It’s tracks of 2009 consideration time - tell me something you think I might have missed out on. My taste in modern popular music is generally fairly straightforward viz.
but I am happy for only some of these to be represented. Any ideas?
Criticism of Sesame Street from The Atlantic, 1971 (via brokenbottleboy). This piece now feels wrong, of course, because Sesame Street is so beloved and so manifestly successful - and also because the piece is rather dry and dour and suspicious of the show’s easy charm.
But I still liked this paragraph:
we could make clear to children that writing is an extension of powers they already have, and that they got for themselves: namely, the powers of speech. We should constantly remind them that they figured out for themselves how to understand and talk like all the bigger people around them, and that learning to write and to read writing is easy. Writing is a kind of magic or deep-frozen speech, which the writer can use, day after day, to say to everyone who looks at it whatever he wants to say. It is an extension of the voice of the speaker, and since children sense their littleness and want to be larger and more potent, the idea that through writing they can make their voices reach much further could be very exciting to them.
“Plaintiffs are not likely to succeed on the merits because Defendants’ website markets and sells an entirely different sound recording than that copyrighted by Plaintiffs.”
BlueBeat says it “independently developed [its] own original sounds” that consist of “entirely different sound recording[s]”through a technical process it calls “psycho-acoustic simulation.” BlueBeat even says it obtained copyright registrations on such “new” recordings (which, as the plaintiffs point out, are exactly the same as the original recordings).
Amazing! I wonder if they’re Borges fans.
Dear Moro Islamic Liberation Front: You really really really need to do something about your name.
(thanks to @runefrancisco for the picture)
“What makes “Empire State of Mind” so undeniable is its innate magnetism— we can’t help but drool over a big hook and even bigger ego, regardless of metropolitan affiliation. Maybe there’s something about the whole concept of the “New York City anthem” that’s always going to resonate with and, to borrow a word, inspire us. It’s not that there’s even anything terribly out-of-the-ordinary going on here: Keys’ hook swings for the upper decks and subsequently the gut, working that “bright lights, big city” angle that appeals to the bridge-and-tunnel set as effectively as it does to people who’ve never actually visited NYC.”
This interested me, because I had really enjoyed this track while back home in London, and then felt enormously self-conscious whenever it came on my MP3 player when I was in the US last week (tho Chicago, not NYC). Even though obviously nobody knew - or cared! - it was playing, I felt over-manipulated by it, like I was walking around carrying a snowglobe or a tourist T-Shirt.
And then as soon as I was back in Heathrow I really liked it again, so it was just me being silly after all.
The song it reminds me of, actually, is Prefab Sprout’s “Hey Manhattan!” which obvious IS explicitly from a non-native perspective.
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Nice quote from Donald Judd via the Jonathan Harris lecture that’s floating around. Jonathan Harris . World Building in a Crazy World . Imitation (via heyitsnoah) And what’s the best way of “locating the inventiveness”? - almost certainly through the trial and error of imitation. There’s a reason guitarists, say, mostly learn by playing other people’s songs or playing along to records. (I love Harris’ web work, as a creator he’s magnificent, but as a thinker this whole lecture was disappointingly weak: that whole tangle of contradiction around simplicity, homogenity, ‘special effects’ etc. Of course he put the obligatory “boo sucks to cynicism” bit at the end too.) |
Billy MacKenzie, piano and strings, “Breakfast” live in 1984. I don’t usually post live YouTube clips - they require too many feats of imagination - but this is very fine.
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Good grief, where did that get dredged up from? (rhetorical qn: it’s on my site somewhere) I still agree with the cultural cringe stuff but the specific example of Beatleness wasn’t well thought out. One of the things that’s interesting about the Beatles is that they were really aspirational in this way - there’s often a role model or ideal behind what they’re doing - but very unusually their aspirationalism was quite far-sighted and they were very good at meeting their models halfway (both of which are probably as near as things get to “being original” anyway). So yes, once you know about AMM or Fluxus or Hamburg Exis or the Tibetan BOTD you “get” the Beatles more but what’s hard to recapture is exactly how far ahead of their audience they were. |
Pet Shop Boys - “Two Divided By Zero”: Just got to the first entry by my (equal) all-time-favourite-band on Popular so here’s this, the first track from their debut album.
Cookie Monster - “C Is For Cookie (Larry Levan Mix)”
Postpunk posted the sleeve of this earlier, and Treblekicker requested this mix. So, yes, here we are.
Does “DISCO COOKIES!” translate to “disco biscuits” I wonder?
