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- Valentine's Day: a Malachai playlist
That's right, it's a day for showing your loved one how much they mean to you. And if you've forgotten to buy them a card, just forward them this link instead
Because nothing says "I love you" like a mixtape.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New album stream: Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx – We're New Here
Be among the first to hear Gil Scott-Heron's I'm New Here as remixed by Jamie from the xx
Gil Scott-Heron's outstanding comeback album, I'm New Here, has been remixed by Jamie Smith, the man who cultivated the sound of the xx's eponymous debut. Listen to all 13 tracks and let us know what you think in the space below.
We're New here by Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx is out on 21 February.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Grammys 2011: Why can't Lady Antebellum find success in the UK?
The Stateside country behemoths were The King's Speech of last night's Grammys, winning six awards. But despite being No 1 across the world, their music barely bothers the British charts
Country-pop trio Lady Antebellum were The King's Speech of last night's Grammys, winning six awards (compared to Firth and Co's seven at the Batfas), including best country album, best country song, song of the year and record of the year, a sweep so clean the other Lady-in-waiting, Gaga, could only pick up the Nashville band's scraps.
Of course, the difference between Lady Antebellum and The King's Speech is that, whereas the latter is doing big business in the States and looks set to repeat its Bafta glory at the Oscars next month, Lady Antebellum have been unable to translate their US success (including multiple weeks at No 1 and multi-million-selling singles and albums) over here. Yes, they had a No 21 single in the UK with Need You Now, and their album, also called Need You Now, reached the top 10 and went gold, but that hardly matches their achievements in America – and Canada, Australia and New Zealand – where the album peaked at pole position. And they're nowhere to be seen on the list of nominees for tomorrow night's Brit awards, conspicuous by their absence from the international breakthrough or international group categories.
But then, 'twas ever thus, right? Taylor Swift is another Stateside country-pop behemoth (not literally, she's actually quite svelte) who enjoys nothing-to-write-home-about sales in Britain, and "hat acts" such as Kenny Chesney or Tim McGraw, while enormous in America, mean bugger all here. Occasionally, an Achy Breaky Heart-style novelty will convince us Brits to briefly embrace all things redneck and join line-dancing clubs, but on the whole we are as impervious to country's charms as the US is to, say, fey'n'flouncy synth-pop – although La Roux won a gong at the Grammys last night, and the Human League and Soft Cell were massive in the US in the early-80s, so maybe it's just us who are not receptive to America's "indigenous" culture.
Maybe we're threatened by music that speaks so clearly to their national condition. Perhaps we don't have the right demographic – Lady Antebellum themselves have joked about the soccer moms and "grizzly lumberjacks" in their audience. It could be that Lady Antebellum's music makes most sense in vast, open spaces – hence its success in Australia and New Zealand. Or it might just be that we don't have much of an appetite for countrified MOR that sounds like anodyne out-takes from Fleetwood Mac's Rumours – hence the current struggle by the Pierces to make it big in Blighty.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Will Radiohead's The King of Limbs save the music industry?
Radiohead's The King of Limbs, which breaks with the honesty-box tactic of In Rainbows, may provide clues as to how the industry could find salvation in a time of flagging sales
Can Radiohead rescue two ailing industries? Tomorrow night sees the Brit awards take place in London, and with admirable intent, the plan is to focus strictly on the music: the show is being moved from Earls Court to the O2, presenter James Corden is under instruction not to insult the talent and the evening will climax with the announcement of album of the year. But this is set against a 7% decline in sales last year, a growing realisation that digital revenue will always struggle to replace the once lucrative CD market, and a lineup intended to celebrate the best in British music, but which boasts the likes of Mumford & Sons. If that's the best we can muster, the feeling is that the industry really is broken.
So it's with impeccable timing that this morning Radiohead announced on their website that on Saturday, their new album will be available for download. The King of Limbs will cost just £6 as an MP3, or £9 if you want a higher quality WAV version. Or you can spend £33 to get the WAV version plus, in two months' time, an edition they're calling "the world's first Newspaper Album". This comprises two clear 10in vinyl records in a purpose-built record sleeve, a CD, and lots of artwork. Presumably, a super-deluxe version will be announced in coming months that will see Thom Yorke appear as a hologram at the foot of your bed to sing the thing.
This release breaks with the honesty-box tactic the band initially employed for In Rainbows in 2007, but emulates the approach of creating a lavish physical format that the most loyal fans will feel they have to own, whatever the cost. In Rainbows was licensed to record companies throughout the world in one-off agreements; in the UK, only the independent label XL enjoyed the flexibility and sensibility to handle such an arrangement.
It seems a canny notion, and while the band's manager, Brian Message, has remained tight-lipped about the commercial success of In Rainbows, it's hard to think that Radiohead will lose out financially this time either. What's not yet clear is why it's called a "Newspaper Album". But newspapers – it's no secret – are suffering the same sort of woes as the music industry. Is there some hidden clue here for how the print business will find salvation, too?
