FAVES / UNFAVES

2010-04-02T07:05:00.000-07:00

end of year pros/cons comments for The Wire 1994 to 2009 (plus some ballots for albums of the year)

1994 (jan 95 issue)

1995 (jan 96 issue)

1996 -- The Wire did not do contributors pros and cons

1997 (jan 98 issue)

1998 (jan 99 issue)

1999 (jan 2000 issue)

2000 (jan 2001 issue)

2001 (jan 2002 issue)

2002

Pros
UK garridge goes gabba and gangsta: gutter rhymes, sick noise, grimy bass and skullcrusher beats from Dizzy Rascal, Musical Mobb, Black Ops, et al. Britrap finally sheds its “lost cause” reputation with The Streets and Extra Yard, plus Genius Kru, Horra Squad, More Fire and approximately 1000 hungry “garage rap” crews close behind. Not forgetting MC Pitman. Electronic: Blevin Blectum’s Talon Slalom, Casino Versus Japan’s Whole Numbers, BOC’s Geogaddi, Horsepower Productions. Electroclash/Nu-wave: better in theory than practice, glorious exceptions being Tiga’s Gigolo mix-CD, Vitalic, Ghostly’s Disco Nouveau comp (especially Legowelt and Solvent). Liars live. Summer in London (DJ Marky & XRS brings the sunshine with drum’n’bossanova anthem “LK”). A day in Sheffield. The British Library’s National Sound Archive. Meeting old heroes and liking most of them (give or take the odd embittered fuckhead). EMP conference in Seattle. Rereading Ballard. Hanging with Kieran.

Cons
The geopolitical precipice looming ahead.

Votes
Albums
1/ The Streets – Original Pirate Material (Locked On)
2/ Blevin Blectum –Talon Slalom (Deluxe)
3/ Casino Versus Japan – Whole Numbers Play the Basics (Carpark)
4/ The Future/Human League – The Golden Hour of the Future (Black Melody)
5/ Recloose – Cardiology (Planet E)
6 / Boards of Canada – Geogaddi (Warp)
7/ Liars – They Threw Us All in A Trench and Stuck A Monument On Top (Blast First/Mute)
8/ Position Normal – Goodly Time (Rum Records)
9/ Horsepower Productions – In Fine Style (Tempa)
10/ Soul Center – III (Novamute)

compilations
1/ American Gigolo: the Best of International DJ Gigolo Records (K!7)
2/ Garage Rap Vol 1 (Eastside)
3/ Tangent 2002: Disco Nouveau (Ghostly International)
4/ Extra Yard (Big Dada)
5/ Playgroup mix-CD (K!7)

Critical beats
1/ Dizzy Rascal – “I Love You” (white label)
2/ Musical Mobb – “Pulse X” (white label)
3/ Genius Kru – “Course Bruv” (Gutter)
4/ DJ Marky & XRS – “LK (‘Carolina Carol Bela’)” (V Recordings)
5/ Something J/DJ Maximus -- Mercedes Bentley Vs Versace Armani [Warp]

electronica
1/ Blevin Blectum –Talon Slalom (Deluxe)
2/ Casino Versus Japan – Whole Numbers Play the Basics (Carpark)
3/ Vitalic – Poney EP (Gigolo)
4/ Boards of Canada – Geogaddi (Warp)
5/ Panytec – Ponyslaystation (Perlon)

hip hop
1/ The Streets – Original Pirate Material
2/ MC Pitman – “Phone Pitman” b/w “Pitman Sez” (Pitman Records)
3/ Styles – “Good Times” (Ruff Ryders)
4/ The Clipse – “When The Last Time” (Arista)
5/ Dizzy Rascal – “I Love You” (white label)

reissues
1/ various -- Verschwende Deine Jugend: punk und new wave in deutschland (1977-83) (Ata Tak)
2/ The Blue Orchids – a Darker Bloom (Cherry Red)
3/ Ludus – the Damage (LTM)
4/ Ultramarine – Every Man and Woman Is a Star (Darla)
5/ Palais Schaumburg –eponymous debut (Tapete)

2003

PROS
Dizzee Rascal--"Vexed", Boy In Da Corner, uncanny and unprecedented alignment of Mercury Prize Committee and my taste. Grime and 8bar: Kano’s "Boys Love Girls"; productions by Wiley (especially "Ice Rink"), N.A.S.T.Y.’s Jammer and Bigga-Man, Social Circles/Sticky. Androgynous pressure: Junior Boys’ "Last Exit"--a kinder, gentler direction 2step could have gone. Other: Villalobos, Vybz Kartel, Animal Collective, LFO, Michael Mayer, Sean Paul. Retro-junglizm: Soundmurderer, The Redeemer, Remarc anthology. Vintage: Cabaret Voltaire’s Methodology ‘74/’78, Pyrolator, Blue Orchids' The Greatest Hit + EPs on LTM/Darla, 23 Skidoo, British Hustle, Factrix, Essential Logic, King Sunny Ade, Black Chiney mixes, Metal Urbain, Home T/Cocoa Tea/Shabba Ranks's "Pirates' Anthem". Live: Lightning Bolt, Avey Tare & Panda Bear. Reading: TWANBOC/Woebot, K-Punk, Heronbone, Astronauts/Worlds of Possibility, Somedisco, Tufluv, loads more blogs and webzines; Morley's Words and Music.

CONS
The war. The even more shameful "reconstruction". The general across-the-culture vibe of cowed-ness, keeping your head down, settling for less.

RECORDS OF THE YEAR
Dizzee Rascal, The Boy In Da Corner (XL)
Cabaret Voltaire, Methodology ‘74/’78. Attic Tapes; (Mute)
Animal Collective, Here Comes The Indian (Paw Tracks/Carpark)
Junior Boys, Birthday EP (Kin)
Villalobos, Alcachofa (Playhouse)
LFO, Sheath (Warp)
The Redeemer, Hardcore Owes Us Money (Force Inc)
Michael Mayer, Fabric13 (Fabric)
Wiley featuring various MCs, "Ice Rink" (three white label 12s)
Vybz Kartel, "Sweet to the Belly" (VP)

CRITICAL BEATS
Wiley featuring various MCs, "Ice Rink" (white label)
Kano, "Boys Love Girls" (white label)
Vybz Kartel, "Sweet to the Belly" (VP)
Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz featuring the Ying Yang Twins--"Get Low" (TVT)
Soundmurderer + SK-1. I<< (Rewind Records)

ELECTRONICA
Villalobos, Alcachofa (Playhouse)
LFO, Sheath (Warp)
The Redeemer, Hardcore Owes Us Money (Force Inc)
Michael Mayer, Fabric13 (Fabric)
Mark One versus Plasticman "Hard Graft 1/Hard Graft 2" (Roadblock)

OUTER LIMITS
Animal Collective, Here Comes The Indian (Paw Tracks/Carpark)
REISSUES
Blue Orchids' The Greatest Hit (Money Mountain) (LTM/Darla)
Metal Urbain (Acute)
Essential Logic, Fanfare in the Garden (Kill Rock Stars)
VA-- British Hustle: the Sound of British Jazz-Funk from 1974 to 1982 (Soul Jazz)
Remarc, Sound Murderer, Planet Mu

COMPILATIONS
Soundmurderer, Wired for Sound (Violent Turd)
N.A.S.T.Y. mix-CD mixed by Jammer, free with Deuce magazine july 2003

2004

Music seemed trivial for much of 2004, for reasons private as well as geopolitically, but affixing a forced Yuletide smile to the face, here’s my list of saving graces:
---Grime’s third terrific year in a row. Voices: Kano, D Double E, Bruza, Lady Sovereign, Wiley, Durty Doogz, Riko, Dizzee. Producers: Terror Danjah, Wonder, Ruff Sqwad, Lethal B, Jammer, Wiley, Target. Tracks: “Pow” a/k/a “FWD rhythm,” “Destruction,” “What Have You Done Lately,” “Chosen One,” “Frontline,” ”Creep Crawler,” “Cha Ching,” “Cock Back,” “S.T.D’s,” “So Sure,” “Pum Pum Riddim.” Albums: Showtime, Treddin’ On Thin Ice.
----New York ferment. A transcendental performance from Animal Collective at Bowery Ballroom, supported by the gorgeously peculiar Gang Gang Dance. DFA’s two best singles yet-- J.O.Y.’s “Sunplus,” Pixeltan “Get Up/Say What”--and Compilation #2.
----Disparate treasure. Usher, “Yeah;” Britney, “Toxic;” Beenie Man, “Dude;” The Streets, A Grand Don’t Come For Free; Infinite Livez, Bush Meat; Kanye West, College Dropout; Junior Boys, Last Exit; Ying Yang Twins, “Salt Shaker,” Nina Sky, “Move Your Body,” Kiki, “Luv Sikk Again,” jungle and drum’n’bass resurrection courtesy Ripley @ Volume and DJ Clever/Offshore Recordings’ Troubled Waters mix, Lizzy Mercier Descloux reissues.
----Words: too many bloggs; Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
--- Downsides: whining about cultural perniciousnesses really does seem trivial, but there did seem to be an inordinate amount of death this year--the saddest of the public ones, for me, being Peel.

2005

Hauntology and memory work from Ghost Box (The Focus Group/Belbury Poly/Eric Zann/The Advisory Circle), Ariel Pink, Boards of Canada, Mark Fisher’s London Under London. Grime exhausting its narrative arc with three perfect scene-reflexive tunes for a crossover that never came: Kano’s “Reload It” and “Sometimes”, Lethal Bizzle’s “Against All Oddz”. Stratford Circus urban music festival; Ruff Sqwad and Roll Deep live at Rinse FM studio; meeting D Double E, grime’s Ian Curtis, and witnessing him enter the zone live; the voice of Bruza, anywhere, on anything; Lady Sovereign, in person and on record; Wonder’s refix of SKL’s “Hype Hype”; Imp Batch’s “Gype Riddim” with or without Crazy Titch. Animal Collective; Kudu, live; Hot Chip; Art Brut; Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice; DJ Koze; Kanye West’s “Addicted” and “Crack Music”; Three Six Mafia’s “Stay Fly”; Analord, intermittently. Reissues of Comus, Orange Juice, Van Der Graaf Generator, Talking Heads, X-Ray Spex, Robert Wyatt & Friends. Non-music: Penguin By Design, Saint Etienne Presents Finisterre, Paglia’s book on poetry; Green Wing and I Am Not An Animal.

albums of the year

1/ Ariel Pink, Worn Copy (Paw Tracks)
2/ The Focus Group, hey let loose your love (Ghost Box)
3/ Belbury Poly, The Willows (Ghost Box)
4/ Animal Collective, Feels (fat cat)
5/ Lethal Bizzle, Against All Oddz (V2)
6/ Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice, XIAO (Troubleman United)
7/ The Advisory Circle, Mind How You Go (Ghost Box)
8/ Kano, Home Sweet Home (XL
9/ Boards of Canada, The Campfire Headphase (Warp)
10/ Kanye West, Late Registration (Roc-A-Fella)

2006

It was as bleak and bereft a year for music as any I can remember. Most folk I know responded to the dearth and deadlock either by bunkering down in some contemporary micro-genre and pretending it was the size of the universe or burrowing deep into an arcane crevice in history. But there are always glimmers, tantalizing glimpses of futures possible or lost. Foremost: Scritti Politti’s luminously lovely comeback, Burial’s woundingly elegaic debut, the delicious confusion of mixed emotions infusing infuses Hot Chip, the provoking spirit of play and erudite mischief animating Ghost Box and Mordant Music. More glistens in the gloom: Ys (a record it’s best to know as little about its making, or indeed its maker, as possible--just bathe in the sound); the gaseous languor of Juana Molina; the second half of Jarvis and the most Pulp-like parts of the Arctic Monkeys debut; moments from Booka Shade, Ariel Pink, Kode 9/Spaceape, Matmos, Various, Scott Walker, Johnny Dark; exhumations from Ike Yard, Byrne/Eno, Broadcast, and especially Jake Thackray. Overall though, a year in which music couldn’t compete with joys personal (March 7th) and public (November 7th), birth and rebirth.

albums of the year
1/ scritti politti, white bread black beer (rough trade)
2/ burial, s/t (hyperdub)
3/ jake thackray – jake in a box (emi)
4/ mordant music, dead air (mordant music)
5/ juana Molina, son (domino)
6/ joanna newsom, ys (drag city)
7/ hot chip, the warning (astralwerks)
8/ arctic monkeys, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not (domino)
9/ broadcast, the future crayon (warp)
10/ belbury poly, the owl’s map (ghost box)

2007

Pros: Against the backdrop of blank bleakness, these shone so hard: Black Moth Super Rainbow’s Dandelion Gum (missing link between “Strawberry Fields Forever” and Daft Punk), The Good, the Bad and the Queen (Britpop ghostified and dub-hollowed), Sally Shapiro’s Disco Romance (more Scando than Italo, a snowblind Saint Etienne gone trance), Burial’s Untrue and Neil Landstrumm’s Restaurant of the Assassins (shimmering rave memorials), Wyatt’s Comicopera, Panda Bear’s lovely Person Pitch. Pulse-quickening: bassline house, the North’s mutation on UK garage. Absorbing: The Focus Group, Battles, Dirty Projectors, Fulborn Teversham. Diverting: Enter Shikari, Klaxons. Excavated treasures: Daphne Oram, Dinosaur L, Nico, Harmonia, White Noise, Creel Pone label. Control: visually ravishing enough to make you barely notice it barely touches the mystery of Joy Division’s music. Personal highlights: meeting Robert Wyatt (and “performing” together onstage) at the Hay Festival; participating in the launch at Dallas Museum of Art of Phil Collins’ the world won’t listen exhibition--a reminder of the power of pop music in general and The Smiths in particular. Meeting Malcolm McLaren after an outrageous "music industry pep talk" he gave chez the British Consulate in New York.

Cons: RIPs (non flesh-and-blood): webmag Stylus; New York’s left-field dance space SubTonic. RIPs (flesh-and-blood): where to start? Legends seemed to shuffle off this mortal coil at a rate of one a week: Richard Cook, Joe Zawinul, Anthony H. Wilson, Lee Hazelwood, Uwe Nettelbeck, Alice Coltrane…

votes
albums of the year
1/ Black Moth Super Rainbow, Dandelion Gum (Graveface)
2/ The Good, the Bad and the Queen --The Good the Bad and the Queen (Honest Jon’s/Parlophone)
3/ Panda Bear, Person Pitch (Paw Tracks)
4/ Robert Wyatt, Comicopera (Domino)
5/ Burial, Untrue (Hyperdub)
6/ Sally Shapiro, Disco Romance (Paperbag)
7/ Neil Landstrumm, Restaurant of the Assassins (Planet Mu)
8/ Battles, Mirrored (Warp)
9/ The Focus Group, We Are All Pan’s People (Ghost Box)
10/ Pinch, Underwater Dancehall (Tectonic)

reissues
1/ Daphne Oram, Oramics (Paradigm)
2/ Young Marble Giants, Colossal Youth (Domino)
3/ Nico, The Frozen Borderline: 1968-1970 (Rhino)
4/ Harmonia, Harmonia Live 1974 (Crowland)
5/ Sun Ra, Disco 3000 (Art Yard)
6/ Dinosaur L, 24/24 Music (Sleeping Bag)
7/ Black Dog -- The Book of Dogma (Soma)
8/ Various, Now We Are Ten (Trunk)
9/ White Noise, An Electric Storm (Island)
10/ Betty Davis, Betty Davis (Lights in the Attic)

2008

For much of the year, music was totally eclipsed by the rollercoaster ride of dread and euphoria that was the US election. Nor did music put up much of a fight. (As for "rise to the occasion", are you kidding?). Looking back through the long tingling afterglow of 11/4/8' s orgasm of relief, a few Moments glisten dimly. The hauntological trip hop of Portishead's Third and Moon Wiring Club's two superb albums (Art Deco Eyes and Shoes Off). Grime's comeback year they say but nothing from it impacted me like Giggs's Walk In Da Park: genuwine South London gangsta , eerie and surprisingly musical. Digital decay: Crystal Castles, Kanye's "Love Lockdown," Dangermouse's greyhaze glitch-psych production on Beck's great Modern Guilt. Pure musical pleasure: Backyardigans, Quiet Village, the rhythmic verve and melodic delicacy of Vampire Weekend. Blackout Crew's chavtastic tune/video "Put A Donk On It." Gang Gang Dance go pop with Saint Dymphna. Old: Gas box, Lily Greenham and other vintage text-sound, the Lines, John Baker, Warner Jepson, Creel Pones. Live: seeing John Martyn for the first time, with Danny Thompson too; Rip It Up tour of Germany. Other: Cold War Modern at the V&A, especially Corbusier's slide projections for Poeme Electronique and Nicolas Schoffer's rotating metal-mirrored sculpture-machine; Mad Men and catching up with four series of this magazine's televisual namesake.

2009

Micachu's Jewellry brought unexpected life and joy to the somewhat tired notion of "noise-pop". Dirty Projectors's Bitte Orca answered the question "why do we need our beauty to be progressive?" Banner year for the hauntological crew with superb records from Belbury Poly, Roj, Broadcast/Focus Group, Mordant Music, Leyland James Kirby, Woebot, Moon Wiring Club, Position Normal. Entranced by hauntology's American cousin hypnagogic a/k/a glow-fi a/k/a New Age Noise (Ducktails, Oneohtrix, Gary War, Ferraro/Clark, etc) but my absolute fave in this Balearic bliss-drone zone is actually Belgian, Dolphins Into the Future. Enjoying the post-dubstep/post-grime/post-funky diaspora (Martyn, Cooly G, Zomby, 2562, Joker, Raffertie, Soule Power/Scratcha DVA, et al) and enjoying even more the irony that all this only goes to prove the continued fertility and relevance of the hardcore continuum. As indeed does Dizzee finally, deservedly, becoming one of Britain's biggest pop stars.

albums of the year
1/ Micachu and the Shapes, Jewellry (Rough Trade)
2/ The Dirty Projectors, Bitte Orca (Domino)
3/ Dolphins Into The Future, On Sea Faring Isolation (No Not Fun)
4/ Broadcast & The Focus Group, Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age (Warp)
5/ Belbury Poly, From An Ancient Star (Ghost Box)
6/ Terror Danjah, Gremlinz (Planet Mu)
7/ Roj, The Transactional Dharma of Roj (Ghost Box)
8/ Oneohtrix Point Never, Rifts (No Fun)
9/ Woebot, The Two EPs (Hollow Earth)
10/ Ducktails, Backyard (Release the Bats Records)

2008-12-16T19:08:00.001-08:00

UNFAVES OF 2001
(now incorporating Over-Rated of the Year, Gripes 'N' Bugbears, Minor Twinges of Irritation, Worries & Puzzlements, Revolt Into Bile, and Random Non-Positive Thoughts)

THE ALARMINGLY PERVASIVE AND ABIDING POP LEGACY OF JAMES HETFIELD, BALLADEER

Trying to fix the rock-historical coordinates for those Staind ballads (as if working out where they came from would somehow contain the horror) it dawned with slowly mounting dismay that all could be traced back to Metallica: specifically, to the glutinous dirge-croon vocals, harrowed earnestness and leaden tempos of "The Unforgiven" and "Nothing Else Matters," the hit singles off their 1991 mainstream breakthrough Metallica.

With maybe a bit of Queensryche thrown in.

Altogether less heinous--in fact weirdly enjoyable--is the fact that Depeche Mode circa "Enjoy The Silence" appear to be a massive influence on a lot of these nu-metal power balladeers. Groups like Linkin Park and Flaw do this weird thing where the verses are all wan and wussy Anglo-Euro melancholia, and then the chorus blasts out with hoarse barking grindcore. (There's a similar disconcerting shift with Kittie, who oscillate back and forth between All About Eve/Clannad sister-of-the-moon wispiness to a grisly roar of Satan's halitosis). From the hairstyles to the voice-styles, nu-metal is the first generation coming through for whom MTV was as formative as hearing the stuff on radio or buying the records. The Hetfield/Gahan hybrid suggests other strange composites will come through based on the incongruous adjacencies of early Nineties MTV play-lists: Lenny Kravitz meets C&C Music Factory, Blind Melon crossed with Dr Dre.

BRITNEY SPEARS: NEW IMPROVED ROBO-HO

"Slave For You" is a triffic song (the best since the first single --which, come to think of it, also had a domination/masochism subtext). The ace Neptunes production and the droney chorus-hook remind me of Prince at his mandroid/sex-machinic best--Sign O' The Times robo-ditties like "Hot Thing" and "It". But watching the orgiastic sweat-stippled video the first time I had this involuntary reaction (no, not what you're thinking), on the lines of: "hmm, the Taliban have kind of got a point, haven't they?" I mean, what kind of a culture have we built here that pimps our teenage daughters so shamelessly/shamefully? Britney's no longer under-age, but the cusp-between-girl-and-woman, nymphet/nympho thing is still so much blatantly her sales shtick (those increasingly absurd and unseemly protestations of virginity). Then there was those cola ads: Bob "'Viagra" Dole ogling the scanty-clad cavortings of Britney on his gogglebox, says "down boy" but he's not reprimanding Fido at his feet, he's talking to L'il Bob in his boxers (and just to spell it out real explicit, the TV remote in his hand is stiffly angled upwards). Euuww, gross!

DRUKQS SUKQS

2001 was a tough time for the aging Anglo vanguard of first-wave IDM: Squarepusher reduced to parodying 2step garage to achieve even a mild frisson of novelty, Autechre alienating even their hardcore devotees with the ultra-abstruse Confield (which I actually quite enjoyed). Meanwhile Richard D. James had reportedly retired from music-making in order to probe the deepest recesses of computer programming, in the hopes of total aesthetic rejuvenation. Which made it doubly disappointing how so much of Drukqs sounds merely like a slight extension of the Aphex sound --- pretty splintered melody colliding with hyperkinetic breakbeats---circa 1996's Richard D James Album (which wasn't especially groundbreaking anyway). Tracks like "omgyjya switch" offer the same old drill'n'bass caricature of drum 'n' bass, whiplash beats evoking the torsions and impacts suffered by crash-test dummies. Clearly we too are meant to be stunned, concussed, by the splattery extravagance of ideas here. But the useless protean energy contorting these songs just reminds me of The Boredoms. When James slows the pace and attempts minimalist simplicity, though, the results are equally unimpressive: witness the series of short interludes in which he drops the digital arsenal and plays inane chord sequences on various acoustic keyboards---piano with reverb-pedal on full, a wheezy harmonium with clacking foot-pedals, and so forth. Let's just say he's no Erik Satie, no Harold Budd.

There's a fab four-track EP languishing within this double-CD's busy bloat: "gwely mernans" is a gloomcore crypt of ambient gabba, the distorted kickdrum sounding distant and suppressed, its frantic pulse overhung by a spectral synth-melody that lingers like a pall of luminous vapor; "bbydhyonchord" glows and clanks like prime Boards of Canada; "gwarek 2" brilliantly pastiches avant-classical composers like Stockhausen and Nono with a collage of agonised shrieks, insectile percussion, swarming sounds, and quaint tape-effects; the madcap electro of "Taking Control" sees a robo-voiced James using his personal superlative "decent bit!" to herald a particularly demented segment of drum machine mayhem. And doubtless there's probably a fair few other "decent bits" scattered across this double-CD, if you can be bothered to excavate them. But like the legion of IDM producers he's influenced, James seems paradoxically trapped by the "infinite possibilities" offered by today's software and plug-ins (the computer-music equivalent of guitar pedals), resulting in infinitesimally detailed tweakage, but no song-shapes or moodscapes that actually leave an imprint in your memory, let alone your heart.

NELLY FURTADO

Things ain't right from the name on downwards. The Nelly is bad enough, but the surname sounds like some kind of dubious Latin American comestible: ground meat stuffed in a bull's pizzle, maybe. Something you'd be wary of putting in your mouth. Beyond that, this girl is just so fucking full of beans. She needs to be suppressed, stifled.

DESTINY'S CHILD

NME, The Face, Vibe, and Rolling Stone all put Destiny's Child on the front cover this year. Mainstream pundits like The New York Times seriously assessed Beyonce Knowles's credentials as postfeminist icon. Give or take a few stubborn hold-outs, just about everybody---lapsed indie types, electronica fiends, non-aligned pop fans--joined the unbroken consensus that nu-skool R&B is the bomb. Owing to the timelag/folks-who-are-slow-off-the-mark syndrome, Destiny's lame follow-up album Survivor gleaned the benefit that should have accrued to the brilliant debut The Writing's On the Wall (c.f. Rooty getting the praise that Remedy deserved). There's two big problems with Survivor: no Shek'spere, and Beyonce's self-conscious sense of herself as icon and issuer of "statements". The debut communicated its ladies-first sass through story-songs and real-seeming scenarios ("Bills Bills Bills," "Bugaboo", "Say My Name"), but Survivor replaces that with bald declaration.

The stiff, harsh beats of "Independent Women Part 2" (not a sequel but a remake/remodel) bring out the true coldness of Destiny's take on modern love: after making the bootie call, and having her itch scratched, Beyonce dismisses the spent stud with "when it's all over/Please get up and leave... Got a lot to do/ I am my number one priority/No falling in love, no commitment for me." Likewise, the bombastic arrangement on "Survivor" matches the histrionic lyrics. The album credits salute those who've made it through "bad relationships, health issues, discrimination, being abused, death of a loved one, loss of a friend, not being popular, low self-esteem...". Beyonce, by contrast, appears to have "survived" a coup d'etat in her favor instigated by her manager/father (and involving the downsizing of two of Destiny's original four members) and.... fame/money/adulation beyond her fan's wildest dreams. Tough life, eh?

Vibe's Destiny's cover had the trio dressed as the Supremes. But the Motown-style separation of singer/songwriter/producer roles that worked so brilliantly on Writing is junked on Survivor, with Beyonce credited as co-writer/co-producer on every song. Although the results are uniformly inferior, it's a shrewd move in credibility terms: being an spokesperson for female empowerment but not writing your own songs wouldn't wash, really, would it? As a self-portrait, though, Survivor is incoherent, cutting from the coquetry of "Bootlylicious" ("I don't think you're ready/for this jelly") to the prudish "Nasty", which reprimands a scanty-clad tramp for flaunting her flesh. And even when the bump'n'grind is rhythmically in full effect---the almost-great "Sexy Daddy"--the raunch is sabotaged by tame, lame lines like "sweety pie/I think it's your lucky night". A crap Christmas album and the departure of the new recruits to DC point ahead to a failed solo career for Beyonce.

CREED
Don't really have anything intelligent to say about this lot but it sorta behoves one to join the chorus of repugnance. The devil really has got the best tunes, eh?

THE NEW GARAGE PUNK

Let's start with the names: what is it with all these short sharp-sounding monikers? Strokes, Stripes, Hotwires, Hives, Vines, the Beatings, Yeah Yeah Yeahs... A lot of them seem to have some connotation or hint of pain, irritation, discomfort, abrasion.... The semiotics of it seems to evoke bands who play "blistering" sets and "punchy" two minute songs. Or perhaps it's just a Sixties-evocative thing (the uniform "The ---- [short staccato noun]" construction is very Pebbles. Also very mod-revival). The one major exception I can think of, Black Rebel Motorcyle Club, is worse, though.... Just those words, before you even hear the music, are mentally exhausting: please no not this again. Pundits reference Mary Chain circa Darklands for this band (too kind: I'd say Automatic. Maybe even John Moore's Expressway). Some wag on ILM tagged them as Telescopes copyists (ouch!!).

How many of these groups end their sets with feedback, I wonder? Isn't this the fourth or fifth garage punk revival already? The thing about all these groups, though, is how clean and groomed and stylized their scuzz looks. If they looked like Canned Heat or Tad or even just as dorky and unprepossessing as your average garage punk band of the Sixties like, say, Shadows of Knight, I'd probably be less suspicious of them. But they're so pretty, so photogenic and fashion-shoot-able. It's like some Dazed & Confused style editor's notion of 'rock'n'roll'.

It's not like loud noisy upset-yer-parents guitar music went away or something, there's not exactly a shortage of the stuff: the kids have Slipknot, System of a Down, P.O.D. (the latter actually sound fresher to these ears than any of the garage-ists: check the weird but doubtless accidental echoes of Geordie/McGeoch/Theatre of Hate in their "Youth of the Nation" with its nu-metal rapping jostling with tom-tom-heavy tribal drums and dub-spacious production).

Anyway we already have garage-punk--what do you think So Solid Crew are?!

THE ETERNAL RETURNS OF KYLIE MINOGUE

Like Haley's Comet, Kylie Minogue always come around again, takes another pass at being hip. Is this her third or fourth stab? (There was the Nick Cave duet, and that whole cover-of-The-Face, Kylie-goes-clubbing-and-may-even-have-done-an-E stuff-hooray! phase). This seems to have been her most successful bid to be cool, though: even fairly sane people of my acquaintance are raving about by "Can't Get You Out Of My Head". Insidiously catchy it undeniably is (but then so are Andrew Lloyd Webber and Celine Dion). Tell me though: when exactly did our demands of pop music become so small that this sort of efficiently crafted aural contagion becomes a sensation and cause celebre? "Fabulous pop music" like Kylie or Britney is a bit like good weather: it comes along and brightens our days, but (perhaps because it all occurs on such a impossibly remote and out-of-any-of-our-hands plane) it seems beside the point to get worked up about it. There's no food-for-discourse there, unless you're a metereologist or Billboard columnist. NY Times did a whole piece on Kylie and the secret of her success, the grand conclusion being the single was very catchy and she was quite personable. Actually, the striking thing about the video is the way it plays up Kylie's essential grotesque hideousness as glamour-- how very iD fashion spread of them---with (I might be imagining this) a weird subtext relating to the erotic-exotic potentials of Kylie being able to dislocate her own limbs.

LAMENESS ON THE HORIZON

I was enjoying the Avalanches show at SOBs, NYC, late 2001: not the full band playing live, but the two DJs doing their mesh-it-up back-2-back across four (or was it six?) turntables thingy. Really enjoying it, actually, but somehow through the pleasure I could sense what I can only describe as "lameness on the horizon". The set was consistently surprising and clever, full of delightfully incongruous-yet-apt juxtapositions and montages, all executed with consummate turntablist skill. You couldn't help smiling when "Like A Rolling Stone" surfaced out of the midst of some banging house track, like nothing could be more natural.

But as I say, there was something vaguely disquieting at the back of it, a premonition of disappointment, ennui, sort of "is that all there is?" mixed with "how much longer can this kind of thing carry on being exciting/worthwhile/surprising." At the end of the day, everybody's got cool records, everybody's got interesting taste and provocative ideas about links and secret connections. (Well, not everybody, perhaps-- but most people I know, and most people reading this, I suspect). In a certain sense, everybody could do what The Avalanches do--maybe not with anything approaching their degree of flawless dexterity, but then again, seamlessness is over-rated, donchathink?.

I felt a similar split response to Gold Teeth Thief, DJ Rupture's highly-regarded three-turntable mix-CD, which mashes up a taste formation that's right on the money vis-a-vis my personal audio-erogenous zones (post-Timbaland R&B, street rap, dancehall) spiced up with some Ambush-style splatterbreaks and bhangra for nice non-obviousness. It's a great selection, and technically dazzling, but once again, doesn't quite transcend the hey-I've-got-some-wicked-tunes-wanna-hear-em? syndrome. (Coldcut's celebrated Journeys By DJ mix-CD of many seasons ago, always left me underwhelmed for similar reasons. i.e. the ultimate lameness of "eclectic" as concept/praise word).

Sort of on the same tip, and inducing a similar ambivalence, are all those Kid606-and-friends homage-through-defacement/dismemberment jobs on Missy Elliott, NWA etc: these are well-intended expressions of genuine enthusiasm for mainstream black pop, and because that music is often underestimated and patronised within IDM circles, there's a certain heretical-polemical edge to these releases. And yet in the end all they're really saying is we really REALLY like these Missy Elliott records. Plus there's a certain pathos to the tribute-cum-desecrations: if only we could be this cool, if only we could pull off the avant-garde yet massively popular/potent balancing act too.

Now wouldyabelieveit, in the interval between starting Unfaves early in the New Year and actually completing the bugger, an entire subculture, nay movement, has sprung up that gives my premonition of lameness-on-the-horizon all-too-solid form. I'm talking about the bootleg/"bastard pop" craze, of course.

Well, that was my initial knee-jerk reaction, and having checked out some of them, it's only been slightly tempered: reams of poor man's plunderphonia, cackhanded and so-very-far-from-alchemy (ie. the kind of transubstantiation which the Avalanches's actual album achieves), leavened by the occasional mass-cult chimera (The Normal + Missy Elliott = Girls On Top's "Warm Bitch") that sounds genuinely striking and even makes an interesting meta-pop critique by linking two apparently remote yet secretly compatible artists.

It's tempting to speculate wildly on the phenomenon. Bootlegging as the expression of subconscious ressentiment on the part of the peon-like punter, a desire to somehow cut down to size the tyrannical uber-pop that invades our consciousness, literally fucking with it by forcing pop stars into kinky congress (a preview of the inevitable D-I-Y movie-remixes to come: Cameron Diaz fisting Brad Pitt while he reams a donkey, etc). Bootlegging as a reversal of the monologic vertical structure of the music industry: the force-fed consumer answering back, with regurgitation. Or (a more positive punk interpretation, this) bootlegging as an attempt to participate in pop, which is otherwise delivered from on high, totally out of reach and inaccessible; the DIY impulse achieving that million-dollar sound the only way it can, theft.

Actually, the fad seems driven by little more than the age-old phenomenon of fandom: people who like music, all sorts of music, and the only way they can think to express that all-gates-open (a nice way of saying "uncritical"?) enthusiasm is through arranging it into different patterns, except now they have the technology to do it in a much more extreme way, and live in a time more inundated by pop past and present than ever. Bootleg as more compressed form of the mix-tape-for-your-mate, in other words. Take Osymyso's "Intro Inspection"--a witty and expertly executed montage of hundreds of famous pop intros, from "The Message" to "Love Cats", Sinatra to Spice Girls. It is possibly the zenith of the bootleg phenomenon, if only because in 12 minutes it manages to cram in all the enjoyment and all the incipient-lameness-ahoy! that the Avalanches DJs mustered across a three hour set. It's impossible to listen to "Intro Inspection" without a fat grin creasing your face for most of its duration, and also impossible (for me at least) to not feel a certain shame tainting the glee. Cos that Cheshire grin is a smile of recognition ("oh, yeah that's X... isn't that Y... ah!...nice!"...) and as sensations-that-pop-music-can-induce go, it's all a bit cosy and self-congratulatory and selling yourself short.

Not wishing to resurrect some ancient notion of creativity ex nihilo, but underlying and unifying all the above, I sense a tendency towards entropy: indistinctness, inertia, ultimately indifference. Whether it's good (Since I Left You) or bad (most bootlegs), what we're witnessing is the kind of sonic grand bouffe only possible during a late era. Could it be that the age of retro-mania/file-sharing/sampladelia--where time has effectively been abolished--enables us to use the abundance of the past to obscure the failings and lacks of the present? Well, it's a thought...

HOUSE MUSIC

Early 1996, a club in Meinz near Frankfurt, a Vauxhall-Arches-style catacomb carved into the concrete foundations of a bridge over the big river (whose name I forget). That's where I fell in love with house again, after a long period of thinking it the lightweight option c.f. jungle. Accompanied by Force Inc/Mille Plateaux boss and lager connoisseur Achim Szepanski, I'd came to check out a set by Chicago DJ Gene Farris of Relief/Casual/Force Inc reknown. Helped by copious alcohol intake and a contact high from the killer vibe in that murky crowded cavern, a revelation began to unfold: just how much fantastic music I'd missed out on through being such a monomaniacal junglist patriot, and the extent to which house had a rebirth of creativity in the mid-Nineties after a long null lull of tribal tedium and handbag hackwork. Farris played so much great stuff--from early filter-house/disco cut-up stuff to Relief-style nu-acid to stuff so techy, tracky and abstrakkk it was essentially what we'd today call micro-house. But if a single song can be said to have opened my ears it was when Farris dropped "Flash" by Green Velvet. When those double-time snares kicked in, it was one of those whatdafuck?!?!?!?! see-the-light moments.

I get the impression quite a few other folk who'd gotten drawn into this dance music/electronic area either through rave, or through drum'n'bass a bit later on with its more cerebral and self-consciously innovative credentials, or through the proto-IDM of Aphex et al, also went through a similar process of waking up to house music: maybe pulled into it through the submerged "jack" element in Chain Reaction, or via the intermediary role of Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx. Suddenly a whole universe of music opens up, vistas of diversity and abundance that are at once awe-inspiring and daunting. A pantheon of auteur-maestros---Masters At Work, Mood II Swing, the two Todd-is-Gods (Terry and Edwards), Pierre, Wamdue/Ananda/Chris Brann, Deep Dish, et al --plus mavericks like Herbert and St. Germain, plus cherishable minor talents beyond counting.... all with endlessly unfurling (nobody ever seems to retire, in house) and endlessly pursuable discographies/remixographies scattered across innumerable labels. A lifetime's worth of passion and pleasure, right there, for the embracing.

Still, house's vastness can be a drag, a real turn-off. There is so much merely adequate stuff (all those semi-songs and over-singing vocalists), resulting in that sensation of 'muck' you get when sifting through house 12 inches in a store: the glutted excess of vinyl, the nondescript sleeves, the pro forma track titles. Even the accredited auteur-gods put out way too much sub-par stuff, the need to keep their profiles visible and the cash turnover going outweighing quality-control and pride in your name.

You can say much the same about most genres of dance and non-dance, though. The real problem with house, for this listener, is that as a culture it moves so fucking slow. House doesn't really have peak years, it never goes through surges of accelerated evolution/mutation. Instead it just chugs along, reliably churning out its small harvest of classics and landmark tracks per annum, along with a much larger proportion of quality but unspectacular tunes. This quality of non-explosiveness is mirrored at every level of the culture, in yer classic Levi-Strauss/Hebdige homology syndrome: from the non-revolutionary stableness of the macro-culture down through individual DJ sets (which involves sustaining a slow-burn plateau of mild tension) right down to the micro level of individual tracks which mostly tend to eschew climaxes.

I think a hefty and crucial element of house's appeal and resonance is always going to bypass you if you're not gay and/or black-Hispanic. The very aspects that are vital to this original core audience (the culture's resilience and abiding, enduring permanence; its perennial role as sanctuary/haven/surrogate family versus an intolerant, hostile, cruel, uncaring outside world; its ethos of pleasant-ness and easy hedonism), all take on a totally different quality when transposed to a white heterosexual audience. So in Britain, house becomes this smugly snug, complacent, bland, nullifying thing -- the mature option for a post-rave, young adult, affluent 'n' aspirational crowd. A song like Masters At Work/Barbara Tucker's "Beautiful People" has an entirely different resonance on the black gay New York "underground" than when it's played at a white British straight club.
The other thing about house that is frustrating pour moi is its lack of neophilia and futurist aspiration. Quite the opposite, in fact: people who get into house often seem to take on/buy into this suffocating sense of inheritance and heritage--legacy, tradition, the notion of a noble past that is long-gone, of declining musical standards. The culture is always looking back and honoring its ancestors, rather than looking forward and desecrating them. Connected to this is the curious way that house has become one of the absolute last bastions of muso-dom (solos! 'feel'! light jazzy inflections! swing!) with all its attendant hippy-dippy fusionesque tendencies towards mysticism and "it's all music, man" drivel. Think Joe Claussell's Spiritual Life label, Ashley Beedle's Black Jazz Chronicles, all that awfully dreary Afro-Brazilian influenced house....

At some point this year ---it was probably that moment in the Union Square Virgin Megastore when my fingers poised to pluck the import-but-still-amazing-bargain-price 4-CD Part Two of Master At Works life's oeuvre, poised and then suddenly retracted--I just came to this sad understanding that this stuff, good as it can be, is never going to matter as much to me as jungle did, or be nearly as thrilling. And, moreover, that I might be "correct" to feel that way. Because at the end of the day, house music is just... house music. It's not going anywhere and, because even its believers believe its best days are behind it, house has an in-built thing holding it back from renaissance or self-resurrection. Which explains why all the new amazing things that have happened to house have come not from yer stalwart insiders, yer Roger Sanchezes and Erick Morillos and Danny Tenaglias and Kings of Tomorrow (god the names alone make my soul yawn)... but from outsiders heisting the form and fucking wid it: ex-junglist rude-boys with UK garage; disenchanted and vocally-famished IDM-ers with micro-house, and so forth.

UK DANCE MAGAZINES

I only bought one issue of a UK dance mag this year: the Muzik with So Solid Crew on the front. Every other mag picked-and-flicked off the shelves was very swiftly returned to them, often accompanied by a slight shudder. The UK dance press has never been that hot, never enjoyed a golden age a la NME in the late Seventies/early Eighties. But there was a nice little period in the mid-Nineties when Mixmag, say, was pretty good: it had a couple of really excellent writers in Bethan Cole and Tony Marcus, people who knew their stuff, did well field-researched pieces, and brought an opionated, critical edge to their writing (and in Marcus's case, an enjoyable hint of gonzo: a sense that these were dispatches from the frontlines of dance-and-drug culture). Muzik too had the more trainspotter end of the spectrum well catered for, with informative and well-written pieces.

Today Mixmag is rivaled only by Ministry for its vulgar vapidity. I suspect market research done by its new owners EMAP played its part in the magazine's tabloidisation: the discovery that most punters don't want exhaustive, in-depth coverage of music qua music, but instead a massively expanded club guide, photos of people off their tits, gossip, and endlessly rehashed articles about drug use (all those 'biggest survey yet of the chemical generation' type--similar to the way Cosmo has a new 'sex' article every month). So the album reviews shrank to 100 word capsules, and there's page after page of pix of furry-bra'd and microskirted glammer babes and grinning gurning revellers (complete with admittedly pretty amusing captions). This shift coincided with Human Traffic and all those 1998/10 Years Anniversary acid memoirs and oral histories like Once In A Lifetime. (Muzik tried to latch onto this with its excruciatingly embarrassing back page where readers sent in their yarns--few of which contained sufficient narrative structure to qualify as anecdotes--about the stupid feats of baseness they'd pulled off when monged out of their minds).

The other dismal symptom of this refusal or inability to write about music in itself is the dance press's cult of pseudo-personality: instead of scene or genre-based pieces, you get profile after profile of DJs, gossipy and breezy and brand-name littered glimpses of their super-jock lifestyles, padded with step-by-step accounts of the career moves that led them to their current eminence, and barely alluding to the one thing that might actually be relevant---their taste in music, and the craft of DJing.

But then again maybe all this just reflects the parlous state of club culture: stagnation, fragmentation, a lack of a really new and galvanizing sound. When the alternative is trying to get people excited about Kosheen or the latest sub-sub-flava-strand of superclub floor fodder (""funky-chunky twisted house," "tribal-tech"--yum!), who can blame them for avoiding addressing the actual music at all costs. Talking of which...

DANCE CULTURE'S LOWEST EBB

It really does feel like we're stuck in a perpetual 1975 here, with the devoutly-to-be-wished Rave-Punk present only as a painfully palpable absence. It was starting to feel like 1975 as early as 1998 (Big Beat as pub rock) but here we are, four years on: things are worse than ever.

If you think this is just jaded-raver syndrome on my part, in its Xmas Round of up of 2001 the normally boosterish Muzik dared to voice a truth it claimed everyone in the dance industry was scared to admit: that UK club culture was in dire straits, attendance at clubs dropping, record sales sliding, the only real boom being in chill-out compilations. People are sick of the expense and the impersonal, sterile, shopping mall-like atmosphere of the big clubs, the bouncers with their walkie-talkies.

Another proof that there is an objective deficit of some vital intangible: the old skool revival, the boom in back-to-92 raves and 'ardkore pirate stations (there's even a handful producers making "new 'old skool'", because the past's seam of legendary anthems and lost classics has already been mined-out). The fact that that the old skool scene is stocked as much with kids too young to have been there back in the day as it is with nostalgic veterans, shows that it isn't just a trick of memory. Rave, hardcore, early jungle, that whole 90-96 continuum produced music that was simply inherently more exciting, more explosive, more creative, more thrills-per-minute than virtually anything that's come since.

Nostalgia gets a bad rap, but it can be creative. Fact is, certain periods in the life of an individual or a culture are more intense, exciting, plain "better" than others; the impulse to go back there may be counterproductive, but it's understandable. Nostalgia-driven movements can also function as ways of getting through doldrum eras, keeping faith until the next "up" phase. The past can be used to critique what's absent in the present. One root of UK punk, Malcolm McLaren's first boutique Let It Rock, rejected all things hippie by paying homage to 1950s rock'n'roll: its clientele was largely Teddy Boy revivalists. In America, record collectors helped lay the aesthetic foundations for punk, from Lenny "Nuggets" Kaye to trash fiends The Dictators to Greg Shaw of Who Put The Bomp magazine (which popularized the term "punk" and published Lester Bangs's proto-punk manifesto "James Taylor Marked For Death").

One of the interesting things that emerges when reading the Lester Bangs biography Let It Blurt and Paul Gorman's music press history In Their Own Write (mega-rant on this coming up real soon) is the fact that for about five or six years before punk really happened, people were calling for something punk-like to happen, and even using the word "punk" to describe this sorely felt lack of populist aggressive/primitivist raw-power oriented rock. And there were various contenders, from The Stooges and the New York Dolls and Dictators and Flamin' Groovies to Sensational Alex Harvey Band and Kilburn & the High Roads and Deaf School, none of whom for whatever reason quite made the grade: they never transcended being mavericks or isolated cases, never managed to catalyse a scene into existence around them. For punk to happen, the conditions had to be just right---essentially people had to feel utterly dissatisfied and disillusioned and lacking all hope of regeneration-- before the whole thing could re-ignite. Maybe this last year was the absolute nadir, the null lull before the storm. Maybe it needs to get even worse.
Not sure what would turns things around in America, though: dance culture here is in an unhappy position, it's no longer underground, but it hasn't broken through to enjoy the fruits of mainstream hegemony either. The heavy-hitters of 1997 (year of electronica's false dawn in the USA), the Daft Punks and Chemical Brothers and (a bit later) Basement Jaxxes, all underperformed with their most recent releases (Rooty sold less than 90 thousand here). Despite the rock-friendly moves on Discovery and Rooty, American radio programmers are sceptical or hostile; the video channels are looking for stellar faces and heavenly bodies. As a result, this music---chart topping pop in Europe--suffers from a Stateside sales ceiling, while its blocked pop-ness backfires in terms of hipster perception, making it seem middlebrow. As for the subterranean end of US rave/club culture, it's a sort of Worst of All Worlds deal: it's no longer got that cachet/buzz-factor of the New Thing (indeed for most hipsters, house/techno/D&B are probably considered uncool or passe; the cool thing to be into now is electroclash/nu-wave) yet the scene is being persecuted by local authorities, and by "quality of life crimes"-conscious Mayors and police forces like the one here in New York City.

BOB AND SIMON: A SERIES OF LOST ENCOUNTERS
I was all set to launch into a vitriolic tirade against Dylan-worship and tyrannical consensus, but curiosity got the better of me and I finally prised Love and Theft from the shrinkwrap. And it's good. Even an un-fan like myself can tell, instantly, that it's someone on darn good form. And if--for reasons that I could never fathom or empathise with in a million years--you happen to follow this guy's creative vicissitudes with a keen ear, I can well imagine how you'd be over the fucking moon at the renewed gusto and joie de vivre of the ornery and horny old codger. It's like he's discovered some Viagra-for-the-soul elixir.

But I'm an un-fan, so this doesn't resonate for me. The equivalent would be, 15 or 20 years down the line, if Morrissey suddenly got "it" back and got it on again. If Omni Trio suddenly started making music like he'd "never lost his hardcore" in the first place.

Talking of which.. and I'm not copping an attitude here, or trying to be deliberately sacrilegious, it's just straight-from-the-heart autobiographical fact: the Foul Play remix (the first one, not even the VIP one on the album) of "Renegade Snares" means more to me than the entire Dylan oevre. I know this is "incorrect" but I'm happy in my wrongness. This is my truth. There, I feel better for saying that.
I'm not claiming Dylan is over-rated (although on a certain purely arithmetical level, he could hardly fail to be, given the cosmic preponderance of approbation) or refusing to recognise an objective eminence, just 'fessing up to a curious, incurable lack of interest. Somehow I've semi-consciously avoided hearing his music as much as humanly possible. Quick inventory: I taped Highway 61 Revisited in 1984, played it twice. I've had possession of David Stubbs's copy of Blonde On Blonde for at least 15 years (sorry David!) and never got beyond Side One. A friend once made me a tape of great vocal performances taken from Dylan bootlegs, in order to advance, quite persuasively, the thesis that ('orrible voice notwithstanding) he's got amazing phrasing, cadence, and delivery; I was persuaded but at the same time never enticed to replay the cassette. Erm, what else? I thought the 1966 live thing of a few years ago sounded glorious, but, again, never played it again.

