The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Right wing media January 8, 2017

Here’s a question, anyone frequent right wing websites regularly? I don’t, the closest I come is looking at links on Real Clear Politics in the US, and occasionally odd stuff in relation to neo-monarchists and people like that. But what of, dare I say, more sensible and considered websites? Any suggestions?

I do listen to a fair bit of British and US and Australian stuff from public broadcasters that encompasses a wide range of opinions, but those are always perhaps a little more official.

Religious attendance: Like snow in the sun January 8, 2017

We were discussing religious attendances a while back and talking to a friend recently on the same topic she made what I thought was a very good point. Her view was that it wasn’t the scandals that did for the Catholic Church or indeed any broader societal pressures but simply that they they functioned as a means of offering an excuse for people who, when all came to all from the off weren’t that pushed about weekly attendance. They went because there was a broad but diffuse social pressure. Once there was a way of lifting that pressure… well, that was it.

And I find that particularly interesting because it suggests that religious observance was never that deeply held, that religious belief likewise, on this island. None of this is to deny the very real pressures that the Catholic Church brought to be bear in both the secular and religious space. But once that pressure was lifted even slightly it was largely gone.

The idea of the Irish as particularly religious was probably always a crock. This was a phenomenon of observance which is of course different from faith.

Reading AC/DC and some thoughts on the meaning of music in the 2010s… January 7, 2017

And speaking of Australian groups, not sure if I’ve mentioned this already, a book on AC/DC – The Youngs: The brothers who built AC/DC by Jesse Fink. It’s interesting because it’s so critical of its subject, not the music so much which it regards – at least in the period up to 1982 as generally excellent, but rather the business and personal approaches of the group.

It is hugely refreshing to read a book about a group by someone who likes them that doesn’t hold back on saying that people aren’t living saints, or that their interpersonal and management relations have been grim, or – as crucially – that their output was of variable quality and sometimes abysmal.

Bon Scott emerges well from it. An incredibly charismatic and self-aware person whose lyrics often transcended the genre. Brian Johnson too – though Fink doesn’t conceal the opinion that only two of the albums he sang on were any good. The Youngs themselves are a curious crew. Hugely controlling, utterly wedded to a view of themselves as working class, unostentatious. And there’s some truth in that latter perception, though it’s not the whole story.

Yet it is to their credit their single minded approach in keeping the show on the road for so many years. It’s perhaps no great surprise that the wheels have only begun to come off the wagon as age rather than anything else has impacted upon them. First Malcolm Young, clearly the de facto leader of the group, became seriously ill. Then Phil Rudd had some…er… issues. And Brian Johnson had a peculiar un/forced retirement. Cliff Williams has announced he’s out of the group at the end of the current tour and meantime one A. Rose has taken over vocal duties providing a weird hybrid between Scott and Johnson which is good but not AC/DC.

And it is telling that the story effectively ends in 1982 after the release of ‘For Those About to Rock’. The point is made, and it’s a good one, that subsequent to that album they never released anything much of any great substance (though I have to admit to a real liking for Stiff Upper Lip from the early 2000s which has a very bluesy feel to it). There’s a lot of groups I’d like to see, but with AC/DC the impulse has never been there. At least not since the death of Scott, but with Johnson, diamond geezer that he is, not so much.

And this from one of their early engineers, Mark Opitz who worked on Let There Be Rock and their (to my ears) finest work, Power Age, is worth considering. It’s obvious but nicely put and far from incorrect both about them and a broader cultural context:

‘It’s okay’ says Opitz of 21st century AC/DC. ‘Mike Fraser is very good. But it’s not fresh for me any more, like it used to be. But that’s coming from someone who was there listening to it 24 hours a day when I was working with them. And it was the vibe of the ‘70s and early ‘80s that was somewhat akin, not to Beatlemania, but to the pointy end of the cultural revolution. Music was the pointy end of that revolution in those days. Music’s not the pointy end any more. The cultural revolution is multifaceted: technology, sports, fashion.

But not music. At least not so much.

DARE DEVIL RIDES TO JARAMA a new play by Neil Gore January 7, 2017

Thanks to the person who sent this…

The Story of Clem Beckett, Sportsman and Fight

FEBRUARY 13, 2017 @ 7:00 PMBLACK BOX – BELFAST
£10

SPAIN 1936: “When Fascism clutched at the throat of the Spanish people threatening a foul tyranny and the menace of war in Europe, Clem felt at once that his place was in freedom’s rank”Clem “Dare Devil” Beckett joined the International BrigadesNot for nothing did he earn the name, “Dare Devil”. He was loved by the masses for his great daring, courage and skill on the Speedway track. He rode as no one else had ever ridden. He was a man of the people, and the same fight he used against money-sharks and corruption in his sport, he used to defend democracy against Franco’s rising fascist army.Clem met his death at the Battle of Jarama after he and his comrades including his friend, writer and novelist Christopher Caudwell, held their posts against overwhelming odds. They remained at their post to cover a temporary retreat, but were never seen alive again.Following the success of ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’, ‘We Will Be Free!’ and ‘United We Stand’, Townsend Productions’ new play, ‘Dare Devil Rides To Jarama’, commemorates and celebrates the contribution and sacrifice of the volunteer International Brigades on the 80th anniversary of their creation. Through stirring song and poetry and compelling movement and imagery the play captures the raw passion and emotion generated by the Spanish Civil War

The Church – albums rated worst to best January 7, 2017

This by Steve Kilbey, their singer, no less.

