vox

90s Music Monday

I really don't get the content industry sometimes. I mean, I do - insomuch that occasionally I can flip my perspective and sort of see things from their world view in which they live in a world in which they don't really understand why the things that work for them actually work and thus they fear change no matter how illogical some of their arguments are.

As a case in point - music videos on YouTube. Music videos are adverts. Sure, ever since "Thriller" there's been the chance that you can monetise these adverts in non standard ways but still, they're adverts. The raison d'etre of adverts is to be seen by as many people as possible yet the idea that people might virally pass around music videos appears to scare the living bejesus out of the Recording Industry who, perversely, also spend millions trying to promote viral content.

Despite these self evident contradictions - and in the face of persistent and compelling evidence that new technology that aids distribution only helps content producers and that, perversely, those who "pirate" more music are also overwhelmingly more likely to both spend more money on legitimate content and eulogise, proselytize and generally act like authentic but unpaid brand ambassdors - there seems to be this gnawing pain amongst these people that someone, somewhere might be not be paying them money.

This manifests itself in the archives of the 100+ 90s Music Monday posts I've done being littered with "This content is no longer available" and "Embedding is disabled by request". Let's face it - these incoherent ramblings, as sad and nerdy as they are, basically represent one long unrequited love letter to an industry which appears to hate me. It's a sonnet composed to an abusive relationship.

I was pleasantly surprised  recently to find that "Night Swimming" by REM had a video. It seemed like a somewhat unlikely choice for a single and, despite it being my favourite song off "Automatic for the People" I don't remember seeing the video in my youth. Sure it's the drowsiest of all the songs on a well crafted yet somewhat morbidly soporific album - made in the period where REM had soaked up all their angst and anger using copious wads of thousand dollar bills. By all accounts it was supposed to be a much harder rocking album but the direction was changed early on - perhaps the mega success of the acoustic influenced "Out Of Time" made boat rocking an unappealing prospect.

Anyway - the video is available here on 'remhq' on You Tube. You'll have to click through because apparently the thought that the consumer might not be able to be corralled into a tightly controlled media 'experience' is an anathema.

Instead you get "Everybody Hurts" - a song which I felt like I ought to like but which for some reason rubbed me up the wrong way, like it had been genetically engineered in lab and focussed grouped to death in order to be just emo enough. One more pinch of soaring strings, the video of cinematically compelling 'ordinary people' all with their own little burden in life, the crescendo of everyone getting out of their cars to be free of ... something, that slightly too pat fake Newscast at the end for just the right sprinkling of verité ...

REM - Everybody Hurts

   

Fun fact which I will share because I have a chronic case of the grumps today: "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" from the album "Monster" is a reference to a somewhat bizarre event in which two assailants attacked news anchor Dan Rather in 1986 and, between beatings, would shout "Kenneth, what's the frequency?" for no sufficently well explained reason. Of course I can't link to the official video because it's mysteriously absent from The YouTube.

Show me this earth thing that you call 'Urination'

Pick One

Alternative titles:

• Bathroom 51
• X Flies
• Kinkiest threesome ever
• "Honey, are you sure the child is mine?"

I CAN HAZ TURDUCKEN

♫He could play that plastic guitar just like ringing a bell♫

Adam rocks out ...

90s Music Monday

I struggled getting started writing this week's 90MM because I don't actually have the vocabulary to describe The KLF.

I started off trying to write something comparing them to that scene in [insert name of practically any teen movie here] in which the cool kids are pretending to agree with the uncool kid but actually they're just taking the piss out of them - but that didn't quite work.

Then, worrying that I was revealing a bit too much of my not-so-secret enjoyment of trashy teen movies, I thought about Marcel Duchamps and his dubbing of a urinal 'art'  and what it meant when one of the leading lights of art starts, if not rejecting the concepts but at least examining the more self-evident absurdities.

Then I started off on a tract about style-vs-fashion and how some people are able to make whatever they do look good no matter what.

What it comes down to though is that Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty in their incarnations as The KLF, The Kopyright Liberation Front/Kings of the Low Frequencies, The Jams, the Justified Ancients of Mummu, The Timelords, The K Foundation, One World Orchestra, 2K etc etc managed to simultaneously mock the whole music and art industry whilst also changing the entire face of the industry and putting out storming, anthemic tracks like this

KLF - Last Train To Transcentral

and this

KLF - What Time is Love?

