The Scissor Sisters album, then. Well it's great, obviously. Scattered thoughts on individual tracks:

'Laura' sounds better than ever (the added sax really, really helps). Why the change from "Deborah" to "Frieda", I wonder? And is the lyric really "come on, come on, where is your love?" rather than "Simone, Simone"? Is this a Michael Jackson reference - "sha-moan!" - eh? Questions, questions...

'Take Your Mama' is, as someone has said elsewhere, the best song ever, possibly the song on here most likely to win over doubters (unless they have an insane aversion to melody, which does happen). There's something about it that reminds me of the best of Suede post-Bernard Butler: when they managed to knock out classic three-minute pop songs that begged to be all over radio but had a sneaky little streak of queerness/glorifying the outsider in there. Think 'The Beautiful Ones'. If I can get really muso for a moment, I also really appreciate the way that they put in that "Do it! Take your mama out all night!" bit right after the first chorus, whereas I suspect many bands would save that until the end. There's no restraint here, they're just piling on the hooks with a kind of reckless indulgence (see also: New Pornographers). Go on then, gimme some more sugar (after all, I am your neighbour).

'Comfortably Numb' doesn't sound much like anything else on the album, but I don't blame them for giving it a wider release - it's too good not to be heard by as many people as possible. Predictably there is now an established camp of haterz for this song, which overlaps with those who are calling it a novelty single. I'm not sure what makes 'Comfortably Numb' a novelty record any more than any other cover version which doesn't slavishly ape the original. It could be that people just aren't prepared to take something that blends rock and disco seriously - 'Danger! High Voltage!' was also called a novelty record, again erroneously IMHO.

'Mary' - you know those people I said couldn't cope with melody? They'll hate this quite a lot. In some ways this is the simplest tune on the album. But it's also one that deserves its own long and pretentious blog entry. Watch this space.

'Lovers In The Backseat' - begins with the most sublime into and then briefly turns into 'Ashes To Ashes' before settling into its own groove. Verrry nice. Chorus reminds me of something I cannot place for the life of me - helpful, aren't I?

'Filthy/Gorgeous' almost fills the gap left by the absence of 'Electrobix' - almost. Crazy 808 sounds. This ought to KILL PEOPLE in the clubs. Dancefloor devastation!

'Better Luck Next Time' - it's like they've taken Robbie Williams' best (or least bad) song, 'Rock DJ', and replaced all the annoying shitty Robbie-isms with great lines about being a detective without a case and the priceless "Will the fun disappear? Is the binding coming undone?" Then there's a completely unexpected 'Octopus' Garden' guitar wig-out. This has gone from being my least favourite track on the album to my ideal next single after 'Take Your Mama'.

I really wish they'd kept in the banter between Jake and Ana Matronic on 'Music Is The Victim', but you can't have everything. This is still a great party tune, with more hilariously good lyrics. The line about "the girls all doin' 'Tina" is, unless I'm very mistaken, a reference to Ecstasy by way of Cristina Aguilera's alter-ego 'X-Tina'. I love this band.

?It Can?t Come Quickly Enough? ? gorgeous, just gorgeous. Evocative of everything from ?Careless Whispers? to Pet Shop Boys, maybe a tiny bit of Depeche Mode in there too? If there?s one song on the album that really proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Scissor Sisters are a band to love, and not just a fun, trashy, pissed-up shag (nowt wrong with that, obviously), this it it. If there?s is any justice, this one will achieve anthem status.

Some reviewers have called 'Return To Oz' prog, but I'm not sure it's prog just because it's, uh, conceptual. Songs as extended metaphors has been done by others, of course - a better comparison here might be the Magnetic Fields. It really works here, too - it's clever, but not distractingly so. (And the spectre of Fairuza Balk looks large. I mean shit, does everyone else remember how fucked-up that movie is, and how much more fucked-up and terrifying it seemed at the time?)

The message from Ms Matronic at the end of the album cracks me up - it's all about the horse noise. Those talking book things were cool - I had an A-Team one and a Spiderman one.

'The Skins' might just be the best thing on here, though. Production reminiscent of the DFA (the only time this is the case on the album really, except maybe 'Filthy/Gorgeous', so I don't know what James Dudley is on about). Another one to fill floors.

"Have you been kissed by a computer?
Are you able to move your hips?"

Eppy on responses to the Courtney Love album - which in turn prompted me to write something I need to post here, too (I still love you, Courtney).