It’s difficult, despite retaining a certain sound they’ve certainly taken interesting musical turns on the journey. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower, sometimes very slow.

I tend to agree, Heydey and Priest=Aura would be up there in my top five. Forget Yourself likewise. Blurred Crusade. Possibly Starfish. I like Hologram of Baal a lot, Uninvited, Like the Clouds as well. But then I’d also tend to the view I don’t listen to the Church for the albums but for individual songs.

Haven’t I been here before? Downloads vs. Streaming vs. Vinyl January 7, 2017

This piece, oddly enough, ties in with IEL’s post on televisions during the week. He writes:

It really is astonishing how much Television , the technology, streaming, channels, pay TV and so on has changed in my own lifetime….

And then we come to this. For those of us who have grown to (had to?) like downloads this piece in the Guardian will come as unwelcome news.

It appears that vinyl is back again with a vengeance as has been noted previously on this site.

More than 3.2m LPs were sold last year, a rise of 53% on last year and the highest number since 1991 when Simply Red’s Stars was the bestselling album. This was also the first year that spending on vinyl outstripped that spent on digital downloads.

Well that’s good. But wait…

She said the trend towards streaming – which has rocketed 500% since 2013, with 45bn audio streams over 2016 – had led people back to vinyl as a way of tangibly owning music and because streaming had encouraged music discovery.

But for those of us who download that’s bad. I’m signed up with Emusic, have been for over a decade and in that time have had the pleasure of literally hundreds of albums to listen to.

Streaming though? Not sure I’m keen on that. Paying a flat fee of 10 euro for everything – or rather everything that the streaming companies offer, seems to me to be a bit, well limited. Part of the enjoyment of music for me is not the availability of everything all the time immediately but instead the filtering process. I like getting a few albums a month that I can listen to intensively. Add in a number of tracks – particularly in electronica, and away I go.

Moreover, my tastes are sometimes (but not always) a bit off the beaten path. Or can be. Emusic and sites likes that are perfect because they deal with smaller labels. There’s always band camp and fair enough that would have to do. But on foot of a piece by music blogger Mark Mulligan that the iTunes store will stop offering downloads…

Since Mulligan’s article was published, rumours have been swirling about plans to kill off iTunes downloads in the next two years, but an Apple representative has since denied this report to news website Mashable. Other analysists are convinced that downloads will eventually end, or at least diminish significantly, but they envisage a longer timeline. “Transitions like this take years and years,” comments Dawson from Jackdaw Research in an article published by Computer World, “there will come a point where Apple will turn off the lights because no one is in the store, but it will be a very slow transition.”

Perhaps because there are some listeners, who albeit with different tastes to those like myself have similar attitudes:

Trawling through platforms like iTunes and Spotify, it quickly becomes obvious how unsuitable the current set-up is for classical music listeners, who may want to identify tracks by work, composer, ensemble, conductor or label rather than simply artist and song ­– not to mention those who want to read well-researched and written liner notes. Classical music enthusiasts, perhaps more than other groups of listeners, are often collectors as well as consumers, and for those listeners the download model may remain more attractive than streaming.

So, peering ahead a few years I can see a situation where I’ll not be streaming because frankly I like my iPod, but I’ll be back buying CDs and vinyl. But hold on – haven’t I been there before?

This weekend I’ll mostly be listening to Swedish Prog – Anekdoten January 7, 2017

Mentioned this last week, Anekdoten, a Swedish prog rock group who take their cues from King Crimson, early King Crimson that is. They’ve been around since the early 1990s and I like them a lot, probably more than Opeth. I like their song craft, the melodies, the arrangements. Guitars and vocals from Nicklas Barker, cello and keyboards from Anna Sofi Dahlberg, bass and vocals Jan Erick Liljestrom and drums Peter Nordins – and who is this coming into view but none other than former Church member Marty Willson-Piper who guested on their last album, Until All the Ghosts Are Gone, and has been playing live with them since 2015.

At first that may not seem to make a lot of sense – the Church being more psychedelic than progressive (indeed just why are all the Church albums listed in progarchive?), and yet, there are commonalities.

Anyhow if you like mellotron you will most definitely like this. There’s a yearning melancholy aspect to the songs. Whispered vocals fade in and out in places. It’s not difficult to imagine their sound being retooled for ambient electronic. That is until the guitars come in – and perhaps I’m wrong but I tend to hear more hard rock than metal in those guitars, which I think is a strength. There are the shades of Zeppelin and Purple at their most proggy – some of those keyboards, well – and a host of other groups too. And on a more contemporary note someone suggested that Radiohead is another influence and I can see that – could be form follows function. Tracks like Shooting Star once they get going have a great propulsive power to them, all surging chord progressions. Writing on the Wall builds and builds and builds and then… stops with an elegant economy. Our Days Are Numbered has a fantastic twisting angular series of riffs and is arguably the heaviest track on the album and then it goes and hints at jazz – it’s not quite an instrumental, there appear to be wordless singing behind it, but its close. Their back catalogue is pretty impressive too.

