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- New music: Everything Everything – Photoshop Handsome (II Figures Remix)
This artful, off-kilter track is given an indie-disco rub down. Still makes no sense, though ...
It's difficult for new bands to build on the hype generated by all those Ones To Watch lists (as the Drums will attest), but Everything Everything have made a good stab with this track.
Photoshop Handsome is the third single from their debut album, Man Alive, and has been given a thorough rub down in this exclusive remix. Out go all those pesky guitars, in come layers of keyboards and an exuberant final third that's pure indie-disco fodder. It fails, however, to shed any light on lyrics such as "I put a rainforest in an Oxo cube" or "Gangrene knuckle announced so audibly". Still, you can't have everything (everything).
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Readers recommend: songs about arguments
Last week was all about the grand finale. Now we'd like you to suggest songs that are fired up and ready to fight
The last two lines of a pop song are the perfect place to let your real feelings show. It's right there and then, as the music swells to a climax or simply drifts away into the ether, that you're given the space to say what it is you really mean – a goodbye, hello, subtle smile or frantic wave. The chorus belongs to everyone, but the last lines are yours and yours alone.
So, as we said goodbye to Paul MacInnes, there were a wealth of amazing nominations this week. The A-list was extremely hard to whittle down, but it goes a bit (OK, a lot) like this: Ballad of Forty Dollars – Tom T Hall; In/Flux – DJ Shadown; And the Racket They Made – King Creosote; St Swithin's Day – Billy Bragg; Lord, I'm Discouraged – The Hold Steady; The Late Show – Jackson Browne; Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine – Shearwater; I Don't Know What Time It Was – Billie Holiday; Goodbye – Best Coast; You're Wondering Now – The Specials
As far as the B-list, well, that's all about this lot. All are wonderful pieces, so, for the sake of blessed sympathy (and to avoid 10 repetitions of me writing, "This 'un are a bit good, I loikes it!11!"), here they are with their rather enigmatic final words:
Walk Into the Sea – Low
"And time is just a hunger, it bleeds us out to nothing and when it finally takes us over, I hope we'll float away together …"
Western Eyes – Portishead
"I feel so cold, on hookers and gin, the mess we're in ..."
Bass Culture – Linton Kwesi Johnson
"For the time is nigh, when passions gather high, when the beats just lash and the walls must smash, when the beat will shift as the culture alter, and oppression scatter …"
Slow Death – The Flamin' Groovies
"Slow death eats my mind away, slow death turns my flesh to clay, slo-o-o-ow death ..."
Heven Tonite – The Coup
"Retail clerk, 'Love ballads', where you place this song, let's make heaven right here, just in case they wrong …"
Fake Plastic Trees – Radiohead
"If I could be who you wanted, if I could be who you wanted, all the time, all the time …"
Scenes in the City – Charles Mingus
"Pretty, but not 'pretty', beautiful like a woman, a real woman …"
From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea – The Cure
"Different name, same old game, love in vain and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles away from home again …"
Charmaine – Plan B
"He asks me if De La Rosa is her surname, if she's, mixed race and her eyes are green, I say, 'Yeah', he replies, 'Blud, that girls fourteen …'
Thriller – Michael Jackson
"Hahahaha! Hahahahahahaha! Hahahahahahaha!"
Argument songs then. I think this one is fairly clear – I want tracks that are ready to pick a fight, ones that have fresh blood on the knuckles, or a dangerously throbbing vein in the neck. The blood is up and the tendons are twitching, the fight or flight mechanism has kicked in and your song is betting the house on the former.
The argument could be between partners, between friends or family or workmates or bandmates. It could be an allegorical argument, or an argument from history that the songwriter felt was ripe for revisiting. Anyway you care to slice it is good, but there should be an element of straining at the leash, an element of righteousness and a desire to see a wrongdoer roundly punished.
If you know why a particular song has a peculiar resonance, then, please, let me know. It all helps and I am, as ever, all ears.
I'll be in and out of the thread on Friday to answer any questions that may arise.
The toolbox: Archive, the Marconium, the Spill and 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, for one week only, biting, burping, rifling, twisting and/or gouging are allowed.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Kanye West and the essence of self-expression
There's a delicious tension at the heart of a pop song, between the personal and the universal, which anyone who's fretted over a mixtape will grasp intuitively
At the end of 2008 I was going through a rough patch: made redundant, kid on the way, and just as I found a new job, the global economy went belly-up. At the heart of that grinding, anxious winter Kanye West released 808s & Heartbreak, his Auto‑Tuned concept album about loss and isolation. And in its flat, metallic musical tundra – the long stretches of arid synth where West had simply run out of words – I found a good deal of comfort.
