I don’t know anything about music after 2003, but this seems pretty good. The Tune Yards album is coming out later this month, as is the new album from little-known American singer/songwriter Mirah.
The last physical album I brought was Mirah’s “Advisory Committee”, back in 2005, because I couldn’t buy it any other way. I’m a huge fan, and I hardly like any music, let alone any single artist, enough to say that. The new album is the combined talents of Mirah and Thao, who are both singer/songwriters with long careers. To me, April 2011 sounds like the future of music has been taken off pause since JSBX recorded a cover of Dub Narcotic’s “Fuck Shit Up“.
(And no, your beepy boopy techno music doesn’t count as “the future”. It’s all well and good but it’s just Terry Riley’s “In C” with extra bells and a whistle posse. Sorry.)
Sometimes I come across something that is so far out of my experience that I am fascinated. This is a video made by “Husky”, who is internet-famous for his Starcraft 2 commentary. The piece is a parody of a Justin Bieber song.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Bieber song, nor have I played Starcraft. I’ve heard of both of these things, and poking around Husky’s back-catalogue of Youtube videos is interesting as it exposes me to a lot of expressions I’ve never heard before (rage-quit? Gibs?), but I’m not too interested in searching out the original song.
I wrote this text when I went to title the photo to the right, and in writing the text (which turned out waaay longer than I planned) I realised that Talking Heads are a band that I really enjoy thinking about… it’s not the emotional resonance of the song that I enjoy, but the idea that you can lose something and come back to it, even something like music, which everybody is a snob about.
I have such a hard-on for that song, every time I hear it. I rediscovered the Talking Heads when I was staying in a pub on the coast. I’d gone to bed, and then, as I lay there trying to sleep, I heard the music come through the walls.
Normally, I hate any sort of late-night disturbance. But the album that was playing was one of the three albums I had when I was deep into being a teenage douchebag, all pimples and sitting in from of the TV, no talking to parents or adequate cleansing routine.
That night, I heard every. Single. Track. From “Once in a Lifetime”, the best of album I had on tape, that I had long ago thrown out, because it wasn’t “cool” like Neds Atomic Dustbin or PWEI (I know, huh?).
I picked up copy of Sand in the Vaseline (the two-disk version of Once in a Lifetime) soon after that, but it wasn’t until I saw the live movie they did, Stop Making Sense, that I became so infused by the band. Even the later, weirder stuff, where the rest of the band have pissed off and it’s just David Byrne and some session guys. I tried to like the solo stuff, and the stuff he did with Eno, but really it’s the other people that make Talking Heads great.
For instance, half-way through the Stop Making Sense video, David Byrne pisses off to do a clothes change and drink water, so the rest of the band play some track called “the Genius of Love”. This was later sampled by Mariah Carey to become the 1990s uber-hit “Fantasy”. That’s right: the other guys in Talking Heads were so shit-hot that they basically hard-baked Mariah Carey’s career into success.
This comes from a set of videos on YouTube where the soundtrack has been replaced, an idea originating on the Something Awful forums. It’s a smart idea.
(Do we need to have forums to make sense of the internet? Even the most dedicated forum has an ‘off-topic’ section, which is usually five times more interesting than the on-topic stuff.)
I used to be seriously into music. Like, seriously spending all my money on CDs, reading about music, and playing instruments. I’ve mentioned a little just how staid my hometown is, but in middle school I was carting around a seriously boring instrument, the Bassoon (if you ever want to kill a kids interest in music, give them a bassoon). That basson was the closest I could get to rock and roll in Bedfordshire, so I dutifully joined the orchestra – and then found that I totally hated the entire orchestra experience.
Later on I would get a guitar, but after years of trying to herd stoned guys into doing something, I jacked it in and concentrated on getting enough qualifications to go to art college. These days my music skills are so rusty that although I can technically play the piano, violin, tabla, guitar, bass, and bassoon, it’s probably more accurate to say I can hold them in the right way to make a noise.
Still, that idea of being a musician still holds some sway. Perhaps I should pick up the cello that my Dad has here, and learn to play it? Surely I could get somewhere good within about six months… good enough to do a Yeah Yeah Yeahs cover, perhaps. Wait, I’ll just google it and see if anybody else is doing that…
Shitnuts.
On the other hand, it looks like nobody is doing Fugazi covers with a bassoon. That could be my big break-through.
I don’t often sling Youtube videos up here, but this band – solo violinist Owen Pallett – has not only covered this song and made it his own, but also written an album called “He Poos Clouds”, which is about the magic system in Dungeons and Dragons.
Slint are a seminal alternate guitar-rock band from the 1990s. I first came across them on the soundtrack to Larry Clark’s Kids, which was one of those albums which promised that the film would be a-fucking-mazing. Instead it was a bit of a bummer, but the majesty of Slint’s “Good Morning Captain”…
Steph Swainston’s Fourlands is the setting for her novels, which are part of the New Weird, an extension to the fantasy genre that allows authors to escape the sword-and-sorcery crap that they’ve been stuck with by certainbest-sellingauthors. Where fantasy had become reliant upon pastiche and re-invention of Tolkein-esque themes, writers operating within the New Weird allowed themselves to create truly new worlds.
Swainston’s books are set in a world ruled by immortals, who fight an endless war against giant insects. There is no orcish horde to defeat, but instead an unknowable enemy who seems to only operate by instinct – something we can all understand, especially if you’ve ever found a cockroach in your kitchen. Familiarity doesn’t end there though, as despite living in a feudal world, her characters wear jeans and t-shirts, know what serial numbers are, and are generally as badly behaved as us in the modern world.
Slint’s work came at a time when Grunge defined what rock was, but they weren’t working alone. Shellac and Helmet released albums around the same time, opening up rock music to a wider range of textures than the pop-orientated sounds that were prevalent within Grunge. The influence that these bands had opened up the sound of rock music in a post-modern sense, meaning that not only could things be heavier but that they could also sound different.
The New Weird is a similar movement in fantasy writing. Swainston’s work, and that of others who accept the genre, are swimming against the idea of fantasy as ‘epic’, or the introduction of vampire mythology into the humdrum present day (such as the Sookie Stackhouse series). It’s a reinvention that enlivens a creative discipline, and while both Slint and Swainston share a common theme of narrative and flawed characters, the best link between them is to see how revolutionary they are.
