So there’s been a lot of controversy recently regarding singer MIA (right) and the bloody, graphic video for her new single, ‘Born Free.’
Placed onto Youtube then removed a day later, it’s a ten-minute, Hurt Locker style hi-def depiction of a group of American soldiers rounding up young ginger people, driving them away in armoured vehicles to the desert, and forcing them to run across a minefield at gunpoint. It’s pretty gruesome- a small child is shot in full-facial close-up, and there is absolutely nothing left to the imagination when the inevitable explosions start happening.
To some, yes, absolutely. That kind of violence is shocking and terrifying, and yes, it is happening in the world today- there’s some suggestion that with these ginger people in there, MIA’s making reference to the Tamil Tigers, who she’s previously caught flack for supporting. It’s a fairly clear message, too- pretty much, it’s ‘Racism is bad, m’kay?’ It can’t help but make you think about the fact that things like this are well within the human capability for violence and hatred.
That’s all well and good, but I have a problem with the opening of the video- there’s a bunch of other shocking images in there, seemingly at random- the old man smoking crack, the overweight couple having sex. It’s unclear why they’re there, apart from the fact that, well, it’s unsettling and unpleasant. And that’s kind of a shame. We don’t need to be beaten over the head with outrage, surely? It’s almost as if they’re just throwing as much at the camera as they can, to see how far they can push it.
It’s odd, too, that to me the music itself is really only a secondary consideration in this. It’s not the main event, it’s the soundtrack. That’s reinforced by the way that the track fades in and out where the narrative of the video deems it appropriate. Now, that might be interesting, but isn’t Mia supposed to be a recording artist, not a film-maker?
And if I’m going to be brutal about the track, it’s not that good. It’s atmospheric, and angry, but it’s not really as good as the song it samples, or indeed strong enough to stand up as a good song on its own. I may be a little bit of a luddite about this, but it’s about the music.
In this instance, I can’t help but think that music is a bit of a distant second priority.
We’ve all heard religious music, I think. I’m not talking about the really good choral stuff, I’m talking about what one could quite easily call Chaplaincy Rock. One earnest singer with an acoustic guitar, banging out some happy-clappy song about being ‘safe in the arms of Jesus’ or something. I knew a guy like that at my university (Richard Craine, Swansea’s answer to John Denver!), and I even drummed on a few biblical epics he recorded, because he was an absolutely lovely bloke.
Still, musically, you know the drill. It’s fairly standard stuff, yer christian folkster. If you were to see this image, you’d have a fairly clear picture of what to expect:
Just another happy-clappy acoustic guitar singalong, right? Maybe a few quotes from the bible, toe-curlingly bad adaptations of ancient psalms, something like that?
I can’t help but find this utterly unique. This is two Australian nuns with a guitar and a drum machine, and more echo than the Edge in a cathedral. It’s strangely eerie, and actually just a little bit beautiful.
‘Fire’ itself is a sort of minimalist evocation of the joys of celibacy. Not sure I see the appeal, myself, but it’s led to this strange wonder, so fair enough. The rest follows in the same vein, and is, well, quite lovely actually.
I love this kind of thing-music which is strange, and naive, and breaks the rules, because the people making it didn’t really know much about what the rules were in the first place. In its own way, Sister Irene O’Connor is almost as innovative as people like the Durritti Column, or any number of bizarre post-punk acts that cropped up in the aftermath of new wave, in that bold time when the rulebook had not so much been torn up as gobbed on, used to wipe blood off the floor, set on fire and then torn up.
That’s right. Two Australian nuns with a guitar and a drum machine. Punk as fuck.
And here’s another ‘A and B’ band, fresh from the wilds of Scotland- the Moth and The Mirror.
They’re a five-piece, and feature the sort of folk-tinged indie pop that’s become popular since the days of Idlewild and Travis- a bit of crunchy indie guitar here, some impassioned Scottish vocals there, a little bit of Violin, xylophone and perhaps the occasional banjo or woodwind section scattered across their songs. It’s nicely done, well arranged, maybe a little tastefully competent here and there, but they do know how to rock out from time to time as well. If there’s a musical agenda, it’s all about showcasing the songs and the singer.
