I don’t really believe in guilty pleasures. But this is a song that I tend not to own up to liking, at least in polite company. However, it is a very good one. I’m not a huge fan of rap (in many cases, it’s fair to say that “rap” is spelled with a silent “C”), but at its best it can be very inventive. This song showcases some of the best and worst about rap – it combines clever wordplay, a compelling story and utterly obscene lyrics. This is, obviously, the censored “radio edit”, but even so it’s not something that you’d want your granny to hear. Guilty pleasure? More like a Guilty Conscience…
I don’t really hate any band. There are plenty of bands that I don’t listen to because I don’t particularly like their music, but that’s not the same thing as hating a band.
What I do hate, though, is the manipulation and destruction of music. In particular, I loathe X-Factor and its clones. Not because I dislike any of the performers, or even the judges, but simply because of the damage it causes to music.
The main problem with X-Factor is that it focusses solely on one aspect of music, vocal performance, and ignores all the others that go into making music what it is. There’s no place on the XF stage for composers or musicians, and yet without them there would be no songs for the contestants to sing. A such, it gives an entirely misleading view of what music is about – treating it simply as a vehicle for a talent competition.
In any case, singing isn’t really that hard, if you’ve got the basic ability. Everyone enjoys the XF auditions where we get to laugh at people who think they can sing when they can’t, but if that gives the impression that vocal ability is rare than that’s entirely false. Go to any church choir in the country and you’ll find people who can sing as well as anyone on XF.
Well, you might argue, surely the XF contestants are at least the cream of the crop when it comes to singing. But no, they’re not. Think about all the most famous rock/pop vocalists, and think about what makes them special. In almost all cases, the key thing about successful (by which I mean famous, in this context) singers is their distinctiveness. Whether it’s Liam Gallagher’s nasal whine, Morrisey’s fey artfulness or Dido’s breathy glottal stops, most well-known singers have their own recognisable style. The format of XF, though, values versatility over distinctiveness – the contestants have to sing a variety of songs without ever being able to impose their own style on them.
In some cases, versatility is an advantage – any XF finalist would certainly be able to get a job as a session singer, if they want one. But it’s misleading in the extreme to suggest that bland versatility is the stuff of which stardom is made. And by encouraging the audience to see choreographed vocal performance as the epitome of their aspirations it’s actively working to block the development of real talent – the composers and performers of original material.
In this respect, Britain’s Got Talent is a much better show than X-Factor, because the BGT contestants are, for the most part, also writing or arranging their own material rather than merely doing cover versions – and the BGT contestants who do sing get to perform the music of their choice, the music which suits their style, rather than being forced to adapt to material which doesn’t suit them. By contrast, X-Factor is nothing more than a glorified karaoke contest.
If you’re going to do karaoke, though, you might at least do it with some real talent providing the music. So here are last year’s X-Factor finalists being accompanied by Brian May and Roger Taylor as they inflict GBH on Bohemian Rhapsody. Enjoy.
I’m not entirely sure that I’ve got a favourite band at the moment. I’m not so faux-cool as to pretend that I’ve never had one, or that I think there’s something thoughtless about having one. And a few years ago, I’d have had no hesitation about telling anyone who asked that my favourite band was U2. But I’ve fallen out of love with them a bit over the past few years, for a couple of reasons.
The first is musical. It’s a widely held opinion that Pop was U2′s lowest point, creatively – having started to experiment radically with Achtung Baby, they took a wrong turning and only got back on course with All That You Can’t Leave Behind. In some respects, I’d agree with that – I think Pop is probably the weakest U2 album that I own, and the fact that it’s preceded and followed by two of their best makes it seem even worse by comparison. But it seems to me that the experience scared them. ATYCLB (to give it the U2 in-crowd abbreviative name) was certainly a return to form, but it was also a return to formula. It worked then, because having had two albums away from their “classic” sound they had plenty of pent-up creativity to unleash on it on their return. But I have to say that I was disappointed with the next two. There’s nothing particularly bad about How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb or No Line on the Horizon, but neither do either of them have any stand-out songs worthy of joining the pantheon of great U2 tracks. And that, it seems to me, is because they’ve stopped taking risks, musically. HTDAAB and NLOTH are just a bit too derivative to be great. There’s too much there that sounds like an attempt to write the next Where the Streets Have no Name rather than an attempt to write something radically different from it.
