Music
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“Can music change the world?” is the question that dogs me more than any other at the moment, and suffice to say, as Simon Reynolds acknowledged during this years Mark Fisher memorial lecture, it has no simple answer. There is always the risk of a kind of theory-based wish fulfilment fantasy when addressing this, as…
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“Who?” – Billie Eilish Who is Van Halen? To some not knowing the answer to that question is unforgivable, a mark of disrespect to ones elders, what came before you, to these guardians of music history there is a right and a wrong way to listen, talk about music, and it invariably arcs back towards…
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A problem with the future is that everyone wants to be the one to find it. Just as the music press has often prided itself on having found “the next big thing”, we all want to be the ones to have picked up on the emergent strand, that one element of the present which presents…
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“It had everything that I thought rock and roll should have. It was violent, paranoid music for a violent, paranoid time “ The shrieking, disjointed funk of the Pop Group is something I distinctly remember discovering via a Nick Cave interview at some stage, during a long trawl through the archives of youtube in which…
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“One morning you awake and all the time has melted away: no more hotel bedroom afternoons, light moving like seaweed over the pale impersonal walls. All your life, dreaming of the other side of the mirror, where the colours all reverse, and now you finally remember what it was you saw in that dressing room…
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Peppered throughout the new track from Algiers, “Can the Sub-Bass Speak?” are conversation-pieces, quick-fire statements, on the bands music, on the classification of Black music and the Black experience, a direct quotation from a negative review of the band’s last album on that gleaming bastion of taste-making “cool-kid” pluralism Pitchfork. “The effect is weirdly impersonal.”…
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A dark, inscrutable passageway into the undergrowth… . Scratchy, anxious sound, ready to burst at the seams, lurching in sputters and starts until it crashes into another rhythmic contortion. Shimmering, skating, pummelling, staggering, slippery notes, squeezing into and past each other, squirming into the cracks in the firmament, the orifices in the mask. . Stilted,…
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I lose count of the times I’ve heard someone claim they don’t like a piece of music or a film because it’s “too depressing”. What this means I have yet to find out, but I’ve become aware over the years that it seems to apply overwhelmingly to a lot of my own cultural library, and…
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“While plucking feathers from a swan song, shit might pretzel Christ’s intestines” intones Scott Walker with operatic fervour on the opening track of his final 2012 album Bish Bosch. It surprises even myself that this sprawling and utterly strange avant tract of absurdity grotesquery, ugliness, beauty, horror was my introduction to Scott Walker, but in…
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A song that has stuck with me in particular lately, not merely due to a catchy hook but for its distinctive pathos, is Imagine, from Ariana Grande’s magnificent new album Thank U, Next. With the song Grande paints an idealised picture of a relationship with the romantic subject undercut constantly with the refrain, a plea to “imagine…