Stacey Sievwright (pictured, right)is a good lead vocalist, her voice sweet and strong with a little hook of yearning in it. ‘Soft Insides’ shows this off to great effect, where the terribly sad line ‘You hold someone/they don’t hold you back’ gets me every time I hear it. She’s tugging at the heartstrings without histrionics, and her willingness to just let her voice carry the song without too much in the way of histrionics or affectation (or overly-accentuated, more-Scottish-than-thou vocals which just end up making ever band north of the border sound like Roddy Woomble)
The songs are good, too-Current single ‘Fire’ has the great yearning, catchy hook- ‘Thoughts of you/Keep Me Warm’ sung over and over like a mantra, like someone clinging to hope.
And there is an optimism running through them- on ‘Everyone I know’ you they start out sounding a bit doomier, all chiming guitars and thudding new wave drums, Sievwright’s lyrics talking about ‘Blue Eyes Turning Black’ and ‘I don’t have the heart for this.’
By about a minute and a half in, she’s singing ‘you’ll be ok’ over and over again.
That seems to be the key to her as a songwriter, and to this band as a whole. Their songs tell you that life is a grind, a hard, hard slog, and whilst things may be fragile, they know you have to cling on to that determination to keep things together, to keep forcing on. That’s sweet, and it’s powerful, and long may their struggle continue.
Two very disparate things, you might think. I would think so, too, but apparently if you combine the two of them you get a sound like a sort of Country and Western desperation. Or so this Glasgow-based three-piece think, anyway. I’m not going to whinge about terrible band names, as this one isn’t all that bad, really, and anyway, everyone knows that the worst band name in the world is ‘The Beatles,’ so it doesn’t really matter, does it?
Oh, you actually want ME to tell YOU, do you? Lazy bastards. Well, if I must. Just don’t go disagreeing with me afterwards.
They sound like a Scottish Howling Bells, mainly- countrified, spaghetti-western guitar, raggedy drums and a sneering, crooning female singer whose lyrics speak of relationships which were more like battlegrounds, where both sides dished out plenty. The protagonist of the songs is no wilting victim- on one song she sings about wanting to break her man down and build him up again exactly the way she wants him. On ‘Gun’ she crows ‘Now you’re safe in jail/and I’m set free to sail’ but it’s not a ‘you can’t touch me any more’ vibe you get, it’s more a kind of ‘I set you up for the fall and now you’re doing time for the crime committed together’ sort of affair. What I’m saying is, don’t mess.
They’re not bad at all- a little derivative of the aforementioned Howling Bells, but that’s no bad thing. They sound like they’d be pretty good live, too. By the look of the gig list on their Myspace, pretty much all of Europe is going to get the opportunity to decide if I’m right. Not that all of Europe, or indeed any of it cares about my opinion, but you get the point, I hope.
Oh, and apparently they managed to convince Tom Robinson to say the word ‘manboob’ on National radio, which has got to be good for something, doesn’t it?
Everyone knows who U2 are, right? Ageing stadium rockers, miniscule singer with a giant ego, god-botherers, sometimes a bit too keen on sticking their noses in where they don’t belong, more like a giant, world-straddling brand than a rock group? With Or Without You, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Live Aid, Mullets, good old Oirish boys who are proud of where they come from but outsourced their ridiculous wealth so their homeland gets no tax monies from all those album sales. Bono’s friends with Barak Obama, Bill Gates and the pope. He’s a dilettante and an egomaniac, a man who spends more time prancing about trying to save the world than he does no his music. That’s them, right? They’re horrendously unstylish, awkward in every way, lumpen, lumbering and just plain unsexy, the opposite of all good rock and roll, right? Most of all, of course, it’s that singer, that Bono. What a collossal ego, right? Wants you to believe he has the answers just because he’s up on that stage?
Nice Braces, Bono.
Wrong.
I’m going to take you back to my bedroom. Steady on, now.
I was fifteen. It was 1993, and I was a desparate, disaffected teenager, looking for an escape from a drab and desperately sad reality that I could hardly even talk about, much less come to terms with. Most important, like teenagers everywhere, I wanted- something other. Something to lift me up. Something to transcend the mundane.
And then I found it. I found it in a strange, subversive and endlessly obscure band who I loved, whose music took me to places I’d never been, who seemed to speak to me alone in my room. Listening to this strange band seemed to open up new possibilities, draw the curtain back on new worlds.
