Incorporating A Brief Introduction To This Fourth New Blog Of Mine In Two Months
I don’t recommend falling downstairs and fracturing your left humerus as a path to enlightenment. But in the nearly three months that I spent recovering from surgery, painfully lazing around at home with little to do, I discovered that, once again, I needed to write, and to write differently. So I started three new blogs to add to the three that I was already running, and still it didn’t seem sufficient.
I got back to writing pretty quickly; consider the Then Play Long piece which I painstakingly and sometimes agonisingly typed with one finger of my right hand, with my left arm still in a sling. But there remained a space, a gap, something lacking.
Hence, following some characteristically wise words from my friend Mark Sinker, I have decided to start yet another blog. The purpose of this one is to accommodate my instant, present-tense thoughts on new music while it is still new. I have recently posted several things on The Church Of Me which really are not in keeping with a blog whose aim had always been to facilitate and ensure an endgame, but I couldn’t think where else to place them. For that reason I have transposed those pieces to here. This is where you will now need to go if you want to read about “Genesis.” or “Angel Of My Dreams” or my favourite albums of 2024 or my posthumous thoughts on Bill Fay. This is not nor could ever be Maja or Koons or Blue In The Air. Those blogs were for and of their times. I am at the time of writing sixty-one and my time, agree all of my doctors, is limited. I haven’t got any time left to waste.
As is my patience with the tired and tiring antics of music critics. Everywhere I look it’s still the same studium of nothingness – forgive the tautology. Marking and grading songs and records like they were school ink exercises (“must do better”). Choking the flow of prose with endless recycled “But The Kids Don’t Know, Say The 40-Something Marketing And Accounts Managers” facts like brains and the internet didn’t exist. Goldfish memory-level kneejerk reactions. Wearisome analyses of lyrics – to which it’s long since been proved nobody listens – by otherwise unemployable English Literature graduates because musical analysis requires technical knowledge and doesn’t usually make for an enticing read. It’s like swimming through treacle.
Can anybody think, without prompting, of a major music writer who’s come up since, say, 2010? Somebody whose name you see appended to a review and you think, ooh I must have a look at this? I can think of two names tops, and even that’s stretching things. If they aren’t drones, then they’re stuffed-shirt Sunday school teachers, nascent empire-builders with preset agendas who get their moderate kicks scolding you for daring to like pop music. As for the examples of sadly departed spirits? Do me a favour. Reading Neil Kulkarni’s writing felt for most of the time like being shouted at and I’m afraid he reminds me of my father, forever raging against more or less everything and dropping dead of a heart attack in his early fifties as a direct result.
Wherever I look, that Picasso quote springs up like a newly-opened daffodil - “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” That’s the way music writing needs to go if it’s going to be saved from the hell of A.I.-generated glorified advertising puffs. Forget the received history and opinions. Your gut knows better. This blog is one attempt to get that envelope opened and pushed.
IMPORTANT NOTE: This blog is not going to be regularly updated. I’m not getting paid for writing it and am not your butler. It will concentrate on looking at new albums that we – Lena and I – care about sufficiently to purchase in physical format, as opposed to the 25-30 new albums that we routinely add onto streaming per week (and which all get listened to). I only have so much time left and there’s only so much space in our house for CDs (ask your parents).
MAYHEM
The great thing about getting past sixty – in addition to the wonder and astonishment that one has actually managed to reach and surpass that age – is that you realise you really don’t give a toss, except for the people and things that matter. Fashion? Pah. It isn’t 1990, when I wasn’t yet thirty and used to purchase last-season primary-coloured suits for £40 a throw from a stock surplus shop on Kensington Church Street called Amazon, any more. We seek our refuge in memory and its renewal. Nor is it any longer 1987, when I would doggedly look at Melody Maker and Sounds (and occasionally the NME, but not so much as before) and treat them like tick sheets – all those wonderful-sounding bands and artists to see or records to chase up. When London was London and you could get on a number nine bus from work and alight from it fifteen minutes later in perfect symmetry with the side of Tower Records Piccadilly blub blub old man medication who’s the Prime Minister.
One thing that hasn’t changed is that, when I hear great new music, I sense its greatness pretty immediately, even in this purposely-devalued world. I plan to write about some of it here. I stumble across somebody like Geordie Greep, who was barely born into the very end of the twentieth century, and what I see is a new Bowie. Perhaps I see the twenty-five-year-old me I could have been if the world had been fairer to me and I had been braver.
And there is Lady Gaga, whom I have always regarded as a kind of marker in the life that Lena and I have been building up here in Britain. When Lena arrived in London on Thursday 18 December 2008 she brought with her, among many, many CDs, The Fame which at that point was only available in North America. We were probably among the first people in Britain to listen to Gaga.
Since then, she has never really let us down. To pick just one instance, we associate “Bad Romance” with a confused Reggie Yates on Radio 1’s Sunday Top 40 show who couldn’t make up his mind whether he liked the song or not, and also with the last time we were at a Club Poptimism night, upstairs in a pub in Lambeth North which no longer exists, me bellowing along with the song and reaching all the high notes. We had absolutely no problems with the Tony Bennett or Bradley Cooper stuff; quite the reverse. She has been less the new Madonna, more an unspoiled Streisand.
And music critics have never but NEVER known what to do about her, how to go about her work. The looped pattern always repeats itself – Born This Way isn’t as banger-consistent as The Fame, Artpop lacks the strength of Born This Way, Joanne is a refreshing change from Artpop’s dead end, Chromatica is a stunning return to honest form following the kwazy kountry adventurezzz of Joanne, MAYHEM (she likes it capitalised) is an improvement on the help-mummy-my-EARS Chromatica. And so forth. They don’t do that with Sharon Van Etten or even St Vincent – not so often, anyway - and you and I know exactly why that is.