It’s well known that Achtung Baby emerged from one of the band’s most troubled periods, when there seemed to be a prospect of the group splitting up and going their separate ways. These days, they seem maybe a bit too comfortable in each others’ company – like an old married couple who’ve been through their troubles, survived them and know that they won’t be breaking up now. But the absence of conflict has also led to an diminution of creative spark – something that’s maybe exacerbated by the fact that all of the band members have enough non-U2 activities and interests to keep them going. U2 have become an institution, and like all institutions, just a little bit tame.
Pop may have been U2′s weakest album to date, but I think that it’s also what they most need to return to – to have another attempt at something radically different that could fail as spectacularly as it could succeed. And even if it does bomb, I think their fans would forgive them if it sparks another All That You Can’t Leave Behind to follow it. But maybe the real fear is that this time, it might succeed – and leave the post All That You Can’t Leave Behind albums looking like the wasted years.
The other reason for U2′s loss of my affections, though, has been an increasing sense of disconnect with some of Bono’s politics. Which is a bit odd, in a way, because one of the things I used to admire about U2, and Bono in particular, was their crusading zeal for justice and their readiness to use their celebrity status to speak uncomfortable truths to politicians and world leaders. But recently, Bono seems to have crossed the floor, and started campaigning for the rights of the rich and powerful rather than the poor and needy.
There was always a risk that someone from the world’s richest rock band campaigning for debt relief would come across as hypocrisy, especially since the band seemingly made no attempt to channel any of their own wealth into the causes they exhort us to support. I don’t actually buy that particular argument, not least because I’m intelligent enough to realise that even the wealth of U2 would hardly make a dent in the global ocean of poverty and I’m not privy to what they do in private with their own money. But when they start endorsing proposals which would not only benefit themselves, but also damage the interests of those they purport to represent in the less developed world, then such charges become much harder to refute. Bono’s comments at the start of this year on filesharing and intellectual property rights are not only directly opposed to what I believe in and campaign for, but have also been expertly deconstructed to show that his opinions, if implemented, would have even more negative consequences for the developing world. This is a powerful enough rebuttal of the pro-IPR lobby that it’s worth quoting a paragraph here:
If Bono truly cares about poverty, education, health care and fair trade in developing regions like Africa, he should be against draconian intellectual property rights (IPR) enforcement regimes and for more balance. Numerous studies (including from the World Bank) have concluded that the strong IPR regimes exported from the West to the South (many through trade agreements) mainly benefit industrialized countries. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is the cost of re-aligning national laws to fit these regimes and the cost of enforcement itself. Resources that could be devoted to education, or health care or fighting poverty are instead spent on protecting transnational media companies.
If Bono really doesn’t see the contradiction here between his enthusiasm for protecting his intellectual property and his exhortations to governments to drop the debt, then he isn’t really looking very hard. And the argument that he’s simply defending the interests of small-scale music producers doesn’t wash either – I refer my readers once again to this view from the sharp end of independent music production by Steve Lawson.
By coincidence, today is also the day that the World Cup starts. You may not care about football, but you probably know that it’s taking place in South Africa. Ten years ago, South Africa was in the forefront of a legal battle instigated by the multinational drug companies who wanted to protect their rights to charge whatever they liked for their products, against the wishes of the South African government which wanted affordable access to the medicines they needed for the fight against AIDS. You can see an old BBC news report here, and a more recent retrospective about it here.
