Piecespeak #13 - 29-06-09

This week, Pieces enjoyed a British player actually being quite good at Wimbledon, got drenched in the inevitable British summer thunderstorm, and felt more shocked than we thought we would when Michael Jackson died.

Now, this isn’t going to be a post about the life and times of Michael Jackson – it’s been done by every newspaper, blog and tv channel already. What really fascinates me is just how much of a big deal people are making of the event. Apparently, a detailed statistical review has showed that since last Thursday evening, 85% of all music played, all over the world, has been Michael Jackson. (this may or may not be made up, but anyone who’s walked down the street and heard snatches of Billie Jean through car windows every 5 minutes will understand.)

As far as I can see, there’s only one explanation: Jackson’s death has to be the last superstar event. It has to be. Noone since his glut of publicity in the 80s has come close to generating the kind of hysteria that followed him wherever he set foot. Noone has really tried – those who have have just been confronted with apathy (Madonna – who is in danger of slipping down the same once-I’ve-run-our-of-musical-ideas-I’ll-resort-to-weirdness-to-keep-people-hooked slope) or hostility (sure, U2 sell a few records, but you can bet if Bono was accused of touching children he’d never work again). Now that we can all communicate with people over the world, some of whom we never need to actually meet, and find out any information at the click of a mouse, there’s no need for anyone to perform the role of the superstar. And the idea of a person being the perfect superstar doesn’t really fit with the times any more. Noone’s untouched by cynicism enough any more to believe in that kind of myth.

What’s going to happen when other giants of pop music die? Noone, no matter how influential or much loved, is going to inspire the same level of posthumous devotion. Why? I haven’t really got a clue, but watch how Paul McCartney gets celebrated but doesn’t make people spontaneously start dancing to ‘Mull Of Kintyre’ in the street the day after he dies.

There was a time when ‘the superstar’ seemed more appropriate, more in tune with a feeling of wanting something better, but that time was finished way before anyone my age was born. Look back at ‘superstar’ deaths before the mid 80s, and consider how revelations about private lives have affected perceptions of the people involved. JFK – apparently a major womaniser, but noone questions his credentials as a great man. Elvis Presley – mega drug and food junkie, washed up and worthless for so long, but still people clamber to call him the greatest voice in Rock and Roll, as if the blots don’t matter. John Lennon – despite allegations of wife-beating and neglecting his first-born child, he’s still treated like a saint. It’s as if we have to continue to elevate these people to a status that is impossible to achieve. There’s nothing wrong with celebrating their achievements, but to a generation (mine) who have grown up exposed to information and opinion from every possible angle, denying human faults – crucial aspects of character no matter how unsavoury – seems like it detracts from a legacy rather than enhancing it.

But Jackson has to be the last of this breed. I just can’t see how it could be possible, in a 21st century world where ‘being true to yourself’ is enough of a venerated quality that it creates celebrities out of base materials like Jade Goody, for anyone to survive as much of a shitstorm, justified or not, as he must have faced in the last twenty years of his life. I have to admit that the overwhelming feeling I’ve experienced since about Friday evening wasn’t shock, or even sadness, but relief – for two reasons. Firstly, whatever your feelings about this man, whether you think he was a boy-saint or a kiddy fiddler, he must have lived a life of pain and anguish, and I’m relieved that a fellow human being doesn’t have to go through that any more. But more importantly, I’m relieved that this is probably the end of the kind of star-worship that presents people like Jackson with that kind of life. Who knows, it might turn out to be his biggest achievement.

There will be no further mention of Michael Jackson. Promise.

Now on to this week’s playlist, which pulses along like it knows you’ll have fun listening to it.

1. El Guincho - Antillas
2. Broadcast - Black Cat
3. Gang Gang Dance - God's Money V
4. Os Mutantes - A Minha Menina
5. TV On The Radio - Golden Age
6. Sunset Rubdown - Nightingale/December Song
7. Dirty Projectors - Two Doves
8. Kraftwerk - Tour De France (Live)
9. The Marvelettes - When You're Young And In Love
10. The Go! Team - Ladyflash
11. Young MC - Principle's Office
12. Lou Donaldson - Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky (From Now On)
13. Neil Young - Rockin' in the Free World

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/5xkP9AGC72ZBBTrtBH1Xg4

See you next week for more.

