I Feel Love

Delighted to see Tim at The Rambler vowing to write more about contemporary classical music, and making a great start with Ligeti. I’ve been thinking along similar lines myself, although I’d be writing more about nineteenth and early twentieth-century stuff, which is my forte. Not that I have any intention of stopping writing about pop music and dance music, but I actually know a little bit about classical music, so that would be a novelty if nothing else. Also, I really want to start listening to classical music again, and these days I tend to view an experience as only meaningful insofar as I can blog about it!

Would love nothing better than to see the blogosphere suddenly overtaken by classical music talk. What’s your favourite Mahler symphony? Christa Ludwig vs Kathleen Ferrier FITE!!! etc. I can’t quite see it happening, but it would be just revenge for all the prog rock talk…

My first day of training at the call centre today. It went quite well, but there was one rather amusing moment when we were doing getting-to-know-you exercises; one person announced to the room that the first record she had ever bought was “that Kylie and Jason duet, I can’t remember what it was called,” and I shouted out “Especially For You!” with what may in retrospect have been unnecessary haste…

Matt joins the hordes of music bloggers making the move to Movable Type, under the welcoming auspices of Abe at Abstract Dynamics (actually, I’m not 100% sure Matt is being hosted by Abe, but most of them are). Make sure you read the very moving last entry at T.W.A.N.B.O.C. first though. I never realised the origins of the phrase “That Was a Naughty Bit of Crap”; that’s what you get for not reading the archives!

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Scott laments the totty decline on Neighbours, what with the exodus of two out of three of the Scully girls, plus cute Kiwi Lori. (That still leaves two Kiwis on the show, but we’re supposed to believe they’re both really Australians.) The big news in Australia is that Scully père (or at least the actor who plays him) has just been sacked without notice and escorted from the set, for no discernible reason, at least none that’s been made public. Apparently frantic rewrites and yet another diminuition in the Scully family are in the works. Meanwhile, though, I can promise Scott and other UK viewers that, totty notwithstanding, they’re in for a treat: Neighbours is the best it’s been for years, with lots of returning characters bringing some old-skool pressure (mostly characters from before my time actually, I didn’t watch for about the first five years). Best of these is the now-adolescent Sky Mangel, who is the best new teenager the show has had for ages, an indie kid with a heart of gold. Her sneering denunciations of commercial pop music are somehow endearing even to a Top 40 fan like me, and there was one beautiful scene where some wicked script editor allowed her to bring Delta Goodrem’s character down to size! Meanwhile, the departure of Darcy left a vacancy for Ramsay Street’s one allotted villain, a post which has been ably filled by the butter-wouldn’t-melt Izzy Hoyland. Like Rachel on This Life, Izzy has managed to charm almost everyone on the show into submission. So far the only people who see through her smiling exterior to the bitch within are Susan Kennedy (who has been rather delightfully allowed to be a bit nasty this year) and the aforementioned Sky Mangel. Tonight Izzy was to be seen trying to force wigs onto someone undergoing chemotherapy! (I won’t say who in case I spoil things for the UK people. Oh, actually re-reading Scott’s post he already knows.) Sheer brilliance.

Meanwhile, there’s been a bizarre Mommie Dearest/Postcards From the Edge storyline involving Nina’s (ie Delta Goodrem’s) mother, who turns out to be an aging cabaret legend. Who knew Nina even had a mother? Also, Scott will be pleased to hear that the charisma drain that was Libby Kennedy has finally left the show, taking the ugliest baby in TV history with her! (My apologies to the bub’s parents, but honestly, that “Ben” had a face that never failed to give me a little shiver of horror.)

One of the delights of the revitalised Freaky Trigger has been the Pumpkin Publog, which has been especially fascinating since it left behind the comparatively dull topic of pubs to concentrate on the minutiae of crisp flavours and food packaging.

Keep it up, boys and girls! Meanwhile, I’ll work on my magnum opus on the subject of Tim-Tams. Talking points will include: who was the malevolent genius at Arnott’s who decided there would be eleven Tim-Tams per pack, making it impossible to divide evenly between any number of people except one and eleven?

Goodbye darling. You’re my idol.

Chart time, and the new entries are actually a bit of a treat this week!

50: Bow Wow feat. Baby – Let’s Get Down Ah, he’ll always be Lil’ Bow Wow to me! But the now 16-year-old Bow Wow wants to be Taken Seriously (and why not—that’s pretty much the average age of your UK garage MC isn’t it?), leaving behind his past as Snoop Dogg’s Mini-Me. And this is actually good, too, a minimal speaker-busting “crunk” groove (well, maybe; I’m not actually 100% sure what “crunk” is but I think it’s this!) with nice little flutey bits.