That's it: a series of lost encounters. There's something off-putting about Bob Dylan, and it's not entirely down to the immense width and breadth of verbiage accumulated in his exaltation, or the donnish Dylanologists with their annotations and interpretational zeal. Somehow, from the very earliest moment I became aware of Bob Dylan's existence, some embryonic (or even zygotic) form of critical perception sensed there was something stuffy and pious and un-rock'n'roll/un-pop about the Dylan Thing. The miasma of exegesis surrounded and interpenetrated the music to the point where whatever the original buzz or thrill or magic was so buried it was impossible to extract.

Well, that's my gloss on it now: probably initially it was something as rudimentary as a gut non-comprehension of how anyone could bear to listen to that aggravatingly nasal and goaty vocal timbre, even if the lyrics were as amazing as cracked up to be. And then beyond that--a notch up the scale of critical sophistication--an intuition that in this ability to hear through the surface un-pleasure of that weathered leathery bleat, and find the truth or word-magick embedded in the lyric---that right there was the residual puritanical streak and scriptural bias (in the beginning, there was the Words) that underpins rock's elevation of text over texture.

Curiously, the other Canonic Eminence I've largely managed to avoid engaging with, oeuvre-wise, is someone I became aware of at almost exactly the same time (1978, when I was first getting into pop music) and whose first name is also Robert. Give or take a "Stir It Up" or "Exodus", I have a similar anhedonic reaction to Bob Marley.

Perhaps it's related to this idea of Dylan as improving, good for you; work at it, and the rewards are rich. People have life-long relationships with Dylan, it's a bit like marriage: a better-or-worse, richer-or-poorer deal, where you persevere through the dry spells, through the Born-Again Christianity stretches and the Slash-on-session-guitar lapses, wait 'em out, in the hope and the confidence that before long he'll get it back, he'll deliver.

I liked something Barney Hoskyns wrote a few years ago about Dylan as a bit of a con-man who hides behind Cool (watching Don't Look Back, I always sympathise with the earnest studenty reporter with glasses who quite stoutly stands up to Dylan's cooler-than-thou bullying, with sycophant Alan Price joining in the jeers). The gist of the piece, if I remember correctly, was that Dylan made great-sounding records and is an amazing vocalist, but gets away with opacities disguised as oracular wisdom: someone with hidden shallows, in other words (the Michael Stipe of his day). Needless to say I haven't done the listening legwork to know if this argument is tenable, but it was nice to see such a heterodox opinion appear in a national newspaper, voiced by an old hero of mine whose ideas about music were extremely formative and inspiring.
Conversely, I'm disappointed when someone I admire turns out be a crypto-Dylanite: one more joins the opposing team. Like, Ian Penman saying nice things about Love and Theft in Uncut, and Greg Tate raving about the record in the Village Voice (ultimately making it his album of the year, in fact) AND doing that irritating thing of reading prophecies-of-9/11 into the lyrics. In both instances, I couldn't have been more surprised, more gutted. (Unless it had been Kodwo Eshun).

WASTED OPPORTUNITY OF THE YEAR

Paul Gorman, In Their Own Write

In the interest of full disclosure I should mention upfront that I was interviewed for this oral history of the music press and not one word made it into the book. BUT even if I hadn't had 90 minutes of my time wasted I am confident that I would be just as disgusted by this shoddy, sloppy effort.

The point of an oral history, one would have thought, is to allow for a multiplicity of opinions, a panoply of angles and takes; it is predicated upon the absence of an omniscient authorial voice, an overbearing slant or bias. But In Their Own Write is hopelessly skewed by Gorman's disproportionate veneration for one magazine during a four or five year period in the mid-Seventies---the New Musical Express of Nick Kent, Charles Shaar Murray, Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons---and his unbudgeable conviction that by and large it was all downhill after that.

Now that's a tenable point of view, for sure, but it's a long way from inconstestable historical truth. Personally speaking that mid-Seventies NME seems terribly dated, from what I've read---both stylistically (the mock-demotic, pseudo-hep writing full of "aints" and nudge-nudge references to reefer or powders) and in terms of its intellectual underpinnings (such long-since-problematized notions of rock'n'roll- as-male-misbehaviour, of genius-as-madness, of real-ness, authenticity, street-cred, raw passion etc which run through the work of Kent, CSM, Parsons et al). Doubtless, it was revelatory at the time; a crucial intervention. But times change, and by 1978-9 that style of writing, that matrix of received wisdom, already seemed, even to me as a 15 year old music-press neophyte flicking through the papers in W.H. Smiths, distinctly stuffy and old-guard.

Amongst people of my generation, it is widely accepted that the late Seventies/early Eighties NME represented a distinct golden age for the music press in its own, er, write. The fact that this notion is not even allowed admittance into Gorman's book suggests active suppression on the part of the author (I'm certain that I can't have been the only one of Gorman's interviewees to have voiced that opinion). Instead, all the quotes marshalled on that period of the NME reiterate the tiresome, surely-should-be-long-discredited version of the Penman-Morley-Hoskyns era as a miasma of indulgent and pseudo-intellectual verbiage that brought down a once glorious paper; as the tyranny of the pale theory boys who drove away the readership (actually NME's circulation was at its highest even during Morley's ascendancy). Penman and Morley aren't quoted, but Barney Hoskyns is--perhaps because he "recants," describing his work of that time as "pretentious bilge of the highest order" that he only got away with because of IP and PM's own prodigious feats of bilge-production. (All these many hues of bilge changed my life, of course: and let's not forget all the other great writers the NME had back then like Andy Gill, Angus MacKinnon, Chris Bohn, Richard Cook, et al). More to the point, the old jovial 'n' breezy rockwrite of "classic era NME" was simply no longer adequate, ideas-wise and language-wise, to deal with post-punk and new pop; new styles and new tones, new modes of analysis and speculation, were demanded to deal with the challenges set by the new music.
Less widely accepted, but still established enough to merit inclusion, is the idea that Melody Maker in the late Eighties/early Nineties was a golden age (perhaps the last golden age) for the UK music press. This notion is again a casualty of the pervasive anti-intellectualism running through this book, surfacing passim as jibes against "the academic school of rock criticism", Greil Marcus, theory etc. Not that MM during that period was entirely about Kristeva-quote-adorned messianic thinkpieces by yours truly---it was also full of hilarious, high-spirited writing by Chris Roberts, Jonh Wilde, Stud Brothers, David Stubbs, and a number of other writers, none of whom were particularly academic in approach, and quite frequently the absolute opposite. More than intellectual penetration or being well-read, what the magazine had going for it was rabid enthusiasm, an open ear to new sounds, self-belief, and a certain swagger. Plus editors who were prepared to take a risk both with their hires and with the bands they put on the front cover.)

The more grievous symptom of Gorman' anti-intellectualism is a failure to engage with the actual ideas of rock writing--the different schools and camps of thought, what's at stake, what all the fuss and fervor and fighting is all about in the first place. Essentially this is a book about music journalism with emphasis on the second word (so you get endless tedious accounts about magazine start-ups, hirings and firings, circulations, internicine office politics, who slagged/shagged whom) as opposed to a book about music criticism. It is about a certain sector of the periodical publishing world; it has nothing to say about ideas, or even music itself.

So what is shored up is the idea of the music writer as a sort of reporter-cum-groupie, with Nick Kent and Lester Bangs held up as exemplars: the rock crit as drug buddy to the stars, as a sort of rock star himself. But the least interesting thing about either Bangs or Kent are their debauches (who they threw up over, who puked on them). The world is full of fuck-ups, drunks, junkies, pillheads: it's utterly commonplace, so deeply lacking in interest. Besides which, if living the rock'n'roll lifestyle is essential to the rock writer's authenticity, then "pale theory boy" Penman was just as much a shall we say bon viveur as Kent. (MM was itself hardly a stranger to heroic, even suicidal, levels of alcohol consumption).

(On the subject of theory boys/girls, pale or otherwise... I reject the notion of "theorist" as a separate category, a notion rather fondly cherished by those who imagine what they do as rockwriters is somehow natural, organic, uncontrived, and therefore somehow more honorable. Everybody who takes music seriously is a theorist on some level: "common sense is just sedimented theory (obvious example: the earth goes round the sun was once a far-fetched and pretentious hypothesis). So the difference here is only between consciously choosing and organizing your own ideas versus inheriting them in an unexamined way. As for the cliche of the rock theorist as cold... seems to me that the potty excess of scrutiny and analysis involved in going to the bother of building a theory around rock or any part thereof testifies to an extraordinary emotional investment in the subject, to the point of amour fou.

It's a fiery thing. (Just anecdotally, some of the most merry-spirited, exuberant, laugh-like-a-drain types I know in "the profession" are yer brainiac theory-mongers. Whereas your just-the-facts-m'am/musn't-take-things-too-seriously/non-stop-wisecracking-scared-to-seem-earnest levity merchants, by contrast, are often quite sour'n'dour sorts in the flesh. Funny that.)

Beyond these specific beefs with eras dear to my heart being unrepresented or actively misrepresented, In Their Own Write is extremely lopsided and patchy: virtually nothing on American music journalism post-Bangs (nothing on Spin, on the Village Voice in the Eighties and early Nineties); hardly anything on important if small and/or shortlived UK magazines like Let It Rock, Street Life, Collusion, ZigZag. The Nineties whizz by in a few pages, mostly taken up with an exhaustive account of the rise and fall of Select; nothing on Lime Lizard, the Wire, Mixmag. Quite outrageously large chunks of it aren't from interviews conducted by the authors: rockcritics.com has been ransacked, and much of the book is derived from memoirs (Julie Burchill's I Knew I Was Right), essays (Peter York's Style Wars), biographies (Jim De Rogatis's Let It Blurt) and even other oral histories like Legs McNeil's Please Kill Me.

Verily, a missed opportunity.

THE BNF DEFICIT

The greater part of the work being done today--musically, critically -- strikes me as gap-filling. A band like Clinic, for instance, have found this tiny strip of terrain to call their own, a thin patch of sonic possibility bordered on every side by precursors who enjoyed much more room to manoevre.

Now, you might feel inclined to lend Clinic your support, praise them for doing the best they can in a tricky predicament. Or you might feel inclined to turn away with a soft sad shake of the head, wondering how people can get worked up over such miniscule increments of novelty. It's probably a generational thing: if you came of age in an era of Giant Steps and Bold New Formulations (BNFs), the present age with its micro-genres and Next Medium-Sized Things is going to be increasingly frustrating. People born after, say, 1977, of necessity have grown up with a more detail-oriented appreciation of smaller measures of innovation and idiosyncracy.
One thing's clear: whoever comes in the wake of Clinic will have an even more circumscribed space in which to operate.

The same syndrome applies to ideas-about-music. When was the last BNF? By my count, nearly five years ago, with Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant Than The Sun. Before that you'd have to go back to the turn of the Nineties, and Joe Carducci's Rock and the Pop Narcotic. Before that, the approach and sensibility hatched by Chuck Eddy and Frank Kogan in the late Eighties. Before that, the BNF's start coming too thick and fast to enumerate. This suggests that thinking-about-music parallels music-making: a sort of thermodynamic model that starts with a Big Bang and a flaming surge of creation, Giant Steps and BNF's galore. The possibilities for formal breakthroughs and striking Thought-Stances get progressively used up as time goes by, though. It's getting mighty crowded out there: more and more folk chasing smaller and smaller options. From galaxies to solar systems, from planets to space-dust.

The non-appearance of BNFs isn't due to a deficit of capability (there's more than enough brain-power out there). Is it just a lack of will-to-power and sheer determination, then? Or are people simply no longer interested in making that kind of totalizing macro-approach, find it unseemly or naff or just uncalled-for nowadays (these times of smaller shifts and evolution-not-revolution). Perhaps it's simply that there's nothing around musically/subculturally that would warrant and justify such an effort (with all its risks of making a fool of yourself).

For there's a grandiosity to the BNF; unconsciously, perhaps, the formulator is asking for the edifice to be torn down, its unsound foundations exposed. All BNF's are lopsided, and some are more wrong than right. But I can't help but admire the determination and guts that go into their construction, appreciate the starkness of intellectual contour. A prime example is More Brilliant Than The Sun, much of which I disagree with but which I can only salute as a heroic contribution to the, erm, dialectic. As with Carducci's BNF (whose premises I ultimately reject) the sheer contentiousness of More Brilliant is hugely valuable and galvanizing---responding to its challenges has sharpened up my own thinking no end.

It is disheartening that in five years since its publication, no one, to my knowledge, in the English-speaking world has mustered the resources of hubris and gall to attempt something of similar scope and ambition.

BNFs tend not be genial things, of course. There's an aggressive aspect, a tyrannical impulse (this sort of book is often praised along the lines of "it will change the way you think about XXX forever", which, if you think about it, is a rather despotic ambition: a putsch on people's minds!). The formulator usually wishes, implicitly or explicitly, to invalidate all other ways of looking at stuff. And every BNF becomes a set of blinkers, blinding its creator to new possibilities, unforeseen pleasures, unexpected shifts; the cardinal blunder of looking in the same place for your rapture/rupture. Pop music's protean on-rush will always outwit, outflank, outmode every BNF, leave this monument of thought standing there looking slightly ludicrous; stranded, no longer applicable to the new conditions.
Perhaps we are better off without BNFs, better off finding more affable, humble, non-polarising ways of looking at pop. As someone who gets off on messianic fervour, though, I can't help finding this kind of unassuming approach ultimately lacking some vital buzz-factor: it's too mild in temperament and temperature. Where's the fiyah?

MILD SPASMS OF MINOR VEXATION

RECORD REVIEWERS READING POST-SEPT 11 RESONANCE INTO SONG LYRICS WRITTEN LONG PRIOR TO SEPT 11

I know it's been on your minds, but please....

PEOPLE TAKING GWEN STEFANI SERIOUSLY

Not shrewd.

SCHEMATIC

This label really had something, a few years back--but not long after the gorgeous compilation Lily of the Valley, they lost "it": feel, flow, funk, whatever vital bodymusic factor it was that had originally osmosed into their sound from Miami bass. They lost it somewhere in the labyrinthine mazework of their own software (c.f Aphex Twin). As a result, everything I've heard from them in the last year or so -- Richard Devine, Phoenicia, Otto Von Schirach, Dela & Rossa---has been like clambering through a Cubist briar patch: this dense bramble of sonic singularities/angularities, all groove shattered through endlessly micromanaged idiosyncracies Like that similarly irritating single by Mouse On Mars, the results are as uncomfortable as mohair Y-fronts

PINK

Supreme niftyness of that single apart (and is "coming up" a sly E reference?), I'm consistently unnerved by her striking resemblance to a young Sharon from Eastenders.

FASHION, STYLE MAGAZINES, STYLE CULTURE, SUPERMODELS...

A pox on them all.

DUNS SCOTUS

Definitely way over-rated as tool for jimmying open the mysteries of pop,

The Unfathomable Appeal of.....

This year, let us ponder the unfathomable appeal of....

VIOLENT FEMMES
like flax seed for the ears

**NEW FEATURE**

IS THAT ALL THERE IS, THEN?

JOHN FAHEY
I mean, 's pretty 'n' all, but...

**NEW RETRO FEATURE**

THE MOST SKIN CRAWLINGLY EMBARRASSING VIDEO EVER MADE
[sponsored by VH1 Classic: "the best 46 cents a month you'll ever spend"]
Elvis Costello & the Attractions featuring Daryl Hall -- "The Only Flame In Town"

INDICTED!
FOR CRIMES AGAINST CULTURE: LEONARD KRAVITZ
charge: consistent/persistent near-cosmic naffness

INDICTED!
FOR CRIMES AGAINST CULTURE: DAVID NAVARRO
charge: consistent/persistent near-cosmic naffness

A THOUGHT

In a reversal of the conventional way of celebrating such occurrences, it suddenly struck me that "Where's Your Head At" and "Digital Love" aren't great because they're inspirational one-offs; that in fact they're diminished somewhat by their isolation. It would be so much more exciting, so much stronger, if they were hundreds and hundreds of similar tracks, extracting every last permutational twist and thrill-sliver from the song. Imagine "Where's Your Head At" as a entire genre/scene/subculture (tekn-Oi! ?), complete with styles, rituals, drugs, slang, the whole caboodle. I suppose the model at the back of my mind is "jungalistic hardcore" 91-93: diversity-in-unity, a weird combo of total anything-goes possibility and rigid format (whatever that week's b.p.m. for breaks was); a phenomenon of bounty and endless surprise that Frank Kogan has called "a context of abundance" (not talking about 'ardkore, though). As it is, "Where's Your Heat At" and "Digital Love" are all too easily contained, as isolated instances of quirky auteurist risk-taking/genre-mashing/diversity. I guess what I'm talking about is how I'd always ultimately take a monolithic scenius vibe over an eclectic DJ/producer who "creams off the best" that loads of different genres provide; it's just that most monoto-vibe scenes are based around bad music; what I'm trying to imagine is a music that's great enough to withstand and live up to being monolithically presented. And that doesn't happen that often.

"Digital Love" and "Where's Your Head At?" are examples of a rare breed-- tracks that seem to demand the building of an entire subculture around them (other examples: Scud/I-Sound & Errorsmith's Roots, Rock, Ravers EP, and Something J and DJ Maxximum's "Mercedes Bentley Vs Versace Armani": although the latter is more an hallucination of an already existing subculture (2step) based on having being exposed to only a few examples of it). Imagine a song so potent that everybody was forced to answer its call, drop whatever they were into, change their affiliations. It's not unprecedented.

THE YEAR'S MOST INEXPLICABLE PAGE-TURNER

Dave Cavanagh's My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For the Prize: the Creation Story

Not at all inexplicable early on (there's fascinating stuff on early independents like Postcard, Rough Trade, and Cherry Red) or indeed for prolonged patches midway through (Lawrence from Felt's peculiar Howard Hughes-like obsession with hygiene; the tortuous gestation of MBV's Loveless; Guy Chadwick's bizarre penchant for stripping naked at parties when off his tits; the shocking rock'n'roll-ness of Primal Scream). But for Magpie Eyes's bulk (that being the operative word for this doorstopper), I found myself increasingly puzzled by the rapaciousness and rapidity with which I was devouring the thing. Why so rapt by the tribulations and career vicissitudes of bands I'd never cared a tinker's cuss for, like Weather Prophets and Ride? What was the fascination? Sheer incredulity at the sheer number and diversity of crap records Creation has put out? (Releases and signings a surprising number of which I, someone "in the business" and on the front lines during most of the period covered by Magpie Eyes, had never even heard of.). The mere fact that many of the names -- press officers, minor bands, journalists--were people I'd rubbed shoulders with during this era?

"Thoroughness" has never been that high on my scale of writerly virtues, but Cavanagh's sterling effort ("well reported" is the phrase reviewers reach for) almost changes my mind on this score. Such unstinting behind-the-scenes detail has two main effects. Firstly, all the nitty-gritty of deals, contracts, promotion and marketing strategies, etc is effectively demystifying, stripping away all the rock'n'roll romanticism that Creation has always trafficked in (which is why McGee, who loathed Magpie Eyes, sneeringly described it as "the accountant's story"). Secondly, the cumulative impact of all this demystifying data as it grinds on and piles up is to create an almost Adorno's-eye-view structuralist-yet-mystic sense of the record industry as a gigantic machine for generating misery; almost everybody loses, gets burned and embittered (for even the few who realize their dreams and achieve the highest heights must always reckon with the difficult of maintaining, the inevitable slide, the Herculean challenge of the comeback, the "didn't you used to be" comments). It's just amazing the way people simply persevere, hang on in there: doggedly reforming bands, or starting new ones, having another crack. Lifers, all. Rare indeed the ones who creep away into dignified seclusion. (And what, I suppose, are they supposed to do with the rest of their lives?).

THE MOST OVER-RATED SCENES/GENRES OF ALL TIME

Part Two: THE MOD/SOULBOY CONTINUUM

Thoughts prompted by three near-simultaneous irritations: seeing the video for Style Council's "My Ever Changing Moods" on VH1 Classic (Weller and Talbot as Tour De France cyclists); reading Kirk De Giorgio's Invisible Jukebox in the Wire; perusing the suspiciously dapper and small-faced Paul Gorman's In their Own Write, with its excessive number of quotes from Paolo "Cappucino Kid" Hewitt.

I'm using "mod" here to signify not so much a specific period in the Sixties, or even its revivals and explicit echoes, so much as a UK youth cultural continuum, a perennial space in the sociocultural field of possibilities. And it's something whose appeal almost entirely bypasses me; it consistently non-resonates. And obviously in this respect I'm just as much trapped in my own class identity (middle middle class, as opposed to lower middle class). What irks? Mod's non-Dionysian, neat-freak retentiveness? Its refusal of both "revolution" (mod is essentially about resignation: youth as brief burst of energy and hope before capitulation to the humdrum) and "bohemia" (which as someone wise said, basically replaces politics with art as solution to/salve for the contradictions of late capitalist society)?
The mod/soul-boy continuum occupies a thin strip of sociological terrain--basically suburban upper working class/lower middle class--and is defined on one side through its disdain for the "studenty" (that bedrock of all things "progressive", Floyd to Radiohead) and on the other through its recoiling from the base pleasures of the un-sussed plebs (your proper proletariat). Caught between these two equally unattractive prospects and with the dire fate of suburban mediocrity staring it in the face, Mod escapes England through a massive projection towards Black America (never, crucially, rock'n'roll America) and through its flirtations with European-ness. As per Style Council's Our Favorite Shop, what's imagined is a utopia of perfect consumption: transcendence achieved through the details of a lapel, the iconicity of a label.

At the core of the mod self-conception is the idea of being one of a select few white boys who truly understand black passion and black style, simply through strenuous self-education in all its crucial details. The original mods were at least dealing with contemporary Black American music, but by the Seventies, with Northern Soul, the mod continuum became increasingly and paradoxically opposed to Black Modernity--it was equally horrified by white misappropriations of black music and by black musician's own deviations from the true path.

For Energy Flash, I was interviewed by Robert Elms on his GLR show, and during a desultory interrogation, with one eye kept on the Test Match playing on a little TV above the studio console, the former doyen of the style bibles opined that as far as he was concerned, house and techno had been the death of the British working class's love affair with black dance music. Like everybody else from a certain mid-Eighties moment in style culture/London clubland, Elms seemed to have imagined that rare groove/"the jazz revival"/go-go should have just have extended itself in perpetuity: a Thousand Year Reich of refinement and righteousness.

Elms's inability to accept house and techno as "proper black music" (let alone all the things that followed like jungle and 2step), then gets weirdly echoed by your Terry Farley types who went a bit further than Elms, falling in love with deep house, but stops there. Read his house review column in Muzik and you sniff the tell-tale neo-mod whiff of "we are the custodians", signaled by phrases like "proper black dance music" and "this is real black house music for those who know". Then there's Kirk DeGiorgio with his historically confused insistence that Detroit techno came entirely out of black synth-exponents like Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, and Bernie Worrell, and owed not one whit to Kraftwerk/New Order/Depeche. DeGiorgio operates some kind of web-site project dedicated to documenting early Seventies black music year by year down to every last record released---so far as he's barely got to 1971!.

I've strayed a bit far from mod here (DeGiorgio is probably as much a case of a jazz curator or Steve Barrow-style archivist type as anything, he certainly doesn't look terribly dapper from the pix I've seen) but the syndrome is essentially the same: what typifies the mod/soul-boy mentality is this weird self-effacing relationship with black music, where the best one can aspire to is to emulate/simulate black music as closely as possible. These white people are continually complaining about other white people ruining black music, making it too "white boy."

Like the house bods referenced earlier, these guys always seemed destined to become curmudgeons, disenchanted by the direction that their beloved black music has gone. Because their attitude to black music is so reverential, conservationist, and purist, they cannot comprehend black musicians own impulses to be faithless and heretical, to miscegenate. Your actual black musicians, on the whole, give or take a few real cultural protectionist/Afrocentric/black power sorts, don't think like this: in fact they think as musicians first, responding to excellence wherever it comes from. The examples are too numerous: southern soul singers who loved the plaintiveness and everyman's-woes aspects of country, George Clinton loving the Beatles and Vanilla Fudge, Ice T's penchant for Phil fucking Collins and making bad hard rock records, jungle with people like Goldie being into The Stranglers, David Sylvian and PiL as much as Loose Ends, Maze, Marley Marl; Jeff Mills's digging post-DAF Euro Body Music and actually playing in an industrial band called Final Cut.
For your mod/soulboy types, this sort of swerve is a real headfuck. And so electro and the hard, drum-machine driven rap of the early Eighties totally wrongfooted the chaps at Echoes and Blues & Soul (some journalists from these mags even formed an entity called LADS: League Against Disco Shit), and most of your style bible clubland guru types consistently backed the wrong horse, rallying to go-go or rare groove rather than rap or house. All hand-percussion and call-and-response, go-go corresponded to their received ideas of proper blackness; Troublefunk's shows in 1986 were wall-to-wall white hipster funkateers, barely a black face in sight.

Black music has an inherent mutational drive that is continually pushing it into directions that are "un-black"--in the process challenging and complicating the reified notions of blackness ("swing", "funky", "soulful", "warmth" etc) cherished by the white believers. (And sometimes the black believers too: in The Death of Rhythm and Blues, Nelson George's ideas lead him towards the paradox that, post-electro, the true conscientious custodians of black music, the people who really cherished and had a gut-understanding of its principles, were all white and mostly British: your George Michaels, Phil Collins, Daryl Halls, Mick Hucknalls etc.) Time and time again, a younger, upstart generation of black musicians will find themselves attracted to some new white music and embrace its qualities (hard attack riffs, distortion, machinic angularity), and the result is the next quantum leap for black music. Time and time again, the white soulboys huddle in horror and disdain, holding tightly onto models of black innovation that have become essentially antique.

And here's the truly perturbing twist---quite often it's been the "pale theory boys", the studenty, art-school, pretentious twats that your mods and soul-boys love to mock--who are not only the first to grasp the new cutting edges of black music (I'm thinking here of your Cabs, New Orders, Mark Stewarts) but who even occasionally have reciprocal influence back on black music (DAF and Throbbing Gristle with the Chicago house pioneers; Pop Group deeply shaping members of Massive Attack, etc). Standing to one side of this fruitful dialectic of funklessness and refunktification, the mod/soulboy types condemn themselves to irrelevance and redundancy. Can you imagine any black musician being inspired by, or finding some re-deployable element worth stealing in, the music of Kirk De Giorgio, Jamiroquai, or the Style Council?

AND FINALLY

after all that negativity... Faves of 2002 So Far!!!!!!

The Streets -- Original Pirate Material [UKG's Maxinquaye]

Boards of Canada -- Geogaddi [more of the same only more so]

Something J/DJ Maximus -- Mercedes Bentley Vs Versace Armani [digital hardcore meets
2step]

Various Artists--Montreal Smoked Meat [Canadian click-house]

BaBa Zula -- UC Oyundan Onyedi Muzik [Turkish neo-psych]

Swayzak -- Groovetechnology V1.3 -- [impeccable micro-house mix-CD]

Req -- Sketchbook (Warp) [old skool beatz meets gamelan]

Ian Dury & the Blockheads -- Ten More Turnips From the Tip

Position Normal --- Goodly Time (Rum Records) [same as in Faves of 2001 only slightly different tracks, different title, and delayed release date]

Blectum From Blechdom -- Fishing in front of people: the early years 1998-2000 live album (Pthalo)

Blevin Blectum -- Talon Slalom (Deluxe)

Kevin Blechdom -- The Inside Story 3 inch CD (Tigerbeat 6)

Kevin Blechdom--Bitches Without Britches (Tigerbeat 6 forthcoming)

[blectal overdose, plus they've kissed and made-up so a proper BfB album is on the cards!]

P.O.D - "Youth of The Nation" [p-punk echoes as discussed]

Liars--They Threw Us All In A Trench and Stuck A Monument On Top (forthcoming on
Blast First/Mute)
[more p-punk echoes: Gang of 4 played with the "Loose"-ness of Birthday Party]

The Rapture--Out of the Races and Onto The Tracks" (SubPop)
-- "House of Jealous Lovers" (DFA)
[even more p-punk echoes--"At Home He Feels Like Tourist" meets Josef K suavefunk, maybe. Tasty Morgan Geist NYC-1981-vibed remix of "House of Jealous Lovers" too]
Euphone -- The Lakewood [enuff p-punk echoes awreddy!]

Soul Center III (Novamute) [best track here--#5 if memory serves--is like the long delayed sequel to Deep Blue's "The Helicopter Tune"]

The Chemical Brothers--Come With Us (Astralwerks) [woooooooooooosh!!]

AntiPop Consortium -- Arrythmia (Warp) [life begins at the glitch-hop] [sorry!]

Tangent 2002: Disco Nouveau (Ghostly International)/
American Gigolo: the Best of International DJ Gigolo Records [all roads lead to Romo] [really sorry!]

Zero 7 --Another Late Night mix-CD [for its long sequence midway of balm-like soft slow 70s soul]

The Specials--Specials/More Specials [timely reissues on account of The Streets 2-tone-meets-2-step tracks--it's a Midlands t'ing, seen)

(belatedly)
Wu Tang Clan -- Iron Flag [extremely funky]

DJ/Rupture -- Gold Teeth Thief mix-CD (www.negrophonic.com) [epi-eclectic]

De La Soul --AOI: Bionix [randy]

NB. What you have just read is the monstermix of UnFaves 2001-- there is actually a near infinitely shorter version available

2008-12-16T19:01:00.000-08:00

FAVES of 2001

TOP TEN SINGLES
1/ Daft Punk, "Digital Love" (Virgin)
hot pink electric jizz
2/ Missy Elliott, "Get UR Freak On" (Elektra)
absolutely rinsin'
3/ Brassy, "Work It Out" (Wiija)
coming on strong like a breakbeat-aware "Cannonball" Breeders
4/ Pay As U Go Kartel, "Know We" (Solid City)
4/So Solid Crew, "They Don't Know" (Independiente)
paired for peculiar "to know us is to playa-hate us" theme as much as for
twin-pronged spearheading of UKG-turning-into-UKrap phenomenon
6/ Aaliyah, "We Need A Resolution" (Blackground)
slinky and sinister, a new noir Aaliyah we'll never get to fully see, sob
7/ QB's Finest, "Oochy Wally" (Ill Will/Sony)
nearly entirely for the quavery full-of-Eastern-promise maiden-vocal sample--
filched from Gong, allegedly!
8/ I-Sound, DJ Scud & Errorsmith, Roots, Rock, Ravers EP (Transparent)
you know the coo: strickly old skool Y2K biznis---bass-2-dark-step rootskore for
the 'r-r-r-r-riginal ravin' kru -- FIRING!!!! (innit)
9/ Shut Up and Dance, "Moving Up"
comeback of 2001: more MC garridge biznis with hella catchy dancehall/soca vocal
lick
10/ that goddamn dancehall tune [actually by T.O.K., title I forgot]
Inescapable, unidentifiable (by me anyway...)... the one with a sort of
soca/calypso/Harry Belafonte "day-o/daylight come and me carry the bananas" type
chorus going about the "cheechee man" (poss. homophobic bogey-figure?), beats
like dynamite detonating under your heels, and ultra-gruff DJ (Elephant Man?)
going about how his crew makes laws, fights war, represents the lords of
hardcore. Or words to that effect... One of the few dancehall tunes to relight
my fiyah this year.
HONORABLE MENTIONS: Basement Jaxx "Romeo" (top video) and "Where's My Head At"
(double top video), Ginuwine "Changed My World" (or whatever it's called: the
deliciously caramelized ballad about how he doesn't hang out with the boys he
stays home with her alternately whispering sweet nothings giving back-rubs and
cunnilingering for hours on end); Sum 41 "Fat Lip" (plastic-punk so fake it's
beyond fake, toppermost video), Tahiti 80 "A Love From Outer Space" (sweet of
them to even remember A.R. Kane), DMX "We Right Here" (just the right side of
inane), Squarepusher "My Red Hot Car" (only the smirk spoils this slinky
2stepper),,,,

TOP TWENTY ALBUMS

1/ PULP We Love Life (Island)

This is essentially Pulp's make-or-break record in terms of them remaining any kind of mainstream pop force. After the sales shortfall of This Is Hardcore, their career arc would logically point towards settling into a sort of Lukes Haines-level culthood: literate, mordant pop that reaps critical acclaim for its probing of England's seamy underbelly. But this would be settling for less: there's clearly a populist streak to Jarvis Cocker, a rabble-rousing, Everyman-championing impulse evident in the anthemic-ness of "Mis-Shapes" and "Common People," and his thrilling disruption of Michael Jackson at the Brit Awards.

Pulp are the kind of group whose music is somehow massively enhanced by massive popularity, and arguably diminished in corresponding proportions by its absence. So the choice of Scott Walker as producer of their comeback---while sure to make hipster sorts like myself moisten their underpants with excitement--is not terribly auspicious. Walker, after all, is the heart-throb crooner who whittled away his Sixties fame with four brilliantly pretentious solo albums, and whose sole recording of the last decade was the ultra-abstruse Tilt. While *Pulp* never approaches the forbidding orchestral density of that album, there is a Scott-like grandeur in the sheer size of the sound. And words-wise it's almost like Cocker's ratcheted up the ambitiousness levels to match the producer's visionary lyrical scope.

Nowhere is that more apparent than with the opening two-song suite of "Weeds" and "Weeds II (Origin of the Species)". As mulch-for-metaphor, gardening goes to the core of Englishness--Gardener's Question Time, landscape gardening at stately homes, allotments, the garden city movement. Even in pop, it's got potent resonances: the image of youth as "flowers in the dustbin" in the Pistols's "God Save the Queen," Flowered Up as hopeful blooms struggling up through cracks in the city pavement. "Weeds" is essentially a rewrite of "Mis-Shapes", replacing the first song's trope (misfits as the broken biscuits rejected at the factory) with those renegade plants that every gardener fears. Cocker uses the idea of weeds to symbolize the underclass, that enemy within Albion's green and pleasant land. Set to a majestic lumber that faintly recalls Led Zep's "Kashmir", the song vaguely heralds some kind of vengeance for this vegetable proletariat. "Origin of the Species" shifts up several gears in terms of complexity and provocation. Musically, it's a breathtaking panorama of symphonic funk, full of eerie spaces and soaring clusters of backing harmony. Lyrically, it transforms the insights of "Common People" about class tourists and slumming voyeurs into a grand indictment of the way the music industry operates: picking up on underclass innovations in style and expression, then mass-marketing them to a middle class audience eager for a controlled dose of life on the edge. Cocker brilliantly sustains the gardening imagery (cuttings, hothouses, poor soil, exotic strains, "very short flowering seasons", first bloomings swiftly followed by decay) but then almost overloads this already perilously extended metaphor by introducing the other connotations of "weed", as drug: "growing wild then harvested in their prime", and proffered at dinner parties as "a sensational buzz". But a searing rage surfaces through this elegant allegory, in lines like "take a photo of life in the margins... then get a taxi home" or the parodied condescension of "c'mon do your funny little dance." For clearly Jarvis feels this is how he's treated: as a freak on a leash, a token prole.

The two "Weeds" are just the start of a thread of imagery relating to flora and fauna, the English countryside, Nature as despoiled yet resilient and renewing. "The Trees" starts with the stop-you-in-your-tracks image of the protagonist armed with an air rifle and shooting a magpie to the ground, "where it died without a sound." The sheer poisoned vindictiveness of this act is an appropriate one-for-sorrow kick-off to a song about strolling through woods where you once had romantic trysts with a lover now departed. "The Trees" is a lyrical tour-de-force that risks absurdity but achieves a sort of Nick-Cave-aping-Jimmy-Webb pathos, from the heavy-hearted sigh of the chorus ("those useless trees/produce the air that I am breathing... those useless trees/they never said that you were leaving") to the lines "the smell of leaf mold and the sweetness of decay/are the incense at the funeral procession here today." The music is stunning, driven by a Walker-esque orchestral riff borrowed from a Sixties spy-movie soundtrack and encompassing an exquisitely forlorn electric organ solo that's pure Robert Wyatt.

Eight minutes long, "Wickerman" is the album's centrepiece: it's about a real river that flows underneath Sheffield, channelled through "dirty brickwork conduits." Cocker's lyrics make me think of John Cooper Clarke's "Beasley Street" or Morrissey's "river/ the color of lead." This is a stream of memory that carries Jarvis back to moments in love, like a first kiss in a shabby cafe where outside "a child's toy horse ride... played such a ridiculously tragic tune." This girl is a composite of lost lovers: he recalls another riverbank vignette, "except you were somebody else". The river is also a witness, a Cocker-like observer of ordinary lives, flowing beneath "pensioners gathering dust like bowls of plastic tulips" and passing an old sweets factory that burned down decades ago leaving "an antiquated sweet shop smell/and caverns of nougat and caramel." Finally, the river is also some kind of life-force, the polluted pulse of a bygone England, distorted by industrialisation yet indomitable. Jarvis imagines following its course all the way through and surfacing "surrounded by grass and trees". Like Neil Young in "Cortez the Killer", he knows he'll find "her" there.

*Pulp* has its share of songs that don't quite make it. Sparkling with semi-acoustic guitars, the obscurely titled "Bob Lind" recalls Felt or The Byrds at their best. Lyrically, though, it's got some good lines but is essentially well-trodden ground, about admitting you're a fuck-up as the only honest basis for real love. Narratively opaque and vocally strained, "The Night Minnie Timperly Died" seems like a botched anthem. rousing but fatally unclear as to what's it actually about. I still don't know what to make of "Birds In Your Garden," an acoustic guitar ballad adorned with simulated bird-song and a recorder. The song seems to want to be this album's "Something Changed", but the lyrics are just the wrong side of daft: two estranged lovers lie in bed, together but alone, until the dawn chorus tells the man to shag-and-make-up before it's too late. The final lines, in which Cocker confesses that "the birds in your garden... taught me the words to this song" are the glace cherry on top of a very sickly cake. An atrocity against good taste, for sure, yet there's a sort of corny majesty that recalls "Seasons In The Sun". Conversely, "I Love Life" is hard-to-stomach for its sourness. From the limping beat to Cocker's bile-choked, decrepit vocal, the song seems ready for the knacker's yard. Persevere, though, and this ailing ballad suddenly surges off with the idiot energy of early Roxy, Cocker howling from the gut like primal-scream Lennon.

*Pulp* lunges for greatness in its final stretch. "Bad Cover Version" goes for the Yiddish Grand Slam--kitsch, shlock, and chintz. With its massed backing harmonies and Three Degrees-like bells, it seems to come from the same rank cleft in UK pop meMORy that contains golden moldies like Brotherhood of Man and Paper Lace. Listening, you can visualize the BBC light entertainment orchestra: musicians with their kipper ties and headphones, the white-suited and baton-waving bandleader with his blatant toupee and smarmy grin. The words are some of Cocker's wittiest, flipping the old Who "substitute for another guy" idea and making Jarvis the definitive original and his successor the fake whose kiss tastes of saccharine. The song goes out with a list of gone-to-crap pop artefacts like the later Tom & Jerry cartoons, the Stones post-1980, own-brand cornflakes, and, rather cheekily, the disappointing side two of Til the Band Comes In by Scott Walker. "Road Kill" is all slow building grandeur a la "By The Time I Get To Phoenix", cymbal-smashes like sea-spray in slow-motion, up-swirling spires of sound. It's about another doomed love, heralded by the ghastly portent of a deer struck down and "dying in the road". Cocker sifts through precious memories, images like scars on his mind's eye: "all these things I see... though I don't see you anymore". Finally, "Sunrise" recalls Sixties balladeer Tim Rose, who specialized in a sort of anti-heroic grandeur, the doomed pathos of guys with a fatal flaw, condemned to spend the rest of their days alone and contemplating the ruins of their life. Likewise Cocker's protagonist hates the sun because its glare starkly illuminates his mountainous failures. If the clever-clever self-deprecation of lines about overfilling "the ashtray of my life" or how "my achievements in days of yore/range from pathetic to piss-poor" lean towards bathos rather than tragedy, everything changes with the shooting-star chorus and its sudden heart-rush of confidence that any life, however fucked, can be transformed. With its angelic choir nodding to "You Can't Always Get What You Want", the stratospheric-drive of the song's final minutes is the essential ascension after an album of largely unrelieved gloom.

Whether *Pulp* restores Pulp to the centre of UK pop culture or not (and I fear the bizarre contours of Cocker's lyrical imagination might be hard for punters to get their heads around), this record has achieved the sort of freestanding quality and distinction that ultimately makes popular impact irrelevant. Two or three of the songs I'd put right up there alongside their producer at his most godlike genius-like, "Plastic Palace People" or "Boy Child". There's no higher praise.

Pick Hit: "Road Kill"

2/ DAFT PUNK Discovery (Virgin)

2/ DAFT PUNK Discovery (Virgin)
Surely the best "Side One" of any CD in recent memory, those first six songs up
to and including the "I'm Not In Love" rip-off. "Digital Love" (Kieran's
favorite tune of the year, heavy-rotated to the point of almost being ruined for
me) does the kitsch/kosmik "camp sublime" like nothing since since World Of
Twist's "Sons of the Stage": yummy Supertramp lick, Van Halen-like frothing
geyser ejaculations of guitarspunk. Love that filtered sound on "Digital" and
"One More Time": sorta glossy and faded at the same time, like if plastic could
rust. A few dull patches of filter-house by numbers, but "Something About Us' is
a heartbreakingly tentative love song, and "Veridis Quo" is like the wistful
theme from an early Eighties French movie about a lonely girl in Toulouse or
something. I like the way they've stuck with the vocoder thing way beyond it
being utterly played-out. Are they saying something about the impossibility of
hearing "authentic" unprocessed human emotion these days? (It's also cool that
they then proceed to get Todd Edwards, famed for his vocal cut-up techniques, to
do a totally straight untampered-with vocal on "Face to Face"). Re. the topic of
inauthenticity, I think it was Tim Finney at Skykicking who was riffing on
Discovery being about "decadance". And there is something simultaneously witty
and eerie about the way Daft Punk fold in all the AOR lite-metal/FM soft rock
influences from the absolute null void of American radio rock (late
Seventies/early Eighties, New Wave never really arrived), as if to point out
dance culture's decline into similarly corporatized, anodyne edgelessness. Then
again, maybe they just purely and non-ironically dig ELO, Frampton, Boston,
Halen, et al..

Pick Hit: "Digital Love"

3/ CANNIBAL OX Cold Vein (Def Jux)

In mainstream hip hop, there's been this rap-meets-rave thing going on: B-boys-on-E like Ludacris and Ja Rule riding grooves built from techno riffs, sci-fi synth, and twisted junglistic beats. Meanwhile, there's a weirdly parallel syndrome on the underground scene, with indie-label rap getting ever closer to left-field electronica---a phenomenon signalled by the recent Chocolate Industries compilation Rapid Transit with its mix of MCs and post-Autechre artists. Cold Vein takes this unexpected hybrid further still. Without borrowing anything blatantly obvious from electronica, the album shows that hip hop can be as texturally abstract and dysfunktionally beat-weird as the most glitch-wracked vanguard techno.

Cannibal Ox---Harlem-based duo Vordul Megilah and Vast Aire--are proteges of producer El-P, who founded the Def Jux label and is something like hip hop's Steve Albini: a fervent loather of the corporate music industry and a producer with a finely-tuned appreciation for the granular texture of different kinds of distortion. Sonically, Cold Vein is essentially a continuation of El-P's first band Company Flow--same mucky samples, draggy tempos, and sprained, lurching beats. The music's feel of more-dead-than-alive perseverance perfectly complements Vordul & Vast's cold cold worldview: a panorama of urban decay populated by obsessive imagery of vultures, dogs, rats, pigeons (rats-with-wings), and phoenixes rising from the embers.

El-P cites Schoolly D's 1986 debut as formative influence. Just post-electro, that was a time when rap's harsh stabs and punishing drum machine beats had more in common with Swans or indeed Big Black than the smooth R&B of Luther Vandross. Old skool electro is the common ancestry shared by underground hip hoppers and your Autechre types (who invariably seem to have grown up breakdancing in deserted shopping centres). Cold Vein's sound, though, is more like electro gone decrepit, its futuristic chrome sheen mottled with corrosion. El-P likes cruddy sounds: gremlins-in-your-ear, computer-malfunction bleeps, cheap synth bombast like a video-nasty soundtrack. His tracks seem to bleed from multiple stab-wounds, seep abject frothy liquids like the dying android in Alien. And his disjointed beats frustrate the boogie-down impulse (not for nothing was Company Flow's debut called Funcrusher). Add to this Vordul and Vast's lyrics--some of the most I-be-the-prophet-and-the-future's-not-looking-terribly-bright rhymes since Sunz of Man's "Soldiers of Darkness"--and you've got a classic of noir Gnostic hip hop.

Highlights? "Iron Galaxy," with its moon-walk groove weirdly reminiscent of Donna Summer's "State of Independence" and savage scratching that serves to remind that this particular technique of technology-abuse was the original glitch. "Straight off the D.I.C." stumbles and flails like some Cronenbourg biomechanical creature, half-videoplayer, half-Doberman. "Real Earth" swirls nauseously, a slow-motion maelstrom of sewage and industrial effluent. "Pigeon" is like some unholy merger of Tricky's "Aftermath" and Royal Trux's ghostown blues: a stately keyboard theme conjures vistas of imperial dereliction, Rome sacked and torched, buildings like broken teeth, dunes of smoking masonry. Following this decline-and-fall tableau, the final hidden tracko "Scream Phoenix" is the faint-glimpse-of-heaven that follows the season in hell, a la Maxinquaye's "Feed Me": a limping blues guitar figure and stricken angel-choir from the soundtrack of some worn-out videotape create a swoony/queasy effect last heard on MBV's Loveless. This is hip hop at its most visionary and challenging.

Pick Hit: "Pigeon"

4/ THE AVALANCHES Since I Left You (XL Recordings)

(Take One, from Uncut)
You should hear the things people say about The Avalanches: "Basement Jaxx meets the Beta Band," "Stardust crossed with Stereolab," sample-based music with the freshness of Foxbase Alpha and the playful wit of 3 Feet High and Rising. With such mouthwatering parallels bandied around, you're almost set up to be underwhelmed by this Australian outfit's debut. Amazingly, Since I Left You lives up to the hype. At the end, you feel dazed and bemused, partly because you're concussed by its tumultuous on-rush of non-stop brilliance, but also because it's hard to put your finger on why the Avalanches are so special, so different.
It's not that there's anything unusual about the group's modus operandi (the album was assembled out of samples from 600 records scavenged during 18 months of field research in second-hand vinyl shops). Wagon Christ's Luke Vibert is no slouch at alchemizing stale cheese into soulful gold and even claims to prefer "shit records" as sample-sources; Bentley Rhythm Ace scour car boot sales for kitschadelic treasure; electronic clowns V/Vm bulk-buy unsellable CD singles and hilariously deface the oeuvres of Shakin' Stevens and Russ Abbott. Nor is it the case that Avalanches do anything especially complicated or technically advanced with their raw material: they loop the samples, layer the loops, drop them in and out of the mix, twist them into strange little riffs. So why is Since I Left You such a relentless loop-da-loop rollercoaster of thrills? Could it be because the group's delight at the sonic jetsam they've salvaged is palpable in every bar of the record? (You can just imagine the exultant whoops when they unearthed the soundbites about a chap called Dexter--same name as the Avalanches singer--who's "criminally insane" and "needs therapy"). Or is it just the sheer un-restraint and gratuitous generosity with which they pile it all on thick?.

Composed out of approximately one thousand "good bits" from other records, Since I Left You rarely feels bitty. The Avalanches's forte isn't technical so much as the art of listening and spotting compatibilities between disparate sounds. For it's one thing to take three or four sampled elements and make them work together, and quite another to take twenty or fifty (which is what many songs here sound like) and making them mesh them together as a plausible, integrated composition (while still retaining that uncanny sampladelic see-the-joins quality). Drawing on exotica, surf music, animal noises, film scores, Francoise Hardy-style Gallic girl-pop, and chartpop from the last five decades, Since hits hardest in the tingly treble zone: your ears are dazzled by acoustic guitars, Radio 2 strings, flute-twirls, harp-ripples, piano trills, dulcet snippets of la-la-la-ing female vocal, tinkling vibes, twinkling electric piano, bursts of heavenly choir. Into this wafts explosions of merriment, dinner table hubbub, football terrace fervor, foghorn blasts, and glorious non-sequiturs like "he also made false teeth." Gorgeously goofy hookphrases like "I got the bubbly/bubbling through me" pop to the surface, momentarily crystallising the music's effervescence. "Tonight", one of the few downtempo lulls, sounds like a Shirley Bassey ballad played on badly warped vinyl. And if tunes like "Frontier Psychiatry" (the one with the Dexter-is-a-loony samples) and "Flight Tonight" verge on Big Beat wackiness, others, like "Etoh" and "Summer Crane," evoke near-mystical feelings of tenderness and rejoicing, sensations of existensial buoyancy and the dizzy bliss that ensues when you lose count of your blessings.