(the less bizarre video for the more conventionally dancey UK version of the track available here and the "Pure Trance" version is available here)

and this

KLF - 3 am Eternal

thus inventing the whole "Stadium House" concept whilst getting Tammy Wynette to sing about ice cream trucks and discordian theory in "Justified and Ancient"

KLF - Justified & Ancient (Stand by the Jams)

This is a band, if calling them that isn't a huge understatement who put out some of the best tracks and one of the best albums of the 90s (in the form of "The White Room" a sort of not quite soundtrack for a film of the same name that was completed but never released) but also managed to build up their own self mythology and wrapped it cherry picked parts of "The Illuminatus! Trilogy". They made art films and they made number 1s and they made fun of the whole industry and life style whilst completely mastering it and subverting it to their will. And they did it all in such a way that you were 100% sure that they had their tongues firmly in cheek except, maybe, just maybe, they were being serious.

They practically invented the modern bootleg with "Whitney Joins The JAMs" whcih mashed "Mission: Impossible" samples with Whitney Houstons "I wanna dance with somebody". Then, as The Timelords they deliberately wrote a nauseatingly catchy "lowest common denominator, something that Timmy Mallet would understand" song which took samples from Doctor Who and crashed them into Garry Glitter's "Rock and Roll (Part 2)" and The Sweet's "Blockbuster!" with the explicit intention of getting a number 1 single. Which they did with "Doctorin The Tardis". Then they wrote a book called "The Manual (How to have a number 1 the easy way)" which told you how they did it and gave the guarantee that if you followed the book to the letter and didn't get a number 1 they'd refund the cost of the book.

They 'retired' in the most spectacular form possible - at the 1992 Brit Awards they performed a live "violently antagonistic performance" of "3 A.M Eternal" in front of "a stunned music-business audience" with crust punk group Etreme Noise Terror. Prevented from throwing buckets of Sheep entrails over the audience a bekilted Bill Drummond theatrically limped on stage and fired blanks from a machine gun into the air

The KLF & Extreme Noise Terror "3AM Eternal" (Live at The Brits 1992)"

After which they burnt their last million pounds on the Isle of Jura and filmed it.

Every time someone tries to tell you that Green Day or Limp Bizkit or Sum 41 or god-forbid Avril Lavigne are punk I want you to think of this. I'm not saying that their music is bad necessarily I'm just saying that if some one tries to straight faced tell you that those or similar artists are "punk" then I want you to cock slap them. I want you to physically either punch them in the penile or vaginal area and/or lay about their face with your penis or other similarly degrading appendage - work with what both you and they have people. Get creative. Make sure they REALLY TRULY understand.

 Because it's important.

Except when it's not.

90s Music Monday

House music has always veered between having a sense of humour about itself and being thoroughly up its own arse. Tracks have trodden the very thin line between novelty, kitsch and playfulness - witness the differences between The Prodigy's "Charlie" (which, even at 180bpm, sounds twice as slow now as it did in my head at the time), Urban Hype's "Trip To Trumpton" and plummeting to new depths with Doctor Spin's "Tetris".

Set against this backdrop was N-Trance who are an odd datum on the arc of early to mid nineties techno. Their first demo was an (unreleased?) rave version of the theme tune to kids' tv program "Roobarb and Custard" but in '92 they put out "Set You Free" - a genuine, euphoric, hands in air rave anthem.

N-Trance - Set You Free

But then they veered off into novelty record territory with BeeGee's cover "Stayin' Alive" and accompanying slapstick pseudo 'comedy' video

N-Trance - Stayin' Alive

and then the slightly less goofy (but only just) with their take on Rod Stewart's "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?"

N-Trance - Do you think I'm sexy

The funny thing about both of those were that, along side long term collaborator and vocalist Kelly Llorenna they drafted in Ricardo Da Force who was, at the time, most famous for being the some time vocalist for the KLF who probably challenged the piss taking/completely credible boundaries more than anyone else before or since.

But more on that next week ...

In which I date myself

Do a barrel roll

I'm pretty sure the only person in my neighbourhood who might get this was 8 at the time it came out.

Also: by date myself I mean - "give clues as to my age" not "pick myself up, take myself out to dinner and then hence to watch a movie before attempting to indulge in a little light self-frottaging and then ending the evening early because I have a headache and I have to get up early and telling myself that I really like me but I'm not really in a relationship place right now"

Gosh, I'm glad we got that cleared up.

90s Music Monday

Apparently #musicmonday is a trending topic on the Twitters - bunch of bloody Johnny Come Latelys. Some of us have been here every Monday morning (for various definitions of 'every', 'monday' and 'morning'), mining the rich vein of at-least-a-decade-old music for nuggets and gems to present you with. Although I'll concede that it may be closer to a family cat, possibly elderly and constantly smelling faintly of urine, 'presenting' you with a the mutilated carcass of a songbird than to a lover presenting you with a platter of the finest silks, gems and perfumes purchasable.

Either way -  I forge on, secure in the knowledge that I'll be here long after those young whipper snappers have got tired and moved on to new things.

