Here are all my posts from the TypePad years. Sorry about all the broken image links and so on; I couldn’t be arsed transferring them all. Anyway, it’s the words that (hopefully) matter.
While I let all this lie fallow for a while, I’ll be instablogging over at Posterous when I feel the urge. Very Gen Y! And I have my professional blog right here.
Thanks for being here. Oh, and there’s one image I want to make sure I don’t lose…here’s Mr eel’s banner that served me so well for so long:
I understand faceless advertisers will sometimes fail to see accurately into my soul, but you have to wonder when your friends do it too…
I love that "SCARILY accurate" – is it scarier to find out you're a lesbian when you thought you weren't, or that you're not a lesbian when you thought you were?
A certain little-known label from Cologne has just arrived at eMusic. Who cares if they've jumped the shark, there's still that amazing back catalogue. More to come, apparently.
eMusic is officially amazing these days. I'm not even signed up for their affiliate program (I'm in a paperwork bottleneck) so you know this is a non-mercenary endorsement. But, I mean, R&S! Or, equally drool-worthy, BIS!Dolly! If you can't find 30 tracks a month you really, really want to download in their vast catalogue, then I'm afraid I have to tell you that you actually don't like music.
Infinite Thought has just concluded a magnificent series of posts about her (or is it his? I think I once knew and have forgotten) recent trip to the US. Some of the most nuanced and non-barrow-pushing writing about the States that I’ve read in a long time.
“What I’ve got they used to call the blues”: and these days, they call it something else, but exactly what is an open question. One of the effects of the economy and understatement of Karen’s performance is that you’re not quite sure of the real extent of the misery the singer is feeling: it could be anything from mild ennui to clinical depression. But it’s not just the biographical fallacy that sways me more to the latter end of the spectrum (unfortunately, every single Carpenters song has to submit to being read as a coded harbinger of fate).
What makes this song one of the greatest ever about depression is the way its easy-listening template allows it to evoke numbness, boredom, anhedonia. An inability to feel is after all one of the main symptoms of depression, which ought to make litotes (rhetorical understatement) one of its master tropes…if it were, music in general would be a lot less lugubrious. Here, though, the sense that what’s being said is standing in for something darker even carries through to the supposedly hopeful middle eight, where, we are told, Karen is comforted by the thought of “the one who loves me”–has any such appeal ever sounded less convincing? It might just be that this is a weak part of the song, but given the sublime beauty of the rest of it I’m prepared to extend the benefit of the doubt here: we are going through the motions on purpose.
In a performance that relies on understatement, small gestures come to the fore: here it’s the slight vibrato on “hanging around”, the plangent harmonica melody, and the very odd, sudden mid-note sforzando on the very last word (”dowwwwwwwwwwwOWWWWWwwwwwwwwn”), an effect I’m unaware of having heard in any other pop song.
The first PSB single I remember hearing was “What Have I Done to Deserve This?”–obviously something of a watershed because it introduced me to not only the Pet Shop Boys but also Dusty Springfield. (It was a few years later that I became a fully-fledged Dusty fan, but I guess “What Have I…?” planted a landmine that was waiting to be stepped on. A delightful land mine, of course.)
So it must have been somewhat after the fact that I first encountered their debut single. But “West End Girls” has subsequently gained a kind of aura for me that’s never quite been replicated in the rest of the PSBs’ career. It seems to me like the most coolly sophisticated pop song of all time. Part of that is to do with the spoken verses (you can’t quite call it “rapping”). Neil Tennant’s singing voice has never been a favourite of mine; fey, insubstantial male voices are a bit of a stumbling block for me in a way that the female equivalents (obviously) aren’t. But when he just talks in that posh accent with no downwardly-mobile pretensions whatsoever, it’s one of pop’s most refreshing disconnects.
Unlike “Billie Jean” where the lyrics seem to me completely beside the point, I really like the lyrics of “West End Girls”. But I like them in an impressionistic way, again I really have no idea what the song is “about”. East End boys and West End girls, I guess. So: desire across class boundaries? That makes it sound a bit too much like Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” though. Maybe it would be very obvious if I did what I never do and just sat down and read the lyrics properly, but to be honest I’d rather not know. “West End Girls” is just one of those euphonious phrases, like “the storming of the Winter Palace”, that is wonderful to contemplate in its own right.
The production, too, is a miraculous navigation of the murky waters of post-New Pop, managing to sound neither dessicated nor pandering in a gruesome White Soul kind of way. It just exists, geniunely unique and unrepeatable. The Pet Shop Boys released a more or less unrivalled string of superb singles following this, of course, but still, nothing quite as good.
You’ve probably already heard of the rather excellent muxtape site; well, here’s my effort. Something a bit different from my usual; in tribute to winter’s very sudden arrival in Melbourne it’s a collection of tracks that give me chills (in one way or another).
The site has a lovely interface and is a real joy to use. There seems to be a glitch with some of the timings: a couple of my tracks show up as 0:00 (they still play fine). But apart from that everything works beautifully. Even though it’s very “now” the site feels kind of retro, and not just because of the mixtape metaphor: it doesn’t (yet) have any of the social networking doodads we’ve come to expect as normal features of this kind of site. I find myself wondering how I can let people know I like their mix if I can’t leave comments? Where do I see a list of people with similar tastes to me? How do I “friend” people? Where is the ranking system, the Facebook integration, the TypePad widget? (There’s RSS, that’s about it.)
