Crooked Timber

What a relief. December 1st show here.

Over at Brainiac, Josh Glenn discusses the theme of “the intellectual, slightly mysterious rock-and-roll woman,” as a recent book calls it, running throughout songs from the Boston scene over the years. All those smart but fragile girls that Jonathan Richman sang about with the Modern Lovers, for example.

Josh suggests that there is a strain of hipster misogyny in this: the revenge of the sophomore spurned, no doubt. And he reads Mission of Burma’s “Academy Fight Song” as a response to that kind of thing—its lyrics “written from the point of view of a cool, educated young woman who was sick and tired of the obsessive attention paid to her by a would-be boyfriend….”

This seems plausible. But it would not be the first song from the Boston scene to approach this archetype (or whatever it is) from the inside. I’m thinking here, of course, of “Ballad of the Hip Death Goddess” by Ultimate Spinach.
Continue reading “La Mal Babe Sans Merci”

I’m enjoying Bryan Talbot’s new – not exactly a graphic novel, is it? Alice in Sunderland [amazon]. Subtitled: ‘an entertainment’. Visit the official site of this ‘dream documentary’, call it what you will.

Anyway, it is set in the Sunderland Empire – that is, a theater – and the rabbit onstage explains to the lout in the audience, who is, oddly, a George Formby fan:

George Formby played here, and his father before him, from whom Chaplin steals his stick-twirling routine. All great northern comedy is drawn from tragedy. One of the biggest ever Music Hall stars, George Formby Senior – the Wigan Nightingale – is born into dire poverty and learns his trade as a singing beggar. His songs and jokes are punctuated by a hacking cough – a symptom of the tuberculosis that kills him in his forties – which he cleverly works into his act.

That’s fairly black. To be a tubercular Music Hall performer, hacking away on stage. The book says Formby, Sr., invented ‘Wigan Pier’ – see also, George Orwell – as part of a running gag to the effect that Wigan was a classy seaside resort, as opposed to a landlocked mining town. I never knew that. (Is it true? Talbott warns us that everything in the book is true except for one, which will be revealed at the end. I haven’t got to the end yet.)

Anyway, YouTube has some fine George Formby (Jr.) material: “When I’m Cleaning Windows”; “Fanlight Fanny”. So that’s where the Beatles learned to sound like that.

Link. Truly, Freakonomics has now entered the mainstream/jumped the shark. Hustlenomics tips from Yung Joc on YouTube (1, 2, 3).

August is the time for our annual household argument about Jesus Christ Superstar. We’re all fans (apart from #3 whose tastes are not yet his own), but disagree about its meaning. Before elaborating on the disagreement I should make a preemptive strike against two charges – the charge of liking Andrew Lloyd Webber (can’t stand anything else he’s done, not even Joseph, which I had always thought I liked until hearing it recently) and the charge of snobbery that response naturally prompts (I’m a snob about some things, no doubt, but when it comes to culture I revel in my lower-middle-browness).

The disagreement is basically this. My wife thinks that JCS is fundamentally anti-Christian, because it presents Judas as the most sympathetic character, and Jesus as vain and rather directionless. I disagree – Judas is, indeed, presented with the maximum sympathy compatible with Christianity, but ultimately his failing is a lack of trust in a power and mystery that is beyond his understanding. Jesus? Well, when I watch the movie (a very good deal at the moment, more on that later), and even when I listen to the soundtrack, I can sort of see her point. But my reading of Jesus Christ Superstar was a response not to the movie or soundtrack, but to the original concept recording.

Continue reading “Ian Gillan Superstar”

I saw Tom Russell last night, for the third time in the last two years, and he was simply marvellous. Funny, crotchety, gritty, and (this hadn’t struck me so much before) with a wonderfully strong and clear voice. He played some new material, together with stuff from recent albums and some of his songs that others have covered on an album he’s reluctant to call a “tribute”: Wounded Heart of America. Like the old stuff, the new featured the usual cast of characters: cowboys, Mexicans, Welsh sailors etc, all superbly observed and changed to suit audience and place. And there were the usual anecdotes about Bukowski, Rambling Jack Elliot, etc., together with some reminiscences I hadn’t heard before (on his experiences in Nigeria during the Biafran war).

