Sewed the buttons back on to my favourite summer jacket. A glorious 48 hours of sunshining tranquility promises so much. Cans at the canal. Paddy Kavanagh sits meters away, unperterbed, LUASs flie overhead. Close enough to the Garda station that they’ve never disturbed us for a good seven years. The best jokes, gossip and ideas are always here, before our friendship dissolves into the unsociable nightlife.
The Latvians bring us somewhere new. Too risky to risk the Guinness; they’ve got Harp on draft! – I didn’t even know they still brewed the stuff, recalling only the firehouse sales of cans years ago when rumours of the brewery closure abound; not sure whether this is a good or a bad thing, but we drink up anyway, the girls making their way through the tastefully predictable cocktail list. Spanish students pull up bar stools and try to make conversation way too close, as the girl I boylishly adore takes a chair next to me. She leaves later to meet her unpopular boyfriend.
On the way to our propsed dance destination we meet a friend of a friend who is Djing at our now new target. A chance finally to catch up with what’s really going on.
And how beatiful it almost is. Proper-banging electro-techno-electro – no house! hadn’t heard a single tune before- for the whole night mercifully unrelenting. What I’ve needed for far too long, giving it all up to just pure sound; glow sticks everywhere, who cares.
The night spent dancing, interspersed with cheap czech beers with K+T, with a girl; glittering metallic dress, imaculate hair, perfect teeth, fishknife eyes; turns out to be the DJ’s girlfriend (woops).
I scarper before the afterparty (always too narcoticly grim to bear). Mercifully the crowd heads to the H- Diner, which despite its long-standing reputation as a centre of poor hygeine and mediocre dining has attained a certain bizarre hip-ironic popularity, largely ignoring the sublime R-’s Pizza where I snatch the last slice of Gourmet’s Choice (!) ; courgette, feta cheese and pastrami. I sit on the steps of K’s nan’s block, observing the migration patterns of nightshifting taxis and late-out stragglers.
24hour Tesco for cut-price salmon and brie. Walking home*, this flashes through my brain – all the way… for some reason;
Mercifully, the few people who have ever threatened to kill me at work have been quite drunk at the time and my continued existence suggests that they didnt give it much further thought. Middle-retail really is ground zero for that sort of passive-aggressive splaying-out of oedipal-consumerist stresses. At least most people say or do stupid things when they are drunk; having to suck up spat bile from some deluded number of the managerial class during daylight hours takes a lot more self-engineering to successfully override the reflexive rage/walk away circuitry.
Double-jobbing again, and sleep has taken the form of an illicit habit, snatching anything from 7 minutes in some place where no-one who matters is watching in order to jack up the nervous system and face another few hours. On a peared-down (/lean/flexible/just-in-time) sleep regime, default physemotional state is binary, oscillating between o = near-ecstatic intense concentration – pure flow - where you can do anything; and 1 = when the environment slows and you shift down that one massive gear, a permanently cold and hungry distance that goes right down to the bones, where coffee burns down effectlessly, tasting of synthetic nothing, and even reinforcing 1 via Pavlovian routine-association. But it’s here where (some) people make so big an impact. The rude and aggressive bodies circulate and replicate inevitably, too mundane to really mark the conscious; a lot of these are just like me, probably, too gone and distracted to check their own behaviour for routine interacions like these. But all it takes is a right look; a bit of articulated eye contact; an unexpected “thank you”; a smile! to reach through the ruthlessly practical abstract bulletproof screen that separates Worker and Customer, to beam in an intoxicating trans-social (beyond the immediate – but necessarily dependent on – social roles) balm. It’s a delicate thing, anything with a modicum more intimacy or formality would kill it.
Pop music then is the other thing. Currently very appreciative of Ne-Yo. Dunno quite what to make of the whole Gentleman routine, but the first three singles really create a lovely atmosphere in the club, a genuinely perceptable shift in vibe, real subtle emotional-environmental manipulation. Those kicks!
The other 0 manipulator is this:
The video is barely worth commenting upon, it’s now long been one of those significantly mundane set-in-stone design conventions – like all mass-produced cars looking curved-off and Japaneseoid – that all electrohouse scene-tracks that move into mainstream playlisting have to be a variation on thesamevideo. The track itself however is quite something, one of the finer products of under-overground genre-liquidising, traces of rap dubstep and bassline house outdoing any single track from any single scene at the moment; wicked hook and that bassline packs weight in the club, but I can feel its effect depleting as I press keyboard buttons.