Pieces x

Piecespeak #12 - 22-06-09

This week, Pieces discovered that, actually Paul McCartney playing with synthesisers isn’t such a bad idea…

One of the things that riles me occasionally about the state of current music is that there seems to be so little worth caring about. I don’t mean caring like caring enough to listen to it on the radio – cmon, I’ll give anything my attention for 4 minutes, even if it’s rubbish – I mean properly, live-your-life-by-its-principles caring, really grab-you-by-the-unmentionables-every-time-you-hear-it caring. Maybe it’s a lot to ask, and call me an idealist, but I think that’s one of the things that the best music should do: create that feeling of really, deeply caring about the people who made it. On the other hand, there is also a shortage of the opposite kind of music at the moment: the kind that you really, really want to like, but you just can’t. No matter how many chances you give it, no matter how many times you listen to it again, through headphones, on crappy speakers, while walking, just to see if it finally clicks – it’s still just crap.

The roots of this kind of association with certain music can normally be traced back to childhood: we usually have at least one person who we look to for musical inspiration, or one person who effectively chooses most of what we listen to. For people with older siblings, it’s usually those siblings who fill this role, dominating the CD player with annoying mopey teenage music while you want to hear something that actually makes you want to smile. For those, like me, who have only younger siblings, or none at all, the role usually falls to parents. Having someone else effectively choose the soundtrack to your lifeis bound to breed some kind of resentment, and no matter how hard you try there’s just no way you can align your taste in music with another person exactly. If someone doesn’t like mushrooms, feeding them mushrooms over and over again isn’t going to change anything.

People who surround themselves with music are inevitibly susceptible to this condition. There’s always going to be a next big thing that you just don’t get, no matter how cool you think they look, or how nice they seem. When, a couple of years ago, everyone started talking about a band called Glasvegas, I thought they sounded brilliant. Informed lyrics, great. Crunching, but jangly guitars, fine. Scottish accents: score! Then I heard their record. Less said the better, really. In fact, at the moment I’m getting a bit frightened, because for the first time I find myself not liking a lot of music that a lot of people younger than me really, really do. This admittedly means my reasons for wanting to like it are a bit shallow: I just don’t want to feel like the kind of old fogey who says ‘Call that music? Honestly, back in my day…’ But I can't help it. God, the pains of growing up, eh?

Some music can surprise you with its sudden transformation from want-to-like-it-but-can’t to can’t-believe-there-was-a-time-I-didn’t-like-this. I can remember desperately wanting to get excited by the Stones’ 60s records, because I’d heard so much about them, and being so disappointed when I discovered that they were just a bunch of blues and limp rock and roll. I tried so hard, listened to Beggar’s Banquet over and over, but nothing changed. In the end, all it took was to treat them like a story: start with Aftermath, then try them all in order. Aaaaah, finally it all makes sense. And to this day it’s the way I approach any new band I come across with more than one album under their belts.

And so to this week’s playlist, which brings you all manner of surprises in no particular order. Feast yourselves by clicking the link below.

1. Tito Puente & His Orchestra - Cuando Te vea
2. Eek-A-Mouse - Ganja Smuggling
3. Ornette Coleman - Eventually
4. Richard & Linda Thompson - Dimming Of The Day/Dargai
5. Shorty Long - Here Comes The Judge
6. Arcade Fire - Lenin
7. Kevin Ayers - Rheinhart & Geraldine/Colores Para Dolores
8. Quincy Jones - Just Once
9. Mazzy Star - Bells Ring
10. Madonna - Physical Attraction
11. Ladytron - Destroy Everything You Touch
12. The Germs - Forming
13. The Replacements - Favourite Thing
14. Paul McCartney - Waterfalls

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/2vxTNKxDgq5rMPP4PHurcL

See you next week for more.

Pieces x

Piecespeak #11 - 15-06-09

This week, Pieces gorged on Futurism at Tate Modern, marvelled at how much better Kate Bush sounds on vinyl, and discovered the joys of cardoid microphones. All very geeky. Do we care? A little bit...