Since I Left You is experienced as one long flow. Structurally (its onion-skin layers of crescendo, the absence of gaps between tracks) and emotionally (an almost painfully plangent euphoria) the record it reminds me most of is Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. But really The Avalanches are the southern hemisphere's Daft Punk. Since I Left You makes a superb companion to the latter's own kitschadelic masterpiece Discovery. If the French house maestros have a slight edge it's only because their own particular brand of cheese---the Seventies shlock-rock of ELO, Frampton, 10 CC, Buggles--is slightly more unusual and piquant than Avalanches's EZ-listening and novelty pop. But unless we're very lucky and other contenders miraculously enter the fray, it'll be these two jostling for Best Dance Album 2001 at year's end.

(Take 2, from Spin)

When it comes to music, misery has a monopoly on credibility (just ask Thom and Trent), and a furrowed brow and tormented soul are essential if you aspire to "deep". "Happy" is a tough act to pull off without seemingly smugly serene (post-Astral Weeks Van Morrison, say), irritatingly jaunty, or simply simpleminded. There are exceptions, of course--Al Green, Brian Wilson, most Krautrock. Now Australian dance six-piece The Avalanches join this illustrious company. Just as the Eskimos have 30 words for different kinds of snow, The Avalanches revel in a thousand subtle shades of joy.

Dance music's own version of "deep" is the way connoisseurs use "dark" as a term of approval. "Dark" typically refers to genres where bass frequencies dominate and treble's been purged (along with melody, the human voice, and general pleasantness). On Since, by contrast, you barely notice the basslines (except when the groove from Madonna's "Holiday" frolics into the fray), while the pounding house beat is more rudimentary than even Daft Punk's. Instead, the Avalanches sound is all about the high end: swirling strings, spangly harps, billowing flutes, twinkly trickles of electric piano, dulcet feminine harmonies, plus the occasional male vocal pitched up to sound angelic. This densely layered cornucopia of radiance and rhapsody (a 1000 samples from around 600 records) is the result of a year spent combing Sydney's thrift-stores for used vinyl. On tracks like ""Two Hearts In 3/4 Time" and "A Different Feeling", the Avalanches tweeter assault resembles Stereolab's Francophile EZ listening crossed with Stardust's French filter disco. Treble not only evokes light, it creates lightheadedness. Since makes you feel dizzy, fizzy inside---a champagne-for-blood sensation captured on "Diners Only" with its catchy whispered chant "got the bubbly/bubbling through me/sparkling sparkling".

With no gaps between its eighteen tracks, just a non-stop groove, Since I Left You is so madly glad, it's demented. But it's not all relentless rejoicing. There are exquisite bittersweet tints to tracks like "Etoh", a sense of heartbursting euphoria shadowed by the intimation that all things must pass. And the downtempo "Tonight" is almost blue. But glumness is instantly banished by the following "Frontier Psychiatry", a Big Beaty jape dotted with wacky soundbites like "that boy needs therapy" and "he also made false teeth." "Summer Crane" ripples religiously like Steve Reich on X.. As its title hints, the album's underlying concept is about unburdening yourself--shedding the dead weight of personal history, cutting loose the ties that hold you back, floating off to some exotic elsewhere or into the ecstatic ether. ("You can book a flight tonight" goes one sample, which could refer to taking a vacation, or a drug). Gravity, in every sense, is abolished. The Avalanches ethos is a sort of positive irresponsibility, dereliction as a duty you owe yourself.

Pick Hit: "A Different Feeling"

5/ JAY-Z The Blueprint (Roc-A-Fella)

This is supposed to be Jay-Z's big comeback. Which is odd 'cos he's only been "away" a year, and the last album sold a couple of million. Then again, the one before sold more, and the album before that shifted five mill. So the perception was that Jay-Z had fallen off significantly (and bar the Neptunes-produced monstergroove "I Just Wanna Love U," the last record did show signs of burn-out) while the hype is "Jay-Z reclaims the throne"--a coup almost unprecedented in the merciless, high-turnover world of rap supastardom.

Clearly the embattled star felt he had much to prove, because it's all nonstop Jay-Z: no verses farmed out to proteges from his Roc-A-Fella camp, and the only celebrity guest is Eminem, whose flow on "Renegade" is so dense and twisting it damn near sprains your brain. The CD booklet shouts out "To This Whole Fake Bulls**t Industry, Thanx 4 being so Fake and Keeping me on my Toes!!!," and the lyrics stomp down various upstarts who'd been sniping that Jay was slippin'. "Takeover" savages Prodigy from Mobb Deep and it absolutely DESTROYS Nas, ridiculing his output ("that's a one hot album in every ten years average") and boasting alpha-male style of fucking his girl ("you know who/did you know what/with you know who"). The track is based on The Doors's "Five To One" (Morrison hoarsely hollering "gonna win, yeah/we takin' over") and there's more inspired pop intertexuality when the chorus from Bowie's "Fame" is transformed into a series of deathblow disses: "that's why you're... LAAAAAME!!!".

If The Blueprint is a triumph, it's one of form over content: Jay-Z's got nothing new to say, but loads of fresh twists on the same-old same-old. Plus he's always been able to cherrypick the hottest tracks from the most inventive trackmasters, and the sonics here are relentlessly ear-catching. Almost every tune sounds like a hit: Kanye West's insanely catchy Jackson 5-based "Izzo," the swampy reggaematic fonk of Timbaland's "Hola Hovito", the drum 'n'bassy tympani thunder of Bink's "All I Need," Just Blaze's "U Don't Know" with its sped-up diva histrionics like parakeets on amyl nitrate, the crunchy-yet-wet percussion and snakecharmer melodics of Poke & Tone's "Jigga That N***a" .

Apart from Jay's mic' hogging, the most striking thing about The Blueprint is how deeply steeped it is in 70s soul. Ignoring the fact that this music's melt-your-hard-heart tenderness was originally radically opposed to big-pimpin' niggativity, Jay-Z deploys the timeless sweetness of Al Green, Bobby Blue Bland, and David Ruffin to sugarcoat his own ultra-cynical worldview The plea for social redemption in "Heart of the City (Ain't No Love)" gets flipped around into Jay-Z complaining about resentful haters: "where's the love?," he asks, as if it never occurred to him that rubbing your success in people's faces will rub 'em up the wrong way. "The Takeover" does a similar to The Doors, transforming the emancipatory, new-day-comin' hope of "Five To One"--"they got the guns, but we got the numbers"--into a purely privatized triumphalism: the victory of the Roc-A-Fella clan over all rivals, a dynasty that will never be overthrown.

Jay-Z's OG shtick involves the fact that he was wealthy through drug dealing before he became a rap star, and that "the rap game" is just a phase before even greater glories. "Put me anywhere on God's green earth/I triple my worth... I'm a hustler baby/I sell water to a well". The sole chink in these delusions of invincibility comes with "Song Cry", an almost-apology to the girl he lost through fucking around. The title's clever concept is that the music (more symphonic soul) sheds the tears Jay-Z's too tough to weep. Actually, that's not entirely true: in the wistful, dewy-eyed "Blueprint (Momma Loves Me)" he gets maudlin' as he surveys the length and breadth of his own awesome saga. The sheer storied epic-ness of his journey from rags to riches to even more riches gets him all choked-up.

Rap's mystery is that people pay to be entertained by what they'd normally flee: vivid and detailed death-threats, bores bragging about their income and sexual conquests. Clearly a deeply unpleasant fellow, Jay-Z is also mildly evil. How about the line "I'm still fuckin' with crime, 'cos crime pays" for socially destructive myth-mongering? Ultimately, though, resistance is futile. If rap is 95 percent about the art of boasting and put-downs (and it's an argument), then Jay-Z is the champion of this particular art form. So give it up for the don of disrespect, the virtuoso of vanity, the king of conceit.

Pick Hit: "The Takeover"

6/ Blectum from Blechdom Snauses & Mallards and de Snaunted Haus (Tigerbeat 6)

Most experimental electronica is anal-retentive---every glitch and click prissily placed just-so. In contrast, Blectum from Blechdom are "anal-expulsive" (to borrow a coinage from their San Francisco comrade Lesser). But this female duo, who lurk behind the aliases Kevin and Blevin, aren't just sonic messthetes: they're positively obsessed with all things faecal. The sleeve of their Bad Music and Buttprints EP featured the imprint of their own hindquarters, and toilet humour is upfront in their name: Blectum echoes "rectum", while "blech" is the gagging sound American kids make to indicate revulsion. The music itself often sounds onomatopeiac, its squits and ploops practically demanding titles like "Audio Stool" and "Shithole".

Those two come from Blectum's debut EP Snauses and Mallards, whose nine tracks make up the first third of this CD. Vaulting past the Ars Electronica prize-winning album The Messy Jesse Fiesta, the rest of the record takes in all fifteen tracks from De Snaunted Haus, their most recent release. Here, Blectum usher us into an Ubu Roi-like fantasia of grotesque scatology and depraved sexuality, populated by unwholesome critters with names like snause, sea slurpent, and bee-grub. Snauses are vermin who live in toilets and ambush people at their most vulnerable, biting their toes off. They have a single "bitch-hole" through which they eat, excrete, breathe, fornicate and reproduce. Then there's Mallard, a scientist duck who experimentally breeds snauses with extra orifices for his perverted sexual research.

The macabre adventures of this bestiary---seemingly hallucinated by a ketamine fiend channel-surfing between wildlife documentaries, porn, and a Cronenburg movie---are recounted via between-track micro-dramas, performed by Kevin and Blevin in exaggeratedly thespian tones and sometimes fed through vocal treatments for added delirium. Breaking techno's taboo about using the human voice (one track is pointedly titled "In case you forgot, we talked on this record"), Blectum shatter glitchtronica's cool with goofy girlish glee and Pythonesque daftness. But the effect goes well beyond Ministry of Silly Voices, and frequently becomes genuinely unnerving and creepy.

The earliest Blectum performances took place at clandestine raves thrown by the duo in the basement beneath the concert hall of Mills, the Oakland, California music college where Kevin & Blevin are students, and whose illustrious alumni include Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, and Morton Subotnik. Blectum music reflects this high/low incongruity: toytown tekno riffs, shredded jungle breaks, and bursts of house's hi-hat/kick rhythm, are meshed disjointedly with musique concrete-style smears and scumbles of sound-goo. Tracks like "Bastard Child" recall 4 Hero at their 1993 darkcore peak: vocal samples like melted candles, loops that unspool like glaucous intestines, angelic-demonic shriek-riffs. It's a sort of devolved rave music, suggesting the alternate route London pirate radio might have taken if jungle had never solidified as a genre, and instead the first Generation E kept on taking the bad medicine while the music got iller and iller. Sheer unsanitary insanity, Haus De Snaus is an infirmary of sound, teeming with sickly melodies, fever-dream apparitions, degenerative nerve-disorder twitches, and wizened noises as perturbing as the plates in a medical text-book.

Blectum use a lot of dinky-sounding mechanistic melody-riffs suggestive of music-boxes, carny-shows, or player-pianos (Nancarrow is one of their favorites). It's a flavour that evokes the uncanny aura of automata and clockwork toys, making me flash on the the sharp-fanged demon-dolls in Barbarella, or the kitsch animatronic companions built by the prematurely aged android-designer in Blade Runner. Electronic musicians usually evoke childhood's idyllic-ness--Mouse On Mars's ice cream van tinkles, Boards of Canada's faded photo poignancy. Blectum, though, plug into the imp-of-the-perverse side of pre-pubescence: the sheer appetite for destruction that inspires surreal acts of vandalism or grossness, like smearing dogshit over the swings and slides at the local playground. The between-song skits recall the comic play-lets you might have tape-recorded as kids, complete with giggles and muffed lines. It's revealing that the only word for this kind of mischief and humour we have is gender-specific: puerile. Yet Blectum's scatomania seems somehow distinctly female, perhaps tapping into the same energies of body-disgust and self-abjection that fuels extreme practices like bulimia. If the girlfriend in Devo's "Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Gettin')" ever got to tell her story, this music might be her riposte.

Probably an inspired aberration, Blectum nonetheless strike me in potential at least as harbingers of a sort of riot grrrl for electronica. With their private jokes, lo-fi approach, and brattiness, they're a bit like Huggy Bear if they'd been influenced by early Prodigy rather than early Pastels. More than anywhere in electronic music, they probably belong to the lineage of outsider rock: The Shaggs, the Residents ("Going Postal" could be straight off Commercial Album), Royal Trux's ultra-primitivist Twin Infinitives.

In this art brut spirit (and their cover art does recall the compulsive doodles of insane artists like Wolfli), this CD closes with "Bad Music", one of two previously unreleased tracks. A Christopher Cross-like ballad, just piano and erratic vocals, "Bad Music" is genuinely awful. But it does serve as a Blectum manifesto, expressing both their accept-yourself ethos (like riot grrrl, they're anti-cool, pro-nerd) and their willingness to sample absolutely anything ("Right Time Right Place" trumps V/Vm by using the ghastly flute-riff from Men At Work's "Down Under"). "Good music," almost by definition, can only confirm and conform to established notions of quality and distinction; besides, there's simply way too much fine music in the world already. "Bad music," though, still has the capacity to surprise and delight, through its deformity or simple failure to reach its own aspirations. It's also true that pathbreaking genres (like darkside jungle in '93) often initially sound plain wrong. Self-consciously walking the diagonal between beauty and ugliness, art and trash, is a difficult act, but Blectum have pulled it off. Sadly, this CD might be the duo's final release, as the partnership, always volatile, is now in trial separation. But here's hoping Kevin & Blevin make up, and give us more of their jolie laide genius.

Pick Hit: "Bastard Child"

7/ N*E*R*D In Search Of...Virgin

N*E*R*D are The Neptunes are Pharrell Williams & Chad Hugo, the Virginia-bred R&B/rap production team who are just coming off an astounding run of hits. The spate started in late 1999 with Ol' Dirty Bastard's "Got Your Money" and Kelis's "Caught Out There," blew up last year with Jay-Z's "I Just Wanna Love U", Mystikal's "Shake Ya Ass," and Beenie Man's "Girls Dem Sugar," and continues with Ludacris's "Southern Hospitality". But if you expected their debut solo would be drenched in that deliciously chewy, sinewy James-Brown-for-the-Y2K sound that underpins the Jay Z and Mystikal tracks, or take the techno tinged brutalism of the Ludacris single even further, think again. In Search Of... is really a black rock album. True, there's hardly any guitar and the drumming is programmed not played. But songs like the dirty synth-bass riffing "Things Are Getting Better" have the hard, unswinging attack of rock. Basically, there's a reason Pharrell Williams is sporting an AC/DC T-shirt on the back cover.

Given that Williams & Hugo were once in a band with their Virginia Beach neighbour Timbaland, and right now are jousting with the podgy producer for control of the Black American BeatGeist, the obvious parallel for In Search of... is Welcome To Our World, the 1997 album where Timbaland stepped out of the shadows for the first time to claim some limelight (dragging his not immensely talented sidekick Magoo with him). There's a difference, though. For all trackmaster Tim's brilliance as rhythm composer, on Welcome he was talking loud (actually, sotto voce in a sub-Isaac Hayes deep 'n' low baritone) but saying fuck-all. Whereas N*E*R*D... well, they're on some kind of early Seventies cosmic/social consciousness trip, harking back to What's Goin' On/Innversions/Harvest For the World. Williams, in particular, seems intent on Really Saying Something, bringing back capital 'c' Content to the sonically radical but lyrically visionless black pop culture of the day.

That's the intent, at any rate. In terms of political acumen, the politicians-as-strippers analogy of "Lapdance" is only marginally more astute than OutKast's incoherent "Bombs Over Baghdad" (2000's most Over-Rated Single, surely?). But as black noise---that raspy riff like a wasp in your earhole, that coiled hypertense rhythm-track--"Lapdance" is as exhilarating as "911 Is A Joke" off PE's Fear of A Black Planet. And the post-election disgust it voices makes a neat parallel with Radiohead's "You and Whose Army?". "Provider" is one notch up the politics-in-pop sophistication scale, from soapbox speaking-out to first person narrative as cautionary tale, couched in B-boy blues similar to Everlast. The song's protagonist is a drug dealer who can only put bread on the family's table by going out each morning to face the streets and the prospect of not coming back, like, EVER. "Freddie's Dead"/"Pusherman"-era Curtis Mayfield is echoed musically as well as lyrically, with a beautifully fey and floaty mid-section. The kosmik stuff is a tad more subtle: references to the subconscious, phrases like "we are the dreamers," while N*E*R*D itself stands for No One Ever Really Dies. (It's fair to surmise that these boys like the odd puff). And there's more than a trace of full-on psychedelia in the mix: the staccato keyboard-stab and eerie, sneery melody of "Brain" recall Sixties garage-psych bands like The Electric Prunes and The Music Machine.

The difference between the Neptunes sound and the rest of the R&B pack is most apparent in the rhythms, which are stiffer and simpler than the fiddly-with-syncopation post-Destiny's norm. Williams & Hugo's unsupple beats evoke Eighties electro's drum machine sound, but rarely sound retro. What this means, though, is that the drums alone can't carry the song, as they do with so much modern R&B. And so "Truth or Dare" is the album's one dud because the riff, beat and Kelis's vocal lick are all based on the same drab pattern. After this mid-album falter, though, there's a seven song stretch of non-stop awesomeness, kicked off by "Run to the Sun"---a gorgeous Isley-esque song of astral love, all honeydripping interlocked harmonies, Roy Ayers-circa-"Daylight" keyboard ripples, heart-pulse bass, and teasing rhythm guitar. Then follows the Beatlesy "Stay Together; " the "black Jaxx" confection of clavinet, twangadelic guitar, lounge harmonies and dub-house off-beat keyboard licks that is "Baby Doll"; the thick moog sleaze and porno panting of "Tape You"; the exquisitely tight-but-loose slow grind funk of "Am I High". Best of all is closer "Bobby James," the lament of a teenage druggy on a downward spiral, reduced to panhandling for dope money. The phased falsetto and headspinningly intricate arrangement make you really feel the swoony chorus "I'm high as hell and I'm ready to blast/I'm just one hit away from being passed out."

This year's Stankonia, In Search Of.... is further proof of the Dirty South's hegemony over hip hop, and a gauntlet thrown down to Timbaland: raise your game again, son.

Pick Hit: "Bastard Child"

8/ MISSY ELLIOTT Miss (E) ...So Addictive (Elektra/EastWest)

Unlike, say Lil Kim, Missy can act the "crazy ho" but never seem to degrade herself. She's got the power, doesn't need to issue shrill micro-manifestos a la Beyonce Knowles, but just revels in her own identity. And appetite: "Dog In Heat', track 2 of her third and latest album, features some of the most cheek-flushingly heavy breathing since "Love To Love You Baby" and huskily droned lines like "slide/let's take a ride" that are genuinely erotic (something that barely exists in modern R&B, for all its graphic imagery).

There's more than hormones fuelling Miss (E) ...So Addictive, though. The title flashbacks to the dodgy puns of 1989, like "Everything Starts With An 'E'" by (groan!) E-Zeee Possee. The cover art recalls those ultra-crap "cyberdelic" videos of computer animations for post-rave chilling out: three little orbs go on a journey through a kosmic wormhole, you know the score. There's a woogly-oozy love ballad titled "X-Tasy", and another tune that shouts-out to "my XTC people". Short of covering the Shamen's "Ebeneezer Goode', Missy couldn't be more blatant about where her head's at these days.

But where other "B-Boys On E" producers do little more than tack on a few techno-y sounds, Timbaland & Missy's production on So Addictive feels permeated with the MDMA vibe, electric with it. The sound is like a hyper-real painting, so sharply contoured and glossy that just listening makes you feel you've been dosed. Elliott's's forte is vocal arrangements: songs like "One Minute Man" teem with a swarm of multitracked micro-Missies distributed across 3D space. Timbaland's endlessly inventive beats offer a whole new bag of tricks for others to nick. "Get Ur Freak On" is a pure drum'n'bass roller, but with a dark-and-daft playfulness that went AWOL from jungle sometime in 1993. And there's even a full-on house tune. "4 My People", one of the few cuts where Timbaland relinquishes the controls (in this case, to Nisan & D-Man), is a chugging monstergroove that cuts suddenly from pumping euphoria to edgy paranoia, as if crossing that one-pill-too-many line.

And yet for all its brilliance, there's something lacking: call it "vision". Missy's never exactly been a "deep" artist, more a rare female recruit to the lineage of cartoon freaks like Bootsy and Busta Rhymez. Mostly she boasts about how freaky and funky and shagadelic she is. Her real genius is the way she says stuff: timing, intonation, contorting the words in her mouth, vocal syncopation that's as virtuoso as anything Timbaland does with beats. But if you'd thought maybe MDMA might have opened her up a bit (for the record, she steadfastly denies trying the drug) there's little sign of E-motional growth. True, there's a hidden track, a lovely slink of modern gospel featuring The Clark Sisters. But for all its talk of "pressing on to higher ground", elsewhere there's scant evidence of a new spiritualized consciousness. Missy's idea of God is, frankly, childish: a sort of agony uncle in the sky. Always there to listen uncomplainingly to her complaining, but never expecting anything in return, like attending church on Sundays (Missy, "witness for Jesus" and true believer, admits she never goes), let alone forsaking vice, deferment of gratification, humility, good deeds, or sacrifice of any sort. Like gangsta rappers who thank the Creator extravagantly in the sleevenotes, then spend the entire CD breaking commandments like Sin's going out of fashion, Missy appears to think she can have her disco biscuits and eat them too.

Pick Hit; "4 My People"

9/ SO SOLID CREW They Don't Know (Independiente/Relentless)

So I'm listening to the So Solid Crew album for the first time when this paramedic ambulance whizzes past my East Village window, and its stuttering siren synchs exactly with the syncopated 2step beat. Perfect: So Solid's music is nothing if not urban, in both the Souf-Lundun-innit and US-radio-euphemism-for-"black" senses. When it comes to the latter, it's hardly news that American R&B and rap have massively impacted Britain's own street culture. Just as the twitchy stop-start rhythm running through They Don't Know wouldn't exist without Timbaland, similarly So Solid's MC squadron are steeped in US rap---the songs teem with thugged-out slanguage like chasing "paper", smoking "trees", stealing another man's "honey", "spittin' " lyrics. The very concept of the So Solid collective with its thirty-plus associates is modelled on B-boys clans like Wu Tang, Roc-A-Fella, and No Limit: entrepreneurial dynasties with street roots and shady pasts.

So Solid Crew -- along with similar outfits like Pay As You Go Kartel, Heartless Crew, and More Fiyah Crew---are spearheading one of the most significant developments in recent British dance culture: UK garage's transformation into a mutant form of British rap, with MCs becoming as important as DJs and producers, and actually starting to say stuff rather than simply hyping the crowd. So while the hip hop stylings (the doo-rags on the Crew's heads, the ice and gold, the titles like "Ride Wid Us") are America-inspired, this is just a fantasy patina overlaying UK inner-city realism.

You can hear this distinctive Englishness in the wiry voices (making me flash on 3 Wizemen and the endless false dawn for homegrown UK rap) and in the sheer speed of the MCing. In Black British sound system culture from reggae to jungle, the mic' chat has always been hyperkinetic. So instead of the slurred growl of a DMX, the So Solid MCs are incredibly crisp, nimble, even dainty. On the title track, Asher D's line "they don't know about my flow" is enunciated with a prissy precision that's almost fey. Elsewhere vocal tricks, like the "human timestretch" bit on "Deeper," where Romeo slows down and speeds up, testify to the legacy of a decade-plus of London pirate radio MCing. Indeed So Solid run their own pirate station.

Sonically, So Solid are equally steeped in the hardcore continuum that runs from rave to jungle to UKG: you can hear it in the murky, viscous basslines, the icy plinking keyboard riffs. Alongside their satellite crew Oxide & Neutrino, So Solid pioneered the shift in UKG away from pop R&B crossover to a stripped-down electro-like sound. In the course of 18 months, UKG has gone from boom-time music to a recession soundtrack, its ominous sub-bass and rigid-with-tension beats evoking the desperate struggle for a share of the shrinking economic pie. Which is why nearly every song on They Don't Know addresses "haters" who resent So Solid's success. (Forgiveably, perhaps, given that the Crew's lyrics relentlessly rub the group's prowess, prestige and prosperity in the faces of non-VIP losers).

"Hater" is a concept that aims to discredit any egalitarian impulse, attributing it to envy. So Solid's pinched, paranoid outlook is the logical upshot of 22 years of postsocialist Britain and the emergence of a permanent underclass. "Solid" carries a faint melancholy echo of the days when people talked of strikes staying solid. But that idea of class solidarity has long since contracted to the gang, the click, the crew: a sort of micro-socialist haven within dog-eat-dog capitalism. For all its don't-fuck-with-us collective swagger, though, and the lyrical emphasis on living large, the overwhelming impression left by They Don't Know is of constraint. This is actually inscribed into the structure of their #1 smash "21 Seconds," where each MC has just a few bars in which to shine. On that track, and the whole album, you hear the hectic sound of talent squeezing itself through a tiny aperture. And while it's amazing how the street realities of exclusion and disadvantage continue to simultaneously obstruct and catalyse underclass creativity, who would actually want to live the lives that produced this grimly thrilling music?

Pick Hit: "They Don't Know"

10/ BRASSY Got It Made (Wiija)

Like Maximum Joy, if they'd grown up in Indiana and the only radio station in town played nonstop James Gang and AC/DC... Like Le Tigre, if they really rocked and really funked... Like PJ Harvey, without all the rock crit baggage of adulation/interpretation... Like Luscious Jackson, if they weren't so, I dunno, prim... Like Breeders' "Cannonball" crossed with Fatboy's "Punk To Funk".... Brassy are the more enjoyable, for not really being "about" anything, except maybe "the politics of sass".

Pick Hit: "Work It Out"

11/ BJORK Vespertine (One Little Indian)

Representing a new post-superstar phase of Bjork's life, Vespertine is all about craving sanctuary and solace, retreating from overlit public spaces. "Hidden Places" has this smudgy glow, like you're hiding under a blanket and the light's coming through the same colour. "Cocoon" is even more intimate. Bjork and her boyfriend make love in the middle of the night, half-asleep, in "a saintly trance"; they "faint back" into slumber, then Bjork wakes up again and he's still inside her. Bjork's whispered vocal--so breathy, it crackles and sparkles, as if covered in the furry spikes of crystals forming in solution--virtually pulls the listener under the sheets with the lovers.

A record about tiny epiphanies, Vespertine is riddled with "microsonics": the ultra-minimal texture-riffs and rhythmic tics that you find in the left-field techno subgenres "glitch" and "clickhouse", from whose ranks she's drawn her latest cast of collaborators--Matmos, Matthew Herbert, Thomas Knak, Martin Console. Alongside these vanguard techno programmers, Bjork's other main collaborator on Vespertine was harp player Zeena Parkins. The album's primary sonic colors are crystalline and prismatic---and that's down to Parkin's harp, an instrument called the celeste, and a music box Bjork had specially made out of glass (so it sounds even more plangent and resonant) rather than the traditional wood, with her own tunes scored on big brass discs. If you don't know the connotations of "vespers", Vespertine actually sounds like a precious stone or some Medieval craft of glasswork. Her best album yet, Vespertine reminds me of the jackfrost wonderland of Cocteau Twins circa "Gold Dust Rush" and "Spanglemaker", of the lush, bejewelled coldness of Siouxsie & The Banshees circa A Kiss in the Dreamhouse. The glittering sound fits the album's idea of inner riches, the treasure people keep hidden inside.

Pick Hit: "Cocoon"

12/ BASEMENT JAXX Rooty (XL/Astralwerks)

When Basement Jaxx's debut album Remedy materialized in 1999, dance music had arrived at something of an impasse. All the outer limits of post-rave music had been reached a few years earlier. It was hard to see how drum'n'bass could convolute rhythm any morer without tying dancers limbs in knots; hardcore gabba had taken concussive beats, distorted noise, and sheer velocity to life-threatening extremes; minimal techno had anorexically paring itself down to the brink of non-existence. In the absence of some new drug-technology synergy, the only way forward appeared to involve systematic cultivation of undeveloped terrain within these frontiers. Hence the spate of inbetween-sounds like tech-house, speed garage, progressive trance, nu-skool breaks, and other hybrids, which convulse committed clubbers into pro- and anti- factions, but understandably leave outsiders scratching their heads and wondering what the fuss is all about.

There was another alternative: frolicing through dance music's own back pages. And so Daft Punk's brand of "filter disco" simultaneously harked back to and renovated house's Seventies roots; big beat slammed Sixties surf music, ska, and garage punk into old skool hip hop and acid house; others, from Les Rhythmes Digitales to i/F, rediscovered Eighties electro and synthpop. And it was all great fun, while not exactly delivering the future-rush and shock-of-the-now that, say, jungle transmitted in its prime. And then there was Basement Jaxx with their house-not-house cornucopia that pick'n'mixed freely across all these options and more. What's great about Simon Ratcliffe and Felix Buxton's sound is the way they go from cartoon disco like Deelite at their groovalicious peak to sick drug-noise perfect for humid murky catacombs; from tunes that resemble Prince's Sign of the Times if he'd come from Chicago rather than Minneapolis, to samba-house beamed in from that Brazil-as-utopia that haunts the imagination of many British dance producers. And yet every track has that special Jaxx signature.

Like Prince's Paisley Park fantasy, Jaxx-music conjures the sense of a freakadelic demi-monde you'd just love to inhabit full-time for real. In that spirit, the queerly titled Rooty is named in homage to Buxton & Ratcliffe's most recent South London club. Album opener "Romeo" is so Sheila E you just have to smile, and "Breakaway" makes me flash on "Baby Wants To Ride" by Jamie Principle, a long-lost house pioneer with an unhealthy Prince obsession. With its broken beats and dirty bass, "S.F.M. (Sexy Feline Machine)" is one of the few tracks here that substantiates a rumored 2step garage direction, and it's nowhere near as full-on foray into that London R&B-meets-house style as Remedy's "U Can't Stop Me." So far, so groovy. But there's a side to Basement Jaxx that's a bit too ditzy-ditty and quirky-verging-on-twee, and "Jus 1 Kiss", I'm afraid to say, just makes me think of Wings: intricately ornamented, but as sickly and unsatisfying as a meringue. "Broken Dreams" also has McCartneyesque shades of clever-clever craft, but for some reason its confection of Spanish horns and jaunty bassline makes for a lovely slice of happy-sad. It's also one of several tracks where a weird effect on the vocal makes it sound glossy and faded at the same time--sort of like, if plastic could rust.

Midway through, Rooty takes a timely turn from silly love songs to dark dirty lust. "I Want U" has the awkward, angular almost-ugliness of Jaxx's most compelling music, e.g. Remedy's "Same Old Show". Singer Mandy's exaggerated London accent ("I've bin finking") recalls UK punkettes like Honey Bane and Hazel O'Connor. "Get Me Off" is a hot 'n' horny pummel, all panting breath and brooding oozy bass swelling and ebbing like oily surf after a tanker spill. "Where's Your Head At" rocks harder still, with a bombastic synth-riff that recalls Never Mind the Bollocks (but is actually sampled from Gary Numan's "This Wreckage") and a jeering thug-chorus that's pure Oi! These three brutal blasts of headbanger house make for a neat parallel with Daft Punk's inspired merger of disco and FM soft-rock (ELO, Supertramp, Frampton, Buggles) on Discovery.

After the monsterfart electro of "Crazy Girl", though, Rooty rather peters out, with the ill-advised juke-joint Dixieland flavor of "Do Your Thing", all piano comping and diva scat, and "All I Know"---winsome, wistful, slight. Despite its many delights, there is a feeling emanating from Rooty that Basement Jaxx didn't really know how to top Remedy. When you've made your reputation through impurism and hyphenated hybrids, you can't really scale back, the only way forward is further into ever more spectacular and farfetched fusion. And the risk is that you'll throw so many things into the pot you end up with the sonic equivalent of that poly-ethnic cuisine so trendy nowadays. Buxton & Ratcliffe have such impeccable taste that they've mostly avoided that calamity. But Rooty's sheer brevity, at 43 minutes, suggests loss of confidence, or even that a number of tracks were pulled at the last minute owing to last-minute jitters. If they're looking for tips, I'd say jettison any remaining Latin influences or notions of "jazzy" and instead build on the lumpen thump of "I Want U"/'Get Me Off"/"Where's Your Head At". That glorious sequence adds weight to the theory that dance music, in the absence of strong influences from or secret affinities with rock, tends to the pale and uninteresting. Acid house, after all, got its name because it reminded co-creator and Sabbath-fan Marshall Jefferson of acid rock; whenever purists get worried about dance music going awry they always raise the specter of "heavy metal house". And everybody knows clubland cognoscenti got shit for brains.

Pick Hit: "Where's Your Head At"

13/ Hood Cold House (Domino/Aesthetics)

Hood make mope-rock for the laptop era. This English quartet are survivors from a brief early Nineties moment of mingling between UK indie dreampop and techno. Reared on the guitarhaze of A.R. Kane and My Bloody Valentine, these groups had their heads flipped around by Aphex Twin. While some of these outfits, like Seefeel, gradually went all the way into abstract electronix, others, like legends-to-a-few Disco Inferno, remained attached to the song and the voice. Updating this indie-meets-electronica formula, Hood offering glitch with a human face, their sound poised somewhere between the jackfrost fragility of New Zealand janglers The Chills and the faded-photo poignancy of Boards of Canada. Crunchy filtered beats jostle with bright acoustic guitar, crestfallen analog synths waver alongside mournful horns. But just as you've got Cold House pegged as a way-underground cousin to Kid A and Vespertine, another element comes in from far left-field: hip hop. Abstrakt-to-the-max rhymes from Dose One and Why? of Bay Area crew cLOUDDEAD feature on three tracks, ranging from surreal lines like "sometimes the sunset doesn't want to be photographed" to stuff that's more like a braid-of-breath than actual decipherable words.

As Cold House's title suggests, the dominant mood is desolate (Hood come from Leeds in the infamously bleak North of England) . On "The Winter Hit Hard" gale-force winds of dubbed-out drumming buffet a frail sapling of a vocal melody, and the entire album teems with images like "there's coldness in this sky" or "your cold hand in mine". This heat-dearth is as much a matter of internal affect as climate, though. TK's fallible voice recalls too-sensitive-for-this-world folk minstrel Nick Drake, and the lyrics manage to stay just the right side of "precious" as they flick through snapshots from what seems to be the drawn-out death throes of a relationship. Pained insights flash by concerning regret, the oppressive weight of the past, dreams "snatched from your grasp," and the way the world seems dead, stripped of all enchantment, after the love had gone. For Hood, life's a glitch, and then you cry.

Pick Hit: "The Winter Hit Hard"

14/ GREEN VELVET Whatever (some label)

"La La Land", one of the standout tracks on Whatever, revives all those classic early rave metaphors that involve imagery of madness, brain damage, derangement, the pursuit of oblivion through concussive bliss. It's sung by a hardcore hedonist who's always "looking for the after-party to begin." The chorus is brilliantly catchy---"something about those little pills/unreal/the thrills/they yield/until/they kill/a mill/ion brain cells" (the rhymes work better if you adopt a black American accent, with the 'd' in 'yield' left unpronounced). But if that chorus sounds like a "Just Say No" warning, the lines "la la land is the place I need to be/the place that sets me free" contradict them. Is this profoundly ambivalent, or just a cowardly refusal to adopt a consistent standpoint? Does Jones accept that drug-abusers are seeking things the real world can't offer, escaping an intolerable world into a chemical utopia? Or does he simply not want to alienate his primary market, drugged up ravers, by unreservedly condemning their self-destructive pleasures?

Moving on from the black comedy and sick humor of previous Green Velvet output, Whatever is surprisingly serious, even militant. "When?" is straightforward anti-racist protest, a "don't judge me" plea to purge from your mind the prejudices and ethnic stereotypes caused by media brainwashing. The only hint of comedy here is his anti-humanist quip "we're *all* inferior". Propelled by a harsh, scouring riff, "When?" is a bit like if Mad Mike let his anger come out through a vocal tirade rather than just song-titles and slogans etched into the vinyl. Elsewhere, the spirit is pure punk rock: the staccato, accusatory "Stop Lyin'", the "don't mess with my mind" aggression of "Dank", the searing instrumental "Minimum Rage" with its title punning on the bottom-level income earned by American 16 year olds at fast-food restaurants and similar dead end jobs. "GAT (The Great American Tragedy" is an anthem for teenage freaks who start dressing weird and acting out, only to get the condescending "you're just going through a phase" treatment from parents and elders. Jones delivers the chorus-howl "THIS IS *NOT* A FUCKING PHASE!!" with the percussive phrasing of early Eighties US hardcore punk bands like Bad Brains and Negative Approach. This is slamdancing techno, moshpit rave.

Whatever's sound has a retro-Eighties feel, at times closer to industrial and EBM than even the most tracky of modern house. Songs like "Stop Lyin'" are clockwork mechanisms pulsating in strict time, all square-sounding, stiff beats and 16th note sequenced bassline patterns that chatter and pummel. "Gendefekt" is a rigid grid of quantized drums and eerily spiralling synth-noises that make you think of the DNA helix; Kraftwerk's Computer World, lost in a ketamine void. Propelled by slinky bass-riffs that writhe and squirm through your ears like frantic mind-worms in a hurry to get to the center of your brain, "Sleepwalking" ---the new album's absolute killer tune--is like Cabaret Voltaire on amyl nitrate.

Pick Hit: "Sleepwalking"

15/ MATMOS A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure (Matador)

Matmos's fourth album brings a whole new slant to the notion of body music. This San Francisco glitch-techno duo--Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt--have made an entire record where each track is partly based on the sounds of medical technology, with special focus on plastic surgery. Opening track "Lipostudio... and so on" isn't musique concrete so much as music liquide, bubbling with abject squelches and slurps that make you visualize cellulite being siphoned out of sagging butt-cheeks. "L.A.S.I.K.", based around laser eye surgery, teems with unnerving hissing noises that suggest a white-hot beam burning through your cornea, plus gristly, grisly whirring that evokes mechanical saws perforating bone and cartilage.

You don't need to know Matmos's modus operandi or sample-sources to enjoy the music, though (indeed the "euuuh, gross!" factor might make ignorance a blessing). Several tracks offer body music in the traditional sense--grooves to make you move. The partially erased skank of "Memento Mori" recalls Pole's dub-techno, while "Ur Tchun Tan Tse Qui" is pounding Herbert-style glitch-house riddled with itchy creaking sounds, like everyone on the dancefloor's dressed in rubber and tinfoil. Like their SF-based friend kid606, Matmos are adept at digital signal processing (DSP), the texturizing techniques that electronica producers use to make drums sound like buckling metal or fireworks exploding. DSP virtuosity, and Matmos's ability to sculpt real-world samples into compelling musical shapes, are why Bjork invited the duo to collaborate on her new album.

If there's a problem with modern left-field electronica, though, it's that all the editing and processing software allows for almost infinite degrees of tweaking and treatment. The challenge is to create a structure to guide the listener through what might otherwise be a chaos of intricacy and nuance. On "California Rhinoplasty", the disparate sonic debris from a nosejob is given coherence thanks to the hypnotic groove, whose muffled pumping bassline is like the calm anesthesized heartbeat of the human being whose face is undergoing voluntary vivisection. Influenced as much by Dadaist collage artist Kurt Schwitters (Schmidt teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute) as sampling culture, Matmos have captured with uncomfortable vividness the sheer surrealism of the modern vanity industry, the Medieval tortures people gladly submit to in pursuit of physical perfection.

Pick Hit: "Ur Tchun Tan Tse Qui"

16/ HERBERT Bodily Functions (!K7)

Is this a trend or what? Swiftly following Matmos's cosmetic-surgery-sampling A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure, here's British producer Matthew Herbert with his own album of glitchy, off-kilter house built from sounds of the human organism. Not only do both records feature tracks using laser eye surgery noises, but Matmos's Martin Schmidt actually makes a cameo appearance on Bodily Functions as a sample source. Herbert's no trend-jumping opportunist, though--if anything, he built this particular bandwagon. His last album, 1998's Around The House, subtly wove domestic found-sounds into its voluptuously textured grooves, and in his more avant-garde alter-egos like Doctor Rockit and Wishmountain he's been messing with musique concrete for years.

Pushing vocalist Dani Siciliano's smoky croon into the spotlight and weaving in vintage-jazz acoustic instruments like horns and double bass, Bodily Functions is more languid and torch-songy than Around The House. It's not quite as instantly ear-grabbing either, but it does represent a definite advance in terms of production finesse. You'll need headphones to really revel in the obsessively micro-managed arrangements on tunes like "Suddenly"---an intricate honeycomb of chambers-within-chambers and muezzin-riffs that writhe in spidery spirals. As accomplished at piano as he is at Pro-Tools, Herbert has pulled off an exquisite merger between traditional manual musicianship and today's digital virtuosity.
On "I Know", for instance, the jazz drummer's repertoire of rimshots, drags, flams, and cymbal splashes mesh imperceptibly with radical processing and computer editing.

Herbert is one of house music's most visual-sounding producers---his music seems to make you listen with your eyes, or peer with your ears. Gurgling and gelatinous-sounding, "Foreign Bodies"--the track featuring the pulsing blood-flow of Matmos's Schmidt--fits the album concept: you feel like you're travelling in a microscopic submarine through the arterial system, dodging flotillas of white corpuscles, virus shoals, and treacherous clumps of chloresterol. Mostly, though, it's kinda irrelevant how Herbert procured his sounds. Because effects are dance music's primary instrument, it's doesn't really matter if the hi-hats are "really" scrunched-up chip packets, or just hi-hats treated to sound like someone crumpling a Doritos bag. What does count is Herbert's flair for marshalling his menagerie of creaks, crinkles, burps, scrapes, rustles, and hiccups into sensuous grooves. The result is house music sublimely poised between ungainliness and elegance.

Pick Hit: "Suddenly"

17/ THE BETA BAND Hot Shots II (Regal)
What I like most about The Beta Band is that they're head-in-the-clouds, barefoot-in-the-grass, tie-dyed-in-the-wool hippies. Circa The Three EPs, the group's sonic laxness offered a welcome relief from Britpop's straight-and-narrow, reminding me of all the disparate stuff excluded from the latter's restrictive mod/New Wave canon---Roy Harper, Traffic, Family, Caravan, Kevin Ayers. Without ever sounding like any of those bands, Beta Band seem plugged into their entirely other realm of "quintessential Englishness": folkadelic whimsy and meander, dappled epiphanies, drowsy meadow bliss. But it was all filtered through a tune-full and rhythm-conscious post-Madchester/Screamadelica sensibility, banishing the spectre of retro.

Mind you, what's irritating about the Beta Band is, of course, that they're such fucking hippies. Perhaps you concurred with the band's own verdict, that 1999's self-titled debacle--sorry, debut--was somewhat unfocused? But you probably never heard the infamous second disc of the original planned double album, briefly circulated to journalists by their American record company. I did, and we're talking Gong-like levels of let-it-all-hang-out plot-loss.

Hot Shots II sees Beta Band once more "on point"--R&B/rap slang for having your shit together. Which is not inappropriate, because R&B producer C-Swing worked on this album. So Hot Shots is sharply produced in a fully contemporary sense--ultra-glossy, big-sounding, with huge bottom end and tuff beats. There's even some interesting fusion between modern black urban sounds and Beta Band's psych-rock tradition. Hold on, don't cum in your pants, we're not talking Timbaland-meets-Tago Mago or anything. But killertoon "Broke" shifts rhythmically from 2steppy beats'n'bass into full-on dancehall ragga, while closer track "Won" (a Nilsson cover?) is a bizarre and brilliant composite of Hollies-like chorus, floor-trembling reggaematic funk groove, ace rhyming from an unidentified MC, and a lick nicked from "Rhythm Stick" by Dury & the Blockheads.

C-Swing's haze-less production actually suits The Beta Band's neo-psychedelic premise--the brightness and separation of sound creates that slightly disorienting sensation of perceptual crispness that accompanies putting on your first pair of glasses, having your ears syringed, or being high as a kite. "Quiet" is awesome: echoes of Piper At the Gates of Dawn or long-lost Brit-psych outfits like Tintern Abbey, but with a massive, tub-thumping groove as powerful as The Chemical Brother's own freakbeat-meets-bigbeat classic "Setting Sun". On this track especially, but throughout the album, the monk-like close harmonies seem sculpted in three dimensions: the way they soar, arc, cluster and braid is breathtaking.

With Hot Shots so tautly disciplined, it's almost like The Beta Band's hippie-dippie, baggy-slacker side can only seep out in the lyrics. Which can be charming in an "it's all too beautiful" style ("daydream/fell asleep beneath the flowers" goes the chorus of "Squares"), or grating (the I'm-just-a-simple-man shtick and spliffheads-solving-all-the-world's-problems doggerel of "Life"; the facile anti-intellectualism of "Eclipse", which imagines humanity united around a pizza pie). Intermittent lyrical inanities aside, Hot Shots II is almost too focused. At times you wish Beta Band had cut themselves some slack, sprawled a bit, self-indulged. You get glimpses: the "Strawberry Fields"-like coda to "Dragon" conjures a dew-brocaded idyll you wish they'd stretched out for ten times its length. Perhaps the strangest thing about Hot Shots II is that it makes the debut's addled goofiness sound better that it did at the time. Somewhere between those two extremes lies the perfect Beta Band record. For now, Hot Shots II is a very fine thing.

Pick Hit: "Won"

18/ The Human League Secrets (Papillon/Chrysalis)

They couldn't have picked a better time for a comeback. After several false starts, the Eighties revival is finally ON. And it's not just smirky weren't-we-ludicrous retro-TV: young, smart bands from Ladytron to Adult are paying tribute the best way, by finding fresh twists to synthpop'slegacy. . Something's definitely in the air: in one of those Zeitgeist/synchronicty, before I even knew there was a new League album coming, I recently picked up Reproduction, Travelogue, and Dare second-hand, while of all sudden friends seem to be waxing nostalgic about "Being Boiled".

Entering that barely populated category of the non-disgraceful comeback, Secrets * sounds* just great: the confidence, conviction, and sense of renewed delight in their own existence is palpable. Opener "All I Ever Wanted" has almost the exact same creaky robot-fart bassline as "Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass" (the 1998 cult hit by neo-electro outfit i/F that kickstarted the techno scene's interest in all things Eighties). "Love Me Madly" is a marvellous blast of controlled hysteria, with great rhymes ( "you're really making me anxious/you know everybody blanks us") and OTT metaphors like "I'm tethered to a trainee hellcat". On "Shameless", the squeaky-clean synths, crisply reticular beats, and chittering 16th-note basslines make you flash on Computer World and the Moroder-produced Sparks of "Beat The Clock" and "Number One Song In Heaven".

Secrets is retro-nuevo, the League staging their own revival ('cos who could do it better?). State-of-art FX coexist with pure-1981 one-finger synth-tunes and rudimentary arpeggiated refrains. Oakey & Co have found a way to modernize their classic "Love Action"/"Fascination"--era sound without losing its distinctive League-ness. And that distinctiveness resides in a certain unsupple, boxy quality. Today, electronica producers just press a button to make their tracks "swing"; computers can give the music "feel" by adding tiny rhythmic irregularities. Paradoxically, it's their stiffness and squareness that makes the League *human*. But--and here's the weird thing--the one place this isn't happening anymore is the vocals. Something's been lost, a certain shaky fallibility. Joanne Catherall and Susanne Sulley especially sound characterless, the girl-dancing-around-her-handbag-at-the-disco charm ironed out. Mostly likely the culprit is Autotuner, a studio device that corrects errors in pitch. Maybe such perfectionism is necessary to compete in the pop marketplace of fembots like Aguilera and Spears, but it brings a certain Bucks Fizz-like plasticity (bad plastic-ness, as opposed to good plastic pop) to the backing vocals, and Susanne's lead vocal on "Never Give Your Heart".

