the group of people that instantly made me want to write when i read them.

The only song i can think in which Steven turns up (and i didn't even think of it, to be honest; that was Will from Explainin' the Cosmos, ta Will) is Helen Love's "Long Live the UK Music Scene": "Johnny Cigarettes and Steven Wells – don't get upset, your paper will still sell". i was never quite sure what the band meant by this line, but perhaps that's fitting for a man who embodied "Sometimes right. Sometimes wrong. Always certain".
mp3: Helen Love — "Long Live the UK Music Scene"

Sleep well, mate, and thanks for everything.


Poem i stole from the comments of his last Weekly piece:

“i'd die fo' me country
says a patriotic dickhead
well go ahead
you make me sick
slash your wrists and slash the statistics
'the number unemployed fell today
200,000 bled away
then they were stripped cold naked
shaved their heads
stopped the thrashing of severed nerve endings
by boiling the buggers in sterilised lead
stacked them by bunkers in dumb grey ranks
introducing the human sandbag
a major donation to the nation's salvation
the sandbag that rots
and absorbs radiation'

this depression won't fade away
it'll trickle in streams
down blood clotted drains
one way
or another”

Camu Tao: remembering one year on

Shockingly, it's now been a year¹ without redoubtable producer/MC/singer/Jukie Camu Tao. i'm sure my feelings on hearing the news of his death, a couple of days after my birthday, coming completely out of leftfield — cancer? 31 years old? dead? There must be some mistake. — are shared by a lot of Jux fans.

Camu's Jux labelmates, including Aes Rock, Cage, and El-P have also been remembering, posting brief anniversary reminiscences on the Jux webpage. Aesop talks about a horrific/hilarious-sounding album the two of them improvised one night (and has even uploaded one track to his MySpace). The most affecting, though, is from El, who describes how, even when Camu had hardly any time left, he was still hatching schemes to get his beefing comrades to patch it up.

It brought a lump to throat, and also really made me wish i'd met Camu in person, however briefly. Read the story about the table and you'll see what i mean.

The 2dopeboyz blog has put up a commemorative mixtape to mark the anniversary; its twenty tracks ably illustrate the talent he took with him. R.I.P Camu.

¹ More like a year and a week, actually, cuz of my trademark lazy slag tardiness.

"Blues for Wingus": Desert Island Dicks pay tribute to a fallen comrade

A track composed by the Desert Island Dicks in memory of their late friend Ingus Lovecharts (“Wingus”), taken from this world in the year of our Lord 2009, upon the day of April 20th, a Monday, for reasons still never disclosed.

Recquiescat in pace, cāre homō sonitūs.

"Blues for Wingus"

"Peace to Biggie, Tupac, Big L, and Big Pun..."

...and now Ike Hayes also. Goodnight Shaft, we will miss you.


Here's Wu-Tang's RZA flipping Isaac's "Walk on By" into one of the most heart-rending hip-hop tracks by anyone ever.




MP3: Wu-Tang Clan feat. Isaac Hayes – "I Can't Go to Sleep"