Everytime I think I’m gonna wake up back in the jungle
To the extent that most Dubliners could be said to know Limerick it would usually be either as a stopover at the Junction on the way to somewehere else, are as a tabloid-fuelling locus of nasty gang violence. For the Dub it is the most inpenetrable of the other cities; compared with the sterotypical views of fun’n'friendly Galway or comically cocksure Cork, Limerick seems to project an opaque combination of the capital’s often sinister ruffness with a rural pragmatism and almost mystical traditionalism.
It is also home to Ireland’s Other DnB record label, Subtle Audio.
Ireland’s DnB scene always had a certain hauntological quality, for reasons to do with both the difficulty in accessing the UK scene jungle in real-time and due to the tastes of its foremost DJs. Early-nineties tunes would emerge on the Dub scene for the first time a decade later by virtue of reissues and more established connections with Uk distributers. DJs were under less pressure than their UK counterparts to compete on terms of the latest floor-smashing dubplates, and the likes of Naphta, Don Rosco and Code would unfussily blend GE jungle with whatever tunes of the day could compete with those standards, so that for the relative neophytes, temporal lineraity was disrupted, allowing mid-90s Reinforced, Metalheadz, Moving Shadow etc, to occupy the present as objects of the present rather than as nostalgia triggers or as Nostolgia Mode-ifyers.
An unusual development over the past decade has been the fetishistic reverance for the breakbeats (cf esp. Paradox) that the first generation of junglists so irreverantly looted and mutated, alongwith a desire to keep alive (or resurrect) the spirit of the latter, so that the drums in many of the tracks on Subtle Audio 1 have the uncanny sound of being lovingly but grotesquely pieced together and brought to a technologically-modified re-life. The product is not a post-modern pastiche of the inplicit funky-science of the sample sources combined with the concrete breakbeat-science of the GEJunglists, rather this is the sound of a last bastion of a defiant modernism, albeit one which has been chastened, toxified and sobered by recent history. Its tone is one of intellectual pessimism and indefatigable will.
In the world depicted by SA1, the fairground has been abandoned and let decay, and blissing-out is no longer a physical possibility. Feminine pressure doesn’t so much re-present itself, but haunts the air in the atmos-windsweeps on ‘What Do You Like?’ or provides akward elegance against the atonal iceiness of ‘Burning Sun’.
(It’s testament to Codes exceptional skills that a track that appears a bit unremarkable on its own can be made sound positively exuberant when placed in its ideal context; bursting into Burning sun, its bassline sounds almost lyrical, the bubbling synth is playful and weird, the sinister sax(?) sample almost threatens to reach out through the speakers in the middle of the track before the drums tumble back in a la sonic the hedgehog in mid-spin accompanied by a wonderful chant of ‘hhhuuup’ like a trace of the “heyyyyy-yooo”s in Foul Play’s ‘The Stepper’.)
At the start of the summer, Subtle Audio’s night in Crawdaddy (for non-Dubz, this is Dublin’s locus central of the electronic end of Hipsterism) provided one of the most intriguing recent musical experiences. The cold breakbeat-science blues was wonderfully and bizarre-ly offset by a young and enthusiastically hedonstic 50/50 gender balanced crowd, the people filling-in the absence of playfullness and optimism in the music, to often uncanny effect; whether this was a display of a desire to respond to stimulation in ways outside of the usual prescriptions, or of simply a zombie-like reaction to the remnants of familiar stimulants (breaks, builds, drops) wasn’t in anyway clear.
The bus route that used to take us to school was notable mainly for the string of burgeoning high-Celtic-Tiger building sites through which it would stop-startedly make its reluctant-seeming way; an industrial estate, a new shopping centre and a load of new apartment complexes all encircled by auto-optimistic plastic hoarding that unconvincingly extolled the bright future that awaited behind for their soon to be denizens. At various stops we’d unload a crack team of mixed-nationality (but mainly Irish and Polish) workers who seemed about as excited at the prospect of another day on site as us on our ’sites of learning’ (the passing of spliffs between the older school-kids and the younger labourers was an almost touching acknowledgement of the shared experience of structural tedium). Head tilted against etched-plexiglass windows which projected oversized coke advertisements to the outside world, the rolling sounds of fin de secile drum + bass offered a strange kind of escape; everything around was there in sound – the relentless repetition, the coldness, the combo of state-of-the-art technological abundance and an inability to imaging anything (architecturally or sonically) truly exuberant. But just as the sheer scale of development and vague sense (or hope) of something happening delivered a unique thrill, so too did 21st Century DnB’s grimly resilient futurism, its militant exploration of 2-step-techno – at the time that indie-retro was consolidating its pop-underground hegemony – offer a narrow alley of evasion.
