Music

I’ve been listening a lot to Si Schroeder’s _Coping Mechanisms_ over the last couple of weeks, and wanted to recommend it, although I can’t really describe it very well. My Bloody Valentine is the closest comparison, but it’s still not very close. There’s a free MP3 here, and you can buy the album as a CD, MP3s, Ogg Vorbis or whatever you like here. Full disclosure: I used to know Simon in Dublin, but I haven’t seen him in over six years.

A friend told me that there is an interesting version of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ new album, Stadium Arcadium, doing the rounds on internet filesharing services, so I listened to it. (Note to RIAA agents: I’d already bought the CD.) The pirate version is fascinating. It looks like a genuine high-bitrate mp3 rip of all songs on both discs, but the panning – the distribution of instruments in the stereo field – is drastically wrong. John Frusciante’s guitar takes up nearly the whole of the right channel, while Anthony Kiedis’s voice, and even the drums and bass guitar, are relegated to the left. Since lead vocals, bass guitar, and bass and snare drums are nearly always more or less centred in standard rock mixes, this makes the mp3s very disconcerting to listen to on headphones for any length of time. (This is a simplification, of course: for some amazing spatial engineering in rock music, listen for example to Placebo’s new album, Meds. But this pirate Chilis rip just makes you feel kind of seasick.) Now, of course this could just be some software gremlin in the ripping process. But it started me wondering: what if it’s deliberate?
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Story here. Tony Blackburn here. Don’t know what to say, so I won’t.

I surfed over to the Daily Telegraph’s obits page , looking for someone who wasn’t there, and was struck by the way in which the headline writers dispassionately express the achievements of the dead. So

bq. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — Jordanian terrorist associated with bombings and beheadings of hostages in Iraq.

is immediately followed by

bq. Raymond Davis, Jr — Physicist whose proof that the Sun’s energy came from nuclear reactions won him the Nobel.

Almost as if proving the sun’s energy came from nuclear reactions and beheading hostages were just different ways of spending one’s life. Sadly, I also learned that Billy Preston is dead aged only 59.

In response to our poll, the people have spoken. It’s pensive rhino by a 3-to-1 margin, over bird on a stereo.

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Desmond Adolphus Dacres (aka Desmond Dekker) died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 64. The NY Times, where I saw this, seems to be a few days behind – he died on Wednesday. Dekker had 20 number 1 hits in Jamaica, starting with “Honour Your Mother and Your Father” in 1963. (That’s how it’s listed on the version I have, but I’ve also seen it also referred to as “Honour Your Mother and Father”, which doesn’t scan as well. There is, however, no excuse for the Times’ calling it “Honour Thy Father and Mother.”) “The Israelites” [spelling corrected] hit number 1 in Britain and number 9 in the US in 1969. Wikipedia is not right that this was the “first international Jamaican hit”, but it certainly did pave the way for other Jamaican recording artists. His final concert was on May 11.

I took Little Lights out of the local library a couple of years ago on the way to pick up my daughter. I was almost late; hearing Kate Rusby singing “Withered and Died” had me almost in tears and I had to pull of the road to compose myself. I don’t think there is a more beautiful voice in popular music than hers; better even than Christine Collister‘s. Oh, except that neither of them are singers of popular music; they are folk singers; Rusby more so than Collister.

Until now, it appears. Kate Rusby teaming up with Ronan Keating is the most unlikely thing to happen in popular music since Robbie Williams simultaneously plagiarised Woody Guthrie and Loudon Wainwright III. The single comes out in the UK on Monday, and Radio 2 has already decided to make it a hit. If I could buy stock in a singer, it would be Rusby. And if I wanted to appear to be cool I’d stock up on all her records (UK)… except that I’ve no interest at all in seeming cool, and I’ve already stocked up.

The Who, “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Conservative rock anthem. File under: complex irony, I guess.

Will someone be so kind as to email or post the whole list? Also, is there significant, er, hermeneutic analysis, above and beyond the short bit Adler quotes, or is it just the list? Also, this is funny:

Listeners get to decide what the song means, not the creator. The audience got Springsteen’s “Born In The USA” was pro-America, even if Bruce was too dense to figure the matter was out of his hands.