I was sitting eating some brilliant homemade soup (potato and vietnamese coriander – suppose it could have been a bit more middle class, but not sure how, not to bite the hand that fed me) at a friend’s house last week, when he said something pretty innocuous that nonetheless came as something of a revelation. “I’ve still got your book and CD”. Now, it’s not that much of a big deal that this friend had these things. But those seven words made me realise how much of a habitual lender I’ve become over the years. As soon as I’ve finished reading or listening to things I really like, I’m desperate to get them off my hands. Maybe the reason this particular moment caught my attention so vividly is that the book in question is one of my favourites from the last year (The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross – read it now if you’ve ever thought you could be interested in twentieth century music), and the CD is one of my favourites ever (a collection of early New Orleans funk). In spite of my intense attachment to these things, they haven’t been in my possession for at least half a year, probably more.

The knock-on effect on my life at home is surprisingly significant. It means that at any one time more than half of my favourite things (given that a hell of a lot of my favourite things are books and/or CDs) are not in my possession. My bookshelves are full of a combination of books that I either haven’t read yet or don’t really like so much, even though I may still really like them. Thanks to Spotify I don’t need to worry so much about lending music, but until someone makes every books available to download (and when someone comes up with a viable way of consuming them that doesn’t involve staring at a headache-inducing screen for hours on end) I’m stuck with this malady. Of course it goes the other way, and I’m really grateful for the fascinating book on animals that are nearly extinct (which I really should give back…) and others that I have lying in neat dust-free piles – another symptom is that I treat others’ things way better than I do my own. This has all made me realise that when the time comes that all media is available from central hubs and noone needs to own anything any more, I’m really going to miss being able to basically loan my soul out and share it with people I like.

It’s also got me thinking about how my situation fits into the wider world, where people lend each other more than just books and pens. Even though it doesn’t quite seem like Capitalism is going to melt slowly and caramelise any more, we’re still living through a time where lending and borrowing are tricky things to talk about in terms of money. Obviously despite Shakespeare’s (well, ok, Polonius’) oft-quoted advice to ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’ whole countries built there economies on the assumption that it’s ok to borrow against future earnings and potential success. Just last week, Florentino Perez, the new president of Real Madrid Football Club (stick with me, non-football-fans, this won’t last long…) justified spending a world-record 80million euros on Christiano Ronaldo by claiming that "Shirt sales will fund the deal". Borrowing, rather than lending, has become a tool to manipulate money markets, and indeed all kinds of markets including those for Real Madrid football shirts, to produce millions of multiples of small profits that together make a big profit.

What has always puzzled me about this situation is that it makes it incredibly easy for anybody to make massive amounts of money. All you have to do is convince someone to lend you enough cash, at a low enough interest rate, to be able to invest in enough money-making schemes (and these can be as wonderfully brilliantly profitable or as gut-bustingly hard work and low profit as you want) to turn that money into more than you started with. Most business people will insist that it’s possible to make a conscious decision to make a lot of money and become stinking rich, and they’re partly right: if you’re happy with creating wealth by basically playing a game where you match big numbers with small numbers in the right order, then it’s yours for the taking. So why isn’t everyone doing it?

I like to think it’s because humanity has an inbuilt safety mechanism: one that makes at least a protion of the population realise that for everyone to survive at least some of us have to actually make things. If every farmer suddenly decided, you know what, fuck it, I’m sick of digging leaf mulch into my tomato beds every morning, I’m gonna get a fat bank loan and invest in millions of Tesco shares and sell them at a fat profit in a year’s time, the world would starve. It would be so easy for them to do it. But they don't. Safety mechanism at work. Please don't let it get rusty any time soon.

This week's Piecesounds mixes it up a bit with some live poetry alongside the one and only...well see for yourself. Click below to mash up your ears big style.

1. Gary Numan - Airlane
2. Cyndi Lauper - Money Changes Everything
3. Tammi Terrell - I Can't Believe You love Me
4. Bronski Beat - Smalltown Boy
5. Morrissey - You're Gonna Need Someone On Your Side
6. Django Bates - Once A Penguin, Always A Penguin
7. Antony & The Johnsons - Aeon
8. Leonard Bernstein - Serenade II (Allegretto): Aristophanes
9. Buddy Rich - What Is This Thing Called Love?
10. The Cookies - Girls Grow Up Faster Than Boys
11. The Walkmen - No Christmas While I'm Talking
12. Walter Lowenfels - All Our Valises Are Packed
13. Fela Kuti - Mister Follow Follow
14. The Flaming Lips/Stardeath/White Dwarfs - Borderline

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/543P5UzIESHwtbJSk1HRyI

Enjoy!

