52 posts tagged “90s music monday”

In most places in Europe this next track made number 1 or, at least, in the top 5 yet peaked at 21 in the US. I'd like to make an interesting and stimulating point about that but I honestly can't think of one. Something about the US rave scene lagging about 10 years behind the European one maybe? Meh.

You know, I almost forgot today was monday. Again.

I was convinced that for part of this video Gaz wore an Ushanka

An Ushanka, yesterday

I actually forgot that yesterday was Monday. I can't decide if that's tragic or not. sigh

I have a soft spot for Mark Romanek videos - especially the sublime "Hurt" for Johnny Cash, "99 Problems" for Jay-Z (although for the last I couldn't really tell you quite why) and the fantastically creepy "Closer" for Nine Inch Nails. No body seems to do lurking menace quite as well as him. Two of his videos - "Closer" and "Bedtime Story" for Madonna - are in the permanent collection at MOMA in New York (although I have to admit I don't really like either the track or the video of Madonna one).

One thing about his work - it ages incredibly well.

It kind of blows my mind that that video is 11 years old - if you showed it to me blind you'd have no problems convincing me that it's was a completely contemporary promo.

And like the rest of Romanek's work it's achingly stylish - hell, I hate 70s retro chic and yet watching this I find that suddenly it looks appealing.

And Ms Apple - worryingly thin yes (the New Yorker described her as "looking like an underfed Calvin Klein model") but somehow a seamless blend of coquettish innocence and wanton knowing. It's not often that you see a someone who manages to project remorse and relish at the same time.

Tell a lie  -  dogs do it when you catch them eating something they shouldn't but it's not quite the same, is it?

Once, in art class at school, I tried to bluff past my suckiness at the aesthetic by claiming I was creating modern, abstract peices whereby my teacher primly told me that you have to be good before you can break the rules. I think I probably responded that I was TIRED of these philistines not appreciating my work and that their insistence in wallowing in their own moribund, bourgeois notions of the same tired art clichés was bringing on a attack of the vapours.

I spent a lot of time in detention at school. A lot. Those who know me are, at this very moment, failing to feign surprise.

Anyway ...

If you are not a fan of the Warp records oeuvre then most of the output by bands like Autechre can sound like so much white noise. Don't believe me? Check out this video for "Grantz Graf"- it sounds like a skipping record. I'm being serious.

And yet it's strangely mesmerising.

Now I'm not nearly hip enough to be one of the people who really gets Autechre but I do kind of appreciate it. I even, through an series of events, have a copy of Gescom on mini-disc.

I also have a soft spot for Tom "Squarepusher" Jenkinson, another Warp artist,  who is also an accomplished 'classical' musician who fuses jazz with more abstract breaks and fast cut-ups. It's more accessible than Autechre but still pretty challenging stuff  -yet the jazz heritage clearly shines through. Like jazz itself it takes the rules and creatively breaks them.

Like my teacher was trying to point out - if you know the rules well enough then you can take risks with them, skirt the boundaries. There are obvious echoes to this in the world of molecular gastronomy which, by going back to fundamentals axioms, Principia Mathematica style, has produced results from the sublime to the shocking.

In music, squatting menacingly on both ends of that spectrum is the malevolent grin of Richard D. James.

Richard D James

It's funny - some people strive to be cool, to be known. They blow huge amounts of money, the go to all the hip parties, they make the right friends. They try. But some people are just naturally cool and some people are cool because they don't want to be.

And some people end up with a mythos.

There are stories about Richard James. That he owns a tank and a Russian submarine (true, apparently). That he owns the silver structure in the middle of Elephant and Castle roundabout (false). That he was once woken up by a courier from a record label wanting a remix he'd promised so he ran upstairs and grabbed a random DAT tape and the record company didn't notice the difference. That at 11 he created sound from a ZX81(which has no sound hardware) by using it to retune the video signal and cause different pitched hums from the cathode ray tube in the TV it was connected to.

Some of these stories he starts, some of them are started about him. Some of them are true. Some of them aren't.

Who cares? This is man who encodes image in tracks so that they're only visible using a spectogram viewer. A man who produces practically unlistenable glitches, squelches and bleeps and yet also manages to get to number 16 in the charts.

With songs like these.

Readers of a nervous disposition should probably just go watch a Norah Jones video.

of which James said

'Come to Daddy' came about while I was just hanging around my house, getting pissed and doing this crappy death metal jingle. Then it got marketed, and a video was made, and this little idea that I had, which was a joke, turned into something huge. It wasn't right at all.

