Saturday, September 06, 2003
The storyteller and the writer sat down to talk...
The storyteller spoke, and then paused to listen to the writer's response. The writer said nothing, but gazed into space. The storyteller spoke again, hoping to say something the writer would enjoy enough to respond to this time. When the storyteller paused to hear the writer's response once more, the writer continued to stare into space.
A third time the storyteller spoke to the writer, and in the midst of his tale the writer turned quickly and said-
"Oh, my words can be beautiful."
The storyteller cried.
9/06/2003 12:29:00 am
Friday, September 05, 2003
Tell me; what is the difference between brain and belly? And is one more important than the other?
I like to think that brain and belly can be the same thing.
9/05/2003 02:03:00 pm
Thursday, September 04, 2003
August 28th (my brother's 33rd Birthday) and Two kinds of music lover; yes. Got my vote.
Enough of this inter-blog communication and back-patting. Uergh. So distasteful. I know who I'm writing for now.
9/04/2003 09:52:00 pm
The most fun (read ‘satisfying’) part of my ‘job’ at Stylus (apart from having people tell me they want to fuck me, or whatever) is editing Dave Q’s pieces (to call them reviews is an injustice). The man is a genius. Deranged, malcontent, misanthropic, cynical, bitter and nonsensical, but a genius. EVERY time I open a file from him in my inbox I’m astonished and enlightened. We’re so lucky to have him writing with us. I Love Music has been a happy fishing ground for Stylus lately, with Dom Passantino, Cozen, William B. Swygart, Matt DC (killer first review, by the way)and Dave Q all recent recruitments of note from there, and maybe a couple more on the way. With the relaunch looking good (a few niggles to be ironed out and further developments to be finalised aside [not that anything is ever finished, of course, merely not worked on anymore]), these ILMers onboard, plus a couple of other recent writing acquisitions who seem really promising, I’m feeling really confident that in a couple of years we can be contributing something really worthwhile. < /smug>
Foxy Lady
I don’t listen to it often, or him often, because I’m not one for living in the past, however illustrious it may be, but when I do it’s undeniable that it’s complete sex, vocals pushed all the way out wide on the right-hand side to make way for that instrument, grinding and spinning and wailing better than any voice, drums and bass played well but just fucking ignored, because, let’s face it, if you’re having a wank (let’s not romanticise what this is, for once) it doesn’t matter what colour the bedspread or the curtains are, does it? They’re just context; and if you’re going to drop yourself in it and lose that linear fantasy you had in mind and give into pure sensation then there’s no point in adulterating the fucking thing. So Noel’s doing these backing vocals only they’re not at the back, they’re on the other side, just quieter (and Jimi’s voice isn’t amped up enough as it is), and Noel sounds drunk, punch-drunk maybe, or fuck-drunk, woozy cos the blood’s not in his head anymore, it’s in his pants and in his bass (Mitch and Noel always looked shit too; Jimi’s dressed like a fucking magician on the cover, cos that’s what he’s doing, and these sidemen look like a member of The Small Faces and a stupidly white-fro’d Maths teacher who’s spectacles have been nicked – Jimi’s got two buttons undone and yours are done all the way up for fuck’s sake). But yeah, Mitch can barely speak because his member’s engorged and Jimi’s just as turned on, more so, probably, but in control. On the edge of it, yeah, of course, but in control. You couldn’t play that if you were totally off it. Could you? I’m not a magician. I mean ‘musician’. “Love Or Confusion” spells it out succinctly but it’s not that we’re interested in. If it’s succinct it’s not quite as full-on, is it? Even when he’s succinct he’s giving into synaesthesia though, “must there be all these colours without names / without sounds”, but he’s remembering. It’s in “Foxy Lady” that he’s totally out of it in terms of his headspace, body together just enough to co-ordinate his fingers (which he does backwards you fucking limp-wristed fuckers, backwards and upside-down!). And anyway, it’s not wanking if you’ve got an audience, is it? It’s making love then, performing, which means that other people are involved and you’re all getting yours. Back to a more innocent time, is this? I don’t understand who or what the Baby Boomers are but Dave Q hates them and blames them and I’m inclined to agree with him. But there wasn’t popular and alternative music there was just stuff lots of people liked and stuff fewer people liked. Courtney Love, of all people, made most sense about it. Why feel guilty about being good? Oh yeah because you’re fucking privileged and therefore guilty and therefore a; have to corrupt it into being art and b; have to make it seem like you struggled to get there anyway, you fucking Catholic little piece of whinging shit. Oh, and of course, if you’re privileged it’s not your place, is it? So either stop whinging about it or else get the fuck out. But yeah. “Foxy Lady”. Like “Voodoo Chile” (the looooooong one) he’s not gonna hurt you (“I made love to you in your sleep / and Lord knows you feel no pain” – oh the pressures of having a big dick, eh Jimi?) and maybe he even throws Tarantino’s “Like A Virgin” speech into full relief (oh to be black and a musician and sexy, eh Quentin?- that’s why you made such a shit vampire-killer; I bet Van Peebles could do it with a silver bullet and a string of garlic). Yeah. Jimi’s off on one. “Not necessarily stoned… / but… / beautiful…”
Up next, “Piss Diary”.
