 |  Music: Music blog | guardian.co.ukArticles published by guardian.co.uk Music about: Music blog http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog рекомендовать друзьям >> |
- Readers recommend: songs about the afterlife
Tell us what should be the No 1 song in heaven
"There is no heaven or afterlife," scientist Stephen Hawking recently told the Guardian. "It's a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."
Maybe so, but most religions buy into the concept; people need to believe that we continue to exist in some way after we've popped our clogs. And it hasn't stopped people writing songs about the afterlife, or making music inspired by it. But in what sense do we continue? How does that work?
Whatever your beliefs, let us know your favourite songs about the afterlife by posting a comment below.
This might help:
* Listen to others' suggestions and add yours to a collaborative Spotify playlist
* Guide to "donds", "zedded", and other strange words used by some of the RR regulars (courtesy of the Marconium)
* The Marconium (blog containing a wealth of data on RR, including the songs that are "zedded")
* Previously on Readers Recommend
* The 'Spill (blog for the RR community)
Please do:
* Write a few lines advocating the merits of your choices.
* Post your nominations before midday on Tuesday if you wish them to be considered for inclusion in a "results" blog (collecting your best suggesions), published on Thursday next week.
But please don't:
* Post more than one third of the lyrics of any song.
* Simply list your nominations. If you must post more than two or three at once, please attempt to justify your choices.
* Congratulations to RR regular TinCanMan for suggesting this topic. You win … er ... nothing, actually. But thanks. Any other bright ideas for future RR themes gratefully received.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Don't be afraid of vanity projects
Hugh Laurie's blues album has provoked negative responses. But like the best, his is about a fan getting up and having a go
I have no great expertise in the blues. In fact my last brush with them was on the gently didactic CBeebies show ZingZillas, on which they were played and sung by a monkey puppet. This, I imagine, puts me squarely in the intended audience for Hugh Laurie's hit blues album, Let Them Talk. Laurie has been doing the chat show rounds for this record, his combination of obvious smarts and gosh-wow modesty as charming as ever, and he's clearly delighted to be fronting a crack blues band on live TV.
Let Them Talk is, of course, a vanity project. There are a lot of negative associations around such projects, and when one hoves into view it triggers predictable responses. Nobody would be buying this, you hear repeatedly, if it wasn't by Laurie. But everyone – including those buying the record – surely already knows this, and they don't care: curiosity is hardly a bad reason to hear an album. And besides, Laurie's theatrical readings and oddly accented drawl are the most individual and interesting things about a gorgeous-sounding but reverential record.
The next line of argument is that vanity projects draw attention away from better musicians. There may be cases where that happens, but I doubt Laurie's project is one of them – if Let Them Talk hadn't existed, the column inches discussing it wouldn't have magically been filled with blues coverage, because without a rich actor at the helm, blues is a minority taste. In any case, Laurie's obvious passion for the subject seems likely to do the music some good. He's not passing himself off as a man with deep roots in the blues, just a lifelong fan made good.
He's in good company at the moment. Next week, David Lynch, who has an electronic album in the can, will be giving the keynote speech at a dance music conference in Ibiza. Zooey Deschanel has spun a taste for light, folksy indie into a fully-formed second career. A lot depends on how likable the star in question is. Laurie's method – bringing together an expensive and talented group of people to make slick music that hides his slightly one-paced vocals – is also the way Paris Hilton made her album five years ago. That record was generally savaged, though song for song it was far better than anything Kylie, say, has done lately. The obnoxious Hilton brand proved impossible for most critics to see past.
My favourite celebrity side project is, like Laurie's, a fan's journey into the past. In 1974, underground cartoonist Robert Crumb decided to turn his fanatical love of old jazz records into a band – he formed the Cheap Suit Serenaders and cut three albums as their frontman, mixing 1920s vocal jazz with originals done in the same style. They even put out a string of instantly obsolete 78s, taking the vanity project to giddily indulgent heights. Crumb is a far weaker singer than Laurie, but the style he played on these records is less familiar than Let Them Talk's blues primer. Crumb has a sweeter tooth than most modern fans of old-time music, so his records feel as much pop as jazz, and their bonhomie is a good fit with the group's enthusiastic, amateurish style. More, Crumb's love of this music became a mission, bleeding into his day job: some of his most heartfelt comics were about old jazzmen, or about how his passion for their work made him feel more of an outcast in the rockin' 1970s.