The video for Windowlicker fits in 44 uses of the word "fuck" in under four minutes, averaging out at about 1 every 3 seconds. Both it and Come to Daddy were directed by Chris Cunningham who got his start doing the puppets for Spitting Image and later, the sculpture and animatronics for Alien³ and followed up Come to Daddy with the rather more mainstream Frozen video for Madonna.

To put it another way, it's Not Safe for Work. You've been warned.  It's also 10 minutes long but worth every second.

 
If you're not the kind of anal retentive like me who actually counted all the windows on the limo - there are 38.

And the French sample half way through is James' then French girlfriend and roughly translates as "I like to shag my dog" albeit in mildly obscure slang.

...

I like to think of myself as sort of an educational service. Not a very good one mind you, but a service none the less.

For some reason which completely baffles me I had Luscious Jackson's "Naked Eye" stuck in my head all yesterday. ALL of yesterday. But not all of the song. Just the hook. Over and over and over and over again.

No idea where it came from or why it lodged itself in my cerebellum but it turns out to be pretty good to snowboard too so I can't really complain. Plus you've got to love a song that starts off "Wearing nothing is divine, naked is a state of mind, I take things off to clear my head, to say the things I haven't said".

I have no recollection of ever buying a single Luscious Jackson record yet, a few years back a friend of mine was looking through my CD collection absent mindedly and commented that I didn't seem like the kind of person who would own every album. And apparently I did - not only that but one of them had my name written on the back of the back cover and another had a post-it note in my handwriting on the inside so it's not like there's any kind of plausible deniability or anything. 

To be honest it's not hard to see why I like them - textured tracks with strong bass lines and a judiciously healthy  dollop of electronic breaks and plenty of tempo and key changes which translate strangely well to an acoustic set

Named after a mispronunciation of Lucious "Luke" Jackson, a Philidephia 76ers player, their first concert was opening for The Beastie Boys and Cypress Hill and they were the first band to sign for the Beaties' Grand Royale label. So clearly they get respect.

Plus I could totally crush on Gabby Glaser.

Yet oddly I find their videos infuriating - especially "Ladyfingers" but even, to a lesser extent, "Naked Eye"^[*] - and I HAVE NO IDEA WHY.

In that way I suppose they're the complete opposite of Feeder's "Just A Day" which despite having all the ingredients present that would normally make me start frothing at the mouth I find strangely captivating and could (and have) watched repeatedly for a unhealthy amount of time.

As if further proof was needed that I am Wrong in the Brain, inexplicably the Luscious Jackson clip is the only advert that Gap have ever done that hasn't immediately sent me into a paroxysms of  tooth grinding fury.

Yes, in case you were wondering. I was dropped on the head as a child. Thank you for asking.

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.

The best laid plans of mice and men etc etc - I had a whole post written in my head and then the overdue sproggling of two of my dearest friends chose today to log in to the great MMORPG that we call "Life'.

However, since Adam, the Stamen bearing member of the Dynamic Duo, has long been my conduit to purest RAWK(!)  I felt compelled to dump a little bit of metal magic and mayhem.

So please raise your hands unto the symbol of the horns and prepare to rock out. With your cock out if you are so equipped and such inclined.

High Fidelity scores highly in Simon's personal all time top 10 list of films.

For a start it's good - always an advantage in these types of situations. It's also one of the best adaptations of a book to film which deftly takes the central message and transfers them state side without being gratuitous or offending the donor country - in this way it is the anti "The Dark Is Rising" which literally made me howl in anger. I'm serious.

Another person who should take note is Jimmy Fallon who defiled (and I don't use that word lightly) the source pieces of "Taxi" and "Fever Pitch". "Fever Pitch"  was also a book by Nick Hornby who wrote the original "High Fidelity" novel but the Hollywood adaptation was so bad it had to be renamed "The Perfect Catch" in all other English speaking countries. In fact I am lead believe that the British version of a fatwa has been placed on the head of Jimmy Fallon for his crimes against cinema. If his smug, shit eating grin ever appears on the shores of blessed Albion then he will immediately be taken from such place unto a place of execution where he will be beaten summarily to death with cricket bats until he be dead.

Thirdly - is this even the third point? Who keeps count of these things? Points are such a linear way of thinking. If digression was an Olympic sport I'd be 4 times gold medal winner and the International Competitive Digression Committee would be so suspicious I would be tested for steroids and blood doping more often than a Tour de France team - thirdly it's a RomCom about a guy which simultaneously celebrates yet also gently mocks the foibles of the obsessive sex without descending into clichés. In short I'm pretty sure that it's the only RomCom out there that both you and your best gal can enjoy and probably for the same reasons.

