Music Banter

After my post last week about Mia’s controversial video slaughter of ginger innocents, I thought it might be worth showing a video which I find a lot more shocking, by a band I’ve recently come to love. The band is Xiu Xiu (which is apparently Japanese for ‘There, There’), and the video is for their recent song ‘Dear God, I hate Myself.’ I’m just going to put one picture of it up here, and then a link. You can decide if you want to watch the whole thing.

And here’s the video in full, if you still have an appetite for it, so to speak.

There you are. How you feeling? Hungry?

This isn’t people getting blown up, or shot in the face, but to me it’s more hardcore, more explicit, than that MIA one. This might be because I’ve had a girlfriend who was bulimic, and I never really liked to think about those moments after meals when she locked herself away. My own personal baggage aside, there’s something absolutely car-crash mesmerising about this anyway.

This is someone actually making themselves sick for the sake of art. It’s unsettling, strange, and feels a little wrong. Just to watch it puts you on edge. That’s the point of it, of course, and I think that for this band, that’s what they want. I also think that the performer, percussionist and multi-instrumentalist band member Angela Seo, is being very brave doing something like this. She’s not spoken much about her reasons for doing it, but she she’s made it very clear on the band’s blog that she was in complete control of what she was doing, though of course some have called this exploitative.

I find it mesmerising- it matches the music, which with its combination of haunting, pained vocals, catchy melodies and aggressive, unpleasant casio-keyboard bleeps, is a wonderful piece of unpop- a tuneful self-mangling which makes me love them all the more.

I was going to post something about the shitty state of the music industry, how not even Lady Gaga makes money out of Spotify and the way that the whole damn edifice is crumbling around our ears, but you know what, I’m not going to write about business. Not today. I’m going to write about genius. Sheer, wonderful, genius. And excitement. That kind of wonderful exuberance that music can plant in your soul and make the day worth struggling on through.

What does genius look like?

Tonight, Matthew, genius looks like this;

Thom Yorke cares not for my long rambling piece about the music industry

See, I was browsing idly on my laptop this morning, trying not to think about the fact that I had to be at my real job soon, when I stumbled across something fantastic.

Thom Yorke has a band. They’re called Radiohead. You might have heard of them. These days, however, he has another one. They’re called Atoms for Peace, and they include Yorke, Nigel Godrich (long-time Radiohead engineer and then producer), Flea from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers (Seriously, I really don’t understand how that musical relationship works!), and Joey Waronker, who is the guy who replaced Bill Berry in REM after his departure. Not a bad line-up, that.

Anyway, they’ve been playing shows. And at one of those shows, they did this:

It’s fantastic, utterly fantastic. Sat in bed I felt something I haven’t for a long time. No, not the touch of a women, a sense of real excitement. The hair actually standing up on the back of my neck, my arms and everywhere else. Wonderful. Just wonderful.

Thom Yorke, thank you for reminding me of how great music can be.

After the recent string of deaths, retirements and general looking back, here’s something to look forward to: Next saturday, April the 17th is National Record Store day, which as I’m sure you know is a wonderful and noble idea.

I spent a lot of time in record shops as a teenager, leafing through seemingly endless stacks of music, searching out new sounds, bands I’d heard of, songs that friends of mine had mentioned to me at school, or that I’d read about. I had a favourite ship, Avid Records in Oxford, which I spent god knows how long looking through stacks and stacks of music. In researching this, I’ve just heard a rumour that it’s been closed down, and that makes me feel old and sad.

Going into that shop was a personal delight, the first steps in a journey into music that I’ve been taking ever since. It’s where I found music by long-gone bands like Echo and the Bunnymen, My Bloody Valentine, The Chameleons, Whipping Boy, and too many more to mention. Every now and then I’d see something that I’d never even heard of before, and buy something just to see what it was. Sometimes it’d be great, sometimes awful, but that was part of the fun.

This is what it looked like, when I wandered in through that door:

Avid Records- solipsistic muso paradise!

Of course, nowadays we have this thing called the internet. You don’t have to do leave your bed to find new music, not if you’ve got Wi-Fi and a laptop. It’s there for you in a thousand guises, all you’ve got to do is look.

In some ways that’s superior- there’s something wonderful about Last.fm and playlists and Spotify and all of that. But still, there’s something irreplacable about the act of going into a record shop. It’s the difference between Amazon and your public Library. They’re nice places to go into, and something about the atmosphere of being in a shop serves to connect you to people in ways that just reading about stuff online doesn’t. I might just be old-fashioned about this, but I think there’s still space for small stores in today’s music world. A good one creates a sort of musical landscape all of its own.

So remember, on Saturday the 17th, go buy some music from your local record shop. Call it an investment in future nostalgia.

I like Weird Things. I like the freakish, the outlandish, and the downright strange are subjects of endless fascination to me. I read the Strange Deaths section Fortean Times with a mixture of ironic amusement and rapt astonishment. I stare at pictures of strange fish from the bottom of the ocean which look like creatures from outer space. I find the bizarre, the crazy, the sheer batshit mental things in life to be a source of constant and spectacular joy.

It’s the same in music. It’s always been that way- Rock and Roll is about the Freak, the Outsider, the Strange. Witness, for example, the entire career of David Bowie- he’s striven to cultivate an ever-developing sense of ‘otherness’ in his endless succession of alter-egos and stylistic shifts, seducing us with a sense of alien glamour. Lady Gaga is a modern exponent of this art, her carefully crafted Alien Sex Robot act a wonderfully entertaining mishmash of styles and previous http://www.music-banter.com/wp-admin/post-new.phpinfluences, which are guaranteed to garner attention, foster a sort of predictable outrage, and to situate her at the center of popular culture with a remarkable amount of skill.

Yes, I like lady GaGa. People seem to find that surprising. They shouldn’t. She’s musically ok, and culturally very interesting. She’s like a mad Frankenstein carefully creating a Monster (or should that be a Fame Monster? Oh, how wonderfully clever I am, see the games I play with words!) which will make her very rich indeed.

She’s also flying the freak flag very high. It’s currently cool to be weird again. Still, she’s not a patch on Karin Dreijer Andersson of Fever Ray. This is footage from a Swedish Awards ceremony. Gaze upon it and wonder, ‘what the hell is going on?

It’s like that weird alien singer from Fifth Element with the tentacles or something, strange pop music that genuinely sounds and looks like it comes from another planet.

Bloody marvellous.