Every music fan has stories like this. There's a delicious, productive tension at the heart of a pop song, between the personal and the universal, which anyone who's fretted over a mixtape will grasp intuitively. No other popular art form relies so much on the first person, which makes pop a vehicle for the most intense self-expression, not just by the people who make it but by the ones who listen to it.
This tension is what makes the X Factor so compelling: it doesn't produce great pop – far from it, usually – but it's a great show about pop, dramatising the ways people take songs and make them relate to their situations. Katie Waissel sings Help! and the "I" in the song becomes her, constantly knocked back by the public whose affection she relies on. It's hardly subtle, but it's effective. The highest compliment the judges give, week after week, is that a contestant took a song and "really made it their own".
Nobody is ever going to be able to make Kanye West's new songs their own. Not that he'd care, but his latest album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, has done his chances of a Theme Week no good at all. The tracks on it may feature a hundred guests but they are incorrigibly, jealously his. One of the points of the record, in fact, is that only he could have made it. West has skilfully used his many channels – Twitter, blogs, videos – to present his existence as grotesquely rarefied, a decadent tapestry of furs and goblets, lust and perfectionism. And because he's made sure we all know he's possessed of this unique, stratospheric perspective, it feels more like art when he sings from it. Doubly so when he then undermines it.
West is a superb producer, and – as the Guardian's Dorian Lynskey has pointed out – there are enough ideas on the album to awe a listener into accepting it quickly as a masterpiece and perhaps repent it at leisure afterwards. But a lot of the praise for the album has centred on West's self‑knowledge: he's a needy douchebag, but he admits it and sings from the experience. For me this is the least appealing thing about the record – noisily admitting your sins doesn't lessen the sins, it just keeps the spotlight on you. On the other hand, the purest expression of this on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy – the nine-minute pity-party Runaway – is also its catchiest and most resonant moment.
In its extreme self-consciousness, the album Fantasy reminds me most of is John Lennon's cathartic 1970 Plastic Ono Band record. Not musically – West has given us a banquet, Lennon kept things stark and short – but because it's a record made by one of the great talents of their age, at the peak of their celebrity, thoroughly dissatisfied with themselves. And it's a record that entirely negates any idea that pop needs to be universal.
But the universal keeps creeping in anyway, like it or not. Lennon's pain makes more sense now when put in the wider context of a collapsing counter-culture and the fad for primal scream therapy. And West's record is equally a product of its times. It's a rich, exhausting album that takes the old model of auteurist pop genius and makes a Herculean effort to have it make sense in a time of collaboration, social media and over-sharing. It's our blessing and curse to live in an era when we can quantify precisely how publicly interesting we are, and Kanye knows that he's objectively more so than most. In the world of Twitter, this isn't even ego; it's just data analysis. But there's a trade-off: on 808s & Heartbreak, I could take Kanye West's private pain and use it to help ease mine. Now, all I can do is gawp.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson: 1955-2010
Along with the rest of Throbbing Gristle, Sleazy was a bold provocateur and activist. But he was also one of the most innovative musicians of his generation
It's impossible to overstate the influence of Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, who died in his sleep yesterday, aged just 55. As a founding member of Throbbing Gristle, he was part of one of the most experimental and notorious British groups of all time. The first industrial band, their music covered everything from machine-like noise to almost quaintly melodic electro-pop. I can still remember the shock of realising the catchy United single was by the same people who I'd seen posing topless (along with female member Cosey Fanni Tutti) when it felt like pornography had suddenly infiltrated NME.
Formed in 1975, their outrages – which included performing naked, vomiting onstage and writing songs about burning bodies – created considerable controversy. Even the punks threw things. The tabloids frothed, and MP Nicholas Fairbairn gave the ultimate seal of condemnation/approval when he pronounced the band "wreckers of civilisation" – shortly before he was arrested for indecent exposure, thus exposing the hypocrisy that Christopherson and pals had sworn to highlight.
Throbbing Gristle's art statements – or "sick stunts", depending on your view – will outlive them. Christopherson was one of his generation's first openly gay musicians, railing against homophobia and "Christian perversions" such as monogamy, while making music designed to help others live with HIV. But he was first and foremost one of the boldest, most innovative musicians of his generation.
His music has influenced everything from Marilyn Manson to techno. Joy Division's Ian Curtis was a fan. Sleazy helped Throbbing Gristle frontman Genesis P-Orridge form the similarly influential Psychic TV, while Trent Reznor's new band, How to Destroy Angels, take their name from the "ritual music for the accumulation of male sexual energy" of Coil, Christopherson's trailblazing band. Fronted by Christopherson and his partner, John Balance – arguably pop's firstly openly gay duo – Coil produced dark music that appeared in the films of Derek Jarman. Prior to this, Christopherson worked as a designer for the hugely influential agency Hipgnosis, creating iconic record sleeves for the likes of Peter Gabriel and Pink Floyd.