I’d discovered music a while back, when Meat Loaf and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had been supplanted at the top of the UK charts by a wild, unsettling chunk of distorted guitar, sleazed-up vocals and pounding rhythms which were unlike anything else, but now this band were touring the world. Strange reports were on Radio 1 every day of increasingly bizarre scenes at their shows, giant screens full of deconstructionist slogans, papier mache models of the band dancing in the crowd, a singer dressed as the Devil singing songs about selling your soul whilst giant TV screens displayed the slogan ‘Everything You Know Is Wrong.’ It was dizzying, it was exciting, and I wanted a part of it.
This is the band that made that sound:
And this was their singer:
Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure that is not a man who is unaware of how he comes across. It sure likes interesting, don’t you think?
I certainly did. So I went out and bought the band’s new album. The first album I ever owned. ‘Zooropa.’ An absolute masterpiece and still, in my opinion, one of the greatest albums ever made. From the strange buzz of feedback and babbling voices chiming ‘What Do You Want?’ on the opening title track, through the slow, industrial rattle of ‘Numb’ to the sad romance of ‘Stay,’ the angry father/son confrontation of ‘Dirty Day’ and the world-weary voice of Jonny Cash singing about being a wanderer in a strange futuristic wilderness, and then a klaxon in the emptiness which chimes out unexpectedly after the last song, and then teminates in a sort of electronic sob, it’s a record that oozes strangeness, that absolutely throbs with the bizarre. I love every song on it, for completely different reasons, and as a whole it’s a wonderful, wonderful 51 minutes and 15 seconds of anyone’s life.
All through the record, Bono’s lyrics reflect ambiguity and confusion, a sense of having no direction, being utterly lost in a dizzying world, questioning everything, claiming that ‘uncertainty can be a guiding light’ as he views the modern landscape of slogans and disinformation around him, and finds it lacking. So what does he do? He chucks out a whirlwind of ad slogans, lyrics about lucid dreams, false promises and lies whilst dressed as the devil, and beaming pictures of lonely cosmonauts to stadiums full of people.
Here’s the ‘Numb’ Video, which I promise you is musically about as far away from your preconceived idea of U2 as you could ever get.
And here’s some live footage from then: First up, here’s ‘Lemon’- a sort of futuristic disco song about despair, futility, and the pointlessness of all our efforts- ‘a man builds a city/with banks and cathedral/he turns his money into light to look for her… these are the days when our work has come asunder’ and the redemptive moment at the heart of darkness- ‘midnight is where the day begins.’
Next we have With Or Without You, an old song off their Joshua Tree days, the kind of song that gets featured in montages in Friends, a safe song, which all of a sudden seems to have that little bit more Edge (see what I did there? Oh, never mind) to it when it’s a gold-suited Devil singing about giving your soul away. Oh, and whilst we’re about it, my god, that boy had a voice on him then:
The Zooropa show closer ‘Love Is Blindness’ off the preceding album ‘Achtung Baby,’ which segues into an absolutely ASTOUNDING version of Unchained Melody. If it doesn’t break your heart, then you are a cold and dead person, lying to yourself.
This is U2 as they were back then. My U2. Wild and ambiguous, four mad souls dancing at the heart of a gleaming, chaotic, contradictory whirlwind of glitter, gold and love, and keeping their heads about them whilst they did it. They were the best band in the world. The strangest band in the world. The most daring rock stars ever. The band that saved my life when I was fifteen and my mother died.
This is my U2. Zooropa is a classic album you thought was shit. Everything You Know is Wrong.
Remember those moments in the school playground where word got round that there was going to be a fight, and everyone would gather at some illicit location to watch two people who didn’t like each other got at it for a little while, whilst the rest of you stood around in a circle watching, feeling oh so rebellious and wondering how long it would be before the teachers came to break things up?
Ah, happy days. I remember my own big moment in the world of FIGHT! when I decided that Jamie Hughes from my class had made one kilt joke too many (Scottish boy in an English school, toughens you up a bit) and that I needed to show people I wasn’t there to be picked on. Oh, the glory, oh the attention. Oh, the week-long detention afterwards.