By my imperfect count, we’ll be writing about Gaga seven times (so far) on Then Play Long (provided I live long enough to do the writing) so we can go all in-depth about the records there. MAYHEM, though. This is a splendid pop record and I need to make some mention of it now.
In her liner note, Gaga makes no secret that with Michael Polonsky she has finally found true happiness and three cheers for that achievement wherever you see it. This joy is plainly, or more accurately extravagantly, palpable throughout the record. “Disease”! What a stentorian Roman demolition derby of a pop song; it really is like the Jolly Green Giant resuscitated and stamping out all mediocrity and compromise. It feels like the soundtrack to the fall of all Romes but what is it actually about? It’s about somebody coming to save the singer’s life, and what do you know, it could well be the singer herself!
There’s a lot of the old duende about MAYHEM. The chorus of “Abracadabra” seems to be making a pitch for bratdom but fuck, Charli was seventeen when Gaga broke through here and knows who actually invented that template. It’s a nice nod back to those who would follow in her fainting footsteps. Elsewhere “Garden Of Eden” and the rock-SQUALL of “Perfect Celebrity” even rouse hard-at-standing-up me out of my physiotherapy-designed ergonomic armchair – four songs in and we’ve already had two uncanny uses of the Picardy third. Yes, it’s yet more isn’t-being-a-megastar-hell soliloquising, but Gaga has a lot more right to wander down that worn trail than many others.
Look at “Vanish Into You” which is what “Fade Into You” would have sounded like if Shirley Bassey had had a go at covering it (“Highhhhh on a hiiiiiiiiiill…you call” over a rustling low drone – completely Dame Shirley, that bit). “Killah” is let’s face it “Sign "☮︎" The Times” with a bit of Depeche Mode flavouring but it’s fun. As for “Zombieboy”; well, if Gwen Stefani is going to go and make country albums from now on (AND WHY SHOULD SHE NOT?), someone has to step into her no’ bad right enough/lovely-on shoes and this is pop music in its highest form – catchy with that lovely Royksoppian celery crunch of a rhythm track, chanty times π to infinity and you just want to step out onto the street and yell the song into the air of the world, but guess what, it’s an elegy for a friend of Gaga’s who died (the Québécois dancer and performance artist Rick Genest, who appeared in the video for “Born This Way” and who in 2018 suffered the same sort of stupid accident that put paid to SOPHIE and Phillippe Zdar) – “Goodbye, I’ll see you in my dreams.”
MAYHEM’s second half dials down from that initial upbeat intensity, but not from intensity itself. Again, a lot of the songs see Gaga doing what she enjoys most; trying on different musical hats and seeing which ones fit. So we get her Lana del Rey song (“LoveDrug”), her smiling nod towards Taylor S (“How Bad Do U Want Me” with its definite Yazoo/Yaz musical undertow), her straight-ahead eighties AoR (“Don’t Call Tonight”), hyperactive eighties Michael Jackson (the great scythes of “Shadow Of A Man”) and neurotic nineties Michael Jackson (“The Beast” a.k.a. “Give In To Me”). All terrific stuff and I am absolutely aware that the “beast” to whom she is pleading and/or demanding could well be her own mirror.
But, Jesus H Cornelius Cardew, these last two songs (which are half the length and at least twice the value of the four ones Richard “I Did It Under Sufferance” Strauss wrote) – well, they sound like the final two songs ever to be sung on a rapidly-disintegrating Earth. Yes, “Blade Of Grass” is sung about and to Michael Polonsky, who has clearly been the answer to all questions Gaga could find, but…I think of the Cornel Wilde movie No Blade Of Grass from 1970, which was a pretty horrible post-global virus action thriller with a gloomy theme song by Roger Whittaker. It was like 28 Days Later but with flares and Wendy Richard. I saw it one late Monday night on STV in the mid-seventies and was depressed for the rest of the week.
And I also think of a decimated world, hurtling towards anti-existence, in the midst of which this astonishing and powerful song is sung with desperate beauty. “Come and wrap that blade of grass/Around my finger like a cast” (there are no rings left to be found), “Even though the church burned down/I’ll be your Queen without a crown” – it is terribly, terribly moving. “This is the lawn of memories I mourn” – and the song grinds slowly, like the negative of “Good Luck Babe,” down and down until the machine of life stops.
Maybe that might have proved too bleak an ending to MAYHEM…which is why the Bruno Mars duet “Die With A Smile” makes perfect sense as a closer (or even Closer – here is the still-young Bruno, but where has he been?) for here are the same sentiments sung from the other lover’s perspective (see also the conflicting accounts of Buckingham’s “Say Goodbye” and Nicks’ “Goodbye Baby” which concludes Fleetwood Mac’s Say You Will), here is another voice.
And what a beautiful and nigh-perfect pop song “Die With A Smile” is, like a reborn Bacharach – and those quiet 6/8 interludes of uncertain guitar between verses even make me think a little of the Cocteau Twins. Its video would suggest some familiarity with Stephen Sanchez’s “Until I Found You,” which latter is not so much retro-nuevo fifties pop but more an implanted replicant memory of what “the fifties” might have been like – that’s what makes the song so great. In both cases, the latent emotion burns through the mask. “If the world was ending…I’d wanna be next to you.” This, you collecting doughnuts, is what pop music, let alone being human, is all about. Remember that while we’re still here, and leave those last two songs in particular as monuments, or footprints, to tell whatever comes after us that once we were here and this is what we were capable of doing. THERE IS AND CAN NEVER BE NO HIGHER OR MORE NOBLE AIM.
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