As a result, Secrets is incredibly strong--there could be six or seven hit singles here--but it's limned with a certain hollowness. Human League have never exactly torn their songs from their hearts. The group was one of the inventors of pop-about-pop, the missing link between M and Saint Etienne. Massive popular success was an essential component of their music, it would have been embarassing, humiliated, without it. Despite this Abba-if-they'd-read-Nik-Cohn self-consciousness, the League's classic-era songs managed to connect with people, be "moving". But it's hard to imagine punters today using Secrets songs to soundtrack their lives. The love/hate tunes like "All I Ever Wanted" and "Liar" are standard-issue romantic scenarios. And when Oakey tries to "say" something, the results are either opaque or clumsy. "The Snake" seems to be some kind of rallying call to a new consciousness ("come and join us" on a "journey of the mind"), and "Reflections" gestures confusedly at the kind of E-piphany that's granted to people of the night but dissipates as the chemicals leave the system next day: "fragments of meaning" indeed. State of the Nation address "Sin City" is a diatribe about Blair's Britain ("confidence at a standstill", "tension you could handle", "our principles blurred") and attempts a reckoning with the lost utopian rage of punk and/or Socialism. But it reminds me of Weller's "Town Called Malice" (there's even a line about "a town without pity") and is ultimately the sort of statesmanlike speaking-out that doesn't really suit Oakey (remember "The Lebanon"?).

Ironically, some of the best things on Secrets are the seven all-too-brief instrumentals: the Kraftwerk-circa-"Neon Lights" intricacy/delicacy of "Nervous"; the pulsatronic drive and filtered bass booms of "Ringinglow," which could mash up the venue at Gatecrasher, Sheffield's temple of trance; the butterfly wing-flutter of "Lament". On these tracks, Human League situate themselves on the continuum that runs from Moroder to Paul Van Dyk: the quest for an authentically European soul, clean, serene, non-earthy, unearthly. A qualified triumph, Secrets reminds you of the League's pioneer stature as electronic musicians, as much as their brief reign as a meta-pop dream come true.

Pick Hit: "Love Me Madly"

19/ RADIOHEAD Amnesiac

Not nearly as cohesive as Kid A or (to my ears) tuneful (I'm serious!), a collection of good bits and not-so-good bits: the goodest bit, to my ears, being the Alice Coltrane-infused dirge-haze of "Dollars & Cents", which most reviewers seemed to find the weakest song (just as they did with my fave from Kid A: "In Limbo"). Other good bits: "Like Spinning Plates" (the best of the three or so Autechre-ish glitchtronic contraptions, with a Robert Wyatt circa Rock Bottom like quality of enervated melancholy) and the Beatles/Nilsson esque rolling grandiosity of "You and Whose Army". "Pyramid Song" is too epic to truly love, but, hey, great bebop bomb-drop drumming! Bad bit: the last song, much as one conceptually approves of the idea of dragging Humphrey Lyttleton out of the retirement home, is a godawful racket.

Pick Hit: "Dollars & Cents'

20/ POSITION NORMAL Sofarsofine (c/o top floor, 9 Corsham Street, london N1 6DP)

Not as sustained in its brillianceas Stop Your Nonsense, but this duo's a brand of macabre whimsy--midway between The Residents, John Cooper Clarke's Snap Crackle and Bop, and Chris Morris's Blue Jam--is still enchanting. It staggers me that these guys now have to self-release their own record.

Pick Hit: "Sunny Days"

OVERVIEW

Disparate as hell out there. No idea, frankly, what's coming around the corner. It was interesting when ILM had a thread on emergent trends, and the trends everyone cited were uniformly ones that had been going for a year, if not two. In other words, I don't think anybody really knows what is the coming thing or leading edge in pop culture.

For me personally, certain areas that have been thrilling or sustaining for various lengths of time (last two three years, in the case of R&B/street rap; last nine-ten, in the case of rave/dance) feel like they have petered out (hence the dearth of represensation on my faves charts), although how much this is personal burn-out and how much is a real objective downturn is hard to determine. Still, my demand of any music-zone is to be constantly surprised, and both those areas fell short dramatically this year. Whether it is a terminal exhaustion of novelty-resources or just a cyclical thing (in R&B the end of one Beat-Geist, but not yet the onset of a new one), who knows.

What else? The experimental end of electronic music--meaning everything from glitchcore to microhouse--is as stimulating as ever, but suffers somehow for being hermetic, incestuous, sealed off from the wider pop world (bar TV ads and Bjork's Vespertine, of course). Not enough "social energy" there, basically.
As for electric guitar music... The back to raw rock'n'roll/rebel danger/black leather thing in rock just seems laughable wishful thinking, played-out before it even starts. It's just a middle class snob/rock scholar alternative to nu-metal, which arguably is genuinely threatening on some levels (if only coiffure) and certainly resonates with the youth. The currents of interest in postpunk and synthpop/New Romance seem more productive, potentially at least: so far it's either on the level of hipster scholarly reconditeness (although it's exciting in itself that one of the American bands on Troubleman Mixtape would care enough to rip-off an early A Certain Ratio tune riff-for-riff), or still too couched in hipster irony (Electroclash) to betoken a real regeneration (which would anyway take the wholesale reconstruction of an entire culturescape/episteme of attitudes, extra-musical inputs, social/political context, etc--i.e. neither possible, nor desirable). Still, the idea of music based around angularity, awkwardness, tension, wilful oddity, abstruseness (without actually being math-rock), nervous energy, a certain lack of warmth and flow, seems both appealing and potentially resonant; as do pretentiousness and over-reach and excessive literacy. Conversely, right now, for whatever reasons, the idea of psychedelia and space-rock, dreampop and blissed sonic blurriness, seem totally uninteresting. So, please, I know it's been ten years since Loveless, but please no shoegazer revival!

What else? Oh there was pop, which even the pop fans and Britneylecctuals thought had a bad year.

So, in summation: the same-old-same-old sense of exhaustion on multiple fronts and of lack-of-pattern, coinciding paradoxically with an absolutely unmanageable surfeit of good-to-great and interesting/stimulating records. Go figure.

TASTY TRENDS of 2001

TASTY TRENDS of 2001 MC GARAGE Dynamite, "Boo"/Genius Kru -- "Boom Selection"/Pay As U Go Kartel, "Know We"/Gorillaz, "Clint Eastwood" (Ed Case Remix)/Shut Up And Dance, "Moving Up"/So
Solid Crew, -- They Don't Know/Oxide & Neutrino, "Up Middle Finger", Execute/The
Streets, "Has It Come To This"/More Fiyah Crew, "Oi!"/etc etc

The new and often genuinely nasty face of UK youth culture. Proof yet again of the endless productivity of "the streets" as both social reality and pop myth. This MC cru thing in 2step seems to confirm the final utter victory of hip hop values over rave ones in the U.K. (although arguably that hip hop/rave border never really existed in Britain, was always porous; maybe the most exciting
subzones of UK dance were always permeated with hip hop values, like
hardcore/jungle; maybe it's always been just a "street beats" culture, at least in London). At any rate, ain't no love in the heart of that city no more; to be a raver just means you're someone who steps out and parties at the weekend, there's no cluster of values or attitudes attached to it (unless "bad attitude" counts).

MICROHOUSE
MRI, (Force Inc)/Various Artists --- Total 3 (Kompact)/Various
Artists, Poker Flat Recordings Volume One (Poker Flat)/Hakan Libdo -- Tech
Couture (Poker Flat)/Various Artists, Superlongeivity 2 (Perlon)/ Andrew
Weatherall, Hypercity: ForceTracks (Force Inc)/ Various Artists, Staedtizism 2
(^scape)/etc
Slinky 'n' intricate, or pared to the brink of barely being there/existing, luvvit luvvit
luvvit to the bone. Don't know about cutting a rug to it, but it's good for when
you have company round: just the right combination of stimulation and
unobtrusiveness. Kudos to Philip Sherburne for having the cojones (and sharp
ears) to coin this most useful and appropriate term. Neologists unite! Death to
genrephobes!

IDYLLICTRONICA
IDYLLICTRONICA (TM)
Nobukazu Takemura, Sign (Thrill Jockey)/Fennesz, Endless Summer (Mego)/Tagaki
Masakatsu, Pia (Carpark)/Manitoba, Start Breaking My Heart (Leaf)/Susumu Yokota,
Grinning Cat (Leaf/Skintone)/ Various Artists, Putting the Morr Back in
Morrissey: A Morr Music Compilation (Morr)/etc etc

Not, I hasten, entirely serious about this coinage---I'm just a perennial sucker
for electronic music's mini-tradition of ice-cream van tinklers and
spangly-tingly music-box chimeology. The first three are at the glitchier end of
the kindermuzik spectrum, with Masakatsu's 18 minute "Videocamera" especially
poignant. Fennesz's is supposed to have something to do with Brian Wilson, but
I'm with Gareth at 1471 here: there's nothing in the actual music to really
betray that, and knowing it doesn't actually enrich your experience of this
often lovely album. Manitoba reside in that blurry zone between postrock and
electronica a la Hood, but without vocals. Grinning Cat is plain pretty in a
vaguely Reichian manner. Slightly disappointed that the Morr comp isn't actually
a series of IDM covers/tributes to the Smiths-- Boards of Canada seem like a
perfect fit for "Back To the Old House"--- but lovely stuff, esp. the second
disc.

ROMO REVIVAL Various Artists, c2001 electroclash (Mogul Electro)/Chicks on Speed,The
Unreleases (K)/Various Artists, Disco Nouveau (Ghostly International)/etc
No great statement of intent a la Parkes & Pricey's Romanifesto (at least, that
I've come across) but the bands loosely arrayed around New York's Electroclash
organisation are a whole heap better. Dig that Berlin (the group not the city)
drum-sound on certain tracks on the C2001 comp. Chicks On Speed, who played at
the Electroclash festival, fall into that quite small category of things I like
but don't "get"; usually it's either get/like, or get (meaning "see
through")/dislike. Seems like some fabulously arcane private humour at work, or
very Berlin (the city not the band) verging-on Sprockets type art school
sensibility. But it sounds cool so what the hey. The Ghostly International comp
is the most all-the-way-through enjoyable thing I've heard in this
neo-electro/Eighties synthpop vein since the Interdimensional Transmissions's
From Beyond several years ago.

POST-PUNK REDUX Various Artists Troubleman Mix-Tape (Troubleman Unlimited), Erase Errata Other Animals (Troubleman Unlimited)
More a trend-let than an actual fully-fledged trend. But Troubleman Unlimited re definitely on the 1979 tip. Bit too much horrible-racket harshcore,
math-rocky herky-jerky frenzy and lowest-of-the-lo-fi scritchy scrawn on this 47
track double-CD of the new sub-sub underground, but it's cool to know that
there's all these bands searching out and cherishing obscure singles by pragVEC
and Grow Up and Fatal Microbes: at least they're looking for different seams of
influence to mine. Erase Errata seem especially steeped in the untypical girls
of UK postpunk (Delta 5, Raincoats, Essential Logic) and post-No Wave
(Contortions, Bush Tetras, Ut). The result is a dislocation dance itchy with
ideas and nervous energy.

BUBBLING ON THE BRINK OF THE TOP 20

WAGON CHRIST--Musipal (Ninja Tune)
----Receiver EP---(Ninja Tune)
Pick hit: "Bend Over," the bad-bearded one's best since 1995's "Scrapes', which features on both of this records. The 'ardcore-flavors on Receiver are enjoyable, like a sort of middle-aged, downtempo adaption of rave.

THE STROKES Is This It (BMG)

First listen: what is this shit? Second listen: hmmm, there's something here. Third listen: boy this is good. Ultimately as a reproduction-antiquey and pointless as Harry Connick Jnr, of course, but top tunes.

VARIOUS ARTISTS Wir (Ladomat)

Heard from the wrong slant of mind, this might seem "slight", but repeated listens unfurl quirky New Pop/Eighties-tinged house of substantial charm, vaguely in the vicinity of Shantel. Killertune: Sensorama's "Echtzeit"

GUSH COLLECTIVE---Collected Dubs (Indigo)

How do you say "criss" in German? 2step from Deutschland, surprisingly undeniable.

PEACHES -- The Teaches of Peaches (label)

Like Sandra Bernhard meets Alan Vega, produced by Keith Forsey and Lenny Dee.

NEIL HAGERTY---Neil Michael Hagerty (Drag City)

One of our last guitar heros. Neil's's got the licks and then some. Bonus points for not sounding like any of Royal Trux's recent, excessively copious output.

LE TIGRE--From the Desk of Mr. Lady EP
---Feminist Sweepstakes (Mr. Lady)

Something hugely irritating about Kathleen Hanna's belief that cos she's got "something to say" she can just shift from fronting a half-assed rock band to fronting a half-assed dance outfit. But at their closest to full-assed, they're sorta undeniable, like a rad-feminist dyke-positive Bananarama circa "Really Saying Something". The politics of sass Pt 2.

The missus has a piece coming out in The Wire on Le Tigre, but here's her old man's tuppeny worth. I think the most feminist thing a woman involved in the arts can do is be excellent. That is why Bjork and Polly Harvey and ----------- [add your own favorites] have done more for women-in-rock, and women outside rock, than Kathleen Hanna, for whom music is clearly a vehicle rather than an end in itself. To be excellent involves a belief in brilliance as an idea, a goal, a value. You have to want to excel, which either means playing by the rules and winning, or coming up with a new set of rules so devastatingly idioysyncratic and new (Raincoats, Yoko, Blectum, etc etc) that they threaten to make the old values irrelevant and outmoded. I don't think Hanna as ever done either of these things, flirtations with ecriture feminine aside. Instead she has the true dilettante's delusion that whatever medium is being infiltrated is actually piss-easy, and that it's ideas (usually extra-musical ideas) that count more than craft. Ideas do count, and indeed you could argue that pop or rock music without the edge that comes from non-musical ideas or inputs, is ultimately worthless. Some of the greatest bands have been constructed around the alliance of a non-musician (with good ideas and taste and some kind of character-driven "fire", charisma/neurosis drive) with people who were actually competent or even virtuosic at music. Sex Pistols is an obvious example: Jones's ability and will-to-rock and Matlock's tunecraft would have been nothing without Rotten, but Rotten would have been nothing without Jones and Matlock (or later, without Wobble and Levene). Johanna in Le Tigre at least has a commitment to the idea of excelling, and a properly humble awareness of how much skill goes into making dance music, but until Hanna forms a group in which she is outnumbered by aspiring musicians, Le Tigre will always be a less than a fully-assed proposition.

VARIOUS ARTISTS The Braindance Coincidence (Rephlex)
The definition of an expertly executed compilation, in so far as it makes a good
case for a label I'd previously regarded as supremely trivial.
JIM O' ROURKE Insignificance (Drag City)
There's something faintly preposterous about Jim O'Rourke, just the idea of this
uber-hipster who was into Ives and musique concrete before he reached the age of
ten. And the way he migrates between musical universes, Fahey to Fennesz, lap
steel to laptop, it's all very rhizomatic and unrooted, but they used to have a
word for it in the olden days: gadfly. You wonder whether there's an aesthetic
core there, like where's his stick-with-it-ness? Still, this album is one of the
minor pleasures of the year. The contrast between the all-American-rocking
semi-muscularity of the music and the pleasing wimpiness of his voice is faintly
suggestive of Big Star, without actually sounding like Big Star.
HVRATSKI/VARIOUS ARTISTS rkk13CD (reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge)
Best stuff here is not by the "name" remixers but by total unknowns (to me
anyway) doing kind of drill 'n' bass GBH on the original pieces, but with real
mash-up rinse-out Amen-tumbly drumkit-falling-downstairs feel of your original
94 ragga-jungle. In other words, not unlike Hvratski's own immortal repro of
"Catstep" by kid606.
SUPER FURRY ANIMALS Mwng (Flydaddy)
Better than Beta Band? These Welsh-language songs create the happy side effect
of making you feel like your hearing is mangled on drugs---or at least, that the
singer's mouth's mushed on shrooms..
REPLIKAS Koledoyuran (Ada Muzik)
Turkish space-rock! Really good! Plenty more like 'em too!
MOBB DEEP Infamy (Loud/Columbia)
Slick, thick, a voluptuous malevolence.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

MUM--Yesterday was Dramatic-- Today Is OK (Tugboat)

VARIOUS ARTISTS/ANDREW WEATHERALL--Hypercity: ForceTracks Force Inc)
HELLFISH-- One Man Sonic Attack Force (Planet Mu)
MICE PARADE -- Mokoondi (Bubblecore)
cLOUDDEAD --cLOUDDEAD (Mush/dirty loop music)
CHRIS CLARK--Clarence Park (Warp)
VARIOUS ARTISTS--Clicks & Cuts 2 Mille Plateaux
LESSER -- Gearhound (Matador)
CEX -- Oops I Did It Again (Tigerbeat 6 )
FLOPPY SOUNDS -- Short Term Memories (Wave)
TO ROCOCCO ROT & I SOUND---Music Is A Hungry Ghost(Mute)
SO-CALLED ARTISTS---untitled (Mush/dirty loop music)
MARUMARI Supermogadon (Carpark)
SAFETY SCISSORS Parts Water (Plug Research)
MONOLAKE Cinemascope (Monolake/Imbalance)
DNTEL Life is Full of Possibilities (Plug Research)
VARIOUS ARITSTS Electric ladyland: clickhop version 1.0 (mille plateaux)
VARIOUS ARTISTS Tigerbeat6 Inc
BUBBA SPARKXXX Dark Days, Bright Nights (Beat Club Records)
VARIOUS ARTISTS --Staedtizism 2 (^scape)

REISSUES

NEU!
Neu!
Neu! 2
Neu! 75
(Astralwerks)

(Take one, from Spin)
Neu! has got to be one of the most beautifully apt names to ever grace a band. The Dusseldorf duo's cruise control surge of steady-pulsing drums and quicksilver guitar creates the sensation of gently hurtling into a dazzling future--a world where everything is glistening and newborn. Forming Neu! in 1971 as a breakaway offshoot from Kraftwerk, drummer Klaus Dinger and guitarist Michael Rother pioneered the style that critics christened "motorik": a unique twist on the thread of white line fervor running through rock'n'roll, from Chuck Berry's "No Particular Place To Go" to Canned Heat's "On The Road Again" to The Modern Lovers's "Roadrunner". Neu!'s music tingled and throbbed with urgent anticipation, yet exuded a distinctly German serenity. Appropriately, the culture that had invented the autobahn also spawned, with Neu! and Kraftwerk, the most sublime sonic expressions of motion-as-state-of-grace. Now, after years of only being available as bootlegs, Neu!'s motorik trilogy gets an official CD reissue on Astralwerks.

"Hallogallo", the first track on the self-titled debut, is a wordless manifesto calling for fresh frontiers, new horizons, cultural renaissance. Ten minutes long, built from just Drummer's pounding drums and Michael Rother's iridescent overdubs (Neu! had no bassist and seldom used vocals), this is supremely transcendent and entrancing rock. Like the Velvet Underground a few years earlier and Television a few years after, Neu! sketched a blues-less blueprint for rock's future, and artists from Bowie/Eno to PiL, the Fall, and Stereolab picked up their glittering trail of clues. On "Hallogallo" and "Fur Immer" (the equally exhilarating and lengthy epic that kickstarts Neu! 2), Dinger & Rother's approach is minimal-is-maximal. What sounds initially like mesmerising monotony on closer listens is revealed as an endlessly absorbing tapestry of subtle shifts and intricate inflections. Dinger especially was il maestro at playing rhythmic accents around the basic four-to-the-floor beat while maintaining the feel of monolithic relentlessness.

Motorik wasn't the only card in Neu's hand, though. The grinding clangor and harshly chiming harmonics of the debut's "Negativland" flash-forwards to Sonic Youth's EVOL and Sister. "Lila Engel," from Neu! 2, is a neanderthal stomp that might, in some parallel universe, have displaced "Rock'n'Roll, Pt 2" as every sports fan's fave yell-along. And that album's entire second side consists of drastically accelerated and slowed-down versions of the single "Neuschnee" and its B-side "Super": a surprisingly entertaining and conceptually stimulating manoeuvre, albeit born of sheer desperation (Neu!'s recording budget ran out too soon!). Neu! 75, the duo's masterpiece, is also their most placid record, its first side gradually decelerating from the poignant, piano-cascading canter of "Isi" through the snowcapped majesty of "Seeland" to the beat-less seascape lull of "Leb' Wohl," all breathless blissed gasps and lapping surf. But really it's "Hallogallo", "Fur Immer," "Neuschnee," and the pedal-to-the-metal proto-punk roar of "Hero" (from Neu! 75) that represent Dinger & Rother's claim for a place in the rock canon. No band has ever surpassed these hymns to the glory of going-nowhere-fast.

(Take 2, from Uncut)
Don't wanna folderol about Neu!'s pervasive influence and ahead-of-their-timeness. Yeah, the rollcall of debtors is long (Bowie cribbed notes for Low/Heroes, Stereolab's hocked up to their elbows, Spiritualized blah Sonic Youth yawn...), but these monumental records STAND ALONE in their astonishing beauty and soul-smiting might. Don't even wanna blather overmuch about Neu!'s innovativeness, 'cos that perpetuates Krautrock's image as sound-laboratory research, whereas this stuff was TORN from the heart-and-souls (muscles 'n' ligaments too: this is physical music) of Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger---a chalk/cheese, yin/yang duo who didn't get on except when making music together. Indeed, bad blood's the reason it's taken so long for these official re-issues of Neu!s oeuvre to materialise.

No guff today, then, just gush. Briefly members of Kraftwerk, guitarist Rother and drummer Dinger released their debut as Neu! in 1972. 10 minute opener "Hallogallo" is both blueprint for their "motorik" sound and a wordless cultural manifesto. Rother's talked about Neu! being inseparable from the late Sixties/early Seventies moment in Germany (student radicalism, anarcho-hippie communes, Red Army Faction, etc) and truly their music tingles with hope-against-hope idealism, yearnings for rebirth, breakthrough, new frontiers. With Dinger setting the beat on cruise-control for the heart of the sun, Rother overdubs a golden horde of guitars: gaseous with sustain, light-streaks of psychedelically-reversed tone-color, glistening flecked rhythm chords.... The result is the whitest music since the Velvets yet oddly close to the black aesthetic Amiri Baraka dubbed "changing same": the groove that just keeps on keepin' on, yet absorbs you with its endlessly shifting inflections and accents. Rest of the debut's less motorik, more avant-rock: "Sonderangebot" could be an alternative soundtrack to the alien obelisk scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, while "Negativland" meshes clockwork bass-and-drum pulse-groove with howlround guitar-scree to create an unusually disturbed and menacing vibe for this usually rhapsodic group.

Neu! 2 basically reprises the debut's winning formula--at least until the budget ran out, and Rother and Dinger had to fill up Side Two with sped-up and slowed-down versions of a recent single! It opens with 11 minute epic "Fur Immer", whose driving Dinger-pulse seems to churn up a radiant slipstream of Rother-dust in its wake. More weirdshit follows: found sounds, eerie ambience, interrupted by the caveman stampede of "Lila Engel" (imagine "Rock'n'Roll, Part 2" meets "Sister Ray"). Then it's onto the 78 rpm and 16 rpm versions of "Neuschnee" and B-side "Super": not as irritating as you'd expect, highly listenable actually, and, sheer desperation aside, conceptually clever in John-Cage-meets-turntablism stylee.

The fissile Neu! separated for a few years, then reconvened for one last blast: their masterpiece, Neu! 75. Piano-and-synth instrumental "Isi" could be Krautrock's "Penny Lane", except it's wistful for the future rather than nostalgic. "Seeland" is like a first-class sunset, Rother's celestial pageant slowly unfurling over Dinger's ceremonial stealth. "Leb'Wohl" lowers your metabolism further still with its becalmed oceanside idyll, then "Hero" revs up again as its glorybound protagonist hurtles down the road-to-nowhere in a dazzling blare of chord-strum and wind-tunnel vocals. After Neu!'s final disintegration, Zen-scented Rother followed the "Seeland" path into a pretty but placid solo career, while velocity boy Dinger contined Neu!'s proto-punk speedfreak side with his terrific band La Dusseldorf. But it's with the holy Neu! trinity that Rother and Dinger etched their lofty perch in the rock pantheon. There's nothing "educational" or difficult about this music: Neu! should thrill anybody who's ever felt rock's rush.

BIG YOUTH
Natty Universal Dread, 1973-1979
(Blood and Fire)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
A Jamaican Story
(Trojan)
GREENSLEEVES 25th ANNIVERSARY REISSUES: DR. ALIMANTADO, AUGUSTUS PABLO, EEK-A-MOUSE ET AL
NINEY THE OBSERVER Microphone Attack: Niney the observer 1974-78 (blood and fire)

In Jamaica, the DJ isn't the guy who spins the records (that's the selector), it's the bloke who chats over the music. As misnomers go, it's a good one, though, since DJ is short for disc jockey, and the whole art of reggae deejaying is vocally riding the riddim--whether it's a loping nag as with the mellow skank of Seventies reggae, or a bucking bronco as with digital dancehall. Alongside U Roy, Big Youth was one of the first and greatest roots-era DJs, his smoky voice unleashing a gentle torrent of prophecy and prattle: "one love" beseechings, get-up-stand-up exhortations, Psalm-like chanting, but also boasts, children's rhymes, laughter, shrieks and grunts. As a less musically compromised natty dread soul-Jah than Bob Marley, Big Youth was a potent icon of radical chic for white youth during the punky-reggae era; John Lydon was a fan, and even persuaded Virgin to sign the DJ for their Front Line reggae imprint. Songs like "Is Dread In A Babylon" and "Every Nigger Is A Star" capture the militancy of a period when Jamaica was feeling the cultural tug of postcolonial Africa while remaining geopolitically very much within the American sphere of influence/interference. Perhaps that's one reason Big Youth forged connections with the US's own black "enemy within", interpolating lyrics from the Last Poets into "Jim Screechy".

Worth acquiring just for the glorious rhythm tracks over which Big Youth toasts, Natty Universal Dread is Blood & Fire's best since their Heart of the Congos reissue, and typically for the label, this 3-CD set is a beautifully designed fetish object. Trojan's A Jamaican Story is a curious looking thing, by comparison. Culled from this veteran label's formidable archives, its cardboard chest contains 10 smaller boxes, shiny packets that look like bars of Ritter chocolate. Each of these three-CD micro-boxes is devoted to one era or aspect of reggae history: ska, rocksteady, lovers, DJ, et al. Unlike the Big Youth set's exhaustive annotations and accompanying essay, there's minimal information provided, just a rudimentary sketch of the specific genres. You don't even get dates of recording/ release, or the identity of the producer and the engineer who did the mix (absolutely crucial information with dub). Truthfully, it's hard to know who A Jamaican Story is targeted at. Reggae fiends will want Blood & Fire-style data overkill (plus those vintage photo overlays and deliberately faded-looking graphics that emphasise the sense of bygone times), while neophytes are hardly going to shell out a few hundred quid for this thirty CD colossus.
All that said, it's impossible to quibble with the quality of music here: Story is a treasure chest. Its span stretches from Desmond Dekker to Scientist, a sonic journey from ska's two-dimensional cartoon jerkiness to dub's haze-infused chambers of deep space. Story also serves to remind just how much Jamaican pop falls outside the rudeboy/rootsman dialectic---there's goofy instrumentals, novelty songs, topical social comment, pure dance music, and love song after gorgeous love song. What's faintly terrifying, though, is that, as crazily copious and encompassing as it is, A Jamaican Story still warrants that indefinite article: 500 tracks long, it only scratches the surface of reggae's ocean of sound

BLACK SABBATH
The Complete 70's Replica CD Collection 1970-78
(Sanctuary Records)

The mystery of the riff--so crucial to rock, so oddly neglected by critics. Or perhaps not so oddly neglected, given that they're almost impossible to write about: just try explaining why one monster-riff slays you where another fails to ignite. A killer riff is by definition simplistic--which is why rock, as it gets more sophisticated, tends to dispense with them in favor of wispy subtleties. Whereas riffs just seem to bypass the aesthetic faculty of "appreciation" and go straight to the gut. Riff-based music seems lowly, literally "mindless" because it connects with the lower "reptilian" part of the cerebral cortex which governs flight-or-flight responses and the primitive emotions of appetite, aversion, aggression.
Talking of reptiles, Black Sabbath--perhaps rock's all-time greatest riff factory--irresistibly invite metaphors involving dinosaurs. For a group that wielded such brontosauran bulk, though, Sabbath were surprisingly nimble on their feet. Listening to this box-set, which comprises all eight albums of the classic Ozzy-fronted era, it's surprising how fast many of their songs were, given the Sabs' reputation as torpid dirgemeisters for the downered-and-out.

But even in manic mode, Sabbath always sound depressed. Rhythmically as much as lyrically, Sabbath songs dramatise scenarios of ordeal, entrapment, affliction, perseverance in the face of long odds and insuperable obstacles. Tony Iommi's down-tuned guitar, in tandem with the awesome rhythm section of Bill Ward and Geezer Butler, creates sensations of impedance and drag, like you're struggling through hostile, viscous terrain. But let's not discount Ozzy's role: his piteous wail is one-dimensional, sure, but it sounds utterly righteous in this Sabbath context of trial and burden. He's even genuinely moving on forlornly pretty ballads like "Changes".

With a few exceptions (Lester Bangs, notably) the first rock-crit generation abhorred Sabbath. Criticism always lags behind new art forms, appraising it using terminology and techniques appropriate to earlier genres. So the first rock critics (typically postgraduates in literature, philosophy, or politics) treated songs as mini-novels, as poems or protest tracts with tasteful guitar accompaniment. Expecting rock to get ever more refined, they were hardly gonna embrace Sabbath's crude putsch on Cream, which stripped away all the blues-bore scholarship and grossly amplified the heavy dynamics. Riff-centered rock--Zep, Mountain, ZZ Top, Aerosmith---was received with incomprehension and condescension. But while Seventies critical faves like Little Feat and Jackson Browne have sired no legacy, over the long haul Sabbath's originality and fertility have been vindicated. Sabbath are literally seminal, their chromosones popping up in US hardcore (Black Flag/Rollins were massively indebted), grunge (Nirvana = Beatles + Sabbath x Pixies), and virtually every major HM phase from Metallica to sludge-metallers Kyuss/Queens of the Stone Age to Korn-style nu-metal.
Sabbath dressed like hippies: check the kaftans and loon pants in the inner sleeve photos of these CDs (which are miniature simulacra of the original gatefold elpees). And they clearly hoped to contribute to the post-Sgt Pepper's progressive tendency: hence pseudo-pastoral interludes like the flute-draped "Solitude," an idyll amidst Master of Reality's sturm und drang. Critics, though, deplored them as a sign of rock's post-Sixties regression , mere lumpen bombast fit only for the moronic inferno of the arena circuit, or even as a symptom of the long lingering demise of countercultural dreams. In retrospect, with Sixties idealism seeming like a historical aberration, Sabbath's doom 'n' gloom seems more enduringly resonant, tapping into the perennial frustrations of youth with dead-end jobs from Coventry to New Jersey: concussive riffs and narcotic noise as the cheap-and-nasty route to oblivion. Sabbath's no-future vision always becomes extra relevant in times of economic downturn, like the recession that backdropped grunge, or the precipice ahead of us right now.

Looking back, the much-derided Satanist aspects seem relatively peripheral and low-key. In old TV footage of Sabbath, the group seem almost proto-punk, their sullen, slobby demeanour recalling The Saints on Top of the Pops. There's little theatrics, and the music is remarkably trim and flatulence-free. But then no one really raves about Iommi's solos, do they? The riffs are what it's all about, and Sabbath's output on that score is rivaled only by AC/DC. "Sweet Leaf", "Iron Man", "Paranoid", "Children of the Grave," "Wheels of Confusion", the list goes on. So we're back with the mystery.... just what is it that makes for a killer riff? Something to do with the use of silence and spacing, the hesitations that create a sense of tensed and flexed force, of momentum held then unleashed? If I had to choose one definitive Sabbath riffscape, I'd be torn between the ballistic pummel of "Supernaut" and "War Pigs", whose stop-start drums are like slow-motion breakbeats, Quaalude-sluggish but devastatingly funky. "War Pigs" is also that rare thing, the protest song that doesn't suck. Indeed, it's 'Nam era plaint about "generals gathered... like witches at black masses" has a renewed topicality at a time when the military-industrial death-machine is once more flexing its ungodly might.

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From the British Empire & Beyond
(Rhino)

Lenny Kaye's 1972 anthology Nuggets was a rock archivist's masterstroke, a feat of canon rewriting that deposed the post-Sergeant Pepper's aristocracy and elevated the forgotten garage punks of the mid-Sixties, from The Seeds to Chocolate Watchband. Rhino's 1998 four-CD update of Nuggets dramatically expanded the original double LP. Now this latest instalment extends the Nuggets premise beyond the USA to encompass the one-hit-wonders and never-wozzers of mid-Sixties Britain: that all-too-brief golden age of amphetamine-cranked R&B and mod-on-LSD that's roughly bookended by "My Generation" and Cream's Disraeli Gears. Just the names of these long-lost groups--Dantalion's Chariot, Wimple Winch, Rupert's People, The Idle Race--induces a contact high, before you even play the discs.

Back then, singles made their point and left. This short'n'sweet succintness allows the compilers to cram 109--that's one hundred and nine--tracks into four discs. Here's just a handful of gems. Tintern Abbey's "Vacuum Cleaner", with the saintly-sounding David MacTavish singing a proto-Spacemen 3 love-as-drug/drug-as-God lyric ("fix me up with your sweet dose/now I'm feeling like a ghost"), splashy cymbals, and a billowing solo of controlled feedback. Them's "I Can Only Give You Everything": Van in I'm-A-Man mode, awesomely surly and swaggering. The Sorrows's "Take A Heart": a Brit-Diddley locked groove of tumbling tribal toms and spaced-out-for-intensified-effect guitar-riffs. The Eyes's "When The Night Falls" takes that drastic use of silence and suspense even further: powerchords like Damocles Swords, caveman tub-thumping, tongues-of-flame harmonica, and an insolent you-done-me-wrong/go-my-own-way vocal. Fire's "Father's Name Was Dad," a classic misunderstood teen anthem: society gets the blame and the kid surveys squaresville from a lofty vantage, cries "I laugh at it all!"

One group stands out as a "why?-WHY?!?-were-they-never-massive?" mystery. Not The Creation, and not The Action--both had terrific songs but were a little characterless. No, I'm talking about John's Children's. Their two offerings here are astoundingly deranged, the monstrously engorged fuzzbass like staring into a furnace, the drums flailing and scything like Keith Moon at his most smashed-blocked. "Desdemona" features the then shocking chorus "lift up your skirt and fly", daft lines about Toulouse-Lautrec painting "some chick in the rude" plus the stutter-bleat of a young Bolan on backing vox. "A Midnight Summer's Scene" captures mod sulphate-mania on the cusp of mutating into flower power acid-bliss: it's a febrile fantasy of Dionysian mayhem in an after-dark park, maenad hippy-chicks with faces "disfigured by love", strewing "petals and flowers," prancing the rites of Pan.

John's Children's merger of cissy and psychotic highlights the major difference between American garage punk and British "freakbeat" (as reissue label Bam Caruso dubbed it for their illustrious Rubble compilation series). The Limey stuff is way fey compared with the Yanks. You can hear a proto-glam androgyny, a "soft boy" continuum that takes in Barrett and Bolan, obviously, but also the queeny-dandy aristocrat persona of Robert Plant. At the same time, because these bands were schooled in R&B and played live constantly, the music has a rhythmic urgency and aggressive thrust that gradually faded over subsequent decades from the psychedelic tradition (think of Spiritualized's drum-phobic ethereality). This, though, was music for dancing as much as wigging out.

Nuggets II isn't solid gold. There's a slight surfeit of boppy shindig-type rave-ups and sub-Yardbirds blues that just ain't bastardized enough. Personally I crave more tunes with truly over-the-top guitar effects, aberrant bass-heavy mixes, phased cymbals, drastic stereo separation, and other psych-era cliches. The "British Empire" part of the subtitle allows in Australia's The Easybeats (godstars for the duration of "Friday On My Mind") while the "Beyond" pulls in groovy Latin American acid-rockers Os Mutantes. But to be honest, a lot of the Commonwealth-and-beyond stuff just ain't that hot. And inevitably one could compile another 2-CDs out of heinous ommissions. Forget the quibbles, though, this box is a treasure chest of vintage dementia.

RADIO BIRDMAN
The Essential Radio Birdman (1974-1978)
Sub Pop

Send in the clones. Because originators are relatively scarce, and "secondary talents" often perform a useful function, filling in gaps left by the innovator's erratic, all-too-brief trajectory. That's my case-for-the-defense regarding the deeply derivative Radio Birdman. Formed in Sydney, Australia by Michigan native/exile Deniz Tek, the band were based with uncanny fidelity on the Stooges/MC5 proto-punk model. The name Radio Birdman comes from a line in the Stooges' "1970" and the songs teem with Detroit-specific references to Woodward Avenue and Strohs (Iggy & Co's favorite beer). "I-94," from the second album Living Eyes, is named after the highway that cuts through Michigan's industrial heartland, and songs like "Murder City Nights' take the Detroit shtick to the brink of schlock.

So what makes Birdman stand-out from the legion of Stooges-imitators cherished by Frenchmen in leather jeans? Singer Rob Younger's hoarse grunt was merely adequately Iggy-esque, and the rhythm section's rolling thunder is potent but never approaches the loose 'n' lethal swing of Funhouse. So really Radio Birdman's enduring cult is mostly down to Tek: his guitar's spare, stinging lead/rhythm hybrid, and his overall band-vision, which worked up the latent militarism in Stooges songs like "Search and Destroy" into fullblown deathwish rock, sorta Jim Morrison-meets-Sam-Peckinpah. Listen to this anthology--the first time Birdman's music's been properly released domestically--and you'll find song after song about self-immolation ("gonna burn alive", vows Iggy-tribute "Do the Pop") and going out in a blaze of glory. "Alone in the Endzone," for instance, is about a bomber pilot hurtling over "burning desert sands" on a mission that's turned kamikaze: his crew's dead, there's not enough fuel to make it back home, but he's deadset on dropping his payload.

Like Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, Birdman inhabit a male-only world of camaraderie in the face of death. Warrior-wannabes just looking to explode and vent all that pent-up masculine emotion, they regarded the fairer sex as an energy-sucking distraction: "Non-Stop Girls" declares "can't use non-stop girls/cos all my love has gone/To another world", while the suicidal "Smith & Wesson Blues" reckons you're never alone with a warm gun. There was a dodgy side to all this sado-machismo: Birdman named their tours things like Blitzkrieg and Aural Rape, and wore black shirts adorned with the band's Germanic-looking logo, prompting accusations of flirtation-with-fascism from some quarters. But combat * rocks*, and Deniz Tek's insane clone posse tapped into masculinity's dark heart, appealing to the part of you that watches Apocalypse Now for the ninth time.

SAINT ETIENNE
Smash the System
(Sony)

Listening to this double-CD anthology, your first reaction is: Saint Etienne were *cheated*. They should have spanned the Nineties with a string of Number Ones, yet despite strenuous efforts, they never even cracked the Top Ten. Cheated, then, but what can you do? Pop is a cruel mistress, and anybody touting a vision of "perfect pop" is cruising for a bruising. See, pop aesthetes are never really affirming the totality of everything that sells (the only real definition of pop: hit for hit, Iron Maiden, Queen and Dire Straits are some of our biggest "pop" acts ever). Instead they hone in on a precious few sublime flashes amid the crass and the crud, distilling an idiosyncratic notion of "pure pop" that may simply be too refined for the rough-and-tumble of the pop marketplace. And these never-never pops, being based on what *was*, typically get progressively more out-of-step with those ever-changing market realities as time goes by.

This doesn't invalidate the Wiggs & Stanley approach---indeed some of the best music ever has come about through being dreamed *against* the times. But any appraisal of this career retrospective ought to address Saint Etienne's "failure": the fact that they never really connected with the populace as yer actual bought-by-kids-at-Woolies chart fodder. Their singles almost invariably lingered in the chart somewhere between two and five weeks, suggesting a compact and distinct fan-base. Saint Etienne simply lacked the common touch (could a song called "Hobart Paving" ever become an "our song" for some everyday couple?). Even when they later adopted a "competitive" sound (modelled on the Europop that dominated the mid-Nineties charts), it was as though some kind of subconscious self-sabotaging impulse (their pop aesthete's integrity) ensured that the lyrics remained too-damn-smart.

Another quality that made Saint Etienne jar with Nineties chartpop is the romantic chasteness of their love songs. The group were the missing link between two quintessentially English moments, C86 and Britpop (they belonged to that superior prequel for Britpop that included World of Twist, Denim, and early Pulp). "Kiss and Make Up," their lovely second single, was a Field Mice cover, and that trademark C86 cutie-pop sexlessness runs through the discography. Sarah Cracknell's voice---sometimes divinely fragrant and airy, sometimes excessively sweet 'n' creamy, like sipping condensed milk---has as much in common with Amelia Fletcher from Talulah Gosh/Heavenly as with Northern soul or Petula Clark-style Palladium pop. Contrasted with today's rampant, sexually graphic R&B, Saint Etienne's songs are strikingly demure and above-the-waist---all about TLC not carnal ecstasy, devotion rather than desire. There's even a sort of running theme about holding hands! "It's too hot to even hold hands/But that won't stop us from making plans" coos "London Belongs To Me" ( heinously omitted from this comp), while "Join Our Club" features the classic Cracknell come-on to the listener: "I know you want to hold my hand/I know you're gonna love my band". And they expected this sort of virginal stuff to play with today's shagging-by-age-thirteen kids?!

Any Saint Etienne best-of missing Foxbase's "London Belongs" and So Tough gems like "Leafhound," "Calico", and the Rush-sampling "Conchita Martinez", is seriously flawed. But there's more than enough here to remind you why Saint Etienne warrant worship. "Carnt Sleep" recalls A.R. Kane's own doomed pop move "i" with its wistful skank of reverbed rimshots, rhythm guitar prickles, and plaintive piano. Featuring nymphet rapper Q-Tee, "Filthy" anticipates the Chemical Brothers with its looped breakbeat, stinging wah-wah riff, and deep rolling bass. "Mario's Cafe" is delightful English observational pop which combines Astral Weeks-like orchestration with Dury/Squeeze-style lyrical references to the Racing Post and bacon rind, and throws in some delicious early Nineties pop allusions: the girl who dreams of an evening with PM Dawn's Prince B., people talking about The KLF on Top of the Pops the night before. And then there's "Avenue", one of the all-time great lost shoulda-been Number Ones. Commercially suicidal at nearly eight minutes, it's a soaring, celestial mash-up of Dollar, Kate Bush, Smile, and FSOL's "Papua New Guinea", with a lyric as indecipherable (thanks to Cracknell's ultra-breathy singing) and enigmatic as an Alan Resnais movie. A special big-up is due Ian Catt, Saint Etienne's engineer/programmer/unoffical fourth member, who obviously deserved his rare songwriting credit on "Avenue".

When "Avenue" stalled at Number 40 in October '92, it was an indictment of the modern world, not Saint Etienne. I still reckon the group should have retaliated by turning their back on chartpop, gone weird. Instead they did the opposite. Towards the end of the first disc, this compilation turns into a document of a misguided quest to score that elusive Top Ten hit, involving the gradual ironing-out of all the experimentalist lumps in their sound: the dub-wise spaciousness, the found sound interludes, the strange codas like the trippy Beatles-esque fade to "Avenue". (Contententious argument: Saint Etienne, anti-rockists who *wanted* to be a consumate singles group, were ironically better as an album band). "Pale Movie," a "Fernando"-meets-Paul Van Dyk shimmer is lovely, but others from Saint Etienne's Euro phase ("He's On The Phone", "Angel", "Burnt Out Car") sound rather faceless, all chugging sequenced basslines and trance-lite beats. Worn out, Saint Etienne took a four year sabbatical and returned with 1998's Good Humor, replacing their synths and samples with a more organic sound (Swedish session musicians, influences from The Cardigans and Vince 'Charlie Brown' Guaraldi). The clutch of tracks here from this phase seem somehow chastened, oddly modest and mischief-less. But with last year's Sound of Water, Saint Etienne seem to be trying to carve out a post-pop identity--discreetly experimental, "adult", with songs like "Just A Little Overcome" as good as anything they'd ever done. So hopefully this compilation is the greatest hits-and-misses *so far*, just a first installment of towering pop genius

CABARET VOLTAIRE
The Original Sound of Sheffield--The Best of the Virgin/EMI Years
Virgin
Conform to Deform--The Virgin/EMI Years
Virgin

It's hard to believe today, but back in the early Eighties the "New Pop" ideal of mainstream entryism was so dominant, and the alternative (staying indie) so discredited, that even the leading lights of industrial music had a bash. Clock DVA, SPK, and Throbbing Gristle (renamed Psychic TV) all formed alliances with major labels, glossing up their music seemingly in hopes of getting on Top of the Pops. What's most surprising in retrospect is not the group's eagerness to "sell out" (hell, everybody needs to make some bread), but the major labels' belief they could sell the stuff to Joe Punter.

Invariably, the post-industrial popsters stiffed in the marketplace and, tails (or pierced dicks) between legs,
they rejoined erstwhile comrades like Nurse With Wound and Coil in the margins. Still, flouting received wisdom, it's not always true that compromise ruins a band's sound. Sometimes it an improvement: the radio-friendly Nirvana of Nevermind is just plain better than the Subpop stuff. Even a failed attempt at mainstreaming can serve as a timely escape for a band that's hit an aesthetic dead end. So while I'd still rate Cabaret Voltaire's first phase from "Nag Nag Nag" through Red Mecca to "Your Agent Man" as their definitive legacy, it's undeniable that by 1982 they'd taken that approach as far as they could. It was time for a change: a new arena, bigger horizons, a shifted sound.

On their first two post-Rough Trade albums, The Crackdown and Microphonies, the Cabs are basically trying to do a New Order: marry postpunk's angst with the party sounds of electro and Latin Freestyle that ruled Manhattan clubs like the Funhouse and Danceteria. If they never pulled off a "Blue Monday" or "Confusion", they got close with "Crackdown", "Just Fascination," and especially "Sensoria", which gave an ultramodern sheen--all chattering sequencers, pert chugging basslines, and robotic handclaps--to the classic Voltaire vibe of twitchy, under-surveillance tension. The result---Shannon for J.G. Ballard fans---was only a few leftward steps from Depeche Mode in their "political", Neubauten-infatuated mode. But Stephen Mallinder's sultry vocals were always too subdued and moody for full pop impact. And melody was never the Cabs's strong suit.

By the time a dance culture based around largely instrumental music arrived, in the form of acid house, Cabaret Voltaire was running out of steam (understandably, after thirteen years and umpteen releases). Remixes of post-1988 Cabs tunes by dancefloor luminaries like A Guy Called Gerald and Rob Gordon show both how much the Cabs had in common with acid and bleep, but also how they needed assistance to really infiltrate that arena. Hooking up with Sheffield deejay Parrot as Sweet Exorcist, though, Richard Kirk did enjoy the ravefloor impact that eluded the Cabs, with early Warp releases like "Testone". Avant-funk finally had its day, as 'ardcore.

The three-CD Conform to Deform is flawed: there's hardly anything from 1985's under-rated The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, and an entire disc dedicated to live versions seems an odd decision (although the Cabs could be a formidable and forbidding live experience). Some tracks haven't dated well: "C.O.m.a" is all stop-start edits, Fairlight gimmicks, and other modish mid-Eighties techniques, but, unlike equally of-their-time efforts by Art of Noise and Mantronix, the effect is "period charmless." The single-disc The Original Sound of Sheffield, though, makes a strong case for the Cabs's crossover era. An essential companion/sequel to the first-phase Cabs singles compilation The Living Legends, this "greatest near-misses" tells the story of how one pioneering postpunk outfit tried to adapt to the challenging climate of the 1980s.

JOHN OSWALD
Plunderphonics 69/96
(fony)

In this "pop will regurgitate itself" era, sampling and referentiality is so par for the course, it's barely comment-worthy. Flashback, though, to a time when the debates about bricolage and (re-, mis-, and ex-) appropriation were more urgent: the late Eighties of Def Jam, the JAMMS, M/A/R/R/S, Steinski, that moment when the sampler suddenly got much cheaper. Canadian avant-gardist John Oswald had been messin' with music by iconic artist for years, using traditional tape-editing techniques, and he seized the opportunities presented by the new digital technology. The result was 1989's Plunderphonic CD: songs by Elvis Presley, James Brown, Count Basie, Stravinsky, and others, vivisected and rebuilt into grotesque mutant alter-egos. What was different about Oswald's approach was that each track focused on a single artist, and usually a single work. This sort of aural Pop Art mischief wasn't unprecedented, either in the academy (James Tenney's 1961 Elvis-deconstruction "Collage No. 1 (Blue Suede) or in pop itself (The Residents Reich'n'Roll), but Oswald's cover (per)versions were especially extreme.

