faves of 1983 #2

 This one is from earlier in the year - January 15

The Xavier doesn't ring any bell at all. Nor can I summon the tune of "Insecure Me" or "Dance Your Ass Off". 

faves of 1983

May 1983 to be precise - a snapshot of my listening as a 19-year old, via an old letter that came into my possession again recently

Formative me...  on the cusp of leaving behind the teenage years...  discoveries and delights mostly indexed to critics I followed oh-so-closely....  but starting to scope out paths across the past all by myself: The Easybeats, reconceived as punk precursors; the strangeness of the Glitter-Leander sound....

 

My Top 38 - by Brian Eno

 

from Sounds magazine, February 5, 1977 - the end bit of an interview with Vivien Goldman. 

three music book faves that are a little bit forgotten

[written for somebody as part of an interview, like a bonus side-bar thing , can't remember who, can't remember when - the concept was "three music books you love that aren't that well known or are a bit forgotten"

Starlust (1985) by Fred and Judy Vermorel has been out of print for years, but is just about to get reissued by my publisher as part of its Faber Finds imprint. Here’s how I blurbed it: “This fascinating and groundbreaking expose . . . lifts the lid on fan culture to reveal—and revel in—its literally idolatrous delirium. Yet, far from manipulated dupes of a cynical record industry, fans are shown to be subversive fantasists who use the objects of their worship as a means to access the bliss and glory they cannot find in their everyday lives and social surroundings. A lost classic of pop-culture critique that’s woven almost entirely out of the testimonials and confessions of the fans themselves, Starlust is above all a celebration of the power of human imagination.”

Big Noises (1991) is a really enjoyable book about guitarists by the novelist Geoff Nicholson. It consists of 36 short “appreciations” of axe-men (and they’re all men; indeed, it’s quite a male book but quite unembarrassed about that). These range from obvious greats/grates like Clapton/Beck/Page/Knopfler to quirkier choices like Adrian Belew, Henry Kaiser, and Derek Bailey. Nicholson writes in a breezy, deceptively down-to-earth style that nonetheless packs in a goodly number of penetrating insights. I just dug this out of my storage unit in London a couple of months ago and have been really enjoying dipping into it.

The Boy Looked At Johnny (1978) by Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons is a curious thing: proof that a music book can be almost entirely wrong and yet remain a bona fide rockwrite classic. Allegedly written in a few days during an amphetamine bender, it’s subtitled “The Obituary of Rock and Roll,” but is really a requiem for the then-married authors’ broken-hearted belief in punk-as-revolution. Bitter and bitchy, strident and stylish, this short, fast tract had a huge impact on me at the time, as it did on loads of other impressionable youths; I was really surprised, later on,  to find out that many people at the time of its release disapproved/deplored/dismissed it altogether. A big deal at the time, The Boy Looked At Johnny really has been forgotten. Few today even remember that perennially infamous newspaper opinionator Burchill was once a music journalist—indeed, for a few years, the U.K.’s most famous rock writer.

Fave Places in New York circa 2008

I have no memory which foreign (I assume?) magazine this was written for, or why.... Maybe I should ask Kieran (NYC native now relocated to Bushwick) to do a 2023-update.... The High Line would be an obvious addition 

Love , 179 MacDougal Street , New York, NY 10011

Dark atmospheric club with possibly the best sound system in Manhattan; home to dubstep monthly night Dub War and drum & bass party The Secret Night of Science.

 

The Frying Pan, Pier 66, New York, NY 10011 (West 26th St. at West Side Highway )

A cool bar that regularly hosts dance parties as well as private events, this is a boat moored at a dock on the Hudson River; once submerged for many years, it was salvaged and restored,  but the interior was left fantastically rusted and corroded from years at the bottom of the sea.

 

Stuyvesant  Town

Apartment block complex, originally built to house WW2 veterans, between 23rd and 14th Street and 1st Avenue to the East River, with many cool recreation areas, playgrounds, trees and greenery. Literally cool, as the tall buildings create pools of shade that are refreshing to dip inside during a sweltering Manhattan summer.

 

DUMBO

Short for Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass, this formerly industrial area in Brooklyn between the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge has been redeveloped with riverside parkways, cafes, book stores, etc, but still retains the gritty residues of its dockland past. Access via the water ferry from the Fulton Slip at Fulton Landing in Manhattan, or take the F-train subway to York Street.

