Music Notes June 2015
Ready for summer?
1. Prodigy – The Day is my Enemy
Well, I don’t know if the Prodigy will ever make another record as good as The Fat of the Land (recently re-released in a deluxe format), but The Day is My Enemy is a pretty good attempt. I’ve seen a few reviews that suggest this is just a re-tread, but listen to the title track, “Nasty” and the Sleaford Mods collaboration “Ibiza” and see if that matters.
2. The Psychedelic Furs – The Psychedelic Furs
I bought this album a year or so after it came out, and then the CD version twenty years after that. If Roxy Music were punks and did a lot of other drugs then maybe. From the sad otherworldly “Sister Europe” to the irony-laced “We Love You,” it’s an amazing record. Still not crazy about the two minutes of barely audible noise at the beginning of the record, but no one’s perfect.
3. The Strypes – Now She’s Gone.
New album Little Victories coming soon.
4. The Rolling Stones – Sticky Fingers
The Rolling Stones have produced some of the greatest records of the last century, although my general feeling is that as a band they have been crap longer than they were great. Still, Sticky Fingers is a great record, and likely fans will shell out for the admittedly quite excellent remastering and the bonus disc of alternative versions and live cuts. Still, don’t you feel a little bit cheated? Especially since if you want to get the bootleg Get Your Leeds Lungs Out, you have to pick up the super deluxe version of whatever it’s called. Mick, I know Keith doesn’t care, so do you really need the money this badly?
5. Richard Thompson – Still
Richard Thompson. Jeff Tweedy. Nuff said? Available in regular and deluxe formats.
6. Various Artists – Sherwood at the Controls volume 1: 1979-83
A compilation of early Adrian Sherwood productions including stuff by the Fall, Shriekback, Mark Stewart and an ultra-rare Slits song. Very cool.
7. Marie Osmond – “Karawane”
Sure, sure, I always had a soft spot for “Paper Roses,” but this is off the chart. Marie Osmond performing Hugo Ball’s Dada sound poem “Karawane.” Nothing I can say does it justice.
8. Rachel Kushner – Flamethrowers
Last month’s Music Notes piece was given over to books. This one didn’t make the list and it’s not even about music, but Kushner’s novel has that rock and roll energy, resistance, the joy of being young and so forth. Quite stunning.
9. Led Zeppelin – “Sugar Mama”
So this is the buzz. An unreleased outtake from 1968 will appear on the Coda reissue coming next month. Yeah, it’s a pretty good blues jam, but it’s not the Holy Grail either. There’s usually a reason why such tracks are never released. Good, not great, but still worth a listen.
10. Various artists – Wanna Buy a Bridge?
Released in the early 1980s as a Rough Trade sampler, it may be the best post-punk compilation ever. The Pop Group, the Slits, the Raincoats, Cabaret Voltaire, Swell Maps, Delta 5, Still Little Fingers and more. Not a miss in the box.
Burn Baby Burn
Or not…
In the days before the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling about gay marriage, right-wing anti-gay Rick Scarborough made the following statement:
“We are not going to bow, we are not going to bend, and if necessary we will burn.”
Scarborough’s comments were immediately interpreted to mean if the court OK-ed gay marriage, he would set himself on fire. Wow! You’re so committed to this course of hatred and bigotry, you’d set yourself ablaze to make a point. That beats that Australian couple who threatened to divorce if gay marriage was legalized there.
But the court ruled and…
Scarborough’s publicist clarified that Scarborough was referring to a spiritual “Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego,” and he meant they would resist.
Ah, Rick, you mean you made an old semi-obscure reference placed in a different context which was misinterpreted by people in an overly literal sense. Sort of like how many read the Bible to justify their beliefs.
Notes on Charleston
It’s difficult to write commentary on the mass shootings in the U.S. that happen with disturbing frequency (a study I read in the Times on the weekend suggested they average one every three weeks), mostly because there are so many of them, but also because the narrative changes so quickly.
So, here are a few memorable troupes.
1. It’s the War on Christians (again)
The attempt by Fox and Friends among others to paint this as an attack on religion, and using a failed black republican candidate pastor E.W. Jackson, who has called gays a plague and was OK with the three-fifths compromise, to do it. To be fair to Fox and Friends, this was before the Dylann Roof was arrested, and even after that Mike Huckerbee, Rick Santorum and a number of Republican presidential candidates said the same thing. However, the very idea that the victims were targeted because they were Christians is, as one wag put it, like saying 911 was an act of architectural critique.
2. Barack Obama on auto-pilot.
How many times has Obama given this speech? 12, 13 times? You would have thought someone could have hired a software designer to write a program for him that just spit out the relevant details whenever this happens.The notion of gun control was floated, but if the massacre of school children at Sandy Hook couldn’t produce change, you have to wonder what will.
3. The False Flag Brigade
Almost as soon as the news event happened, the conspiracy industry began geering up. On the right, it was those who saw this as the Obama administrations attempt to take away guns. (why worry – if Obama’s agenda has been to take away guns, he’s not very good at it) And on the “left,” there have been suspicious mumbling about how the security apparatus could have missed someone like Roof. The only possible conclusion? They created him like Lee Harvey Oswald. Actually you only have to read the comment section in pretty much any on line forum to read these opinions.