9/04/2003 09:11:00 pm
After two days of worry, sitting up late at night, attempting to install over and over and over again, after a midnight email to Cakewalk techsupport, I've finally installed Cakewalk Plasma on my new computer. My adventures in modern music begin here...
By the way, Olly, you need to get (Bytes) by Black Dog Productions (Warp 1993). I think you might like it.
9/04/2003 07:25:00 pm
Olly's started blogging! Olly, I miss you. I emailed James telling him to do a Japanese Adventures blog. The Lumidee single is great. Outkast are the best band in the world (in Nick's subjective little world, anyway). Bimbolake is wicked and "Senorita" is great. N*E*R*D are wonderful.
I must do some work.
9/04/2003 10:13:00 am
Radio Five Live last night (or was it technically this morning?) got talking about music again, which they seem to do quite often for a station based around live news and sport that doesn't play any music. Anyway, they had in a dancer (not sure if he was professional) who danced to rock n roll music and latin music and all other sorts or music (12 hours a week was the figure he kept giving for how often he danced), but who didn't own a single CD or record. Why? Because he didn't actually care at all about the music, merely the dancing, which I guess he kind of saw as exercise / sport. The presenters and other guests were incredulous about this (one of them was Steve Lamacq).
Anyway, the upshot is that they got people to text, email and phone in either suggesting the first record that this chap should buy (I think one of the presenters offered to buy it for him [I texted in suggesting Spirit Of Eden]) and other diversionary anecdotes and opinions about music, whether they like it, if it's essential, how many CDs they own etcetera. But there was one chap in particular, who phoned in and explained how he used to be a music junkie in his late teens and early 20s, unable to walk past a record shop without buying something (Lamacq was nodding with agreement at this, as was I, distractedly). But he'd had an epiphany a couple of years ago (he was still only late 20s I think) and stopped. Not just stopped buying, but stopped listening, and had got rid of most of his records/CDs. He had, he said, taken up reading instead.
I don't know what to think of this at all. And what's more I've got stuff to be doing at work this mornign, so I'm not going to be able to formulate ideas or thoughts on it properly, and will probably forget about it soon enough anyway. But my initial impression was that if you can love music so much tat you can become impulsive about it (and presumably this guy must've had some emotional involvement with it at least) and then drop it like a stone and take up something else, feel no remorse, and what's more state that listening to music is "a complete waste of time" (which is what this bloke said) could you do that with anything/everything else? People? I'm all for the idea of people changing, but...
9/04/2003 09:50:00 am
Yes, I am basically saying the same thing over and over and over again. But it needs to be said, sometimes.
In related news, I am very tired. And I've finally linked It's all in your mind after promising I would ages ago.
If you read this blog, please email me at nick@beatbay.co.uk (again). That goes double if you think I'm a twat / want to puke everytime you see my name. Thanks.
9/04/2003 12:01:00 am
Wednesday, September 03, 2003
Like any sane man (woman or child), Mark K-Punk likes the Lumidee single. Unfortunately he has to contextualise it in terms of post-punk qualities, ie; the fact that she can't sing. OK, she can't sing, it's true, and her weak vocals add a degree of emotional desperation (near hysteria, but contained massively) to the tune, giving it's slinky, funky, irresistable handclap-percussive hook some empathic clout on top of the masterful fishing lines dropped neatly into your jiggy-centre ("uh-uh-uh-oh" in the remix, which she mimes along with in the video like Buster Keaton falling off a cliff on a burning train - ie; beautiful, fatalist, tragic and brave all at the same time), but the less-than-technically-brilliant vocals are not the only thing that's great about the tune. You might as well say you like it because she's not a skinny lass vacuum-formed from plastic in the anorexia-melisma mould like so many other female singers these days (or airbrushed to look as if they are). Excuses, excuses, excuses. There's nothing post-punk about "Never Leave Me (Uh-Oh)" at all, but there's everything brillaint about it.
9/03/2003 02:11:00 pm
Credibility, authenticity, the genuine, feeling really real and clubbing a baby seal…
Written for The Turntable…
The thing is that all these notions are obsolete, and what’s more I’m not sure any of them were ever not obsolete. The problem is that they encourage a belief in universal truths, in objective facts about music, art and humanity, and there is no objective truth about these things. You may find Ott an interesting writer, Todd, but for me he’s flawed because he thinks he’s got it all worked out, when the reality is that there is nothing to be worked out. Ott’s “where’s your cred at” jibe may be amusing, but it’s also dangerous because it assumes that if you like X then you must ergo like Y as well, and what’s more that you must dislike Z, as if the vagaries of human tastes must fit directly into analogous compartments linked by threads of logic, when they don’t. We’re not dealing with logic, we’re dealing with aesthetic and emotional responses to things, to music, art, and ultimately through that, to the people and events and objects that compose our universes. “Credibility” as such, trusting a writer’s taste implicitly and completely, assumes that you’re the perfect fit for that writer; the only way you can be is if the writer created you as a perfect work of fiction designed to fit, like in The Circular Ruins by Borges. And like in that story, once you start trying to create things as objects of your own perfection you lose track of your own creation and existential choice, and thus lose the credibility you were pursuing in the first place. This is the whole problem with Pitchfork. As soon as you think you know the order that everything fits into then you’re fucked, because that kind of codification, linearity and mathematical proof simply doesn’t exist outside of science and mathematics. Even science as a discipline recognises now that none of its findings and laws are immutable, because the universe, like individual people, is a work in progress. Much as we can’t understand it, given that the universe is infinite, gravity could stop working tomorrow if something alters in the fundamental physics of the cosmos for whatever reason. If something that you’ve invested a great deal of faith and thought in as being a permanence, a given fact, an absolute, if something like that ruptures, flails, and alters completely for a reason beyond your understanding, then where does that leave you? Because if you pin yourself to a mast of one system, define yourself by it, and that system turns out to be wrong one day, then you have nothing of yourself left and you have to start again.