 

Prospect Park, Brooklyn

More rugged and wild than Central Park, Manhattan, the perfect place for a summer picnic party.

  

Chelsea Market

Indoor market with restaurants, cafes, food stores, patisseries, gelateria, etc, a short walk from the Hudson River and in close proximity to the formerly squalid, now slightly cleaned up Meatpacking District.  75 9th Ave (between 14th and 15th Street)

 

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Williamsburg's Bedford Street is what the East Village's St Mark's Place and Avenue A were like 15, maybe even 20 years ago: where the hipsters prowl, grazing at the wares offered by street vendors selling used books, used records, vintage clothes, etc.

DiD

Someone, somewhen, asked me what my desert island discs would be. (It wasn't Radio 4)

This is either what I sent them, or a Long List to be winnowed down

Actually, inspecting it closer, I appear to have drawn up two lists - absolute faves versus records chosen for  functional reasons, the solace and spiritual-emotional sustenance they'd provide on an actual deserted island. 

List 1: Ab Favs

John's Children, A Midsummer Night Scene

Sex Pistols, No Fun

Roxy Music, beauty queen

Slits, Cut

Michael Jackson, Rock With You

the Smiths, There is a Light that Never Goes Out

My Bloody Valentine, Slow

Orbital, Chime

Omni Trio, Renegade Snares (Foul Play VIP remix)

Aphex Twin, Selected Ambient Works 1985- 92

Aaliyah, One in a Million versus Groove Chronicles 'Stone Cold' ( second song samples the first)

Future, Fuck Up Some Commas

LIST 2 - therapeutic comfort listening to make desert island bearable

Beethoven, Pastoral Symphony

The Byrds, Younger than Yesterday

Love, Forever Changes

Miles Davis, In a Silent Way

Al Green, 20 Greatest Hits

John Martyn, Solid Air

Robert Wyatt, Rock Bottom

Joni Mitchell - The Hissing of Summer Lawns

Brian Eno, Another Green World

King Tubby's Special (disc two)

The Smiths, Hatful of Hollow

Ultramarine, Every Man and Woman Is A Star 

August 26th 1989

 

A moment in time... juxtaposed with Melody Maker's American albums chart for that week, me and Stubbsy's current obsessive listens that midsummer o' '89. 

Note the soon-to-be Disney-embargoed original title of A.R. Kane's "i".... and, in a relatively lean year compared to '88's bonanza, how the focus of both our listening is increasingly encroached upon by the past (Miles and Blue Orchids, Can offshoots and Love) 

firsts

An aeon ago, I was asked to do a thing on BBC Radio 6 and the preparatory stage involved filling in a questionnaire on "Good Day Bad Day" music

First Single You Bought:   What was it, where, why?

The Theme From ‘Sting’ aka ‘The Entertainer’ by Scott Joplin, as recorded by Marvin Hamlisch

WH Smith in Berkhamsted

Liked it!

First Album You Bought:  What was it, where, why?

Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Do It Yourself

Probably the local little record store in Berkhamsted

Loved Ian Dury – New Boots and Panties, along with Never Mind the Bollocks, changed my life.

First gig:   What was it, where? Any particular memories/stories?

The Slits, Aylesbury Friars.  Not as good as the album Cut (second album I bought), a bit loose they were as a band. But still a big buzz.

Best Gig:  What was it, where, why was it your best?

Either My Bloody Valentine at ULU around the time of “Glider” (1990?), or Animal Collective at the Bowery Ballroom, New York in 2004 I think it was. Both transcendent and engulfing.

What you’re listening to now:  What music are you currently into?

The new album by Woebot, Hallo. Maria & the Mirrors’s “Gemini”. Traxman’s The Mind of Traxman.

Good Day Record:  What and why?

Kraftwerk, “Neon Lights”.  Wanted to pick something electronic and dance-related as that’s a huge part of my listening. And of course, spoiled for choice there. I could have picked something by Aphex Twin or Ultramarine or LFO or Omni Trio or Wagon Christ or Orbital or…   But let’s go with the godfathers: Kraftwerk. Electronic music, groove-based music, is music that I tend use as a pure mood-modifier, the emotions in it are quite abstract. If you’re having a good day, you probably don’t need your spirits elevated that much, but the rhapsodic flutter of this song is the perfect soundtrack.

Bad Day Record:   What and why?