The trundle into the double-0’s saw DnB go truly post-modern with the proliferation of an endless number of equally-useless self-subdividing micro-genres; latin DnB, housey-DnB and philtered-disco DnB ‘for-the-laydeeez’, clownstep, tech-step, metal-step, drumfunk/’edits’, and my personally most-hated, dubwise DnB; all tiny permutations of a monolithic stifling formula. By the time I finished school most of the developments had been built; the industrial estate and shopping centre housed the various service jobs that most of us would be constantly laundered through for the forseeable future (except for our contemporaries who cashed in on the construction boom at the time and are now stuck in an extremely more precarious position) within profoundly uninspiring vaguely corporate-looking buildings, while the apartment complexes are now home to mostly city workers who avail of nearby public transport, again cod-sophisticated plasterboard constructions, each slightly different but all substantialy the same.
Dissillusionment with both lost horizons was so programmatic and inexorable so as to go almost unoticed for a period, until the loss of that which had taken up so much mental and physical investment, and its colonisation by the extra-musical developments, became unavoidably apparent.
But the junglised organism can never fully return to ‘normal’, even after the junglising agent has been drained of its potency. The slightest aural glimpse of 160+ bpm or shard of Hardcore soundwave triggers a pavlovian adrenaline-acceleration response and concrete-alloy mentality which reverts to its previous uneasily-settled disposition as the tamed rolling mechanisms of PoMo DnB kick in, the brain filing ‘false alarm’.
Apologies to anyone who’s being expecting new Mentasms posts, no free college internet access and the poxiness of starting yet another new temporary job making it a bit difficult at the moment. But in the mean time…
The one advantage of work is, of course, that the besuited masters occassionally (12 times a year to be precise) peel a few digits from their big fat virtual wallets, tuck them into your grubby breast pocket and grant you permission to leave the compound for a few hours to unwind and get yourself ready for the next shift.
And so with the first decent paycheck of the summer comes new CD’s!
Whenever a new Nas album is near release, I cant help but have high expectations; despite his choice of beats being gallingly erratic, ranging from the sublimley apt to the incomprehensibly mundane, and the apparent fact that he nor anyone else involved in their production ever seems to listen to his albums all the way through before they’re released, on every album there are solid gold examples of what hip-hop was at the peaks of its golden ages, and of what it still can be. Hip-Hop is Dead was a post-It Was Written Nas album par excellence; the first four tracks inexplicably dull, an inexcusable overture to an album packed full of great ideas executed with varying degress of success. HHID officially finished with ‘Hope’, an accapella, and the line “If your asking why Hip-Hop is dead, there’s a pretty good chance YOU’re the reason it died”. This being Nasir “God’s Son” Jones, the impression produced is that Nas here thinks of himself as the sinless one casting the first stone; but for the same reason, and because of the convinction demonstrated by devoting an entire album to the theme, there’s a exciting inkling that he’s going to exonerate himself, something will be pulled out of the bag which will surprise everyone (except me!).
And from the beginning of the first track on Nigga/Untitled(bang-on piece on the title issue here) there’s a real sense that this is gonna be it ; the album that makes not only hip-hop, but music itself, once again something essential, a socially, personally, sonically, lyrically, aesthetically, ontologically force for good, and not just the piped-in soundtrack to your stay at the Capitolist HotELL. And the thing is that, the album kind of is. The opener kicks off with ghost-in-the-broken-piano slightly off-kilter loops – the clash of the would-be archaic and the now – before his voice bursts in; and, it’s so strange, the usual self-assured effortless gracfullness of his flow isn’t fully there; instead there’s an utterly distracting slightl tint of nervousness and akwardness, a tiny little tell-tale that he’s almost starting all over again, the youthful cockiness that sources its exaggerated self-belief from an in-built inferiority complex is inverted; now that he knows the truth (that they‘re not superior to him, far from it), that oversized inpenetrable confidence isn’t automatically necessary and is therefore so much harder to manufacture. The anxiety is subtle palpable; his flow is spitting rather than ’spitting’. It is an almost perfect, dreamt-about, introverture.