You know what really annoys me? The fact that it's so predictable that there will be a bunch of negative reviews that say "how tragic, we hate this but we loved Live Through This". Like nobody remembers the extent to which the misogynistic male rock critic knives were out for Courtney in 1995. Same as it ever was. Same as it EVER was.

It's not like this doesn't happen all the time, either. With specific acts (yes, all you reviewers dissing the latest Wu project, you were so drooling over 36 Chambers when it came out - of course you were, yes, yes), and with whole swathes of music in general ("why can't hip hop sound like it used to back in the day (when I didn't like it either)?" - BECAUSE YOU'RE A FUCKING MUPPET).

The calm of reason will descend upon me once more in a moment, I'm sure.

the best you can is good enough

So I feel like I have to weigh in on this, if only because the word 'poptimism' seems as good a term for my attitude to music in 2003 as any other, and it's with regard to that year in particular that the validity of that attitude is being questioned. If I stumble while trying to put my thoughts on this together, I plead the excuse that the attitude being offered instead is alien to me almost to the point of incomprehensibility. Here’s a particularly troubling chunk:

"Worth reflecting that in 1985 those who pointed to the obvious poverty of pop in would inevitably have been accused of nostalgia. The tragic fate that awaits such cheerleading should serve as a warning to our current Poptimists. Didn't they know? Couldn't they see they were in a time of privation, of drought? Ask yourself this: is the choice between British Sea Power and Justin Timberlake really that much better than the choice between the Loft and Go West? Is Beyonce much of an improvement on 85's Whitney?"

Dealing with the specifics first: I have no idea who Loft were and I've never heard British Sea Power to my knowledge, so all I can say is you’re goddamn right I’ll take Beyonce over Whitney (as far as I know, the number of tracks recorded by the latter which are actually any cop can be counted on the fingers of one hand, possibly not an unmutilated hand either), and even though Justin seems increasingly intent on making a monkey of himself, I’ll still take two thirds of Justified over Go West (not the worst band of the 1980s by any means).

But the specifics aren’t really the issue here. The idea that there are a bunch of people who were really excited about the pop music of the day in 1985, who are now holding their heads in shame and skulking in the shadows because a few music bloggers have arbitrarily deemed that year to be a nadir in the history books – this is in itself laughable. What exactly is the “tragic fate” that awaits me if I continue in my reckless poptimism? Well, let’s see: the 2021 equivalent of K-Punk will decide that 2003 was a rubbish year for music, and I will be roundly mocked and have only my copy of Speakerboxxx / The Love Below (now deeply reviled by all credible music writers worldwide) to comfort me.

Go on, guess the extent to which I can live with that.

And yeah, nostalgia is a constant of human nature, that’s the whole point – while K-Punk seems to suggest that the pessimists can’t be guilty of it both then and now, but yes, yes they can. Saying “I’ve not heard much stuff that got me excited this year” is one thing, and always fair enough. Buy saying “Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? They have gone like rain on the mountains…” etc etc – that IS nostalgia. And it still crops up all the time: just hang out on a music forum and watch the ‘Am I Getting Old Or Is Music Shit Now?’ threads pass by, regular as migrating birds.

The funny thing is, no matter how often the people who start those threads phrase the question like that, many are unreceptive to the idea that it might be the former option – not necessarily age, but just something about their approach. I’m not assigning blame here: we all need a nudge in another direction every now and again, whether practical (new avenues to provide new opportunities to hear new music) or in regard to our own ways of listening. Nor do I blame individual music fans for being reluctant to admit that this guidance might be needed. No, what I blame is something endemic in the culture of music criticism (which shapes the attitudes of most pop fans, however much we might want to deny it): the idea that your knowledge of popular music past and present has to be as near-encyclopedic as possible. If you don’t have encyclopedic knowledge, you’re obliged to fake it: what you cannot do is admit that maybe you’re just out of the loop.

This is pernicious precisely because admitting the possibility that one is out of the loop should always be the first recourse before one damns an entire year. If I say it’s been a good year for pop music, what I mean is that there has been sufficient music released this year that I’ve found enjoyable for me to feel satisfied. Whereas if I say this has been a bad year, I mean that I have failed to find enough music I enjoy – and doesn’t it require a certain amount of arrogance to assume that this is in no way a failure of my own? Sadly, this arrogance is pretty much a central requirement of ‘proper’ music criticism. (One of the reasons why blogs are great is that their highly personal nature frees them up from the need to feign omniscience that plagues the Rock Critic. When your opinion is just yours and not a publication’s, you can be that little bit freerer to be as casual – “I keep hearing that on the radio, it’s fun” – or as militant – “This IS the best song EVER recorded” – as you like.)