When someone really bad has happened in my life music tends to drop away completely, it is inadequate. So I have to rephrase the question in my mind: what songs do I know that contain “healing wisdom”? And one of them would be The Byrds’s “Everybody’s Been Burned” off Younger Than Yesterday. Apart from its beauty, the lyric offers good counsel: don’t respond to set backs or traumas by retreating into yourself, stay open.

fave theorists

 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text is probably my favoritest. A joy to read, broken up in nice little aphoristic short sections, a mind rearranger for me aged whenever it was (21?). A Lover's Discourse is wonderful too - similar style and structure - but less applicable to other things as Pleasure, as it is so focused on romantic love. Then there's that hardy perennial, "The Grain of the Voice". Mythologies, I still remember certain perceptions - the chapter about the court case against the allegedly murderous farmer, the literary way the prosecution wielded rhetoric against the simple-speaking man.... the stuff about strip teases, about wrestling.. 

Jean Baudrillard wrote about 50 books (I've not counted but that's what it feels like). Yet - and this is just a hunch - I suspect the kernel of most everything is contained in this fantastic short essay, "The Ecstasy of Communication".  Which must have been written in the late 70s or early 80s but in a feat of unintentional prophecy explains the internet and its effect on culture and psychology. (The other things I've read, I found overly abstract - a lot of sweeping assertions ("power no longer exists" - hmmm, you think so Jean?) 

One of JB's books in that highly fetish-able Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents series of black pocket-sized volumes was titled Forget Foucault - which always tickled me, the French-crit-theory equivalent of a diss track. But I could never forget Michel Foucault - the prose is arid next to Barthes, but the ideas have so many applications. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 is not a sexy read, but it rearranged my mind - put out of contention, out of their misery, all those lingering Sixties ideas about Eros as inherently revolutionary. The Archaelogy of Knowledge is tough going - it's extremely abstract, he proffers even less in the way of evidential support than Baudrillard. A grim grinding slog, to be honest - until the final chapter, styled as a dialogue between ice-veined Michel and an imaginary humanist interlocutor whose objections are patiently and remorselessly demolished. It ends with a wonderful flourish of chilling anti-humanist rhetoric. I struggled resolutely through the whole thing during my lunch breaks while working a summer job in a factory, packing aerosols of fly-spray. This final chapter felt like the pay-off.

My brother Jez "riveted" by The Archaelogy of Knowledge 

Foucault was a better interviewee than a writer and the anthology of dialogues Power / Knowledge is a very good way in.

Julia Kristeva made a big impression on me with The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection... and a medium-sized impression with Black Sun and the book about love. She's slogging on, does a book every few years, seemingly with zero impact. 

Can't forget Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari - their concepts seemed to have a lot of applications to music and music culture at one point. Now, I'm a little befuddled as to their use value - in any context. 

Paul Virilio - Mark Fisher hated Virilio, or found him extremely frustrating. And it's true, there's little in the way of sustained linear development of argument - the text jumps around all over the place. A paragraph ends and the next one is a complete non-sequitur. Sometimes the next sentence is a non-sequitur.  Fragmentary and disjointed as it is, though, I found a fair amount to ransack and redeploy in his work, in particular with The Aesthetics of Disappearance.  Like Baudrillard (and Kristeva), another one of these extremely productive, churn-out-a-book a year almost, types. A lot of reiteration (and self-cannibalism maybe).

Georges Bataille. Got Visions of Excess in hardback - a copy without a dust jacket, going cheap. Mad stuff.  It seemed then to have all kinds of applications to what I was listening to at exactly the point of reading, which was the Butthole Surfers!  But the one that really has proved enduringly useful is the three volumes of  The Accursed Share, his relatively straightforward and analytic book about economics and human psychology. (At one point I had loose leaf pages of all the Acephale writings, I think an advance copy had come into Joy's possession when she was a book's editor. I chucked those out eventually, though. Can't be grappling with an unbound book). 

Now I have read some really interesting books in the last decade or so - things that have sent me down unexpected thought-paths  - but they tend to be more like obscure scholarly works, discovered through project-oriented research. They don't really fit the category of  "Cultural Theory", and nor are they the kind of stuff that is setting the pace in academia nowadays. Things like Jonas Barish's The Antitheatrical Prejudice, Daniel Patrick O'Keefe's Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic (that one a Phil Knight tip), Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death (which you can see the Woody Allen character suggesting as some light reading for Annie Hall in the scene below - what a dick!), Esther Newton's Mother Camp, Donald Meyer's book about the history of Positive Thinking, Daniel J. Boorstin's The Image.... 

