Severely Memed

Tagged by the chronically inspirational Sit Down Man You’re A Bloody Tragedy:

“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.”

 

 

1) Foul Play – Finest Illusion (Illegal Mix)

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feelings of totally-consuming giddy excitement that used to accompany the arrival of summer/end of the schoolyear have been replaced by a conflicing mixture of relapse to nostalgia and boring dread.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.

 

2) Rihanna – Take a Bow

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.

3) Asian Dub foundation – New Way, New Life

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.

 

4) Nas feat. Kelis – American Way

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

 

5) Burial – Endorphin

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.

 

6) Stephan Bodzin – Bedford

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.

 

7) Crystal Castles – Courtship Dating

(Waits for someone to point out that Crystal Castles aren’t original as their patently retro sound might make you believe)

 

To be anTagonised: Please Keep Dancing, The Colour of Memory, anyone at Weareie, Pop Feminist and HIMAN!