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Music Videos and the passing of all things

We had gotten as far as Creswick when my mother told me Grandma had taken a “turn” and by the time we were in Castlemaine, she had died.

She was 89, and for months it was coming, and then it wasn’t, and then it had come.

My Grandma, a selfless and giving woman, had a life that was remarkable, if only in its length and how emblematic it was of a certain experience of the last century — a childhood and early adolescence stolen by the second world war and the privations that followed, before achieving a lower middle class comfort with her husband as England was rebuilt that had been unthinkable to her parents. Her children were the first in her family to go to university and they in turn achieved a greater prosperity than she. Greater ease of travel took her grandkids over to Australia.

This may seem a frivolous association, but I think her death had something to do with my voracious consumption of old music videos while we were holiday.

My girlfriend and I had — fresh “negative” Covid tests in hand — gone on a long-planned road trip, a diamond of towns between Ballarat, Clunes, Castlemaine, Echuca and Beechworth, mere hours before Melbourne’s postcode-specific lockdowns extended city wide. So every day we gulped down the freedom of movement, the bustle of bars, the lighting of restaurants like it was life itself.

And predictably, it all knitted together in my mind — the oncoming return to lockdown, with its ringing reminder we weren’t living through a discrete and conquerable episode, but most likely entering a new understanding of what life is. The trips through old Gold Rush towns, either “preserved” and pristine or cracking up around the edges and seemingly half-abandoned, all monuments to rhythms and understandings of life that lasted the majority of a generation, and suddenly finished.

Clunes, for example, the site of the very first gold discovery in Victoria, possibly the state’s savior. It was wealthy and prosperous from 1840ish to the turn of the century, before spending the next 60 years dying, the population falling to 200 by the time George Farwell visited it for Ghost Towns of Australia in 1965. It’s back up to 1,700 as of the last census, and has re-branded as a “book town” surrounded, as it always was, by farmland — green and gently undulating under charcoal skies, every achingly competent landscape painting you’ve seen in an antique store.

The town retains an eerie grandeur (partly COVID related of course): everything was closed, closed until the weekend, closed until the pandemic is done, or just closed, profoundly closed. The old free library, the old butcher, the old post office, all relics of the 1800s, all dimly preserved and utterly abandoned looking, lined with cracks and surrounded by wild, unruly grass.

And then my grandma was gone, and the best part of a century was gone with her.

And then music videos. Our last hotel had Foxtel and the remaining MTV channels and I watched them for every minute I wasn’t specifically called to do something else.

Like everything in pop music, naming the first music video is a fool’s errand. But let’s say it’s Go Now by The Moody Blues — nicking the light and dark palette of the With The Beatles cover and using a lighting scheme Queen might have been thinking of with Bohemian Rhapsody.

This is where it starts to count — the idea of a promotional film almost as familiar as the song it promotes (which is why The Beatles innovations in this area don’t count). You know what the Bohemian Rhapsody video looks like, and so does everyone you know.

Eight years on from that — which takes in Stayin’ Alive and The Message and the first clip to be played on MTV, Video Killed the Radio Star — we get Thriller, which kicks everything into the next gear. MTV gives us the idea of music videos as a key, perhaps primary way of interacting with popular music.

By the time I was 13, music videos were mini-movies — P Diddy, Mariah Carey, late-era Michael Jackson. They calmed down a bit after the millennium, but they still remained at the very least half of my interaction with popular music, and often by extension the wider popular culture, with all its pretensions and anxieties and profundities.

So watching MTV Classic, unable to simply search for what I thought I wanted, I was just delivered songs, and it brought those songs back more vividly than simply encountering them at a bar or on a car radio: re-delivered in the form they were first encountered, and engaging the senses in the same way, recalling the fashions, and trendy film tropes of their era.

It delivered hit after hit (not all good songs or videos, but quality is miles from the point), many of which I was dimly surprised to find I recognised within the first few frames (Don’t speak, Total eclipse of the Heart, What have you done for me lately?).

And that, like all forms of cultural consumption that predates the internet, is dying, if it’s not already dead. They still make music videos, obviously — indeed, watching the most viewed videos this year on YouTube reveals two things: they’re just as much a mix of cynicism, trends, empty bombast and genuine artistry as they ever were, and they are getting to as many eyeballs as ever.

Further, it’s internationalising pop superstardom, with artists from Korea, India and various Spanish language countries muscling in on the US turf in a way that couldn’t — or at least didn’t — happen under the old system.

But the point is, I had to search for it. My parents could probably recognise the Wonderwall clip, and I could tell you what happened in most Mariah Carey videos, an artist I’d never once listened to on purpose during her peak.

The mass culture that one passively imbided and shared with pretty much everyone they knew is what’s going. And I don’t think that’s just me –because I’m in my mid 30s and pop music isn’t for me anymore. When was the last time you talked to a friend about a new song and the conversation involved the video?

When was the last time the culture at large gave a shit about a music video? And remember, we are in the golden age of an exhausting litany of takes. If, say the Weeknd couldn’t really get us talking with a “PROVOCATIVE” and “THEMATIC” series like the one that accompanied After Hours, what hope does an absolute nothing like 6IX9INE stand?

Incidentally, the counter-example you’re thinking of was two years ago:

That fracturing of experience isn’t good or bad, really, but it makes me sad to see it go. Because the whole artform is aimed perfectly at people my age and slightly older — sufficiently established as we were growing up to be ubiquitous, sturdy enough to outlive du jour status into our early adulthood — hell, we even got a generation of mini-auters like Gondry and Williams — and then visibly decaying as a centre of culture as we approach middle age.

Whatever meaning or beauty it provided, it was ephemera, just my generation’s equivalent of radio serials or spiritualist meetings. Like any ephemera, it won’t be mourned much.

