"come, little lately, getcha shine on"

Twilight Singers, Islington Academy, 28.1.04

Let's get the hyperbole out of the way first: last night has to be one of the most enjoyable live shows I've ever seen. The signs were good: payday is always a good day, and I was relieved I could still get tickets, plus Nina had her HOTT new hair, rocking the Maggie G look (hey, she talks about Jake enough, I'm allowed that). Sure, so the weather outside was dreadful, making the walk up Pentonville Road a little too much like Artic exploration, but that just made it all the sweeter to arrive at the venue.

Greg Dulli's showmanship is well-known, but I'll confess to tiny reservations when he swaggered on several minutes after the rest of the band, with cigarette clamped in his mouth and drink in one hand, and said "Hello London. Did you miss me?" That's the kind of cockiness you really have to make sure you live up to. The first three songs were pretty great - a much more raucous 'Esta Noche' than the album version (using mainly Dulli's howl rather than his croon, which is a change from most of his recent recorded output come to think of it), 'Teenage Wristband' and 'Twilight Kid' - but I think it was around the point of their cover of 'A Love Supreme' that I really decided my god, Dulli's self-belief is really not unreasonable at all - in fact, it's part of what makes him such a good frontman.

'Decatur St' is probably the track from Blackberry Belle that benefitted the most in a live setting. Don't get me wrong, I like the recorded version, but on stage it clatters and roars even more so, the band really ripping into that chorus, everything shifted up a notch.

On the basis of 'King Only' and 'Love', I may need to buy the first Twilight Singers album. 'Love' got two airings - one began with Dulli singing the beginning of 'All You Need Is...', another came during the first encore, with Dulli alone behind the keyboard, and began with a partial cover of Outkast's 'Roses' - "y'all know this, right?" - which really brought out the viciousness of the song. So appropriate, too - it may make sense that Dulli digs The Love Below, but that track in particular could have been written for him.

Dulli's habit of inserting snippets of other songs into his own is both brilliant and maddening - maddening because I've been trying to figure out why the additional coda of "I think you're crazy, baby" on 'Crazy' was so familiar, and only just remembered that it's the chorus of Radiohead's 'Motion Picture Soundtrack'. Nice. (Another nice touch: 'Martin Eden' was dedicated to Dr David Kelly because, do you see?)

Best of all was the second encore. 'Uptown Again', annouced as a reference to this being Greg Dulli's first time in London for four years ("I'm not normally a sentimental man, but...") was a treat, but for the Twilight Singers to play 'Hey Ya!'*, tearing into it with the kind of gusto that can only come from loving it as much as, well, we all do, right? - that was something of a dream come true. Yeah, so I am a sentimental man, so sue me.

*After this, Dulli jokingly explained that while he loves Outkast, and would never accuse Andre 3000 of stealing from him, he wrote 'Hey Ya!' five years ago. Cue '66'. Now, it must be stressed that the two songs have very little common apart from inciting people to "shake it", but there is one little "oooh-ooooh" bit in '66' over which you can sing the chorus to 'Hey Ya!' and make it fit, as was thus demonstrated - yes, it was a joke, but a nice one.

Hey, it's the serious bit!

Udi Aloni rocks my world. Local Angel is so good - in turn breath-takingly poetic, politically incisive, and theologically/spiritually fascinating -it's enough to make me consider buying a DVD player. More on the screening/talk with Aloni and Slavoj Zizek at the ICA last night to come, but I wanted to mention one of the highlights of the discussion.

Responding to the suggestion that by including a Palestinian hip-hop group in the film, he was just exoticising an alien youth culture (he's not, in fact he's friends with and tours with the band in question), Aloni said this:

"The problem with the old Left is that they think everything that's beautiful must either belong to the Right, or be a form of exoticism."

Which I think is a damning and accurate critique of the mindset that plagues a whole generation of radical thought. How else do you explain the kneejerk suspicion of any form of creativity that isn't didactic (ie, functional)? The innate distrust of popular culture that testifies to an inability to accept that, while hegemonies exist, the populace retains the ability to enjoy art for its own sake? Not for the first time, it strikes me that there's a hell of a lot of leftover Puritanism and Protestantism in certain 'radicals'. The struggle is serious business, it is work. Fun is for decadent capitalists. Art or music that is only beautiful for its own sake (eg, the simple melody of the pop song) is at best a distraction, at worst an unacceptable indulgence.

How else do you explain why when the 'Left' produce their own art, it's so often clumsily preachy, obvious and without grace or joy? How else do you explain Chumbawumba*?

Of course, there are other radical approaches to art... Let's come back to this.

*'Tubthumping' excepted: it's shit, but doesn't quite fit the pattern, obviously.

please don't ask about the future
I am not a fortune teller
if you'd just be civil,
baby don't get trivial

You will live in Apartment.
You will drive a Black Tracks.
You will marry Cat Power and have 3 kids.
You will be a Assassin in San Francisco.

You illeterate fucks.

(Can you tell I'm bored?)

A Public Service Announcement From Comrade Spears Regarding Her Forthcoming Single 'Toxic'.



"Look, let's just pretend this is my comeback single and the last year never happened, okay? I mean, Madonna - Christ, what was I thinking? Have you heard the rap on 'American Life'? I'm seriously thinking of having my people remove 2003 from history, y'all."

