If you live in London and you haven't yet seen Kyoichi Tsuzuki's Happy Victims, then I urge you do so - Sunday is the last day...

In the exhibition Happy Victims, Tsuzuki photographs some thirty individuals who have turned the act of shopping into an indefinable obsession, lying somewhere between artistic expression and an unusual kind of fetishism. Worshipping one individual designer, these men and women consume religiously their chosen labels — Jean Paul Gaultier, Anna Sui, Vivienne Westwood — often at the expense of life’s other necessities. They turn what are typically minute apartments into living temples to their fashion gods, resulting in interiors which range from the breathtakingly cluttered to the manically ordered.

It rocks. I ought to go and try to write something clever about it...

(Reminder via NYLPM, originally brought to my attention by the fabulous Janina.)

The pop bit:

So apparently at the N.E.R.D. gig in Brixton the other night, Justin joined them on stage and among other things sang the lead vocal on 'Run To The Sun'. Which makes soooo much sense. Hey man, do us all a favour and put a studio version of that out instead of a song about tasty cheeseburgers or whatever...

Tonight is ICFTS and I am psyched, despite the fact that my weekend promises to be ridiculously crammed. My only concern tonight is: I want them to play 'Hey Ya', and yet if they do, I shall have to dance in a certain way. It is a way of dancing that has already earned me a slight amount of ridicule from my nearest and dearest - like Crunchy says, it's all about wanting to move like Andre 3000 does in the (jaw-droppingly good) video.

Speaking of the montezboy, he is totally on the money about 'Flip Reverse' by Blazin' Squad. I have always liked the idea of Blazin' Squad: we need more groups who resemble a gang of scary 14 year olds hanging around the swings or the shopping centre in a shit, provincial English town. But prior to this their music didn't do anything but annoy me: 'Flip Reverse' on the other hand is magnificent, the best UK pop response to American r&b/hip-hop since Liberty X's 'Just A Little'. Just one thing: I read somewhere that it's about sodomy... Which would surely mean that Missy is also on about sodomy on 'Work It'... Nah, that can't be right, surely?

Lots of stuff to get through today, not much time to do it. Here we go.

Julie Burchill will no longer be making me choke on my Saturday morning fry-up. You have no idea how happy this makes me. My only wish is that the Guardian had actually given her the heave-ho, having realised that giving a platform to openly hateful views is not a necessary requirement of a supposedly lefty/liberal newspaper...

It would have been nice, for example, if she had been let go after the following crazed and delusional piece of transphobia - "Lesbianism used to be the one place a girl could get a little me-time, but these days men are having male-to-female sex changes so they can get in on the Sapphic act, too." - truly worthy of Richard Littlejohn.

I was however pleased to discover that the Guardian website now prints any subsequent corrections at the start of archived pieces, thus: "The column below said that the national lottery's community fund tended not to give money to unglamorous groups such as those helping blind servicemen. The fund points out that to date it has given money to 400 ex-servicemen's and veterans' organisations."

Come on Rupert, offer David Aaronovitch a job too!

Hilarious and spot-on pastiche of the attitudes of certain prog/rad/lib/left types when it comes to the politics of body shape, courtesy of I Love Music, and in answer to the question 'Can FAT people rock?':

I think this question doesn't go in depth enough, what we have to understand is not just wether or not a person is fat, but rather, why they are fat. For example, people who are morbidly obese because they patronize McDonalds, eat hormone-filled dead cow, and spend there time at home buying stocks in NIKE from their computer - well, they're corporate whores. Corporate whores are totally incapable of rocking (See: Everything on any major label, ever, especially Metalica). However, people who are fat because of their asthma medication, or as a statement, or because they're vegan, or because they ate Metalica alive and they haven't been digested yet, or because they ate an SUV (As a statement), or because they spent they're childhood listening to CRASS instead of exercizing, or because they're emulating the bassist from D4, or because . . . I forget what I was talking about.

I'd add some kind of commentary but I think that really nails it. (Hmm, I better post something slagging off right wing assholes quickly, I've been venting my frustrations with my supposed "side" a lot lately...)

The correct answer to the original question itself - like you really needed one - is of course:



YES.

Oh my God there's a new Greg Dulli album out and I had no idea. According to this interview, the first song opens with the lines "Black out the windows, it’s party time", which makes me think that Dulli really is as good as it gets at those opening statements of intent: 1965 kicks off with "I got your phone number baby, I'll call you sometime" ('Somethin' Hot'), while its murkier predecessor Black Love - the greatest album ever made! (maybe) - begins "Tonight, tonight I say goodbye, to everyone who loves me" ('Crime Scene Part One'). Although maybe the defining statement of intent on that album is on 'Bulletproof': "this time we go a little lower"...