And so the mine is depleted, the body withers and the venue has to close. It’s only sad if, in one way or another, it was part of you.

The ecstatic horrors of Jeff Rosenstock

Jeff Rosenstock’s Worry was released a month before the 2016 US election, and for me there have been few albums that have better captured a sense of the post-Trump world, of what it is to live and work and consume in these times.

I want to emphasise the distinction I draw between music that captures its times and music that reflects them. Plenty of music reflects the times – in our era, this means music and culture in general that is indistinct, sprawling, passive, self-involved, backward-looking. Music like Rosenstock’s is urgent, clarifying, energising, alive, socially-minded*.

Rosenstock’s concerns as a lyricist are decidedly material, grounded and adult, which might be why I fell so suddenly and hopelessly in love with his poppy humanist punk in my late 30s, which would otherwise seem an odd age to be newly smitten with a genre you’ve never previously connected with, particularly one so speedy and youthful. Worry is a true “growing up” album.

So on “We Begged 2 Explode”, Worry’s opener, a friend warns Rosenstock that the coming decade is “gonna be fucked’” and it’s not, or not just, an act of political prescience.

The prediction concerns a dissolving sense of community, the likelihood that “friends will disappear” thanks to the exact events – work, babies, weddings, divorces – that would be expected to require and reinforce communal bonds in previous generations.

This is the politics that pervade Worry, a sense of coming apart, potential sites of community (music festivals, the internet) co-opted and poisoned by the market. In many ways the realities of Rosenstock’s characters would not have been noticeably improved if Hillary Clinton had won; they’d still be looking through the windows of the apartments they can no longer afford to live in.

HELLMODE (2023) was his first album after my conversion. Its sound is possibly the fullest, richest Rosenstock collection so far, producer Jack Shirley acting as a kind of punk Phil Spector, adding glockenspiels and choirs to the lithe, raging guitars.

If the material effects – particularly on housing – of America’s long decline is at the forefront of Worry’s politics, HELLMODE shifts to the interpersonal and mental health implications of this state of affairs, starting with the cluttered, dayglo pink cover and the song titles styled in all caps, the packaging carrying an appropriately assaultive and relentless quality.

“Will you still love me?” he asks, backed by a surge of voices, “once I’ve given up?” as the opener “ WILL U STILL U” peaks. On the searing “HEAD”, Rosenstock shouts himself hoarse about a “bomb inside my head, and I wish that I could disconnect the threads”.

Meanwhile, “When I can see that there’s just no talking to people deceived by fascists, I wanna be wrong,” from “I WANNA BE WRONG” has only become more relevant since the record’s release in September 2023.

There’s a touch of the “slow cancellation of the future” in the lines which open “FUTURE IS DUMB”:

Do you still dream about tomorrow?

Does it look like the one you knew?

Does it remind you of a future we won’t do?

Only now, it’s also stupid and irrational: “I feel like the future is dumb, the present’s insane”.

Yet, I always come away from his work feeling Rosenstock is an optimist. He deals in the specific horrors of this modern life, and renders them meaningful, or at the very least bearable, via the best conduits we’ve yet found for making that transition: music and other people.

So, as Worry’s “We Begged 2 Explode” surges to its conclusion, Rosenstock, backed by a choir yelling like a football terrace, laments “all these magic moments I’ve forgotten” and “all these magic moments I’ll forget once the magic is gone”.

But the music is too ecstatic, too alive, and it gives him away: the magic of such moments may burn bright and clean, and then fade, but it’s never gone – it just lingers somewhere we can’t reach with words alone.

*The thought process of other work that qualifies on either side of this distinction has kicked off for me will be a subject for a future post.

Emmagen Creek

It’s a single moment, right at the end, that confirms “Emmagen Creek” as my favourite song released this year. The song, which closes out Naarm-via-Johannesburg singer-songwriter Ruby Gill’s wonderful second album, Some King of Control, is a series of sketches, capturing our narrator and subject in moments of tactile, unaffected tenderness.

In “Emmagen Creek”, love is nothing more or less than an act of nature – just as commonplace, inevitable, and awe inspiring. Gill tells the song’s recipient “I’m stuck in your orbit, or whatever you call it” and when they reach over “to solve some ache inside me” it feels “like lightning”.

The sites of these quiet revelations are themselves suggestive: sand dunes and streams, where disparate material collects and becomes one new thing.

The writing is elegant and evocative, conjuring more detailed images that the words alone contain. And it’s this coherence which gives the song a deeper resonance, a melancholy realisation that the connection between the song’s characters is subject to the same unforgiving rules as any other organic matter. “I know this can’t last forever/just look at the weather … “ she notes, adding an inevitably destructive human intrusion: “the aerosol’s taking its toll”.

The piano, Gill’s only accompaniment, moves alongside the words with a steady, unfussy flow. And so to that moment, which, subtle though it is, floors me every time. On the final verse, having conceded:

Now I know we’ve evolved

and that planets revolve

and there’s plenty of fish in the sea

She counters

but when I do my taxes

or watch the earth spin on its axis

you’re all I can see

you mean the whole world to me

And throws in a bridging chord to accommodate the extra syllable on “its”, a single chord that arrives so unhurriedly, so inevitably, I’ve never been able to fully conclude whether I think it’s an improvisation or an indispensable part of the composition. Regardless, it’s the point where form and content entirely merge and “Emmagen Creek”, for all its sonic elegance, reveals that it is entirely alive, and free.

Cool Calm Pete: demolition

Since I publicly mourned the fact that Korean-American rapper Cool Calm Pete wasn’t putting out any more records, he’s done the woozy, melodic single “These Daze“, collabs with Heems and Cheshire rapper Lee Scott, re-released 2005’s mini-masterpiece Lost with some outtakes and, most improbable of all, put out a second full album.