Christopherson was a man ahead of his time. He built electronic equipment and used digital sampling onstage years before Fairlight synths made it a staple tool in pop. He put together videos for everyone from Soft Cell's Marc Almond to Paul McCartney. He was innovating right up until his death – in a Throbbing Gristle re-formed "to destroy our own myth" and as director of The Threshold Houseboys Choir, a band featuring computer-generated vocals.Born in Leeds to an academic family, and benefiting from an education that enabled him to study computer programming and video, Christopherson explained that Throbbing Gristle's innovation came about because the band were social misfits who had no idea what they were doing and so did not recognise rules. His nickname, along with his bands' fearsome reputations, belies the truth of a gentle, much-loved soul with a benign manner, who loved "silly electronic gadgets".
This summer, after Throbbing Gristle concerts were cancelled amid rumours of an illness, Christopherson insisted: "We are all only temporary curators of our present bodies, which will all decay, sooner or later. In a hundred years or so all the humans currently alive will have died. I take great comfort in knowing, with certainty, that thing that makes us special, able to enrich our own lives and those of others, will not cease when our bodies do but will be just starting a new (and hopefully even better) adventure ... "
Even in death, Peter Martin Christopherson is still giving us something to think about, which we should celebrate.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Inky Fingers: Maggoty Lamb ponders the NME Cool List to end all cool lists
Forget everything you've ever learned about rock'n'roll: the NME has established chunky winter socks as the apex of cool
Has enough scar tissue formed over the livid psychic weals inflicted on us by this year's NME Cool List for us to contemplate it with something like equanimity? Probably not, but best clean out those wounds before gangrene takes hold.
First, we must set aside the fact that any meaningful definition of "cool" – from the original prose templates formulated by Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac, to the ones boldly lived out in the 21st century by such beatnik inheritors of our own generation as Zane Lowe and the Sunday Times's Dan Cairns – basically boils down to "an elusive essence which cannot be corralled with the reductive confines of a list". Now, imagine yourself a key player on the editorial team of a British music paper with a proud (albeit not always entirely uncompromised) counter-cultural tradition. Your readership finds itself poised at a historic moment of profound socio-political turbulence. Who should you offer to them as the highest embodiment of their every aspirational impulse? Would Laura Marling be the right choice?
Let's not be too hasty. Rather than reject this bold proposition out of hand, I have subjected Marling's claim to the lineage of Miles Davis, Elvis and Patti Smith to rigorous critical analysis, and these are the results.
Makes carefully crafted and scandalously inoffensive music which invites the inauguration of the improbable critical category "KT Tunstall-lite". Check. Goes out with one of Mumford & Sons. Check. When photographed for the Cool List cover with Carl Barât's arm around her shoulder, adopts the serenely benevolent posture of the older man's widowed mother at a family gathering. Check. There we go then. As former NME Cool List chart-topper Alan Titchmarsh might have it, "Job's a good 'un."
"She dresses down," gushes Gavin Haynes, bewilderingly, "jeans, cosy jumpers, chunky winter socks." Did Leigh Bowery die for this? It's not Marling's fault that the NME ("Behind those moon-eyes sits an iron clad sense of purpose ... She's unbreakable, incorruptible, because she sees further ...") seems to have confused her with Jean Seberg's Joan of Arc. And yet it is she who will have to spend years trying to shrug off the burden of such misplaced mythologisation (in much the same way that Warpaint may never recover from the same paper's current campaign to misidentify them as the new Slits, when the new Bangles might be a more appropriate benchmark).
"You can tell that her [Marling's] place as an icon won't wither under the weight of years," maintains Haynes valiantly (somehow devaluing the currency of the word "icon" beyond the 2,000-year low it had already reached), before coming to the surprising conclusion that "in the future people will talk of Laura Marling's career in terms of 'periods' rather than mere 'albums'." Even those of us who have so far remained immune to her siren spell had hesitated to envisage a time when Marling's entire body of work would be equated with a menstrual cramp.
And NME's Cool List insania does not end there. "'Band of the People' is a cliche" admits Liam Cash, "but come on, what else can you call Mumford & Sons?" Well, a few alternative descriptions do spring to mind. But still more glaring than Cash's David Cameron-style category confusion is the following instance of the especially specious rock hack's ruse – technically termed "the bogus aphoristic proxy" – wherein greatness is ascribed to an improbable repository (in this instance, Marcus Mumford, No 11 with a bullet) via the blatant misappropriation of words previously used by one far more significant personage to describe another: "His voice – to borrow a phrase Bowie used to describe Dylan – is like sand and glue."
