I Said Worthy Farm I Can't Hear You! (pause, silence)

With literal hours to go the liberal disquiet still grows at Jay Z’s imminent performance on the fields of our very own Avalon – Glstnbry. Like the Roc-a-fella himself, they have invoked the commercial imperative, this black man is not cricket and has inspired poor ticket sales (nothing to do with complete festival saturation then). Of course, in curtain-ruffling England the new breed of cultural Nimbys haven’t been expressing their misgivings in anything so vulgar and as giveaway as racist terms. They’d have to admit that to themselves first. No, far easier to say ‘he’s just not my cup of tea’ and then to have a cup of tea than anything too divisive. Inclusion is an illusion on the modern festival goer’s iPod.

No-one would deny Jay Z has got rich on glorifying the gangster lifestyle. In an entrenched Jam and Jerusalem world, the artifact representing an ethnic poor trying to get rich and being a success by any means necessary is not welcome – 70s films only for that please. J-Z was on J-Ross’ show last night, casually dressed and completely comfortable with turning his life into art and therefore commerce, not feeling guilt for making teenagers rapists and murderers because this simply wouldn’t have happened.

Listen carefully, beyond the niggaz and hos language, and the overall sound is pretty tame and not likely to inspire youthful rebellion any more than the latest Jet rockout or Duffy soul revue. He’s not likely to inspire extreme devotion and replication, but if you're (still) into hip-hop in the mid-to-late noughties you’d be checking his thing.

So Brooklyn boy Shawn Carter is the unfortunate target of the ongoing consensus hallucination that is gangsta rap (it doesn’t even look right writing that in 2008), a genre that peaked about 15 years ago and isn’t really relevant to any of the main players’ current package.

Of course there are criticisms of Jay-Z - he should work his talent a bit more, write down rhymes and knock out the cliché; revealingly on Ross he said his mum told him that to be a star you’ve got to work at it, but Shawn realised his talent was natural and he has therefore never really had to work at it as such.

No Stone Circle dropout for him then, but my expectation and hope is that the legions of white boy hip-hop backpackers will forget their Q-Bert mix tapes for a while, get down the front and get down, displacing the indie moaners to the back. Repeats of Fiddy being bottled off at Reading seem unlikely.

Scorching back

My Bloody Valentine returned to live performance on Friday 13 June with a rehearsal gig for their few UK comeback dates. They did an expected set of purely 87-91 Creation albums and EPs.

The a-side of the awesome 1990 ep, Soon and Glider (repetitive sliding technicolour bursts precede industrial dystopia) is represented. Agree with Bliss that a favourite is the grungey e-bounce of Slow on the 88 You Made Me Realise 12, and that an album of the eps would make curatorial sense. A lot of the best bands only need around 20 or so great tracks to really make their mark, not walls and walls of careerist, new creative directions and churned lps ad infinitum. The percussive trances and quiescent tones of the last ep, Honeypower excepted (a great track despite being one of their most conventional, feel the warmth of the alternative post-new wave bass!), were a kind of endgame for Shields and co.

But as Paphides says on Quietus, the idea of this being retro or nostalgist doesn’t make sense when you consider the black hole of regress that followed MBV in the indie rock arena at least. Even without new output, they can make this short tour a huge blast of infinite present! All of which leaves me slowly relenting to my philistine “tickets are too expensive” attitude when the tour was first announced. It might be time to leave the records upstairs for the experience to go search for a spare.

Only Shallow:

Let's balk about sex

“I don’t want to employ the services of a beautiful Chinese call-girl. I’m quite happy to stay ‘out of the game’, thanks very much. I have no desire to act on desire.”

This was the situation 22 I found myself in on another ‘business’ trip to Singapore - if being holed up in an office robot-editing stories for three days can be called corporate travel (and next time I’ll just get up early and do it from home). One evening, the insistence of hospitality ignored anything I’d like to do in favour of checking out the hotel bars where the aprostates roam. When will people realise that we don’t always have to act on our desires, that we don’t always have to serve these needs, that the deed once done returns a gruesome reality to life? I eventually managed to leave this pre-transactional parade, vocalising taut jungle beats down Orchard Road in riposte (and still being offered business).

Super-reality is Singapore’s forte. It is like one long episode of the Apprentice. A city-state sandwiched with British colonial help between Malaysia and Indonesia, it long ago sought economic primacy with culture and society running behind a distant second to discipline and the work ethic. You will all have heard the stereotypes – clean, boring, crime-free, strict, corporate, efficient, it is all these things and not a lot more. In 30° heat, I found the ‘no drinking’ on the mass rapid transit (SMRT) system particularly oppressive.