My delay in writing about demolition, which was released in late July, has largely been down to not quite knowing what to make of it. My initial response was that it sounded a little unfinished, a little tossed off, especially given the wait we had to endure for it. I’ve now come to the conclusion that the qualities that gave me that impression are the very things that make it work. It is, in its way, as effective an evocation of what it is to be a certain kind of person living through certain times as my beloved Lost was two decades earlier.

The album opens with “Hertz”, a two minute soundscape in which snatches of TV, ads and audience sounds, echoing room tone, little hiccuping sobs and stabs of bass about in a dreamy sonic expanse like detritus bobbing in a tide. From here the songs continue to be restless, oneiric and short — there are 16 tracks over the 42 minutes runtime, most of them featuring more than one distinct musical sections. When he does rap, Pete’s 2025 flow is such a drawling, somnambulant baritone that it makes his early work sound like Twista on helium. This combines to fill the album with temporal disjunctures — on tracks like “Hertz” or “Atlantis”, time will slow and dilate. Elsewhere, there will be sudden shifts from one idea and set of tones to another.

Take the sampled dialogue that echoes on ‘Now?!’:

‘Now. You’re looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now, is happening now.’
‘What happened to then?’
‘We passed then.’
‘When?’
‘Just now. We’re at now now.’

This is from Mel Brooks ’80s Star Wars spoof Spaceballs, but in these surrounds it’s rendered as eerie as Sapphire and Steel‘s ‘This place is nowhere, and it’s forever’ conclusion.

If demolition‘s haunted qualities — the slowed, heavy keys and faintly discordant waves of synth — have you hankering for Pete’s sweeter, more soulful palette, don’t despair: “These Days” is in there, and we close on the bittersweet yet quietly triumphant “Hats and Glasses”.

And best of all is “Prologue”. Pete raps over one of his best ever beats, showcasing that great knack of his for uncovering treasure/trash beauty. In this case strings sounding like the love theme from a Kung Fu movie, complete with angelic vocables and a trembling violin line. The lyrics, with typical shorthand and allusion, touch on his career and long absence before the album’s most explicit and affecting moment of emotion. At 2.35 he dedicates the track to “the hopes and dreams gone astray” then breaks into a high, frail singing voice: “Ironic, how life just gets in the way”. He concludes on a note of fatalism:

When it’s all said and done/Tupac, Biggie and Pun/Fast food or guns, we all just …

And then he’s interrupted by a series of warped string stabs, and it’s off to the next idea.

All in all, demolition vividly evokes a feeling that became discernible to most during the recent lockdown years, but predates it, and has lingered long after. With the strange slow/fast time of the music, and Pete’s voice frequently distant in the mix, it has a sense of the insularity and unreality of our time, of its relentless streams of information, its constant light and noise. Not all of it bad, much of it genuinely pleasurable, but all of it both insubstantial and inescapable.

*I’ve included a Spotify link so you have the option to quickly listen, but of course, fuck Spotify and everyone should buy a digital copy on bandcamp. I’ll update the links if a physical copy becomes an option.

15 short films about Oasis

Once, my parents were fighting, and it must have been a bad one, the kind where an awful silence seems to settle on the house, the kind that, to a 12 year old brain, felt as though it would become near permanent. My solution was put on “She’s Electric” as loud as I could get away with. I thought the bridge (“cos I’ll be you, and you’ll be me …”), so happy and so sad, so evocative of something just out of reach, would make everyone happy, or at least content, again. It didn’t work. My parents eventually made up anyway
Oasis made music for the end of history. Their monstrously successful debut Definitely Maybe came two years after Fukuyama’s 1992 book. It was the year Kurt Cobain died, and the year Pulp Fiction became the most influential film of the decade. Pulp Fiction played with time in multiple ways, taking place in perpetual 1970s, it’s aesthetics and themes woven of all the grimy underground pop culture of the mid 20th century.
All this was, as I wrote in Crikey “the end of something as well as a beginning. From the early 60s to the early 90s, pop music never went more than a couple of years without the shuddering jouissance of new genres, sounds and rhythms that had been hitherto unthinkable in the mainstream. Of course alongside this, rock bands had been incorporating the tones and tropes of the past, from the Edwardian music hall numbers on Sgt Pepper‘s to grunge’s frequent interpolations of classic rock — there’s as much of ‘More Than A Feeling‘ in Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ as anything by The Pixies. But that subtext became the full text in Oasis’ hands.”
“Oasis took all that (white) musical culture of the decade between 1966-76, hoicked it up over its shoulder and mixed it into music that evoked a sunny, non-specific past without quite recreating it …. “
1994 is also the year Tony Blair became the leader of the UK Labour party and set about putting place Third Way politics and removing any vestige of the party’s socialist history.
What was the politics of Britpop? Personal freedom, social mobility, a vague solidarity, and a level of Union Jack fetishing that one can simply never imagine landing as unthreateningly as it did ever again.
Life long Manchester City fans, Noel and Liam graced the NME cover in 1994 in that season’s home and third shirts. City ended that season in 16th place and their top-scorer, who had played for the club since childhood, scored six goals.
1992 ticket prices for Manchester City: £11
2025 ticket prices: £74 for adults
2024’s cheapest adult season ticket at Manchester City: £385, Most expensive non-hospitality ticket: £1,030.
Tickets to Oasis’ 1996 gigs at Knebworth, which featured several other high profile acts, were £22.50 each (roughly $45). We paid $400 for decent seats at the group’s reunion in Melbourne.
“Like every revolution, [Britpop’s] legacy was complicated. Because the revenge of the marginalised involved embracing things that were taboo — commerical ambition, celebrity, patriotism, cocaine — the new guard very soon came to resemble The Establishment”: writer Dorian Lynskey, quoted in Dylan Jones’ Faster Than a Cannonball: 1995 and All That.
I suspect it will have the opposite effect, but I hope the reunion inspires people to check out the Gallagher brother’s solo work.
Liam has developed an stunning level of soul and introspection in the years since Oasis. In my view, Noel was unfairly maligned as a lyricist — to be fair, as much by his own laziness as anything. But Liam has bettered him as writer on his solo work — as I wrote in 2023, I could not have predicted “how lively and engaged he would sound, how much he’d care about the words, how frail he’d allow himself to sound”. Lines like “Remember you belong here as much as anyone” and “Tell me what do you love, and would you let it kill you” are vulnerable and, more than that, specific in a way Oasis never was.
Noel put his first solo project with the high flying birds out in 2011, coinciding with what was my lowest ebb. My sheer inability to take much joy anything at the had lead to a desperate accrual of some truly dire albums. The high flying birds was the rarest exception, the hooks on “The Death of You and Me” and “If I Had a Gun” made me feel just the merest hint of possibility.
“The Death of You and Me” in particular, continues to haunt me. Lyrically and melodically, it has a true ambiguity, a kind of spiralling quality; the characters in the song are free, but only to spend their whole lives running. The trumpet solo sliding in from nowhere, was swaggering, but in a way almost unrecognisable from Oasis; it was lithe, theatrical, almost dandyish compared to the brick wall of Oasis’ production.
I remember walking alone some night at that period, the album in my headphones, and being hit by a great surge of the hot wind that hits as summer nears in Perth just as the chorus for “(I Wanna Live in a Dream) in my Record Machine” peaked. I mustn’t overstate how much this fixed or how quickly — for one thing, the song is a mid-tier shout-a-long by Noel’s standards — but at a period where I felt profoundly insubstantial, almost terminally so, like I could dissolve into the ether without leaving any trace the song, with it’s blocky, confident chords, it’s cliche-cos-it’s-true belief in the redemptive power of pop put a little weight in my heels, fixed me, briefly in space and time. It was something. Christ, at least it was something.