Readers might like to try out this technique for themselves. But only once they've had a go at the last of our NME Cool List linguistic legacies – "the abridged history culminating in a last word which isn't really the last word". Jaimie Hodgson's brief encomium to Giggs (who's at No 26) offers us "An abridged history of the UK rap scene in five words: 'stuff, more stuff, grime, Giggs'."
"OK, that's a bit mean" Hodgson concedes. Well, not so much mean, as wildly off the mark. And, secure in the belief that the proud lineage which stretches from the Ragga Twins to the Streets and Derek B to Dizzee Rascal really should have thrown up the odd performer worthy of an individual namecheck, let us bring down a disrespect curtain on this whole sorry proceedings. It's a lovely thick velvet curtain, sumptuously embroidered with vivid tableaux from the following abridged histories – Germany ("stuff, more stuff, war, Helmut Kohl"), art ("stuff, more stuff, cubism, Beryl Cook") and the magic of the movies ("stuff, more stuff, Technicolor, M Night Shyamalan).
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Moon Wiring Club and DD Denham: music for children, by children
Two new albums – one sampling vintage TV shows, the other featuring spooky sounds made by schoolkids in the 70s, should delight and disturb younger listeners in equal measure
"One thing I've always wanted for my music is for it to appeal to children," says Ian Hodgson of Moon Wiring Club. "An ideal listening situation would be a family car journey. I think children would like all the voices and oddness. If you present kids with fun, spooky electronic music, then they might grow up wanting to make it themselves, like I did with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop." Hodgson's friend and collaborator Jon Brooks, aka the Advisory Circle, goes one better with the debut release for his label Café Kaput, which consists of spooky electronic music made by schoolchildren in the 70s.
Brooks and Hodgson originally met through MySpace. They rapidly discovered that they were "probably variations of the same person", according to Hodgson, with a shared passion for vintage 70s and 80s TV (not just the programmes but their incidental music and theme tunes). The friendship soon became an alliance. Brooks has done the mastering for all four Moon Wiring Club albums, including the brand new and brilliant A Spare Tabby at the Cat's Wedding. Hodgson, in turn, has done the artwork for Café Kaput. A full-blown collaboration between Moon Wiring Club and the Advisory Circle is in the pipeline.
The pair are chalk and cheese, though, when it comes to the way they operate musically. A skilled multi-instrumentalist whose music is "98% hand-played", Brooks makes little use of sampling or computer software. The Advisory Circle's 2006 debut EP Mind How You Go (reissued this year by Ghost Box in expanded, vinyl-only form) and 2008's much-acclaimed Other Channels reveals Brooks to be one of the contemporary scene's great melodists, with a gift for plush, intricate arrangements. Hodgson's approach, in contrast, is much more hip-hop raw. Entirely sample-based, Moon Wiring Club is assembled using astonishingly rudimentary technology: a PlayStation 2 and "a second-hand copy of MTV Music Generator 2 from 2001".
Hodgson turned to this crude set-up after struggling with software typically used to make electronic dance music. Because he's a longtime gamer, Hodgson found using a joypad to make music "much faster and more enjoyable" than clicking a mouse. But it still took him a while to work out how to get good results out of a PlayStation 2. "After months of tinkering, I discovered that it's good at sequencing short repeated phrases." Instead of looping breakbeats, Hodgson builds up rhythm patterns from single drum hits. Then he'll weave in sinuous and sinister basslines that are often coated in a dank layer of echo and delay. "I'll place the bass melody around the rhythm in a very 'stereo' way. I tend to see it all in my head as a 'cat's cradle'. Then if you add delay to the bass and time it right you get extra little melodies inside this structure. They sort of bounce and react with each other. Add melody and atmosphere to it and you get another interlocking structure – slightly organic, soggy, bouncy and knackered."
Moon Wiring Club often resembles trip-hop if its "vibe" was sourced not in obscure funk and jazz-fusion records but from the incidental music to The Prisoner, Doctor Who and The Flumps. Vocal samples are a huge part of Moon Wiring Club. Always spoken not sung, and always British in origin, they're derived largely from videos and DVDs of bygone UK television series such as Casting the Runes, Raffles and Ace of Wands. A scholar of "vintage telly", Hodgson can discourse at persuasive length about the superiority of British theatrical-turned-TV thesps such as Julian Glover and Jan Francis over American actors like Harrison Ford. He recently dedicated a podcast mix to 70s voiceover deity and Quiller star Michael Jayston.