Of course, as with In Rainbows, what's not first discussed with The King of Limbs is what the thing will sound like. Will it be the epic rock record that some have rumoured, which the industry would so dearly love, a sign that the UK can still produce bands that will tick a box at the Brits or the Grammys? Or will it be more in the tradition of Kid A, a determinedly singular album? Bearing in mind something Thom Yorke said last year, it's unlikely that Radiohead will be going out of their way to offer succour to the former camp: "It's simply a matter of time – months rather than years – before the music business establishment completely folds."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Lady Gaga's new gay anthem
Has Lady Gaga's Born This Way got what it takes to be a classic gay anthem? Jon Savage on the debt she owes to a brave 1970s singer
Lady Gaga has just debuted her brand new single at the 53rd Grammy awards in Los Angeles. Her first all-new material for well over a year, Born This Way has been trailed by a mountain of hype and conjecture. This is par for the contemporary celebrity course. What is not, though, is the nature of the song, which is nothing less than a contemporary LGBT call-to-arms.
Elton John has recently called Born This Way "the anthem that's going to obliterate I Will Survive" – a laudable ambition indeed for anyone who's heartily sick of that Gloria Gaynor warhorse (which, by the way, is not an exclusively gay record). Gaga herself has been more circumspect: "It has been in my heart for over a year," she recently tweeted, but otherwise has, sensibly, fought shy of making any grand claims. Anthems are adopted, not hyped.
Born This Way begins as it means to go on, with Gaga intoning over swelling synths: "It doesn't matter if you love him or capital H-I-M/ Just put your paws up/ Cause you were born this way, baby." Then the rhythm kicks in, and it's classic um-da um-da late-disco/hi-energy, albeit with psychedelic 21st-century time-stretching production touches. It's a big sound without being ponderous, and sticks in your head like a burr.
The lyrics are ballsy enough, certainly within the US context, to run the risk of offending the many and vociferous religious groups: ''I'm beautiful in my way/ Cause God makes no mistakes/ I'm on the right track, baby/ I was born this way." It also makes some sharp points about the self-hatred that many gay people and outcasts of all kinds share: "Don't hide yourself in regret/ Just love yourself and you're set."
It's important to remember that Born This Way is not, of course, a self-improvement tract but a pop record, from a performer at the top of her game. Lady Gaga is the quintessential 2011 pop star: her records are a winning mixture of electro-pop with contemporary R&B touches, and her subject matter feeds into the media's self-obsession on the nature of fame and the devouring, if not sadomasochistic, nature of 21st-century celebrity.
Part of this involves the courting of controversy, and Gaga pushed her public persona to ever more hallucinatory extremes. She has long included gay imagery in her videos as part of her armoury: Telephone included a make-out scene with Beyoncé, while Steven Klein's nine-minute epic for Alejandro fused homoerotic, horror and religious imagery. The subsequent public spats merely boosted net views and sales.
With everything she does under such close scrutiny, Gaga knows that releasing a gay-friendly single will bind in her gay, "lesbian, transgendered" target audience, who find their preoccupations reflected in her songs. And there's the other side of the coin, which is that it's just polite to recognise the concerns and lives of the people who are your fans – and to give them a bit of support.
Neither is Born This Way just a gay record. If there are sections within her mass audience who might baulk at the message, then she has pre-empted that by making the song all-inclusive in the later verses. "Whether you're broke or evergreen/ You're black, white, beige, chola descent," Gaga raps, whether you're "Lebanese or Orient/ Whether life's disabilities left you outcast, bullied or teased/ Rejoice and love yourself today."
This lyrical inclusiveness can seem programmatic, but then she is talking about something that happens to many people, including herself: "They used to call me rabbit teeth in school," she recently tweeted, "and now I'm a real live VOGUE BEAUTY QUEEN!" Revenge is a prime pop motivation and, indeed, can lie behind the manic drive to overachievement shown by many who feel themselves excluded from the mainstream.
Gaga's knowledge of gay politics is explicit in the song's title. Born This Way echoes a founding gay-lib document from 1975, when Bunny Jones recorded a young man called Valentino on a song she had just written. The title was I Was Born This Way and the lyric went: "I'm walking through life in nature's disguise/ You laugh at me and you criticise/ Just because I'm happy, I'm carefree and I'm gay/ Yes I'm gay/ Tain't a fault tis a fact/ I was born this way."
Released on the Gaiee label and later picked up by Motown, I Was Born This Way sold well and had a wider impact as the first openly gay record. It's better known in the version released in early 1978 by a gospel singer and future minister called Carl Bean: "It's God's way of making a statement through me," the singer said at the time. "I'm very positive about it because it is something that should have been said a long time ago."
