“On the other side is us. And they can’t understand.”

Following up on my rambling about Tatu (or t.A.T.u. if you will/must), here's a link to the best article I've read about the duo, which goes on about Bjork's 'Pagan Poetry', Nabokov, The Smiths and Daniel Bedingfield, in an entirely inspired way. However, if you find the piece itself pretentious wank, you have the option of either reading the Appendage and nodding along sagely, or just fucking COMBING YOUR HAIR.

P.S. Apologies to any Billy Bragg fans who were offended by my likening of the man to Sting earlier. My original contender for title of "might as well be Sting" was REM, a comparison which I still feel stands.

I have had LCD Soundsystem's 'Give It Up' stuck in my head all day. This is good.

I found out recently that my slam of the Beastie Boys' anti-war song had been linked to by at least one crazy right-wing pro-war fuckwit blogger*. The kind who crowed over Rachel Corrie's death, etc. This is not good. I feel like I need some kind of magical boobytrap rigged up here, so any right-wing fuck who might misconstrue me and think we agree on anything automatically catches, say, cancer of the face...

*And some other people, who shouldn't worry that I'm referring to them.

Why am I so completely, sub-humanly useless in the morning?

I think about IT baby all the time

On rotation:



Thoughts on this and other promised musical topics to follow very soon. Really.

Tatu on the Eurovision Song Contest were as amazing as I knew they were going to be ever since I heard that the title of their entry translated as ‘Don’t Believe, Don’t Be Afraid’ (apparently taken from Solzhenitsyn’s rules for surviving the gulag, and a former and probably future byline for this blog). Nearly a decade ago now, in the sweet rush of the early Britpop skirmishes, it was suggested that the UK should enter something by one of these new guitar bands – if not actually an Oasis track, at least something penned by Noel Gallagher (remember, this was circa ‘Whatever’, arguably the band’s zenith and certainly a long time before they became as inarguably, hopelessly shit as they have now been for some years - they were an excitingly effortless guitar pop band). The argument went that of course, we probably wouldn’t win: the rest of Europe was still far too fond of syrupy power ballads and mindless disco pop (conversely, remember that this was a time when disco pop meant unspeakable Belgians, not Kylie cyber-fucking with Fischerspooner and Tiga). Our boy/girls wouldn’t win, we’d even get a few “nil points”, but we’d put on one hell of a show, and afterwards we’d know that we’d been right. That we’d been the best thing on the night.

That was Tatu on Saturday, screaming out the words defiantly, running round the stage and using the space in a way no act before them on the night (of course I didn’t watch the ones after – jeez!) bothered to do – like they owned the place, which is also how they reportedly acted prior to their performance. What ‘Don’t Believe’ really has going for it, to a greater extent even than ‘All The Things She Said’, is that sense of desperation – and I know I’ve been over-using the word ‘yearning’ lately when talking about music, so let’s use ‘plaintive’ instead – which was only added to by the euphemistic nature of their hand-clutching and eye-to-eye staring... Because they were quite literally forbidden to do anything else.

"If I were to kiss you here, they'd call it an act of terror" - Hakim Bey.

If you don’t like Tatu, it’s worth considering that perhaps you’ve become a big old cynic, and the time has come to buy only Sting records. Or Billy Bragg records, which is pretty much the same thing.

From the latest issue of SPIN magazine - via Flux - and I'm going to struggle to write this without swooning: Grant Morrison on Justin Timberlake!

"Definitely a pure mutation - and he's trying to push his powers in a more evil direction. I think they inject all of those Disney kids, like Britney, with something when they're young. One minute, they're singing about mice, and the next, they're riding motorcycles and fisting each other."

Every time I get cranky with Morrison, he reminds me that where certain very key things are concerned, he Gets It.

Coming very soon: entries on Scissor Sisters vs. Electric Six (sadly in the sense of "comparing the differing merits of", rather than a reference to some amazing bootleg soundclash remix THANG), why Tatu actually did win the Eurovision Song Contest and you just didn't notice (you are SLEEPING and you do not want to WAKE UP), and why I can't stand people who hate beauty.

But for now I must return to hacking reality with my miiiiiiiind. Meep.