Despite being scrupulous about identifying his sources, and circulating Plunderphonic on a non-commercial basis, Oswald was persecuted by the Canadian Recording Industry Association (largely because CBS were upset by his reworking of Michael Jackson's "Bad") and forced to destroy all remaining copies of the CD. For years, the only way to hear it has been to contact various Copyright Liberation outfits who'd tape it for free. But now, finally, Oswald has secured permission for all his "electroquotes" and has re-released Plunderphonic, plus some of his earlier and later collages, in a deluxe CD box. There's an extensive booklet, which goes into fascinating detail about Oswald's techniques and diverse approaches to each different song-treatment, along with all the related issues of originality, copyright, artistic signature, etc, that Oswald is exploring.

Listening to the set's two discs, a certain Oswald "signature" emerges: a partiality for choppy, fractured rhythms and weird time signatures. The herky-jerky cut-up of "Hello I Love You" sounds like the Magic Band reduced to eking out an existence as a covers band, with the players uncannily imitating the Doors's instrumental and vocal timbres, but restructuring the tune in the jagged spirit of Trout Mask Replica. Extracts from Plexure, Oswald's attempt to compress the entire pop universe into one 20 minute piece, offer a frenzy of crescendos, choruses, soul-screams, whammy-bar back-blasts, etc, an FM radio inferno that spawns monstrous hybrids like Annie Lennox amalgamated with Fine Young Cannibals inna Cronenburg/The Fly-stylee. There are also moments of beguiling delicacy, though: offcuts of Juan Carlos Joabim bossanova rewoven into a beautiful quilt of lilt; "Strawberry Fields Forever" condensed into a quintessential quiver of wistful ethereality; a varispeeded "White Christmas" that makes Bing's croon droop and ooze like a Dali dreamscape. "Pretender" is a sex-change version of a Dolly Parton song descending from only-audible-to-dogs ultra-treble to a testosterone-thick basso profundissimo, and executed using a Lenco turntable that goes from 80 rpm down to 12 rpm.

The most stunning of Oswald's plunderphonic feats is "Dab", his infamous unravelling of Michael Jackson's "Bad". Attempting to bring sorely-needed electricity to what he felt was musically lifeless, Oswald does his usual Beefheart/Zorn-style thing at first, transforming the song into convulsive cyber-funk. Halfway through, though, the remake ascends to another place altogether. Micro-syllable vocal particles are multitracked as if in some infinite hall-of-mirrors vortex, and this ghost-swarm of
nano-Jacksons strobes stereophonically from speaker to speaker, while simultaneously billowing back and forth through dub-space. The opposite approach to Plexure's maximalist assault, "Dab" creates a new universe within a finite, not-especially-great pop song. It's one of the most cosmic (micro-cosmic?) things I've ever heard. And it alone justifies the not-cheap admission price to Plunderphonics 69/96.

23 SKIDOO
Seven Songs
Urban Gamelan
(both Ronin)

23 Skidoo were prime explorers of an area of sound that opened up in punk's aftermath, when people were looking for a forward path to take them as far from rock's reeking corpse as possible. Funk, it was decided, was the new music of danger, the most suitable rhythmic template for experimentalism or militancy. Based on a quite small range of instances (the psychosis latent in James Brown's frenzies, the voodoo grooves of Tago Mago and On The Corner, Sly Stone's darker moments, Fela Kuti, , Last Poets) a notion emerged of funk as a rhythmic metaphor for control, addiction, possession, exorcism. Mix in ideas borrowed from vanguard s.f. writers Ballard & Burroughs (sounds like a haberdashers!) and paranoid vibes from Seventies auteur movies like Klute, The Parallax View, and The Conversation, and voila, you've got the future.
Bridging avant-funk's pioneering first-wave (Pop Group, Cabaret Voltaire, A Certain Ratio) and a less distinguished second-wave that formularised the genre (Hula, Chakk, Shriekback, 400 Blows), 23 Skidoo have enjoyed a spectral presence in Nineties dance culture, despite the out-of-print, terribly-hard-to-find status of their recordings. The bassline to their single "Coup" was copied note-for-note by The Chemicals on "Block Rockin' Beats", while early darkside jungle circa 1993 was often bizarrely Skidoo-like. And the group's ethnological forgeries and tape-looped exotica pre-echoed the world music sampling of your Loop Gurus.

Mind you, this sort of talk--precursors, legacies, heirs, groups that were, yawn, ahead-of-their-time--is of academic interest only. Why listen *now*? Because 1981's Seven Songs especially still sounds bloodcurdlingly intense. A malevolent tumble of congas, feedback, and gutteral chants, "Kundalini" is as much Birthday Party as Gap Band. On "Vegas El Bandito," seething slap-bass and brittle-nerved rhythm guitar are offset by dank, lugubrious trumpet, whose ailing wail is pure Miles homage. The track immediately cuts into "Mary's Operation", dropping everything but the horn, which is multi-tracked and mingled with tape-loop drones. The resulting gloomscape of wilting and billowing sound devolves further still into the churning cosmic cistern of "Lockgroove". "New Testament" is like dying machinery, a drum track massively slowed down, its rapid-fire percussive events elongated, snares smearing and cymbal-smashes blossoming pendulously. "IY" showcases Skidoo's strength (percussion) and weakness (vocals), but "Porno Bass" is just ill: booming bassdrones reverberate in a cavernous murk, while Hitler fan Unity Mitford, plucked from some ancient radio interview, rails against pop for displacing "manly" activities like sports, hyperstimulating young people's libido, and generally being "the sign of a degenerating race". When the rancid nutcase opines that youthful "ears become degraded by wrong style and senseless reiteration", Skidoo mischievously double-loop the word "reiteration".

Seven Songs's closer "Quiet Pillage" references exotica king Martin Denny, whose Polynesian-flavored "Quiet Village" was a massive 1950s hit. "Quiet Pillage"'s vibe of humid disquiet (sorta Apocalypse Now: The Day After) and its plinky metallic chimes look ahead to 1984's Urban Gamelan, made after an expedition to Indonesia. "GIFU" is basically an alternate mix of "Coup", Skidoo's most straightforwardly funky single, with a Viet-Cong war-cry "G.I., fuck you" added for anti-Western Imperialism edge. Mostly, though, the album supplies precisely what the title suggests: gamelan-influenced drumstrumentals, all tuned percussion, hand-cymbals, and gongs. Well-produced compared with the hastily executed debut, Urban Gamelan frequently teeters on the thin line between minimal and underwritten. Its gently ominous atmosphere (space age bachelor padded cell music) grows on you, but it lacks the turbulence and sheer de-civilising ferocity of Seven Songs.

THE PRODIGY
Experience: Expanded
(XL)

1997's "Firestarter" might have been their US breakthrough, but in Britain The Prodigy were massive almost from the git-go. Their second single "Charley" was a #5 pop hit in the summer of 1991, and the follow-up "Everybody In the Place" was only kept off the top spot by the re-released "Bohemian Rhapsody." Back then the Prodigy were pop ambassadors for hardcore, staple sound of England's early Nineties rave scene and the hip hop/techno mutant that eventually evolved into drum'n'bass. All convulsively strobing keyboard vamps, frenzied breakbeats, and bruising bass, hardcore always was the "the new rock'n'roll". It's just that Liam Howlett had to add guitars, punk-snarl vocals, and videogenic hair-rebel shapethrowing before the non-rave world was convinced that Prodigy rocked.

Experience: Expanded is a reissue of Prodigy's 1992 debut album with an extra disc of remixes and B-sides. Sounds slightly dubious, I know, but actually it's a radical enhancement of an already bona fide classic. The B-sides offer ruff proto-jungle bizness, and the remixes are the absolute killer versions that slayed 'em on the ravefloor in 1991-92 (then reappeared in slightly-inferior remixed form on the original Experience). So this retrospectively "corrected" Experience now includes the definitive "Alley Cat Remix" incarnation of "Charly", with its cartoon feline's miaouw smearing into the miasmic churn of the distorto-synth riff, and the superior "Fairground Remix" of "Everybody In the Place," a dementedly whirling dervish-machine that was actually popular on rollercoaster sound systems.

Experience is all about speed--not just the synergy-rush of E's and whizz (UK slang for amphetamine) with exponentially-soaring b.p.m rates, but an entire emergent culture of hyperkinetic thrills, from videogames to snowboarding. And in 1992 that gave The Prodigy and their hardcore rave brethren real resonance for Brit-kids languishing under Tory tyranny: when your culture is all about blockage and stagnation, reaching escape-velocity becomes paramount. Things haven't improved a whole heap since, which might be one reason Experience still packs such a mighty buzz.

... Native Hipsters
There Goes Concorde Again...
(MRM)

Armand Van Helden
Repro
(Armed)

Heavenly
Heavenly versus Satan
(K)
for the pretty cruelty of "our love is heavenly"

PUZZLEMENT CORNER

Dieselboy The 6ixth Session (Palm Pictures)

It always amazes me that quite a few people still haven't noticed that drum'n'bass is, like, dead. Every year I hear the same reports of regeneration, a return to the old skool darkcore vibe, or ragga-jungle bizness, or more complicated mash-up beats, and yet when I check the stores or comps like this one, it's still the same old grrr-grrr basslines and jackniking two-step/chases-scene-propulsive beat. Dieselboy's sound--his taste in other people's tunes--is almost verging on gabber: incredibly fast 180 bpm rigid-with-sulphate beats, mentasmic/terminator type death-ray noises, Mover-like atmospherics. Why don't I like it more then?
Why is that drum'n'bass rampage-beat even more dull and linear than gabber's bassdrum boing? Still, checking out D&B in its full-on club-or-rave context might be interesting---like sleeping with an ex-girlfriend in a moment of weakness, or something. Is the passion (the grand passion of my entire pop life) dead, or just dormant? If tiny sparks remain, sparks can turn into flame"

CURATE'S EGG CORNER

THE CLIENTELE Suburban Light (Merge)

Paid cash money for this based on two eloquent testimonials, one by Tom Ewing on Freaktrigger, and the other by Dennis Lim in the Village Voice, but I must admit to being only partly won over. The guitarstuff's nicely diaphonous and as-seen-through-spring-rainy-windowns, just as promised. But the singer... well, I can't help thinking we'd be better off he couldn't sing, if he was more a Lawrence in Felt type drone-presence. As it is he sounds a bit sappy and sapped and Hollies-like. As for the other elements of the group's sound---well, being the drummer in the Clientele must be world's most demeaning job, surely.

AALIYAH RIP

This here piece was all set to run in the Village Voice a few days after Aaliyah's death, but had to be pulled because it wasn't written as an obituary/tribute, but is obviously a mixed review with a fair few snarky comments in it. Not sure exactly how much time needs to have intervened before you can "speak ill of the dead", but here for better or worse here goes.... Needless to say I was a massive fan and was gutted to hear of her death, but in this piece I ponder what it actually means to be an Aaliyah fan. If it had run the Wednesday after her death, it might have been titled: "Aaliyah, we hardly knew you"....

Aaliyah
Aaliyah
(Blackground)

I was going to call myself an Aaliyah fan---after all, she's made two of my
all time favorite singles, "One In A Million" and "Are You That
Somebody?"---but somehow the idea of an "Aaliyah fan" seems faintly absurd.
There's dozens of websites devoted to the singer whose name is Swahili for
"most exalted one", but beyond her obvious beauty and vocal skill, what are
these folk latching onto? The sites are uniformly thin on biographical
content or back story. Of all the premier league R&B goddesses, Aaliyah
seems the most blank: she doesn't even have a persona as such, let alone
exhibit actual this-is-me personality. This is a young woman who's been involved in the music industry for most of her 22 years, working her way up the rungs from the age of nine. In a recent Billboard interview, droning fluent bizspeak about the importance of "versatility" and the need to pace your career, unfurling cliches about creative "chemistry" and thriving on "pressure", Aaliyah comes over as a
dour professional and a workaholic strategist who's cannily diversified into
movies like Romeo Must Die and Queen of the Damned.

More than just impersonal, there's something almost immaterial about Aaliyah
(it's hard to imagine her flossing her teeth, or wiping her bottom). Aaliyah might be best understood, and enjoyed, then as a figment--a phantom of cathode-ray dazzle and studio-processed breath--concocted by an ensemble of stylists,
choreographers, make-up artists, personal trainers, lighting technicians,
video directors, song-doctors (like her main writer, Static from Playa),
and, not least, trackmasters like Timbaland, her primary production foil
until now. Timbaland has said he uses Aaliyah as "a probe" (itself an oddly
depersonalized phrase), a vehicle for testing his most far-out ideas in the
"urban" marketplace. That metaphor fits "One In A Million", the 1996 smash
whose stutterfunk kick drums created the rhythmic template for the last five
years of R&B and rap, and it works for 1998's "Are You That Somebody?",
which took the stop-start groove thing to the brink of rhythmic arrest. But
the sole novelty of last year's "Try Again," its acid-house Roland 303
bassline, was fresh only in context (urban radio), while this year's "We
Need A Resolution" continues the decline in daring, showcasing no new moves
whatsoever. Everything in the song is decidedly deja for Tim-watchers, from
the snake-charmer flute motifs ("Big Pimpin'") and tabla-like percussion
("Get UR Freak On") to the sinister slither of the reversed-sounding
techno riffs ("Snoopy Trak," off Jay-Z's Vol. 3). With his two other cuts on
Aaliyah's new album being the catchy but unstartling "More Than A Woman"
and "I Care 4 U", a five year old, Missy-penned out-take from the One In A
Million album sessions, there's a suspicion that Timbaland shot his wad on
So Addictive and is all innovated out for the time being.

The other producers involved in Aaliyah-- Keybeats, Inc (a/k/a Rapture &
E-Seats), Bud' Da, and J-Dub a/k/a Rockstar-- aren't probing any outer
limits either. The result is an album that is unspectacular, but very
listenable. From the ungainly title/chorus down, "We Need A Resolution"
wasn't exactly singular as a single, but its midtempo understatedness works
just fine as an album opener. The same applies to most everything here:
Aaliyah's all album tracks and no obvious hits, but it's expertly paced and
programmed, the whole stronger than any individual part. Make it past the
first, underwhelmed listen and its cumulative seductiveness kicks in.

Rapture & E-Seats's stand-out "Rock The Boat" is all diffuse sensuality and shimmering sleekness. The song's "adult" lyrics--"stroke it for me/work it to the middle/change positions"--are something of a maturity move for Aaliyah, and not wholly convincing. She doesn't really do "hot", it doesn't suit her gritless voice, at times so snowy-textured and sparing with the melisma that it's almost white. Showing more skin than usual, draped in snakes and caked in vampy make-up, she looked uncomfortable in the "Resolution" video, and you can't really imagine
her mucking in with the harlots of "Lady Marmalade". Until now, her two
primary modes have been near-virginal devotion ("One in a Million", "4 Page
Letter") and tension, a yearning-but-holding-back wariness of love. Both
"Are You That Somebody" and "Try Again" are premised on the idea of Aaliyah
as hard-to-get, while "Resolution" is all about people not getting (it) on.

Outside these two modes, Aaliyah doesn't fare so well. The twittery-vocaled
anti-wife abuse schlock of "Never No More" is a calculated display of
versatility, announcing "I can deal with heavy topics". "U Got Nerve" is a
weak stab at Beyonce-style toughness, and "I Refuse", from its
I-am-woman-hear-me-roar defiance to the baroque'n'roll bombast of J. Dub's
arrangement, is a "Bills Bills Bills" knock-off two years tardy. Mind you,
this Austro-Hungarian Rhapsody might be the album's most authentic Aaliyah
moment, given that her all-time favorite band is apparently Queen!

On two songs, you get a glimpse of Aaliyah as a potential auteur, rather than just a key component of hit records, the brand name front for a collective of expert technicians. Bud'Da's "I Can Be" is Aaliyah at her most frosty, shrouded in a skein of glassy guitarscree that seems to belong more on a Banshees or Cocteaus album. And the J.Dub-prod. "What If," daubed in garish metal-funk guitar, even sees Aaliyah rock out with a modicum of sass. The song's sheer
overwraughtness feels cathartic after so much mature'n'demure restraint.

Hints, if not of darkness or deepness, of at least an aspiration in that direction: Aaliyah as ice queen of Gothic R&B! "I Can Be" especially is a glimpse of the more audacious album Aaliyah could have been, if, for instance, the singer had
done a collaboration with Trent Reznor as she once improbably contemplated
with apparently genuine enthusiasm ("I think he's a genius!", she gushed).
For the time being, though, Aaliyah is a fine third album. And Aaliyah
remains a exquisite cipher.

2008-12-16T18:55:00.003-08:00

FAVES AND UNFAVES OF 2000
(originally on Blissout website)

Simon Reynolds's
FAVES OF 2000

Greetings! Delayed because of various life-vicissitudes (including a weekend in
the children's ward of Saint Vincent's Hospital), here is my annual inventory of
sonic delights. During its strenuous and spasmodic assembling, I've been
prompted occasionally to ponder: why do I do this? "This" being, essentially, a
fanzine. After all, I write about music for a living; I got outlets, don't I?
Actually, A White Rave Aesthete Thinks Aloud (name-change overdue, it gets more
misleading each year as my interests re-expand) has become an essential
sanity-valve for me. Seems like each year an ever larger percentage of my
opinions are simply unsellable on the "ideas market" (sick joke) that is music
journalism--being either too ultra-specialised/insidery, or too
vehement/vituperative, or too pretentious/theoretical. Some of the backlog of
far-fetched ideas will hopefully, life-vicissitudes willing, make it onto the
site during the months ahead. Before then, hopefully within a few weeks,
there'll be the usual Over-Rated whingefest (slightly less morose than last
year), which is now renamed Un-Faves of 2000 and containing new features like
INDICTED: For Crimes Against Culture and the first of a series of diatribes that
disclose The Most Over-Rated Eras, Scenes or Movements in Rock History.
About what is on your screen right now: like every year's Faves, this is a
last-track-of-a-Mantronix-album style megamix of already published stuff
leavened with the newly written. Hence the slight but discernible fluctuations
of style, intensity, sloppiness/tidiness, and general prose deportment. Of the
non-new stuff, some is in "director's cut" original form and some has been
remixed/augmented.

DANCEHALL

ELEPHANT MAN
Comin' 4 You!
(Greensleeves)
CAPLETON
More Fire
(VP)
BEENIE MAN
Art & Life
(Island)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
The Biggest Ragga Dancehall Anthems 2000
(Greensleeves)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Doorslam (Greensleeves Rhythm Album #3)
(Greensleeves)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Strictly the Best 23
(VP)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
The Biggest Ragga Dancehall Anthems 99
(Greensleeves)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Greensleees Reggae Sampler 21
(Greensleeves)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Massive B Presents: Yard Bounce
(Massive B)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Dancehall 101 Volume 1 and Vol. 2
(VP)
This goes up front not because it's necessarily the stuff I extracted most
pleasure from this year, but because it's the stuff that surprised, confused,
and did my head in the most, forced me to think hardest... and this year, that
seemed more important than mere enjoyment... (That said, I can't actually think
of many things I enjoyed more than this stuff.)
A lot of the thinking related to the quandary of whether I can have any place in
this music, any real relation with it... It's not even a black/white thing, as
with hip hop -- dancehall is so relentlessly Jamaica-local in its references;
lyrically it's almost indecipherable. For a white liberal, it is also a culture,
strung out between Rasta's Afro-Protestant fundamentalism and its inseparable
polar opposite, rudeboy/Staggerlee ghetto-nihilism, that is impossible to affirm
or be comfortable with--the ritual battyboy-bashing incantations, the misogyny,
the guntalk. And yet, and yet, the sheer physical compulsion and force of sonic
surprise demands attention, deserves excitement.
Can't claim to have "mastered the field", or even come close. Jamaica has the
highest per-capita rate of musical production in the world, and given
dancehall's insanely frantic turnover of riddims and versions, its scores of
production squads and hit-factory studios, keeping up with the genre would be a
full-time occupation, involving much time in cramped basement record stores with
hundreds of seven-inch singles (amazingly, what the DJs still use--they don't
even mix) stuck on the walls.... So, like any dabbler, it's compilations for me.

If it seems like there's been a creative upsurge in dancehall, I'm aware it's
almost certainly an optical illusion caused by my not really having paid
attention since the last time ragga grabbed my ears, circa 1994. That was back
when jungle was synonymous with ragga samples, and this time round it's partly
through the endemic use of dancehall vocal licks in 2step garage that my dormant
interest's been revived. Often it's the exact same MC chants and catchphrases,
originally from yard tapes, re-used for the Nth time-----"get ready for dis, for
dis, for dis", "special request", "come with it my man", "get mash up,"
"champion sound a-way"-- a sort of sampladelic folk-memory archive for the
hardcore continuum. Then there's all the 2step collaborations with dancehall
stars (Glamma Kid, Lady Saw) and the MCs with a strong ragga influence to their
patter (Richie Dan, Splash, etc).
More and more, I am coming round to the idea of rave, at least in its
London-centric hardcore/jungle/garage sense, as an almost straight transposition
of dancehall culture into the UK: the dubplates, the champion sounds (pirates
largely replacing the sound systems, as sounds on the airwaves), the cult of
spliff-tastic bass frequencies, the role of the MC (which you don't get in
house, techno, trance) and his glorious nonsense; the sense of manor and local
identity. Then there's the whole dancehall/hardcore thing of renegade capitalism
a/k/a resistant micro-capitalism: white labels and illicit raves, studios/labels
based around record stores (like M-Dubs's Sugarshack Recordings being in back of
their Hounslow record shop); the balance between avant-gardism and pleasing the
massive. In Jamaica, the dubplate system works in a different fashion to UK
hardcore/jungle/garage. Because they compete in "soundclashes" against each
other, sound systems need a constant turnover of fresh dubs to sway the crowd
and slay their rivals. At each of Kingston's many recording studios, there's a
bustling traffic in killer and filler tunes alike (sounds can't fire all their
best shots too early; they save the most devastating ordnance for the final
stretch of combat). Established stars and hustling aspirants alike chant
patois-rich raps over currently hot riddims; in return for these
vocals-for-hire the champion sounds pay anything from US $25 to $3000.
Another typically Jamaican attitude that seems to have migrated into the
hardcore/jungle/garage continuum is that weird mix of idealism and
pragmatism---a sort of arty experimentalism untrammeled with modernist/bohemian
complexes about money-making or selling out. Read Wake the Town and Tell the
People, Norman C. Stolzoff's useful analysis of Jamaican dancehall culture, and
what emerges is a native genius for transforming economic constraints into
creative opportunities. Sound systems, for instance, first emerged in the 1950s
when the burgeoning tourist trade priced live bands out of the popular market;
DJs playing records (then imported American R&B) filled the void. Thrift was
partial inspiration for two crucial innovations: the recycling of rhythms, and
dub. Producers realized they only had to pay session musicians for a single
performance if they put instrumental dub versions on B-sides, or released "one
riddim" albums featuring different songs and singers over the same groove.
Similar implacable financial logic led to today's ragga, where drum machines and
digital technology enabled the downsizing of human players altogether. It's
really only the raucous, overbearing presence of the MCs (confusingly known in
Jamaica as DJs; the guy who spins the record is the selector) that has concealed
for so long the fact that dancehall is essentially identical, in terms of its
means of production, to house/techno/jungle/etc.
Beyond these affinities and its subordinate role as a pantry full of patois
vocal licks sampled by junglists and 2steppers, dancehall has its own forceful
claims upon our attention as the Other Electronic Music. Its digital rhythm
science can easily rival the art-techno fraternity when it comes to
bio-mechanical this-must-be-wrong-but-it-works weirdness. Just check the madcap
creativity of Beenie Man's "Moses Cry" (on Greensleeves's Biggest Anthems of
2000 double-CD) for sounds as futuristic and aberrant-sounding as any
avant-techno coming out of Cologne. Produced by Ward 21 & Prince Jammy, its
asymmetrical groove is built from palpitating kick drums, garbled rave-style
synth-stabs, and an eerie bassline that sounds like a human groan digitally
mangled and looped. Or check the quirktronica pulsescape underpinning Beenie on
"Badder Than the Rest", or Elephant Man's amazing "2000 Began" from Comin' 4
You! --basically acid techno a la Plastikman.
It's easy to overlook dancehall's sonic strangeness, though, because the
performers' personae are so domineering. The mix seems lopsided, in-yer-face
voices battling with the beat to control the soundscape, and crushing the rest
of the music (strangulated samples, perky videogame-style blip-melodies) into a
skinny strip of no-man's land in between. The ragga voice, jagged and croaky, is
a form of sonic extremism in itself. Dancehall's got to be the only form of
modern pop where the typical range for male vocals is baritone to basso
profundo. Obviously related to the culture's premium on testosterone and disdain
for effeminacy, ragga's ultramasculinist bombast sounds simultaneously absurd
and intimidating. From some DJs, like Buccaneer, you'll even hear a
Pavarotti-esque warble, hilariously poised between portentous and preposterous.
Elephant Man's own voice is a pit-of-belly boom that opens up like an abyss of
menace, enhanced by a sinister, serpentile lisp. Combine this sort of gravelly
machismo with typical lyrics about exit wounds and tonight being the opposite of
your birthday (i.e. your "deathnight") and you've got some seriously chilling
Staggerlee business. "Replacement Killer," a series of boasts about how
cold-blooded Elephant is, actually utilizes death-rattle gasps as functioning
elements of the beat. No surprise, then, that there's a mutual trade pact
between dancehall and gangsta rap (which has escalated since Jamaica recently
got wired for cable and now has exposure to BET and MTV). US rap terms like
"playa hater," "my dogs", and "making cheese" now crop up as brief blips of
relative cipherability amidst ragga's hieroglyphic code-flow of opaque patois.
And increasingly dancehall artists interpolate direct lifts from current rap
hits. On Comin' 4 You! "One More" is based on DMX's "One More Road To Cross,"
"E-L-E-P-H-A-N-T" rips a Dre/Snoop chorus, and the album's fiercest cut
"Somebody" rides the clanking rampage of the Yardbounce riddim, a fusion of
dancehall with the New Orleans bounce style popularized by Cash Money Records.
(The Yardbounce CD features seven versions of that riddim, created by Bobby
Konders of Massive B, including Bounty Killer's "Fire With Fire", Burro Banton's
"Phenomenum 1" and Lexxus's "Ride With Me" --- a sequence, culminating with the
Elephant Man's version, that has been played with shameless incessant-ness on
Massive B's dancehall show for Hot 97 in New York). You also get dancehall
artists doing remakes of rap hits, where they treat the original as just another
riddim and do a totally different vocal lick over the top: Elephant Man's got
one based on Ludacris's amazing "Southern Hospitality" (see Street Rap section).

With six appearances on the Greensleeves best of 2000 compilation, Capleton
reaffirms his supremacy over the dancehall already established by last year's
awesome More Fire LP. Like Malcolm X, he belongs to the syndrome of the
self-reformed Staggerlee; like Buju Banton, he's a raggamuffin who turned Rasta.
But Capleton's sanctimony doesn't sabotage his records because instead of
soothing roots reggae visions of "one love", he concentrates on Old
Testament-style wrath and Armageddon: Jah as the ultimate Enforcer, the Don of
dons, smiting the corrupt and ungodly. The gloating relish with which he wields
the brimstone imagery of divine retribution (he fits this Rasta street preacher
archetype known as the "warner") is as vindictive and venomous as ragga's
ultraviolence. Capleton's righteousness and Elephant Man's ruthlessness are
flipsides of the same cultural coin; God's fire simply replaces gun fire. Even
though he's a "good guy" now, Capleton still sounds like a rude boy. That
ragga/rasta dialectic is fascinating to me, because in dancehall they aren't
seen or felt as opposites but complementary: it's similar to the way that even
the most cold-blooded, heartless, murda-mad, ho'-banging rappers always give
praise and thanks to God despite their ungodly, vice-ridden and vicious
lifestyles. Dancehall can appear to merely mirror and perpetuate "reality"
(soundclash slanguage, all "sound boy killers" and "burial" tunes that finish
off the rival sound, reflects not just the routine violence of Kingston, but
capitalism's war of all against all--harsher in this postcolonial corner of the
globalized world than most). But the culture still contains flickers of utopian
hope for a better way: selectors will cut from a toast about murderous revenge
to a conscious song about redemption in the blink of a cross-fader. In the mix,
these contradictions--glamorizing Babylon's ways versus dreaming of
Zion--achieve an uneasy co-existence.
Back to the music.... Basically, there's too many insanely inventive,
rhythmically ferocious tracks on all these comps to get into close description.
One thing I can't get my head around just yet: the one riddim album. Even when
the riddim is hothothot, like Doorslam, 20 different versions from DJs and
singjays in a row riding the exact same groove, well it's a bit of a mindfuck.
(Although it is a good way of appreciating the skills of each vocalist: the
groove functions like one of those mechanical bucking broncos where you can
pretend to be a rodeo; each MC finds different way of riding the beat). If you
want to play catch-up with this dauntingly vast zone, which has churned out
goodstuff all through the late Eighties and early-mid Nineties, VP's Dancehall
101 Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 are superb crasher-courses.
Another thing I've found increasingly intriguing is the music of the
non-Jamaican West Indies, e.g. digital soca and calypso. At its best, it's
really demented sounding -- like the happy hardcore of the Caribbean. I've heard
a soca version of Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" (a tune also versioned in a 2step
garage stylee this year). Strange bhangra influences, at times--- apparently one
legacy of the British empire is the way East Indians migrated to the West
Indies.
And we can't forget dancehall's great crossover artist-- not Shaggy (although
that "wasn't me" tune is catchy-as-fuck) but Beenie Man. Whose latest album Art
& Life produced the gorgeous R&B-dancehall crossover hit "Girls Them Sugar"
featuring the lovely Mya, the ominous New Orleans-style gangsta-bounce of
"Original Tune, " and hardly any "pure" ragga. And why should it? Dancehall and
the other genres of the "Black Atlantic" Diaspora have long entered into
relations of fruitful mutual contamination. From techno-ravey-drum'n'bassy ideas
infiltrating the E'd up world of American hip hop, to 2step's one-way alliance
with US R&B and borrowings from dancehall and roots reggae, to the rumors about
Timo Maas's "Doom's Night" remix being a huge smash in Jamaica, more and more
the borders between all the different street musics become meaningless-- thanks
to digital technology and the near-instantaneous way that musical ideas migrate
these days. (Dancehall itself is a diaspora, with outposts from Brooklyn to
London to Miami to Toronto; almost as many Jamaicans live outside the island as
on it). What has emerged through all this criss-cross traffic is a single
unified bass-beats-bleeps culture, a transatlantic confederacy of hardcore
sounds.

STREET RAP

JAY-Z
Vol. 3... Life and Times of S.Carter
The Dynasty: Roc La Familia 2000
(both Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam 2000)-
DMX
And Then There Was X
(Ruff Ryders/Def Jam 2000)
THE LOX---"Wild Out" from We Are The Streets
(Ruff Ryders/Interscope)
DA BRAT---"That's What I'm Looking For" (So So Def)
MYSTIKAL--- "Shake That Ass"
RAH DIGGA -- "The Imperial" (Elektra)
LUDACRIS
Back For the First Time
(Def Jam South)
MEMPHIS BLEEK--"Is That Your Chick?" and "Do My" from The Understanding
(Roc-A-Fella)
DR DRE-- "The Next Episode"
JA RULE
"Between You and Me"
"Six Foot Underground"
Rule 3.36
(Murder Inc/Def Jam)
NELLY
"Country Grammar"
"E.I."
Country Grammar
(Universal)
After 1999's astonishments, 2000 was for the longest-time somewhat disappointing
on the street-oriented hardcore rap front. Dreary albums by The Lox and Drag-On
suggested that Swizz Beatz was in need of battery-recharge; the Ruff Ryders II
comp on first listen contained some startling tracks but strangely I've not
revisited it; and what's with the pukey-sounding Caribbean-style digital "steel
drums" on various Ruff Ryders tracks. Albums by Juvenile, BG, Lil Wayne, and Big
Tymers showed Mannie Fresh still coming up with clever arrangement gimmicks and
sharp beats, but (until the late entry of "Project Bitch") nothing as anthemic
as "Back That Azz Up" or as weird as Cash Money's most technoid 1999 tracks.
Plus the lyrics have got so vile on the misogyny front, and so tiresomely
repetitious in their vileness, it's hard to stomach the records.
Highlights (most of which are from the very start of the year, or the last
third). Jay-Z's "Do It Again": Rockwilder's production as harsh and mechanistic
as a track by Jeff Mills, just a melody-free spasm of sub-bass, a nagging blurt
of computer-in-distress bleeps, and an asymmetrical loop of punishing kicks and
snares; bleak, almost Swans-like music that makes the playa's
clubbing/drinking/pulling/shagging lifestyle depicted by Jay-Z ("6-AM I be
digging her out/6-15 I be kicking her out") sound like a treadmill grind. Sonic
brutalism that has me flashing back to Schoolly D's "PSK" and Skinny Boys' "Rip
The Cut" back in the proverbial day. DMX is the most interesting superthug of
all because he doesn't glamorize the life: "One More Road To Cross" (prod. Swizz
Beatz) has the accursed, burdened heft of Blacks Sabbath and Flag, perfectly
fitting DMX's stoic description of a carefully planned liquor store heist that
goes bloodily wrong. "The Professional" is a bleak glimpse into the mind of a
hired assassin ("Shit ain't go too well/THAT'S MY LIFE/Know I'm going to
hell/THAT'S MY LIFE"). Betrayal-and-retribution themed "Here We Go Again" starts
with the insuperably fatigued murmur "Same old shit, dog/Just a different day":
thug life as agony, repetition, and endurance. This comes through as much in
DMX's hoarse rasping timbre and his delivery, which alternates between
pay-close-attention-this-is-hard-earned-knowledge-I'm-sharing slow to rapid-fire
blurts like he's got too much pain to cram into the rhyme-scheme's stanzas, as
through the lyrics. And what's this I hear from some quarters about DMX being
crap at rap, having no flow? The whole point of his shtick is (see also Ja Rule)
the tar-thick, bronchial rasp, the chesty congested anguish. It's a style that
precisely communicates the life-stance and worldview, just like Ozzy did in
Sabbath, or Rollins in Black Flag. And I like the barking thing, it's sort of
comical and scary at the same time.
One last start-of-year blast from the Ruff Ryders camp before their failed 2000:
the rowdy call-and-response clamor and bruising bass-bounce of The Lox's "Wild
Out," almost exuberant enough to make you forget socially irresponsible couplets
like "if a nigga step on your goddamn shoes/fuck him up/WILD OUT!!!"---if not
incitement, then certainly legitimizing the culture of over-reacting to any
perceived insult or threat. Also promoting socially destructive aspirations: Da
Brat's paean to hot boys and love thugz "That's What I'm Looking For", with her
great croaky lust-cracked vocal riding a killer avant-funk groove based around a
detuned and lurching guitar riff (proving that even a second-rater like producer
Jermaine Dupri can excel if the peer-group pressure cooker's hot enough).
Later in 2000 things got busy again: Mystikal's "Shake That Ass" and Jay-Z's 'I
Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me')' are both chips off the same Neptunes block,
James Brown updated for the new millenium, and a sound that's sort of crisp and
chewy, undeniable if less futuristic than some of the other stuff around. Also
from the Roc-A-Fella camp, more B-boys on E bizness: Memphis Bleek's "Is That
Your Chick" (Timbaland building on the "Hot Boys" blueprint: dead-sounding,
ultra-dry kicks and fuzzy, indistinct bass-booms like explosions reverberating
from way underground, weird double-speed sensation of sluggish and urgent
similar to Ludacris's "Fantasy") and "Do My" (the clinical rush of pure techno,
prod. by A Kid Called Roots whose very handle sounds like a rave-age moniker).
Rap and R&B (and 2step) Trend of the Year: Pizzicato. One example of this was
the micro-fad for Oriental plangency, e.g. Ja Rule's "Between Me and You" (which
sounds like the Burmese Court Orchestra or something) and the gamelan-chimes of
his "Put It On Me". My favorite Ja Rule tunes though were "6 Feet Underground",
with mad sped-up divas twittering like helium hummingbirds off of some 92
hardcore white label, and "Ecstasy", a pill-popping anthem with full-on
ravey-housey keyboard vamps and great loved-up lyrics that seem to have flashed
in from some old Beloved tune back when Jon Marsh was a Shoom blisshead. Funny
lines too about how come if he's such a superthug and baller, he's buying "all
that damn water," how all the playas are glugging Evian and OJ instead of Moet.
Just elbowing Jay-Z's Timbaland-produced "Snoopy Track" (hip hop's "Dominator",
a dark demonic blare of Numan-meets-Beltram synth-bombast) and Nelly's "Country
Grammar" (that chiming bling-bling bassline, their springheeled groove, that
summertime joie de vivre) into a tied second-place, my absolute favorite rap
track 2000 was Ludacris's 'What's Your Fantasy". This oddly sinister,
near-dystopian song about shagging features a Marquis De Sade-like dirty laundry
list of sex acts (I think water sports is in there; doing it onstage at a packed
Ludacris concert certainly is). What makes it compelling though is the way that
the freneticism of the hair-raising, scurrying noir strings (tres
Hermann/Psycho) and chittering electronix creates this weird disjunctive tension
with the extraordinarily torpid groove (a bass line with immense chasms between
each note, a gap-toothed drum beat). "Fantasy" actually sounds like an old rave
tune, all stabs and muffled fuzzy sub-low bass, but played at 33 rpm instead of
45 rpm. Producer Shondrae, who does more tracks than anybody else on the album,
is clearly one to watch. There's other good stuff on the Ludacris album: "Get
Off Me" (prod. that man again Jermaine Dupri) sounds like a bounced-up LFO circa
Frequencies. while second single "Southern Hospitality" (prod. the Neptunes) has
mentasmic hoover-riffs more suitable for a Lisa Lashes hard house set lunging
into the mix at peculiar jutting angles.