But not only does this mentality require music fans to know everything about the past and present, it also demands that they predict the future. The really sad thing about all this is how the writer in question ends the piece:

"(I hold the first TFF album in high esteem: and their decline, their massification and blusterization is symptomatic of everything that went wrong in the Eighties.)"

The pathos of parentheses. I want to buy the guy a drink and say DUDE, so you like the first Tears For Fears album? SO? Why would you burden yourself with feeling bad about it, why would you let your distaste for the band's subsequent work and what it may or may not be "symtomatic" of tarnish your memories or the enjoyment you get from listening to that album now? To think it's the former indie kids turned pop lovers who get accused of letting guilt cloud their judgment!

It's not the responsibility of music fans to answer for how history judges their era. It would be insane to try to do so, because of the way the music industry works. To take the most obvious example, a relatively unique band who achieve success are almost always followed by a stream of vaguely similar but often increasingly inferior bands. Is this a reason to want your favourite band not to sell any records, not to come to wider attention? Should I be worrying about my enjoyment of the Scissor Sisters record because we may soon see a rash of acts being signed and lauded who have an ounce of the style and none of the tunes? Well, there are people who do think like that, I know. But to me, like I said: insane.

To be honest, the idea of sitting around and thinking “1985: that was a dark year for music – how on earth do we stop that from happening again?” seems like an enormously unproductive, unenjoyable and just plain unnecessary way to pass the time. It reminds me of something my mate Cavsy likes to say: "We fought in the Britpop wars, and lost - but the world was a better place for it" - a joke at the expense of the accepted history, because how do you know? How do you know that the pop landscape turned out better because you were buying Elastica and Pulp records but telling as many people as you could that Cast were a pile of shite? You don’t. That’s not why you did it. It should never be why you do it, not really. To base your tastes on “will this album be hailed as an innovative classic, or be found in many a car boot sale?” is lunacy. It is suicide for your enjoyment of music.

In the end, this also makes me think of probably the smartest thing Matthew ever wrote:

"Importance and relevance is a scam and a trap. Don't bother with it. Don't think too much about it. Once you stop thinking about things in those terms, all of music and art becomes far more enjoyable."

***

A possibly off-topic addendum inspired by some of the comments on the K-Punk piece over at that link, and other things: it strikes me as ironic that it’s the “poptimists” who are accused of being in love with novelty, when it’s the killjoys who become so jaded so quickly. The Neptunes productions? Played out. Timbaland & Missy? Boring. Pharrell Williams? Overexposed, and therefore no longer any good. I’ll admit that Clones failed to light my ass on fire in the way I’d expected, but it sure has its moments – The Neps’ crowning achievement in 2003, however, was probably the holy trinity of sparkly, cool breeze pop tunes: ‘Frontin’, ‘Beautiful’, and ‘Change Clothes’. Meanwhile anyone who heard ‘The Jump Off’ and ‘Pass The Dutch’ with open ears knows Tim & Missy can still knock it out the park. I really feel sorry for those hipsters who have suddenly decided they can’t show the same enthusiasm they once did for Missy now that the whole world’s caught on - Miss E… So Addictive may never be surpassed in album terms, but she’s still an extraordinary presence in pop world. Plus, if you’re counting ‘Milkshake’ as a 2003 track, I don’t see how you can deny that The Neptunes filled their annual “staggeringly good record” quota (unless you’re in the tiresomely puritan “Kelis has made a song about sex and thus sold out!” camp).

Standard apologies for the long grass and the crumbling brickwork and blah blah. Long piece on poptimism later today - for now, take a look at the cover for College Dropout by Kanye West, and tell me if it's not setting the bar for sleeve artwork for 2004:



Was talking to my flatmate last night about the death of the "middle-underground" (for want of a better term) - ie, the gap in hip hop that currently exists between the bling and the beardy - and now I wonder, could Kanye West be the guy to remake that broken line? He's produced for Jay-Z and Ludacris, but his album cover is a man in a bear suit - it looks like it could be the artwork for an Eels record, for fuck's sake (only good). It's food for thought. And damn, another one gets added to my shopping list.