A very naughty lady, bless her heart – Keith Richards
High compliments indeed. If Marianne Faithfull didn’t write Guilt doesn’t mean it’s not her song. Barry Reynolds penned the tune, from inside a haze of codeine-spiked cough syrup according to Faithfull, and who knows whence the inspiration came. But I think it’s easy enough to guess where Faithfull drew from when delivering her vocal. She must have felt enough guilt and shame for her choices in life. When Broken English was being recorded it seemed that she had failed as hard as possible in every way possible, ruined her life, lost everything, squandered her life on smack, with no hope on the horizon of redemption. It was only in hindsight that her journey came to seem a necessary trial by fire through which the true artist could emerge. But it’s a mistake to take all (or any) of Faithfull’s work as only drug fueled. Crushing aimless guilt doesn’t just come from a junkie’s sense of worthlessness. It can strike anyone, at any time. The same is true of the heartbreak and regret that are Faithfull’s hallmarks. She may have chosen a rougher path than most, but the emotions she channels are universal. That is what’s made Faithfull such an interesting artists over the years, what keeps her music essential and brings her into fans’ hearts.
Finally, a little Black Uhuru live clip. Playing one of their best known songs no less. Why these cats aren’t world dominating and popular on a par with Bob Marley I’ll never understand. I think they’re quite simply the best reggae band. Oh well, that’s my opinion, and if they have to remain so obscure then at least I don’t have to share them with the less worthy. Because you know when something becomes popular you’ve got to share it with Sunday-drivers who think they’re into something after they saw it in a movie but they really don’t understand it at all. Like how every doucherag in world who’s ever laid eyes on a joint owns a Bob Marley CD. Yes, ‘chill out and let’s get high’ is one of the messages of reggae music, but it’s not the only one, and far from the most important. But, don’t let me rant. Chill out and enjoy the music, and see if you can’t spot a message in there that’s more important than getting high.
Here’s more of Elton John showing his music-hall touch at the keys. As a kid, not having taken the slightest interest in the lyrics, I assumed that Grimsby was an ode to an English butler. Because it sounds like the kind of name a butler would have – “I say, Grimsby, be a good lad and fetch us a clean set of spats, atta boy!” As it happens, Grimsby is an ode the thoroughly unglamorous English seaport town of Great Grimsby, which is distinguished by exactly nothing. It’s unknown whether Elton or Bernie had actually been to Grimsby and liked it, or had been there and hated it and were being satirical, or if they just thought the name sounded cool. I’ve also heard that Grimsby is Bernie Taupin’s reply to something Randy Newman had composed about Cleveland, but I don’t know enough about Randy Newman to make a judgement on that.
Another brilliant album track from Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Making a double album on which every track is a winner is quite a feat, and Elton pulled it off. Most double albums, even classic ones, suffer from at least a little bloat. Even if it’s solid all the way through, there’s still the matter of fun exhaustion, when the listener’s attention spans simply runs out and they wander off. Not here, though. Every song on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road could have been a single. Even better, every song is different, so it’s impossible to get bored. It does make you think, though, about the ways the record industry has changed for the worse. In the days of vinyl, a double was an extravagance, and the sheer physical limitations of an LP meant that most albums had to confine themselves to a lean eight to ten songs. The physical capacity of a CD is much larger, and online the physical boundaries disappear altogether. Which means that the idea of an album being single or double no longer has any meaning. Today artists routinely release albums of 20 or more songs, even if they only have enough good material for what would have been an extended-play in the old days. Putting out such a volume of material just because you can is a curse, not a blessing. Not everyone is Elton John, who can whip up 17 chart-quality tracks. Most artists should limit themselves to three or four good songs and another three mediocre ones, but don’t. Too many times what could have been a sprightly short little album of good music ends up a bloated heap of filler that the listener has to wade through to find the handful of worthy material. And don’t get me started on ‘deluxe editions,’ those unabashed ass-fuckings the studios like to unleash on consumers still dumb enough to buy physical product. Take me back to those times when a gatefold sleeve was cause for celebration.
I’m going to go all fangirl and gush how much I love Bryan Ferry in makeup, with his shiny hair and huge gold epaulets. So glamorous. As usual the appeal is not so much straight forward attraction (although, yes…) as a desire to emulate and possess. I don’t know if this is exactly normal. Does everyone else who admires opposite-sex rock stars and actors just see them as bedtime fantasies? Am I the only one who sees them as someone I want to be when I grow up? Surely not, and surely it’s precisely the point of glam rock and perhaps rock’n'roll in general to erase boundaries like that.
Here, feast your senses on the spectacle of Elvis Costello being what today’s marketers would call ‘adorkable’. What precisely his deal was, I don’t know, but I suspect there may have been a level of irony in there somewhere. Was Costello the first hipster? He was definitely a trailblazer – he was one of the first to contrive to be cool by being uncool. There was also a genuine effort to be cool; if he’d wanted to maintain maximum uncoolness, he’d have kept his birth name. Because you can’t get any uncooler than Declan McManus. The visual image was cribbed from Buddy Holly, but here it gets complicated. The homage with the big glasses is supposed to be an avowal of proud nerdiness and, as with everything these days, irony. Except that Holly wasn’t a nerd at all – he was charming, popular and classically handsome, and in his day, horn-rimmed spectacles were non-ironically fashionable. Evidently by the late seventies fifties-referencing retro was already a thing. I guess establishing a respectable image without aligning yourself with punk in 1977 was tricky. Costello did pull it off with panache – smarter that the punks, cooler than the nerds, retro yet with-it, and a fuck-you-I’m-not-cool attitude that had the desired effect of coolness. Though, as I’ve said before, Mr. McManus is not naturally blessed with great coolness and after the first few records stopped making any pretense of being so and now he’s so happily uncool he barely qualifies as a rock star anymore.