I Was Born This Way was released at the peak of disco – the musical form most associated with gay visibility. The first out-of-the-closet performer to have an international hit was Sylvester – former member of drag queen group the Cockettes – whose You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) swept the board in 1978. Soon afterwards, the cartoon-like Village People took gay subculture into the mainstream with huge hits such as YMCA and In the Navy.
Just over a decade on, Dusty Springfield released a song called Born This Way on Reputation, her album collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys. Written by Geoffrey Williams and Simon Stirling, the song's lyrics are much vaguer than the Bunny Jones track, but have a similar meaning: "You can't spend your whole life/ Just fooling around/ Break away/ And take the time to break the ties/ And leave it all behind you and say/ That's the way I am."
The idea that sexuality is inborn, rather than some lifestyle choice or unfortunate disease, is at the heart of much modern gay identity formation. It flies in the face of the old contra naturam argument, and gives the lie to the idea that homosexuality can be converted, or "cured". It also offers a kind of counterbalancing self-assertion that is necessary in the face of hostility and prejudice: as Lady Gaga sings: "In the religion of the insecure/ I must be myself."
Certainly, gay anthems are born rather than made, but Born This Way has a good pedigree. Referencing I Will Survive and including the cosmic "star" imagery beloved of disco – imagining yourself a space boy or a space girl is a great way of avoiding trouble on planet Earth – it shows a deep understanding of gay life and, further, what it is to be an outsider of any hue.
Born This Way may make more waves in the US, where it is one of several loosely defined "gay anthems", including Katy Perry's Firework, Ke$ha's We R Who We R – with its echoes of I Am What I Am, from La Cage aux Folles – and Pink's Raise Your Glass. This has coincided with an upsurge in activism, concentrated around the "Don't ask don't tell" policy and the bullying of gay youth in schools – highlighted by the It Gets Better video campaign.
Even so, it is sobering to consider the similarity in theme between the Lady Gaga and the Valentino songs. In the intervening decades, there have been great improvements in the lives of many gay people, but prejudice still exists – and it hits the most vulnerable. The point always has to be restated. While gay teens face extraordinary levels of bullying, records such as Born This Way will remain as necessary as they are generous in spirit.
Born This Way is out now. Jon Savage's compilation of gay pop, Queer Noises, was released in 2006.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Exclusive: Arthur Russell – Moving Me Up (Pocketknife mix)
To celebrate the release of Arthur's Landing, the songs of Arthur Russell reimagined by his many collaborators, we have an exclusive stream of Pocketknife's extended mix
The last few years have seen a resurgence of interest in the late Arthur Russell, a musician whose accomplishments range so widely he defied definition by genre during his short lifetime. In fact, you could argue Russell's posthumous popularity among a whole new generation of fans outstrips the appreciation the disco-making cellist enjoyed in his life, which sadly came to an end in 1992. The mid-2000s saw numerous re-releases of his music by record labels such as Soul Jazz, followed by the veracious, quietly respectful Matt Wolf documentary Wild Combination (2008) and the first in-depth biography, Hold On to Your Dreams, in 2009.In these various examinations of Russell's life and work, the spirit of his collaborative drive is obvious, and so it's fitting that the latest release to invoke his name is by a group of artists who've previously worked with the musician and now call themselves Arthur's Landing. To celebrate their eponymous debut release, record label Strut have given guardian.co.uk/music exclusive access to the extended remix of Russell's songs by New York DJ Pocketknife.
The full tracklisting is below. Arthur's Landing's self-titled album is out now.
Arp & Anthony Moore "Wild Grass I (for Arthur Russell)"
Arthur Russell "This Is How We Walk On the Moon (Youth's Return To Base Edit)"
Arthur Russell "Make 1,2"
Arthur's Landing "Love Dancing"
Elodie Lauten "Vision"
Arthur Russell "Let's Go Swimming" loop
Peter Gordon & The Love of Life Orchestra "That Hat"
Arthur Russell "Let's Go Swimming (Walter Gibbons mix)"
Holiday For Strings "Calling Out Dance mix"
Billy Nichols "Give Your Body Up To the Music (Larry Levan remix)"
Loose Joints "Is It All Over My Face (MAW mix)"
Loose Joints "Tell You Today (Allez-Allez edit)"
Lil Tony "Treehouse (Lil Tony rework)"
Arthur Russell "She's the Star (Pocketknife's Continual Cornfield remix)"
Recent Memory "Lucky Cloud (Pocketknife remix)"
Arthur Russell "That's Us/Wild Combination"
Arthur Russell "All Boy All Girl"
Johanna Billing "This Is How We Walk On the Moon (Bogdan edit)"
Arthur Russell "Keeping Up (Pocketknife remix)"
Allen Ginsberg "A Cradle Song"guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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