Yet you head into town on the Smart-link and see perfect advertisements for Cities in the Sky – whole districts chocked full of clean, functioning towerblocks with the requisite infrastructure nearby. There will obviously be isolated resistance to ‘the system’ mainly due to and expressed through Western youth culture, but there’s no way an underclass can develop, so let’s do away with the net. Just as Chinese, Malays and Tamils come together and avoid tension through the lingua franca English, corporate and entertainment culture combine so the business, hotel and resto district is Singapore’s selling point – come and have a look at supersized towers, get a nice meal, let’s talk business. The ‘oldest profession’ is not pushed under the carpet but is legitimised as all part of the service.

An expat band played funky hits as the men roamed and the girls waited until drink absolved any morals or resistance (the ladyboys I’m told were more likely to roam near the airport, by a taxidriver crank credulous of the notion that it’s just “the jews” who run all the businesses!). Europe’s grotty red-light districts have thrust similar stag-tour temptation at me so I was unlikely to say ‘oh sure, get me a whore’ even if there was more of a patina of glamour here, even if, as I was told, they were ‘flocking’ to me. A mid-30 average white boy being slightly higher up the aesthetic food chain than their stock middle-aged sweaty overweight trade. Apparently though it’s fine here as everybody, meaning those sweaty and overweight and the ‘mind on my money and my money on my mind’ call-girls, has been able to reduce it to a pure transaction, the justification you hear everywhere else.

There is no room for the uncanny in Singapore, or an appreciation that culture quite often comes from the margins, and can’t just be slapped on the populace. I found myself longing for a bit of London’s rough around the edges, its faded glamour, its dissolute attitude. Culture is a little more than fine food, wheels even bigger (but of course) than the London eye and impressive neon-lit views of the harbour from a hotel tower (I’d surprised myself by not going bandy after I had been persuaded to go 70 stories up). It is not all about the spectacle and - because you’re worth it - satiating desire (generated by all that work).

But in global capital, the machine needs all the cogs to work for faultless efficiency. And there were lengthy delays at Changi Airport on connecting flights – at last I had time to put on my the walkman and play some tunes. White Denim’s playful rock shapes were an enjoyable way of blotting out the entreaties to enjoy the Changi Airport 'experience' (when culture has been traduced as outlined, it is the same as anything outside the airport has to offer).

When it got delayed again, I had no music to match the fraught mood. I thought I would zone out with Liars’ 30-minute psycho trancer This Dust That Makes Mud, but it beat me about 15 minutes in. Singapore will never be able to degenerate culture this way.

Strewth-via-Sonics

***Update, it turns out MC/r council themselves were only prepared for the pseudo event of celebrating football, etc, and not the reality of 100,000 Rangers fans pissed out of their mind and irate when a) one of the main screens went off b) they lost 2-0 and a significant minority used the city centre site for a rampage. MCFC.co.uk, of course, fails to mention this side of the occasion at all in its review.

Don't laugh, the Euroid final between Glasgae Rangers and Zenit St Petersburg was not the first time there has been at atmosphere at Eastlands. It's the seventh. This was also City's final and the whole area was lit up like normally it isn't, the B of the Bang banging and a great overhead of the ground. the gers lost to two good goals from Zenith Peter's Borg and some Russians ran on to the pitch but were briefly dispatched. Rumours have it the Rangers crowd were pissed from town centre booze-offs and this may have been reflected in their non roof-raising noise but took defeat well. From a City Eastlands point of view the coverage was great, although given that the area is normally neglected this showed up the very worst of international capital's veneering of area/event/'experience'*. And where is this 'Manchester' that they say the final is being held at? is it near or have anything to do with Manchester City? or is Eastlands one of United's training grounds or something - Not loving the neutralisation of place in the description.


The coverage did it until the final climax of the trophy lifting, which was timed horrendously by the UEFA colleagues with the release of a Foo Fighters song about 'giving the best of me' or something (actually Best of You), to add to a collective stew that looked/sounded like David Brent at his motivation lecture in Reading, finaling with Tina turner's Simply the Best. When will these mediator bastards realise that one sensation/celebration doesn't need to be excessed with a complimentary overload by another. Leave the music out of it, the atmosphere was sufficient.

Morphing the munglists

Back to rave last week. Czuk and I landed in some stereotype nu jungle jump-off in ghetto rave venue/pubclub Goldsmiths Tavern, a night made palatable by an enthused local crowd even as the music made a standard out of its own bog. Yes the mood was better there than last time, what with laydeez free and the still-liberating deshackler of the madfast jungle, put on by Kings of the Nu School and with Skibadee representing the only known.

His name ensured an MC-led angle to it. Each tune sped past unremarkable by any other characteristic, this functionality emphasised by the treble seeming to be down on the record to give the chatter its space, siren and riff-free. Each time though the 100ish crowd helped to make each lick seem more vital, more edgy than perhaps either the present-day post-garage or four-beat variants. It’s surely time jungle as a music moved on from its psychedelic concrete heyday but this may be unlikely while the spirit changes it in half-death. Maybe it should roughen up the beats again and take a different reality, like these.

On a personalised and selfish note, because I blog like that, the night emphasised the unfulfilled futility of any nights out when the interdependables are back at home. So schooled now in the metaphorical boat-pushing out and barely able to resist the flow in any case, this was made painfully evident by the need to go relatively early, leaving the 171 bus and home as chief loci for the biscuitworkings. No point in going out if the deshackler can’t be accessed, but it was still a welcome few hours away from corpo-reality.

Geoff Barrow: Mark Ronson is to Soul Music...

... what Shakin Stevens is to Rock 'n Roll"
Saw this in Mojo over a man's shoulder while on the 8:30 to Sutton and had to laugh. Ten seconds looking at images of the Brit New Yorker funking his guitar off, or indeed walking back to Amy-Lily-Sadie-Kate's at 4am, and the rock-soul man's sheeny oeuvre begins to grate. You know how serious producers disdain to mix business with pleasure, Marky Mark. And apparently this little spat has a bit of history.
Given that this post was mainly a vehicle to upload the the rmx as outlined in the previous post, that could well make me what DJ Otzi is to house. Crinkle-christ!

Spiriting rave

I’m adding to the noise around the 20th anniversary of rave, the summer of 88 generally credited with its birth as a mass movement. Twenty years, that’s a lot of anthems. By going overground and then splintering into a million different if not mutually hostile factions, dance music was able to constantly regenerate and replicate, keep going without lapsing into a cult. Hip-hop may have lasted a lot longer but apart from a very few artists still flipping the script, that scene has long been unable to bring anything new and vital to the mainstream. The ‘I was there and this is my two pennorth’ articles will come thick and fast – avoid most if you can and concentrate on archival stuff like this on house in the US. The Guardian of course is so cool that it started this off a year earlier. Like, yah, I was bang into house in 86, it was so liberating back then.

Twenty years on, and if you say you’re going raving that’s still a statement of intent, of plausible difference. It doesn’t sound like a niche, nostalgic night out like, say, a northern soul or a mod night might, because it has never gone away, never been satisfied that the first emissions from Chicago and Detroit were the perfect template. In 1988, my older sister was going down the local town venue to listen to ‘acid house’ (dance as a close friend of pop has always been in and around the charts), I, still a year away from GCSES, was waiting for my moment.


Even the most enthusiastic heads will be sanguine about any revolutionary-transcendental effect it has had, and cynics will say that the dance music culture has just made societies more addictive, more in thrall to appetite and desire, chasing the chemical hit over any quotidian reality, falling thrall to narcosis. It’s a pity, because the music does sound better on drugs, the communal high of a rave or club puts other leisure options into the shade and invariably those who have been on the rave turnmill are politically more progressive than those who only left the public house to go to nightclubs and pull. And of course the great thing about the wide-scale diversity of the movement that a definitive history of rave is impossible, you may have stalwarts of one scene or one place but this was transnational and nobody’s been through all the scenes for that long. After the techno boom of 88-90, you had to choose one of many paths.

Further proof of rave’s vitality is seen by it’s feeding through to parasitic cultures wanting to take a bit of that spirit. The indie-rock scene is the obvious example, and not for the first time. For those still keeping check of the emissions from the corporate bedfellow, I find Marc Riley’s Brain Surgery by far the best, bullshit and hyperbole-free, constantly teaming up new quality with older selections. The last show I heard rave motifs were being appropriated in at least a couple of new tunes – Cheeky Cheeky & the Nosebleeds’ trying the best part of the Pacific State out on a guitar for their Slow Kids, XX Teens’ latest dependent on one of those queasy, uncanny 93-94 jungle riffs. Most bands, even defiant indie like the Courteeners (yes it’s Cortinas) are willing to put space into their tunes now, let the kickdrum do the work just like a four-four beat would. Even Semitic for his first remix has gone back to the avalonian Then for inspiration, remodelling Playing With Knives. It’s nearly done.

Depending where you look, indieboyband doyens are apparently having a whale of a time in their indie discos (ever since Sonic Mook and others they have been done properly). That scene has depended on a certain application of rave mores – in the primacy of the beat, the pushing up of the tempo, the losing one self, the never say sleep spirit and the drug taking. Don’t let that be your only port of call (patronising alert), kids! To be fair, arguably these have more connections to the electronic dance scenes, if the link-ups, diversity of nights and collaborations are anything to go by, than the rock-soul regression of Ronson, Winehouse, Duffy et al and the mainstream names of Killers-Coldplay-Editors (anyone up from Bloc Party). I dream of a radioshow which pays deference to the rave history, in the context of new output. This is still unlikely while the media owners still think rock (which died with punk) still rules and disco sucks.