Anyway - my American friends will be blissfully unaware that for British soap operas are completely unlike their Yankee brethren. For a start there are no impossibly glamorous people or complicated plots involving hitherto unknown twin siblings, murders and lengthy comas. Or vampires. No British soaps, such as "East Enders" are mostly populated by grim, ugly people living grim, ugly lives in grim, ugly surroundings. See this comparison for example:

 

Anyway, when we want to import a little glamour we instead turned to two Australian soaps - "Neighbours" (24 years old this year) and "Home and Away" (22 years old this year). I mean, when I say glamour it's still no "Stairwells of Time" they're are still set in mundane locations - a Melbourne suburb and small, coastal town near Sydney respectively - after all, and the people them selves are pretty ordinary.

But they boast a startlingly accomplished and wide spread alumni amongst the cast. Probably the most famous, is of course, Ms Kylie Minogue, now so famous that her surname has withered and dropped off with disuse, like an unused appendix. Kylie played tomboyish greasemonkey Charlene Ramsey in Neighbours

Kylie

   

Meanwhile Heath Ledger played a goth boy who took Sally's virginity in H&A, Dichen Lachman now plays Sierra in "Dollhouse", Guy Pearce was the main character in "Memento", Jim Dale has been everything from the vice president in "24" to the big boss in "Ugly Betty", Isla Fisher's been in, well lots and now dates Borat, Julian McMahon is in "Nip/Tuck", Simon Baker's the titular character in "The Mentalist", Ryan "Vinny Patterson" Kwanten plays Jason Stackhouse in "True Blood" and Naomi Watts has been, in well, lots as well. I hear she's quite succesful.

Which is, to say, you probably didn't realise it but there are Australians everywhere. Do you really know your friends and neighbours? Do they ever casually "chuck" a "shrimp" on the "barbie"? Do you ever see them with faint traces on zinc on their noses? These and more may be an indication that you have an Australian infestation. You have been warned.

Anyway - so on to the main point of this increasingly rambling and incoherent post. 90s music. And Australians. Who were in soap operas.

Oh, look it's adorable elfin faced pixie Natalie Imbrugliagaliagala looking all quirky and alternative

Natalie Imbruglia - Torn

It's not a bad concept as a video although I think iconic German synthpop band Wolfsheim did it better with their video dyptych of "Find You're Here" and "Find You're Gone"

Wolfsheim - Find You're Here & Find You're Gone

Christ, bet you'd never thought you'd find a musical blog which mentioned Natalie Imbruglalalaiglia and Wolfsheim in the same post.

Anyway, somewhat little known fact - Ms Imbruglaglaglala didn't write (and by 'write' I mean, 'was given the song by one of the 5 pop composer supremos who secretely write about 90% of stuff that's in the charts these days') "Torn" it was originally a 1991 track by a Swedish band called Ednaswap

Ednaswap - Torn

which was then covered by Danish singer Lis Sørensen as "Burnt" in 1993 (in Danish - listen to it, it will mildly freak you out)

Lis Sørensen - Brændt

and then again, by Trine Rein in 1996 sounding much more like Ms Imbruglililgigglli's eventual 1997 version

Trine Rein - Torn

Of course the best version ever done was Johann Lippowitz's mime version

Johann Lippowitz - Torn

which he then duetted with Natalie Imbrogliogle at "The Secret Policeman's Ball"

Johann Lippowitz with Natalie Imbruglia - Torn

So there you go - 8 videos and 3 pictures. Let's see you stick that in 140 characters.

90s Music Monday

Placebo are one of those bands that I always feel oddly guilty about enjoying which is odd because "Nancy Boy" is damn fine blistering 3 minute pop song which lovely crunchy guitars and a thumping bass line. I mean the video's a little bit "Art school student gets his 'alternative' friends together and then gets a bit enthusiastic with the Inferno effects plugins" but I never seem to get tired of listening to the song itself

Placebo - Nancy Boy

and "Pure Morning" is annoyingly compelling too

Placebo - Pure morning

It's slightly disturbing that Brian Molko is probably one of the prettiest people in pop.

As a bonus track - not strictly 90s but I really like the Placebo cover of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" which Q magazine memorably described as "sound[ing] more like a 'pact with the Devil' than the original 'deal with God'"

Placebo - Running Up That Hill

even if the video is like a better dressed emo version of Feeder's "Just A Day" (which for some reason I can't help watching every time it comes on)

Hmm - no nerdy music factoids so far. Errm. Ok - the reason why drummer Steve Hewitt is blurred out in the Nancy Boy video is because he was still contractually obliged to a band on another label at the time.

 

Spotted during a bit of Economics Blog spelunking

"Economists should listen more to techies on what techs will be feasible at what costs, but techies should also listen more to economists on the social implications of tech costs. Alas, just as economists prefer to rely on their intuitive folk tech forecasts, techies prefer to rely instead on their intuitive folk economics."

- via Arnold Kling commenting on Robin Hanson's "Overcoming Bias"