Note: Part of the reason for the simply dreadful up-keep around these parts is the happy development that my day job is allowing me to do more music writing there for actual money. I’ve simply failed to highlight any of that here. But no more: I’m setting myself the task of, at least once a week, using some of music writing I’ve had published elsewhere as the basis for further exploration.

The Hold Steady and the story of 21st century America

In an essay for the 2023 oral history The Gospel of The Hold Steady, veteran Rolling Stone writer and early evangelist for the band Rob Sheffield shuffles through his memories of religiously following the group in their early days gigging in New York. The nadir of this generally optimistic period comes on November 4, 2004, days after George W Bush had inched over the line in Ohio to clinch a second term as US president. In this atmosphere, Sheffield recalls, a tiny zombie-like audience was already “too depressed to move” when Finn told them from the stage that the legendary First Avenue Club in Minneapolis was closing down. The club, converted from an old Greyhound bus depot, had a claim to be up there with CBGB’s or the Cavern in pop music history; Prince, who featured the club prominently in his film Purple Rain, Husker Du, The Replacements and many others got their start there. If there is a political genesis to the group’s subsequent work, starting with their second album, 2005’s Separation Sunday, it could well be this moment; the great sense of escape and possibility emanating from America’s triumphalist late-20th century popular music snuffed out like candlelight by the realities of the 21st century.

Separation Sunday marks a turning point for the group on many levels. Musically, it’s the album on which Franz Nicolay’s limpid, rollicking keys and Bobby Drake’s loose-limbed drums become permanent fixtures of the group, completing a line-up which, on and off, would produce the band’s best work over the next two decades. Conceptually, the album feeds the recurring characters introduced on their 2004 debut Almost Killed Me into an album-long narrative, characters whose stories the band will return to again and again.

To quickly sketch the outlines of the Separation Sunday’s loose, impressionistic story; it follows Holly (short for Halleluiah) as she runs away from home, falls in with a bad crowd (drug dealer and pimp Charlamagne, skinhead Gideon) and spends years as a “hoodrat”. She has visions of St Theresa, and mimics mortifications of the flesh with “sharpened ballpoint pens and steel guitar strings”. Having courted disaster for years in her search for the ecstatic, she is “infested with infection” and nearing oblivion. She gets high one last time by the Mississippi River, presumably somewhere along the banks that arc through Minnesota’s capital Saint Paul, and then returns home. There, she enters a church to tell the congregation “how a resurrection really feels”.

Even if you’re unfamiliar with the album, the above will likely have prepared you for the fact that the organising imagery of this narrative is a conscious, active Catholicism. As he wrote the lyrics, Finn’s then wife was sick, and he had sought comfort by returning to church for the first time since his teens. “That’s kind of where the two rivers connected. The love of punk rock and the longing for something bigger,” he told America Magazine in 2017. “Something to explain some of the hard times I was going through in the comfort of faith.”

In an interview for The Gospel of The Hold Steady, Finn compares the story of Holly to that of “the prodigal son, or in this case prodigal daughter”.

“People can always come back, that’s the beauty in the stories you hear in the bible.”

The jump in nuance and sophistication from the leaner, more treble-heavy Almost Killed Me is most instantly evident on track two, the roiling “Cattle and the Creeping Things”. Described by lead guitarist Tab Kubler as “as good a song as I’m ever going to write”, it’s a speedy (in every sense) run through the early books in the Bible, which in turn showcases the greater sonic depth made possible by Nicolay’s countermelodies and flourishes.

A lot has been made, not least by the band themselves, of how hopelessly out of time this all seemed when contrasted with the general hue – arch, sleek, removed – of the New York indie rock scene at the time. Classic rock influenced concept records featuring conversational poetry barked out in beery, mic-flecking sprechtsimme was not what important bands did in the time of TV On The Radio, The Strokes or The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. And yet, 20 years later, the album seems as indicative of its time, and indeed as prescient, as anything any other American guitar band was producing.