But nothing hits you quite as hard as when you're young and mind-malleable. You're hungry, then - and an indiscriminate forager for mind-food. 

So for me it would be the French lot, largely. In the late '80s, early '90s, it also seemed to work really well with what was going in music at that time. Or at least it was irresistible for me to glom one onto the other, and there seemed to be a fit, or a friction that created a spark.

And it had style as writing - whereas much that has followed in later phases 'n crazes of theory (cyber-theory, postcolonial, queer theory, affect) is dry and often rather tortuous. There also seems to be a common style of taking very particular texts as a starting point- an obscure poem, or a film or a photograph - and using that as a prism from which to zoom out. (As opposed to a macro vision, that sweeps up a lot of evidence to support its sweeping claims). I find this zoom-out-from-something-small approach often feels a tad tenuous; it requires your credence to support itself on something that might just be a rather particular and private obsession. Which is fine for blogs (I do it all the time, obviously - reading massive significance into something minor and obscure) but seems less so for a bound book of scholarly argument.

Strangely though, much as I love all that French stuff still, and if my eye happens to fall on a patch of it I'll slip very easily into being as swayed as ever by it, thinking it Truth... it doesn't seem to have much explanatory power with current popular culture, little in the way of resonance or purchase.... 

What does? Affect theory, maybe. Although probably in terms of the 'what's hot' stakes in academia, that might possibly already be a bit passe. 

Other fave thinkers and theorists:

Harold Bloom, mostly for The Anxiety of Influence - so so useful -  but I do like to marinate in his windy locutions about the Western canon. 

Susan Sontag, mostly for "Against Interpretation" and "Notes on Camp" and "Fascinating Fascism"

Dick Hebdige, mostly for Subculture: The Meaning of Style

Simon Frith

Norman O. Brown

JG Ballard

Klaus Theweleit

Brian Eno 

Nietzsche 

Fred Vermorel

Joe Carducci

E.M. Cioran

Oscar Wilde 

I suppose I would have to say Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, they had a huge impact on the unformed moi (although as a model for living, or a practical politics -  I'm unconvinced, these days. The analysis of boredom and alienation seems perennial up to a point, although the idea that watching TV or films or spectactor sports is necessarily passive and isolated is woefully uninformed - typical snobby outlook that comes from living inside a purely literary culture, there's that disdain for the mass medium and thus an ignorance of the possibilities for sharing that exist in the collective enjoyment of this stuff - all the ways in which we literally make fun together out of this supposedly unilinearly-imposed pablum).

Fredric Jameson (although it's a bit of a slog, a tad arid, as prose - loves a long sentence, loves to use punctuation). (What isn't a slog - and actually is easily my favorite of his things, is the short book on Wyndham Lewis, Fables of Aggression) 

Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and The Death Drive.  Kind of an unhinged book - in a weird way it reminded me of the mindset I'd managed to get into circa Blissed Out, this apocalyptic-nihilistic bliss-as-ego-death mysticism. But reached through a completely different angle:  Leo Bersani's  radical negativity, opposition to all breeders (aka "reproductive futurism"). (Disappointing to discover that Edelman has been married to a fellow scholar for decades - but then who of us really lives out our principles?) 

Talking of apocalyptic-nihilistic I'm afraid I would have to give the nod to N. Land's Bataille-book The Thirst For Annihilation. There's something about the anti-life, anti-human, anti-everything mindspace that has an unleashing effect on the prose. 

Camille Paglia - Sexual Personae. One of those books where it's the prose and the force of personality that is utterly swaying in the moment of reading. You get a high off the vehemence.  

Recent years: 

Berardi's After the Future

A couple of things by Nicolas Bourriaud, e.g. The Radicant

Alan Kirby's Digimodernism

I'm sure I'm forgetting many brain-rearrangers

(And I'm not including probably the most influential thinkers - the rock critics and music writers. No need to reel out that pantheon again).

I will say though that an awful lot of the theory and academic stuff I've read over the years - the preponderance of it, honestly - has left no trace whatsoever - no ideas-trace, and no memory-of-pleasure trace either. 

So in a way, maybe nowadays I'm "after theory" - I've taken in enough fuel, transmuted and distorted it, that I can now sustain my trajectory, for my remaining years. That has not stopped me, however, from repeat-visiting this site I came across recently and downloading a couple of hundred titles -  books that will almost certainly never be read, pdfs that in many cases will never even get opened. So clearly some kind of theory-itch remains, a vestigial limb from those young hungry days.  

