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.....

............???...........