In 2022 the veteran rock critic Robert Christgau, noted how few of the “all-white casualties of finance capital and the fossil fuel cartel”who populate Finn’s songs own the place they live, and concluded there is a “near zero” chance any of them vote. It’s quite a compliment to Finn’s writing that such questions come up.

At the time of Separation Sunday Finn’s characters are a long way from noticing the luxury apartments filling up the disused factories in their home towns, as they would on later albums. If they have or want jobs – other than dealer, pimp, bartender or musician – it doesn’t come up. But as Patterson Hood of Georgian alt-country rockers Drive-By Truckers would later write, Separation Sunday is distinctly post 9/11 album, made during a time of “unnecessary wars and social upheaval”, the great jarring “disconnect that the turn of the century brought”:

So while the war on terror or the administration who prosecuted it are never mentioned, it is there, an offscreen source of light that sets the textures and shadows of everyone’s stories. For example, it’s American author Nelson Algren and Irish poet William Butler Yeats who mingle in “Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night”, probably the most impressionistic song on the album. Algren is the writer who on the one hand famously chronicled human detritus amid the urban decay and waning industrialism across America’s mid-century and, on the other, was warning in the late 1940s that “for the foreseeable future American foreign policy [would] be dominated by a continuing need for oil”.

Yeats, meanwhile, injected “The Second Coming” into the 20th century’s bloodstream in the aftermath of the First World War. Countless writers, good and bad, have reached for it when “things fall apart” and the “center cannot hold”. It was at the forefront of people’s minds in the mid-2000s as much as it was in 1968 or, as if anyone reading this could forget, it is now.

This is also why the surging punk-meets-classic-rock sound (somewhere in the centre of “Billy Childish and REO Speedwagon”, as Kubler puts it) isn’t contentless nostalgia or ironic posturing, but a crucial part of the story being told. The scuzzy Americana the band echoes is what soundtracked the world in which these people’s dreams were shaped.

Those big blocky major chords, adorned with bright fizzing arpeggios, that fade out opening track “Hornets! Hornets!”, are a slower, heavier recreation of “Sympathy for The Devil”, “Hey Jude”, “Dear Mr. Fantasy”, “Can’t You See”, and a million other arm-in-arm shout-a-longs that these characters would have heard in their cars and at parties growing up in suburban Minneapolis.

Particularly on the keys-led “Don’t Let Me Explode” and “Crucifixion Cruise”, it’s a genre that has always had the quality of the road stretching off into the outskirts of town, representing both freedom and the end of the line. Music for those “condemned to drift,” as fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan once put it, “or else be kept from drifting”.

And of course, the band and their characters are largely descendants of people who, as track one side one on their debut puts it, spent the 1950s “twisting into the dark parts of the large Midwestern cities”. Hold Steady characters who want to find something head for the coasts – take the peyote-fueled “vision quest” in Sonoma on “A Multitude of Causalities”. But when Gideon (Almost Killed Me’s “Payne Street”) or a murderous townie (“One for the Cutters” from Stay Positive) don’t want to be found, they head to Michigan and Ohio. Holly lives with friends on Nicollet and 66th, near a shopping mall and a catholic school, in suburban Minneapolis.

Holly notes in “Your Little Hoodrat Friend” that “City Center used to be the centre of our scene, now City Center is over, no one really goes there”, referencing the Minneapolis shopping mall seemingly in a constant state of decline since its ‘80s heyday. Could there be any greater monument to late-capitalism’s failed promises than the dying shopping mall? The mall reshaped American life in the last quarter of the 20th century, draining and replacing city downtowns. At the turn of the century, they in turn died off, nationwide, in their thousands. Alongside that came the continuing neoliberal gutting of public spaces and the exodus of industries that once formed the basis of communities.

This collective hollowing out was well underway by 2005, and The Hold Steady’s music, in ways that have become increasingly explicit as their career has gone on, has always dealt with what remains after these processes have had their say. Discussing the album in The Gospel of The Hold Steady, Finn talks about drugs, music and religion as modes of escape, but the songs also treat them as points of human contact that can’t yet be dismantled.

My favourite Hold Steady album cover, incidentally, is 2021’s Open Door Policy. A shot through the window of a suburban laundromat, all black and white tiling and battered coin-slots. Reflected in the window are a handful of birds in flight and the top of a sparse, thin tree, near-silhouetted against cloudy skies. We also catch the edge of a car parked in front of a BWS. This is Cambridge Laundry Service in Floreat, Perth. Perth the furthest you can get away from Separation Sunday’s Williamsburg street corner before you start heading back again. That laundrette is a few blocks from my parents’ house.

Floreat is a nice area, but as evidenced in that cover, it contains in miniature Perth’s great malady: the liminal, the noplace, the vast, vast sprawl. Perth is the longest city in the world, scattering two million people across an area the size of Shanghai. You are never far from a freeway entry to take you past beautifully anonymous shopping and industrial precincts, crowded by motor lodges and motels, places to buy furniture and white goods, car dealerships, business suites with small accountants and podiatrists, drive-thru, places to get your security guard certification. Places, essentially, where humans don’t go unless they specifically have to or are stopping on the way to something else. Contrasted with Perth’s piercing natural beauty – walled in by ancient hills to the east and diamond white beaches on the west – are the great flat expanses and the dreamy, muscle-memory driving that links it all together. Which might account for the feeling of familiarity The Hold Steady’s sound has for me.