The drug companies lost that one. As the Avert website points out,
Big Pharma was eventually forced to back down and drop the case following a tremendous outcry from the international community including the South African government, the European Parliament and 300,000 people from over 130 countries that signed a petition against the action, angered over the apparent pursuit of profit over public health.
Ten years later on, we’re still fighting the same battles. Maybe Bono is simply too naive to realise that the same laws he hopes will protect his own earnings from the filesharers will also be used to protect the drug companies from having to help the poor and sick in Africa. Or maybe he knows, but doesn’t care. Either way, it’s a massive misjudgement on his part.
But anyway, back to the music. And apologies anyone who’s had to wade through all of this before getting to the song (although not much of an apology, since you could have just used the scrollbar!). Despite all of the above, I’ve picked a U2 track anyway. But I’ve picked one, and an accompanying video, which demonstrates the best of U2, and the best of Bono. The track is from The Joshua Tree, which is certainly the best album of their earlier classic period, and the video is from the 2001 Elevation Tour. I wasn’t there when this video was filmed – this is from Boston, USA, and I saw the tour in London – but this was one of the standout moments of the evening both live and when viewed again on the DVD release. Imagine this is London, imagine that I’m down there in the mosh pit (just outside the tip of the heart, as it happens), and relive the experience with me, Where the Streets Have No Name.
If I’m tired enough, nearly any music can send me to sleep. There’s something about the rhythmicity (is that a word?) of it that can be very somnolistic. But, for a while, I used to have the habit of playing music in the bedroom as I went to sleep, so there are some songs which I associate more with sleeping than others. By its nature, ambient trance or chillout music is well suited to that, so this album got played a lot.
I’ve already picked out one track from it as a “spirit of place” song, but the album as a whole is, for some reason, associated more in my mind with either going to sleep or long car journeys at night. That may be somewhat worrying, given that the last thing you want to do when driving a long distance is go to sleep, but it seems to work for me. I suspect that, in both cases, it’s primarily about being relaxed and calm, something which assists sleep when you’re trying to sleep but also reduces stress when driving and hence makes driving less tiring – and if driving is less tiring, then I’m less likely to feel sleepy. There’s probably a PhD in thare somewhere for someone who investigates the relationship between music and alertness.
So, have a listen to this if you feel like taking a nap. Or going for a drive. Either way, this is Children, from the album Dreamland by Robert Miles.
There’s dancing, and then there’s dancing. I’m perfectly capable of doing the white-guy-disco-shuffle to most danceworthy stuff, and in my younger days I was quite partial to the odd bit of pogo or headbanging as well. But there isn’t really anything that I could claim to know the real moves to, if you’re discounting (as I would) the semi-ironic “big square, small square, circle, tree” that I’m inclined to throw at anything trancey on the radio or the fact that I can actually do Y-M-C-A in the right timing. Except, possibly, one. This is the point at which I have to own up to knowing the moves to this.
There are probably quite a lot of these. Quite possibly, more than there ought to be. I’m half-tempted to pick something like the national anthem, or a classic hymn, rather than a pop tune, but I think that might be stretching the point a bit. I’m also excluding songs that, as a musician, I play regularly and hence have to know, even if I don’t particularly like them.
Instead, I’ve gone for a song that I don’t just know the words to, but can actually manage a fairly decent rendition of when singing it. I don’t have the greatest voice in the world, but that’s often also the case for a lot of rock/pop performers – not every lead singer is Bono. What I do have, though, and though I say it myself, is an excellent sense of timing. And getting it right when singing is often as much about timing as it is about hitting the notes. So this song is one of my few (well, only, really) party pieces on the karaoke machine – it’s not too challenging as far as range is concerned, but it’s the timing of the vocals which really makes this song work.
So, if I ever end up on Stars in Their Eyes, when asked who I’m impersonating, I’ll say “Tonight, I’m going to be Glenn Tilbrook from Squeeze”.
