90s Music Monday

It's a shame when good songs get over used. Moby's "Play" has the dubious distinction of being the first album that had every single one of its tracks licensed for an advert, movie or tv show. Hell, even Track 1 of the B-Sides album was used in the opening sequence of "Gone in 60 Seconds". But that does that mean it's a bad album - on the contrary doesn't that mean that it was a good album with absolutely no fillers in it?

To a lesser extent you get albums like Morcheeba's "Big Calm" which it seemed like everyone had played constantly to the point that, well, you got sick of it. There are only so many times you can hear "Down by the Sea" before each listen becomes an exercise in savage teeth grinding.

"Clubbed to Death" was kind of like that. Except, for all the over-exposure, I still love the song and I love this video.

I love the style, I love the theme and I love the ending. Although part of me wonders  if there were two post houses working on it simultaneously because some of the vfx are great yet some of the compositing is terrible. The colour palette reminds me strongly of being in Australia - particularly Sydney and Byron Bay all blown out pastel colours and strong, flat, white sunlight. Lying on a beach yesterday with the same sort of light, looking at the water through wind gnarled pine trees I had a moment of temporal dislocation and spatial dissonance.

My digressions ... let me show them to you.

"Clubbed to Death" was a slow burner - it'd been around on the UK club scene since 1995 but it wasn't until the Matrix came out in 1999 that it really started getting exposure and Dougan didn't release his Album "Furious Angels" until 2002.

To be pedantic the version that everyone knows as "Clubbed to Death" is in fact a remix called the "Kurayamino variation" or "The Variation of Darkness" - くらやみ (kurayami) meaning darkness in Japanese and の (no) being the possessive suffix (I think - I didn't do very well in Latin at school. Or Japanese at night school to be honest. Or school if I'm being brutally fair.)

Aaaanyway.

So, yes, the Kurayamino variation is a witty (I'm using the word 'witty' in the academic sense rather than in a Eddie Izzard, ROTFL, LOL sense) play on Elgar's Enigma Variations - the string movement at the start is from the first movement and the piano parts are Rob Dougan's own but are thematically inspired by the visible Theme and variations 1 and 2. Moreover the various remixes of Clubbed to Death are an echo of Elgar's own project - for example Clubbed to Death 2's classical part is built around Chopin's "Prelude No.4 in E-minor" and the "Abyssal Mix" was first reversed before any editing was done.  The whole song, according to a Dougan himself was inspired by the works of the writer Yasunari Kawabata, the film maker Yasujiro Ozu and the musician Rijuichi (Ryuichi) Sakamoto.

So there you go  - hopefully you now know something you didn't when you woke up this morning. And as we all know from GI Joe cartoons - "Knowledge is Power and Knowing is Half the Battle!". Now we have to stand and laugh as the comic side kick gets their tongue stuck to an icy lamppost or is accidentally buggered by an errant doberman or something.