HOUSE-TECHNO-ELECTRO-IDM-WHATEVER

ISOLEE
Rest
(Playhouse)
This album by Isolee --not a French outfit but German dude Rajko Muller-- is my
favorite home-listening house album since Herbert's Around The House, and like
the latter it is endlessly listenable, discreetly avant-garde, weirdly gorgeous.
Multi-tiered, built up from parallel streams of lurching beats, clanking
percussion, and snaking acid-pulses, this music is a tapestry of sinuousness and
angularity, a split-level mesh of frictions and fluencies. On tracks like
"Text," the production is wormholey with eerie crevices, hidden folds, and
trapdoors of echo that crack apart the groove for a micro-second. On the
scintillating "Beau Mot Plage", the music is so fluttery with hand's-on "feel"
that it doesn't feel strange when an African high-life guitar darts in like a
dragonfly--simply because the tune's electronic components are equally
played-not-programmed sounding. There's a pronounced early Eighties feel at
times--brittle Oriental brush-strokes that recall Japan or Thomas Leer,
Vangelis/Blade Runner-style melody-vapour like sungleam creeping over horizon
rim, future-jazz tone-smears. The music brims with indefinable emotions, flits
from tight-as-a-drum tension to sudden synth-splurges of awe. On the closing "I
Owe You," an alien voice thanks the listener, and expresses concern about
recompensing you for the time and attention bestowed. Rest assured: listening to
Rest is its own reward.
ANANDA PROJECT
Release
(Nite Grooves)
P'TAAH
De'Compressed
(Ubiquity)
In rock, you get local heroes, bands that are big in their town or region. In
dance, you get the opposite. Take Ananda Project's Chris Brann: a god for house
hipsters across the globe for his mid-Nineties releases as Wamdue Kids, but I
bet he can walk round his hometown Atlanta, Georgia, without a nod.
A slightly pat reference point for Release: Everything But the Girl's
Temperamental. "Breaking Down", with its jazzy-guitar flecks and forlorn vocals
(courtesy of Heather Johnson, one of five guest singers) even sounds a bit like
EBTG. But Brann's coming from the other direction: he's a trackmaster getting
songful, rather than singer/songwriters getting their groove on. Release has the
pump of club-oriented house, the kind of voluptuously thick kick drums that
become a cocooning environmental pulse when heard through a massive sound
system. But it also has the intimacy of music for home and headphones. And there
can't be many house artists who put a quote from Edith Sitwell in the CD
booklet.
"Cascades of Colour" is the stand-out. The plangent gravity of the melody,
redolent of Harold Budd & Brian Eno's ambient albums, conjures deliciously mixed
emotions---blue joy, sweet sorrow. Gaelle Adisson's multitracked vocals form a
counterpoint lattice that sets your nape-hairs tingling. Close behind "Cascades"
is the title track, with its "let your spirit free" invocations and pensive
piano chords that suddenly roll backwards on themselves, psychedelic
guitar-style, to form a seamless, timewarping Moebius Strip. Throughout the
album, there's a blurry, miasmic quality to Brann's production, the aural
equivalent of Vaseline-on-the-lens. The way Brann arranges his drums spatially
is like landscape gardening, making you gaze into the distance. On the
vocoderized ballad "Expand Your Mind", snares crack like thunder on the mix's
horizon, while hi-hats bustle right in your face.
The wispy drum'n'bass excursion "Bahia" suggests an affinity with softcore
junglists like LTJ Bukem and PFM, a common quest for aquaboogie wonderlands.
(For more of this vibe, check P'Taah, a Brann side project that moves into
broken beats terrain---see Still On the Fence section below---complete with a
Nubian Mindz remix). As with the Good Looking guys, New Age alarm bells
occasionally ring: lots of liquidly chirruping birdsong, a Stevie Nicks-esque
lyric about a "daughter of the moon" on the otherwise gorgeous "Falling For
You". Mind you, in these despiritualized, money-mad times, maybe we need some of
that. The opulence of Brann's sound doesn't connote aspirational "audio couture"
(a slogan coined by Moving Shadow just at the point the label, and the
drum'n'bass scene, started to undergo gentrification) but what New Agers call
"abundance consciousness"--in plain, old-timer's English, counting your
blessings. Release is the kind of record that reminds you to feel grateful to be
alive.
POLE
3 (Matador)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Staedtizism (~scape)
KIT CLAYTON
Nek Sanalet (~scape)
3 is the most rootical-sounding of Stefan Bekte's records, and the first I've
really cared for. The partially erased skank of tracks like "Taxi" -- all
worn-vinyl pops, "muffled pumping bass" (c/r hyperdub), and awry sway -- make me
imagine some kind of X-Files episode where a guy looks normal but has mutant
inner organs and when you listen to his stomach gurgles it sounds like Burning
Spear. Either that or a lost King Tubby master tape dropped in a puddle and then
dried out in the Caribbean sun for a couple of years, and sounding all warped
and pocked and encrusted. On a similar mirage-wavery reverb-woozy tip, Kit
Clayton and the other exponents on Bekte's ~scape label go some way to
substantiating Ian Penman's argument that the Geist (spirit/ghost) of Seventies
Jamaica currently enjoys an uncanny afterlife in post-Basic Channel/Chain
Reaction technodub.
SWAYZAK
Himawari (Medecine)
Almost defying comment (especially as I know nothing about the outfit), this is
simply very very good dance music somewhere at the intersection of house, techno
(it's definitely not tech-house though---house-tech?) and also electro. Great
balance between light and dark, sensuousness and brutality, filter-spangly
grooves and almost-mentasmic riffs. Track after killer track, including one
featuring dub-poet and All Souls fellow Benjamin Zephaniah. Highly recommended.
MATTHEW HERBERT
Let's All Make Mistakes (Tresor)
British house's great eccentric, Matthew Herbert made the album I've listened to
more than any other these past two years: 1998's Around The House, a voluptuous
amalgam of the innovations of US auteur-producers like Mood II Swing and Deep
Dish, infused with a quirky charm that's uniquely English. Plugging the gap
until that long overdue sequel arrives, here's Herbert's superb mix-CD Let's All
Make Mistakes. It's oddly titled, not least because it's the most seamless mix
I've ever heard on disc. Not in the tedious sense you'd associate with, say
progressive trance DJs like John Digweed---who typically holds two equally
characterless tracks in the mix so long you don't notice the transition. No, on
Mistakes, each tune sounds singular and discrete, but it's meshed with its
predecessor and successor in such an intimately entangled, organic manner that
the result recalls the chimera of ancient myth (a creature formed out of body
parts belonging to different animals).
If anything unites Herbert's 22 selections, it's that same uncanny blend of
supple and rigid that characterizes his own music (of which you get six examples
here). On a typical track, crisp, dry, just-this-side-of-grating textures enfold
little internal oases of lush loveliness. Herbert's own "Tasteful Dub Mix" of
Moloko's "Sing It Back" is plain lovely, a spongy groove that emits a soothing
amniotic glow. Other parts of Mistakes, like the sequence that runs
Pantytec/Errorsmith/DBX, strip away song-flesh to reveal house music's inner
organs, the grotesque gurgles and base bubblings generated by its
gastro-intestinal plumbing. This kind of ultra-minimal house has a lot in common
with experimental electronica, especially "glitch" with its aestheticized
mistakes and malfunctions. In both styles, the musique-concrete-like timbres
create a cornucopia of sounds that can only be evoked by onomatopoeia: ploots,
crickles, schlaaps, grunks, etc . But unlike glitch-techno, Herbert-style house
always keeps the groove pumping. Even at its most tic-riddled and tourettic,
there's an unmistakable wiggle to its walk, a hint of bump'n'grind.
TIMO MAAS
Music For the Maases (Hope Recordings)
AZZIDO DA BASS
"Dooms Night (Timo Maas Remix)" (Kinetic)
"Doom's Night" everybody knows, surely--the best dance track of the year?
Certainly the most implausible crossover tune, appealing to everyone from trance
& progressive headz to the garage scene to Fatboy Slim to the nu-breaks twats to
cyberpunk novelists to Jamaican raggamuffins if that rumour's true. The track's
all-things-to-all-people quality is related to its hard-to-tag generic
slipperiness. It's like Maas has taken the very indistinct-ness of Sasha &
Digweed-style "progressive" (trance sans fromage, house rid of gay disco
flamboyance, techno without either hardcore fervor or Detroit jazziness) and
turned its inhibitions and checked tendencies into positive attributes,
wide-open potential. "Doom's Night" is so inbetween-sounding, merging the gritty
funk of breakbeats with the gritless glide of trance. It chugs along like a
slightly obese monster, waddling and wobbling and almost losing its footing but
determinedly staying on the warpath. The tension between the one-note,
uninflected whub-whub-whub acid-drone and the sculpted fart bassline (which
actually improves the Flat Beat squelchbass sound) , is delicious.
Couldn't initially get into the double-CD anthology of Maas's remixes plus a
handful of his own productions: sounded like a more muscular version of Sasha's
Expander EP, all those tunes like "Rabbitweed" and "Belfunk"; Sasha with balls,
but still with that "progressive" sterility and clinical aura. Heard in its
proper context, a superclub like Twilo (where Maas now has a residency) it makes
a lot more sense. DJs and that sort of clubland pundit seem to be dropping the
phrase "big room" into their track reviews, and it's almost like "big room" has
become a genre in itself, with Sasha as forefather and Timo as the young gun.
Site-specific rather than musically defined (so it remains relatively open to
influences: the "internal hybrid" theory, progress through implosive
intensification rather than expansive advance) "big room" means
colossal-sounding tracks designed to exploit the quadraphonic surroundsound of
the massive club sound system, the vast sub-bass to ultra-treble frequency
spectrum ... tracks that are sculpted in four dimensions, riffs like blocs of
sound-in-motion that swoop across the crowd-body, dazzling tracer-trails of
filtered or echoplexed noise panning across the superclub sky. Maas has
perfected a style of production that has SIZE but avoids sounding epic or
overblown; like a progressive or tech-house DJ, he shuns cheese, but unlike most
of that lot he still retains flava somehow. Impressive, too, the way he works in
different kinds of rhythm-feel (tricksy drum'n'bass science; massive-sounding
electro) into a set that is 90 percent oriented around a rush/pulse
kinaesthetic. Because this music is primarily all about sonic girth and
spectacular effects, it's not especially intimate, soulful, or even "musical".
There's an amorphousness to its texture-surges and two-note oscillations, which
barely qualify as riffs, vamps, or even stabs. Often, it doesn't seem like
there's even notes being played: tracks consist of various concatenations of
chug, pump, pound, surge, and whoosh. Lots of whoosh. Still, when he's firing on
all cylinders, Maas's might is right.
VARIOUS ARTISTS
clicks_+_cuts (Mille Plateaux)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Sonig comp (Sonig/Thrill Jockey)
MOUSE ON MARS
Instrumentals (Soniq/Thrill Jockey)
Gotta admit to having been highly suspicious and sceptical of the "glitch" trend
initially--seeing it as the ultimate extension of IDM anti-populism, i.e. not
just getting rid of the beat, but melody and eventually music itself, leaving
just sonic dust'n' debris But clicks_+_cuts is a surprisingly musical and
sensuous experience. Nu skool auteurs like Jake Mandell, Autopoieses, Neina,
Curd Duca, and Kit Clayton choreograph the digital detritus---the hums, tics,
crackles, and pops generated from vandalized CDs, traumatized hardware, and
daydreaming machinery---with brain-tickling intricacy. Ranging from eddies of
sound-dust to an insectile funk of chitters 'n' creaks, to tangles of iridescent
chimes, clicks_+_cuts proves that electronic music can be groovy even when it
doesn't have a groove. The Sonig comp--featuring Lithops, f.x. Randomiz,
microstoria, vert, and others--goes further still and introduces humour and
weird, goofy charm to the glitch universe. Like Mouse On Mars' own music (
Instrumentals came out on vinyl in late 97 I think and is now happily available
on CD), these tracks often sound like crackpot contraptions, surreal automata,
or beguiling audio-mobiles designed to entrance an alien infant.
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Lily of the Valley (Schematic)
More IDM--what the fuck's happened to me? (Must be something to do with hardly
making it out to clubs anymore--kiddies play time at 7-AM makes dancing 'til the
crack of dawn a costly choice--so home-oriented stuff starts to make more
sense). The missing link between 2 Live Crew and Autechre, booty and brain,
Miami-bassed (forgive me folks!) Schematic showcase their roster's flair for
rhythmic convolution, texturological research, and low-end boom. Tracks like
Takeshi Muto's "Rotea" offer a captivatingly contradictory texture-blend of
succulent and crisp, supple and fractured. Phoenicia's "Yamuna" makes me think
of that old sci-fi scenario, a glistening and refractory crystal-world where
life emerged based around silicon rather than carbon. And Muto's closing "Muto
Love" is like courtly love for a future neo-feudal society: the sighs and
suppressed sobs of a bummed-out bot besotted with the belle dame sans merci, his
all-too-human but heartless mistress.
kid606
"down with the scene" (Ipecac Recordings)
The Soccer Girl EP (Car Park)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
kid606 and friends vol 1 (tigerbeat)
HVRATSKI
Oiseaux 96-98 (Reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge)
PHTYALOCYANINE
25 Tracks Fer 1 Track (Planet Mu)
IDM's bastard children, upstarts who traded in the somber men-in-white-coats
sound-laboratory image in favor of passion, polemic, and petulance. No more
"faceless techno bollocks" impersonality, cultivated anonymity-mystique, or that
geektronic trainspotter fanboy vibe. Instead, uncontrollable urges to
communicate, engage, goad, and incite. All the goodstuff of electronic music
(mad Tex Avery beats, stupid noises, itchy glitches, digital dirt) combined with
emo-core venting (kid606 especially tends to use his music as a dear-diary,
resulting in titles ranging from "Fuck You Sarah" to the public declarations of
sweethearthood on the Soccer Girl EP and PS I Love You; Phtyalocyanine verges on
Reznor-esque viscera-baring expressonism without using a single voice). Other
ingredients include a brattishness redolent of Riot Grrrl/K Records/Huggy Bear's
"Kids' Lib guerrillas", a pinch of Situationist/Dada-style mischief-making, and
a lo-fi-like love of noise, loose ends, and abusing technology. The result,
voila, is what Mike Paradinas has dubbed "glitches with attitude".
In some ways, it's a revolt of younger generation American bedroom producers
against the Europhile-by-default tendencies of IDM (Intelligent Dance Music),
whose first-wave pantheon was all Brit (Aphex, Autechre, Squarepusher, Future
Sound of London, etc) or Kraut (Mouse on Mars, Oval, etc). Hence songs like
Lesser's "Markus Popp Can Kiss My Redneck Ass" and kid606's "Luke Vibert Can
Kiss My Skinny White Indie-Rock Ass"---c.f The Clash's "I'm So Bored With the
USA". That said, they have a lot of allies in the UK and Europe---V/VM,
Speedranch Jansky, Irritant zine, Diskono --neo-Situ pranksters,
nuisance-mongerers, and mess-makers all.
Fave moment so far in the annals of glitchkore: "Catstep/My Kitten/Catnap
Vatstep dsp Remix", the Hvratksi reworking of a tune by his feline-obsessed pal
kid606 that you can find on both Down With and kid606 and Friends. DSP means
digital signal processing, and is the arsenal of techniques that glitchkore
producers use to make the beats sound so texturally arresting, such a fireworks
display of chromatics and timbre. But what really makes "Catstep" so delightful
is the MC with the speak-and-spell robo-voice: at once a piss-take and a
celebration of jungle's mash-up-the-dance spirit. "Catstep" is simultaneously
ridiculous and rinsing like drum'n'bass hasn't been since "Dred Bass" days.
HELLFISH & PRODUCER
Constant Mutation (Planet mu)
After on-and-off flirtations for the past few years, certain IDM producers seem
to be moving towards gabba as the next frontier, now that the drill'n'bass bag
of tricks has lost all novelty. Mike Paradinas plays full-on gabber in his set,
and brought gabba stabs and distorted kicks into his own productions on recent
records like the Kid Spatula Full Sunken Breaks CD. And this year he released on
his Planet Mu label a mix-CD by Hellfish & Producer, leading lights of the tiny
UK hardcore scene, composed entirely of the duo's own tunes-- which mash up
gabba style distorted kickdrums with mad turntabilist scratching, electro-hip
hop influences, and old skool rave rush-riffs. One of the striking things about
the Hellfish & Producer sound (and Paradinas's own gabber tunes) is how the
kick-drums are so distorted, they become this smeared belt of sound with the
percussive impact of each kick muffled deep within this sensuous wall of noise.
There's also more of a fluid and frisky quality to the rhythm programming--it's
still incredibly punishing and monolithic, but there's an ebb and flow of
intensity that ensures that the effect is brutal but not numbing (the downside
with too much gabba). According to Mike, this is down to the possibilities
opened up by the new wave of digital audio software, like "Fruity Loops" --
where you can alter the parameters of every single bass drum kick in each loop
throughout a track: its compression, EQ, amplitude envelope, filter, pitch, even
the actual sample itself. So now you know....
EIFFEL 65
"Too Much of Heaven
THE LOVE BITE
"Take Your Time"
Aural mementos from a holiday in Tuscany--not sure if these count as Balearic
dance music or just pop (in Italy's there's no difference: all pop music is
electronic and gloriously plastic-sounding, even Bon Jovi). So many amazing,
melodramatic, gorgeously catchy tunes---these are just the only ones I was able
to identify and get hold of. "Too Much of Heaven" is preposterous and moving,
Euro-R&B bubblegum that protests against jiggy culture's spiritual bankruptcy,
with a nape-tingle-triggering vocoder-rap vocal that mourns the fact people only
care about "the dollar bill yeah" in slightly shaky Euro-English. "Take Your
Time" is, like the Swayzak album, one of those perfect dance records that not so
much defy description as render it superfluous: a spangly filtered-house tune
with plaintive FX-warbled girl-vox and a subtle sample from Orbital's "Chime".
Not innovative, just consummate.
BOARDS OF CANADA
In A Beautiful Place Out in the Country EP (Warp)
TELE-FUNKEN
A Collection of Ice Cream Vans Vol. 2 (Domino)
FIZZARUM
Monochrome Plural (Domino)
Music Has A Right To Children crept up on me to become one of my favorite
'electronic listening music' albums of all time, close behind stuff by Aphex
Twin and Wagon Christ. I love the tangled strains of wistfulness and eerieness
in the music, the crumbly textures, the miasmic melody-lines. At times, it
recalls the kind of music that played in the gaps between schools TV in the
mornings... or like My Life In the Bush of Ghosts if its exotica was based
around late Seventies Britain rather than Africa. I was listening to it one of
these days and had one of those almost out of body experiences--a mysticism of
the commonplace, the poetry of the municipal... reveries of parks, walkways, and
concrete overpasses, playgrounds with fresh rain on the swings and slides,
housing estates with identical backgardens and young mothers pegging wet shirts
on a windflapped clothing line, clouds skidding across a cold blue March sky...
saplings neatly plotted in canalside recreation areas.... lamposts dimly
gleaming through fog... In A Beautiful Place is more of the same, only better
produced (not necessarily a plus). With its kinder-gamelan chimes and peals, the
Tele: Funken album similarly plugs into the vein of childlike wonder and naivete
running through electronic music; if that sounds merely cute, the record also
veers off into the dark side of the child's imaginary. Russian outfit Fizzarum
don't quite belong in this company, for the nostalgia they evoke is for an
earlier moment in techno's life, not your own: it's like LFO had squeezed out
another album real quick after "What is House?".
VARIOUS ARTISTS
The Forgotten Sounds of Tomorrow (Ersatz Audio)
I-f
Mixed Up in the Hague Vol. 1 (bootleg)
CONSOLE
Rocket in the Pocket (Payola/Matador)
JAKE MANDELL
Love Songs For Machines (Car Park)
ADULT
Dispassionate Furniture EP
Nausea EP
(both Ersatz Audio)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Oral-Alio: A History of Tomorrow (Ersatz Audio)
The Eighties revival continues. The Ersatz comp and the Adult EPs are all
Hardcorps-style kinky-noir electronix and BEF/Heaven 17 tropes of anomie &
modernity, "desire and efficiency". The I-f mix-CD is archival Eighties, the
progressive Italo-disco and Eurosynthpop that soundtracked those legendary
Detroit high-school parties that spawned techno: now you can finally hear
Alexander Robotnik, Klein & MBO, "Sharivari", et al. Console bring enough
contemporary programming science to the Eighties revival party to avoid charges
of retro-redundancy a LA Les Rhythme Digitales or DMX Crew. But nobody has made
a record as exciting as "Being Boiled" yet.
RONI SIZE/REPRAZENT
In the Mode (Talkin' Loud)
Call it the Mystery of Subcultural Persistence--the reason why there's Goths
galore in the Y2K, why death metal refuses to die, why there's 16 year old kids
with gel-spiked hair and Discharge T-shirts mooching around St. Mark's Place.
Fact is, at any given moment, 95 percent of listeners are not "in the place to
be" (as decreed by style mags and hipster vanguardists). Long after its claims
to cutting edge-ness have faded and its street audience got hijacked by UK
garage, drum'n'bass mysteriously persists. Globally, there's more producers and
labels than ever, and pioneers like Omni Trio are up to Album #4 already. And
now here's Size & the Reprazent crew with the sequel to 1997's New Forms,
simultaneously the highwater mark of jungle's crossover and an aesthetic
pinnacle.
Against all the odds, it's a terrific record. Like last year's Breakbeat Era
project and Krust's solo debut, In the Mode is darker and harder than the
jazz-inflected New Forms, largely replacing the latter's warm acoustic
instrumentation and lavish arrangements with nagging computer bleats and garbled
cluster-fucks of dirty samples. It's also the Bristol clan's most concerted
effort yet to align themselves with hip hop, expertly weaving guest rhymes from
Method Man, Rage Against the Machine's Zack , and human beatbox jester Rahzel,
into the frenetic rhythmic onrush. The only slight disappointment is those
beats---pulse-racingly urgent but (like most drum'n'bass these past three years)
rather linear in their chase-scene propulsion. Whither the frisky
topsy-turviness and polyrhythmic exuberance of jungle's annus mirabilus, 1994?
Still, tunes like the Onalee-crooned "Lucky Pressure" show that Size & Co remain
unrivalled at integrating songfulness with jungle's dense, fissile grooves.
Overall, an unexpected triumph. Long may they persist.
X-DREAM
"Aspirin" on Tsunami compilation (Kinetic(
Live at El Cuco rave, Puerto Rico
Shame this Hamburg duo languish in the psy-trance ghetto -- this is dark'n'doomy
drug bombast on a Gothic tekno diagonal that transects accepted genre divisions
and connects with the Mover, Nasty Habits, and Suburban Knight. A night ride
through the catacombs of the cosmos. X-Dream's Markus closed out Tsunami rave's
in Puerto Rico, the most tropical and bejungled part of the US of A, with a
dead-of-night til crack-o'-dawn DJ set, progressively stripping away
psy-trance's frilly fractal FX and grinding out a vast blare of barely more than
distorted kickdrum and concussive bass. And the blonde-tressed maenads in loon
pants and cobwebby shawls danced the rites of Pan.
DAN BELL
The Button Down Mind of Daniel Bell (Tresor)
Triffic house-tech mix-Cd.
FAT CAT'S 8 x 7"s OF EMILIANA TORRINI REMIXES
Fave: the going-insane endless spiral FX of the V/Vm respray.
DETROIT GRAND PU BAHSv "Sandwiches" (Throw/Jive Electro)
Nice 'n' sleazy does it. Does it every time.

2STEP AND UK UNDERGROUND GARAGE

CHRIS MAC-- "Dubplate Style" (2step dub mix of 'Baby Gonna Rock Dis') (First
Class Records)
ZED BIAS -- "Neighbourhood" (Locked On)
ARCHITECHS -- "Body Groove" (Go Beat)
NAPA TAC -- "Dibby Dibby Sound" (white)
TRUESTEPPERS FEAT. VICTORIA BECKHAM-- "Out of Your Mind" (Arista)
SHOLA AMA--- "Imagine"
B15 PROJECT --"Girls Like This"
SWEET FEMALE ATTITUDE --"Flowers"
OXIDE & NEUTRINO--"Bound 4 Da Reload (Casualty)" (EastWest)
CRAIG DAVID--"Fill Me In (Artful Dodger Remix)" (Wildstar)
CHRIS MAC PRESENTS UK APACHI & DAVID BOOMAH--"Beep Beep!" (Metrix)
LEEE JOHN--"Your Mind, Your Body, Your Soul" (Locked On)
DJ ZINC -- "138 Trek" (label unknown)
TEEBONE FEAT. MC SPARKS AND MC KIE (a/k/a TKS) -- "Fly Bi' (ditto)
WOOKIE -- "Battle" (Soul 2 Soul)
VARIOUS MCs-- "Millenium Twist" and "K.O" on the Warm Up EP (Middle Row)
ARTIST UNKNOWN-- "Warship" (Pulse)
STEALTH MEN--"Chapter 1: Behind the Wall" (Phatt Budd)
2 WISEMEN-- "Hardcore Garage" (Ibiza)
SO SOLID CREW -- "Dilemma"
N&G feat. MC CREED AND ROSE WINDROSS--"Liferide"
BASEMENT JAXX--"You Can't Stop Me (Steven Emmanuel Remix)" (XL)
TEEBONE & SKIBA DEE -- "Super S" (Solid City Records)
SECOND PROTOCOL -- "Basslick" (EastWest)
SOVEREIGN -- "There You Go (Pink bootleg)" (All Good)
MONSTA BOY feat. DENZIE Denzie-- "Sorry" (Locked On)
BRANDY VS X-MEN-- "Angel" (white)
MJ COLE---"Sincere Remix" (Talkin' Loud
El-B feat. JUICEMAN -- "Digital" (Locked On)
Y-TRIBE-- "Computer Love" (label unknown)
VARIOUS ARTISTS--- Blackmarket Presents 2Step Vol II (Black Market)
VARIOUS ARTISTS--- Pure Garage: Mixed Live by E-Z and Pure Garage III (Warner
ESP import)
VARIOUS ARTISTS--- The Sound of the Pirates (Locked On)
VARIOUS ARTISTS--Masterstepz freebie mix-CD on cover of Mixmag
VARIOUS ARTISTS--- 2Step Pressure mixed by Merlin (www.wiggle.cx)
UK garage/2step enjoyed its fourth fabulous summer in a row, defying both the
Law of Subcultural Exhaustion that decrees genres get three years tops before
going pear-shaped (e.g. jungle) and the usual problems of over-exposure leading
to boredom that accompany mainstream crossover. But I've got to admit I started
to lose much of my interest before the summer was out -- assisted by close
encounters with the sheer unpleasantness of 2step as club culture (see
over-rated of 2000, forthcoming), the mounting drabness of the "breakbeat
garage" tendency (see over-rated of 2000, forthcoming), and just personal
exhaustion with that sound. If you're really into something, by a certain point,
you've accumulated so much of it (and I probably have more UK garage 12's than
jungle at this point) that an inverse-ratio syndrome sets in: it becomes harder
to be surprised, it feels like the genre isn't moving as fast as it was, fast
enough for you. (The same thing happened with drum'n'bass for me around early
97--although I'd argue that was real stagnation setting in, not a perspectival
trick). Plus it's tough getting the records in New York, and the excitement
doesn't get continually recharged every weekend by being plugged into the
electrical grid that is London pirate radio. At any rate, here's an inventory of
2step delights from this year.
Chris Mack's "Dubplate Style", Leee John's "Your Mind, Your Body, Your Soul":
love the way the drums on these tracks are so digitally texturized and glossy,
it's like the whole track's made from lustrous fabric that crackles, crinkles
and kinks with each percussive impact. The way the latter morphs into the former
on that Masterstepz/Mixmag freebie is my fave 2step sleight-of-mix this year.
Fabulous also to hear Imagination's Leee John again nearly 20 years after
"Bodytalk". "Dubplate" has sticky-the-most snares and this fantastic pinging and
chiming xylo-bass that's sort of pizzicato and rib-rattling all at once. Chris
Mack generally is a supreme exponent of 2-step's art of decentering and
spatializing the drums across the stereo-field---so it's like you're moving
through a mesh-space of pointillist percussion, your body buffeted and flexed
every-which-way by cross-rhythms and hyper-syncopations. Shame he doesn't often
have good-enough songs to work this magic through and around, though ("Beep
Beep" and "Baby Gonna Rock Dis" don't quite cut it as Tunes).
"Vocal science" seems to have faded a bit from the scene--the cyber-melisma
effects, the percussive voice-riffs, the way producers make the diva twinkle,
tremble, buckle, pulsate, fold in on herself. Nowadays these deployments tend to
be more subtle: like the ecstatic shiver-stutter woven electronically into the
word "re-e-e-mix" by Artful Dodger on their version of Craig David's already
ultra-warbly "Fill Me In." It's unnerving because the line between what's human
and what's artificial isn't so clearly defined.
Oxide & Neutrino's much-detested "Bound 4 Da Reload" --possibly the most
tuneless UK Number One ever, but bleakly compelling all the same: those icy
staccato strings, that sinisterly bubbling bass. Cool, too, that it infiltrated
dancehall's metaphor of the killer track as ordnance in the war of sound versus
sound right into the heart of popland. Also on the nu-dark tip, "Warship" which
is either by or on Pulse, I'm not sure: the best techstep record since
"Metropolis" essentially, albeit substantially slower of course. What's weird is
that you'd hear it in the mix with soppy garridge tunes like SFA's "Flowers" or
lush musical ones like "Sincere", but this is a track that contains no garage
elements whatsoever. Weird also that the scene's getting into the kind of
caustic acid-y sounds that originally drove people out of drum'n'bass and into
speed garage in the first place. Stealth Men's "Behind The Wall" is in that
strung-out coke psychosis mode a la Skycap, and is notable for its creepily
effective Tracy Chapman samples --from some song about hearing either wife abuse
or child abuse going on in your next door neighbour's flat, but here taking on
something of the audio-hallucinatory agony of Coppola's The Conversation. Also
plugs into that hardcore continuum of using anything that comes to hand, not
being afraid to be cheesy (see also: garage remake of "Tainted Love", the UB40
"One In Ten" chorus borrowed in Suburban Lick's "Here Comes the Lick Again", etc
etc).
B15's "Girls Like This", Shola Ama's "Imagine".... high-pitched melisma anthems
that showcase a crucial aspect of 2step: the way that extreme treble can be as
intense as extreme bass, triggering a fizzy-dizzy sensation like champagne
running through your veins instead of blood. Leading the counter-reaction to
chart-step's trebletastic effervescence, Second Protocol's "Basslick", El-B's
"Digital", and So Solid's "Dilemma" bring the new bass-2-dark minimalism...
Amazing to see how when the high frequencies are stripped away, the ladeez just
disappear from the floor ("gir-rls, don't like this, n--n-n-no no"). "Basslick"
is just jump-up jungle slowed to 130 b.p.m., right down to the shlocky classical
music intro, but the one-note bassdrone of "Dilemma" is bracingly innovative,
echoing electro without replicating it. Shame about the cliched martial arts
movie samples, though.
Why can't 2step's balance of yin and yang, tweeter and woofer, lite and dark,
stay where it's at? Especially when the result is chart smashes as jarring and
weird as Truesteppers's "Out of Your Mind". I saw them on this crappy CD: UK pop
show on TV the night I arrived in England to do a garage story for Spin: Posh
Spice wearing one of those R&B singer-style headset microphones and moving
amidst this huge phalanx of militaristic-looking backing dancers shrouded in a
sinister cloud of dry ice, Jonny L and the other guy lurking at the back with
their keyboards. "Out of Your Mind" is so shrill and jagged-sounding it's almost
atonal, R&B-meets-Schoenberg. I love the vocal duel between Posh and the
indignant vocoderized male singer. And the way she warns "this tune's gonna
punish you."
Wookie's definitely over-rated and liked by the wrong sort (acid-jazzy,
Rhodes-fetishising tossers) but the first one-note section of "Battle" is
undeniably great, building this fabulous tension. Then it opens up into ghastly
Giscomby Brit-Soul. Thank Heaven for the dark mix that's just the tense, terse
first part of the song---remixing at its most effective and improving!
Napa Tac's "Dibby Dibby Sound": one of those great tunes that come out, probably
get played a few weeks on the pirates, you'd have to be in the shops that week
to get a copy (I just happened to be in London), and then it's gone: a glorious
composite of tried-and-true elements from across the hardcore continuum
1990-2000 (lovely housey shimmer-riffs, bit of ragga chat, rolling bass, ravey
stabs, bleep'n'bass echoes) that for some reason makes me think of Foul Play at
their finest. If you ever see it, buy on sight. Teebone feat. Sparks & Kie's
"Fly Bi": my favorite of this year's many MC tunes, boisterous, exuberant,
insanely catchy. What else? The fractured funk of Stephen Emanuel's remix of the
Jaxx's "You Can't Stop Me "..... Zed's "Neighbourhood": the plangent roots vocal
and twin bass-riffs (a midfrequency blare of drone-swarm distortion and an
electro-style battery of sub-low thuds and booms)..... Sovereign's boot of
Pink's "There You Go": a tuff little unit, with Star Trek/Lieutenant Uhuru type
radio-sonar blips running all the way through.... Monsta Boy "Sorry" with its
absurdly weepy and prostate-with-regret sounding Denzie vocal..... Architechs's
sultry "Body Groove".... N&G feat. MC Creed and Rose Windross's "Liferide": not
sure if this even came out this year, but a melodic/percussive plinky xylo-bass
classic, and a good spur to pondering why exactly that garage MC style of
prissy, prim, clipped delivery sounds so cool... There's probably dozens more
I've forgotten. Perhaps strangest of all, and the kind of record that will
always keep me fixated on "the sound of the pirates", was Middle Row's The Warm
Up EP, with the Dickensian dancehall of "Millenium Twist" complete with comical
Fagin impersonation and the bizarre boxing-ring MC narrative that holds together
"K.O."
A good year, then, but we're overdue another paradigm shift from the London
hardcore continuum. Within a year, I expect another "all change" on the part of
the pirates. Can't wait, and can't imagine what it could be---always a good
sign.

UNDIE RAP

MIKE LADD
Welcome To the Afterfuture (Ozone)
THE INFESTICONS
Gun Hill Road (Big Dada Recordings)
ANTI-POP CONSORTIUM
Tragic Epilogue (75 Ark)
DIVINE STYLER
Wordpower 2: Directrix (Mo Wax)
SCIENZ OF LIFE
Coming Forth By Day: the Book of the Dead (Intergalactic Entertainment)
COMMON
"The Light" (MCA)
To reiterate last year's rant: critics love lost causes (it's almost part of the
job description)and although this defiance of the market's judgement is
honorable and although it's absolutely true that what sells is not necessarily
any indication of interest or value, we've all seen from the indie rock
mentality how failure can become a perverse token of integrity and how
mainstream success gets equated in knee-jerk fashion with worthlessness. If this
is problematic in rock, it's even more so in rap, a megabuck entertainment
industry these days for sure, but still motored by the cruel fluctuations of
popular desire, a/k/a "the streets". These last few years critics have endorsed
"lost causes" and committed/condemned marginalists as The Roots, Prince
Paul/Handsome Boy Modelling School, Kool Keith, Deltron 3030, Quannum, etc, all
of who are deemed to be saving hip hop from itself or some such condescending
cliche. And they've consistently recoiled from huge-selling artists on labels
like Ruff Ryders, Cash Money, Murder Inc, Roc-A-Fella, despite the fact that
producers like Mannie Fresh, Neptunes, Rockwilder, Swizz Beats, Timbaland, and
others represent a creative surge within hardcore, gangsta rap not seen
since.... well, since ever, actually (the Dre/G-funk sound was nice, but not
radical; RZA's a one-trick pony and besides which Wu-Tang have always been on
that edge between undie and street anyway.). Yo, reality-check: a bitter pill to
swallow, but the truth is that Nineties rap was shaped not by 3 Feet High or
Fear of A Black Planet (twin totems of the critic-cherished "lost golden age of
1988-91"), but by N.W.A's Efil4zaggin and Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready To Die.
Similarly, the directness of Tupac has proved far more influential on MC's than
any Wu-Tang clansman's virtuoso encryption skillz.
Okay, rant over---now I can admit to liking rather a lot this year's batch of
undie demi-gods. Per last year's comments on Kool Keith, I do think the
Afro-Futurist/black s.f./myth-science thing has become a rather predictable
shtick--most of which seem to involve endless twists on the old
Parliament-Funkadelic saga of interstellar funkateer warriors resisting a
devoid-of-funk Evil Empire. By Deltron 3030's record, even fans of that kind of
thing had noticed how formularized this particular brand of hip hop concept
album had gotten---easily as cliched as the realer-than-thou thug life/we are
the streets personae and lyrics in gangsta rap. Plus, that
too-many-words-for-the-bar-scheme skool of rhyming and densely encoded,
imagistically overloaded, pop reference corroded style of writing can be a real
chore to listen to; if I wanted to tie my brain in knots I'd be perusing
Finnegan's Wake or Of Grammatology. Still, there were weird sounds and striking
lines galore from the Anti-Pop Consortium/Mike Ladd/Infesticons axis and on
Divine Styler's LP (re-released for some reason; it came out late 98
originally).
A record that appears to have gotten virtually no attention whatsoever even from
the undieland backpackers: Scienz of Life's Coming Forth By Day: the Book of the
Dead. When I first encountered this I was blown away by the sonix -- which
seemed to take off from OutKast's Sun Ra-gone-hip hop classic "Elevators (You
and Me)" and get even more ethereally unstrung--but dismissed the lyrics as yet
more Afronautical, ancient-to-the-future, prophecy-by-numbers bizness, complete
with pharaoh face-masks on the cover. However, it turns out, according to a
feature in the New York Press later that year, that the group are actually
informed by a genuine esoteric philosophy; they are adepts of the Nuwaubian
creed, and in fact live and record in the organization's compound in Atlanta.
Not that sincere belief compensates for crackpot notions, and I for one am
doubtful about the historical arguments about Nubia as cradle of civilization
(even if it was, it's a long way from West Africa, where most black Americans
originated---geographically, it's like me claiming ancestral glory for things
that took place in Siberia.) But the Nuwaubian creed seems relatively and
refreshingly free of blacks versus white devils style Manichaeism, Tribe of
Israel envy, or the other "fusion paranoia" traits that often taint Afrocentric
mysticism; its racial pride doesn't seem to entail regarding any Others as
subhuman or as a eternally devious people. Anyway, never mind the bollocks, hail
the music: at times not far from the sort of svelte-but-sinister darkstep you
might hear dead-of-night on a London pirate, twisted and garbled jazz-noir and
death-Muzak strands barely integrated into music but haunting and hypnotic
nonetheless. Very worth searching for. (Try www.intagalactic.com, or
www.subversemusic.com)
Common's "The Light" doesn't really fit in this company except for the
more-white-fans-than-black (well, probably) dull'n'worthy aura. A sublime
example of the paradoxes of sampling: I only like this tune for the Bobby
Caldwell sample, but I'm almost positive that if I heard the original song in
its blue-eyed jazz'n'soul lite radio context, it'd be nauseating. Common's
flat-as-pancake delivery, boring right-on lyrics, and the undemonstrative groove
provide the perfect supportive matrix for that sample to shine. There's probably
a million examples of hip hop (or hardcore) isolating the sublime moments in
their sample-sources and discarding the dreggy rest, but I can't think of one
where so there's so little else about the new track it adorns to catch the ear.
But without Common and the bland backing track, it wouldn't work, strangely.
OUTKAST
Stankonia (La Face/Arista)
Despite the fact that Atlanta specifically is the money-mad hub of the New South
and spiritually closer to Silicon Valley than the cotton fields, people still
imagine all of America below Mason-Dixie as "country" rather than urban. Which
is why OutKast's 1998 Aquemini was cherished by critics for the way its organic,
live-band feel-- horn stabs, string cascades, Isley Brothers guitar links, even
a harmonica solo from an honest-to-goodness black minister--was so different
from the jittery cyberfunk rhythms that dominated R&B and rap in the wake of
Timbaland. On Stankonia, though, possibly in response to the monstrous success
last year of the Southern "sci-fi" sound of labels like Cash Money, there's a
marked inorganic edge to the textural palette, especially on tracks produced by
Earthtone III, like the gibbering, gargoyle-like synths on "Snappin' &
Trappin'." As with so much rap recently, Stankonia 's often incredibly close to
electronica--and for once, the influence is direct and fully acknowledged. Big
Boi and Andre 3000 attend raves in the Atlanta area, did field research in
London's clubland, and upped the tempos on Stankonia because "nowadays you got
different drugs on the [rap] scene. X [Ecstasy] done hit the hood." The single
"Bombs Over Baghdad" is a stab at drum'n'bass, but a bit of a noisy mess, marred
by the kind of metal guitar that people are praising only because any rock
element at all is so unusual in rap these days. "?" is a far more compelling
foray into the jungle--tangled breaks, chirruping synth-blurts, ravey
micro-riffs.
Aquemini often recalled the early guitar-dominated Funkadelic, but Stankonia 's
coordinates are much more George Clinton's Eighties electrofunk sound: "I'll
Call Before I Come", for instance, features waddling "Atomic Dog" synth-bass and
processed percussion that dribbles like a hound in heat. Elsewhere, you hear
another psychedelic funkateer : "Ms. Jackson" recalls Prince at his most
flower-power-poppy circa Around the World In A Day, all skidding and stumbling
backwards-echo drums and lovely "Pop Life" piano. Lyrically, it's a touching
take on the baby-daddy syndrome (the guy who's no longer with the woman whose
child he fathered), addressed to the baby-mama's mama: "Never meant to make your
daughter cry/I apologize a trillion times."
OutKast are often tarred with the same "soul-nourishing" brush as their
compadres Goodie Mob (both groups work with production squad Organized Noize).
And it's true: OutKast don't really go in for "niggativity" or ghettocentric
"real-ness" Where Ruff Ryders-style hardcore MCs "spit" (slang for rapping that
vividly evokes expulsion of noxious emotion), Boi and Dre skip. For them,
rapping is still about (word)play, not verbal homicide. When it comes to the
gender wars, there's equal-opportunity abuse on "We Luv Deez Hoez", with
put-downs of both the gold-digger who schemes to get pregnant and the foolish
baby-daddy who "should have pulled it out and squirted on her eyelash." What
makes OutKast interesting is the way the duo's partnership dramatizes and
reconciles the two warring sides of rap's soul: bad boy versus conscious. Boi is
the Cadillac-driving playa, a thug with a heart. Wackily attired Dre is an
androgynous dreamer/kook a la PM Dawn's Prince B or Kool Keith, to the point of
receiving the ultimate gangsta aspersion of "gayness" (despite being Erykah
Badu's baby-daddy).
Most rap albums peter out around halfway, but Stankonia just gets better.
"Humble Mumble" unleashes a triple-time tongue-twister of internal rhymes and
assonance over an urgent slink of a groove. "Red Velvet" is an audio-maze of
multitracked, warped vocals as cartoonishly absurd as wildstyle graffiti, with a
lyric that's street-wise in a different sense to the usual thug threats: it
warns playas that rubbing your wealth in folks' faces ain't just mean, it's
dumb--some hater will eventually try to take it, and your life. "Gangsta Sh*t"
is a headspinning miasma of echoplexed guitar billowing and braiding across the
stereo-field. Cyber-ballad "Toilet Tisha" grieves for a pregnant teenager who
committed suicide in the bog (hence the title's painful pun), gorgeously
appointed with liquid blues guitar like John Martyn jamming with Zapp. "Slum
Beautiful" features cigsmoke-through-sunshaft curlicues of backwards-guitar that
could be from "1983, A Merman I Should Turn To Be", while closer "Stankonia
(Stanklove)" is real-deal trip hop, a stoned mirage of cosmic choir,
robot-with-indigestion bass, and dub-reverb.
Like Electric Ladyland, "Stankonia" doubles as the name of OutKast's studio and
their nickname for utopia: a boogie wonderland where you can free your ass and
mind. Dissolving all the binary oppositions that conventionally structure music
(live vs. studio/programmed, streets vs. space, roots vs. future), OutKast's
music is equal parts fleshly and phantasmagoric. A freakadelic masterpiece.

POST-ROCK! !

Re. 2000, two words: post-rock lives! What with Kid A, Godspeed You Black
Emperor, and Sigur Ros, it was the best year for that most "so-called"-called of
genres since records have been kept, or even made. (And Tortoise's new album's
is a bit of a return to form too).
Actually, I'm still on the fence about Godspeed and Sigur (see "Still On the
Fence" section below). Kid A, though, is undeniable: if anything fits the
post-rock definition, this record--the consummate guitar band making an
almost-no-guitars album, informed by listening to the entire back catalogue of
Warp Records, then this is it. Of course, the very post-rockness of Kid A made
many people hate it all the more, from silly old punkies like Howard Hampton in
the New York Timeswielding the "it's just like the Seventies"/new Pink Floyd
big-scare argument as if A/ the idea of the pre-punk 1970s as a cultural void
hadn't been thoroughly discredited B/ the present doesn't makes that period look
like a fucking golden age, to Nick Hornby in the New Yorker whose complaint
boiled down to the fogie-ish claim that the album is simply too demanding for
grown-ups to listen 'cos they don't have much time to get into records and they
get back from the office totally shagged-out and want to hear something relaxing
and familiar, so how dare Radiohead "indulge" themselves.
The thing about Kid A, though, is every single track on the record, with the
exception of "Treefingers" maybe, is constructed like a song and is incredibly
melodic and memorable. Guitar or not, quite a bit of it rocks. My initial
astonishment faded quite quickly and the record seemed quite palatable, possibly
too palatable even.
I haven't listened to Kid A much since I wrote a Radiohead versus Britrock
thinkpiece for Uncut (which I'll post up here eventually) so I'm not sure what I
think about it now: to some extent the juggernaut of coverage around it slightly
tarnished and interfered with what was originally a purely sensuous experience
of delight and wonder. What follows is the initial, purer response, written up
for Spin based on a listening party on the bizarrely inappropriate penthouse
roofdeck of a hotel (incredibly fierce sunshine, critics milling around trying
to avoid each other's gaze--keeping their cards close to their chest, and just
plain awkward at the public airing of such private music) followed by four hours
alone with it an office at the PR firm. Things I wish I'd known: that there was
hardly any guitar on the record, and that one of the guys was playing an Ondes
Martenot (spacey-sounding proto-synth much favored by Oliver Messaien and used
for the Star Trek theme apparently).
RADIOHEAD
Kid A (Capitol)
There's always been something slightly uncool about Radiohead. The characterless
name, binding them to that undistinguished pre-Britpop era of semi-noisy
guitarbands with equally blah names like The Catherine Wheel. The albatross of
"Creep," the sort-of-great, sort-of-embarrassing song whose rousing
anthemic-ness they've long since complicated. The superfluous "h" in Yorke's
Christian name. "Cool," though, has never been Radiohead's thing. Leaving all
that hipster credibility stuff to the Sonic Youths, Becks, and Stereolabs,
Radiohead instead lay their wares out on the stall marked "importance." They
hark back to an era when bands could presume the existence of an audience that
took them deadly serious, and audiences in turn looked to bands to somehow
explain them rather than merely entertain.
This self-seriousness--the earnestness of being important--is why critics
continually reach back for the Pink Floyd parallel. (That, and the sheer
magnitude of Radiohead's music and themes). It's not the tinsel and tack of
Seventies pop kitsch that is unsalvageable---it's the solemnity and sense of
entitlement with which bands comported themselves as Artists back then, the
concept albums and gatefold symbolism. Everything about Radiohead---the trouble
they take over track sequencing the albums to work as wholes, the lavish artwork
and cryptic videos, the ten month stints in their private recording studio in
the English countryside---connects them to a bygone era when bands strove
without irony to make Major Artistic Statements. In the contemporary context of
pop's tyrannical triviality, there's something almost heroic about this
unfashionable impulse towards the deep-and-meaningful. Is there still a market
for this thing? Go ask Trent Reznor...
Like many people of the electronic persuasion, I was eventually seduced by the
ear-ravishing textural loveliness of OK Computer. I've still got only the
faintest idea of what Radiohead are "about", or what any single Computer lyric
depicts. Lucky for me, it's the sheerly sonic that Radiohead have plunged into
full-tilt this time round. KID A's opening tracks make a mockery of the impulse
to interpret or identify. "Everything In Its Right Place" teems with eerily
pulsating voice-riffs, bleats of digital baby babble, and smeary streaks of
vocal tone-color that are barely distinguishable from the silvered synth-lines.
A honeycomb of glitchy electronix that sound like chirruping space-critters and
robo-birds, "Kid A" could be by Mouse On Mars; Yorke's voice is melted and
extruded like Dali-esque cheese whiz. After this jaw-dropping oddness, the
relatively normal rock propulsion of "The National Anthem"---grind-and-surge
bass-riff, cymbal-splashy motorik drums---ought to disappoint. But the song is
awesome, kosmik highway rock that splits the difference between Hawkwind's
"Silver Machine" and Can's "Mother Sky," then throws a freejazz bedlam of Art
Ensemble of Chicago horns into the equation. All wincing and waning
atmospherics, the out-of-body-experience ballad "How To Disappear Completely"
calms your metabolic rate in preparation for "Treefingers", an ambient
instrumental whose lustrous vapors make me think of a rainforest stirring and
wiping the sleep from its eyes. Now you too can own your own miniature of
Eternity.
Revealing fact: a high proportion of Radiohead websites provide "guitar tabs" as
well as lyrics, so that the Jonny Greenwood fans can match his every last fret
fingering and tone-bend. Something tells me there won't be too many tabs
transcribed from KID A . Saturated with effects and gaseous with sustain, the
guitars resemble natural phenomena--dew settling, cloud-drift--more often than
powerchords or lead lines. With producer Nigel Godrich as "sixth" member,
Radiohead have gone so far into the studio-as-instrument approach, into
overdubbing, signal processing, multitracked and treated vocals, radical stereo
separation, and other anti-naturalistic techniques, that they've effectively
made a post-rock record.
That said, KID A 's "side two" (no such thing with CDs of course, but
"Treefingers" feels like the classic "weird one" at the end of the first side)
is slightly more conventional. "Optimistic" is mined from the same lustrous gray
seam of British post-punk as the Bunnymen's "All I Want" on Heaven Up Here. What
PiL did with "Death Disco" and Joy Division with "She's Lost Control" at the
dawn of the Eighties, "Idioteque" does for the modern dance. Call it bleak house
or glum 'n' bass: the track works through the tension between the heartless,
inflexible machine beat and Yorke's all-too-human bleat, trembling and wobbling
like a distraught amoeba over the rigid grid of rhythm.
I'm still not convinced that Yorke's lyrical opacities and crypticisms don't
conceal hidden shallows, c..f. Radiohead admirer Michael Stipe. But as just
another instrument in the band, as a swoony, voluptuously forlorn texture in the
sound, he's dazzling. Yorke moves through the strange architecture of these
songs with a poise and grace comparable to his hero Scott Walker. Less oblique
than OK Computer but way more indecipherable (the deliberately slack enunciation
takes us into Scuse Me While I Kiss this Guy territory much of the time),
Yorke's words evoke disassociation, dejection, ennui, numb indifference.
"Optimistic" (it's not the least bit) scans the world with a jaundiced eye and
sees only bestial, un-evolved struggle: "vultures circling the dead", big fish
eating little fish, and people who seem like they "just came out the swamp". "In
Limbo" recalls the fatalistic castaways and torpid, passive nonentities from
Eno's mid-Seventies solo albums. "Idioteque" grimly heralds an "Ice Age coming"
(presumably emotional heat-death, rather than climatic). And "Motion Picture
Soundtrack" closes the album with the proverbial whimper--a mushmouthed Yorke
dulling the heartbreak with "red wine and sleeping pills... cheap sex and sad
films" amidst near-kitsch cascades of harp and soaring angel-choir harmonies.
On first, stunned listen, KID A seems like the sort of album typically
followed--a few years later, and after chastening meetings between band and
accountants--with the Back To Our Roots Record, the retreat to scaled-down
simplicity. ("We realized that our early sound was where our hearts really
lay"--you know the score). With further immersion (and this is one of those
albums where you want to curl up into a foetal ball inside your headphones), the
uncommercialism seems less blatant, the songfulness emerges from the
strangeness. The track sequencing, immaculate and righteous in its aesthetic
logic, gives KID A the kind of shape and trajectory that lingers in your
mind---it's a CD people will play over and over in its entirety, without
reprogramming micro-albums of their favorite bits. Smart, too, of Radiohead to
resist the temptation to release a double and instead stick to a 50 minute
duration close to the classic vinyl elpee's length. Ultimately this album A does
not seem like the self-indulgent act of commercial suicide that some will
castigate and others celebrate it as. That doesn't mean it's not hugely
ambitious or adventurous (it may even be "important", whatever that might mean
in this day and age). But the audience amassed through The Bends and OK Computer
is not suddenly going to vaporize. Part of being into Radiohead is a willingness
to take seriously the band's taking themselves (too) seriously. The fans will
perservere past the initial shock and discover that KID A is Radiohead's best
album as well as their bravest.

SEMI-POP, UN-ROCK, PLAIN UNCLASSIFIABLE

BROADCAST
The Noise made By People (Warp/Tommy Boy)
Extended Play Two (Warp/Tommy Boy)
Obvious coordinates for Broadcast: midway between Stereolab and Saint Etienne.
Sixties psych influenced, analog synthy, but not retro, subtly informed by
Nineties technology. The singer reminds me a bit of Dorothy Moskowitz from
United States of America, the late Sixties synthesizer rock pioneers (specially
on their classic "Garden of Earthly Delights) or a more chilled and poised Grace
Slick. And song-wise sometimes their vibe is redolent of the band/song in
Midnight Cowboy 's freak-out happening/party scene, Elephant's Memory "Old Man
Willow"---oddly poised between flower power twee and genuinely eldritch. Lovely
stuff.
ADD N TO (X)
Add Insult to Injury (Mute)
Imagine an alternate universe where the synthesizer displaced the guitar as
rock's primary instrument. A world where the superbands of the 1970s weren't Zep
or Sabbath but keyboard-dominated prog-rockers like Heldon and Goblin, where
punk was kickstarted by Silver Apples and Suicide not the Velvet Underground and
the New York Dolls, and where techno never needed to happen. This is the
parallel reality conjured by Add N To (X).
Where synth-based fare today is dancefloor oriented, pulse-based, and hypnotic,
Add N To (X)'s music is heavy riffing and headbanging. Electronic music has an
in-built tendency towards Appollonian neatness and prissy subtlety. Psychotic
rather than neurotic, Add N To (X) seize upon the synthesizer's under-explored
capacity for mess, mayhem, and Dionysian disorder. They relish the analog
synth's vocabulary of vulgar blurts, toxic emissions, fartacious eruptions, and
histrionic whinnies. Their tracks are steam-punk contraptions, creaking and
hissing like B-movie computers pushed to the limit. Add N To (X) are also a
rampaging, fully live band, with two human drummers (well, if it was good enough
for the Allman Brothers and Adam and the Antz).
They may hate electronica's machine rhythms, but they're not totally averse to
digital techniques: "Peanuts for Eno" features jungle-style drum breaks that are
pitchshifted and computer-edited, and they even dabbled in sampling on their
last album Avant Hard (with a sample from Canterbury scene proggers Egg!). "Plug
Me in", the single, is deceptively light and Air-y, and it foregrounds one of
the irritating aspects of their analog fetish: the belief that deploying
voice-box is any kind of big whoop, even after Cher's "Believe" and the endemic
use of vocoder in recent R&B. Mostly, though, Add N To (X) eschew kitsch in
favor of bombast: the mastodon boogie of "Incinerator No. 1", the 16 minute pomp
and circumstance of "The Regent Is Dead." There's also an oddly appealing
English seediness: "Monster Bobby," with its thuggish chant and Gary Glitter
beat crunching like a Doc Marten in the groin, could be a soundtrack candidate
if they ever remade A Clockwork Orange, while the sleazy bass-pummel of "Peanuts
for Eno" recalls the Moog-laced punk of The Stranglers's "Bring On the Nubiles".

Some folk regard Add N To (X) as just a conceptualist novelty outfit, pure
English art school. But Add Insult to Injury is actually the group's third album
in three years, and if not quite Grand Funk Railroad three-albums-per-year rate,
still testifies to a desire to be taken seriously as a proper musical entity. In
that parallel universe where the burn-outs play air synth, Add N To (X) are the
hardest workin', hard-rockin' band around.
SAINT ETIENNE
Sound of Water (Mantra/Sub Pop)
This one seems to have disappointed the fans; I reckon it their best since So
Tough, integrating the two sides of their collective personality (pure pop
enchantment versus studio-as-instrument sorcery) as never before. A soft
soundclash of digital programming (with help from German post-rock unit To
Rococo Rot) and lushly arranged acoustica (courtesy of detail-freak Sean O'Hagan
from High Llamas/Stereolab), Sound of Water glistens and ripples with exquisite
nuances. It's beyond headphone-friendly: wearing a pair is virtually de rigeur,
just to catch all the scintillating near-subliminal subtleties--like the Pierre
Henry/Jean-Jacques Perrey analog blarps and pnoots peeking out from the crannies
of "Sycamore"'s lush harpsichord-and-harmony arrangement. Like their other
albums, Sound of Water offers a cornucopia of pop equations (Petula Clark +
[Mouse On Mars X Angelo Badalamenti] = "Downey CA") and alternative-history
scenarios ("Late Morning" is from the parallel universe where Burt Bacharach
teamed up with Steve Reich to become a two-man hit-factory). Two tracks stand
out for me. The twinkling snowscape production of "Just A Little Overcome"
enfolds what might just be the groop's most accomplished and beautifully poised
piece of songwriting and singing yet---"adult", but in a good way. "How We Used
To Live"'s triptych structure shifting elegantly from orchestrated/observational
pop (Montague Terrace in Yellow, Scott Walker minus the existensialist
paperbacks and Ingmar Bergman movies) through Orbital-gone-Eurovision shimmy to
Rotary Connection-style cosmik jazz. Saint Etienne have grown-up gracefully.
PRIMAL SCREAM
Xtrmntr (Astralwerks)
More old farts coming up with the goods---in this case, their best since
Screamadelica. Not that I've recanted on my critique in Over-Rated of 1997 or
anything -- I'll still don't regard Primal Scream as a proper band. What they
really are is what Public Image Limited was supposed to be and for a while
was--a floating collective organized the fluctuating vision of a non-musician
with a good record collection and big ideas. (And in fact the Scream started out
in the early Eighties as a PiL-influenced avant-noise outfit). This is why, as
with PiL, every Primal Scream album is different than the predecessor, and each
is only as good as the milieu of musicians and soundboy producer pals Gillespie
manages to mobilise. This time it's people of the calibre of Kevin Shields, the
Chemical Brothers, the Automator, and so forth, so the results are as exciting
as with Screamadelica when they worked with Wobble, Weatherall, Alex Paterson,
etc. Highlights: "Swastika Eyes"-- Never Mind the Bollocks if Giorgio Moroder
had produced it, trance-punk for the pretty vacant Gatecrasher generation.
"Pills," the collaboration with Dan the Automator, as spatialized and
atmospheric as the more fight-the-power MC5-ish tunes like "Accelerator" are
deliberately two-dimensional--it's "Higher Than The Sun" turned inside out,
Ecstasy-fueled delusions of grandeur curdled into self-loathing. "MBV Arkestra":
almost as good as the title suggests.
Mind you, the lack of a proper rhythmic engine behind not-a-band outfits like
Primal Scream means that live, they tend to suck. After the testifications from
witnesses of their UK show to the effect that Primal Scream are the greatest
rock'n'roll band on earth, I was stunned by how flat and grooveless their New
York date was: as Carducci put it, rock has nothing to do with volume or
distortion, it's about a rhythmic combustion between the players, and that spark
was barely there. And what, I ask you, is the point of employing one of the
greatest guitarists of the last 20 year (ie K. Shields) if he's only doing
simple two-chords fuzz-riffage?
MOMUS
Stars Forever (Le Grand Magistery)
THE MAGNETIC FIELDS
69 Love Songs (merge)
Clever sods. Sometimes too clever for anybody's good, but clever sods
nonetheless.

