From 2001: A Space Odyssey by Jack Kirby, 1976.
“Can It Be Some Harbinger of Hope — When Hope Is Almost Gone?”
366 Songs 269: Too Tough To Die
There are days when everything gets on top of you, and you find yourself feeling that worrying sense of vertigo, even as you know that you’re standing upright and theoretically perfectly fine. On those days, dear friends, Martina Topley-Bird has this song for you, a simple one in which she reminds you that – like herself, of course – you should consider yourself too tough to die. If you don’t find yourself wanting to sing along to the chorus of this one, I suspect you need a whole lot more self-belief.
(I love the lyrics of this song; “The strange fruit swing” is a wonderful euphemism that plays off the Billie Holliday song, and yet brings a really strange sense of bleak humor to it. The swing? Really?)
And if Martina’s version isn’t enough for you, maybe you need this spectacular cover from Neneh Cherry and the Thing, from earlier this year:
Holy moley. More songs should sound like the sound of a messy, violent fight inside your head.
Recently Read, Prose (9/25/12)
In addition to the regular diet of Star Trek novels to help my brain decompress – Warning, that Star Trek: New Earth series isn’t nearly as fun as you want it to be – this week, I’ve also been reading Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman, a book that I cannot recommend enough. Wonderfully funny, bold and just plain fucking smart, I’ve heard a lot of people here in the US describe it as “The British Bossypants,” which – Well, I know what they’re trying to say, but it does How To Be A Woman an amazing disservice. For one thing, it’s more of a coherent book than Tina Fey’s, and it also has more to say – It’s trying to educate and argue as much as make you laugh, even though it’s at least as funny as Fey’s book. I really, really loved it, and I hope that the attention it got here in America around its long-overdue launch will make Moran well-known and much-loved over here, as well as in the UK.
Obsessions, Not Beats
So instead of fixed beats, we structure our newsroom around an ever-evolving collection of phenomena—the patterns, trends and seismic shifts that are shaping the world our readers live in. “Financial markets” is a beat, but “the financial crisis” is a phenomenon. “The environment” is a beat, but “climate change” is a phenomenon. “Energy” is a beat, but “the global surge of energy abundance” is a phenomenon. “China” is a beat, but “Chinese investment in Africa” is a phenomenon. We call these phenomena our “obsessions”.
That’s Gideon Lichfield, editor of an about-t0-launch business news site Quartz, writing about what’ll make the site different. I like it a lot as a model – The idea that writers don’t have particular “beats” or areas they have to follow, but will instead follow particular stories wherever. It strikes me as a smart reaction to the decentralization of media thanks to the Internet (Now people want to follow stories and ideas, not particular areas, as readers, I think, a lesson they’ve learned from reading bloggers go wherever they want), and I’m curious to see how it works out.
Sleeping In
You know it’s not going to be a good day when you wake up late, from weird (but not especially bad, per se) dreams in which you get lost in a foreign city without your glasses, but manage to find refuge from the rain in a workshop that backs onto multiple different locations all around the world (It was a specific type of location, but frustratingly, I can’t remember what type). There’s a lot to be done this week in general, and sleeping in and having odd dreams distract you afterwards isn’t what I need right now, thankyouverymuch, brain.
The Universe Is An Amazing, Beautiful Place
“Carson Dyal?”
366 Songs 268: Bring The Light
The law of diminishing returns – Not to mention pop music logic – would suggest that the first single by Beady Eye (Essentially, Oasis except without Noel Gallagher, who left in a strop one night) would be terrible. After all, the band had been on a slow downward spiral for years, and Gallagher was always the musical heart of the band and the lead songwriter. How could anything from Beady Eye sound like anything more than an okay performance of shitty music?
To be fair, that’s a pretty apt description of everything off their first album with the exception of that first single, “Bring The Light.” Because, while it’s not pretty, “Bring The Light” is a song that I find myself weirdly adoring. Maybe it’s the unexpectedness – Here’s a song that’s driven by an unstoppable piano, female backing vocals and handclaps, three things that seem amazingly anti-Oasis. They’re definitely the hooks for what is otherwise a fairly ugly, misshapen song (Really, it just doesn’t work, structurally), but what hooks. They driving the song forward and pull you (me) along with it, even though part of you (me) is still thinking “Wait, is there actually a song here at all?”
Everytime I listen to this, I end up thinking that the backing vocalists and pianist should go off and form their own band, and be more interesting elsewhere. It’s a better fate.
366 Songs 267: Darklands
One of those occasions where a cover version is so amazingly superior to the original where it’s almost embarrassing, Primal Scream’s mellow, backwards-adoration version of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Darklands” is a triumph of performance and, far moreso, production over original source material. Almost everything that makes the dark, sleepy and just-a-little unsettling Scream take on the material so compelling despite its apathy is original to their version, and when you listen to the original afterwards – as I did; I didn’t even know there was a Jesus and Mary Chain song of this name at all until the Scream’s cover – it just sounds kind of weak and shy in comparison.
The Primal Scream version was from the Vanishing Point/XTRMNTR period where the band could do no wrong, and you can tell. It’s just a beautiful take on what is, let’s be honest, not an especially wonderful original. Do do do, do do do.
366 Songs 266: Black Nite Crash
Seeing as I was somewhat dismissive about Ride’s version of “How Does It Feel To Feel” yesterday, it seemed only fair to share what I remain convinced was their one shining moment of greatness: The loud, sloppy, grinding “Black Nite Crash,” released after the band had split and pretty much ignored by most of the world. It’s never going to win any awards for originality or poise, but there’s something enjoyably grimy about this song, the way it sounds as if everyone involved was pissing off as they recorded it and just put their heads down until it was done. For once in their entire career, even though they still sound out of it, at least this was out of it on the right drugs for rock and roll noise.