47: Stella One Eleven – Out There Somewhere/SSD Australian indie outfit. The hype for this release uses promising terms like “slightly disco” and “Saint Etienne”, but I can’t find it for download anywhere and the band’s website doesn’t have audio, so I haven’t heard it.

32: Sophie Ellis Bextor – Mixed Up World It’s pretty unfashionable to like SEB, but I’ve always had a soft spot for her. This has a kind of latter-day Pet Shop Boys feel to it, pretty unmemorable but rather sweet. I’d tell that “Murder of the Dance Floor” joke that’s doing the rounds if I could remember it…

27: Mandy Kane – Billy Bones Australian novelty act. This sounds like a combination of power-pop and gothy synth-pop, genres that don’t really work for me separately, let alone together.

21: Holly Valance – State of Mind Ohhhhh yeeeaaahhh!!! Why isn’t this higher? One of the best singles of the year, and I don’t know why people feel like they have to compare it to the new Kylie song, which is also great but very different. The genius of this is the way that it keeps threatening to collapse into a heap, there are so many changes of direction and so many overt mini-gestures (check the “ahhh-ahhh” straight out of “Fade to Grey”!), but it’s all held together by that merciless hi-NRG beat, which sounds like the kind of thing you would hear filtering through from the front room at 4 am while you’re lying in a sling with a stranger’s well-oiled fist advancing on you. If you know what I mean. Spectacular.

20: Junior Senior – Move Your Feet Seems like years since I first heard this, but apparently it’s just been released here. Anyway, it’s great. Junior Senior are Danish; Junior is thin and straight, Senior is fat and gay, just put-p-p-put-put their record on and all of your troubles are dead and gone! That’s all you need to know.

Meanwhile, Australian Idol are still at No 1, which is no surprise to me considering the astonishing number of people who arrive here googling for the lyrics. (Yes, people are searching for the lyrics to “Rise Up.” I know, I know.) New entries in the Top 10 are Hilary Duff’s “So Yesterday” (which I don’t think I’ve heard), and—in its 14th week in the charts!—Blu Cantrell’s “Breathe”, which for some reason has failed to make the dent here that it did in the UK (it’s excellent, though).

Australian Idol report: tonight was Big Band night. It was quite a fun episode really, interesting to see the different ways the contestants approached the genre. No spectacular performances, but no absolute duds either (well, maybe one).

Guy was probably the best performer of the night once again. I am really starting to think he deserves to win. His version of “Hit the Road Jack” (sic! what a great song for him to do if he gets voted out…) was loads of fun, and “The Way You Look Tonight” (the only performance sung in front of an old-fashioned stationary mike) was smooth and lovely. Pretty hard to fault anything in Guy’s performances, and he continues to be the contestant most likely to surprise us by interpreting the theme in an interesting way.

Paulini was again superb, although I thought perhaps she could have held back a bit more on her first number, “At Last,” which sounded a bit like Beyoncé Goes Big Band. Her follow-up, “Almost Like Being In Love,” was terrific though. She was the only contestant who attempted to scat! Good for her. (Her comment to the effect that “I believe I can do anything” might hurt her though. I’m a bit nervous for her this week: keep voting, people!)

Cosima made an excellent choice for her first number, “L-O-V-E” (the one that goes “L is for the way you look at me” etc.). I was a bit worried that she’d sing the arse out of everything she attempted, but she gave possibly her first subtle performance ever, a cheeky, pixie-ish lounge-y interpretation that worked very well. (Dicko’s comment that she “looked like someone out of Roman Holiday” was odd though; did he mean Audrey Hepburn or Gregory Peck?) Her second number, though, confirmed my fears; I didn’t like her “heartfelt” interpretation of “Smile” at all, especially since it was completely at odds with the arrangement.

Shannon was the surprise package of the night, managing to pull out performances of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and “New York, New York” that at least vied with those of certain other People Who’ve Tried To Do Swing Numbers Who Really Shouldn’t (viz. Robbie Williams). The latter was an especially good choice, as, let’s face it, singing “New York, New York” is more about gumption than actual ability.

So all in all, a pretty good night. I have no idea who will go tomorrow. On tonight’s performances I would probably chuck out Cosima, purely on the basis of her second song, but I still think Shannon is pretty much frontin’ (albeit charmingly). If Paulini or Guy goes I will weep copious tears.