ROCK!!!!!!

QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE
R (Interscope)
Having seen them live a year or so ago, in a smoky sweatpit of a club on St
Marks Place--quite possibly the only guitar band I've seen in the last two years
but then I hardly get out at all these days--I can testify that Queens of the
Stone Age rock, most assuredly they do. And this album fucken rocks... But
rocking and even fucken rocking don't quite have the same resonance anymore, as
achievements, in the same way that saying something "swings" doesn't set off the
same reverberations as when jazz was the Zeitgeist's very pulse back in the hot
whenevers...
QOTSA are everybody's token rock group it seems. Then again, why not QOTA, when
you consider the competition rockband-swise.... The great materialist theorist
of rock, Joseph Carducci, endorsed Kyuss (the band QOTSA flaked off from) as
just about the single solitary form-advancing and all-round top band to emerge
in the Nineties. In Rock and the Pop Narcotic 's updated second edition, he
raved about how primordial and reptilian-brain-activating and quagmirey and
marsh-gas stankin' Kyuss's funk was.... Thing is, no disrespect to Mr. Carducci,
but Queens, despite their prehistoric-themed moniker, actually sound kinda clean
and gritless to me. This is real metal machine music. At that gig, they played
something from the first album that had a real motorik Tago Mago -meets-Neu!
churn to, an awesome drum pattern that rotated remorselessly and futilely like
the caterpillar treads on a bulldozer that's flipped over like a beetle on its
back.... and some tracks on this new album have a real silvered rush that's
almost clinical (no diss-word in my lexicon), almost Plastikman like or
something. It's odd that Carducci, the great defender of heavy metal, and the
righteous scourge of the drum machine and frigid digitalized riddim hasn't noted
metal's tremendous envy of the machine.... all that killing machine imagery ....
Very few rock bands are either capable of or even aspire to the kind of Jeff
Beck/Santana-style jam-wank fluency that for Joe is the essence of rock's
internal combustion.... most bands would be happy to each time replicate exactly
that Platonic Form Ideal Version of each song... So QOTSA, as drug-assisted
humans on a becoming-machine trip, are essentially plying the same trade as
Hawtin or Beltram or any techno producer... That at least is my rationalisation
for the first appearance of a rock band in the Faves since Royal Trux several
years ago.

kieran's pick

VARIOUS ARTISTS
The Story That The Crow Told Me: Early American Rural Children's Songs, Vol 1
(Yazoo/Shanachie)
Imagine a sort of Appalachian Teletubbies and you'll be close to this Harry
Smith-esque comp's charm.

REISSUES

ASSOCIATES
Fourth Drawer Down
Sulk
Double Hipness
(V2)
The first time I heard Associates was the first time I saw Associates was one of
the four or five true pop epiphanies of my life: Top of the Pops, February 1982,
"Party Fears Two". That blithe bittersweet piano refrain, the cold smolder of
Billy MacKenzie's voice, the still-never-totally-fathomed-to-this-day
song-scenario (oblique snapshots of a breakup in progress?).... But what really
brought me to the brink of a swoon was the way MacKenzie moved (at one point, he
sashayed backwards), the impossible panache of the man. Even if he'd never
emitted breath into a microphone and engraved it in wax, if you just saw him
strolling down the street on the way back from Sainsburys, you'd still have
recognised a star from the supernatural glow.
That TOTP appearance pierced and transfixed lots of other people: "Party Fears"
shot straight to Number 9 the following week, launching Associates's brief (just
eight months!) reign as a pop sensation. The career/careen of Billy MacKenzie
invites all kinds of questions about why born stars can't maintain, the reason
they mutilate their own genius and fail their own gift. I won't get into the
biographical speculations about MacKenzie's apparent self-destructive streak,
but there's another related mystery worth addressing: how does "chemistry"
happen in pop music, why is it so hard to sustain or recreate? The fact is that
without his other half, Alan Rankine, MacKenzie produced fine but ultimately
modest and minor work that we (meaning critics) bigged up extravagantly only
'cos we loved the guy so much; harsher still is the truth that Rankine has done
nothing of consequence sans Billy. Even when they briefly reunited in 1993, the
duo couldn't re-ignite the spark--judging by the scrappy, incandescence-free
Autchterhouse Sessions, now available on Double Hipness, a double CD of demos,
out-takes, alternate versions, and other undercooked material that mostly serves
to tarnish the myth.
To the ears and eyes of the fan, it's the precedent-free singularity of the love
object, its un-likeness to anything past or present, that is dazzling in its
obviousness. The task of the critic, though, is (supposedly) to bypass the
present-tense, ahistorical FAB WOW! and get into analysis--breaking something
down into its constituents, showing where it came from. At the time it never
even remotely occurred to me, but now (cursed with knowledge) I can hear the
substantial debt to Bowie in MacKenzie's voice and in elements of the Associates
sound. Billy might actually be the sole example of a positive Bowie influence in
the annals of UK pop. Indeed, the first Associates single was a cover of "Boys
Keep Swinging" (included on Double Hipness, it's oddly restrained, un-camp,
almost U2-like in its earnestness), and Billy later sang a highly-strung version
of "Secret Life of Arabia" (from Heroes) for BEF's Songs of Quality and
Distinction.
The spate of astonishing EPs subsequently compiled as Fourth Drawer Down (now
reissued with several extra tracks) are steeped in the un-American Europe
Endless-ness of Bowie's Berlin trilogy Low/Heroes/Lodger --especially "White Car
In Germany", with its metronomic march rhythm and "Dusseldorf's a cold
place/Walk on eggs in Munich" lyric. With its furtive rhythm, broken balalaika
riff, echoing footsteps, and clammy electronics, "Q Quarters" is Hapsburg dub,
Cabaret Voltaire remaking The Third Man soundtrack. Lyric shards about "concrete
civilians" and the black-humorous punch line "'washing down bodies/seems to me a
dead end job" conjure a Cold War ambience-- partitioned cities, deportations,
informers, double agents. Think The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, the Ipcress
File (Rankine and MacKenzie had bonded through their love of soundtracks, plus
Kraftwerk and disco). Other Fourth Drawer gems include "A Girl Named Property"
(Scott Walker, from the title downwards), the torrid xylophone-scampering romp
of "Kitchen Person", the sculpted histrionics of "Tell Me Easter's On Friday,"
and the "I Am The Walrus"-like Dada-dementia of "Message Oblique Speech" ("he
drinks double hernias/spits out wooden spoons').
The non-American aspect was crucial: the Associates aesthetic revolved around
Anglo art-rock's artifice/androgyny/aristocracy (apologies for alliteration
overload), around disco diva operatics and fabulousity, i.e. things considered
treasonably unmanly and effete by American heartland rock'n'rollers. Many of
their favorite bands also passed through the glam/disco interzone: Sparks
shifted from guitar swashbuckling hysteria into Moroderized electro-throb, Roxy
streamlined their angular art-rock into sleek jet-set disco. And there was that
man Bowie again--the plastic funk of "Golden Years," the Neu Romanticism of
"Ashes To Ashes". "Funk art, let's dance" anti-rockism was par for the course,
of course, for UK bands poised on the cusp between post-punk and New Pop, angst
and irony. But unlike most of the music of that 1980-82 era, which now sounds
dated, flimsy, and "funky" only in the most notional sense (e.g. Lexicon of Love
--then hailed as possibly the best pop album of all time, but unlikely to make
any mag's Top 200 today), Associates records still tantalise like an unrequited
future: the direction pop should have gone.
Sulk is so lovely it's harrowing. Overdubbed to the hilt, obsessively mixed,
addled with bizarre found-sounds, it's bruised, over-ripe, fruity as
fuck--headspinning and delirious, all the sugar fermented to alcohol. Like the
Banshees (whom Billy admired) and later Prince, Associates crammed all the
derangement and texture-saturated voluptuousness of psychedelia into pop, nearly
bursting it at its seams. (MacKenzie actually described the Sulk sound as "Abba
on acid", Rankine called it "thick... dripping"). After the perverse opener of
instrumental "Arrogance Gave Him Up," Sulk really starts with the impossibly
towering grandeur of "No"--a tormented ballad with helium-high backing vocals
that ooze around the song's crenellations like ghostly mist. "Bap De La Bap" is
overwrought in both the emotional and baroque metalwork senses, flailed along by
the snap crackle pop of John Murphy's fireworks drums and Rankine's iceburn
spires of glassy guitar. One of the forgotten things about Associates music,
given New Pop's anti-rockist tenor, is how fabulously inventive it was as
electric guitar music. Working from the post-blues, un-American sounds of Neu!'s
Michael Rother and the blazing celestial pageantry of Fripp on "Heroes," Rankine
was part of a postpunk moment in which guitarists (Wire, Johns McKay/McGeoch of
the Banshees, Joy Div, the Edge) operated with absolute confidence that the
instrument could probe new horizons. Nobody would have dreamed of stooping to a
refried Stones lick.
Sulk has too much preciousness to inventory; the frisk and stealth and anxious
exhilaration of "Skipping," the fraught bombast of "It's Better This Way, " the
sunshafts-peeking-through-clouds intro of "Party Fears Two" and its celestial
cloisters of double-tracked MacKenzie harmonies; the Nordic Chic of "Club
Country," all zinging rhythm guitar and beetling slap-bass; Billy's words
throughout, absurd and portentous yet utterly right, from "tear a strip from
your dress/wrap my arms in it" ("No") to "it lies there canistered for future
reference" ("Nude Spoons") and "even a slight remark makes no sense and turns to
shark" ("Party Fears Two"). It's staggering to think that this record--the best
of its era--sold a quarter million copies. The re-ish adds fine B-sides of the
time like "Ulcragceptimol" and the gloriously over-the-top cover of Diana Ross's
"Love Hangover", double-A side of their last proper hit "18 Carat Love Affair."
You've heard the best, what about the rest? The first CD of Double Hipness pulls
together demos from MacKenzie/Rankine's early phase as punk-cabaret troupe
Mental Torture and sundry Associates out-takes. The early stuff, done with a
pick-up band, is motley at best, ranging from the one-line gag of "The Shadow of
My Lung" (a Lurkers-meets-Bacharach spoof-cover of "Shadow of Your Smile"),
through the almost Rocky Horror Show -like "Not Tonight Josephine," to a
smarmy-vocaled and saxophone-wheezed prototype for "18 Carat Love Affair" that's
horrifically redolent of Darts (the intended reference was probably the
rockabilly version of "John, I'm Only Dancing"). The early Associates demos are
better: "Janice (AKA Deeply Concerned)" is a beautiful sketch of a song, "Saline
Drips" shows Rankine emerging as an interesting guitarist, "Galaxy of Memories"
has the spindly spidery quality of Young Marble Giants, "Mortice Lock" hints at
flushed fevers to come, and the silverpoint stitchwork on "Big Waltz (AKA Paper
House)" has a crisp Celtic frost that is pure Edge. Disc Two is much more ropey,
with cute, utterly unnecessary early versions of Sulk and Perhaps tunes, and the
lacklustre secretions of the aforementioned Rankine/MacKenzie reunion tryst of
'93. Most of this stuff sounds like deathbed Roxy or Eighties/Nineties solo
Ferry, with Rankine impersonating an expensive session guitarist and MacKenzie
succumbing to cliche-encrusted melodrama. Still the mysterious "Edge of the
World" is a sketch for a twilight-gem a la "Slave To Love". And the muddy glam
rock pummel of "Stephen, You're Really Something"--Billy's belated riposte to
Morrissey's kiss-off "William, It Was Really Nothing"--at least inspires an
alternative-history fantasy: the parallel universe where the twosome stayed
"close" long enough to record a duet single. The fey flamboyance of the
resulting Top of the Pops appearance would probably have put me in a coma.
But being (still) a star-struck fan in relation to all things Associates, I
don't really want to hear the stumbling baby-steps towards the Divine Pinnacles
("of historical interest" is by definition anti-pop), let alone the dwindling
diminuendos of a tragically spent force. Having never bought a bootleg in my
life, I can't understand the mindset of those who savor such droppings. Fourth
Drawer Down and Sulk are all you need.
VARIOUS ARTISTS
David Mancuso presents The Loft - Volume Two (Nuphonic)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Last Night A DJ Saved My Life (Nuphonic)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Disco Not Disco (Strut)
Far from Studio 54's velvet-rope exclusivity and cocaine-eyed rockstars, there
was another New York disco scene: just as druggy and glam, but largely gay and
black/Hispanic. This 1970s dance underground---venues like the Sanctuary, Galaxy
21, the Gallery; DJs like Nicky Siano, Walter Gibbons, Larry Levan--was the
crucible for what came to be known as house music. Of that era's legendary
clubs, The Loft is generally cited as the source, as model and prototype for
both Paradise Garage and the Warehouse (Frankie Knuckles's transplant of the NY
vibe to Chicago).
Started in 1970 by the hippie-ish David Mancuso at his Soho apartment, the Loft
parties were famed for the sparkly audiophile-quality sound-system and
ultra-eclectic mix of music. See, this was the early Seventies, before disco was
codified as a style. And it was an absolute aeon before today's club culture,
with its splintered genres rigidly formatted around beats-per-minute. The cult
of precision-engineered mixing makes samey anonymity a virtue; today's DJs look
for compatible components rather than outstanding songs. But back in the early
Seventies, DJs barely mixed records at all. Drastic changes of tempo, style, and
mood were possible.
Where the first volume of this Mancuso-compiled series focussed on what house
afficianodos call "Loft Classics" (long, lushly orchestrated disco epics and
sultry Afro-Latin percussion workouts), Volume Two truly honors the open spirit
of that lost golden age by moving freely and anachronistically across the
Seventies, Eighties, and early Nineties. On the first disc, Philly-flavoured
shimmer by Demis Roussos (fer fucksake!!) shifts into the pert synth-funk
choogle of D-Train's heartbursting hopeful "Keep On", then cuts into the musky
dub-funk swirl of Jah Wobble/Jaki Liebezeit/Holger Czukay's "How Much Are
They?." Disc Two encompasses the peerless mutant disco of Dinosaur L's "#5 (Go
Bang), dub wizard Joe Gibbs's "Chapter Three", the ambient house waft of Holy
Ghost's "Walk On Air," and 16 minutes of "Macho City" by Steve Miller Band (fer
fuck's fuckingsake!!!). The latter---disco-rock with a deluxe sensurround
production a la Welcome to the Pleasuredome --shows how DJs back then would look
anywhere and everywhere for gems, and find them. Also containing the Steve
Miller track, Disco Not Disco focuses on the early Eighties "mutant disco" era
and features some hard-to-find Arthur Russell classics. (Nuphonic apparently
have a Russell oeuvre anthology in the pipeline for this year).
Based around Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton's dance history, Last Night A DJ
Saved My Life is even more crazily eclectic. Its single disc starts with
Handel's "Largo" (the first recording played over the radio, back in 1906),
proceeds through Northern Soul, roots reggae, Philly and Salsoul (like the
fabulous 11 minute version of "Love Is the Message"), a slight but catchy effort
from a post-Blockheads Chas Jankel, yet another Wobble/Czukay gem, before
finally winding up with Visage's "Frequency 7" (a B-Side that was "seminal" in
early Eighties Detroit). With scarcely a whiff from the Nineties, the
compilation reinforces Brewster/Broughton's thesis (more accurately, bias, since
it's barely argued, just taken as something "one instinctively knows is right")
that nothing of real note happened in dance culture after 1988. At best, you got
respectful continuation of the Grand Disco/House Tradition; at worst, the
"diabolical mutations" that were bleep, hardcore, trance, jungle, big beat,
2step garage, etc. Wrong! Still, the duo deserve kudos for exhuming a classic
early Larry Levan mix, Class Action's "Weekend" from 1983. This was the first,
but not last, record I purchased largely because it had a fabulously intricate
and brain-ticklingly catchy hi-hat pattern. As such it was, on many levels, the
shape of things to come.
With two books largely on this era ( Last Night A DJ, and Kai Fikentscher's more
academic treatise You Better Work) plus a memoir from the guy who founded
Paradise Garage, all these compilations, and various clubs based around the 70s
underground disco concept (Body N' Soul; a night based around Nicky Siano, a
contemporary of Mancuso's), it's almost like New York underground disco has
become a heritage industry, as identified with Manhattan as, say, jazz is with
New Orleans. People come from all over the world to experience Body N' Soul's
time-travel simulacrum of a bygone time.
VARIOUS ARTISTS
OHM: the early gurus of electronic music (Ellipsis Arts)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Vintage Volts: Early Modulations (Caipirinha)
An exquisitely packaged fetish object, Ohm 's 3-CD survey of avant-classical
electronix and musique concrete is also a sonic treasure trove, gathering choice
cuts from out-of-print albums that are near-impossible to find and
extortionately priced if you do. Featuring oeuvre pinnacles from suspects usual
(Cage, Schaeffer, Eno, Stockhausen) and lesser known (Pauline Oliveros, David
Behrman, Charles Dodge), OHM reveals the vivid and varied soundworlds opened up
by the synthesizer and "sampling" (in its pre-digital, tape-and-scissors form)
long before the dawn of the beats-per-minute era. Not quite as deluxe or
encompassing, Vintage Volts is also highly recommended, and features some
interesting lesser-knowns like Vladimir Ussachevsky and Max Matthews alongside
yer Morton Subotniks and Luc Ferrari.
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Droppin' Science: The Best of Cold Chillin' (BBE)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Ego Trip's The Big Playback (Rawkus)
Not to romanticize the old skool days but these comps are electric with that
rough-and-ready, made-on-the-fly excitement that characterizes all musical
movements in their early days--before career paths become mapped out and anybody
even thinks there's a future for this thing...
more tasty reissues
PLAID
Trainer (Warp)
Wish someone would do something like this for the proper Black Dog early stuff
which is virtually unobtainable; this has a lot of the offshoot/alter-ego music
by Balil and such. Captivating stuff.
MASTERS AT WORK
The Tenth Anniversary Collection: Part One 1990-1995, the Definitive Remixes and
Original Production (BBE)
Cor, bargain! Four CDs of classic New York house and house-not-house, in an
attractive silver box with smart booklet and record-style sleeves for the silver
discs, all for under $26. Wish somebody'd do the same--round up in one package
the classic remixes and original tracks--for others in the pantheon of US house
auteurs, e.g. Mood II Swing, Deep Dish, Todd Edwards, Todd Terry, etc.
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Absolutely Classic Drum & Bass (Slammin' Vinyl)
One to get on vinyl, as opposed to mixed CD, for the full-length versions of
such virtually unfindable, collectors-market-overpriced-if-you-do, old skool
hardcore classics as Bodysnatch's "Just 4 You London", Potential Bad Boy's
"Let's Go" (from "Work the Box" EP), and DJ Ron & EQP's "Crackman the Return"--
three of the most delirious, febrile-sounding darkside tunes ever. Plus good
stuff from Noise Factory, Ellis Dee, Swan E, and others.

STILL ON THE FENCE

PJ HARVEY
Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea (Island)
Certainly the easiest-to-listen PJH album to date. Strong songs, clear singing,
clean production. Like with Hole's make-it-big move Live Through This, though,
my first thought on listening to Stories From the City was: Concrete Blonde.
There might be a lot to recommend within, all kinds of artistic and personal
growth, but I can't hear past how dull and conventional its sound sounds.
GODSPEED YOU BLACK EMPEROR!
Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven! (kranky)
If Kid A was the upper-middlebrow candidate for this year's Most Important
Album, Lift Yr. Skinny Fists looked set to sweep the highbrow/hipster vote (but
just got pipped by Sigur Ros, seemingly). Kid A and Lift Yr are both grand
statements, bleak panoramic views of the Zeitgeist wrapped in music that
revitalizes the "post-rock" project. Post-rock tends not to be about anything,
though, beyond the exploration of sound-in-itself. What immediately
distinguishes Godspeed is their expressionistic passion and their
politics--which are vague, but anti-capitalist and apocalyptic in tenor. In the
CD booklet, Lift Yr. Skinny Fists is dedicated "to quiet refusals, loud refusals
and sad refusals". "Loud" is what Godspeed are most renowned for, especially in
their reputedly gobsmacking live shows. With keening strings, harrowed guitars,
and two drummers, Godspeed stir up a wall of sound that escalates and abates
like popular disorder. Mournful yet exultant, the music has the doomed
Romanticism of revolutionaries dashing themselves against an immovable status
quo, or the epic historical clash of vast impersonal forces (something
reinforced by bombastic titles like "Terrible Canyons of Static", "World Police
and Friendly Fires", "Cancer Towers on the Holy Road Hi-Way"). Godspeed's "loud"
mode often provokes comparisons with soundtrack composers from a classical
background, like Ennio Morricone and Michael Nyman. Composer-wise, they actually
remind me more of Penderecki, symphonic mourner of 20th Century atrocities like
the Holocaust and Hiroshima. A Pendereski-esque alternative title for this album
could be Threnody for the Victims of Globalization.
After a while , though, the "loud" Godspeed's hope-against-hope histrionics
start to seem a little hammy and (pardon my Quebecois) deja ecoute: the maudlin'
strings, the cantergallopfranticpell-mell dynamics, the anguished crescendos.
Personally, I prefer the "quiet" and "sad" modes: interludes of intricate
anxiety, plangent sound-collages, beautiful lulls of spidery, jackfrost guitar.
Much of disc two is taken up by gorgeous ghost-town driftwork redolent of Ry
Cooder's haunting slide-guitar score for Paris, Texas: saloon doors slapping in
the breeze, tumbleweed ricocheting off a picket fence, wind whistling through
the telegraph wires. In this desolation row context, the vocal samples are
potently poignant, like old-timer Murray Ostril lamenting the bygone golden days
of Coney Island, when "we even used to sleep on the beach overnight... they
don't sleep anymore on the beach". Deliberately or accidentally, the sample
echoes the Situationist graffiti that was ubiquitous in Paris during the
build-up to the May 1968 uprising: "underneath the pavement lies the beach."
What Godspeed seem to mourn is the withering away of the utopian imagination,
the way people seem reconciled to the panglobal triumph of what the
Situationists called "the commodity-spectacle society," to living a dreamless
existence. Ultimately, sonic reservations withal, one must salute Godspeed's
courage for risking Big-ness--sheer size of sound, emotion, theme. If this
sometimes results in deluges of grandiosity, it's because Godspeed music
dramatizes the internal struggle within each band member: optimism of the will
versus pessimism of the intellect.
SIGUR ROS
Agaetis Byrjun (Fat Cat)
Initial encounters have left a vague impression of "pretty", in a sort of 4AD
for the Y2K stylee. But clearly there's more here than meets the ear. There must
be, mustn't there?
EMINEM
The Marshall Mathers LP (Aftermath)
He's rather good at it, isn't he, this rapping thing? But does consummate rhyme
virtuosity make up for such unflagging white-niggativity? You're not supposed to
object to the queerbashing and gynocidal imagery because that's PC or uncool or
sanctimonious or something. It does sorta make me wonder how "we" got to this
point of numbness to stuff that's just noxious--it's not even about disapproval,
or imagining that it has a corrupting effect, which is all infinitely debatable,
it's more a question of why even expose yourself to this stuff, why waste your
time? Eminem may be a great "artist", but at the end of the day, so what? You
could be listening to Astral Weeks or Al Green or Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony
or In A Silent Way or the Congos or.... something, dare I say it, elevating.
Just personally, I have wondered recently how I got to this point where I can
listen to the Cash Money boys degrading their groupies, or DJ Assault looping
all this ass'n'titty-lick-the-balls-bitch crap, without much more than a flicker
of disgust. Obviously I'm not its target, but then again, I had my mind
re-arranged at 16 by The Female Eunuch, hung with radical feminists at
university, believed in androgyny all through the Smithsy Eighties. There's a
case for the defense, artistic license (if Nick Cave can sing about killing
women and it's art, why condemn gangsta or booty?), but I'm more interested in
the question of the numbness: the fact that hardly anybody even bothers to
object anymore.
I can see why Eminem is so lauded: most rock critics are in the business of
persona analysis, and who else around in the pop charts is more than
two-dimensional? Britney Spears might as well be a robot for all her personality
is involved in her music, which is as enjoyable as any ruthlessly efficient and
perfectly designed machine, e.g. your typical Hollywood blockbuster, and just as
not-worth-thinking-or-talking-about. But with Eminem, you can do the shrink
thing, you can do the sociologist thing, there's plenty of material to work
with. Like, "Stan" --a pretty song indeed--but the lure for the critics is that
it's a self-reflexive pop song about the dynamics of stardom and fandom, as
self-aware as Morrissey's "Rubber Ring". More intriguing for me, though, is that
in the song's scenario of disavowed boy-love, the woman (pregnant too, woman at
her womanliest but also most potent) gets killed into the bargain. You could see
why Stan has to die, for raising the spectre of homo-eroticism, but why the
woman too? Could just be gratuitous melodrama/shock-horror factor, but it
suggests to me that Stan's line "we was meant to be together" is Eminem
projecting his own buried longings onto his "confused" fan (who appears to be
closer to knowing what he really wants than Em). A longing to bypass womankind
and find a true soul-mate, a male wife. That's the only way I can explain the
tone of tenderness and concern that appears nowhere else in Eminem's songs. Stan
as mirror image of Eminem's damaged narcissism (and where are all these supposed
Shady-clones anyway? The video again reminiscent of Morrissey--the one where
Stephen cycles around town followed by bequiffed and bespectacled
Mozzer-clones).
THE WEST LONDON SOUND a/k/a BROKEN BEATS
VARIOUS ARTISTS
People... Make the World Go Round (People)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Co-Operation Vol 1 (Goya)
NEW SECTOR MOVEMENTS
No Tricks (Virgin)
JAZZANOVA
The Remixes 1997-2000 (Compost)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
The Good Good (2000 Black)
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Compost Community (Compost Records)
With no massive convulsion likely to renew dance culture any time soon, some
observers are touting "broken beats" a/ka "the West London Sound" (a/k/a
"house-not-house", "nu-jazz", "phusion": why can't they just settle on the one
name?!) as the Next Medium-Sized Thing. Weaving together the jazzier strands of
drum'n'bass, deep house, and Detroit techno, this new(-ish) style could be
critiqued from a number of angles: sceptics arguing that it's merely acid jazz
upgraded with digital tricknology, populists attacking it as a composite of
cognoscenti-oriented snob musics (fusion, rare groove, acid jazz again) that
unavoidably conjures the image of some twat sashaying down Portobello Road in
Jamiroquai-style woolly hat and wafting the stale reek of jazz Woodbines in his
wake. But, hey, I thought: maybe I should check my bigotries at the door, wipe
from my mindscreen the incontrovertible subcultural pre-eminence of East London
(font of greatness from hardcore to jungle to 2step), and give the new contender
a half-chance.
Well that's what I did and I'm still on the fence. The People double-CD has some
magic moments, especially when this dude I.G. Culture is involved--particularly
his Likwid Biskit alter-ego, rather than New Sector Movements. The latter's
Virgin debut EP has some good sounds'n'rhythms but they're ruined by a Big-Voice
Female Singer doing this Afrodelic mystical positivity thing a la Rotary
Connection or the vocalists on Roy Ayers and Lonnie Liston records. Co-Operation
Vol 1---named after this micro-scene's principal club, the Co-Op---shines when
Reinforced's side label for broken beats, 2000 Black, is involved: Seiji &
G-Force's "Chase De Ace" and Nu Era & Pavel Dego Kostiuk's "Nana Nomura" take
off from the 70s-into-90s nu-fusion developed by on Parallel Universe /disc one
of Two Pages /Jacob's Optical Stairway and soar to virgin outerzones of
drum'n'space. The twinkling keyboards and crisply textured percussion exude the
cosmic utopianism of Roy Ayers and Lonnie Liston Smith. There's a particular
Moog-tastic synth-sound--sort of spangly and squelchy at once---that's all over
the Reinforced posse's productions and I can't get enough of it. Surprisingly,
though, 2000 Black's own comp The Good Good (out on Planet E in the USA--and
Innerzone Orchestra is a good reference point actually) is a bit blah, on the
whole.
4 Hero have the first track on Jazzanova's double CD collection of their
celebrated remixes. Part of the Compost family (the German chapter of "broken
beats" movement), Jazzanova are feted for their flair at digitally simulating
the "feel" and "swing" of real live drumming, and for their facility for
complicated time-signatures. Like their West London allies, Jazzanova fetishize
analog and acoustic timbres, the sort of "warm", fuzzy sounds that get
DJ/producers digging through crates of old vinyl in search of undiscovered
sample-sources from the 1970s. They also exemplify the broken beats scene's
hallmark infatuation with Brazil, home of musical hybridity and polyrhythmic
percussion. Remix clients here include Brazilian fusion outfit Azymuth, and
there's a pervasive bossa nova influence. The Brazilian fetish also results in
some truly puke-provoking Portuguese-sounding names--Modaji, Misa Negra, Domu,
Da Lata (apparently a reference to some folkloric tale about marijuana first
arriving on Brazilian shores in a tin---pass the sick bucket, please).
Jazzanova's own name is enough to make me vom into my lap each time my eyes make
contact with it. And as I've said before in these pages, you can tell a
lot--maybe everything--from the names of bands and titles of records.
Still, if you ever dug the jazzual, easy-glistening side of drum'n'bass--Alex
Reece's "Jazz Master", Roni Size's Roy Ayers/RAMP sampling "Daylight" , Adam F's
"Circles": and those are all undeniable, certified bomb tunes in my book--you'll
find thrills here and there within the West London output and on the Compost
compilation especially. Unavoidably, though, there is that Gilles Peterson/Mo
Wax/Bar Rhumba/Blue Note/Straight No Chaser/Kirk De Giorgio sort of stench round
the whole thing---and the lack of any interesting "social energy" behind the
scene is a big minus for me. Not sure if West London/broken even counts as a
genre as such, it's more like an aggregation of oneupmanship strategies---a
tapestry of music styles that have all historically been rallied to as
connoiseurial bulwarks of taste and musicality against the plebeian rave horde.
Still, toying with this genre did lead to me a new theory...

THE THEORY OF VIBE MIGRATION

Historically, it does seem that the Next Big Thing always comes from where you
least expect it: from areas of music that are disregarded, despised,
written-off. Think of disco, decreed dead, regenerating itself as house and
having the last, very loud and very long laugh. Think of rave, supposedly
finished, kaput, utterly worthless, resurging in mutant forms as both jungle and
gabba/hardcore. Think of the innumerable rebirths, the eternal returns, of heavy
metal--NWBHM; thrash; death; black; rap-metal, QOTSA-style stoner metal...
Just personally-speaking, the two most exciting musics for me in recent years
have both come from the last zones I would have expected anything good to
emerge. Garage---which in the early-to-mid Nineties, always seemed like the
tamest, mildest scene (especially its UK version; I even have some garage pirate
tapes from '96 just before speed garage that somebody sent me, and it's amazing
how pale and uninteresting they are.). And gangsta rap--which seemed sonically
retarded (No Limit as the NWBHM of rap) until the Cash Money/Ruff
Ryders/Roc-A-Fella wave came through. In a smaller way, Goa Trance--a genre
which like most non-disciples I'd found repulsive--got interesting when it went
darker and name-changed to psy-trance: it'd never be anything I could base my
pop life around, but every time I encounter it in its full-on context, I'm
struck by how striking it as music, way more interesting than you'd imagine,
honest.
The Theory of Vibe Migration is something I probably should have grasped a long
time ago: it seems common sense that if you keep looking for your bliss in the
same place you will wind-up disappointed. Cultural lightning never strikes
twice, a watched kettle never boils, etc etc. Instead I wasted most of 1989/90
imagining the blissrock/oceanic rock/posthardcore wig-out moment was going to
keep on escalating, and I should have seen the writing on the wall re.
drum'n'bass hitting a dead-end even earlier than I did. It's a mark of real
existensial delicacy to know when to leave a party, the exact right moment
before the energy sags. Same with genres and scenes.
This year a couple more "last place I would have dreamed" type genres have taken
me unawares. The whole glitch-core/laptop punk/kid606-and-friends commotion
isn't just IDM getting good, it's essentially an IDM subgenre I'd especially
loathed: drill'n'bass. "Progressive", the most boring of trancey genres, the
descendant of that dishwater-dull progressive house thing in the early Nineties,
spawned Timo Maas---not a redemption of the sorry genre (see Unfaves of 2000) by
any means, but more than I expected. This is why I'm still not ready to write
off the West London thing, because its parent genre--acid jazz--is absolutely
the last place I would have dreamed anything of interest coming from. According
to the Theory of Vibe Migration, it is therefore a prime candidate and something
that should be monitored closely. By similar logic, 2step and UK garage now have
the odds heavily stacked against them, in terms of staying interesting. If being
a hipster was like playing the market, now would be the time to sell your
stocks. Of course, when you factor in the Mystery of Subcultural Persistence,
it's clear that 90 percent of musical activity is stagnant and stalled, and in
most cases it's going to stay that way; it's highly unlikely that, say, techno
or drum'n'bass is suddenly going to spawn the new sub-paradigm, if only because
it had a good run at being the leading edge already. Still, keeping an ear on
things you've dismissed as passe or used-up still seems a useful strategy.

Most "normal" people probably spend significantly more of their annual listening
time playing records that don't come from that particular year than records that
do. I'd probably do the same if I wasn't a "professional fan" (interesting
contradiction-in-terms, that). But even when it's your vocation to keep tabs on
the new, sometimes you just gotta ignore the mounting piles of unplayed promos
and dig (out) the old music. And so here's my...

NOSTALGIA OF THE YEAR: AMBIENT JUNGLE

Another Pop Mystery I've been contemplating recently relates to the life cycles
of genres, their arc and fall. You can be basking in the blooming fullness of a
genre's annus mirabilus, and somehow it never occurs that this is obviously the
golden age, the peak, the best it's ever gonna get, and that the only way
forward now is downhill. When you're in the thick of it, you think it can just
carry on forever at this perpetual crest.... Records that at the time seem like
portents or glimpses of so-much-more-to-come turn out, years later, to have been
swan-songs, the last of the summer wine. Who'd have thought, for instance, that
Adam F's 'Metropolis' and Nasty Habit's 'Shadowboxing" were destined to be the
historical pinnacle of techstep (and therefore drum'n'bass), that they were
form-defining and form-exhausting ultra-tunes?
These thoughts emerged during a spate of compulsive re-listening to what they
used to call (alright, what I used to call) "ambient jungle", which inspired
musings on the lines of why couldn't this music just stay forever at this
sustained peak of awesomeness? Why do musics have to deteriorate or die? Tracks
like Dillinja's "Deep Love" and "Sovereign Melody," Bukem's "Atlantis", EZ
Roller's 'Believe" and "Rolled Into One" (Moving Shadow's last masterpiece?),
the Steve Gurley's remix (more like re-production) of Princess's Eighties
Britsoul classic of yearning "Say I'm Your Number One," still sound so
fantastic----why couldn't they have carried on like this until the end of time,
or at least lasted out the decade. A peculiar twist of hind-hearing is that even
tracks I didn't rate particularly at the time sound fabulous now, like PFM's
"One and Only"---the way the bass moves and drops, the ripple-trails and
glistening vapors of ambience, the explosive entrance of the diva vocal. Then
there's Peshay, a producer I've never rated--his track on the first Logical
Progression, "Vocal", is amazing, and I never even noticed it at the time; that
kind of Speed-oriented mellow jazzual track was the enemy, back then. Now, long
after the battle's subsided, whatever was at stake a faint memory, I can hear it
as a tour de force of exquisitely mashed-up beats and diva deployment, using a
vocal sample (Anita Baker? Barbara Tucker? it's the vocal lick that goes "I'm
singing to you") that's got more in common with a beautifully designed
commodity, a sports car or leather sofa, than say Aretha Franklin; it's all
burnished technique and poise, not raw soul. After 2step I can appreciate what
is basically a kind of capitalist utopianism behind such fetishising of elegance
and surface slickness. Another example: in my disappointment that Omni Trio had
abandoned the euphoria fireworks of the "Renegade Snares" formula, I missed how
good bits of Haunted Science are--"Who Are You?" and especially "The Elemental",
an early neurofunk-style two-stepper beat with keyboard lines as delicate as dew
settling and bass-drops like tender thunder--how cleverly Rob Haigh had
developed a new, calmer but still compelling style of drum'n'bass for the home
environment.
The truth is that there always was an integral side to drum'n'bass that wasn't
about rudeness (nasty B-lines, mash-up breakbeats) but about supreme dainty-ness
and neat-freak finesse. It's a different kind of rush--the tingle you can get
from the groomed delicacy of a hi-hat pattern, the nimble, glancing panache of a
synth-chord flourish. Jacob's Optical Stairway, the oft-maligned alter-ego album
by 4 Hero, is some kind of pinnacle in this respect: the detail in the music
induces its own kind of high, the aural equivalent of putting on your first pair
of glasses and suddenly everything's ultra-sharp.
The chill-ness of "ambient jungle" and the jazzy stuff that followed is also
more appealing, partly because of the feeling that I've listened to enough
extreme music for a lifetime so why not go with sheer beauty and pleasantness
for a bit, and partly because there's nothing like parenthood to make you
appreciate the aesthetic of stress-reduction. (Actually, a few years ago I had
something of an epiphany: a plane trip, creating the typical intense stress
situation right up til you go with all the getting work done before departure
and packing in a rush. Coiled as tight as bedsprings, we got in the cab to JFK;
the driver had the radio tuned to one of those lite-jazz stations, the kind that
plays what Jackson Griffiths dubbed "biz jazz", the post-ECM, post-fusion
travesty of jazz favored by many corporate executives (and Yellowjackets fan
Goldie). Any other day my response would have been nausea, but the music hit
like a IV drip pumping liquid valium straight into the spine. Instant
tranquilizing bliss. That day, I could dig it.). Of course, people still make
this kind of drum'n'bass (or carry on doing something pretty similar in spirit
e.g. broken beats/West London Sound) and it's not as good as the 94/95 stuff.
LTJ Bukem's long-awaited debut album came out this year--encased in a striking
period-looking jazz-fusion style cover, and with a montage of snapshots of his
jazzbo heroes on the inside--but it got almost no attention. Bit sad, for a guy
who once commanded dance magazine cover stories.
But going back to the golden period that late 93/94/95 phase when darkside
started to flirt with musicality, blossomed into artcore/ambient-jungle, and
then went too far into the fuzak-zone.... quite a few tracks from that era fit
the syndrome of "lost future" music, or genres-that-never-were (but could/should
have been). Sometimes A-sides, more often B-side tunes or track four on an EP
jobs, these tunes--Blame's "Anthemia", Trace's "Jazz Primitives", Myerson's
"Find Yourself" (with its painted bird of a Flora Purim sample flitting through
a labyrinth of future-jazz foliage), lots more--feel like they could have been
blueprints for entire worlds of sound , but of course they weren't. The DJs
weeded them out; the massive rejected them. Still, I'm fascinated by these
tracks that represent a path not taken.
other oldies but goodies:
La Dusseldorf ---Klaus Dinger's post-Neu! debut, the first track is as good as
anything by Neu!
The Sweet---"Blockbuster", "Ballroom Blitz", "Teenage Rampage", "Action"--the
plastic Pistols.
Kraftwerk--"Neon Lights"--untouchable perfection, almost religious music
Old speed garage: Smokin' Beats's "Dreams", Armand Van Helden's "Spin Spin
Sugar" remix, etc--and apparently the pirates are going through a back to
97/four-to-the-floor revival right now
Lee Perry--"Come Along", "Roast Fish and Cornbread"--and after dissing Scratch
'n'all
Israel Vibration-- "Why Worry?/Worry Dub"--prod. Tommy Cowans and just one of
the most gorgeously disorienting dubs ever
X Ray Spex -- Germ Free Adolescents --warri-or, warri-or,warri-warri-or!
Harold Budd/Brian Eno-- The Plateaux of Mirror --Arcadian slopes of drowsy
blissdust--excuse the '88 flashback

WORDS

Read a few good books this year: Martin Amis's oddly affecting
Kingsley-and-dentistry memoir; Zadie Smiths' flawed but funny White Teeth; Jason
Toynbee's Making Popular Music which wraps some rigorous writing about dance
music inside a dull title and a crap cover, Ghostly Demarcations, an interesting
collection of essays in response or riposte to Derrida's recent rapprochment
with "a certain spirit of Marx".... Nothing compared to Nothing by Paul Morley,
which as (mostly) non-music writing is easily the finest achievement of his
generation of ex-inkie writers (not as huge a compliment as it sounds when
scrutinized, but still....). Dealing with his father's unexpected (but not out
of the blue, since he'd already been going AWOL periodically) suicide when the
author was a post-punk in his late teens Nothing deploys some of the stylistic
techniques Morley used with music writing ---making what's almost the same point
(or asking virtually the same question) over and over again but from a slightly
different angle; accumulating intensity via repetition----but to almost
infinitely more powerful effect, given the harrowing and ultra-profound nature
of the subject. There is one staggering passage where Morley devotes several
pages to describing in excruciating detail his physical actions and wobbly state
of mind as he cleaned a filthy cooker immediately after being informed of his
father's death (his aunt, bless her, thought it would distract the Morley
children if they had physical chores to occupy them). Quite a lot of the book is
a memoir of growing up in the North of England in the 1970s, and in the middle,
dealing with secondary school days, Morley loses his touch for a while,
exaggerating the contrast between the looming menace of the tyrannical teachers
and his own cowering insignificance for a comic effect that doesn't quite come
off. But the last third or so of the book is devastating, drawing upon
interviews with his mother and sisters (who, typically English, had never talked
together about the family tragedy/mystery) and closing with an amazing chapter
that calmly describes Morley's grim pilgrimage to the country lane in Wales
where his father parked the car and pumped it full of carbon monoxide, trying
all the while to imagine what was going through his dad's head. Nothing is an
amazing piece of writing. The picture of the sofa on the cover is pretty cool,
too.

UNFAVES OF 2000

UNFAVES OF 2000simon reynolds's
UNFAVES OF 2000
(now incorporating OVERRATED OF THE YEAR)

No panoramic whinge-fest this time.... Not that things were so much better last
year than 1999 (still waiting on a new paradigm, fresh-making meta-context, or
mega-convulsion on the scale of rap or rave) but as Faves of 2000 showed (and it
only scratched the surface, of course) there was more good-to-great music
unleashed into the world last year than any sane person could physically absorb,
and even more that qualified as interesting/promising/thought-provoking. Lots of
little reasons to be cheerful, then--or at least keep your ears trained on this
area of the culture (whereas, films, books, TV--I mean, let's face it, pop
music, even at its most piss-poor, pisses on that lot from extreme height every
time.) That said, last year there was also a surfeit of reasons to be irritated,
affronted, repelled, depressed.... So without further delay (and let's just pass
over the little matter of this thing being four months late) here goes with this
year's rollcall of dishonour.

2STEP GARAGE AS A CULTURE
Did this piece on 2step for Vibe, they were looking for illustrations, so I sent
the few club and rave flyers I'd gleaned. Owing to some clerical error, I got
this hefty package back from them through the mail, containing my flyers plus
tons of others they'd procured by means unknown. Sometimes it's only when you
confront a culture in concentrated bulk form, that you realize how crap it
really is. I mean, these flyers were so relentlessly tacky, so cheaply put
together, so lacking in rave-era humour or wackiness. Pix of horrible
cheesy-looking birds in flash scanties, images of champagne flutes and similar
nouveau riche imagery. Tack-eee! A real turn-off.
I'd had my 2step anti-epiphany earlier, though---doing another feature on UK
garage, as it happened, this time for Spin. I expect this isn't especially
uncommon: feelings of cognitive dissonance when you love a particular form of
music yet are confronted with the "social energy" that fuels the music and is
essential to its very existence, and find it grim, dismal, in all ways
irredeemable, just a drag to be near. Field-researching the piece in clubs like
Liberty's and Twice As Nice, I found myself wondering why on earth anyone would
voluntarily expose themselves to the toxic atmosphere of tension, incivility,
and snooty attitude that permeates these events. I mean, my excuse was I was
being paid to be there, and got in for free--why would you actually pay--queue
for ages, and then pay hard-earned dosh--to experience such sustained
unpleasantness? UK garage's collective superiority complex is the antithesis not
just of rave but of house culture: uptight, alpha-male, peacock, skrewface,
people looking down their charlyed-up noses at each other, imagining themselves
hot-shit cos of their costly garments---the fatuous circularity of paying tons
of money for clothes that are desirable simply because they signify you paid
tons of money for them. Why would anybody want to waste their precious leisure
time in such a no-fun, merriment-free space?
People who are into this lifestyle (as opposed to the music, which you can
sort-of-but-not-really separate from the subculture) are people who... well, not
to put too fine a point on it, their consciousness is fucked. When you compare
UK garage to hardcore rave, you're talking about a real, measurable
deterioration in intensity, electricity, idealism, and all-round worth: a fall
from paradise into the vice and vicious-ness of a world where the prospect of
any other mode of existence, any better way, is unimaginable. Hardcore knew the
rave dream was "just a dream", but it still clung onto it. Whereas UK garage
culture's very foundation is the post-rave relapse into dream-less cynicism,
accommodation to "reality".
Thing is, I think most people in the scene, in their heart of hearts, know this.
At Liberty's, for most of the night there were more people in the old skool
jungle side room, where the DJ played fevered 1993 darkcore classics like
Potential Bad Boy's "Let's Go". You could see people moving to the old music,
eyes shut, and just tell they were dying to brock out, trying to dance their way
back into that explosive euphoria; they were yearning for the release, feeling
it still in their nerve-memories, but blocked, trapped, stranded.
I can't imagine ever ceasing to be obsessed with the latest sounds to come out
of London pirate radio; at the same time, I equally am unable to find anything
worth endorsing about UKG as a subculture or A.W.O.L. Essentially, UKG is about
glamorizing the ways of Babylon. There's a word here I'm grasping for, it's on
the tip of my tongue---could it be "counter-revolutionary"?