(Sometimes when going along to hear an act with others, I feel slightly unsure of their reaction: I like this but maybe they won’t, and I can see why and I might feel the urge to explain or say that X was better last time. No such worries with Russell: if someone doesn’t like him then there’s something wrong with them .)

Russell is on tour in the UK at the moment, and you can catch him in Newcastle tonight, in Edinburgh on Saturday and in London next Monday (along with a bunch of other places in between and afterwards).

One of the reasons I was so amused by my Soft Boys YouTube discovery is that it’s funny to see a young Kimberley Rew banging his head so furiously, alongside Robyn Hitchcock. He can really play guitar. His more recent song-writing/performing accomplishments are, to my ear, less convincingly rocking.

In other news, I was discussing TV and film with a student and it emerged that, since he hadn’t been born yet when The Simpsons started running, naturally he thinks of The Simpsons as a thing that has just always been there. A comedy equivalent of electricity and hot running water, if you will. Curious. (By the by, Amazon has seasons 1-10marked down 55%. If you are like me, you snap that sort of thing up.)

In other news, I see Keith Richards is writing his autobiography.

In 1980. The Soft Boys, of course. The Only Band That Mattered.

Or possibly, Elvis Costello, “Peace, Love and Understanding”.

In other, less consequential 1980 news: XTC, “We’re Only Making Plans For Nigel”; Boomtown Rats, “I don’t like Mondays”. Pretenders, “Brass In Pocket”. Devo, “Whip It”. Talking Heads, “Once In A Lifetime”; The Cure, “A Forest”.

UPDATE: by popular request, The Young Marble Giants, “Collasal Y”.

(I just felt like my claptrapese joke had spent enough time at the top of the page.)

The Guardian has a photo gallery of the floods. (And Chris Brooke has some pictures of Oxford .) The excellent Bottle Rockets have their song “Get Down River” available for download from their website.

One way or the other you probably know Ary Barroso’s song Aquarela do Brasil, either because you’re all up on classic Brazilian music from the 1930s and 40s or, like me, you have watched Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece Brazil, for which it’s the main theme. I show a clip of Brazil in my Complex Organizations class, were we follow the paper trail through the mass of clerks up to Mr Kurtzmann’s office. How odd, then, to hear it twice in the space of half an hour this afternoon: once looking at a TV spot for Michael Moore’s new film Sicko, and then later (via Gruber) in the trailer for Pixar’s new film, WALL-E. And in all these cases, the music is used to emphasize the perils of counterproductive routines and the promise—true or otherwise—of being liberated from them. They’re trying to send me a coded message, I’m telling you. Dum dum dum, dum dum dum dumdum …

I use Yahoo! Music for most of my music-listening at work. I like the service and at $60 for two years (they had a special when I signed up, the regular now is $72/year) it’s a great deal.

The system allows the user to customize various stations by giving it feedback about what songs and artists are of interest.* It’s a helpful feature, for the most part. But I think services like this might want to tweak the system so certain songs are kept off playlists at certain times of the year. I am not suggesting that they should be banned, of course, but perhaps not streamed unless sought out actively by the user.

I may like Boney M, but I really have absolutely no interest in listening to a Christmas song from them in the middle of May.

This reminds me of the dance club I used to go to in Budapest when I was in high school. One of the most popular Jive songs at the club was Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree [audio]. It was very bizarre to listen to it over and over again in June.

[*] For those who don’t know about Y!M, this is just one of the many ways one can listen to music on this sytem. Yes, I am aware of Pandora, last.fm, etc.

My Valve colleague, Scott, has the actual ‘is anyone still being made to read Shakespeare?’ thing covered. This is about something else.

Matthew Yglesias has a 90’s nostalgia post, dissing Semisonic for their 1998 earworm, “Closing Time”. Matt is not feeling strangely fine; rather, finding it ‘weirdly hilarious’ that anyone would write: they were “no longer upstarts, underdogs or indie rockers. Instead they had a hit song and sales of two million albums worldwide to follow up.”

Here’s the thing. Continue reading “Are You Shakespearienced?”