As with yesterday’s topic, there are plenty of songs that I can choose from for this one. I could, for example, pick any one of a number of sings I’ve heard at gigs, or that were playing at events I’ve been to. I was originally going to pick Young Folks by Peter Bjorn and John, as it’s one of the songs that makes me think of Greenbelt – not because they’ve ever performed there, but because it seemed to be a favourite of the DJs responsible for the inter-performance music at mainstage! But I think that an association between a song and an event is somehow stronger if the link is more obscure, and I have a feeling that today’s song has one of the more obscure links!
I like football. I don’t get to go to many matches, but I like watching it on TV and the bigger the match the better. I was lucky enough to get a free trip, courtesy of my employer, to watch a match at Euro 2000 in Holland, and that’s the event that I’m thinking of here. But it’s not a football song as such. I have to confess that I do like some of the less cringeworthy ones – this combination of football and Euro-disco from Euro 2000 is excellent, and, of course, this one from the World Cup two years earlier absolutely has got to be the best football song recorded. Ever. But a football song is too obvious a link with football, so my choice is a song that has no real link with football at all. Except one.
My song for today is linked in my mind to Euro 2000, but it was actually released the previous year and I already knew it – and liked it – before it acquired the link. One of the things about summer football tournaments, though, is that they’re also linked with heat, and this song’s theme and setting is linked with heat too. That alone doesn’t make it a football song. But, almost by coincidence, the song and its accompanying video had been picked up in 2000 for use in a major advertising campaign, and, in the UK at least, it was one of the adverts that came on during almost every half-time break in one of the summer’s football matches. That meant I repeatedly heard the song in the context of football, and its twin association with summer and warmth meant that, for me anyway, it became a summer football song – in particular, a song of Euro 2000. Here are Sting and Cheb Mami with Desert Rose:
Unlike yesterday, I’ve got so many options for this category that the difficulty is in choosing just one. But there’s one song which recently demonstrated to me just how vivid the “spirit of place” associated with a piece of music can be.
From 1996 to 2002 I worked for an ISP, PSINet Europe (now Telstra Europe). In late 1997 their Brussels office was relatively new and they needed a bit of additional staffing, so I was briefly seconded there to help out with technical support – the first time I’d worked outside the UK for anything more than just a one or two day trip. The fact that I spoke neither French nor Flemish was not, I was assured, a problem – they would only put customers through to me who spoke English!
I have a lot of memories of that period, of which one of the standouts is from my very first day when I was taken to collect the rental car which would be mine for the duration. Having signed off the paperwork and got the key, my colleague told me to follow her as she drove back to the office – something easier said than done, given that her driving was typically Belgian, with an emphasis on speed rather than safety, and I’d never driven a left-hand drive car before. So keeping up with her was a bit of a hair-raising experience, to say the least! Other interesting experiences included visiting Ypres (or Ieper, as my Flemish colleagues insisted on me calling it) on Remembrance Day, and having my only credit card (and only source of cash) swallowed by an ATM – resulting in me having to return to the office that evening and raid the fridge, mostly for waffles as that’s pretty much all that was there, as I had no way of buying anything else to eat. I then scrounged off other people in the office for a couple of days until a replacement card arrived.
The other thing that was memorable, though, was the music. And, in particular, one song, which seemed to be on the playlist of every radio station we listened to at the office or was played in every bar or cafe I visited. So that’s the song I’ve chosen for today’s post.
The twist, though, is that from November 1997 until last year I hadn’t been back to Brussels at all. I returned last year as part of the British contingent for the European Citizens Convention (more about that elsewhere on my blog), and, as the coach which had collected a group of us from the airport dropped us outside our hotel, it felt strangely familiar. A quick delve into my memory, and I realised that I wasn’t just standing in a street that I’d visited when working there over a decade earlier, but I was standing outside a bar that I’d drunk in. And, in the back of my head, I could hear my mind gently playing a song to me that I’d heard in that bar the previous time I visited – the Euro-trance sound of Robert Miles, One & One.