Then, things seem to take a turn for the vilely normal; with the crushing sound of a laidback soulful guitar lick looped over an as-trad-as-trad-Hip-Hop-can-get rythym, comes the feeling that this is going to be the usual well-intentioned but sadly unimaginative effort; except, there’s something more to this track ;- that riff, laidback though it may be, is slyly menacing, almost jeering, in its drawling catchiness. The sample, it turns out, is from The Wahtnaut’s ‘Message From a Blackman“, and the ensuing “You Can’t Stop Us Now” is a reclamation, a restatement, of that track’s calling/warning to society; and it contains Untitled’s mission statement; This is our time, we have to make something happen NOW.
‘Hero’, the lead single, is absolutely brilliant (can you imagine a collaboration between Pollow Da Don, Keri Hilson and Nas being anything but?), and on first hearing, at monumental volume, viscerly spine-tingling like nothing has been for a long time. The video opens with Nas overlooking a Gothic neon skyline, the Dark Night surveying his Hamletian charge, but quickly he turns from comic-book hero to concrete-level commander, leading a mixed-race team of real life X-Men. The production is cartoonish in a Marvel sense, every sound is high-definitely bold and bright; a steamtech break-beat conducts incandescent synthetic-strings of symphonic neon. Nas’ occupation of the Hero role is, as he acknowledges, by default; since no one else is going to it, he Has to.
However the album’s greatest failure (as always) is it’s sequencing and the presence of a handful of utterly unneccessary tracks; after the masterful opening are two tracks which definately should be located elsewhere; “Make The World Go Around”’s affecting optimism would be way better suited to later in the album, after the self- reflection, analyis, criticism, rectification, resolve; the trackfeels premature so early in the album, like a spin in hip-pop’s cruise control mode of unjustified self-aggrandisement rather than the poignantly uplifting demand for recognition that it is.
The effective denoument, ‘Black President’, even manages to redeem the loathsome practice of posthumous-Tupac-sampling and is one of the album’s better productions in terms of pure sonics; half marching drums and high-pressure bass, and the 2P sample is poignant for many reasons; the slow realisation of something that seemed utterly impossible only a decade ago, 2P not being let live on to see it, and because this great almost utopian vision of a black president, a coming to life of a long-held prophecy, in its actual form now looks to be something far from monumental and more like a benevolent quirk in the self-regulating circuit of politics-as-usual.
From a musical point of view, the album quite spectacularly poses the great question of the moment; how important, now, are pure sonics (or how can they be important now), after sound has been co-opted and devalued, desublimated and mudanified. Explicity political music is usually quite a fraught project – the best music is that which is the most stimulating and activating without being glib and/or Po-faced – but when this has been made an almost impossibilty as at present, and when the option of explicit adress has been foreclosed by and for all but the worst ‘artists’, breaking that space back open is an imperative and has produced the most exciting sound at a time when, technically and practically, the possibilities of sound are at their most expansive.
I picked up Wiley’s and JME’s new albums at the same time, both sound great on the first few listens, but have so far failed to get me as riled up as Untitled, sonically they are what music in 2008 should rightly sound like anyway.
When it comes to all things 4X4, my allegiance will always lie on the Hard House/Trance/Happy Hardcore side of things rather than trad Techno/House, for reasons of age, geography and historical circumstance (though nothing beats Detroit Techno for reading about). 1999-2003 (those crucial adolescent years when I was starting to really get into Dance music) seems now to have been the golden era for this kind of stuff, before it was subsumed into the post-9/11 heading-for-apocalypse Goa-Trance-meets-Noisia-style-DnB monster-genre of Hard Dance.
One interesting thing, to which I didn’t really attach much significance at the time, was that loads of my favourite trax were by female producers. Hard House in particular seems to have benefited from a greater number of big-name women DJs/producers relative to other genres; Lisa Lashes, Lisa Pin-Up, Rachel Auburn, Anne Savage were all pretty massive at the time (thats only four, but still double what I can think of off-hand for either techno or jungle). You can hear the gender mixology in the sounds; the pitched-up hip-hop vocals, playfully agressive hoovers, and that ever-present on the off-beat spaceball sound, all elude characterisation by standard gender-specific descriptives.