See you next week for more.

Pieces x

Piecespeak #10 - 08-06-09

This week, Pieces travelled across London to vote, and look what happened - we now have BNP representatives in Europe for the first time. Brilliant. Almost as heart-warming as the news that the Tube will basically not exist for two days this week. Why can't they strike like they do in Australia, where instead of closing things they let people in for free over the strike period? Imagine, a strike that actually made people happy and got them on the side of the strikers...

One of the advantages of delaying this week’s Piecespeak (I would love to be able to blame the Tube strike but a] I do this from home and b] it didn’t start until after I finished writing this. Never mind) is that I get to do one of two things: either point anyone who didn’t see Nick Griffin getting pelted with egg at a self-organised press conference outside Westminster in the direction of this video, or remind anyone who did just how good it was to see him literally get egg on his face at last.

Fun as it was to watch an arsehole get peltered with righteous anger and abuse, this was the perfect illustration of the contradictions facing anyone who seriously opposes extremist parties. You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. Do you ban them from the political process, or censor their broadcasts and policies? Then you’re just instigating the same discrimination you’re trying to prevent. Do you leave them to it and try to ignore them in the hope that they’ll either just go away or that noone will care about them? Well, nice idea but this just leads to a bizarre kind of press martyrdom, where the BNP campaign along the lines that they’re being unfairly marginalised – and they would be under those circumstances. Not very democratic. The view taken by Unite Against Fascism, the organisers of today’s protest, is that they are justified in trying to silence the party, because the BNP’s aim is to silence the views of those they hold grievances against. But if you have even the smallest, most wavering belief in free speech and the power of people to make up their own minds, you have to believe in the right of any political party, no matter how unsavoury, to express their views and present their proposals for ways of running the country.

See, there’s no way out! And it sucks because not only are a lot of the possible ways of making extremist parties very counter-productive in the sense that they serve to fuel their ‘discrimination’ fire, even more of them actually provide amazing publicity, that they clearly relish. Does Nick Griffin actually get a strange kind of pleasure hearing people calling him a wanker in the street? Probably – at least it means they know who he is and it might get him a slot on the news. Would the BNP have got any TV coverage today if their amateurish press conference on a patch of grass hadn’t been ambushed by protestors? Probably not.

At a party recently, I was talking to an old friend about ways to stifle the rise of parties like the BNP, UKIP (just as an aside, how can anyone, no matter how disaffected, take a party that chooses bright garish pink as its colour seriously??) and in Europe the NPD and FN. The best he could come up with was the idea of introducing intelligence tests before voting, to ensure that noone under a benchmark IQ would be able to have a say in the selection of the Government or local Councillors. I know, I know, not exactly a great solution, and we could go on for hours about what’s wrong with ignoring the very people who probably most need to be heard by political ears. But what it does show is that if that’s the best idea a pretty intelligent, insightful person can come up with then any kind of solution must be pretty damn hard.

In any case, most political historians seem to agree that what’s really alarming about the results of last week’s elections is not the rise of the Right across Europe (troubling though it might be), but the total collapse of the Left. In almost every voting country there’s a lack of support among traditional Left voters, and because the nature of ‘the working class’ has changed so much since the last major continent-wide political shift, there may never be the same support base that parties of the Left have enjoyed up to now. And if that proves to be the case, what happens to political choice, balance and liberal democracy? Who knows. But we’ll probably still be able to get crisps and a drink with our sandwiches.

This week’s Piecesounds is a lot of fun: crazy homemade synthesisers, funk freakout Beatles covers, ridiculously high notes and mega key-change spectaculars all over. Lovely. Click the link below to hear all of this, and more! Not much more, but still.

1. David Bowie – Speed Of Life
2. XTC – Making Plans For Nigel
3. Silver Apples – A Pox On You
4. Company Flow – Silence
5. Run-DMC – Jam-Master Jammin’
6. Allen Toussaint – Goin’ Down’
7. Gregory Isaacs/The Revolutionaries – Leaving Dub
8. Camille – Money Note
9. The Staple Singers – This World
10. Eddie Hazel – I Want You (She’s So Heavy)
11. The Pretty Things – Baron Saturday
12. Stevie Wonder – Something To Say

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/11lSGbNl671Prg5Ct37imL

Next week: something even deeper. Maybe.