R&B
Funny, 2000 was the Year of R&B for so many people (meaning they finally woke up
to it, of course), but I can hardly think of a single killer R&B tune that
really knocked me out. I mean, there was Destiny's Child's "Say My Name" and
"Jumpin'"--but they're both from an album that came out in 1999. They're not
even the best tunes on that album--those would be the first two singles, "Bills
Bills Bills" and "Bugaboo", both massive hits and both released in 1999. A lot
of critics actually voted for the Destiny's Child album in the 2000 end-of-year
polls, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the album came out in midsummer
1999. (Or was it even earlier? I'm not sure). It is therefore a piss-poor
argument for 2000 as a fantastic year for R&B.
"Independent Women", on the other hand, is a fantastic argument for 2000 as a
piss-poor year for R&B. Around about the 11th hearing, the song finally revealed
its melody to me. but it barely constitutes a song, and the arrangement and
production still seem flaccid and nothing-special. It is also attached to a
really really bad movie. (I haven't actually seen it, but some things you just
know, you know). Could it be that the expelled/downsized members of Destiny's
were actually crucial to the chemistry in some barely fathomable way?
What about the rest of this year's are-enn-bee crop? I can barely remember any
of them. "Case of the Ex" was neat but the rest of Mya's album is bogged in
slow-jams and maturity-bids. Kandi stepped out from her background song-doctor
role ("No Scrubs", "Bills Bills Bills", other angry-diva sub-feminist anthems)
and revealed why she shoulda stayed in the background (a little something to do
with having no vocal presence whatsoever). Hmm, what else? Seemed like there was
just endless faceless loverman trios/quartets in the post-Boys II Men/Jodeci
mold, all unctuous cunnilingual vocals and slow-jam tempos---cloying, glutinous,
characterless, audio soft-porn. Talking of which, Sisquo's "Thong Song": shurely
shome kind of cultural nadir? I'm really scraping my memory-barrel here: was
Pink's 'There You Go' this year? Pretty good but so much better as Sovereign's
tuff 2step bootleg.
Ah yes, there was my old favorite Aaliyah with "Try Again".... Candidate for
Over-Rated Single of the Year, surely? Timbaland has said he uses Aaliyah as a
"probe" for his most far-out ideas---so what happened here? The 303 acid
bassline is a cute novelty accoutrement, but that's about it. So funny the way
Tim keeps rapping his little rhyme about "been a long time/we shouldn't have
left ya/without a dope beat/to step ta." I'm like, "so where is it then, tosser?
This sure ain't it." The actual song's weak as kitten's piss too. Romeo Must Die
as a whole I thought fairly lame and disappointing after Timbaland's great tunes
on the Jay-Z album.
Beyond the lack of great songs, production ideas, and the over-saturation of
that Timbaland/She'kspere stop-start beat thing (with supastars like Janet
Jackson and Jennifer Lopez further diluting the weak brew--and may I just
digress for a moment, and ask whatthafuck's up with Janet's teeth--in every
video, she looks like an ad for denture cleaner, this eerie pearlescent glow,
like she hasn't got individual teeth just this unstriated band of tooth enamel.
Creepy! Her body looks really weird too---Japanese-prisoner-of- war-camp levels
of exercise fighting against her natural shape, winning, but at what cost. And
that strange, perturbing bra that makes it look like she's got a pair of
buttocks transplanted onto her chest. Shudder!), beyond the sheerly sonic
disappointments... I have to tell you, I'm feeling a little bit of a value gap.
It's sort of a cross-the-board antipathy that goes from R&B to all the white-out
teen-oriented versions of blackpop from Britney to the legion of boy bands....
As pop music goes, on a certain level, it's irresistible... but mainly in the
sense that a conquering army subjugating all in its path can be said to be hard
to resist.
The remorseless, ruthless, invincible precision with which this vidpop is
programmed, edited, choreographed, groomed... definitely verges on the
militaristic. And the "artists" involved, whether it's Aguilera or Aaliyah or
whoever, are like figments spun into existence by squadrons of technicians--make
up artists, hair stylists, lighting crews, postproduction special effects,
recording engineers who tint and pitchshift the vocals, chop up the best takes
down to single words and re-stitch them together... The amount of energy and
effort and money and micro-management that goes into one 2 second shot in a
video, or one bar of the record, it's staggering... These stars are cartoons,
robots, ciphers, logos, branding devices.... and while I suppose there's a sort
of Baudrillardian hyper-real/posthuman/simulation-pop buzz to it... I dunno, is
it backward of me to prefer the early Eighties New Pop era? Where there was a
striving for glamour yet at the same time the charm of all-too-evident flaws and
fallibility and untampered, untreated fleshly reality-- I'm thinking of Altered
Images or Human League... or going back further, Marc Bolan (who, with just a
mane of corkscrew curls and some glitter on his cheekbones, was more
otherworldly and alien than any of today's digitally enhanced popstars). This
faux-animation element to modern vidpop, the way that the choreography and film
techniques are designed to make humans move in ways that resemble the characters
in videogames, is why you've got this spate of pop groups taking the next
logical step and hiding themselves behind cartoons: Gorillaz, Daft Punk's
anime-style promos and robot shtick. William Gibson's Idoru--the purely
computer-generated star-as-figment--is just around the corner.
I'm also, gotta admit, starting to feel a certain intellectual exhaustion with
the whole rhythm-as--the-star, rhythm-as-melody approach. When everything else
about a record sucks--the song, the star, the cultural ramifications--maybe a
"dope beat" alone ain't sufficient. Rhythm, melody, lyrics, compelling
persona.... It's not entirely unprecedented to have the whole package: Sly
Stone, Prince, P-Funk... there's even a few white examples I can't be bothered
to list.
Perhaps what I'm imagining in the back of my brain is some kind of eventual
revolt against the utter victory of "black" musical values
(rhythm-and-production as more important than song/lyrics; nouveau
riche/aspirational, licking-the-arse-of-the-status-quo lyrics/attitudes) and the
return with a vengeance of rock pretentiousness/bohemianism. Simon Biddell has
been banging on about "vision" as a concept that needs to be reintroduced to the
critical lexicon---the idea of being transported, by music as well as by lyrics
and charisma, into an individual's very particular view of the world---and
citing the likes of Beefheart, Mark E. Smith, Sly Stone, Peter Hammill as
exemplars. And in a lot of ways I kind of concur, if only out of boredom, desire
for an all-change: a massive movement of sonically over-reaching and lyrically
over-ripe art rock would be just the ticket right now. (Some would say that's
what the best of modern hip hop is anyway--today's art rock--and maybe they're
right--which reminds me, you gotta hear the Cannibal Ox album). Of course, as
Biddell concedes, the idea of "vision" leads back down the perilous path towards
auteur theory, the expressionist fallacy, and so forth... But maybe it doesn't
have to be so backward: Radiohead, for instance, have shown that you can have
the vision thing and the riddim thing at the same time. PiL, Roxy Music, Can,
Joy Division---all utterly bang-up to date rhythm-and-production wise, all
utterly vision-ary. And there was this great moment in the late Seventies/early
Eighties, when people tried to fuse punk and disco, "white" and "black" in
really suggestive ways. How did we ever learn to settle for less, adapt to the
split consciousness of liking parts of things but not the whole?

THE BANGS/MELTZER/TOSCHES JUGGERNAUT
By one of those weird Zeitgeisty/cultural synchrony type things, a Lester Bangs
biography, Richard Meltzer and Nick Tosches anthologies, and Almost Famous
complete with Lester Bangs character and rose-tinted view of lost golden early
age of rockcrit, all coincided last year, and gave all the people (book
reviewers/clapped-out babyboomer rock writers) who last got a musical hard-on
with, I dunno, The Replacements's Let It Be, an opportunity to bash contemporary
(meaning last 20 years really) music journalism with that tired old "it was all
so much better in my day" argument.
An example from a Bill Holdship piece on Let It Blurt, Jim DeRogatis's Bangs
bio: "DeRogatis claims he fought his publisher regarding the "Greatest Rock
Critic" part of the book's title; after all, nowadays, that's almost akin to
calling someone...oh, I don't know... 'America's Greatest Pig Fucker'? 'Ass
Licker'? 'Pond Scum'? For his part, DeRogatis claims it's more like
'Afghanistan's Greatest Chef.'".
Aside from the obvious question of "who the fuck was Bill Holdship anyway and
why is he so confident that he played any part in any putative 'lost golden age'
of rockcrit?", aside from the fact that DeRogatis's blurt-less prose has far
less in common with his beloved Lester than it does with outspoken Bangs-phobe
Anthony DeCurtis (whose anti-LB piece I thought was actually kind of ballsy--and
in its consensus-bucking, anti-hagiographical irreverence perhaps closer to any
putative "lost spirit" than any number of epigones piously genuflecting at the
shrine of Lester).... aside from these not-irrelevant points.... I just don't
buy it. I've seen old copies of Creem. Bangs at his heights was untouchable, but
just 'cos Shakespeare was Shakespeare doesn't mean literature didn't carry on in
scores of paths and permutations and even advance in certain respects. Bangs had
as many "off" nights as "on" ones (the Beefheart reviews circulated as PR
material for the Grow Fins box---astonishingly sloppy and interest-devoid! Or
for that matter 50 percent of the content of Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor
Dung). And when you take the obvious and abiding Giants That Stalked The Earth
Back Then out of the picture, the average quality of music writing in the 1960s
and 1970s was really poor -- way more rambling, self-indulgent, slackly written,
insight-free than an average piece of music writing in an equivalent publication
today.
I'm not even convinced there's more craven-ness and toadyism around today-- the
confrontational interview has disappeared because PRs and managers are better at
controlling access, but reviewers still slag bands off (especially in the
bitch-as-fuck UK, which, needless to say, hardly figures in the Bangs-nostalgics
assessments of then-versus-now: typical US isolationism in effect as ever). If
anything, I'd say writers today are, on average, less inclined to supine
reverence. Back in the golden 1970s, people used to write about the likes of
Jackson Brown like they were oracles, fonts of crucial insights into the human
condition, vital life-wisdom on a par with the great novelists (check the piece
by Paul Nelson in the Stranded collection, an appreciation of The Pretender
that, incidentally, is entirely on the level of lyrics--it literally doesn't
mention music or sound once.) For better or worse, you hardly ever get that kind
of earnestness from today's rockwriter.
Richard Meltzer is one of the most voluble rhetoricians for this alleged loss of
heart and nerve on the part of rock criticism, he's been saying this since 1970
or even earlier, as part of his "rock died in 1969" argument (Meltzer's date for
when that whole arena ceased to be worth a flying fart about keeps slipping
earlier and earlier, 1968, 1967--at last count, it was in 1966 that it all
started to go down the tube). Meltzer's move is a typical one: projecting
everything he fears himself guilty of or implicated in onto a scapegoated other
(academicist/"careerist"/professionalized rockcriticism), and insisting "I'm the
only one who got it right".
Meltzer's extrojected self-disgust finds a dismal echo in that little tic of...
what, bad faith? self-delusion?... that afflicts rock critics when they use the
word "rock critic" as an insult, e.g. "oh that's such a rock critic mentality",
as if they alone have somehow escaped the category. It's just one facet of a
peculiar shame that attaches itself to this profession. Very odd -- you don't
get this kind of flagellating self-doubt with TV critics, or theatre reviewers,
or sport writers -- just rock critics. Meltzer being (as he
tirelessly/tiresomely claims) the first rock critic, he was also inevitably the
first self-hating rock critic, the one who has spent the whole of his life since
1969/6whenever-it-was trying to get away from it, failing to get away from it,
loathing it and himself.
And so A Whore Just Like the Rest, Meltzer's career-spanning compendium of music
crit, is a bitter and twisted little (fat, actually--nearly 600 pages!) book,
reflecting its contradictory impulses to stake claim to originating pre-eminence
in the rock critical field ("I invented this shit"), while at the same time
ridiculing the very notion of rock criticism as something worth doing in the
first place ("all you guys turned my invention to shit"). His agon with the
absurdity, the CRIME of still-writing-about-rock (when as any-fule-kno the day
the music died coincided precisely at the point Meltzer's passion for it died:
funny that!), gets really histrionic. Hasn't he grasped the basic emotional
truth (this is really heartbreak-and-recovery 101) that hating someone you used
to love is still a way of loving them? But no, he just won't let it go. Worse,
he maintains this absolute tyrannical and monomaniacal insistence that his story
(the inordinate investment of belief and inevitable disillusionment, all over
and done by 196??--- before you were out of diapers/even born/a twinkle in your
prepubescent dad's eye, son) is the Story, the only story that can ever count.
Meltzer's forte isn't even writing about music, anyway (I find Aesthetics of
Rock unreadable, occasional clever ideas buried in punctuation-free mudslides of
proto-deconstructionist-but-Derrida-was-never-actually-such-a-grim-slog prose,
supposedly a parody of academic writing but all too successfully impenetrable,
and I'm a pretty rugged reader let me tell you). His forte is actually writing
about rock critics---and not even about their ideas, but about their
personalities, the way they conducted their lives. The absolute best things he's
ever done are the pieces on Lester Bangs--- harshly critical but luminously
evocative, loving. LB is a subject he strangely can't leave alone (despite the
doubled absurdity of writing about someone who--ugh!--wrote about rock) and
maybe that's because Bangs is his connection to true greatness, someone people
still care about 'cos (as the cliche goes) LB was "all heart". (Whereas RM is
all bile). When it comes to mauling his peers, major (diatribes lacerating his
more successful contemporaries Christgau and Marcus) and minor alike (as in the
entertaining Almost Famous-inspired spurt of malice against Cameron Crowe and
some long-forgotten early Seventies rock writers---the words "sledgehammer,"'
"squash", and "flies" spring to mind), Meltzer is simply peerless. (Shame it's
such a minority-interest field, though.) (Most stuff referenced in this rant can
be found at rockcritics.com).
In the interest of fairness, I'll concede he's done a few other goodies--some
creepy memoiristic stories about his sexual exploits in Forced Exposure, for
instance. And at the end of Whore, there are some gig guide blurbs for the
alternative weekly San Diego Reader, make-the-rent stuff that in recent years
he's been reduced to penning, and they're hilarious, pure surrealism, almost
always with absolutely no connection to the band whose upcoming gig he's
supposedly previewing. There's a couple that are so funny, I damn-near soiled my
britches---one about these imaginary revolting soups in this Soup Museum (I
forget the band it was 'about'). Here's my point, though: as writing about
music, these blurbs are utterly useless, an insult to the reader who might
conceivably want to know if the bands playing in his town are worth seeing. And
this pretty much applies through the entire body of work: Meltzer is
interesting/entertaining in exact ratio to his use-lessness (in the literal
sense) as a writer about music. A fine clown (and all comedians are poisonously
self-loathing sorts, this we know), a good hurler of excrement, and, as I said,
a superlative critic of other critics....
As for Nick Tosches, the final member of the lost golden age triumvirate, well,
I must admit I've enjoyed everything I've read (not much actually) by Tosches,
just as pure writing... Ideas-wise, though, it's atavistic phallus-waving
machismo, the line of argument boils down to cult of authenticity, as in Jerry
Lee Lewis was cool 'cos he was a speed-and-booze damaged, religion-tortured
hillbilly who fucked a 12 year old; that black boxer he just wrote a biog of
who's name escapes me--Liston?--was cool 'cos unlike Muhammad Ali he wasn't
black power oriented and therefore not amenable to liberal rad-chic; and so
forth. Basically, Tosh is rockwrite's own Norman Mailer: the penile dementia
(some amazing rape-imagery stuff he wrote about the Stones and Jim Morrison cums
to mind: 'Hello I Love You' as "a cold hard blue-veined cock right up the
tie-dyed skirts of benighted sensitivity" (i.e. flower power, wusses to an
androgynous man as far as ol' Nick's concerned), the white negro-ism (with a bit
of white trash-ism: when it comes to sociopaths, Tosh is an equal opportunity
voyeur), the chauvinism (he once said something to the effect that he approved
of Madonna because she'd made "whorishness fashionable again"), the obsession
with boxing. Similar to Meltzer's ideas about rock dying almost as soon as it
got going, Tosh locates the lost moment of purity and unselfconscious wildness
way way WAY back in the misty yonder of times past--with the rockabillies and
hillbillies, Jerry Lees and Hanks--before rock'n'roll lost its --n'roll and
became pompous art-minded rock, or even before rock'n'roll existed as such.
All of these guys were obsessed, pathetically, with the Beats (it's the cause of
Bangs's worst work: he got so much better when he got into rewriting later on).
Melzer too was into this automatic-writing thing of just hitting the keys and
not correcting anything, typos, repetitions, missed words, stoned/soused drivel,
it's all the unconscious, unsocialized self speaking, innit. And this really
dates those guys to the whole Kerouac typing On the Road (Most Over-Rated book
ever? Maybe one of Burroughs's pips it to the post) on a single giant spool of
paper during three days of benny-induced mania. The result is that highly
formalized "informality" of gonzo rockwrite, that stylized anti-style with its
abbreviations and pseudo-phoneticized spellings. (Of all the Meltzer casualties,
I like Byron Coley of Forced Exposure best 'cos it goes so far into faux-sloppy
un-style and shorthand phoneticized terms and onomatopoeia that it becomes
utterly, almost baroquely stylized---hieroglyphic, like wildstyle graffiti, a
very jagged read--and thus exposes its own highly contrived--for it takes as
much trouble to write 'yr" or w/o as "your" or "without"--and constructed
nature).
Going back to the gonzo triumvirate, though, that let-it-blurt
pseudo-spontaneist ethos is rooted in a peculiarly American queasiness about
writing itself: writing as intrinsically distanced, detached, remote, Old World.
As if to compensate for writing's original sin of non-presence, the inherent
monologic imperiousness of expounding your opinions to an unseen audience,
there's a belief that writing should aspire to be like speech: that you can and
should create the illusion of a drunken bar-side conversation between buddies.
There's this longing for the literary equivalent of MTV Unplugged: remove all
the "writerliness" and elegance, find a "real" voice. But what sounds more posed
and artificial today than the speed-rush "raggedness" of On the Road? Bangs
himself soon abandoned the "no overdubs" approach, became a scrupulous and
fastidious remixer of his language, and did his absolute best work--the honed
radiance of the essay on Astral Weeks in Stranded springs to mind.
As for Almost Famous -- whorraloada flimsy tripe!

"PROGRESSIVE"
At the end of the day, I can't hate trance too much---at least in its shlocky
way it strives for the sublime, and sometimes grasps it: the Cygnus X mix of
"Madagascar" by Art of Trance, Three Drives On A Vinyl's "Greece 2000". Fluffy
Euro-trance's combination of mildly cosmic feel and sheer innocuousness--it's
like tripping with the Teletubbies, like a lobotomized Philip Glass--is
ultimately kind of endearing.
The appeal of "progressive"--all that Sasha-and-Digweed type stuff--eludes me
utterly though. Don't know what it's like in the UK, but in New York, all of
sudden the dance stores were swamped with the stuff---vast swathes of wall-space
swallowed up it, drum'n'bass banished to the back of the shop like the day
before yesterday's flavour it undoubtedly is.
There's a blankness to progressive that is faintly terrifying. Musically it
seems defined by its inhibitions and checked tendencies: trance without fromage,
house purged of its gay disco roots, techno stripped of black feel or jazzy
tinges.... The music is texturally monochrome, as if the tracks are all made
from the same matt silver-grey synthetic substance. Perhaps there's a kind of
purity in this approach (almost none of the sounds resembles "real" acoustic or
even electric instruments; the music seldom "moves" like a conventional
instrument does, e.g. the basslines could not be construed as played on a
bass-guitar; if there is sampling going on, it sounds like synth). But the
samey-ness and sterility of the sound make it a desperately uninvolving kind of
purism.
Progressive is long on long-ness: long sets, long tracks, the long mix. DJs like
Digweed deliberately select characterless tracks rather than orgasmic anthems,
because those "run-of-the-mix" sort of tracks can sit together for a protracted
period in the mix. You can't really tell when the transition starts or is
complete. The result is a level, peak-less experience, mild, middling---immense
longeurs of gritless throb and sub-euphoric pummel. Sasha and Digweed ration out
a stingy three climaxes per nine hour set, which might conceivably make for an
MDMA-friendly Tantric experience of hovering at the brink-of-orgasm, but to my
ears is less slow-burning tension and more like damp squib.
Progressive's sonic featurelessness carries over to the DJs (that endless
rollcall of Nicks and Johns and Daves and Pauls), and the vibe-less quality of
the band names and track titles----Evolution, Breeder, Hybrid, Slacker, Tilt,
Moonface, Quivver, Dutch Liquid, Lustral; "Force 51", "Overactive," "Syncronized
Knowledge", "Emotion Surfer", "Rhythm Reigns", "Gyromancer", "Enhanced",
"Carnival XIII", "Strapped", "Descender", "Supertransonic"----which seem almost
designed to avoid conjuring up images or outside-world evocations. They suggest
nothing beyond the faintest whiff of pasteurized spirituality or futurity. The
DJ/producers are technicians, anti-personalities, their patron saint the almost
illegally dull Digweed; the audiences too is hard to read in terms of clothing,
subcultural affiliation, class; the crowd-tableaux generated by the music are
flat. (Tech-house is much the same, another inbetweeny sound/scene---but one I
find slightly preferable, for reasons I can't be bothered to finger.)
Purging all the aspects of rave that harked back to earlier youth movements like
hippie and punk (or for that matter, disco or hip hop or reggae), progressive
has achieved a perfect non-referential purity. The "big room" sound with its
quadraphonic effects and audio-visual pyrotechnics shows how rave's explosive
energies have been corralled by the professionalized clubbing industry and
transformed into an anti-cultural deadzone, compartmentalized from life. Sound
becomes spectacle, dancers become spectators, pseudo-participants.
Progressive is the perfect soundtrack for superclubs---places where a kind of
hygienic, edgeless debauchery takes place. (Again, the same applies to
tech-house: going to the End for the first time recently was dispiriting--so
many fucked-up people, so little real fervor or electricity in the air.) Going
to raves in the early Nineties was edgy, equally likely to result in unforeseen
adventures or some kind of disaster. Today superclubs like Ministry of Sound
(sounds Orwellian), Gatecrasher, Twilo, ensure that you get what you pay
for--but nothing more. The "surplus value" or "subcultural capital" that came
from participating in the rave underground has vanished. And what's weird and
sad is that for the new generation of clubbers, the superclubs's "quality night
out" consumerist ethos inspires huge loyalty. They identify with these
mini-corporations so intensely that they mark their bodies with their brandname
logos--getting tattoos of Cream's symbol or Gatecrasher's heraldic British lion
logo. Gatecrasher's slogan "Market Leaders In Having-It-Right-Off Leisure Ware"
even plays up their corporate image.
Anyway you slice it, "progressive" is a massive misnomer on just about every
conceivable level.

L'IL KIM'S "HOW MANY LICKS" VIDEO
When it comes to ho rap (gangsta rap's sister genre--well, why not?) I always
did prefer L'il Kim to Foxy Brown--if only because Kim seemed genuinely
rapacious and nasty. But with this latest album and attendant videos, she just
seems pathetic: the antithesis of empowered, a mere ploy-toy for a series of
male mentors (one of whom, Notorious P.I.G., she appears to still hold a torch
for). I didn't get the full resonance of "How Many Licks" title/chorus until
Joy, being American, explained: it's a reference to this popular confectionery
called Tootsie Roll, a gobstopper-type thing which you lick down until you get
to this brown center of otherstuff... So I guess the chorus "how many licks does
it take to get to the center of it??", it's like this all purpose
cunnilingus/fellatio metaphor, echo of jazz age quim-code "jelly roll" in there
maybe... Song's okay: neat Daft Punky squelches and all. The video, though, is
gross. A factory churns out these Lil Kim sex dolls with "movable parts" that
are "anatomically correct" and "fully edible". (Anatomically correct? Kim's
"real" body looks cyborg and computer-tweaked---the shrunken torso, the alarming
breasts, the non-existent arse, vast head. Self-hatred made flesh). Back to the
vid--there's several different kinds of Kim doll lending themselves to different
sexual fantasies, and there's this truly grim masturbatory scene in which a guy
is beating off (twitching and sweat-stippled, he looks more like he's dying of
malaria) and suddenly this phantasmic Kim materializes over his tormented body,
her face clenched and twisted in this horrible grimace of pseudo-lust.

You'd have to go through some intricate Baudrillardian convolutions to find
anything affirmative or clever about the "How Many Licks" Video (actually, no,
it's not offering a neo-Vermorel-esque critique of stardom as symbolic
prostitution, they really do plan on making lotsa $$$$$ pimping Kim as
wank-fodder). What I think about, though, is not the pollution represented by
the "message" communicated by the video (it's just one tiny increment in the sum
of human immiseration after all), but the video as an artifact that somebody had
to make. I think of Kim sitting through meetings where the ideas for the video
were thrashed out, people explaining the concept to her, her nodding,
complying... The video as the material accretion of myriad small humiliations
and ordeals; the hundreds of hours of make-up, styling, posing, reshooting... a
sheer laboriousness of degradation, a low drawn-out process of
self-cancellation... (You can see it in her eyes----in the video and album
sleeve and street posters, Kim has the dead eyes of the ground-down
sex-worker---it's a numb, sightless, seen-too-much look you also find on those
other peons of the vice industry, croupiers in casinos). Like the history and
material conditions of existence of those sneakers on your feet, it just doesn't
bear thinking about.

HUMAN TRAFFIC
Why has the rave movie been such a long time coming? Truth is, nothing really
happens at raves. The basic nature of the experience is repetition leavened with
randomness. Sure, there's a feeling of adventure--ephemeral incidents,
ultra-vivid tableaux, strange encounters, being on a mission to
the end of the night. But dialogue is fragmentary or non-existent, because
Ecstasy allows people to feel connected without needing to talk. Real life, with
all its dramatic potential, is elsewhere. That's the point of raving, and the
reason why it's been so hard to film. It's no coincidence that ravers boast of
``losing the plot.''
Where Groove tried to capture the sweet ephemerality of the rave experience with
lots of neatly-observed incidents and inconsequential encounters, and through
its very low-keyness achieved a measure of authenticity, Human Traffic (bit late
with this one for UK readers, but its US release was last year) uses a different
tactic: although it was hyped and hailed as the definitive document of British
clubbing-and-drugging culture, the movie strangely seems to put off getting to
the club for as long as it could, and then quits the dancefloor as swiftly as
possible. As the movie proceeds, the whole thing starts to look like a series of
evasion maneuvers designed to keep a safe distance from its alleged raison
d'etre: the rave E-piphany, the white hole in which narrative incandesces.
Instead, screen time is lavished on the early-20s characters' commonplace sexual
problems and romantic woes. Only Moff, the Cockney pill monster, corresponds to
a clubland archetype: the born-again convert who proclaims ``raving's better
than sex.''
Moff's confession that he's got no real interest in relationships right now is
one of the few moments in Human Traffic that actually tells you something about
rave. It's the first youth music movement where sex is not a primary motor. And
this has everything to do with Ecstasy's peculiar lovey-dovey but
anti-aphrodisiac effects. On E, many men experience Seinfeld's George Costanza's
``significant shrinkage''; most find it hard to get hard. The buzz, for both
genders, is a hyper-tactile sensuality that's decentered and goal-less. Sure,
people meet and get off with each other, but mostly the ``loved up'' energy
coheres around the collective--the crew you came with, the dancefloor massive of
friendly strangers rather than couples. Above all, there's an erotic
relationship with overwhelming, engulfing sound--which is why ravers hug
speakers, and why Moff declares ``I'm having sex with music, mate--and believe
me, I can go all night.'' It's sad and suspect that Human Traffic lumbers Moff
with not one but two semi-comical masturbation scenes. The one person to escape
the heterosexual fix that encloses the other characters is dissed as a wanker.
Human Traffic's relentless bawdy banter contrasts with the film's coyness about
drugs. Amazingly, the actual procuring and ingestion of drugs is never shown.
Even in the scene where protagonist/narrator Jip and best mate Koop talk stoned
shit while chopping out coke lines, they never actually hoover any powder up
their nostrils. All tell and no show, Human Traffic flaunts a script caked in
down-with-the-scene drug slang and we-are-the-chemical generation rhetoric.
There's a cameo from cannabis crusader Howard Marks talking about ``spliff
politics'' and a fantasy sequence in which Jip jousts with a neurologist about
Ecstasy's drawbacks and dangers. Even the film's brief trippy sequence of
dancefloor nirvana is overlaid with a blissed Jip voiceover: ``we're thinking
clearly yet not thinking at all... we flow in unison.. I wish this was real...''

Rave isn't just about Ecstasy, it's about the mutual synergy between drugs and
music. Even the most addled participants in dance culture are incredibly picky
about what soundtracks their frenzy. But apart from a scene in a record store
and a throwaway interlude where Jip and friends rail against teenpop, Human
Traffic transmits little sense of the urgent distinctions and dissensions that
animate your genuine club culture fiends--which DJs are cool, what tracks rule,
where the vibe is to be found scene-wise.
Where Groove is about rave as counterculture, as DIY autonomist activity, Human
Traffic is about something more modest and ultimately conformist--young people
letting off steam at the weekend, like they've always done. The movie can't make
up its mind whether all the drugging is just harmless fun, or whether it's edgy,
subversive, naughty. This vacillation mirrors the fact that British rave has
become a leisure industry, with only the illegality of the party potions
providing a vestigial veneer of rebellion. Ultimately, Human Traffic is just an
annoyingly lively post-Trainspotting youth
movie with some club scenes as backdrop. There's even a nonchalant
anxiety-of-influence nod to Trainspotting, when Nina and Lulu are interrogated
by a TV crew doing a documentary about club culture and claim they don't do E
anymore, but ``jack up on heroin and float about the club.... we saw
Trainspotting and it just made us want to do it... we seem to be so
impressionable.'' This also works as an advance rejoinder to anyone who accuses
Human Traffic making drug culture glamorous and seductive. Actually, it's more
likely that the movie's five friends--an irritatingly feisty and manic bunch
forever doing comic routines and funny voices--will turn kids off drugs big
time. Who'd want to be like these idiots?

BREAKBEAT GARAGE
When this flavour of "garage" first started to come through--must have been
late 1999, with Deekline-- I remember being excited by the way the sultry,
swinging R&B-2step flow would be disrupted by this much more raw, stripped down
and rhythmically unsupple sound that was disconcertingly similar to Big Beat:
130 bpm breaks, bulbous bass, wacky samples. But what was refreshing about these
tunes--"I Don't Smoke", later the more electro-flavored "Dilemma" by So
Solid--when they were a brief tang of different flavour, becomes tediously
homogenous as a scene/sound on its own. Stanton Warriors's "Da Virus" especially
seems to be the drab template for a lot of this stuff, and "138 Trek" wore out
its welcome fairly quick. There's some cool-enough stuff, I suppose--like
Blowfelt's bippety bassline tune "Lickle Rolla"---but generally it sounds too
much like jungle minus the extra b.p.m speed-rush, hardcore without the E-fired
euphoria. Or worse like nu-skool breaks (alarming to see Rennie 'Stupid Fucking
Name' Pilgrem reviewing 2step tunes in Muzik's breakbeat column).
That said, the last batch of pirate tapes I got, showed signs of a new twist in
this breakstep (or whatever they're calling it) direction: not so much
jungle-slowed-down, and more like a post-rave, drum'n'bass influenced form of
English rap. On these spring 2001 pirate tapes, there's hardly any R&B diva
tunes, and every other track features very Lunndunn-sounding MCs or
ragga-flavored vocals, over caustic acid-riffs and techsteppy sounds, like some
latterday Dillinja production. Unlike with techstep or recent d&b, there's very
little distorto-blare in the production, there's this typically 2step clipped,
costive feel, an almost prim and dainty quality to the aggression-- a weird
combo of nasty and neat-freak. Lyrically, the vibe seems to be similarly pinched
in spirit, a harsh, bleak worldview shaped subconsciously by the crumbling
infrastructural reality beneath New Labour's fake grin; UKG seems to be already
transforming itself from boom-time music to recession blues. The Englishness of
the vocals reminds me of 3 Wizemen Men and that perpetual false-dawn for UK rap.
Lots of killer tunes I can't identify, but one in particular stood out that I
could: "Know We" by Pay As U Go Kartel. As I say, quite mean-minded and loveless
music but sonically very exciting-- a new twist if not quite paradigm shift from
the hardcore continuum.

THE NU HAIR-METAL
It wouldn't take that much argument to get me to concede that Tool, Faith No
More, Marilyn Manson, Alice In Chains, Primus, Nine Inch Nails, Korn, Kid Rock,
White Zombie, Monster Magnet, they all have at least some redeeming qualities.
Marilyn Manson---upsets Christian heartlanders, creative use of colored contact
lenses; White Zombie--as industrial disco-metal goes, pretty darn hooky;
creative use of mud as hair gel; Alice In Chains--good doomy melodies, creative
use of mud as lyrical tropes; Tool--good Quay Brothers plagiarism, creative use
of mudpeople; Kid Rock--employs a fine drummer; like name like nature;
Korn--strange "rapping"/primal yelp therapy bit in the middle of the song/video
with the bullet in it, the perfect vocal counterpoint to singer's
uber-dweeb-as-nu-kool transvaluation. And so forth... However, if you were to
take all these bands least redeeming attributes, add extra flava from purely
irredeemable cases like Insane Clown Posse, the resulting composite of
beyond-redemption godawfulness would be a lot like the latest crop of post-nu
metal gracing MTV (when it deigns to show videos at all). Like Mudvayne, whose
miasma of tats, grimaces, zany hair, and agonized rock-out body-moves is
audio-visually like some three-way fusion of Blue Man Group, Primus, and
Slipknot. There's a whole other bunch whose names escape me, all seem to share
with Mudvayne this two nouns composited into one word moniker thing (a la
Godsmack, Buckcherry, et al), names like Silverdung, Bloodrivet, Twisterfelch,
Sikkbuccit (I'm making these up but it can only be a matter of time they're
real, because of the global band name shortage crisis--it's getting desperate
out there). The connection to the old pre-grunge perm-and-spandex metal is that
the music seems like an afterthought to the creative use of hair (facial and
scalpal), tattoos, piercings, gurning. Or maybe you just can't hear it for the
retinal glare of sartorial/tonsorial shock-effects, grand guignol theatrics,
exhausted signifiers of rebellion/outrage/excess/maladjustment, all being piled
on in a desperate attempt to revivify some faint sense of the forbidden, the
transgressive, the extreme, the anti-boyband. These gateaux of grotesquerie
makes me think video-oriented rock (definitely a genre now) has become a bit
like breeding pedigree dogs--the art of deliberately cultivated genetic
travesty.
Mind you, from a certain slant of thought, that makes it kind of an interesting
phenomenon....

U2---All That You Can't Leave Behind
U2's tenth album, says Bono, is where the group "reclaim who we are". It's
always alarm-bells time when a band starts pining for an earlier sonic
incarnation of itself, for a time when it all felt so fresh and
for-the-first-time. Think of those other Eno-ites Talking Heads scaling down
from Remain In Light's oceanic sprawl to the rootsy scrawn of "Road To Nowhere".
In U2's case, though, they've scaled back up to the panoramic swirl of
Unforgettable Fire/Joshua Tree, the Eno/Lanois sound that made your ears gaze
into the far distance.
That sound coincided with U2's megastardom, but I really don't think the band
have got Uncle Brian and Danny Boy in the producers chairs again purely and
cynically in order to be Big again. No, this album is a naive, heartfelt attempt
to go back---back to when they sounded naive, heartfelt. "Reclaim who we are"
means no more postmodern play with identity, no more sub-McLuhan/Baudrillard
embracing of media hyperreality , no more Warhol-esque we-are-product malarkey.
It's good timing, too, Zeitgeist-wise. The culture is shifting away from
media-saturated referentiality and surface-oriented cynicism towards
earnestness, activism, giving a fuck. Hence Bono's work with Jubilee 2000's Drop
the Debt Campaign, and his heralding of this album with pre-postmodern phrases
like "righteous anger" and "fire in the belly". Soon, very soon, the blank irony
and mainstreamed camp that ruled the Nineties will be rejected as mere fin de
millenium decadence (Seinfeld as our Oscar Wilde) and loss of nerve.
But surely it's simply too late for a U2 makeover? Here's Bono again: "Pop music
often tells you everything is OK, while rock music tells you that it's not OK,
but you can change it". Hang on a minute, wasn't the last U2 album actually
called Pop? Didn't the first video off it have the boys camping it up under a
giant discotheque glitterball? U2 seem to be suffering a bit from
Orwell/1984-style doublethink: "Howie B? Who's that then? Dance music---not us,
mate!"
All That You Leave opens with "Beautiful Day," a song stunning enough to blast
your hackles into oblivion: for four minutes you truly believe U2 can go back to
1987. Apparently almost abandoned at birth because it sounded too much like
"quintessential U2", the song is like Boy's wide-eyed ardour filtered through
Unforgettable Fire's tingly shimmersound: Bono struck by a bolt of joy, Edge's
echoplex chimes cascading like a sun shaft through clouds, the rhythm boys
shedding Achtung-style funk'n'grit for the chaste 'n' chesty surge of old. The
tune sounds deceptively simple, but the production teems with subtle flickers,
dub-wise backwash whooshes, and vocal harmony embellishments.
"Stuck In A Moment" is gorgeous, too: a Philly soul influenced midtempo ballad
with a "tears are not enough" lyric to an emotionally paralysed friend. But
lines like "if your way should falter on that stony path" point ahead to the
album's slow slide into boggy Rattle N' Hum terrain: the sort of semi-balladic
bombast and elemental widescreen imagery that have made U2 scorned by
sophisticates for so long. "Walk On" and "Kite" resound with epic-sounding
vagaries, as if Bono wanted to come back and show Richard Ashcroft how it's
really done. In "Kite", Bono admits "I don't know which way the wind will blow".
Most likely it'll be gusting out of your bellow-like lungs, Bono.
The Stax-flavored "In A Little While" and Moondance-redolent "Wild Honey"
(featuring yet more wind and breeze imagery!) belong on that chest-beating
Celtic soul continuum that spans Hothouse Flowers and (shudder!) The
Commitments. "Peace On Earth," a song for the innocent dead and their bereaved,
at least lets Edge sound Edge-like, with radiant supersaturated overdubs. "When
I Look At The World" likewise glimmers like a planetarium, all shooting stars
and reeling constellations, but by this point the listener is suffering from
grandeur fatigue, like you've spent one day too many at the Grand Canyon. It
makes you want to listen to something modest, withdrawn, almost
imperceptible---like, where did I put that Young Marble Giants record?
"New York" saves the day with its subdued "Streets Have No Name" twinkle. It
gets louder, though, and you start praying that it doesn't explode into
passionate gesticulations, and of course it does. Even so, it's a fabulous
showcase for Edge as cinematographer of the guitar. "Grace," lovely and low-key,
ends things with a welcome whisper.
Book-ended with brilliance, All That You Can't Leave Behind's centre is hollow
and overblown, and that's got everything to do with bad faith. You can't simply
unlearn the lessons of postmodernity---it's like imagining you can become a
virgin again. Removing the quote-marks and attempting to speak straight from the
beating heart, U2 end up somewhere even worse than lame-ass Beck-style irony:
corn without authenticity, its only saving grace.
Craig David---Born To Do It
Artful Dodger----It's All About the Stragglers
I was struggling for the words to describe what ails the Craig David album, and
the word I came up with was "balls". As in, "this music's got no balls". What
was deliciously androgynous about CD on "Rewind", now sounds insipidly epicene;
not so much between-genders, as neuter. Maybe it's just a case of nice in small
doses, like fudge or butterscotch. The voice that was wonderfully light and
fluttery and melt-in-your-ear delectable on 'Rewind', here, en masse, is
revoltingly cloying---like drowning in caramel. And the music itself is like
cotton-wool or candy-floss, insubstantial without being ethereal.
Much the same applies to the over-sugared Dodger album. Like Shanks & Bigfoot,
Artful Dodger were prime movers in the grand transvaluation of London
underground principles that made 2step circa 1999 a form of pop music in
waiting, future-pop in exile. It was captured perfectly by the line in
"Re-Rewind," where Craig David sings about being "real hardcore" in the most fey
softcore croon imaginable, and by Mark Hill and Pete Devereux's hallmark
production blend of dainty and ruff. But with the exception of the singles and
moody bass-bubbler "Something", Stragglers proves that A/ 2step's pop life is
almost used up B/ the perennial incompatibility of dancefloor-targeted genres
with the album format. For what is thrillingly singular as a 12 inch is
inevitably diminished when surrounded by similar-but-not-quite-as-good material
(marked by the sort of semi-songfulness that's the downfall of all crossover
house and jungle). It forces you to notice the faceless prowess of the
"featured" vocalists, the over-used arrangement mannerisms (pizzicato off and
come back with some new ideas). That treble-intensified gloss and effervescence
that you got with peak-era 2step has been muted too: these tracks sound like
radio mixes, mid-frequencies flattening out the polar extremism of club-oriented
garage (all top-end tingle and sub-woofer boom) into a dulled sheen. The result:
disappointingly mild, characterless, and adult-oriented; pop music without the
POP!

QUILLS
What a ghastly romp for the senses! The costume designer and set designer ought
to be hunted down and physically interfered with. Props department too. The
retinal equivalent of being force fed patisserie. If eyes could barf.... then
there goes a half-digested eclair, spattering against Ms. Winslet's formidable
décolletage. And the less said about the script's pretensions to intellectual
profundity, the better.

NEW FEATURE!
The Unfathomable Appeal of.....
This year, let us ponder the unfathomable appeal of....
JOHN HIATT

(a man in sore need of a lozenge)

NEW FEATURE!
INDICTED! for crimes against culture

INDICTED!
for crimes against culture:
FLEA
charge: undue prolongation of slap-bass's cultural life

INDICTED!
for crimes against culture
PAUL OAKENFOLD
charge: unremitting soul-less professionalism

INDICTED!
for crimes against culture
MANUMISSION
charge: bringing fancy dress back to club culture

INDICTED!
for crimes against culture
MARIAH CAREY
charges: 1/ incorrigible subservience to the male gender
2/ coyness with intent
3/ leaving almost-nothing to the imagination ("and it's just/like/honey/when
your love/comes over me"--eu!!)
4/ grievous bosomy harm

INDICTED!
for crimes against culture
TOM PETTY
charges: 1/ Byrds trademark infringements
2/ Dylan trademark infringements
3/ perpetuation of tired old runaway/freebird type
bad boy narratives
4/ orthodontic infractions
5/ "Eighties drum sound"
6/ videos featuring dead women, women being eaten as cake, etc etc

INDICTED!
for crimes against culture:
MATTHEW SWEET
charge: persistent innocuousness

NEW FEATURE!

IF THEY HADN'T EXISTED, IT WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN NECESSARY TO INVENT THEM
1/ Killdozer
2/ The Catherine Wheel
3/ Cud

NEW FEATURE!
THE MOST OVER-RATED ERAS OF MUSIC EVER

1/ NEW YORK PUNK ROCK
Dolls, Dictators, Dead Boys, Ramones, Voidoids, Heartbreakers, Patti Smith
Group.... I'd swap 'em all for a single cut off Cut, for one Buzzcocks B-Side
(up to and including "Something's Gone Wrong Again", at any rate). Maybe it's
just me, but when I think of New York punk rock I just think of junkie losers,
trust fund kids slumming it, dilettantes of the Edge, grown men with college
educations dedicating their lives to wrestling and other
trash-aesthete/psychotronic fetishes...
Alright, fair's fair, it wasn't a total wasteland: there was Television, who
reinvented rock with their awesome cleansing debut, but they were always closer
to the West Coast thing (Byrds, Airplane, Dead) than the Velvets, really. And
there was Suicide, the American Kraftwerk except that Americans, punks included,
rained abuse and garbage on their heads. There was Talking Heads (but didn't
they only get good when Eno entered the fray, and then get bad as soon as he
left it? just like Blondie got good when they sold out and went New
Wave/Eurodisco?). And there was isolated sparks like Neon Boys's "Love Comes In
Spurts". But that whole eight year period between the Velvets's last sputter and
that exciting phase of No Wave turning into mutant disco circa 1979--the
"classic" era of Noo York proto-punk and punk rock--well, it really pales next
to the UK version.
Stiv Bators, for instance, must be the most worthless individual in rock
history---this is a guy who penned the song "Caught With The Meat In Your
Mouth", the Iggy-Reed fanboy who incorporated hanging himself into the Dead Boys
stage act. As M.W.I.I.R.H., he is only rivaled by Johnny Thunders. There's an
inadvertently hilarious anecdote in Please Kill Me (Legs McNeil's interminable
catalogue of vileness, iniquity and baseness posing as a definitive and
encompassing oral history of punk: the UK side of it is reduced to about 12
pages out of nigh-on 400--talk about rewriting history! A la Meltzer, McNeil's
slant is "we invented this shit, you Limeys turned it to shit"). Thunders is mad
at Dee Dee Ramone for smashing all his stuff, guitars, all his worldly
cherishables (this is some low point -- lower point, to be accurate, there were
never any heights--in the mid-Eighties when Bators, Dee Dee, Thunders and other
dregs are trying to get some kind of Noo Yawk scumpunk supergroup together) and
Thunders is vowing vengeance, he's obsessed with it, retribution is the
consuming thing in his life, and what he does, this major tough guy and
all-around monosyllabic genuine article Noo Yawk bad-boy (the guy that Please Me
Kill rates as "real" whereas John Lydon was just a poseur, an art school-reared
career opportunist), is he spots Dee Dee in this bar, and he.... creeps up
behind him (Dee Dee doesn't even know he's there)... and bonks him on the back
of the head with a beermug. Not even very hard. And then... he runs away. And
Dee Dee never even knew it was him. And Thunders meanwhile is crowing to his
girlfriend that he got back at Dee Dee.
Tosser!
Talking of which, The New York Dolls: frankly, the Sweet did it
better---gender-bending, Nazi/totalitarian flirtations, mock shock-rock--did it
with top tunes and real joy.
My respect resurged dramatically for Greil Marcus when I read recently some
interview comment from him to the effect that when it came to punk, he only
really cared for the UK stuff, plus Pere Ubu. Right on, Greil, I thought (even
if he's a little unfair to Los Angeles in that verdict, maybe). The UK brought
politics into it; behind the surface negativity and sado-masochismo, there was
idealism, naivete, sensitivity. By contrast, New York punk was apolitical and
slumming boho through and through, fixated on already-tired ideas of
transgression and decadence, hooked on the seedy glamour of low life and
nihilism.
Either that, or as Marcus said of the Ramones, it was just dumb. (Or worse:
pretending to be dumb--Dictators, Punk magazine). The Ramones: they're okay, I
guess, a bracing-enough blast, a timely intervention in 1975 no doubt (but
people were starved back then for anything remotely taut and to-the-point
aggressive). But all that rockrockrock/rock'n'roll high school stuff underlines
the crucial difference between NYC punk and UK punk, which was that the former
wanted to rejuvenate rock, restore it to how it used to be, whereas the Brits
wanted (the best of them, anyway) to un-invent rock, kill it off, step off its
grinding go-nowhere treadmill and out into something new. It made perfect sense
that the Ramones would end up doing an album with Phil Spector -- it's
impossible to imagine any of the notable UK groups, even the Clash, doing
something so retro.
What about Patti Smith, I hear you protest. Better as an idea than a musical
reality, I retort. "Land" is enduringly awesome, but most of the rest of it is,
as Joe Carducci said, a rock critic's and a poet's vision of "rock'n'roll", and
as such its rapid decline into Springsteen shlockodrama was predictable from the
off. And the debut features one of the weakest stabs at white reggae ever--it
makes The Members look like Jah Shaka.

AND NOW, AFTER ALL THE SPLEEN 'N' SPITE, SOME POSITIVITY!!!!!

my faves of the first four months of 2001:

ALBUMS
1/ Daft Punk -- Discovery (Virgin)
2/ The Avalanches---Since I Left You (XL)
3/ Cannibal Ox -- Cold Vein (Definitive Jux Recordings)
4/ Matmos -- A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure (Matador)
5/ Beta Band--Hot Shots II (Astralwerks)
6/ Wagon Christ -- Musipal (Astralwerks)
7/ Peaches -- The Teaches of Peaches (Kitty-Yo)
8/ Herbert -- Bodily Functions
9/ Various Artists---Staedtizism 2 (^scape)
10/ Big Youth -- Natty Universal Dread (Blood and Fire)

bubbling under:
Manitoba -- Start Breaking My Heart (Leaf)
Various Artists/Andrew Weatherall--Hypercity: ForceTracks (Force Inc)
Hellfish -- One Man Sonic Attack Force (Planet Mu)
Mice Parade -- Mokoondi (Bubblecore)
cLOUDDEAD --cLOUDDEAD (Mush/dirty loop music)
Chris Clark--Clarence Park (Warp)
Neil Hagerty ---Neil Michael Hagerty (Drag City)
Various Artists--Clicks & Cuts 2 (Mille Plateaux)
Susumu Yokota -- Grinning Cat (Leaf/Skintone)
Lesser -- Gearhound (Matador)
Various Artists--Braindance (Rephlex)
Cex -- Oops I Did It Again (Tigerbeat 6 )
Basement Jaxx---TBA (XL)
Floppy Sounds -- Short Term Memories (Wave)
To Rococo Rot & I Sound---Music Is A Hungry Ghost (Mute)
So-Called Artists---untitled (Mush/dirty loop music)
Shantel--Great Delay (!K7)
Tricky -- Blowback (Hollywood)
Mouse On Mars--- Idiology (Domino/Thrill Jockey)

lastyearstuffpickeduponbelatedly
Blectum from Blechdom---The Messy Jesse Fiesta (Deluxe)
--De Snaunted Haus (tigerbeat 6)

SINGLES
Daft Punk--"Digital Love" (well it's number one in this household)
Pay As U Go Kartel--"Know We" (Solid City)
Missy Elliott featuring half the rap world--"Get Your Freak On" (majorlabel)
Gorillaz---"Clint Eastwood (2step garridge mix, perpetrator unknown)"
Aaliyah--"We Need A Resolution" (Blackground), but only the last 50 seconds,
mind ---the main song-bit sucks
QB's Finest--"Oochy Wally" (bigraplabel)
..erm...
..... um.....
............???...........