Of course, these days we do things differently. We have the internet. We have Twitter, Facebook, blogs, text alerts and a thousand ways to communicate.
But some things are still the same. The recent Hole Album, which I liked seems to have stirred up some rage in erstwhile Smashing Pumpkins frontman and professional asshole Billy Corgan, who has launched an astonishing rant on Twitter about Courtney Love.
Here’s a highlight:
Thought number three’s a bit harsh, I have to say.
It’s a shame, really. They’ve both made some amazing music at various times, and now they’re sniping at each other for all the world to see. It’s not very dignified, but it is very them.
If I can offer a solution, then here it is; LET’S TAKE THIS TO THE RING!
This article has three openings. Choose which one you like, according to taste, then read the rest.
Opening 1:
Poor Courtney Love. She’s a tragic footnote in the story of one of music’s cultural icons, the late lamented lionised Kurt Cobain. She’s a woman in a man’s world whose junkie husband ran out on her in the worst possible way, and whose life has been a struggle ever since. People like Michael Stipe and Billy Corgan reached out to her to try and keep her together with varying success as she struggled to remain true to her artistic muse in the face of the most difficult set of circumstances any female rock musician has ever faced. Still, the very fact that she’s still on this planet is a testament to her tenacity, the power of the human spirit. She’s flawed, sure, but she’s beaten the odds to even be here. This album happened against all the odds. For that she is to be commended.
Opening two; My god, what a bitch Courtney Love is. A fucking obnoxious monster who destroys everything she touches, ruined her husband’s life and causes chaos in her wake. She’s a disaster area, a piece of human wreckage who squats on her wonderful husband’s legacy like a shit stain on the Mona Lisa. She’s an embarrassment, a modern day Nancy Spungeon who is wedded to her own pathetic drama, and her life is a cautionary tale for musicians, celebrities, and women anywhere. Her life is a mess, and thank goodness her daughter has finally been taken into care. The only surprising thing about her is that she isn’t dead right now.
Article Opening 3; Courtney Love was actually a musician, once. the frontwoman of Hole, she was a captivating, mesmerising stage presence, a tattered angel in a torn baby-doll dress, spitting venom and sparing no-one, not even herself in the bravest act of truth-telling to come along onstage for a long, long time. She’s the woman who wrote ‘Doll Parts,’ ‘Celebrity Skin,’ ‘Miss World,’ and ‘Jennifer’s Body,’ which still sound as awesome as they ever did. She was a musician worthy of being discussed in the same sentence as PJ Harvey, Bjork, or Patti Smith, and she has been an inspiration to a series of female performers ever since.
Pick up reading here
And now she has a new album out. Of course, it’ll be judged not just on the music, but upon which version of Courtney Love you believe in.
Let’s be honest, none of us actually know her. We know what we see, and what we read, in the press. This isn’t going to be a rant about the media, it’s merely an old philosophy student’s acknowledgement on the limits of knowledge. I don’t know what Courtney Love is really like. You don’t either. We project our picture of her across her music in a way that we do with everyone. Everyone who makes public statements is doing so with one agenda or another. She can come across as a bitch. Fair enough. I don’t pretend to know that for certain.
But what does it sound like?
It sounds like Hole. Maybe the drumming isn’t as good as Patty Schemel’s was back in the day, and Eric Erlandson isn’t on board, but let’s be fair- this band is defined by Courtney Love. It always was. There’s a bunch of other musicians on this album, but there’s no doubt whose vision is being carried out here.
And, well, it’s not bad. It’s a bit slick in places, closer to ‘Celebrity Skin’ than ‘Live Through This’ or ‘Pretty on the Inside’ in its sound, but she’s still got it. Her voice is still the powerful instrument it always was. Listen to ‘Loser Dust’- she’s yelling like she always did, shredding her throat in that way you get from no other singer since…. some guy in some Grunge Band.
Lyrically, the same themes are here- the girls who let themselves be used, the superficial lure of glamour and excess, and just how desperate those moments when you wake up alone can be. ‘so you’re lying in your underwear/in someone else’s bed/and the silence is so dangerous..so I have another cigarette/ and I try to forget’ is the same story as ‘When I wake up in my Make-up/it’s too early for an address,’ still being told.
‘Samantha,’ with her refrain of ‘people like you fuck people like me’ is another girl caught up in destructive behaviour, pitied and reviled in equal measure.