[Update: check out some very smart comments on the big band special from an actual jazz musician (my brother).]

An interesting piece by Kevin Guilfoyle in The Morning News about fade-outs in music—how could anything written on that topic not be interesting?—which unfortunately grabs the blindingly obvious title so I’m going to have to go for the second most blindingly obvious for this post.

Guilfoyle has a lovely theory that fadeouts were introduced to make it clear when music played over the radio came from recordings rather than being played live, which unfortunately turns out to be complete rubbish; fadeouts weren’t introduced until the 50s, long after radio began, and reached the peak of their popularity in the mid-60s (virtually every Motown hit ends with a fadeout as I’m sure you all know). According to Guilfoyle’s friend “Jim, the recording engineer,” the purpose of fadeouts is not utilitarian but aesthetic:

There’s an aesthetic to it. When you fade-out on the chorus, it sounds as if the song goes on forever. It’s eternal. The listener is just dropping in on a few minutes of a performance that never ends.

I think that’s exactly right, and it’s a pity in a way that Guilfoyle tried to press this thought into immediate sociological service by arguing that the way in which fadeouts signify “never-endingness” portends the iPod generation’s “always on” mentality, the way music surrounds us so much that it never seems to actually be off. It’s not that there’s not a valid point to be made about “our generation” (for instance, since I’ve been listening fairly constantly to music on headphones while I use the computer, I’ve been wondering myself whether I’ve started to take music for granted); rather, I don’t think this “attitude” to music, which is about perpetual gratification, follows from Jim’s point, which is surely about how pop music withholds gratification as much as anything. There’s a fort-da logic to the fade-out, which holds out the utopian promise that the song is still going, but only elsewhere (in other words, it’s literally utopian). And of course the fade-out is the sound of the music moving away from you, or vice versa. There’s considerably more complexity and ambiguity to it, I think, than Guilfoyle allows for, but that’s always the problem when you try to extrapolate cultural meanings from formal attributes.

Another way of expressing Jim’s point is that fadeouts are a compromise between an aesthetic of looping and the need for the song to actually end. In most cases of course it’s the chorus that’s looped and faded, although there are some wonderful examples of fadeouts that occur not on the chorus but on an entirely new musical thread (a kind of bridge to nowhere): perhaps the greatest ever example of this is Sly and the Family Stone’s “Stand!,” but who could forget the fadeout in Justin Timberlake’s “Like I Love You,” which occurs just as you think the track is about to head off in a new direction! (See also this ILM thread.)

Dance music, then, results from people like Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder taking the idea of fadeouts—the bits that you want to go on forever—and actually making them go on for ever. (Well, almost forever.)

[Update: I do realise that Guilfoyle's piece is meant to be humorous, so my apologies if I've taken any of his jokes too seriously!]

Just a hint to people trying out iTunes for Windows: if you have “Sound Check” ticked under the Effects tab in Preferences, the software will go through all your files in the background, checking them for volume levelling. This seems to be very resource intensive, and was making my music skip and making everything very sluggish in general, so i’ve turned it off until I can give it a chance to plug its way through everything while I’m not here. (I do have over 3000 MP3 files, incredibly enough; where the hell did they all come from?)

Meanwhile, I’m no apologist for Apple in general, but I must say I do admire the cleanness and usability of the iTunes interface. I now just have to decide whether I can quite commit myself to the irreversible process of letting iTunes organise my music for me by clicking “Consolidate Library”. Has anyone else taken the plunge?

So far I’m unconvinced by the virtues of the Music Store, as I suspect many Windows people will be (we already have pretty good, albeit legally—er—dubious, ways of downloading music), but it’s not even available in Australia yet, so Apple is as good as telling us to keep up the illegal downloading in the meantime, really, aren’t they?

Sasha Frere-Jones with the oddest news of the day: Timbaland is remixing Dido’s “White Flag”! Can’t wait to hear that one. (Actually, it could be weirder; he could be remixing Delta’s “Not Me, Not I.”) Great post, and a lovely insight into what it’s like being a Famous Music Writer and shit. (Speaking of which, now that I’ve been, like, quoted on a band’s website—right next to Kodwo Eshun, no less!—when do people start sending me free stuff?)

[Update] Sasha elaborates: “Tim’s astringent bump takes the pong off Dido’s wrapped Grandma pocket caramels and leaves blank spaces to bring out the grain of her voice.” Cool! Why didn’t he produce it in the first place? Looks like I might end up a believer after all, Mark!