Pieces x

Piecespeak #9 - 01-06-09

This week, Pieces walked a lot to save bus money, ate home-grown to save food money, and generally enjoyed the free pleasure of basking in bright sunlight. Best time of the year? Sunny late May runs Christmas pretty close…

Besides the sunshine and the improbable heat, the main thing on our minds this week was the difficulty of finding band names that don’t sound either ridiculous or stupidly contrived. Several friends are looking for names for new groups, and each one asks for advice, and each time we say the same thing – ‘oh, that’s the hardest bit of being in a band’. Because it is. The pitfalls are many: pick a bad name and you’ll be labelled with it for all time, the shelves of HMV will forever mark the moment of madness that saw you decide that Arctic Monkeys was the best you could do. Poor guys.

There are actually precious few really, really good band names written in the annuls of history, which may be one of the reasons that we find it so hard to do right now. The ranks of the massively great bands who went by similarly great names is very small. Joy Division is probably the best band name ever – exciting, full of both suggested and referential meaning, wonderful metaphorical implication. Thank god it was found by a group whose music fit it perfectly and not a bunch of leather-dressed pub rock stallions from Philly. Thank god also that The Mother Of Invention were formed by someone as effortlessly inventive as Frank Zappa.

The catalogue of bad bands with bad names is too huge to properly sum up in a blog post, so I’ll just list a few of my favourites: Gay Dad. Hootie And The Blowfish. Bowling For Soup. Milli Vanilli. Wet Wet Wet. Babyshambles. KoЯn (as in, sweetKoЯn?). Get Cape Wear Cape Fly. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Coldplay. Counting Crows. And so on…

Then there are bad fits. These can be subdivided into at least two categories: Bad Bands With Good Names, and the infinitely funnier Good Bands With Bad Names. Razorlight are a great example of the former – decent name, sounds like it could mean something. Then you put on one of their CDs and it all unravels. Never mind. I always thought The Darkness was a pretty good name too, and it’s amazing that noone actually used it before a bunch of cock-rockers with silly voices came along six years ago. By contrast, there’s any number of good bands whose good taste just didn’t quite extend to picking a good moniker. Then the ultimate clunker – The Beatles. Bad pun, bad connotations, looks awful. Guys, you’ll never make it in this town with a shite name like that. Not a chance.

Then there are the It Could Have Been So Much Worse files. The band names that could have been foisted upon an unsuspecting world but instead were snatched away just in time. The Beach Boys were only given their all-american-surf-buddy name by a record company drone at the last minute, when he realised that The Pendletones is, well, just terrible. Blur were famously called Seymour before having second thoughts about their ‘why don’t we give it a person’s name’ moment. Pink Floyd toyed with The Tea Set for ages before finally noticing that it’s crap, and would have led to lots of uncomfortable ‘so you play with The Tea Set?’ conversations. And the less said about On A Friday the better. Before anyone asks, Pieces were once known as Out Of Her Reach, so we’re not immune to the perils of awful, awful bags of poo being slung across our shoulders.

There. See, occasionally we think about things other than massive cultural or political trends. Next week – Pieces shows you how to erect an attractive yet practical yurt.

Piecesounds this week combines the slick with the very, very daft. Enjoy Sparks rubbing shoulders with Van Dyke Parks – possibly the biggest silly/sensible divide in the history of pop music. As ever, click the link below to hear all of this in, of and through your own ears.

1) Spank Rock – Chilly Will

2) Architecture In Helsinki – Heart It Races

3) Johnny Trunk – Sister Woo

4) Ofo The Black Company – Eniaro

5) Sparks – Amateur Hour

6) The Bonzo Dog Band – Canyons Of Your Mind

7) Van Dyke Parks – All Golden

8) Nico – The Fairest Of The Seasons

9) Los Campesinos! – You! Me! Dancing!

10) Sly Stone – You Really Got Me

11) Thomas Dolby – Hyperactive!

12) Richard and Linda Thompson – When I Get To The Border

13) Gene Greene – King Of The Bungaloos

14) Manic Street Preachers – William’s Last Words

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/62wYvLieWQdpVtHvS2fFeX

Catch you next week for more

Pieces x