You know she’s talking about herself. You also know that the biting contempt in her voice is directed inward more harshly than anyone else ever could.
She also still rocks pretty hard: Skinny Little Bitch is one of a couple of songs on the album which seem designed to make a bunch of young folk jump up and down and bang into each other. It seems to be working, too, if this live video is anything to go buy;
She isn’t always successful; on Letter to God, she asks how on earth she got to where she is:
‘I never wanted to be the person you see… I always wanted to die but you kept me alive/can you tell me who I am?…I never wanted to be/some kind of comic relief’ It’s groaning under the weight of The Myth of Courtney Love. She’s sick of it. She wants to escape it. But here’s the rub- she seems in love with the attention it gives her. Plus it doesn’t have much of a tune.
Long Ride Home, the last song on the album, is just her and a guitar. I may be nuts but it sounds like Bob Dylan, I swear it. And strangely, the comparison’s apt- the two are both so completely in thrall to their own mythology that no sound they make, no word they speak is judged in and of itself. Dylan, you could argue, is more in control of that, but Courtney isn’t going down without a fight.
‘It’s a long ride home and my head is bowed/and you’re no comfort to me now/and it’s fully loaded/and it’s set on stun/at least I know that I have won/and my wig’s on crooked/and I got no shoes…I don’t care what it takes my friend/I will never go hungry again.’
This is the song that seems to be most directly about her. She knows how fucked she is, and she knows it’s a long way back up from where she’s been. It’s a fitting final statement of who she is, and where she is. Maybe she’s a little wedded to her own mythology, but this is her story, it’s who she is. She can’t let it go, she doesn’t dare. It’s all fucked up, but she’ll find a way to go on.
Everyone knows ninjas are awesome, right? I know it. Robert Hamburger knows it. You know it. They’re silent, dedicated killers who stalk through the night, walk through walls, do that ‘hiding on the ceiling by bracing themselves’ thing that’s so fantastically cool and strong, and they are the masters of brutal unarmed killing.
We know this. It’s fact. And here’s some more proof.
This guy is amazing. In fact, he’s got thousands of similar videos. He’s combined three things to devastating effect; the power of ninjas, the amazing force of the electric guitar, and the stunning terribleness of bad music.
Ah, 2 Unlimited. You were the nemeses of my youth. Whilst I was walking through the corridors of my secondary school, debating Therapy? b-sides with my best friend, you were ruling the charts with your terrible fairground-friendly euro-techno shitfest. You were huge. Absolutely huge.
Tell you something weird, though- I didn’t know anyone who liked you. No-one at all. Not even the people who liked music I hated liked ‘No Limits.’ It was kind of just around, like acne or the Conservative government. Everyone thought you were shit. The carnies (seriously! I had a twenty minute conversation with a fairground attendant once, who hated your guts but apparently ‘just had to play the song’), the ravers, the goths, the indie kids, the parents, the radio DJs, everyone. Everyone whose opinion should have counted. Everyone hated 2 Unlimited.
And still it was successful. What the hell was up with that?
I still don’t know the answer. It vexes me yet. Still, at least the music has been at least slightly redeemed by the power of ninjas with electric guitars…
This is about a musician. A pop musician, albeit a rather strange one His name is John O, and he looks like a pipe-cleaner model of Billy Corgan caught fooling around in Grace Jones’ make-up cabinet. He’s also written the best pop song you’ll hear all year.
I’ve had this man’s song ‘Wait and See’ in my head for days. My immediate reaction to hearing it is to click ‘play’ again. Now it’s your turn. This is brilliant, slightly old-school alt-pop which recalls all kinds of old songs, but which manages to transcend its influences, rather than be weighed down by them. Musically, this song’s got a lot of the Smashing Pumpkins’ ’1979′ in its DNA, and John O even cheekily puts in a line about hanging out ‘with the freaks and ghouls.’ Somehow, he can get away with it.
This song is just amazing. It really is. this man’s music and his lyrics are so good, so direct, they just utterly blow me away. Seriously, check this out:
‘falling into something different/how should I know/whether I should
trust my instincts/ further than I can throw?’