Shooting Star

Get Out Alive

Our Days Are Numbered

If It All Comes Down to You

Live, Malmo 2016

Talking about Ireland…. January 6, 2017

Prospect has a podcast and in one of the recent ones they addressed the idea that Trump was ‘The least ideological Republican since Nixon’, not least that despite his apostasy on Republican issues and the fact he fought against the Republican party himself Trump managed to bring in with him a massive number of Republican candidates in other races. And the question was raised does Trump shape the party or is it the other way around.

But who do they drag in as expert on Irish matters? Why it’s none other than Ruth Dudley Edwards.

Which means we get this gem when talking about Ireland and Britain about how ‘it’s four centuries [since the Plantations] and people have to get over it’ and ‘of course Ireland’s always been taken over by your bigger neighbour and I point out they’re bloody lucky given some of the neighbours they could be taken over by…’ Hmmm.

She’s utterly contradictory, she argues that Ireland may have to leave the EU and negotiate as ‘equals’. Except, except she’s just said in practically the same breath all
that stuff about bigger neighbours dominating others. She’s hugely fond of our ‘grown up’ and ‘responsible’ government in this state.

As to her belief in ‘new technology’ on a post-Brexit border one has to wonder. I’ve heard this line from others but no one seems to know much about it. One presumes that at a minimum it would require some sort of fixed installations, would it not, sensors and suchlike? Which would be a problem. And a potential target.

Then it was on to the Rising. Apparently ‘disaffected’ Irish went to the US and funded the Rising which wouldn’t have occurred without funds from there. And it was their fault that violence had occurred during the 20th century.

Rather simplistic too in relation to controls – comparing passport checks between London and Dublin with the border. Except that’s not like and like. But hey, it was that sort of a conversation. Unfortunately there was no other voice on the panel with any expertise in these matters.

Interestingly in an article in Prospect she strikes a more measured tone – to an extent, at least in her conclusion. Note by the way the sheer detachment (and a very certain sort of anglo-centrism) in her initial analysis in the following.

An Irish citizen and a British resident, I voted for Brexit after much soul-searching because I thought the EU was a busted flush and Brexit was in the interest of the majority of people in these island and, indeed, in Europe. Now watching the hurt and fear among my countrymen, I feel strongly that the British government owes it to its small neighbour to make every effort to minimise the collateral damage.

Well gee, thanks. But she compounds her original error by completely misunderstand the dynamics between large and small states. The UK, or rather the London government, will do what it perceives to be its best interest. Given the distinct lack of interest during the referendum campaign in this island here it’s difficult to believe that we’re a priority, high or even medium on their list. And collateral damage? It’s already started.

The Irish Dream? Is that your dream or mine? January 6, 2017

John McManus wrote some while back in the IT that:

The cost of the Irish dream is now €50,000 year. And that is just for the entry-level version. What we are talking about here is having a house, a partner, two kids and a car. Not included is private schooling, skiing holidays and all the other aspirations of the urban middle classes.

Is he talking about the working class? And is ‘middle’ class defined by private schools and skiing holidays? Clearly to a point, the latter.

In fairness he notes that:

Micheál Collins of the Nevin Economic Research Institute has done quite a lot of work in this area using data from the Central Statistics Office. The data is quite old – from 2011 – but things have not changed that much in the interim, which in itself is part of the story.
The key point from his research is that the average disposable income of an Irish family is about €40,000 a year, which is quite some way off the price of the basic Irish dream. In fact only the top 20 per cent of households have a disposable income in excess of €60,000 and can thus be said to be truly “living the dream”. In numbers terms, we are are talking about only 320,000 out of 1.6 million households.

And that points to how low wages are. He notes that:

A country where the modest aspirations of only one in five households are being met is not exactly what you would describe as a nation at ease with itself. Depending on which side of the €50,000-a-year line your household falls, it is a recipe for dangerous political instability or the harbinger of much-needed social change.

In effect, Ireland is not working for 80 per cent of families. This makes it a fertile breeding ground for those offering populist solutions á la Donald Trump and the Brexiteers. We have already had a taste of it in the amazing rehabilitation of Fianna Fáil at the last election on the back of nebulous promises about fairness.

But note this…

Right now, the key political battleground must be the 400,000 or so families who are in with a shout of the economy-class Irish dream. They are the families whose disposable income is somewhere between €35,000 and €50,000. They don’t “have it all” but they still have a good chunk of it. They have a car, but probably need to replace it. They have a house but can’t afford to extend it. They are also the sort of people who vote.

I’m always puzzled why there’s a lower limit. Why €35,000? And what of those below that level? How does McManus feel they should be addressed? Note how it comes down to what they ‘have’. Somehow that seems to me to be part of the problem rather than any sort of a solution.

And this dream he mentions. Has that any currency at all?