It's partly thanks to those 60s and 70s rockers, though, that blues occupies the place it does in our musical imagination. The success of Let Them Talk isn't down to the success of House, or even a general feeling that Laurie is a good egg. It's also that the things the album makes you think of – coffee shops, branded blues bars, a home counties pub on a Sunday afternoon – have become homes to the blues, even if they aren't terribly authentic. To the public, blues survives as a comfortable everyman music, reassuringly old. The kind of music, in fact, that's very well suited to a vanity project, the essence of which is really just somebody getting up and having a go.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Your Love by Frankie Knuckles: a song that will be raved about for ever
This Summer of Love anthem still packs a punch after influencing a quarter-century of pop and dance music
Trying to nail the exact appeal of a song is a bit like taking a hammer to a frog. Sure, you'll splay its innards and identify the individual bits that make it what it is, but why would you want to? Never is this daft metaphor more true than in the case of dance music, where genre classics are supposed to transcend nerdy analysis.
But sometimes a song has such power it can define a genre and a generation – surely that deserves more than just fleeting dancefloor glory? So goes the story of Your Love by Frankie Knuckles, a track considered an anthem for Britain's 1989 Summer of Love, unwittingly going on to influence a quarter-century of pop music and dance culture.
"From the arpeggiated synth line to that thick, fat analogue bassline, it's one of a handful of tunes that captures the spirit of acid house," says Nick DeCosemo, editor of Mixmag. "Lots of current producers still look back to it for inspiration." DeCosemo insists electronic music wouldn't be the same without it. Dave Pearce, who interviewed Knuckles for a special edition of 6Mix on BBC 6 Music last weekend, agrees. Pearce tells me it's not just misty-eyed rave nostalgia that gets him going, "it works because it manages to combine a soulful spirituality with a darker side, while being very sexual at the same time". Not bad for a track recorded for a laugh in the DJ booth of one-time Chicago house club, The Power Plant, with a drum machine borrowed from Derrick May and pal Jamie Principle roped in on vocals.
Knuckles, a 55-year-old New Yorker whose name hardly ever appears in print without the words "godfather of house" preceding it, has even managed to pip Chicago icon Oprah in having a street named after him in the Windy City, so appreciated is his influence on the music scene. Meanwhile, America's doyenne of daytime TV had to wait around until this week before finally being honoured with Oprah Way.
But it's not just me, club DJs, and the mayor of Chicago who remain hypnotised by the Knuckles back catalogue: Animal Collective sampled Your Love on My Girls while Friendly Fires covered it on their Photobooth EP. And, of course, the Source mixed it under Candi Staton's You Got the Love and produced an even bigger hit (several times over), spawning additional covers from Florence and the Machine, the xx and, er, Joss Stone.
In short, the debt pop music owes to Your Love isn't just to those old enough to have indulged in the days of acid house (as opposed to huddling in front of the box for the next episode of Fun House). Nor can the track be relegated to propping up the bargain bins of 90s pop. To paraphrase Pearce, its shelf-life extends way beyond the usual dance music sell-by date, largely because "it's an exquisite record you can really lose yourself in. It will just live for ever."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Maggoty Lamb on Arthur's afterlife and a resuscitated NME
What's it all about, Arthur? A lucky drip of critical perspectives, finds our Lamb. Elsewhere in the music press, there's a meeting of minds and a creative spark at NME
It should be a strange and rather sad feeling to stumble on the last rites of a music publication you never read – like wandering through the aftermath of a party you might have really enjoyed if you'd only received an invite. But the main emotion prompted by a speculative trawl through the bounteously still-up-and-running archives of sadly defunct American underground newsletter Arthur is one of pure enjoyment.
In a month when the publication of Greil Marcus's latest Bob Dylan anthology has prompted a rash of the kind of music journalism technically described as "canonical bollocks" (regular readers will know how this column hates to point the finger, but in the context of a book which is at best Live at the Budokan to Invisible Republic's Blood on the Tracks, Mojo's five-star review does have a rather knee-jerk quality to it), it's a treat to come across Arthur's lucky-dip of much fresher critical perspectives. From brazenly pseudonymous record reviewers "C&D" daring to face up the apparent simple-mindedness of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On in May 2006 – "Maybe it's only a love singer who can bring the super-commentary that lasts" – to Pavement's Stephen Malkmus (in March 2008) talking a lot of sense about the historic backdrop to the evolution of US golf-course design but showing considerably less of an aptitude for political prophecy ("President Obama – I'd probably be surprised by that too"), Arthur's best contributors retain the capacity to surprise and delight even as former editor Jay Babcock ponders his next move.
"My girlfriend and I are putting in an enclosed vegetable garden today at our home in Joshua Tree, California", Babcock reassures concerned former readers, "near our outdoor shower and compost toilet." And for those – like me – struggling to come to terms with how they could have failed to get on this particular publishing bandwagon before it drove into the digital ravine, maybe we simply got Arthur mixed up with the Kennedy family Vanity Fair tribute-magazine George, just as zoologically unfocussed British indie fans have sometimes been known to confuse the very much alive-and-flapping Stool Pigeon, with the sadly extinct Lime Lizard.