With the troubled panic of man who's just found out his mother watches Hollyoaks, Chris sends me a text (TXT) message about a week ago to the effect of "b-b-but the Scissor Sisters are rockist!", which presumably refers to this bit from the Guardian interview I linked to a while ago:

As the Darkness have done with 1970s and 1980s pomp metal, the Scissor Sisters have rescued commercial 1970s and 1980s middle-of-the-road music from the dustbin of kitsch history. "We just like that traditional style of pop songwriting that people haven't touched on for a while."

In fact, the songwriting, mostly courtesy of Shears, is superbly accomplished. "The shelf life of a song," according to Boom, "is exponentially greater if you can sing it with just an acoustic guitar."

"Try and sing a Destiny's Child song a cappella," suggests Matronic. "It's very rhythmic, but there's no melody." Shears can think of a decent current song. "Hey Ya by Outkast," he says. "You could sing that round a campfire."

Let's get something out of the way: it's important to remember that an interview will often tell you as much about the publication as the band, and though I used that interview as an example of why the Guardian don't always suck, it still betrays the existence of certain attitudes that usually surface when broadsheet newspaper journalists write about music. Like it or not, not all interviews with the Sisters can be like this one at Popjustice. So any 'rockist' leanings you pick up on may well not be coming from the band (anyone who's ever written or edited an interview will tell you how easy it is to arrange quotations just so, in order to give the impression that someone is saying exactly what you want them to say) - this isn't a conspiracy theory or a form of excuse, just context to bear in mind.

Next up, I'm not going to try and pretend that I agree with the claim that there is no melody in a Destiny's Child song. But I suspect that if we broaden this out a bit, we might get to a point where most people can agree with what Ana Matronic is saying here. For the last couple of years, the emphasis in a lot of r&b tracks has been on the production - this has been the focus of attention from the artists and producers, but even more so from the critics. Those stop-start, jerky beats perfected by Timbaland and others (Rodney Jerkins, Shekspere, etc) are great to dance to, but it's true, you couldn't play most of them on an acoustic guitar the way you could play 'Hey Ya!'. Bear in mind that what the 'rockists' have been doing in the meantime has often been making songs that use acoustic guitars, but that will never be played round a campfire because nobody would want to hear, let alone play, them ever again. Scissor Sisters aren't doing either of those things, and what they *are* doing isn't something that (m)any other people are doing right now.

It also helps if you avoid the gag reflex you may understandably have on seeing the word 'tradition', and take "that traditional style" to mean "this particular traditional style" rather than "the one true style of olde". What the Scissor Sisters represent primarily is a tradition of pop that's arguably even less credible in the eyes of 'rockists' than modern urban r&b/pop. If I wanted to grossly over-simplify matters, I'd describe it as the gay side of disco rather than the black side. Think of the two records that 'Comfortably Numb' references most obviously - Frankie's 'Relax' and the Bee Gees' 'Staying Alive'. If you need more reference points, think of Dexy's Midnight Runners (and not just 'cos of the outfit Jake Shears is wearing in the photo below) - 'Come On Eileen' is one of the greatest pop singles of the last thirty years, but people are much less ready to admit that this than they would be about, say, 'Thriller'. Dexy's have zero credibility; 'Come On Eileen' is seen as music for wedding receptions and 'cheesy' (self-conscious or otherwise) club nights. It's that all-too-familiar pattern where the tune is so undeniable that a huge number of people embrace it, and then it must in turn be scorned by those supposedly in the know. 'Rockism' (if you're reading this wondering what the hell this term means, now is the helpful bit) if it means anything, means shunning music that a huge number of people embrace, because it means shunning the vulgar tastes of the masses for a canon of artistically worthy classic albums (which in the process creates a hegemony more repetitive and boring than any pop song could ever become through mere overexposure). 'Rockism' values the original version of 'Comfortably Numb' too highly to enjoy a disco cover version of the same.

Which brings me to the point that to be honest Chris, it wouldn't matter if Scissor Sisters spent every interview extolling the merits of the Mars Volta - they still wouldn't be rockists by virtue of the music they make. It's shiny and you dance to it = it's pop. Of the highest quality.

In case I'm not making myself abundantly clear, we should all be exceedingly grateful that as of yesterday, Scissor Sisters have made it into the Top 10 of the UK Singles Chart. Top 10 motherfucker! It's like Britpop all over again. Except with better clothes. And better music. And no British people. Yes.

In conclusion:



(Image also courtesy of PopJustice.)

(The longer smarter stuff isn't coming yet, let's make do with random thoughts inspired by watching music channels.)

Y'know, someone should tell Missy & Timbaland that that thing where they switch to a different song in the middle of the video got old REALLY fast.

you were dressed like a punk but you were too young to remember

I'm thinking of making "hott extras in music videos" into a regular feature in this blog. Today's entry comes from Belle & Sebastian's lastest single, the excellent 'I'm A Cuckoo'. The video features Stuart Murdoch doing a lot of running, which pleases me because it reminds me of the first B&S song I ever heard, 'The Stars Of Track And Field', a song I'm not sure they've ever bettered. The video also reminds me of Gregory's Girl, but whether this is deliberate or not, I have no idea, not least of all because it's so long since I saw that film I'm not even sure that's the film I'm thinking of. It could be a whole other Scottish film from roughly the same era. Anyway, back to that matter at hand, the girl in question is the one with a quiff, at one point seen reading 'Teds Monthly', who can also be seen on the single's cover:



So can anyone who has Dear Catastrophe Waitress tell me if it's worth getting? Bear in mind that my previous favourite B&S album was Fold Your Hands Child..., and that I've been a little bit put off so far by people who like the latest album dissing that one.