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- Readers recommend: songs about assassination
Last week was all about getting high on life. Now we want songs that take aim at public figures ...
Hello pop picker-offers. You know, there's nothing quite as exciting as staring down the sight of a sniper rifle just waiting to blow away some passing dignitary, oh, hang on a minute, what the hell am I talking about? Snuffing people out is a bad thing, except, of course, when it's within the safe environment of a pop song. Then it's ace, and that's we're after this week. Murder is murder, but an assassination is, well, it's something else, isn't it?
But first, the A-list (and the column that discusses it): Mr Fingers – Can You Feel It; Neu! – Euphoria; The Turtles – Happy Together; Albert Ayler – New Generation; The Future Sound of London – Papua New Guinea; Donna Summer – Love to Love You Baby; Eugene Record – Overdose of Joy; Dionne Warwick – In Between the Heartaches; Miles Davis – Blue in Green; Elbow – One Day Like This
With that lot dispatched, let's train our sights on the B-list:
Spiritualized – Lay Back in the Sun
Jason Pierce is the long-acknowledged king of a particularly pie-eyed sort of glum, oh-crumbs-my-legs-don't-work anti-euphoria. However, I interviewed him once and he couldn't have been more chirpy or delightful. Life is strange, no?
King Curtis – Soul Serenade
Even if you were a mollusc living in darkness under the sea you would still perform a little jig and yelp with pleasure when Curtis's tenor sax trilled in on this brilliant live version at 0:46.
Adam Faith – I Vibrate
Adam Faith was the only pop star my mother ever really understood. This is a great song made even greater by the fact Adam can't weally pwonounce his Rs, so he ends up "vi-vi-vi-vibewwatin'", which is very cool.
Mandrill – Never Die
"Morning comes, she brings me such a clear and gentle smile," the brilliant Mandrill warble of their new – and hopefully ever-lasting – love. The Brooklyn band's euphoria is rooted in a bright vision of their future. Neat.
Black Sabbath – Supernaut
What a lot of people don't know about Black Sabbath is they were quite capable of being funky as hell, as Supernaut proves. I think it's fair to suggest the inspiration for the euphoric, yet monumentally odd, Latin-tinged breakdown at 2:40 may have been chemical-related.
The Five Keys – I'm So High
He is high, all the time. He's just high because she's so fine. Delightful Virginia-based doo-wop from 1953 that has no need for Mandrax or cooking sherry, just the thump-thump-thump of a freshly squeezed heart.
Dexy's Midnight Runners – Let's Make This Precious
The intro alone will make you want to stand on a chair and punch the sky, so when Kevin Rowland's ludicrous vocal appears, wobbling like a blancmange on a trampoline, the effect is almost too much, a surfeit of joy.
Julian Cope – Fa-Fa-Fa-Fine
From BeltwayBandit: "This is the sort of Euphoria that only comes from someone who has lived on the edge for years and has come out of the other end alive and well and excited at the prospect of living – joyous and utterly inspiring." Wise words there.
John Tavener – The Protecting Veil
Is this "euphoric"? I don't know, hence the B-list. Have I listened to it (and the album it comes from) more than any other piece of music this week? Yes. Utterly beautiful.
The Stone Roses – She Bangs the Drums
At this point in human history the Stone Roses are about as uncool and out of time as it's possible to be. But that's tough because this remains an elementally smart, flowering-of-consciousness sort of pop song. To deny its naive, yet uplifting power would be demeaning for all of us.
Here's a Spotify playlist of the A and the B.
So anyway, assassinations. What we're after here are songs that deal with actual killings of famous – or infamous – people. They could be legendary ones, recent ones, supposed ones or even imaginary ones, but they need to focus on offing of a well-known figure – good people and bad sorts both welcome. If I were here next week – which I won't be – I'd almost certainly allow some bright spark to get a song about a character assassination into the final 20. But Paul is a ruthless taskmaster and he may not allow it.
The toolbox: Archive, the Marconium, the Spill, the Collabo.
The rulebook
DO post your nominations before midday on Monday if you wish them to be considered.
DO post justifications of your choices wherever possible.
DO NOT post more than one-third of the lyrics of any song.
DO NOT dump lists of nominations – if you must post more than two or three at once, please attempt to justify your choices.