The band’s music has grown a little grander and more stately on recent albums, slowing to match their protagonists, now drifting into middle age under late-stage capitalism. But despite the nervous energy and raucous release of the music on Separation Sunday, its lyrics are already dealing with sudden bursts of acceleration amid a general sense dwindling momentum, characters who are starting to wonder whether the wave has run as far up the beach as it can before the moon tugs it back out to sea. “Lord, to be 17 forever,” laments our narrator on “Stevie Nix”, as its blazing opening riff slows to a Nicolay led breakdown. She recalls “the way the whispers bit like fangs in the last hour of the parties.” And, before you know it, she (or someone) is thinking: “Lord, to be 33 forever”.

Shortly after the first Trump election, Finn discussed with an interviewer the book Dreamland about America’s opioid epidemic, and found a suggestive correlation in this nexus of unregulated capital and out of control pain: “I couldn’t help but notice, all the states they’re mentioning—Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania—these are the states we heard about so much in the election. And I’m thinking: this is not unconnected. You know? This is all tied together.”

Indeed, from our vantage point, Separation Sunday, for all its squalor, for all the dissipating promise of its character’s lives, registers as optimistic. it is a work that still believes in the dual promise of America and its culture: that there is always somewhere to escape to, and always somewhere to which you can return.

Lyrical Wax: 2014 Forest Hills Drive

There are more thrilling Hip Hop albums, albums with greater vision and scope, bigger ambitions and tighter cohesion. But J. Cole’s third full length album 2014 Forest Hills Drive leaves most behind on one measure: there are few albums in the genre* as consistently, luminously, lump in throat beautiful, few albums as crowded with pristine musical pleasures.

The tone is set on Intro, as it swells from solo piano and voice, billowing out with horns and bells, propelling Cole’s half-sung half-rapped verse into the thermosphere, where he looks over his shoulder at what he’s left behind. Its in that sweeping view that the album — featuring no guests — takes place.

Lyrically, his reflections on his upbringing send him into the same territory as Nas both in content and tone — his obvious intelligence, vivid storytelling and undeniable skill coalesce into an artist that is impossible to not admire, but somehow difficult to completely give oneself over to.

His cool precision gives him a slight remove from his stories, as does his sense, strong even by rap standards, of self mythology. It’s hard to shake the feeling that, when he’s being his most outwardly vulnerable and raw, he’s actually exercising the most steely control, that his revelations here are a way of keeping the audience at arm’s length.

Along similar lines, it’s a consistent disappointment that a storyteller as good as Cole can describe so few women in terms more interesting than parasitic gold diggers, exes filled with regrets or fantasy ideals — Lisa Bonet, Nia Long, Aliyah — disqualified by age or death.

Hello offers something of an antidote and explanation, Cole addressing an ex, and concluding:

Reflection bring regrets don’t it
Rejection make your defences
So you protect your pride with your reflexes
But life is a game with no reset on the end

Wet Dreamz might sum the whole affair for good and for ill. Its reconfiguration of Family Circle’s Mariya possibly the album’s lively, addictive musical peak.

It recounts Cole’s first time and it’s detailed, funny and sweet and also tells us almost nothing about his partner except he desired her and very little about him except he did an apparently flawless job of hiding his nerves and inexperience.

But Cole does possess a natural storyteller’s grasp of structure. Intro pulls us in. The distinct, glowing pleasures of each track keeps you watching — behold G.O.M.D filleting Brandon Marsalis, adding thumping bass, haunting strings and jazzy keys before a minute is up:

And then there’s Note to Self, typically dynamic, expansive and melodic, bringing the album to a warm, satisfying conclusion:

Wow them in the end, as the man says. But the credits run for 14.35, so take Cole’s advice and skip them.

*Graduation, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, The Grind Date, Circles, Let’s Start Here are others I’d put in this category, but I’m happy to hear what I’ve missed.

Lyrical Wax: Odyssey

The cover is one of my favourites in my collection. The music is … fine. Odyssey’s 1977 debut album is seemingly an attempt to cram every facet of tasteful, pleasant, unobtrusive late 70s pop music onto two sides of vinyl. There’s the smooth sheen disco for which they’re best known — Native New Yorker, their biggest hit. The key jump on the fade out is genuinely sublime:

There’s a patina of faux-international influence, the Latin samba piano on Easy Come, Easy Go and the vague Tropicana of The Woman Behind the Man.

There’s even a mildly socially-conscious number, Golden Hands, about a kid looking to break out of the ghetto with his basketball skills. Across the record, electric pianos and saxophones abound.

If this all sounds a little mid, I guess it is. But the album, in its intense, zealous commitment to sweet, frictionless mid tempo, has its own genius: an ability to reach back into the collective memory of “quality”American late 70s pop, conjuring a very specific part of US pop culture — the kind you encounter soft focus sit com credits, or the grainy footage of an American city skyline under blocky film titles that comes before a low key romance.

This stuff was old, but still relatively ubiquitous on afternoon TV even as I was growing up, in the early 90s, in a tiny town on a highway that stretched for 100s of kilometres in all directions before hitting anything else, painting a dreamy, comforting other place, equal parts enticing — romantic, tinged with possibility — and repellent — cloying, unambitious.

You Keep Me Dancing has, as many tracks do, a hook you instantly swear you’ve heard a million times before. At moments like these, deep into the grooves, it’s as lovely and soothing as the rainbow sweeping across the back cover.

Bookmarks, June 2023

CW: Self harm, suicide

“If only”, I thought so many times as the half formed and abandoned ideas piled high and the time since I’d added anything to this blog stretched to an embarrassing length. “If only I had carved out a space in Dancing to Architecture where such general thoughts, small joys and passionate recommendations could be collected?”

So anyway, welcome back to Bookmarks – a collection of recommendations, recent addictions and subjects for further study, the first for roughly two and a half years.