Moon Wiring Club originally evolved out of what was intended to be "a peculiar children's book", Strange Reports from a Northern Village." That project got stalled but it did spawn the Blank Workshop website, based on an imaginary town called Clinksell, which has its own brand of confectionery, Scrumptyton Sweets, and a line of fantasy fiction, Moontime Books. The children's book project lives on also in the distinctive graphic look that Hodgson, a former fine art student, wraps around the Moon Wiring releases, drawing on influences including Biba's 20s-into-70s glamour, the strange exquisiteness of Arthur Rackham's illustrations, and Victorian fairy painters such as Richard Dadd. Blank Workshop and Moon Wiring Club is where all of Hodgson's enthusiasms and obsessions converge: "Electronic music, Art Deco, and the England of teashops, stately homes, ruined buildings and weird magic." Not forgetting computer-games music, a massive influence. "There is something about the forced repetition that makes you remember the tunes in a unique way," Hodgson says, adding that in some ways "Moon Wiring Club is meant to be Edwardian computer-game music."
"Still a kid in a lot of ways," is how Jon Brooks describes himself. His journey through music began "at pre-school age", thanks to his jazz session-player father. "Fellow jazzers would come round to record demos or share ideas. There were always instruments and tape recorders lying about." Brooks was proficient on a half-size drum kit his dad bought him before he even went to school. Soon the child prodigy was grappling with guitar, glockenspiel and keyboards, as well as messing with tape recorders and learning from his father about microphone placement. Although his dad died when Brooks was only nine, the son continued to pursue music, avoiding any formal training but studying music technology while helping to teach an A-level class in music technology.
Perhaps his early start with music, along with his later involvement in musical pedagogy, accounts for why Brooks was so intrigued by Electronic Music in the Classroom, an ultra-rare recording that was the byproduct of a course implemented at several home counties schools in 75-76 and which he has reissued through his just-launched downloads-only label Café Kaput. Originally released in a miniscule edition of reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes for the parents of the children involved, this remarkable record is credited to DD Denham, the peripatetic teacher who devised and implemented the course. But the contents are actually the creme de la creme of the work created by participating children. Now retired, Denham stresses that "the concepts were always those of the child. I would help quite a bit with technical realisation, in terms of connecting that concept to a sound. But I always explained to them the steps taken in order to achieve the sound. The children soon picked up various techniques and developed them on their own. So, a little bit of collaboration, but it was more guidance than anything."
Many of the pieces on Electronic Music in the Classroom are disorienting and disquieting, reflecting children's under-acknowledged appetite for the sinister. "Some children would get spooked by each other's compositions or sounds," Denham recalls. "Sometimes an oscillator would emit a loud wailing and lots of other children would gather round the instrument like a magnet, rather than run away. Kids actually love being scared and sound, although harmless in this case, can be scary and thrilling." The reissue comes with the original liner notes, in which Denham recounts some of the quirky inspirations that the children drew on, from a nightmare about nuns, to the unsettling smell of the air expelled from a church organ, to the ghostly flitting figures of poachers seen from afar after dusk.
Then there's The Way the Vicar Smiles, a delirium of drastically warped, vaguely ecclesiastical sounds (what could be church bells, a choir singing psalms). In the liner notes Vicar Smiles is accurately described by its young creators Robert and Luke as "a bit creepy". "The local education authority thought we were probably skating a little too close to the middle with that one," recalls Denham. "You couldn't get away with it now. However, the vicar in question disappeared from his work a couple of years later, without so much as a whisper. Make of that what you will."
Moon Wiring Club's A Spare Tabby at the Cat's Wedding is out now on Gecophonic in CD and vinyl formats (the latter with radically altered sequencing and some different tracks). DD Denham's Electronic Music in the Classroom is out now on Café Kaput and available via Bandcamp
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: WIN WIN – Releaserpm
This ultra-hip supergroup features contributions from members of Spank Rock and Gang Gang Dance
WIN WIN (capital letters artist's own) are producer/remixer XXXChange, DJ Chris Devlin and visual artist Ghostdad. XXXChange is most famous for remixing Thom Yorke and Björk, while producing albums by Kele, the Kills and his other group, gonzoid hip-hop duo Spank Rock. Releaserpm is the band's minimal debut single and features Liz Bougatsos from Gang Gang Dance, whose deliciously eerie vocal is set against steelpan beats and gurgling synths. Their self-titled album is out in February through Vice Records and features Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor and Naeem from Spank Rock.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Kanye West says more things about George Bush and Taylor Swift
The rapper attacks the media for exploiting his many public outbursts, in what can only be described as, er, a public outburst
Kanye West played New York's Bowery Ballroom yesterday (23 November) for a concert promoting his new album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. But it wouldn't be a Kanye event without a bit of ranting, and the rapper obliged with a monologue on his Katrina outburst in 2005. "Everybody said: 'Oh my God, Kanye! I love you so much! I hated you until you said that! Now you're speaking for me! I always thought you were an asshole, but now you said something that represents me!'" he told the crowd. "And the whole time, I'm thinking in my mind: 'That's not exactly what I wanted to say.'"