Here someone you may not know, who I discovered a while back on one of my many internet travels. I stumble over a lot of random things online that grab my attention, but rarely anything I want to come back to after the initial jolt of interest. I found ThouShaltNot while looking for a Suzanne Vega song on YouTube. A random connect, but that’s how lightning strikes. I actually have a lot of their songs on my iPod now. I don’t know much about them, though. I know they’re still ‘active’ or together, but they haven’t made an album in a few years that I know of. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough. Also they often get labeled Goth or ‘Bauhuas-influenced’ but prefer the term Dark Cabaret. Which I think is an actual thing. Anyway, check them out, they have a Myspace.
I’ve mentioned before and want to reiterate my delight at discovering a thriving and youthful Brian Eno fandom online. Surprisingly to me, I’ve found that I’m not the only one hooked on his eccentric genius. Nothing aggravates me more that the casual dismissal of Eno’s music as ‘elitist’. The fact that anything remotely intellectual and outside the deepest mainstream is called ‘elitist’ is infuriating. As if not being able to appreciate the novel and challenging were somehow a point of pride. Just as bad are fans and followers who actually embrace that label and start to think of themselves as being part of some kind of ‘elite’ just because they bought a Brian Eno album. Those people are called ‘hipsters’. I wish they would die. Eno’s music is outsider music, designed not to sell to the broadest audience (though he’s capable of that too) but to speak and connect with a small and devoted fanbase. That teenagers in Oklahoma are finding warmth and comfort in Taking Tiger Mountain doesn’t make them an ‘elite,’ but it does showcase the remarkable and magic connection formed between an artist with a vision and individuals years and miles away who respond to that vision. And yes, I do think I’m Brian Eno’s intended audience, in that his music does require a mindset specific and different and inaccessible to large swatches of Top 40 fansj, and maybe after all, that does make me better than everyone.
Tyrannosaurus Rex makes me take leave of reality like none other. It’s not music that can hold its own in a shuffle marathon, even against latter-day T.Rex. It’s too fragile and fey to make itself known amid hustle and clamor, too refined an appeal. It’s amid peaceful and quiet times, with mind opened to rare pleasures, that it whisks me into another world. Marc Bolan was a happening cat by all accounts, a dresser and an egoist. It was soon enough his music developed an element of look-at-me-go calculation. But in the early days, on the winsome early records, he seemed to pour out his imaginings as unguardedly as a child. The Tyrannosaurus Rex albums were entirely new and original, though their roots showed plainly what Marc had been reading and fantasizing about. To call it fantasy music, akin to fantasy writing would be diminishing, but not inaccurate. Bolan was writing about his own fantasy world with heroes and wizards, magic and lore, and talking animals of course.
Talking Heads were one of the funkiest bands ever to walk the planet, and as such they contradicted certain paleolithic notions about musicality, intellect and race. Gender also. Tina Weymouth was one of the first to prove that a woman could pick up and play an instrument without having her little arms fall off, which is now considered an incontestable truth. The other great curveball Talking Heads threw was showing that nerdy white people could be funky. (I apologize for repeatedly referring to David Byrne as a ‘nerdy white guy’ but that is very much his persona.) The baseless and rather racist conventional wisdom is that a)black people are naturally funky, presumably because they keep their brains in the vicinity of their pelvis; therefore they are not naturally intellectual because those two things are mutually exclusive; and b)white people are naturally intellectual and have great big heads but can’t dance, because intellect and funkiness cannot coexist; c) the more intellectual (i.e. nerdy) a white person is, the less they can dance, or make funky music, or even be allowed to appreciate funky music from a safe distance. Now obviously, the part about black people not being intellectually inclined is racist thinking and there may be a certain President who would beg to differ. But the idea that white people can’t dance is also racist, and stubbornly persistent, despite the continued existence of Mick Jagger. Note here, I’m not subscribing to the dumb and self-serving idea that white people are somehow being unfairly maligned – we’re still the dominant majority and as such should shut the fuck up about our stupid imaginary problems. ‘White people can’t dance’ is racist not because it maligns white people, but because it presupposes that the opposite is true – the aforementioned notion that ‘blacks = funky and dumb, whites = not-funky and brainy,’ which is still a deeply held and insidiously oppressive belief that our culture clings to. It may seem that a popular rock band can’t do much towards influencing an entire culture’s racial notions, but the seemingly innocuous field of entertainment can make a huge difference, just because people are absorbing their entertainment with open minds. It’s clear when you see girls today playing in bands like never before, partly because of their mothers’ and grandmothers’ fight for equal rights and suffrage on the political stage, and partly because they grew up seeing Tina Weymouth rock out on MTV. Nobody is brainier that David Byrne, just look at his great big brainy white head. At the same time, he’s one of the funkiest guys around, and Talking Heads not only made some of the funkiest music ever, they helped bring Afro-rhythms to a wider audience in the 70′s and 80′s. Hopefully, a childhood spent watching Stop Making Sense led today’s youth to get up and be funky together regardless of race, perceived intellect or levels of nerdiness. Way to represent.
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