Tobe Nwigwe, my favorite rapper of the last three years, clarified something very important to me. The fact that a great deal of modern hip hop leaves me a little cold isn’t *just* down to the aging conservatism of an old head who long ago decided, by shocking coincidence, the genre was perfected during the era they first fell in love with it. Much as I like a lot of it, what I miss in the groggy autotune, dark synthy beats and repetitive triplet flow that’s been one of the predominant commercial aesthetics of the last era of hip hop is the voices. For one example, take the Wu Tang Clan – the diverse and distinct beauty of those nine vocal qualities and flows; none you could confuse with any other.

Nwigwe and his wife and collaborator Fat have extraordinary voices. The flow is diverse from bar to bar, prying out the track’s rhythmic possibilities, dragging out a word here, cramming in syllables like tetris blocks there. Tobe in particular uses his voice as surely as any virtuoso wields their instrument — at times a lazy rumble at the back of the throat, near whispers, at other moments a desperate howl. FYE FYE is how I first found them – and their superb videos – and as good a vehicle for those qualities as you’ll get. 2005’s Today’s Your Day (Whachagonedu) gets in for the voice too, combining Fatlip’s spit flecked sing-song and Charlie 2na’s regal baritone bouncing off each other over a sublime Lee Dorsey sample.

But credit where it’s due: Lil Yachty’s Say Something, which uses autotune to expand the singer and the song’s emotional palette rather than to blur it out.

Liam Gallagher has no right to make me cry in this day and age. I feel an incurious dolt to have waited so long to tune into his post-Oasis career, assuming he’d be bereft without Noel’s craft, leaving nothing to fuel the bombast and swagger he brought to the group. Little could I conceive what he’d do with that absence, how lively and engaged he would sound, how much he’d care about the words, how frail he’d allow himself to sound. Once is the peak of those qualities, over a chorus as grand as anything the band gave him, our kid confronts the moment “When the dawn came up, you felt so inspired to do it again,But it turns out you only get to do it once”. Then there is the music video, featuring eccentric football genius Eric Cantona as a mad and lonesome king. It will never reach the same number of people, but it’s as good as anything he’s ever done.

Blame by Gabriels swirls around the palette like a cognac and cigarette, rich, substantial and somehow weightless. The X + Y = Z approach to describing music is obviously of limited use, so believe me when I say there’s no better way I can sum it up than to say it sounds like Marvin Gaye writing a show tune arranged by Leonard Cohen.

The late Tina Turner has a claim, in my view, every bit as strong as Little Richard, or Mick Jagger any other figure to embody all that was great about rock and roll – the androgyny, the pain, the ecstasy, the sex, it’s all there. Her take on Whole Lotta Love is evidence enough – funkier, filthier, wilder than Zepplin.

Julio Iglesias’ live, profoundly 70s take on La Mer closes out Tomas Afredson’s 2011 adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It’s a film nominally about the search for a double agent through greyscale streets and beautiful-ugly nicotine stained rooms at the height of the cold war, but is really about men and women and how the work they’ve chosen severs every human connection they’ve ever made. I first encountered the movie via a film critic friend taking me aside at a party before the film was released and showing me the preview, guessing rightly that’s it’s dowdy lyricism, deeply English emotional palette and immaculate cast of character actors would be the dead centre of one of my cultural venn diagrams.

I mention it because the night has come in retrospect to feel like a point where many threads of my life, my life as it had been to that point, knotted together and started to gingerly emerge at the other side, heading now in different directions. The Hold Steady – represented here by 2021’s Family Farm and lead singer Craig Finn’s elegiac Messing with the Settings – were there too that night, playing in the car as we drove home through gleaming black streets, fresh from a recent downpour. The film and the band have thus come to feel somehow bound up in much of what I have done since, returning periodically to remind me of what I was, and then nearly wasn’t.

Was I behind the wheel, or was Dave? Neither possibility seems remotely safe in retrospect, but I don’t remember being the least bit nervous.

In this period I would drink to excess, chasing the numbing warmth it delivered, until it lead me to the cliff’s edge, and I would have to run to the bathroom, to a car, to corners of friends’ gardens to hide silent tears. I would wake most nights after half an hour’s sleep, gripped with terror. I’d been experimenting with minor self harm as a release, staring at my housemate’s kitchen knives and wondering if today was the day. I didn’t know if I was going to get better.

Anyway, the song was playing as Dave saw me gulping back tears – crying on the way home from parties being my screensaver state in this period. With a dancer’s timing, cranked the volume, as song hit the chorus – he looked at me and pointed, eyes wide in expectation, and we both gave our throat linings to the most fundamental phrase in pop music:

“We Gotta Stay Positive.”

Lyrical Wax: Dolemite (1974)

It’s called room tone. The sound recordist on a film set will record 30 seconds to a minute of silence in each location, which is then used to smooth the transitions between shots in that location, covering any subtle differences in the background noise of each cut. By its nature, it’s noticeable only by its absence, and even then, you rarely know you’re noticing it. It is one of the most common ways a low budget film will feel amateurish and off putting in a way that the average audience member can’t quite put their finger on.

Dolemite is My Name (2019), one of my favourite films of the last few years, does not fuck up its room tone, but it’s about the making of a movie that does. Eddie Murphy plays Rudy Ray Moore, an aging, down on his luck entertainer with a genius for optimism, a staggering inability to quit. One day he hits upon the profane beauty of the rhyming performance of local homeless men and street poets, and adapts it into the Dolemite character: a mythic, Stagger Lee-like sex machine (“fucking up motherfuckers is my game”). He put out a series of successful comedy albums, putting filthy, braggadocious poetry over a jazz/funk band – his influence on hip hop is well documented. Eventually he sinks all his money into a movie version of the character; made by friends and film students, it concerns a civic minded pimp with a stable of karate trained sex workers.