Finally, let's all try and be a little bit more like this dude …
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Переслать - Behind the Music: Is The X Factor alternative The Source good for artists?
The latest talent-spotter to enter a crowded marketplace is offering unsigned acts a cooperative record deal along with their taste of success. But is it as fair as it sounds?
For nearly a decade, Simon Cowell has dominated the format of talent contest TV. In the process, the Pop Idol and X Factor machines have come to dominate the charts, leaving bands and artists that don't fall into the narrow formula of these shows struggling for broader attention.
More recently, rivals have attempted to get in on Cowell's act. In 2007, MobileAct Unsigned (which turned into Orange unsignedAct in 2008) gave exposure to artists on Channel 4, with Lauren Laverne, Alex James, Jo Whiley and record executive Simon Gavin taking the place of Cowell, Cheryl et al. Maybe it was because the show wasn't shown on prime-time telly but on Sunday afternoons, or maybe it just wasn't very good, but I've yet to see any of the contestants – or even the winners – make any headway in the aftermath (Tommy Reilly, anyone?).
The latest show of this kind is Must Be the Music, which Sky claims is, well, about the music. It strikes me, however, as being a bit like a cross between Britain's Got Talent and The X Factor, with Dizzee Rascal, Jamie Cullum and Sharleen Spiteri buzzing their approval or disapproval of the competing acts. With The X Factor coming back to our TV screens this autumn, it looks like weekends will be saturated with music talent competitions.
But there's more. Entering what now appears to be a slightly overcrowded space is The Source (not affiliated with the hip-hop magazine), which launched last month. Will it be able to compete?
Although saying in a press release that "a revolution is about to hit the music business" may be a bit of an exaggeration, the show is at least trying to go about selecting the winner in a more community-orientated way than any of Orange unsignedAct, The X Factor or Must Be the Music, with the public making the decisions right from the start.
Here's how it works: the viewers vote for their favourite acts and the top 120 go through to the TV show, which airs daily on Sky 203 and Channel M (Freeview 200). Then there'll be a weekly show with celebrity and artist interviews, which will also screen the most popular videos of the week. We7, 106.1 Rock Radio and Peter Hook's Manchester nightclub The Factory are also involved with the project. It'll all end with a live final, still without any judges, in which the winner will take home £10,000 and a cooperative record deal.
So, what does this deal entail? The Source told me that the record deal on offer consisted of two options. The first is a 360-degree deal from which they earn 50% of the profit from downloads, live events, merchandise and PRS. This would only be better than a traditional record deal when it came to downloads, so it's unlikely many songwriters would give away 50% of publishing unless they got a massive advance (and the same goes for live and merchandising). The second option would be a service through which artists could raise money through crowdsourcing and self-promotion, with some assistance – then they'd earn more than 50%. However, I'm told that this cooperative record deal is "still in progress".
I'm not suggesting the show are intending to rip musicians off; they appear to be well-intentioned and want to create an artist-friendly venture. It does, however, make it look like they're kind of making it up as they go along. They told me the artists would get 50% of the revenue from the votes that go to them, based on £1 per phone or text message. When asked to expand, they say the breakdown is still unconfirmed, but that they expect the artists to get around 30-33p, which "is 50% of the net profit". If this sounds low, compare it to The X Factor, which rakes in a fortune from phone votes while giving none to the contestants.
None of this really matters unless they manage to actually get a big viewing audience. The Source's initial press release refers to the "Rage against the X Factor phenomenon" – the Facebook campaign that hauled Rage Against the Machine's Killing in the Name to Christmas No 1 ahead of the Cowell-backed Joe McElderry – as an example of "a groundswell of opinion that something must change, new music should be supported and nurtured and the old ways of exploitation and corporate control are out of date and out of touch with what the people want". But the Rage Against the Machine phenomenon was more of a statement of what people don't want than what they do want. Another Facebook campaign called Storm the Charts, with 30,000 members, chose 40 original songs from acts not signed to majors and who'd never appeared in the charts, asking people to download them in one specific week on 4 July this year. None of them entered the top 75.