Overrated

Derrida - I've found little of use to me in there, really. And there's a lot of fannying about and irritating play with words. Spectres of Marx is a disparate collation of meditations on quite far-flung subjects. Each component seem to relate to the other ones only tangentially.  It's also extremely short. Now I'm not a believer in length per se - but you definitely get a bit of  a "will this do?" whiff from it.  Yet equally you also feel it could have been briefer still - vastly more succinct. In terms of actual ideas, it could have been boiled down to a few pages.  

Archive Fever - the title is a wonderfully poetic, mind-triggering phrase, but the book (another very slim effort) is actually about something else altogether than what you think (or at least, what I thought it was going to be about). There's stuff about circumcision. And the closing chapter is Jacques having an intellectual tussle with an obscure scholar of Judaism, who's written a book about Freud in which he tries to insinuate that psychoanalysis is a Jewish science. Although Jewish himself, Derrida's not having this. Yes, it's that esoteric. 

Lyotard - some great phrases ("the desire called Marx") but very hard going indeed. Extracted very little of use for my particular purposes. 

Haraway - I suppose the cyborg woman essay is a classic. I tried with the OncoMouse TM one, but had to give up after 8 pages. Same with the one about dogs as companion species. Kinda felt "look, I get it - you're a dog person. But there's no book to write here". (And in fact it's exceedingly short - a monograph). Reminded me a bit of my first girlfriend's dad, who used to talk to his dog when out walking him, confide all his problems and grievances. (Necessarily he was a good listener, this dog). He would pay tribute to his canine companion, say things like "'there's people in this town who aren't fit to lick my dog's bumhole!"

Never got to 

Bourdieu

Marcuse

McLuhan

Blanchot

Zizek

Badiou

Wittgenstein

Too many others

fave science fiction + alternative history

 11 of my fave s.f. novels

(originally wrote this for purposes irrelevant to go into at this juncture)

Keith Roberts, Pavane  

Alternative history/counterfactual set in England where the Reformation never happened, Roman Catholicism dominates the country, and science has been suppressed.

Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee

Alternative history in America where South won the Civil War, an unacknowledged precursor to steampunk in terms of technological backdrop, very well written and characterized, full of great historical jokes and inversions - e.g. in the impoverished, backwards remnant of the United States of America, the transcontinental railroad was never completed, the Native American tribes never defeated, and Deseret (the original Mormon name for Utah) still has polygamy, while a Klu Klux Klan-like militia called the Grand Old Army fights against the overwhelming economic influence of the Confederate States of America, a/k/a those damn Southrons.

Robert Sheckley, Mindswap. 

The exact plot escapes my memory – something involving a guy who ends up in an alien body and his attempts to get home, involving jaunts across many strange planets, each time ending up inside a wildly different lifeform. But Sheckley is that rare thing, the genuinely hilarious s.f. writer.

John Brunner, Stand On Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up. 

These weren’t quite sequels but more like companion books, both set in an overpopulated future, Sheep I think nearer the present and more polluted and ruined, Zanzibar more about pop cultural overdrive, the pressures of overcrowding. Both excellent.

Frederick Pohl and CM Kornbluth, The Space Merchants  and Gladiator At Law

Possibly my favorite s.f. book ever - certainly the most reread. Another one set in an overcrowded, ecologically ruined future, this time a world dominated by advertising agencies. Written in the 50s circa Vance Packard and The Hidden Persuaders but surprisingly not dated at all and probably has renewed interest because of Mad Men and our culture of branding, Facebook ads, micro-targeted propaganda etc.   Pohl and Kornbluth wrote a bunch of really excellent books both separately and together – they belonged to this cabal of NY-based, mostly Communist or left-aligned writers who called themselves the Futurians, so the anti-capitalist slant of Space Merchants makes sense in this light.   Gladiator At Law, also excellent, is set in a similarly dark, corporate dominated future, where the masses are kept happy by a revival of  Roman style bloodsports

Walter Miller, A Canticle For Leibowitz 

Absolute classic set in the Dark Ages several centuries after world war three, with monks who preserve the lost knowledge and painstakingly copy onto parchment the circuitry diagrams for machines they no longer know what they were for. Beautifully written and wry

Alfred Bester, the Demolished Man, and Tiger, Tiger (also published as The Stars My Destination)  Two more classics. The Demolished Man involves a future where telepathy has been developed and so has teleportation ... and to be honest my memory of the plot/scenario momentarily fails me, but it’s.... great!   Tiger, Tiger – ditto, I recall more particular amazing scenes.  A great stylist, though, is Alfred Bester and generally accredited as a master.

Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!

The book that was turned into Soylent Green but about 10 times superior to the movie. A very grim and gritty, well imagined scenario of overpopulation and resource depletion in New York circa 1999. ‘Soylent’ is not “made out of people” as in the hokey Charles Heston  movie but is just one of the dreary processed foodstuff that people subsist on along with krill burgers and weed crackers. The rich go to “meatleggers’ and “meateasy’s” where they can get some dog or if they are really wealthy and connected, a sliver of beef steak.

^^^^^^^^^^^^

Things I would obviously add to the list: Philip K. Dick The Man in the High Castle (and a couple of other PKDs), several J.G. Ballards (The Drowned World, High Rise, Low Flying Aircraft, others), an Aldiss or two (Greybeard, Hothouse) Lem's Solaris and Fiasco definitely, possibly Christopher Priest's A Dream of Wessex. 

And I suppose Fahrenheit 451 is undeniable. 

As is Neuromancer. And The Difference Engine.

Ooh, how could I forget - most of John Wyndham - particularly The Chrysalids (that should be a movie, I think) and The Midwich Cuckoos and Chocky, but you can't deny The Triffids. 

Out of recent years reading in the genre, I don't think anything would get added to this core list, which was consolidated in my mid-teens - except for Olaf Stapledon's First and Last Men  and Starmaker - visonary works both. And David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, which isn't exactly s.f.  (more on it at the bottom).

That said, I was very impressed by Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry For the Future. 

Short stories is a whole other ball game... Dozens by Ballard. Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" is one that lingers in the memory disquietingly. Ray Bradbury's one about the pedestrian who gets arrested for going for a walk at night. 

So many others from paperback collections I got from the local library.

Some major science fiction writers that I have never read: Asimov, Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke, Heinlein (not entirely sure actually that it's zero with him - but certainly nothing has stuck in the memory). A number of other surprising omissions...

Mainstream literati having a go? Well, you'd have to mention 1984, Brave New World, Kingsley Amis's The Alteration (but certainly not Russian Hide and Seek), Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (but certainly not 1985 and nor The Wanting Seed). The Plot Against America. Oh and Nabokov's Ada, although he professed to despise s.f. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

A Voyage to Arcturus 

One of the strangest novels I've read. By David Lindsay, published in 1920. Not exactly science fiction, nor fantasy, but a tortured religious vision. Absurd, yet with a unsettling quality of reality and gravity that takes it out of that zone of the Marvelous a.k.a. make-it-up-as-you-go-along cobblers.

It starts with a seance or spiritualist type meeting in an Edwardian living room, there are three gentlemen ... but then quickly.... well, it's hard to say what proceeds from that, paraphrase wouldn't quite convey.... Logic and plausibility quickly disappear without any loss of a sense of reality or grim seriousness.. It's a slightly barmy religious vision that you can't shake off. The outer space location (Tormance, a planet around Arcturus) is by the by really...  

The attitude to all things worldly, fleshly and pleasure-giving reminds me of peak-delirium K-punk's Spinozist scorn for "sad passions".

Harold Bloom was such a fan of Arcturus (he claimed to have read it hundreds of times!) that he tried to write a sort of an extension of it, The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy (1979).His only attempt at a novel. Did I read somewhere that he subsequently tried to get hold of all remaining copies and destroy them? Or perhaps he joked about doing so. 

fave lyricists versus overrated lyricists

(one side of a chat with Carl Neville aka the Impostume, done in the mid-2000s)

FAVES

Ian Dury 

Jim Morrison (but perhaps only his delivery could get away with some of that stuff)

Robert Wyatt (king of bathos)

Kevin Ayers (recently got into into him in a big way... "Decadence" and "Song from the Bottom of A Well", amazing words)

Bryan Ferry (a genius of delivery also)

Marc Bolan (best spangly pop nonsense)