Dolemite (1974) is not on the unhinged level of, say, The Room or Manos: Hands of Fate, but it possesses that same quality of truly bad filmmaking: its rhythm is all off.

Background conversations audible in one shot will stop dead as it cuts to another. Actors take an extra breath and visibly search their mind for the next line. People talk over each other, not in a naturalistic, Robert Altman way, but in faintly panicked and faltering tones. Punches visibly miss the people recoiling from them. The film is crammed with T and A and bloody violence, yet, partly because cuts so frequently happen a beat after they should, it feels slow and padded for long stretches.

This quality, this uncanny simulacra of what we expect a story to be warping at the edges, an alien’s first attempt at mimicking an earth movie, is hypnotic and fascinating if you like it, and pretty much unwatchable if you don’t.

So naturally, the soundtrack is fucking incredible.

This is a common enough dynamic in Blaxploitation cinema: Superfly, Black Belt Jones and Shaft are all, to varying degrees, better than the films they score. Dolemite’s soundtrack – frequently featuring in the film as diegetic performance footage that is way, way out of sync – pulls a similar trick, but the gulf is far greater.

In Dolemite is my Name, Moore’s film, and not just the jokes, gets laughs at its premier. Moore appears to be taken aback, before leaning into the new reality, as he always has. If that’s why people are paying to see it, of course it’s supposed to be funny. The film becomes a cult smash and spawns a series of sequels..

While no one could watch Dolemite and conclude anyone involved wanted to be particularly solemn – there’s one of Moore’s trademark filthy stand up routines, and plenty of nasty humour in there – I think the quality of the soundtrack is what really gives them away.

From the opening – a classic blaxploitation title track, driving, stomping myth-making (“awwww, he’s bad …”) — to dreamy love ballads sung by Ben Taylor and Mary Love, to percussive wah-wah instrumentals, one thing is very clear: no one told The Soul Rebellion Orchestra they were scoring a film that’s so bad it’s good.

The intelligence and invention of the musicians survives the slightly muddy recording. Take the penultimate track, “The Jive Jungle” – rumbling and rambling through the rhythmic possibilities of the piano groove at its core, it could go for ten times its length and you wouldn’t get sick of it.

In short, this record is bad, but bad like Dolemite the character, not like Dolemite the film.

Cool Calm Pete – Heart

I’ve more or less made peace with the fact that, the occasional odd, beautiful mix on his Soundcloud aside, I’m not getting any more Cool Calm Pete. 2004’s Lost, the Korean-American rapper’s one and done album, represents, in its modest way, a defining article in what I want from Hip Hop, both in aesthetic and content.

The album might be my favourite chronicle of the “War on Terror” era, imbued with sense of living one’s life crushed between competing millenarian horrors, and the feeling that certain ideas of community and wholeness had splintered without anyone really noticing. Imagine how he feels now.

Lost came out the same year as Kanye’s The College Dropout, and musically, it feels like a slightly shabbier younger brother – same deep, soulful palette (check the lilting strings of “2am“, the one track to crack a million plays Pete’s Spotify), but while Kanye always plumped for prestige artists like Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye as sample sources, Pete’s beats have a thrift store aesthetic, making a virtue of their decay. Take the easy listening trash of Paul Marriot’s “Yesterday Once More” and then note the regal horns on Lost’s title track and wonder how many others would have bothered listening to the former for the near two minutes it would take to find them.

His insistently lazy flow confirms that skills and speed are not necessarily synonymous. His lyrics sketch the frustrations and joys of the interregnum between childhood and thinking of yourself as an adult that is a lot of people’s experience of their 20s. A key line, from “Cloudy”: “Fucking around and it sucks to be you, but I guess living a lie is a luxury too?”.

Another, from “Offline”: “Remember Y2K? A little bit of you hoped the world would end. Then it came and went, and moved on. And nothing happened.”

Then there was a collection of non-album singles, remixes and rarities called Loosies and that’s it. The talk, on the various forums where you still find people wondering where he went — as Walking Dead actor and professional level handsome man Steven Yuen says, if you know, you know — is that he had no desire to be famous, and now works as a graphic designer. A side gripe: in return for all the relentless horror of late capitalism, I expect at the very least to be able to locate hard copies of the two Cool Calm Pete records at a sane price. It’s failed even at providing that.

Best as I can figure, 2011’s single “Heart” is the last Cool Calm Pete song. To say he samples Nina Simone’s “Peace of Mind” isn’t quite right: for the majority Pete plays the record near unchanged, preserving and extending the hip swinging rhythm and turning it first into dialogue and then a duet.

CCP: “that perfect someone, she broke your concentration, love God and figments of your imagination”
Nina “ … when the fathers”
CCP: “Yo Papa was a rolling stone”
Nina: “And the mothers … “
CCP: “I heard her crying on the telephone. And they … “
Both: “…fight all the time”

The outro doesn’t let up for over two minutes, more than half the song’s length. Focusing in mantra-like on the phrase “no time for the heart”, there’s humming, snatches of drumming, echoing voices. It swerves suddenly, briefly back into Simone’s groove, then takes a breath and dissolve back into the drone, instruments and voices fading in and out until Simone’s cooing echoes away and there is a round of applause. That fades too, leaving a single organ note, and then the song and probably the catalogue it’s part of, is done.

It’s a retirement note of sorts – “for old times’ sake, put your hands up” — and building lines like “It’s so much money and stress, I’m getting depressed, to consider, that this might be the end …” from dialogue between Simone and Pete, perhaps I ought to be glad that’s all it was.

There are plenty of artists who’ve given me one or two irreplaceable albums before making a far more permanent and wasteful end to their time in public life than simply getting a new job. And the feeling of being personally addressed that comes with artists that arrive at the perfect time for you works both ways: just as often as I wish he’d do a second record, I find myself hoping he’s doing ok.