The rapper continued with what appeared to be a dig at Taylor Swift (she of "I'mma let you finish" fame), saying: "I was emotional, that was not exactly the way I wanted to word it. But I rode it, I rode it. Just as Taylor never came to my defence in any interview, and rode the wave, and rode it, and rode it, that's the way I rode the wave of the Bush comment. I rode it."
So there you have it, more words from the mouth of Kanye. Rolling Stone scribe Brian Hiatt recorded much of what was said at the concert, which you can listen to here.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Ask the indie professor: Why do bands want 'indie' cred?
It's often vital for new artists to be seen as 'indie'. But this label has little to do with how independent they are, and it never did
The indie professor is looking for more questions to answer. Please send your musical queries to theindieprofessor@gmail.com or in the comments section below ...
Why doesn't "indie" mean "independent record label" or DIY any more?
bristarmanI would start by asking: according to whom? Among fans there was never a consensus, and from an industry standpoint "indie" never meant "independent record label". In Britain, a record is independent if it is eligible for inclusion on the independent record charts. In the US, there used to be a college radio chart, which arose from the tastes of students who worked the airwaves while getting degrees. The UK standpoint classified a record as independent if it had an independent distributor, such as Pinnacle or 3MV, rather than a distribution company owned by Sony, Universal, EMI or Warner. So regardless of size, the nature of label ownership or the degree of DIY, distribution was considered the defining criterion for "independence".
The question of why independent distribution was the deciding factor is a historic one. In the post-punk era, when lo-fi recording became affordable, lack of funding was no longer the obstacle to a band's bid to be heard. DIY artists could make their own records but the issue was how to get them available and noticed. One of two major stumbling blocks for nascent artists and labels was media exposure. With a limited number of media outlets in the UK, charting was the primary way to get music on the radio or on record store shelves. Charting was seen as so essential that record companies would regularly lose money on singles as part of a larger strategy to break a band. Thus, giving music away for free or at a loss in order to introduce an artist isn't something from the MP3 generation but a longstanding practice.
However, there used to be a more consistent return on fans purchasing albums after getting their hands on underpriced singles. There were few ways for unsigned local artists to be heard nationwide, other than through the sadly missed John Peel; the industry machine had majors manipulating the chart system and excluding the sales of speciality retailers. It was the weekly press that initially began making alternative charts (Sounds was first). Someone would call up a speciality retailer, such as Intone Records or Rough Trade, and get a list from whoever answered the phone of what they claimed their top sellers were. Not the most scientific way of putting a chart together, but one that had the intended effect of broadcasting the tastes of niche markets (or at least of the person who answered the phone).
The second and biggest obstacle for artists and small labels was securing distribution to get their records into shops. Some companies made deals with majors for distribution but lost control over release schedules. Distribution was seen as crucial for control over access and expression. In the early days, independent distribution and record labels mostly coincided in practice, though certainly not in musical styles. It was typical for a Stock Aitken Waterman-style pop act such as Kylie Minogue to appear alongside Orange Juice or the like on the independent chart.
However, as smaller independent labels flourished, some were bought by majors or had artists poached by majors after doing the initial legwork. During this time, an ideology grew up regarding the means of circumventing corporate gatekeepers. As David Cavanagh put it: "The decision to take the independent route represented an emotional rejection, based on ethics and political beliefs, of everything the major labels stood for." Professionals began to see "indie" as a marketing tool. Artists wanted to be indie, but not necessarily on an independent label. The criterion of independent distribution was a loophole that could be exploited and the early 90s saw the development of crypto-indies: imprints on major record labels that would be distributed independently in order to be classified as independent. Thus, a band could both be on a major label and appear on the independent record chart.
I've often wondered why people prefer independent labels but have no concern over the nature of ownership of publishing companies or booking agencies. The idea of independence being about labels is a fascinating one because it reveals that the chief concerns are issues of autonomy, artistic control and rejection of the establishment. If an artist has signed a contract with a label of any sort, independent or major, they have given up control and it really is a matter of the specific practices of the label how much of a good or bad thing that turns out to be. Independents are viewed as having less marketing power and fewer financial resources, leading to the assumption that they give artists more control and greater ownership – but that isn't always the case.