Never mind that concern for the plight of the working man need not be anti-American, I think liberals should push back against rampant conservative ‘lyrical activism’, running rough-shod over the original intentions of our nation’s founding playlists.

I assume “Okie From Muskogee” made the cut. Also “Sweet Home Alabama”. Lots of country music. (I’m reading a book about Laibach. Maybe some Rammstein?) “Material Girl”. Any number of bling-themed songs? The Smiths? “Shoplifters of the World”? Something by Stryper?

Ah! Turns out Bruce Bartlett did his top-40 a couple years ago. The criteria are debatable, as ‘religion’ is deemed an “unambiguously conservative value”.

Because I’ve managed to get myself a slot as a reviewer for a local webzine , I’ve managed to get to see a good number of gigs in the general area of america/alt.country/whatever in the past year. So I thought I do a little survey of what I’d been to and make some recommendations. Details below the fold since lots of you probably couldn’t care less!
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Any of you who wonder what we are going on about when we talk about the Eurovision Song Contest, can spend an hour learning about its complete history here (complete with an interview with the marvelous Dana).

I used to be homesick all the time. Now, it is only when I realise that I cannot watch the greatest living Irishman presenting Eurovision on TV.

And then the bard says: “I warrant you, mistress, thunder shall not so awake the beds of eels as my giving out her beauty stir up the lewdly-inclined. I’ll bring home some to-night.” And then the bawd says: “Come your ways, follow me.”

I think it means that I just realized this really great Eels track, “Jelly Dancers”, is available free here (mp3). It’s off Dimension Mix [amazon], which boasts some seriously ok earworms.

For example, here’s the Beck track. Someone did it up as a Monty Python video and everything.

Roy Hudd’s investigation into the history of the comic song ended last week with a show on parody. The main highlight for me was being reminded of seeing Neil Lewis at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 1979 performing his hit song, “The Packer of the Leads” — google provides just a single reference, and the song is only mentioned (by Richard Digance) not played. The big question arising out of the show, though, is: why were The Smiths famous? Mitch Benn claims it is because fans fell for Morrisey’s winsome tortured poet act. But my wife (an American) says she liked them because they were funny. Me, I did fall for the act, so I thought they were prats; if I’d realised they were funny I’d probably have loved them (I eventually bought her their greatest hits, but only because it has Charles Hawtrey on the cover and I thought that was worth the money). Anyway, who’s right; Mitch Benn or my wife?

For your weekend listening pleasure, some Hungarian political campaign music. I had meant to blog about this a few weeks ago during the elections (it’s just one of about a dozen posts I haven’t managed to get around to recently), but it’s not as though it’s any less relevant now.

The song was written explicitly for the Hungarian Socialist Party‘s campaign in the recent parliamentary elections. I like it – it’s reminiscent of Hungarian pop/covertly political songs from the 1970s. I didn’t like it the first time I listened to it, but got pretty hooked the second time. I wonder if it’s at all of interest if you do not understand the language and/or are not familiar with the style. (No need to get into how unique the style is, maybe it’s not, but it still reminds me of lots of Hungarian songs from a while ago, songs that don’t tend to make it to the Billboard charts despite being quite good.)

The most commonly recurring words are “igen”, which means “yes” and “Magyarország”, which means “Hungary”. The bottom of the page suggests that the song was also made available as a ring tone for cell phones, which seems like an interesting idea.

So what are other exampes of political campaigns creating their own songs? I can think of campaigns adopting songs for their purposes and playing them at victory time, but those songs weren’t written for the campaigns explicitly. Bonus points if you can link to the examples.

Show of Hands are brilliant. English folk with a rock beat, a sense of humour, and political passion. They sound like nice thoughtful guys, too. Hear them on this week’s Mike Harding show and make up your own mind. You can download two singles legally; Are We Alright and Crooked Man. Their home page is here. An inexpensive 2-CD sampler here. Tell me if I’m wrong.