4. The Rick Perry Misspeak
A day after the shootings, Rick Perry was on TV giving his opinions. During the segment, Perry referred to the shootings as an accident. Twice. A spokesperson later insisted that Perry merely misspoke. He meant to say “incident. ” Odder though, was the attempt by Perry to link it to prescription medication given to vets (Perry’s pet issue)
5. The Von Clownstick Bluster
In his speech announcing his candidacy for president, Von Clownstick made a number of ugly slanders and argued that most Mexican who came to the US were murders, rapists or criminals (along with a few good people, he conceded – huh). After the killings, Hillary Clinton argued rhetoric like Von Clownstick’s contributed to such events. The response on Instagram:
“Wow! It’s pretty pathetic that Hillary Clinton just blamed me for the horrendous attack that took place in South Carolina. This is why politicians are just no good. Our country’s in trouble.”
And again, I note, these are the best and the brightest America has to offer?
6. The NRA: Blame the Victim
NRA Board member Charles Cotton hands down wins the tone-deaf comment award
“He [Rev. Pinckney] voted against concealed-carry. Eight of his church members who might be alive if he had expressly allowed members to carry handguns in church are dead. Innocent people died because of his position on a political issue.”
Cotton, you may remember, wrote in January that spanking a child may prevent people like Cotton having to shoot them when they get older. Uh huh. Because the reason for the rise of violent criminals is not enough spanking, right?
The NRA though distanced itself noting that individual board members do not speak for the organizations, in other words a weasel excuse.
8. Oh, you mean the Confederate Flag is a symbol of Racism?
I will say, the collapse of support for the Battle Flag of the Confederacy surprised me. You’d be hard pressed to find someone in favour of keeping the flag. Of course, a few whined that Republicans were being unfairly tarred with being flag defenders when it was the Dixiecrats in 1948 who were responsible for its rebirth – true enough, but given that Nixon’s “Southern strategy” was win that racist demographic for the Republicans, the criticism does seem a little thin). But since everyone’s an anti-racist now…
And that’s it.
Under this entire discussion, racism and gun violence, are discussed as simply individual acts, as bad decisions that bad people make. The notion that these things are built into the structure of society is outside of the bounds of polite conversation; the territory of the crazy. And yet, by viewing the fraying social fabric of U.S. society and beyond as simply the result of bad choices rather than a fundamental problem with social organization, the problem will only continue and worsen.
Sir Christopher Lee R.I.P.
I must have been in my early teens, so it must have been in the late 1970s. I was looking for something to watch on TV (we had three channels, so it didn’t take long to run thorough the options). I stopped at a movie. Obviously a horror film. Four travellers stop at a mysterious castle. One is lured in to a crypt and murdered; his body is hoisted above a tomb, and as his blood drips down, smoke pours out and a hand emerges. Dracula reborn. The film was Dracula: Prince of Darkness starring Christopher Lee.
I quickly discovered that the station, might have been BBC 1, but it might have been ITV, was showing the old Hammer horror films on Friday night. I saw the Gorgon, Plague of the Zombies, the Reptile, and pretty much all of the Dracula films starring Lee. And of course it was Lee’s Dracula that drew. There was just something about him. In Prince of Darkness he has no lines I remember. But like Lugosi before him. Lee commanded by his very presence.
Lee appeared in many other classics: The assassin Scaramanga in the Man with the Golden Gun, the treacherous Saruman in Lord of the Rings, and the equally treacherous Count Dooku in Star Wars, but the film you really need to see is The Wicker Man in which Lee plays the leader of a pagan community on a remote Scottish island, Lord Summerisle.
His death last week at the age of 93 marks the end of an era of British acting, and for me a link with a part of my youth.
People Ain’t No Good (part 1)
With apologies to Nick Cave and with some fear that if I keep doing this page, it will never end.
There was a fatal shooting at a barber shop in Scarborough in the east end of Toronto last week. A friend of mine knew both people involved, so I wanted to read up on the details. I came across the Toronto Sun web page on the story, and I foolishly decided to read the comments section. Argh. Probably the most racist comments I’ve seen, erm, since the last time I read the comments section in the Sun.
Is it the Sun’s readers or just this stuff is bubbling beneath the surface all the time and the relative anonymity of the net lets it loose? Neither answer is particularly palatable.
Montreal Anarchist Bookfair 2015 – A Very Brief Report
It’s hard to believe that this year was the 16th annual Montreal Anarchist Bookfair. I’ve been to every one of them as a tabler, first as Red & Black Notes and then as Notes from Underground.
If you’ve never been, it’s quite an event. First the sheer numbers that come through. This year seemed busier, but that might have been because tabling was only on the Saturday. The bookfair had the usual interesting selection of workshops on anarchist ABCs and specialized talks on things like pirate radio (wanted to go to that one)
Don’t forget: The Toronto bookfair is in July.