This month's Word magazine brings together two of the most feared and formidable operators in the history of Anglophone pop culture journalism. "But enough of Allison Pearson and Jude Rogers," I hear a voice in the wings observe mischievously, "how does the 'rock critic power summit' between Nick Kent and the aforementioned Greil Marcus go?" Well, it's more of a meeting of minds than the similarly heavyweight Eurovision head-to-head between Charles Shaar Murray and Cheryl Baker from Bucks Fizz, but the unusual structure of the Kent/Marcus encounter gives the proceedings a welcome extra edge.
It is normal for such public conversations between eminent individuals to be brokered by an at least nominally neutral umpire, but in this case, Kent himself is on transcribing and introduction duty. In one sense – history generally being the propaganda of he or she who has the kept the interview tapes – this gives him an advantage, but in another it makes him vulnerable to the perception that his need of media exposure might be greater than that of his distinguished contemporary.
To compensate for any consequent diminution in status, Kent starts by getting Marcus's name wrong ("In my ignorance", he disingenuously confesses, "I'd pronounced it Grail") and later proclaims himself "pleasantly surprised to find that he [Marcus] also possessed a very ready sense of humour, something that tends to stay hidden when he writes". These waspish pleasantries aside, Kent ultimately gives a commendably fair-minded account of the ideological division between his vision of rock journalism as "fundamentally an action-driven medium" and Marcus's "harvesting of cultural obsessions in a quest for literary epiphanies". Both parties also have interesting things to say about Bruce Springsteen (insofar as that is not a contradiction in terms), and the only real disappointment served up by this dichotomous duo is their disappointingly safe choices for top turn of the last 20 years – Marcus picks PJ Harvey, Kent plumps for Radiohead.
Hamish MacBain's well thought out exposé of the hypocrisy inherent in Thom Yorke and co's attitudes to the music industry is one reason an avid and well-informed rock press reader of my acquaintance was only half joking when he proclaimed the 23 April edition of NME (the issue with Lady Gaga on the front doing Hazel O'Connor for Stars in Their Eyes) "the best ever". No doubt he was also quietly impressed by Peter Robinson's readiness to front up to Lady Gaga over the possible melodic kinship between Born This Way and Madonna's Express Yourself ("If you put the songs together side by side, the only similarities are the chord progression", Gaga snaps back, somewhat inconclusively. "God sent me those lyrics and that melody").
While not sufficiently venerable to know every Danny Baker singles page by heart, this particular newly satisfied customer is certainly well-seasoned enough to recall the halcyon days of wilfully confrontational Steven Wells letters pages and 6 Music's Stuart Maconie writing about important underground Northern bands such as The Railway Children. This puts him in an ideal position to notice that Krissi Murison is proving to be NME's boldest and most imaginative editor in decades.
What a shame it would be if the paper were to go the way of Arthur just as it's finally emerging from years in the journalistic doldrums. Maybe a few more disgruntled ex-subscribers should reallocate some of the resources they might have squandered on one more book about Dylan and give NME another chance for a few weeks – if only as a gesture of collective confidence in music journalism having a future as well as a past. After all, if they don't like what they find, there's always the paperback to save up for.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: New Look – The Ballad
Beautiful synth sighs form the backdrop for this message of support – though who it's for remains a mystery ...
In 2008, Canadian duo New Look, aka singer Sarah Ruba and producer Adam Pavao, released their debut EP, How's My Hair? The throwaway title and their effortlessly stylish press shots practically screamed: "We are your favourite new blog band!" Yet there was something wonderfully effortless about their brand of pop, particularly on the strange vocal effects of Future Times. Since then they've signed to !K7, home to Chromeo and the DJ Kicks series, and this is the first song from their forthcoming debut album. The Ballad softens the band's edges with synth sighs, rippling beats and a chorus featuring a Kate Bush impression. Lyrically, it's an offer of support: "This is the part when everybody says they love you so/ You know I love you so." It's such a personal song that the band are reluctant to reveal who it's about. "The song is a message to someone we know and even though it's a fleeting message to them, we would never want them to find out." At more than six minutes – and featuring a delicious Kraftwerk-esque keyboard riff midway – The Ballad is a spectacular tribute.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
 | Только самое свежее о стиральных машинах Мы расскажем, что следует учитывать при выборе стиральной машины. Обсудим последние новинки, поговорим о хитах продаж и причинах их популярности. Сообщим последние новости, совершим исторический экскурс и ближе познакомимся с компаниями-производителями Присоединиться → |
| rss2email.ru |
| rss2email.ru | отписаться: http://www.rss2email.ru/unsubscribe.asp?c=90855&u=756462&r=477547156 управление подпиской: http://www.rss2email.ru/manage.asp партнерская программа: http://partner.rss2email.ru/?pid=1 |