The Stimulant DJs (aka Happy Hardcore legends Brisk & Ham) track is an almost perfect techno-fairground dance tune. The polymorphous mentasms(yay!), the jumpin-jumpin-bass-keeps-pumpin mid-line, the hoover-MC “ooah ooah” bit in the middle, the bonkers tempo-shifting breakdown, and then the “Are You Serious” refrain getting shredded in the jet-speed drop; wicked!
There was a slew of whopper posts recently on the subject of work. One thing struck me though where Infinite Thought sez “The service sector is certainly run in the main on those character traits that Virno mentions, and the exploitation of basic forms of sociability and linguistic capacity, but it is also not entirely removed from modes of Taylorism, and the old idea that ‘you are not paid to think’, as Steve Wright reminds ut us”.But what I find so especially pernicious about Late-Capitalist/Post-Industrial/Immaterial labour (especially in lower-status jobs), is that while you may still be engaged in work that is as menial, constricted and draining as Fordist factory micro-repetition, you are being paid to think, but paid to think thoughts that are not yours.
It’s the forced cognition of sales tactics, the articulation of an alien business language and the anti-social interaction with co-workers and customers/clients/victims that really pushes the repugnance to the next level; the voluntary impregnation of the capitalist brain-slug; the jettisoning of the bits of your system design that you actually value, so as to make room for the worker mind-virus, all in order to do something that you really do not want to do (or at best, to do something that you DO want to do, but in opposite way of how you SHOULD do it). And because these thoughts are assimilated into your mind, becoming fixtures of your cognitive circuitry, you cant just simply ‘switch off’ after work, even if you didn’t have to live with the ever-present threat of your boss ringing/texting/e-mailing you to pick your brains, get you to perform ‘just one more’ task, or drop any non-work related activity to come in and cover someone’s shift.
(This is in no way to eulogize old-skool physical labour either, apart from the de facto heinousness of all labour exploitation, anyone who has seen another person spend their whole life engaged in good ‘ol honest manual labour knows the crushing mental as well as physical toll that is inevitably incurred.)
Today capitalism demands of its workers not just physical exertion, but mental exertion as well. In order to survive, we are forced to sell, not just our “labor power” (as Marx called it), but also our affective and cognitive powers, our abilities to think and feel and create, our aesthetic sensibility and our capacity for enjoyment. Capitalism does not just steal the fruits of these powers from us. It also organizes our very expression of these powers in the first place
Under these circumstances, the function of education is to smooth out (and often perform) the operation of cognitive implantation, to counter any rejection or resistance in the host mind, and above all else, to convince the student-worker drones of the inevitability of this whole process, to hardwire in the belief that there is No Alternative.
There is no “initiation into a field of study” which, eventually, might bring one’s acquired knowledge into direct conflict with the world-as-it-is-presented: the initiation is precisely one into presentation itself; a training into neo-liberalism’s glassine vocabulary and enervating rhythms
[…]
This seduction works like nitrous oxide, pernicious and foggy, lowering mental and bodily resistance to the unsense of the dominant political rationality.
[…]
The acquisition of a university degree becomes increasingly compulsory the more it furnishes proof for an employer of one’s willingness to enter into neo-liberalism’s training.
Most contemporary accounts of Post-Industrial society derive their ultimately pessimistic conclusions from the depiction of the social body as inherently divided; disparate and atomised on a subjective level; permanently disunited by the PoMo credo of infinite social identities/endless difference, isolated inside personalized entertainment Pods; and ideologically neutralized by the hegemonic doctrine of Individualism. But what unites the multitude is the collective experience of being (wirelessly) plugged into the cognitive network of Late Capitalist Labour. The crucial aspect of this is that the experience cuts across all class/race/gender/age lines. Everyone’s position is interminably insecure, their nerves chronically frought, systematically forced to transgress any conception of good-bad or right-wrong - to abandon or distort any facets that are not compatible with capitalist onotology - in the name of paying the bills/keeping your hours/maintaining the bottom line/sealing the deal/MAXIMISING THOSE PROFITS. Everyone is plugged into the same network, subjected to the same mind-virus >>> susceptible to the same anti-virus
It would be painting only half the picture to characterise the rejection of the Lisbon Treaty as an Oedipal tantrum by voters who, as Fintan O’Toole rightly points out, would undoubtedly re-elect their Fianna Fail Father-government right now if the opportunity arose.