Fourthly - since Grosse Point Blank John Cusack can do no wrong. As long as you pretend that he made no films after this one and that the bad films in-between were done by some sort of goatee wearing evil John Cusack. Seriously - go watch Pushing Tin again. It's actually a really good film.

Anyway, so - I like High Fidelity. I like the cinematography (almost too good for a RomCom), I like the actors alot and it's got a line in it that almost always trips up the pseudo music snobbish elite geeks. As a pseudo music snobbish elite geek myself it means that I get to wait for other PMSEGs to inevitably and smugly point out the mistake and then point out that how wrong they actually are[*]. Oooh, just thinking about it gives me nigh sexual chills. That's just how I roll.

And the sound track is, as is to be expected,  pretty damn excellent.

Anyway, today is the kind of sunny, crisp day where I just want to play this song over and over

so, err, I am. My only regret is that I'm not sitting on a warm sun terrace somewhere in a reclined chair, dozing peacefully with a gin and grapefruit juice in my hand.

Anyway, despite not having a video, here's the whole thing

may the remains of your day be peaceful and fruitful. And may Jimmy Fallon fall foul of the unusual and exotically painful.
 

It's odd how sometimes completely insignificant events can be etched with startling clarity on your brain but yet you can forget fairly important details of really major events in your life.

It's like that when I remember the first time I listened to "Better Living Through Chemisty". I was standing in an Our Price on the Kings Road in with a friend of mine called Alex having blown off college for the day. I was actually listening to the OST for "The Jackal" which was a crappy film but had a pretty great soundtrack (including "Western" by PFM) and there was the one track, "Going Out Of My Head" by this guy Fat Boy Slim which I really dug.

You have to remember that, at the time, Big Beat didn't sound incredibly light weight and clichéd. "Exit Planet Dust" had been released a few years ago and "Dig Your Own Hole" had just come out. The Chemical Brother's were doing their Heavenly Social sets at the Turnmills and I'd heard of this club down in Brighton called the "Big Beat Boutique".

So, next to "The Jackal" soundtrack OurPrice had kindly placed this album with a 3.5" floppy on the front cover - a reference apparently to New Order's "Blue Monday" and a title that was a nod to both the Chemical Brothers and, allegedly, to Norman Cook's use of Ecstasy to get over depression.

I remembered Cook from The Housemartins and as his previous incarnations in Beats International, as Pizzaman and later as Freakpower so I figured what the hell and blew a little more of my student grant on the CD. I'm sure that if the tax payers who funded my jaunt to university had known they would have understood.

And I listened to it a lot those first few weeks - I'm pretty sure I got more out of it than if I'd spent the money on extravagances like 'food' or 'text books'.

I actually have no idea whether this next video is official or not - I suspect no but what the hell, it's pretty anyway. The crosses are apparently in the town of Siauliai in Lithuania

and finally, in honour of this weekend and because the video, whilst home made, has a certain mesmerising quality to it

which makes me wish I was at college again just so I could blow off lectures and go lie on some grass somewhere.

In my mind I remember "Drinking in LA" as being everywhere in the summer of 97. I mean absolutely everywhere. Since it only got to number 36 in the UK top 40 charts this seems somewhat unlikely.

I'd just been kicked out of college, which had come as somewhat of a shock, and was stuck living in Germany - carless and with nary another person my own age around. It was a fantastically warm summer though. I was working days as a handyman and nights as a bar tender earning about DM 8, or about £2.66 (or $5.20) an hour. However beer was only DM 1 so, in typically convoluted logic, I figured if I drank 8 pints then that was the equivalent to about £16 an hour  back in London. It wasn't like I had anything else to do and hell, if The Economist can use The Big Mac Index then I get to do what I want to.

So my summer was spent working and on my days and nights off either hanging round the pool or in someone's garden drinking cheap booze and listening to a lot of whatever music we could buy from over the border in Holland or from the American airbase nearby. There was a lot of Drum and Bass - particularly Aphrodite - and the Bran Van 3000 album which I'd bought on a whim and which had turned out to be much, much better than I'd thought it was going to be - I'd figured they'd be one hit poppy wonders but the album turned out to have far more depth and complexity than I'd expected.

So here's an ode to being in the sun and not achieving anything

and, in recognition of the fact that I just spent the last 6 months homeless,