Edwyn Collins

Morrissey (not after a certain cut-off point which is almost as early as The Queen Is Dead except there are moments in the later Smiths stuff and one really great later solo song "I Am Hated For Loving"... actually I just read a really good book on Morrissey by an academic that made a good case for his lyrical genius throughout, broke down his various strategems etc... I was convinced but then the music gets to be mostly so pedestrian post Viva Hate)

Roy Harper

Billy Mackenzie

Green (the early stuff ....  Songs to Remember just is too cute and smugly in love with himself .... some moments on Cupid... the last LP, White Bread Black Beer, very much)

Jarvis Cocker

Martin Bramah

Kristin Hersh 

Poly Styrene

John(y) Rotten/Lydon

Pete Shelley

Syd Barrett (actually there is also one song that was a B-side early on, by Rick Wright -- amazing lyrics, strange fragile emotion i can't think of any prototype for in rock. 'Paintbox" -- well worth checking out if you have any time for Floyd at all)

Captain Beefheart (not always but often)

Lawrence from Felt makes it just for "Primitive Painters" and some of the Denim lyrics.

David Byrne (not always but quite often -- "Mind", "Animals", side 2 of Remain)

Iggy Pop when he was in the Stooges

 

further thoughts 

Stevie Nicks, in a funny sort of way

Rapping is almost like another thing, it doesn't look good written down often, but Jay-Z, LL Cool J, DMX

SPECIAL CATEGORY: can't say I adore exactly but you can definitely see why they're so rated: Lou Reed, Ray Davies, David Bowie

 

OVER-RATED 

it's not that they're bad, they might even be "good", but just substantially over-rated

 

Thom Yorke (just very few really memorable lines)

Manic Street Preachers (I warm to them as people but the lyrics are just fucking wretched aren't they! as is the music and the singing come to think of it. Do not see why Owen and Anwen et al are so into them, guess it might have been a certain-age type thing)

Ian Curtis (it's very young, isn't it? Exception: "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is perfect)

Elvis Costello (used to really like but it's rubbish,  okay it's not rubbish but really masturbatory --  wordplaying with yourself in public heh heh- actually I kind of enjoy it on that level, as grotesque exhibitionism, and also as sensuously sounded nonsense) (see this earlier post, the section on "pubadelia")

Nick Cave (used to like him a lot but now it seems so posey -- the over-written Birthday Party stuff is still pretty great I think, but what's worse is when he tries to do "simple" later on in a sort of King James Bible/Faulkner kind of way, tries to achieve the language of parables and common simple-hearted folk... cod-"timeless").

Mark E. Smith (agenius obviously but his seems to be an approach where you could get away with murder so I wonder if he does that quite a bit)

Brian Eno (the story ones are good, the ones about people marooned on beaches or twilight states of vegetative indolence...  but  the other Warm Jets type stuff is just twee )

Kurt Cobain (some great one or two liners and the odd verse but…)

J&MC, Primal Scream, Spacemen 3, Spiritualized --  it's like the cooler, slightly higher brow version of how metal bands write lyrics, like they've gone to the School of Rock

X, Violent Femmes, etc -- American wannabe poets

Vic Godard (good lines here and there, don't completely understand the fuss I must say - like "Ambition" - why is this considered an all-time lost classic?)

Patti Smith (has her moments, but…)

Joe Strummer and Paul Weller

The Clash lyrics pale next to the Pistols (the exceptions here - "Complete Control", "White Man in Hammersmith Palais", "Lost in the Supermarket" and - while overly abstract  - "Straight To Hell")

Weller has some moments but ("When You're Young", "That's Entertainment". "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight" is great - a 3 minute Play For Today was his goal, he said - but then narrative doesn't make sense - why is travelling by Tube to bring home a curry; midnight is a bit late to be having a curry; how would the muggers work out his address so to be able to use his keys to break in and attack the wife?). "Town Called Malice" makes me wince. Then there's the Style Council... 

Donald Fagen (except for The Nightfly, when he's great) 

That was circa 2006, who would I add now?

Faves

The chap(s?) in Vampire Weekend but only for the first album

It pains me to say it but Ariel P**k

Florence Shaw, obviously

I should have added The Specials (Dammers, Hall, Golding, Radiation)

Also Gang of Four but only the first album (gets clumsy after that - except for "Paralysed") 

Also Joni Mitchell (often)

Also John Lennon (often)

Also Paddy Macaloon except when he's very cloying (which admittedly is quite often)

Also Neal Peart but only for two songs, "The Spirit of Radio" and "Limelight". 