In other words, his life’s confusing as hell, he doesn’t know what he feels, and he’s wise enough to know that he doesn’t have a clue about what’s coming next. Now that is so wonderfully observed, catching the dilemma of adolescence and the sense that you’re catapaulting into a future where you may well be an entirely different person before you even know it, and that all sorts of things which are really important to you are going to be lost along the way. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone, but he knows he will. This song is a warning to a lover, telling them to get away from him whilst they can, to carry on with their life; ‘for your heart’s sake/don’t you wait around for me to decide what I want to grow up to be/I’ll just let you down.’ It’s so tortured, twisted and human that I just want to hug him and thank him for reminding me that everyone feels like this.
Plus it’s got an absolutely kick-ass video, so ridiculous that it’s deeply deeply cool. John O strides out of his house past some Pumpkins (LOOK, I GET IT, OK! JEEZ! YOU LIKE THE SMASHING PUMPKINS!) wearing a halloween mask, and then strides through a Leafy Canadian suburb with a bunch of goths behind him, doing a wonky, awkward dance that reminds me of the kind of thing my sister and her friends used to make up when they were seven. The best thing about this is that it’s delivered stoney-faced, as if they’re doing Swan Lake at the Sydney Opera House. I particularly like the hostile expressions on the faces of the two on the right. Of course, as it goes on, you see them start to smirk. It’s awkward, strange, clumsy and utterly brilliant. In other words, he’s captured exactly what it feels like to be an adolescent.
I don’t really rate most of the other songs on his Myspace, and I don’t know if he’ll develop into anything, but I really don’t care. I’m in love with this one song. It’s the best piece of pop I’ve heard in a very long time, and pop is about crystallised, perfect moments that life forever. Diamond Rings, for this one moment in time, I salute you.
I like Tunng. It’s a really good word. It sounds good to say, like ‘tongue,’ but somehow more visceral- you savour the sound as it comes out of your mouth. I may just sound nuts but I do genuinely like language that much. t’s fun. It feels good to make those sounds.
Much like this band. I saw them about a year ago when they were touring with the wonderful Tinariwen as part of some grand and worthy cultural experiment about combination of cultures, which was actually about having a grand good time. It was one of the most genuinely diverse line-ups I’ve ever seen. There was usually about six people on stage at a time, with Tuareg instruments, electronic beats, pottery drums, guitars and banjos were all mashed up together in a wonderful, riotous mess. I guess they’re folktronica. The thing is, out of all the bands I’ve heard called that, Tunng are the one who seem to have understand that if you’re going to use all these other instruments, you’ve got to give them heart. I think they’re fairly unique in this, though I would also say bands like Found, Lemon Jelly, The Acorn and perhaps at times the Guillemots are wandering through the same musical landscape.
Tunng. Cheery bunch, eh?
And so to the album- it’s called ‘And Then We Saw Land’ and it’s their fourth. It’s probably a progression from their early works, realising the potential they displayed. Yeah, all of that most likely. I don’t actually know, to be honest, I’ve only heard this album. Most people writing reviews probably won’t admit that. That either makes me refreshing or unprofessional, take your pick, maggots.
but my goodness, this is a beautiful assortment of songs which lodge in the brain, in very different ways. Opener ‘Hustle’ fades up with a strange, pulsating synth sound which gives way to a jaunty acoustic guitar figure and a song which seems to be about someone being gone, but that not being such a bad thing after all- ‘And I will Hustle, Hustle, Hustle to be free,’ singer Sam Genders intones, joy in his voice. Things have been bad, but they ain’t going to get him down.
And so it is throughout the album. There’s undercurrents of melancholy here and there, sad little recollections of regrets and missed turnings (I think that this album may have been written during a break-up, but not a particularly bad one) which are there, but are somewhat overshadowed by the sheer joy of life, and of finding out what’s next.
Standout tracks for me are ‘Sushimi,’ a big, epic chant-along with fantastic drums on it, ‘The Roadside,’ which a naggingly catchy hymn to movement and progression, and ‘don’t look down or back’ which sounds like the feeling of waking up on a summer morning., and talks about a girl waking up alone and coming to terms with it.
Yes, this is a complex beating heart under that cheerful exterior. Tunng have cried and felt so sad, but they never forgot how to dance.
and the bloody, graphic video for her new single, ‘Born Free.’