"Being a musician is not the same as it used to be," says Hook, formerly the bass player of Joy Division and New Order. "The record company used to take you out for a meal, now it's the other way around. Musicians need to be business-minded, nowadays. It's not all sex, drugs and rock n' roll – especially when you're starting out." Asked if being a musician will effectively be the same as being a plumber or any other skilled trade, he answers: "If we can earn as much money as a plumber, that will be a great start."
It remains to be seen whether any of the artists entering The Source will earn anything close to what a plumber does – or even a busker.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: Samuel – I Heart NY
Just what we need, another irritatingly catchy song about New-blooming-York
The video for I Heart NY may feature Samuel riding on the back of a garbage truck, but in real life the 22-year-old found his way into the more glamorous environs of Kanye West's blog with his cover of Drake's Find Your Love. I Heart NY could be considered a lyrically downbeat antidote to Empire State of Mind, with Samuel paying tribute to the backstreets of the metropolis, where so many are "made to grow up and be famous". Insanely (and almost irritatingly) catchy.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Insane Clown Posse: a magnet for ignorance
Fascinated by miracles such as, er, magnets, Insane Clown Posse should be a laughing stock. But their fans – the Juggalos – symbolise a growing reactionary culture in America, in which ignorance is seen as a virtue
For nearly a decade now, the Juggalo is the dirty secret that mainstream America has tried to sweep under the carpet. Juggalos are fans of Detroit, Michigan's Insane Clown Posse, two former wrestlers turned rappers going by the names Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, who first applied face paint in the early 90s, and have since sold 6m albums, including 1994's Ringmaster and 2004's Hell's Pit.
Juggalo culture is what happens when hip-hop settles in the poverty-stricken cities and suburbs of America's rust belt. Fans, known to one another as "The Fam", mimic the band's clown face-paint, drink their favourite drink, the Detroit-produced soda Faygo, and attend their annual festival, the Gathering of the Juggalos.
Not everyone, however, is so keen. Authorities in states including Utah, Arizona and Pennsylvania reportedly classify the Juggalos as a gang, while in September 2003, the US music magazine Blender voted Insane Clown Posse as the worst band of all time.
In 2009, however, Blender closed its doors. Insane Clown Posse, meanwhile, have just released the DVD of their debut feature film, Big Money Rustlas. They are not leaving us anytime soon.
The Juggalos are back in the news thanks to reports from this year's Gathering, where the performer Tila Tequila was pelted with cans, bottles, rocks, and according to the testimony of one onlooker, "part of a watermelon allegedly soaked in faeces and urine". Tequila posted a picture of her bloodied and bruised face online and is said to be pursuing legal action against the festival.
Consensus from Juggalos on the internet seems to suggest something along the lines of "the slut deserved it" – a strangely Puritan position, coming from someone who attends festivals with wet T-shirt competitions and horny clowns wandering the site with cardboard signs that read "Looking for my first Juggalette".
If all this suggests a frightening degree of ignorance, it is rather par for the course. Insane Clown Posse's bread and butter has traditionally been songs such as I Stab People and The Neden Game, a number apparently inspired by a Blind Date-style TV show, although Cilla probably wouldn't have had to shell out for too many new hats with contestants of the calibre of Shaggy 2 Dope, who distils his singular wooing technique with the couplet "To get your attention in the crowded place/I'd simply walk up and stick my nuts in your face".
Earlier this year, however, the pair further elaborated on their worldview with the single Miracles, a quasi-mystical number about all the wonders of the natural universe that Insane Clown Posse don't – but more importantly, don't want to – understand. The widely circulated highlight finds Shaggy 2 Dope pondering "Fuckin' magnets – how do they work?" before announcing his question was effectively rhetorical, because all scientists are "lying motherfuckers" (Saturday Night Live took this anti-science angle up and ran with it, in style).
But Juggalo culture is no freak of nature. Indeed, one can see it as part of a reactionary groundswell of American culture that sees ignorance of science and book-learnin' not as a weakness, but as a virtue. It's the presidency of George W Bush (famously not really "a details guy"), Tea Party tub-thumpers convinced Obama is a Muslim socialist because Glenn Beck was just thinking it out loud, and creationists disproving evolution by pointing out no one ever found life in a jar of peanut butter.