The referendum itself has to have been one of poxiest things in ages to impose itself upon the thoughts of anyone unlucky enough to have engaged with the ‘issues’ for more than five minutes. The sense of futility that accompanies participation in the formality of a General Election is magnified in EU Treaty referenda, where the Government doesn’t even bother going to the trouble of trying to convince you that what you think has any bearing upon what they do, beyond delaying their gratification by as long as it takes to force through the result they desire.
It’s hard to figure out to whome exactly the ‘disconnect’ between the political classes and the electorate has now so suddenly and dramatically been revealed. The Business-Managementarians, the only group who mainstream politicians can be said to genuinely represent, were all in favour of a Yes vote, and presumably cast their ballots accordingly. The rest of the FF-voter-types (a group which includes most PD and Green voters obviously, but also many FG, SF and Labour voters) could only be said to be ‘connected’ to their political overlords via redundant historical allegiance or, in the majority of cases, a lazy superstition which reinforces the paternal bind; ‘THEY were in charge during the Celtic Tiger, therefore THEY must be the only party capable of generating economic growth/giving me what I want’ (ignoring, of course, the many years of economic contraction overseen by FF, the role of the Rainbow Coalition, the interchangability of FF and the constituents of the former, the utter ineptitude of FF in managing the ‘Tiger and thus the inevitable return to many years of economic contraction overseen by FF). Everyone knows that politicians dont represent Us, but Voters will always be tied to politicians as long as the difficult break is avoided; until then hatred, resentment and occassional acts of showy disobedience can only be expected.
The other half of this sorry vista is the myriad of genuinely painful daily grievances and chronic sense of dissatisfaction suffered by most people, grievances which Politics has divested itself of any obligation or capacity to address.
While a more integrated Europe must surely be a good thing, its positive potential is seriously tempered by much EU policy’s unwavering and outdated faith in Neo-Liberal Capitalism. And while the No result is satisfying on the level of pissing-off our aggrieved overlords by embarrassing them in front of their cool Euro-mates, and (maybe) expressing genuine reservations about trends in EU policy, the lack of a coherent opposition to express these concerns has handed some of the most reactionary elements in the country an opportunity to claim victory; the confused voices of dilapidated nationalism, nu-racism, Home-Ownerism and PoMo-catholic selective-puritanism have managed to contort the result into a vague mandate, with Joe-Higgins’ dogged workerism lost somewhere in the mix. But what exactly would the ‘better deal’ that they are demanding from the Father-government look like?
What the sloppy morass of desires attributed to the Average Voter points at it is the desperate collective need for an alternative trajectory, for anything beyond more of the same half-baked neo-liberalism. The great danger to be avoided is the consolidation of neo-conservative tendencies on one hand (anti-immigration, familialism, pro-business fiscal policy), and the neutered entrenchment of the Left in exclusionary politics of protectionism on the other, a process which has already taken hold in individual member states. Such developments conserve the worst products of Neo-Liberal Capitalism (deepening structural inequality, cultural degredation, the pissing away of the environment, intra- and international exploitation), while inhibiting its few positive side-effects, such as globalisation and the destabilisation of repressive traditional identities. Now more than ever there is the impetus, and the space, to begin articulating a way through the double-bind of Oedipolitics; a way, it now seems, that must be at once both Pro-market and vehemently Anti-Capitalist. (More on this to come…)
“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.”
Since coming to college, the fleeting feelings of totally-consuming giddy excitement that used to accompany the arrival of summer/end of the schoolyear have been replaced by a conflicing mixture of relapse to nostalgia and boring dread. The annual June appearance of the tractor-mower plowing through the knee-high grass of the green accross the way used to signal towards the theoretically limitless potential for 2 months of exploration and joyful experience - i.e. about as far from the suffocating dismal hell of school as one could possibly be. Now it heralds the return to counter-productive regimentation and discipline via one or more crap ‘full-time’ service jobs, where notification of toilet-breaks is required, telling-offs are doled out for not having the correct uniform, and everything must be done the inefficient, protracted and wasteful, but official standardised and therefore ‘proper’, way. In spite of the lonely brain-kill this arrangment engenders (not to mention the stifling horror of the thought that this is quite likely the future), that same giddy excitment still occassionaly manages to sneak through the cracks of the lonely labour market walls, engulfing every billimeter of nerve-ending in quietly rapturous pleasure; hopping from the bus on the eve of a day-off, watching the landscape mutate into dense mythological rural glory on a sly trip down the country, or chilling with Paddy Kavanagh by the canal as a certain comrade recites fantastic stream-of-consciousness remixes of the PK canon. When the vocals, NRGised piano and pushedtothelimit Amen finally coalesce after three minutes, nothing else can capture that feeling so totally.