Apparently some of these things are coming, but in the meantime I’m enjoying the pared back simplicity and the fact that there are only two ways of finding mixes: following a direct link from an outside site, or clicking on one of the random links on the homepage. I’m hoping to experience a bit of serendipity; my random clicks so far have generally turned up a whole lot of indie rock but I can still hope. It would be nice to be able to leave comments, though; that’s one social networking feature I’d actually go for.
The first recollection I have of being aware of Michael Jackson’s existence is seeing the video (or film clip, as we called them back then) for “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” when it was released in 1979. This might seem odd considering that I was born in 1970 and Michael and his brothers had been releasing hit songs throughout my childhood, but it’s a measure of the rather sporadic relationship I had with pop music back then (and to some extent continue to have). I’m always bemused and slightly envious when I read the various serial commenters on Tom Ewing’s Popular give very precise recollections of their own experience and the public reception of any given pop single, up to and including what the drummer was wearing when it was performed on Top of the Pops. For one thing, my family was never allowed to watch Countdown (the Australian equivalent of TOTP and at least as influential on the rest of my generation), so I only got to hear music by accident or by occasionally tuning into AM radio (which was all there was).
Anyway, “Don’t Stop…” more or less instantly became one of my favourite songs and could easily have been included in this list. But I chose “Billie Jean” as the more life-changing track, even though I can’t remember whether or not I actually liked it when it was relased in 1983. (I was one of the few people in the world who didn’t shell out for the Thriller LP, I remember that much.) As a memory trigger the song has a melancholy edge; ‘83 was the year I started high school and “Billie Jean” is associated very clearly for me with the dancefloor at school socials, always a rather lonely place for me but also the place where I discovered I actually loved dancing, choosing to make a virtue of the fact I wasn’t dancing with anyone and experience it as a kind of dialectic between alienation and community. Hey, I was before my time! (NB my dancing exploits did not extend to any attempt to moonwalk; in any case I looked down on “prescribed” dance moves and communal dancing of any kind, groaning inwardly every time the strains of “Nutbush City Limits” started up…)
“Billie Jean” was an ideal soundtrack for dancefloor epiphanies because it is so downright ominous; and here I’m only talking about the music, this is one of those songs where I choose to completely ignore the lyrics, and indeed it was many years before I even realised what it was “about”. There’s the famous stalking bassline of course, but for me the really terrifying elements of the song are the staccato keyboard stabs that puntuate the whole thing, and the scintillating descending string line that comes in the second chorus (a brilliantly delayed moment; once you know the song well its absence creates a real tension in the first chorus).
I could go on and talk about how the downbeat tone of “Billie Jean” reveals Michael’s inner turmoil and prefigures the vicissitudes of his career, but nah, I’ll save that crap for when I talk about Karen Carpenter.
I was thinking of selecting “Confide in Me” as my Kylie song for this list, but in the end that just seemed too safe, this indie-approved, unexceptionable Kylie from the point in her career (well, one of the several points) when she decided to try her hand at being a Serious Artist. Remember the label shift to Deconstruction (ha!), the black-and-white cover of Kylie in a trouser suit wearing thick-framed glasses and the title “Kylie Minogue” in restrained Helvetica? Très chic of course, but I still have a soft spot for the original SAW Kylie (note to younger readers: by SAW I mean not the torture porn franchise but “Stock Aitken and Waterman”, ask your mum and dad), the Kylie who was more or less strictly for The Gays, the Kylie I saw perform at Mardi Gras (the only time I ever went, actually). In any case, “Better the Devil You Know” has always been my favourite Kylie song so in the end it was the only possible choice.
I thought then, and still do, that the music is quite striking, especially the harmony. Listening to sequence of contortions required to shift the key from the B flat major of the verse to the distant D flat major of the chorus (”a hundred times or more-ore-ore-ore!”) you’re struck by how weird SAW could actually be at times. No I’m not going to push some “they were more avant-garde than Stockhausen!” line, but for anyone who thinks they made paint-by-numbers pop this is a corrective. There’s an even weirder example in “What Do I Have to Do”, another song from the Rhythm of Love album that marks the high point of the Kylie/SAW collaboration.
I’ve also always found Kylie the most enjoyable to listen to of all the female singers with undeniably weak voices. She seems to find a way of putting her limited instrument to the best possible use, and this song is certainly an example of that.
Mostly, though, this one’s about memories, my first tentative forays into gay life (in Adelaide! the glamorous Mars Bar! but still!), my learning not to be embarrassed by cheesiness. It occurs to me that the latter is a subtext in the whole “rockism” debate, there’s an association for me at least between anti-pop sentiment and the closet. I wonder whether that’s why some gay men become such ardent popists. It certainly always made me sceptical of the young gay men I would meet (they were often my students and would expound this point of view earnestly in their essays) who thought that their interest in indie music was some act of guerilla resistance against hegemonic gay culture. I quite liked hegemonic gay culture because of what it rescued me from, and I still do. And of course I still love Kylie.