Anyway, this is yet another album I have to get - will have to go on my Xmas list together with Basement Jaxx, Jay-Z, Kylie, The Distillers and the Fiery Furnaces.

(Via No Rock.)

we mean it, man

Yet more evidence that people who write for broadsheet newspapers have less understanding of popular music than almost any other sub-species of human being: Sunday's Observer described Pink as "the husky voice of authenticity".

Uh-huh.

Don't missundaztand me here: yes, on one level this is a ridiculous statement just because Pink is clearly not "the husky voice of authenticity" by any means. But what really gets my goat is the fact that dumb-ass, boring journalists still feel the need to attach such an ill-fitting epithet to a pop star. This is the flipside of those radio stations in the UK that (allegedly) didn't playlist 'Hurt' because they haven't yet grasped the fact that the kids might be into ol' Johnny Cash (who I guess was the husky voice of authenticity) rather than just wall-to-wall pop shinyness. Which is to say, it's being so narrow-minded that you can't accept more than one type of music or artist on its own terms - you have to either exclude things that don't fit into your little hermeneutical definitions, or distort shit wildly so you can pretend one thing is the other.

It all goes back to the fact that supposedly progressive newspapers like the Guardian / Observer almost always struggle to engage with pop music in a way that isn't reactionary. Weirdly, it seems that the perceived high/low divide has been eroded much more successfully in the written discourse that surrounds other media: trashy TV can be celebrated, big noisy summer blockbusters can be celebrated... But certain types of popular music? Well, by and large they have to be handled in an insidiously specific way.

So for hip-hop the formula is something like "most rap music is about X and Y (bad, scary things!), but not this artist!" - because you can't give the culture the respect it deserves, rather you portray one specific individual as a lone messiah figure. It doesn't matter how ridiculously inaccurate or contradictory the results may be - eg if you're writing about Missy, you have to say that she redeemed rap from being macho and obsessed with violence, but if it's Eminem then you have to go on about how gritty he is and how that's much better than talking about partying on yachts and the bling bling.

With straight-up chart pop, what happens is even more weirdly arbitrary: you say "unlike Cristina or Britney, Pink's not just pretending to be dirrty or jumping on bandwagons, she really means it and she's in control!" - and then when you have to run a Kylie interview, you just flip the names round and say "unlike weak rebellious poseurs like Pink, Kylie is the real deal!" and JESUS CHRIST ENOUGH ALREADY. Just say it. Say "I like chart pop done by female vocalists." Say it! Or if you don't like it, God I'd almost rather you just joined the Hatrix and just never covered it, y'know? Because I cannot cope with this need to strip the fun away from something in order to try to impose the ill-fitting concept of serious artistic credibility, a concept that's been looking shoddy for just under a century...

And which would you rather be anyway, the husky voice of authenticity or dressed up as the devil like something off the nose of a WWII bomber complete with ridiculous huge blonde hair extensions (and cage)? And OH SHIT why can't we get our head round the idea that people can be both? I'd love to see The Detroit Cobras rock the devil costume thing, they're pretty much there already with that ridiculous Seven Easy Pieces cover art. In fact, The Distillers - there's your bundle of contradictions right there - Brody, the husky voice of authentic (punk rock) media manipulation and hype - and we don't caaaaaare...

The above interview ends with Pink pretty much making it explicit that she doesn't care either: "Yeah, maybe I'll write the next album on my own. Maybe with Dolly Parton. Who knows?"

Anyway… ‘Trouble’ has really grown on me. I think it’s the way it has this smoked-too-many-fags, anyone-fancy-a-splash-of-vino-colapso quality to it - it's not proper punk, it's a pop song for people who overdo it now and again, which is fine and really far more human. And I can't help group it in my mind with the Distillers track...

Comics reviews!

Stupid Comics #2 by Jim Mahfood

Mahfood likes the Mars Volta. That kind of sums up everything that's wrong with this comic. I mean, I like it in large parts even though the politics are simplistic and self-congratulatory* and frequently contradictory in a very unaware way but... I can't help feeling like I'm mostly cutting the guy slack based on how much I like some of his earlier work. No prog please Mahfood, etc.

*9 times out of 10 when people describe a piece of art/entertainment which has 'progressive' politics as being self-congratulatory, they are lying to you and just being reactionary. This is not one of those times.

Singles reviews!

The Distillers - 'Drain The Blood'

Okay, I admit it, I totally would.