It’s interesting then that we still, as music writers in general, try to pin these little numbers on works of art as if we can state the immutable and universal quality of them, as if we actually know the minute differentials in class between a 7.8 and a 7.9, as if there’s a quantifiable (qualifiable!) system for working these things out. One of my lecturers at university sent off my final essay to be externally moderated, and it got sent back having been bumped up 3%. This didn’t alter its grade or even bring it nearer to a higher grade (it was already a first), and my lecturer confessed that he had no idea why they saw fit to add 3%, and also added that anything below 40% (a fail) or above 70% (a first) was simply arbitrary. With music writing this is accentuated, in that every mark is arbitrary, because there are no guidelines as to what constitutes a certain grade like in academic work; you simply have to rely on how you feel about something. As such I’m erring closer to Julio Desouza’s assertion that you ought to give everything either a 10 or a 1 – ie; bother or don’t bother.
Smashing apart these meta-narratives of universal truth is what postmodernism does at its most useful and positive utility, because it encourages (for me at least) a degree of incredulity and existential awareness (by removing meta-narratives it forces you to choose your own path and understand your own opinions). Cannibal Ox are not necessarily/intrinsically better than Jurassic 5, The Jesus & Mary Chain are not necessarily/intrinsically better than Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, post-rock is not necessarily/intrinsically better than trance. You cannot ever hope to prove these memes (ideas? - opinions) as fact. All you can do is understand and explain why you’ve come to any conclusion that you have come to. As soon as you start accepting these kind of memes as universal truths then you’ve given away your existential control to an external party (and what’s more you don’t even know exactly who that external party is).
What this comes down to is that all you have is you, your own opinions and feelings about things, and your ability to communicate them to others and make yourself receptive to the thoughts and feelings of others in turn, in order to further your own understanding of your opinions and feelings. There isn’t one system of order which you can buy into which sorts it all for you, and believing that there is, and that understanding and subscribing to it gives you credibility, is both futile and short-sighted. I have much more time for the opinions of someone who knows their own mind and feelings and is open to suggestion and tries to understand different values and cultures and approaches and forms on their own terms, rather than trying to squeeze them into a matrix of pre-defined judgement. I prefer the incredible to the credible.
9/03/2003 10:57:00 am
My legs are fucked. Last night I rediscovered my footballing form, scored four goals, created four goals, made some blinding touches and some crucial interceptions, but boy, am I feeling it this morning...
9/03/2003 09:26:00 am
Tuesday, September 02, 2003
I try, oh how I try, to look mean and moody and unapproachable. I've even taken to wearing my walkman+headphones at all times lately (primarily cos my snazzy new Sennheiser PX100s rock and I got some kick-ass NiMH batteries for the minidisc) in order to deter people, and yet still I am asked for directions seemingly in preferrence to anybody else in the vicinty. Just half an hour ago I was standing on a grassy knoll, staring aimlessly into space and dreaming of JFK's blooded head jolting back and to the left whilst listening to Vibert's exemplary "I Love Acid", when some chap asks me where Cornwall House (better known as The Lemongrove) is. Do I look like I know? Evidently. And I did. But still...
"Ghettomusick" and "Flip Flop Rock" from Speakerboxxx/The Love Below have been downloaded (worry not, Arista, I shall a; be reviewing the album for Stylus, b; be singing it's praises in all likelihood, c; buy myself a copy, and probably d; buy other people copies too as I have done with Stankonia, so you're not going to lose any money by me pinching it off the net first) and fuck me is they aren't both perfect. Fuck me if they are perfect too. I want to fuck every molecule of everyone ever, we're all beautiful.
 might just prove to be the album of the year, and then some. All this and The Rapture too on Monday! It's becoming too much. I may have to have a lie down.
9/02/2003 01:40:00 pm
Sunday, August 31, 2003
You have no idea how much I want one of these. If you love me and have a spare £6k I'd be ever so grateful.
8/31/2003 08:13:00 pm
I have a new computer, hence updates and activity may be quiet for a few days while I set it up, but then, once I'm downloading like a crazy-legged churchman and fully sorted with everything, I imagine I'll be updating like buggery.
8/31/2003 04:41:00 pm
|
|