Didn’t like this at first, put off before even the first chorus by how standard it all sounded; standard post-Irreplacacble 808 ballad-beat, standard tinkly-tender piano, standard semi-soulful melifluosness. Foolishly, had only half-paid attention to the lyrics. How could someone make an entire song’s worth of derision and sarcasm* sound so utterly beguiling? The grace with which the invective is dolled out multiplies by a million the gutted self-loathing of the regretful manbot at the receiving end.
*While we’re on it, sarcasm isn’t really half as bad as the old adage makes it out to be is it? Sexual innuendo is surely the absolute nadir of humour.
Community Music touched so many bases at the time; popular experimentation, overt politicism and defiant optimism. At times the various pieces of outsider-rap, neo-punk, Asian trad and after-the-moment-jungle didnt fit very neatly togther, the rough joints tellingly visible and some of the lyrics could have done with a bit of fine-sanding, but taken as a whole, as a collective (Mode), it was genuinly inspirational. Dusting it out recently, it sounds so out of tune with current trends but utterly necessary because of it. Chosen here is ‘New Way, New Life’, a paen to parental struggle and the wonders of immigration.
In anticipation of his new abum, have been listening to his last Great one, Street’s Disciple. Nas is the only mass-appeal rapper who can still excite some genuine fanboyism. No matter how succesful he becomes, he seems incapable of being fully ingratiated into, and rendered utterly irrelevant by, the establishment a la Jay-Z, Snoop, Ice Cube et al. Always cutting a lone figure, the unsatisfiable autodictat without a true home, always caught between conflicting desires and aspirations, he is one of few rappers with the nous and the will to talk intelligently about something actually worth taking about. While Public Enemy have sadly allowed themselves to be carved out of pop/mainstream hip-hop and into a corner for the already converted, Nas has successfuly evaded typcasting and so still commands the attention of a more diverse (political and sonic) audience. Here, in the space of less than 5 minutes he achieves what most ‘political’ artists of any genre might struggle to achieve over an entire album – if ever -, expertly calling out capitalism, neoliberal ideology, class segragation and Patriarchy, with Kelis giving sardonic voice to their common root; I don’t care about the runaways/ I don’t care about who’s gay/ I don’t care about dying of AIDS/But I care if I got paid
Who even cares about the president?/ I think they’re making a mistake/I don’t care about the hurricane/ As long as my family’s safe
Blissblog declares he no longer believes in beats, Villalobos cuts out the sacred kick drum for one of his greatest tracks yet, and a sizeable proportion of the best tracks on Untrue are completely beatless; bring on the trend.
The flipside to ‘Daytona Beach’ and a personal favourite out of all of his tunes so far (though haven’t managed to keep up with much of his recent stuff). Begins with what sounds like an old Trance melody that’s been locked in a dark basement for the past decade grown wretched and psychotic, hate swelling and spewing out sporadically over the two minute intro. Then, everything quietens down to an unnerving, unbearable calm; a seemingly innocuos bassline lurches into the sounscape, drops of plinky, slightly atonal melody dripping down upon it. >>>> Fuel begins pumping into the bass-engine, growling louder and louder, liquid hi-hat quickly pouring in before combusting into pure white noise; powering one gigantic black-chrome machine, the component parts are still distinct enough to convey the rythmic angles. This track has everything that the Border Community/Get Physical pseudo-trancers and the Ed Banger entrist rockers have been trying at for what seems like ages now. Like Villalobos, Bodzin refuses to take the mechanics of the Track for granted; but where RV is refining and redefining them spatialy, Bodzin is down in the engine room, loosening the valves, letting off the saftey latches and bypassing the limiters, to see what it can really do.