(Incidentally, this, too, is an alternate version of the video – albeit a bootleg of the official one – as the official version can’t be embedded. The official version is better quality than this, but the stupidity of disabling embedding is such that I feel no obligation to link to it)
This one is unusually hard because, for some reason, I tend not to associate songs with people. I have plenty of songs that remind of of places, or events, or dates, or even seasons. But not people. And I can’t even take the obvious route and pick a song that reminds me of my wife, or one of my children, because, well, there aren’t any. (Songs, that is, not wife or children, of which I have one of the former and two of the latter). Emma and I don’t have an “our choown”, and, although Ellie has her own favourite songs and asks me to play them, none of them particularly remind me of her when I hear them. Abi isn’t old enough to have a favourite song at all yet, although I’ve noticed that she cries less when I’ve got music on. Which is a good thing.
But, anyway, back to the subject at hand. Since none of my family or friends have songs that I associate with them, I’ve picked one that has at least a vague association with a celebrity – in this case, a BBC Radio DJ. The song I’ve chosen is one that could just as easily have been picked as a song that reminds me of an event, but it happens to be an occasion where part of what makes it memorable is the people involved.
The event was the Greenbelt Festival at Castle Ashby sometime in the late 80s – I can’t place it precisely from memory, but I think it’s most likely to have been GB15 in 1988. That was back when Greenbelt was still big enough to attract the attention of Radio 1, and back when Radio 1 still did roadshows in the UK instead of jetting off to the Mediterranean. So that year featured Simon Mayo doing a live roadshow from mainstage one afternoon.
The live roadshow format was fairly generic – a few live on-stage performances were linked by short interviews and recorded music from the standard Radio 1 playlist – so most of the music was from then-current chart acts, either on vinyl or performing live. To the live audience, though, the recorded music interludes were essentially breaks between the real action, and were, consequently rather boring. That is, until one of the regular mainstage compères (I think it may have been Stewart Henderson, but I’m not sure of that either) decided to climb a maintenance ladder onto the top of the mainstage roof. On the roof, he started doing a series of rather exaggerated dance moves to one of the songs being played, and his actions were promptly copied by the crowd. What made it funny, of course, was the fact that Simon Mayo couldn’t see the compère above him, and had no idea why the crowd had, from his perspective, broken out into a seemingly well-choreographed mass dance with no visible prompting. His increasingly bemused attempts to get the crowd to follow his moves instead eventually led to the whole thing breaking down in laughter.
Rather annoyingly, the original video to this song at Youtube has embedding disabled, so I can’t show it here. So, instead, here’s an equally funny version from Ashes to Ashes. So you can dance along with Gene Hunt as well as the Greenbelt crowd to Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl.
Firstly, an apology. It seems that those of you reading this via the Facebook “notes” import (and, for that matter, planet.uknot) won’t have seen the videos as the import system strips out embedded objects. If that’s you (and if you care), then go to my actual blog to see the embedded video. or look it up on Youtube directly. From now on, I’ll include a simple href link as well. Now, back to today’s song…
OK, so yesterday I said that a major part of the point of music is to make people happy. But it’s equally true that a major part of the point of music is to make people sad. In fact, what’s probably more true than either of those is that almost the whole point of music is to affect the soul – to tug at your heartstrings, and take you into either seventh heaven or the slough of despond.
Almost all the classic sad songs are break up songs, or so it seems to me. In one sense that’s entirely logical, since the end of a relationship is probably the most emotionally traumatic experience that most of us go through – only the unexpected death of a close friend or relative is likely to be worse. But, from a musical point of view, that’s also a drawback, since it gets harder to tell the same story again in different words each time. That’s why, for today’s song, I’ve picked one that’s about the death of something else – not the death of a relationship, or even the actual death of a person, but the death of a dream.
“Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true?” asks the singer, “Or is it something worse?” I can’t speak for you, but this song is one of the few that can bring me to tears. Here’s Bruce Springsteen at last year’s Glastonbury, singing The River:
