It may be a hackneyed old plot which is rarely dragged out today (bar tomboyish starring teen movies*), but cross dressing women trying to pass as men has been around for a while. And the difficulty with this age old plot is that when it was all the rage, the only thing to dress up as, as a woman, would be some sort of soldier. Hence Mulan. Spot question, one of these people is not, as you might think in first view, a man. Look closely, see if you can guess which one is actually, and I know its hard to believe, a woman dressed up as a bloke. Answer below the cut. more »
The controversy around “Ride On Time” now feels like a mixture of typical sharp practise and unusual naivety. Details are murky, but it seems production team Black Box had obtained sample clearance for Loleatta Holloway’s “Love Sensation” from her record label, but they hadn’t asked her about it, they hadn’t credited writer Dan Hartman, and they certainly had no compunction about hiring a model to lip-synch Holloway’s lines. more »
Michael Jackson came to the title “King of Pop” in the style of a medieval ruler, carving out his realm piece by piece across a hard year of campaigning. He won some of his new subjects when he performed this song as part of a Motown anniversary special: others when he formed common cause with Eddie Van Halen or Paul McCartney. His fiefdom suddenly extended across my school playground with the release of the “Thriller” video and its body popping zombies. Through it all the album and its spin-offs sold, and sold, and sold. “Billie Jean”, its Wikipedia page claims, has now topped 800,000 sales as a digital download, a format invented close to 20 years after its release. more »
101. THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS – ‘My Elastic Eye’: ‘It sounds exactly like an elastic eye!’ said Fred S. I scoffed, but you know what? – it does! Though maybe more a clockwork one – but the wobbly fuzz-bass still sounds like it’s looking, even probing the track for something. Every music-box noise here is luxurious and sinister, like the beautiful baroque machines of City Of Lost Children reset for music-making.
100. From the Soundtrack to HAAN MAINE BHI PYAAR KIYA – ‘Mubarak Mubarak’: Entirely tokenist Bollywood tune, representing the style that’s given me the most meaning-free pleasure this year – I picked this filmi track because I could date it to 2002, but not much seems to change. Actually that’s not true – check the Bollywood Nights compilation to find out how dance music infected/inflected Bollywood – so in those terms ‘Mubarak Mubarak’ is old school. It presses my buttons though – rampaging percussion, big-lunged singing, and a heartbreakingly direct gypsy melody care of the inevitable string section. more »
The mode of the music changes, the city quakes, or at least those blocks of primer-than-thou office space quake that house the HQs of worldwide record companies. The reason, apparently, is MP3 technology, which you all know about and most of you use, and which has been the subject of acres of ruminative, pessimistic music biz newsprint over the last year.
Business reactions to MP3s aren’t what interest me (they’ve mostly been laughably ineffectual, as far as I can see), nor the economic consequences, nor even the theory that MP3 is going to democratise the production and distribution of music and open all our minds to amazing new, unsigned talent (not likely, in my opinion – small record companies are useful and will remain so precisely because they act as quality control, not as a block to the new). What interests me, rather, is the way MP3s will accelerate current trends in the way we’re listening and relating to music. more »
One of the happy upshots of the Bosman Ruling which we have been living with for almost ten years, is the effect it has on players prices near the end of their contract. Take Clinton Morrison (Birmingham wish someone would) the Republic of Ireland striker. Bought for a club record of £4.25 million three years ago, he is certainly not at the end of his playing career. But his contract is up next year, and Birmingham have just realised that if they don’t sell him now, he will go on a free transfer.
Therefore the pack of clubs hovering are in an interesting position. Southampton, Norwich and better the devil you know Crystal Palace have all brandished chequebooks. But are also taking their time? What does this remind us of? Why, its record collectors returning week after week to the Music & Video Exchange in Notting Hill, waiting for a record the really want to go down in price for them to buy it. more »
Introduction
It was about 2 in the morning and I was trying to get a handle on Alexander the Great. I had a final exam coming up and I’d missed half the syllabus – and something else was missing; a way into the man’s head. Alexander had single-handedly destroyed the world’s largest Empire and put an even larger one in its place, had conquered places hardly known to exist, had convinced himself he was the son of a God, had done most of this before he hit 30. That stuff was easy to understand though: what was harder was working out how he’d managed to keep the loyalty of his army, ordinary Greek farmer-soldiers who’d been on the march, away from home and family, for ten years. What was eluding me was the intuitive grasp of how a leader could do that, a fix on the mix of eloquence, megalomania and neediness Alexander must have had.
You won’t believe me, you’ll think it’s strange, but I played “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina” that night and I had my answers. more »
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This week we talk of art (visual) with Tim, Kat and Rob, including Tony Hart, GCSE coursework, Candice Breitz and Pop about Art. Featuring music from Art Brut, Solange Knowles, Marilyn Manson and Sportique!
Here’s the Tony Hart clip we mention, it’s about three minutes in:
EXCITEMENTS next week will include not only cheeses 98 – 100, but also the CHEESY LOVER 100 CHEESES AWARDS, where I’ll be choosing my favourites of the 100 so far tried, and combining them together on a supercheeseboard. And then eating them!
Blu di capra
A blue raw milk (I think) goats cheese from Lombardi, Italy, bought from Gastronomica.
The pale, almost grey paste of this cheese is smatterd and scored with a green mould. The rind’s a bloomy mix of white and biscuity colours, with occasional patches of the same mould. When I cut into the cheese, it crumbles slightly. more »
How about this: back at the start of the “late 80s phase” of Popular I wrote about how the charts became a free-for-all between radically different visions of what pop was for: a futurist, bricolage-driven club music? A cheap production-line soundtrack for the everyday? Or a time machine for grown-ups to travel back to when music meant something? These strands in 80s pop seemed to be aimed at utterly estranged audiences, so the idea of something pulling all three together was insane. But isn’t this exactly what Jive Bunny is doing? more »
It is a good piece and it discusses a field that is often overlooked, frequently patronised and generally treated as an irrelevantly twee “soft option,” largely confined to colonial-era eccentrics. This article, in the same week, highlighted that Botany has disappeared as an A-Level subject and only ten of the 115 universities in the UK offer any qualification in Plant Science. This is partly because Botany is not well-suited to universities, of course; it requires large, specialist facilities and preferably gardens like those at Kew. It needs funding to undertake huge trips across the world and although it has wide applications (medicinal science, agriculture) it doesn’t always commercialise them very well. It happens in buildings called ‘the herbarium’ or ‘the nursery’ or ‘glasshouse number nine.’ It is sometimes a little ‘hullo clouds, hullo sky.’ And if I’d told my parents I wanted to do botany at university I can’t think they would have had a reaction better than confusion; “Hazel is continuing her study of the False Banana” is hardly the stuff of round robins, that great whistle test for academic respect. So in defiance of all that an article arguing that plants are not just beautiful or twee, they help us to survive is a very good thing. more »
A theme we’ll come back to relentlessly when we reach the 00s: people assume reality pop talent shows are (or rather, ought to be) about talent, when in fact they’re about narrative. The records sell initially because we’ve accompanied the singer on a story whose ending requires that they sell: it’s what happens next that’s the problem. Of course, this has always been part of pop’s dynamics – Sonia’s career runs along similar lines, only without that pesky four months of television to sit through. more »
I had to constantly remind myself before I went to see World’s Greatest Dad that when I saw Sleeping Dogs (nee Stay / Sleeping Dogs Lie) I had no expectations. Bobcat Goldthwait’s scabrously sweet dog sex satire turned out to be one of my favourite films of 2007 and when I heard of the premise of World’s Greatest Dad I was sold. Even with Robin Williams in the lead. But I had no expectations for Sleeping Dogs, and do remember that tonally it could easily shift, shimmy and sometimes undermine its nicely black content. The good news is that World’s Greatest Dad is still at its heart a pretty dark comedy with plenty of laughs and a world view like Sleeping Dogs that can still have heart in a misanthropic world view. But, and its a big but, its not as good as I wanted it to be. more »
Tim Hopkins, Steve Hewitt and Clare Spencer join me – Pete Baran – flying by the seat of our pants and talking about safety, danger, the extended mix of the Safety Dance, “if I scream if I wanna go faster what do I do if I wanna slow down”, driving lessons, ELEPHANTS = DANGER and far too much time spent discussing iron cords. With music from Half Man Half Biscuit, Alpha Blondy, Blahzay Blahzay and a rubbish Men Without Hats Song.
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What’s remarkable about “Back To Life” is its self-sufficiency: surrounded by records so very eager to please, this is a track which stands out for its restraint. It’s become a ‘classic’ almost to the degree “Like A Prayer” has, but that record makes more sense the more public it is. Caron Wheeler, on the other hand, sounds more private and her song is more self-contained. It’s an ultimatum of sorts, but not a desperate one: this is real life, not fantasy, and integrity is more important than drama, so take your time.
That’s what the song sounds like, too: a voice, then a breakbeat, but no hurry. A switch to gospel vocalising just as that rich, rolling house piano line comes in – and then the strings…. there’s so much going on, but so much space too, and for all that Wheeler’s terrific performance centres the song, it’s worth thinking about how Soul II Soul construct that space. more »
The controversy around “Ride On Time” now feels like a mixture of typical sharp practise and unusual naivety. Details are murky, but it seems production team Black Box had obtained sample clearance for Loleatta Holloway’s “Love Sensation” from her record label, but they hadn’t asked her about it, they hadn’t credited writer Dan Hartman, and they certainly had no compunction about hiring a model to lip-synch Holloway’s lines. 
Michael Jackson came to the title “King of Pop” in the style of a medieval ruler, carving out his realm piece by piece across a hard year of campaigning. He won some of his new subjects when he performed this song as part of a Motown anniversary special: others when he formed common cause with Eddie Van Halen or Paul McCartney. His fiefdom suddenly extended across my school playground with the release of the “Thriller” video and its body popping zombies. Through it all the album and its spin-offs sold, and sold, and sold. “Billie Jean”, its Wikipedia page claims, has now topped 800,000 sales as a digital download, a format invented close to 20 years after its release. 
Where does one even begin?
A theme we’ll come back to relentlessly when we reach the 00s: people assume reality pop talent shows are (or rather, ought to be) about talent, when in fact they’re about narrative. The records sell initially because we’ve accompanied the singer on a story whose ending requires that they sell: it’s what happens next that’s the problem. Of course, this has always been part of pop’s dynamics – Sonia’s career runs along similar lines, only without that pesky four months of television to sit through. 
I had to constantly remind myself before I went to see World’s Greatest Dad that when I saw 
What’s remarkable about “Back To Life” is its self-sufficiency: surrounded by records so very eager to please, this is a track which stands out for its restraint. It’s become a ‘classic’ almost to the degree “Like A Prayer” has, but that record makes more sense the more public it is. Caron Wheeler, on the other hand, sounds more private and her song is more self-contained. It’s an ultimatum of sorts, but not a desperate one: this is real life, not fantasy, and integrity is more important than drama, so take your time.