This is a mindset that knows what it knows thanks to what the US comedian Stephen Colbert called "truthiness" etc etc – defined by Colbert as "a 'truth' that a person claims to know intuitively, from the gut, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination or facts". And it stubbornly refuses to be enlightened. In this TV interview, filmed shortly after the Miracles video went viral, the host presents Insane Clown Posse with a book called The Way Things Work, featuring a chapter on exactly how magnets work. They do not, it's fair to say, look particularly happy.
"It's a lot funner being the dumb guy, because then you get to appreciate the beautiful things like all the miracles we talk about," says Violent J.
"Science can be real exciting," concedes Shaggy 2 Dope. "But I'd rather get what we call pussy. Know what I'm saying?" Well, quite.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - And in other news ... Kings of Leon reschedule 'pigeon poo' gig
All the news that's fit to link
• Kings of Leon reschedule "pigeon poo" gig, but not at the same venue (Via NME)
• "The rat's nest of music licensing. In one horrifying diagram" (Via Digital Music News)
• The man behind U2 gives his verdict on how the future of the music indutsry ought to look (Via GQ)
• Katy Perry crashes an Australian prom and yet still finds herself upstaged by two teenage boys who have ALL the moves (Via Idolator)
• A snippet of Kanye West's Ghetto University, featuring Drake (Via Nah Right)
• Method Man suffers facial injury at Gathering of the Juggalos, but still fares better than Tila Tequila though (Via TMZ)
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - The Libertines: by no stretch of the imagination a great band
Today's Libertines piece in the Guardian celebrates a band who broke down the barrier between artist and fans. But judging from the reader response, not everyone was keen on them – and I agree
Context is everything. The rise of the Libertines was baffling but inevitable. Every other country had its own version of the Strokes (even New Zealand had the Datsuns) and Britain so badly wanted a piece of the action we got ourselves in a terrible lather over a couple of bozos spewing what critics insisted was a "Keatsian evocation of Albion" (trans: shambolic scribbles) over doggedly uninspired retro garage rock.
Throw in a seedy soap opera and – bingo! – a sporadically decent but unremarkable guitar band, who were essentially a slightly grimier Vines or Hives, became saddled with expectations they were ill-equipped to fulfil. Though briefly a great rock'n'roll story, perhaps even a great love affair, by no stretch of the imagination were the Libertines ever a great band.
Have you listened to them lately? Pawing pallidly at their instruments, muttering doggerel into their collars, they sound like nothing so much as that first, staggeringly inept band you formed for a giggle with your schoolmates. Now the only interest lies in determining which is more annoying: Doherty's wheedling voice and manipulative justifications of serially shitty behaviour, Carl Barât's tired repertoire of purloined riffs and chord changes, or the leaden thwack thwack thwack of perhaps the least inspired drummer in history? And their second album has more filler than Andrew Ridgeley's Greatest Hits.
Every strained note shrugs "will this do?" This was their USP, of course: glorified buskers wearing their can't-be-arsed incompetence as a badge of honour. Their reunion betrays even that meagre talent. With the conditions dictated by festival coffers, these shows will have precious little spontaneity or sense of event, the only aspect of their shtick that was even remotely engrossing.
After the almost metaphysical mediocrity of Barât's Dirty Pretty Things and Doherty's countless foot-shooting antics, they now need the Libertines much more than we do; there are tax bills to settle and careers to keep afloat. And for anyone still pining improbably for the long lost Arcadia of 2003, remember this is the band directly responsible for the likes of Razorlight and the Fratellis crawling out of their holes. What a glorious legacy.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: Gold Panda – Snow & Taxis
Remember the BBC's Sound of 2010 list? This track suggests the list-makers got it right with the inclusion of Gold Panda
In January, Gold Panda – or Derwin to his friends and family – joined the likes of Ellie Goulding and Hurts on the BBC's Sound of 2010 poll. Since then he's kept a relatively low profile, save for a few EPs featuring tracks made from samples of old VHS tapes and computer games. While his last single, You, was a frantic concoction of bouncing beats and buzzing noises, Snow & Taxis feels slightly calmer, perhaps reflecting the fact that much of his debut album, Lucky Shiner (due in October), was recorded in his uncle's house in the country. Built around stuttering beats and glistening synth washes, Snow & Taxis ushers in the impending winter in the warmest way possible.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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