My answer, then, to why indie doesn't mean "independent record label" or "DIY" any more is: because it never did.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: Cut Copy – Take Me Over
A sophisticated, if cheesy, pop masterclass that isn't afraid to borrow a bassline from Fleetwood Mac
For those of you unfamiliar with Aussie synth-pop, Cut Copy are a Sydney trio whose second album, In Ghost Colours, reached No 1 in their homeland and was proclaimed album of 2008 by many esteemed publications. After two years on the road, they are back with a new LP, Zonoscope (due in February 2011), from which Take Me Over is the first single. Opening with a rush of synths and a bassline cribbed from Fleetwood Mac's Everywhere, singer Dan Whitford's soft delivery floats over various 80s pop flourishes (including padded drums) before the song morphs into Paul Simon's You Can Call Me Al. A sophisticated, if cheesy, pop masterclass.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Kanye West's fantasy has come true – critics believe the hype
Reviews for Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy have been off the scale. But have critics confused size, ambition and bluster for a genuinely brilliant record?
British music critics of a certain vintage still shudder at the mention of Oasis' Be Here Now, a record that inspired five-star hyperbole far out of proportion to its modest virtues. Britpop's armageddon came to mind when I was reading reviews of Kanye West's fifth album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It's not that West's effort is a dud like Be Here Now – in fact it's sporadically brilliant – but the critical rhetoric seems similarly dazzled by its scale and ostentation.
Pitchfork (which awarded the site's first perfect 10.0 for a new album in years) congratulated West for "taking his style and drama to previously uncharted locales, far away from typical civilisation". Other critics have described Kanye as "coasting on heroic levels of dementia, pimping on top of Mount Olympus", producing "a monument to self, to desire, to smashing limitations", and making "the Sgt Pepper of hip-hop". The album's current score on review aggregator Metacritic is a whopping 98% at the time of writing. West recently profiled himself for XXL magazine; now it reads as if he is reviewing himself as well. He says he's the best; ergo, he is the best.
It's always worth pausing for breath when hyperbolic music spawns hyperbolic prose. Because West is, depending on what Lady Gaga's up to that week, the most interesting pop star in the world; because his ego is as big as the Death Star; because his first two albums were hip-hop landmarks; because Twisted Fantasy is so overstuffed and overwhelming, it almost forces an awestruck response. If it walks like a masterpiece and it quacks like a masterpiece ...
But it feels like many people are applauding the idea of the album, rather than the reality (or even just the idea of West – one review spent as much time discussing his Twitter feed as his music). Sure, in a field of hedged bets and half-measures, lunatic excess is to be welcomed, but there are too many lazy lyrics, too many unnecessary guests (All of the Lights seems to feature everyone bar Brandon Flowers, Willie Nelson and MC Skat Kat), too many foot-dragging codas, too much dead-end self-absorption for this to live up to its billing.
It's not even a creative breakthrough. West's already done contradiction on The College Dropout, triumphalism on Late Registration, celebrity angst (and unexpected sampling) on Graduation, and moping on 808s & Heartbreak. Now he's just doing them all at once, louder. And the creeping sense that he's had nothing new to say since 2005 becomes undeniable when, at the end of an album about West's adventures in celebrityland, he has to turn to a 1970 spoken-word piece by Gil Scott-Heron for some big-picture gravitas.
The album's intended message is clear: I AM A COMPLEX GENIUS. And sometimes he is. Songs such as Power and Lost in the World make West's glitzy, paranoid melodrama sound as exciting as anything in pop. But at more than 68 minutes, it feels tiring, bludgeoning, blockbusterish: an album that seeks nothing from the listener beyond stunned awe. It reminds me of a medieval banquet where, just as you're starting to feel stuffed and nauseous, they wheel out the roast hog.
Maybe the current glowing consensus is down to the late release of promo copies, forcing critics to write reviews based on initial impressions – grandiosity tends to impress quickly but date badly (in the past I've overrated certain albums under deadline pressure). But maybe it's a more profound longing, in a fragmented, long-tail, death-of-the-megastar era, for a Thriller: a record by the biggest, most compelling man in pop that just happens to be an all-time classic on which everyone can agree. Wouldn't that be something?
But wanting it won't make it so. Rolling Stone wrote that "West wants us to demand more". I think we (and Kanye) should instead demand better. As anyone who bought Be Here Now will tell you, more and better are not the same at all.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - The Streets write a song for the Guardian
Yesterday we blogged about Mike Skinner's innovative use of Twitter to help crowdsource songs. A few hours later the Streets man posted a new track ... for us
Read the blog about Mike Skinner that inspired this song
James McMahon blogged for us yesterday about Mike Skinner's latest internet adventures and his fondness for turning followers' tweets into songs. A few hours later we checked back on Skinner's blog to find a rather more personal update."Hello to James McMahon from the Guardian newspaper, thank you for your kind words ..."
