Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
Shall we talk about the value of having more than a riff to play with, for once? Now, don’t get me wrong, I love a good riff, and George Harrison’s “Wah-Wah” has a great one, but still. Here’s Harrison’s demo for the song, with the riff firmly in place (Unlike the lyrics) –
– and here’s the finished song:
Holy crap, just listen to what the finished arrangement brings to the proceedings. The drums! The bassline! Giving the “Wah-Wah!” to the harmonies! It becomes instantly more exciting to listen to, and a complete song (The keyboard in the background! The guitar solo that almost sounds like horns for a second!) instead of a pleasant enough ditty. Clearly, there’s something to be said for leaving things to percolate in your head (and recording studio) for some time, if this is anything to go by…
Ah, insomnia.
As I type this, it’s 6:30am, and I’ve been awake since 4. I didn’t wake up of my own accord; Ernie is sick and requires eye drops every 4 hours, so at 4am, it was time… but then I couldn’t get back to sleep. You know that feeling, when you’re lying in bed and your brain just tells you that you’re definitely awake no matter how tired you feel? That was me. When I was younger, falling asleep was no problem; I could be up until 4am at a club or working on something or in some deep, awkward romantic tryst and as soon as I’d get to bed, I’d be asleep. Now, though, I lie there all too often, all too awake.
I remember, when I was a kid, the tricks I’d try to play on myself to induce sleep. I’d try to remember the opening scroll from Star Wars – I used to be able to do that in its entirety, worryingly – or count from 100 backwards, imagining each number was a lower rung on a ladder towards sleeping. Neither work anymore, sadly; the noise in my brain overpowers it all. And so, I lie here hours before the sunrise, cuddling a sick dog and reading Marvel Comics: The Untold Story on my Kindle, wishing that I could close my eyes and open them hours later.
The above is the instrumental version of the complete track – There’s a rap by Princess Superstar on there that’s kind of awesome in her “I am the female Eminem” way, and includes the great/terrible/hilarious “I’m gonna spit my saliva/You’re definitely the worst of all time-a/You know what definitely doesn’t feel ya?/My vagina” – but it’s not on YouTube for whatever reason. Luckily, what I really love about the song is the music, so let’s go with that. Because, listen to the way this just goes; from the drum intro to the bass-led crawl of the song, jangly guitars and handclaps, this is a marvelously funky reappropriation of all manner of small pieces of soul and r’n’b music, jumbled together into something that sounds like it could’ve come from any time from the 1960s on up before the rap is laid on top. Shawn Lee – for he is the one responsible for this – you are a great man. So great, in fact, that I’ll even forgive you for this:
Rhyming “nose” and “so-and-so’s” is, of course, lyrical genius.
It’s the bleep bloop bleep bloop GUITAR of the song’s opening that gets me everytime. The rest of the song is an agreeable enough little ditty, sure – It’s very singalongable, and the Danger Mouse production does his thing of updating old fashioned techniques to create something relatively contemporary in a mysterious way, but it’s also somewhat slight. But that opening: It’s like hearing something blossom into pop music. If there was a way to build a song out of that level of surprise and excitement, it would be a thing of beauty – and likely very short, too.
(The bridge comes close, but that might just be because it’s the bleepy-bloopiest part of the song. Maybe my problem is that the rest of the song just doesn’t match up to that bit?)
One of my favorite songs to open an album, “Introducing The Band” is a great primer for what listeners should’ve expected from Dog Man Star, the second – and by far, the best – album from Suede way back when (That this album is almost 20 years old makes me feel depressingly decrepit): Something that managed to sound like grandiose glam rock science fiction that’s been particularly tarnished and beaten, with wonderfully over the top lyrics that hint at an awkward poetry (“Chic thug stuttered through a stereo dream/A fifty knuckle shuffle heavy metal machine/The tears of suburbia drowned the land/Introducing the band”) even as it acknowledges its own pretentiousness (“As the sci-fi lullabies start to build”) with some tongue-in-cheek comedy (“I want the style of a woman/The kiss of a man” always felt to me like a reference to this), all performed in a stupidly over-the-top manner. It’s a song that’s hypnotic – Really, that “Dying/I’m Dying/I’m Dying/I’m” loop is what does it – but almost daring you to pull away because it’s so ridiculous. I love it dearly.
“I believe that if someone restores the [Rothko] piece and removes my signature the value of the piece would be lower but after a few years the value will go higher because of what I did,” he said, comparing himself to Marcel Duchamp, the French artist who shocked the art establishment when he signed a urinal and put it on display in 1917.
“I was expecting that the security at Tate Modern would take me straight away, because I was there and I signed the picture in front of a lot of people. There is video and cameras and everything, so I was shocked.”
“I didn’t destroy the picture. I did not steal anything. There was a lot of stuff like this before. Marcel Duchamp signed things that were not made by him, or even Damien Hirst.”
He said that he admired Rothko, describing him as one of the great figures in art of the last century, but added: “I don’t believe that what I have done is criminal. If the police are going to arrest me, then they are going to arrest me. I am OK with that.”
From here, and apparently a quote from the man who signed a Mark Rothko paining in the middle of the Tate Modern. As much as I love Rothko – and I genuinely love Rothko – I have to admit, I kind of love this.
Related: This Is Yellowism.
Another toy that drove the nine/ten-year-old me insane with excitement, the 1984 Super Powers line. Only the first “wave” of releases came out in the UK – the twelve figures above – but they were more than enough to please me. Even at that age, there was something iconic about the big-name DC Comics characters, and I remember being ecstatic when I found Super Powers characters in a toy store in nearby Gourock. I still remember that the first ones I owned were the Flash and Green Lantern, but I remember that I also ended up with an Aquaman, Lex Luthor and Superman, too.
In America, there were a further twenty-one figures released, with lots of characters that I hadn’t even heard of at the time. I wish that I’d seen them, though; the idea of these toys being an early introduction to the likes of characters to whom I’d later become massive fans of – Jack Kirby’s Darkseid and Mister Miracle, or the stoic Martian Manhunter – appeals to me, even if I’m not sure what I would have made of such characters back then.
1997 was, in many ways, the hangover of Britpop; the bloom was off the rose, as they say, and the more interesting bands were looking elsewhere for inspiration already. Blur, of course, had “Beetlebum” and “Song 2” coming out, and Supergrass had “Richard III.” Like “Song 2” – the singles were contemporaneous – this is a song that throws away the cheeky-chappy persona for something heavier and purposefully less melodic, but what it lacks in tune it makes up for in force: This is a claustrophobic song that deserves to be played loud, so that the whole “I know you want to try to get away” overwhelms you the way it should, and you find yourself able to pick out the bouncy, McCartney-esque bassline, organ stabs and theramin amongst the aural soup. This is a song to get lost in, and find yourself exhausted by, by the time the fade-out finally arrives…