Also David Crosby for "Everybody's Been Burned", "Mind Gardens" and "Triad"

Also Peter Perrett

Overrated

Really not sure - I don't seem to listen out for lyrics in the way I once would have, and for a while now quite a large proportion of my listening is music sans words. 

But in terms of someone for whom the argument is made very much on the basis of the lyrics, I would say Lana Del Rey. 

best gigs (2006)

 some publication asked me the best gigs I ever saw, this is what I said in circa 2006

 

my bloody valentine at ULU

butthole surfers at ULU

orbital at progeny

chemical bros at irving plaza

animal collective at bowery ballroom

young gods at ULU side room

basement jaxx (somewhere in South London? or on the Frying Pan in NYC? or both)

world domination enterprises in croydon 1987 (possibly still the greatest gig i've ever seen)

throwing muses at africa centre 1987

janes addiction at ICA

zapp at hammersmith (so good i went the next day as well - still good but a mistake to go so quickly in succession)

meat puppets at that really gross shabby venue in Hammersmith (clarendon?)

since 2006?

gang of four that same year or thereabouts

buzzcocks and chris and cosey  at Tilburg, Holland festival

scritti politti at bowery ballroom 

the go go's at Hollywood Bowl

LCD Soundsystem at Bowery Ballroom

pre-2006 omissions from the first time round

killing joke - twice (Friars Aylesbury and a place in Dunstable)

adam and the ants (Friars)

23 skidoo (Scamps, Oxford)

bad brains (a big venue in London whose name escapes me)

world of twist at astoria

pulp at a venue in Islington in that moment between "Legendary Girlfriend" and "Babies" when they were just starting to take off

stone roses somewhere in London at their very peak

seefeel (unusual venue in North London, Main also good that night)

PJ harvey at cbgbs

a class of their own: kraftwerk 

(seen them several times - first at Brixton Academy  - the middle one at Roseland NYC might have been best but then I was on one. the most recent, Disney Hall, was spectacular (3D Spex) but the volume was too low)

electrifying for not strictly musical reasons

John Martyn with Danny Thompson at Joe's Pub, NYC, not long before he died

never seen them give a really good concert

smiths or morrissey

far from a complete inventory this.... 

Changed My Life

Ten Records that Changed My Life 

(can't remember who this was done for, or when - 2003?)

 

1/ Sex Pistols, Never Mind the Bollocks, 1977

Awoke me to belief in rock as a revolutionary, world-historical force - a faith I've still not yet fully shaken off.

 

2/ Ian Dury and the Blockheads, New Boots and Panties, 1978

Awoke me to the possibilities of rock as poetic language (Dury) and awoke in me a feeling for funk and disco (Blockheads).

 

3/ Public Image Ltd, Metal Box, 1979

Awoke me to the power of bass weight and dub space,  something that would keep on reverberating across an entire continuum of Jamaica-into-England music, from ska to UK garage.

 

4/ The Byrds, Younger Than Yesterday, heard 1982/released 1967

Awoke me to Sixties psychedelia and its mystical dreams of self-surrender and recovery of the lost child within.

 

5/ The Smiths, "This Charming Man", 1983

Awoke me to Morrissey, the most charismatic frontman and fascinating pop intellect since Bowie, and to the poignant glory of his refusal of the 1980s.

 

6/ Schoolly D, self-titled, 1986

Awoke me to the fact that rap was the major new pop music art form of the Eighties, avant-garde in form and almost Marxist in its coldhearted dissection/dramatisation of the capitalist psyche.

 

7/ Beltram, "Energy Flash", 1990

Awoke me to the dark Dionysian delirium of rave -- to the fact that techno was the new punk, or new heavy metal - either way,  the rock of the future, and the future of rock.

 

8/ Omni Trio, "Renegade Snares (Foul Play Remix)" , 1994

Awoke me to the fact that jungle's breakbeat science was the major new pop artform of the Nineties - regardless of whether it would ever become pop music in the Top Ten hit sense (it wouldn't, but it would get around).

 

9/ Dem 2, "Destiny ", 1997

Awoke me to the fact that jungle's spirit of playful invention had migrated into UK garage and especially its subgenre 2step, which this track defined and blueprinted.

 

10/ Dizzee Rascal, "I Luv U", 2002

Awoke me to the fact that grime (the UK finally coming up with its own ferociously original counterpart to rap) was the major new pop artform of the first decade of the 21st Century.