Skinner went on to say that he was a tad disappointed at McMahon's claim that he has given up tweeting about his hangovers. And how best to vent this disappointment? Through a song, of course, and a video that aims to show "the genuine process through which one obtains the clouded head that leads to the morning after a day off on one". Enjoy!
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: Hunting Hat – Who I Thought
We still haven't had our fill of ghostly lo-fi rock. A good job, too, as this singer-songwriter is a master of it
Hunting Hat , the nom de guerre of singer-songwriter Kyle Gootkin, makes the kind of lo-fi, guitar-based song sketches that frustrate and delight in equal measure. On the one hand, they're so fragile and haunting that part of you wants to grab hold of Gootkin and tell him to cheer up. On the other, they're so fragile and haunting that you want to curl up in a ball and weep. It's a delicate balance. Who I Thought is taken from his new EP There Are Plenty of People Younger Than You; I'm One of Them. It's an unsettling mix of cheap-sounding jack-hammer beats, distant guitar lines and a Julian Casablancas-style vocal buried in so much distortion that it's impossible to make out a single word.
You can download the EP for free here
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Mike Skinner needs you (to write his new music)
Mike Skinner's Twitter collaborations with fans show that the Streets' mastermind understands the true potential of the internet
Like Kanye West, Lily Allen and 50 Cent (actually, no one is quite like 50 Cent), last year Mike Skinner was merely a moderately opinionated pop star with a Twitter account, using @skinnermike to tell Streets fans what he was up to and how he was keeping. Occasionally this meant posting a photo from an aftershow party, but more often than not he just used Twitter to complain about his hangover.
But on 19 October last year, after a mundane tweet telling his 91,064 followers he'd "arrived in LA" and that his plane had been "cold", Skinner went quiet. A day passed, then another, until after several months most of his followers either stopped caring or presumed he'd got bored or moved to Foursquare. Then, on 19 October 2010, after exactly a year's absence, he resumed tweeting, returning at half past midnight with the simplest of messages: a link to the Streets' new website.
It was the neat, buzz-fuelling return you might have expected from a man who's always paid attention to details – logos, record sleeves, videos – as well as the devil – drugs, booze and, um, drugs – throughout the Streets' 10-year career. But the return of the Streets wasn't the only thing significant about 19 October. It was also the moment Skinner made a public point that – unlike most other pop stars – he really did understand the potential of the internet.
Other musicians have demonstrated that they know how to generate buzz about a new project and engage fans in smart, innovative ways. A prominent example is Nine Inch Nails' viral campaign for their Year Zero album in 2007. But what Skinner has done is turn a one-way sermon into a discourse, breaking down barriers between fan and band with a simplicity that an arty hardcore group such as Lightning Bolt (who perform on the floor, rather than the stage, because, like, we're all the same) might envy.
The new Streets website – which is more of a blog, really – principally contains odd videos of swans dying and badly edited pieces about why Skinner doesn't like owning a phone. But it's also become a dumping ground for ideas – many of which have started out in the minds of Streets fans, not Skinner's.
Skinner, you see, has taken to replying to his followers' tweets in the form of a video blog. Some of these tweets have become songs, the most recent being Cinema Barz, which was posted last Tuesday, the result of Skinner answering followers @shetlandshaun, @bec_brough and @glory55, and incorporating their call and responses into the song.
It's likely just a way to pass the time, but it shows Skinner isn't using Twitter as an extension of ye olde subscription list, a platform from which to shout information. Skinner isn't just telling fans what he's up to; he's effectively writing music with them, including them in the creative process and creating an ephemeral rehearsal room of sorts. Admittedly, he's the keyholder – but it's an open-door policy. It's obvious the internet is what really excites him these days – on Sunday, when @clairethornhill asked if he thought he should be included in the "walk of stars" in Birmingham, he replied, "yes, but I want one in cyberspace first".
Amid this activity, the 31-year-old has said his forthcoming sixth album, Computers and Blues, will be the final Streets release. Why? Because he's bored, and as the autobiographical stories that make up his output attest, the Streets were never supposed to be boring. As well as his infrequent online TV show, Beat Stevie, and irreverent podcasts with his mate Ted Mayhem, Skinner's recent online movements suggest it's worth keeping an eye on what comes after the Streets are put to rest. After all, you might be as much a part of his future music as he is.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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