Play To Z: What's Poppin' Vol 1 to 1972

Random Observations

  Being a teenager is an awful, horrible experience. It's tortures are innumerable, but large among them is the weight of peer pressure. I am only thankful that I was out of my high school years by the time social networking truly exploded - I cannot imagine the experience magnified through the privacy-denying world of Facebook and Twitter. Anyway, as I've written previously, I didn't really forge any kind of musical taste or identity for myself until I hit 18, so high school consisted largely of agreeing with whatever my friends liked.
  I can remember sneering in adolescent derision at Girls Aloud as they emerged from Popstars: The Rivals. I can remember seeing Cheryl Cole (then Tweedy) arrested for her racist assault in a night club and making what I thought was an oh-so-zeitgeisty observation that with accelerated stardom came an accelerated decline. I can remember deriding their songs and going back to listen to Tenacious D.
  But all the time, a little voice in the back of my head was saying "But their first single...it was really catchy...it was doing interesting things..." When What Will The Neighbours Say came out I was out of high school's pressure cooker and growing into myself. The videos for "The Show" and "Love Machine" were on regular rotation on the two Freeview music channels, and by then, I was willing to accept the irresistible lure of Xenomania's dancefloor ready beats and clever, subversive lyrics, channeled through Girls Aloud's obvious talent.

  Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not would be an impressive album even stripped of context. Knowing that it was a debut album written by a band when most of the members hadn't turned 20 makes it a marvel. It carries such assurance, in both the instrumentation and the songwriting. There is no sloppiness disguised as punk-rock intention - this is a precise beast, stopping and starting and turning on a dime, humming along with a well-engineered purr. The topics of the lyrics may not vary, but Alex Turner engages them with such fine observation that it doesn't wear. In fact, by taking a universe and exploring it so thoroughly from multiple viewpoints and with a true sense of place, it could almost be a concept album. The fact that the Arctic Monkeys didn't rest on their laurels and simply try to recreate this album, musically or thematically, is the cherry on the already delicious cake.

  "Wichita Lineman" by Glen Campbell is one of the songs I want played at my funeral. His voice is beautiful - rich and simple, carrying loneliness and longing. The song balances a sort of country/Americana aesthetic with a sweet, Burt Bacharach kind of melody, and there's that iconic synthesizer Morse Code tapping out into the night. It's been called "the first existential country song" and there are many who proclaim it one of the best pop songs ever. Listening to it now, it's easy to see how.

  Witching Hour by Ladytron is like carving a passage into a glacier only to discover that it's got the world's coolest nightclub inside.

  As I mentioned near the beginning of this whole escapade (sometime in October I believe), We Are Scientists are one of those straightforward bands that aren't trying to reinvent the wheel, they're just trying to make some great pop music. With Love And Squalor, their first album, is a blueprint for their subsequent ones, producing song after song that you want to be hearing in the slightly dive-y back room of a bar in New York as you dance with your friends at 3am.

  I have no idea what "Lisztomania" by Phoenix is actually about (I'm pretty sure it's not actually about Franz Liszt) but I don't particularly care. I just wanna dance to it.

  Whenever I hear "Joker & The Thief" by Wolfmother, I feel sad that it wasn't around in the late 80s and early 90s, so it could inevitably be used in a Schwarzenegger vehicle. Imagine that spiraling guitar riff being played over the gearing up sequence in Commando and you will share my pain.

  Yeah So by Slow Club is a great album, topped off by a truly amazing song. "Our Most Brilliant Friends" became a touchstone of mine a couple of years ago when it felt like every friend of mine was lurching from tragedy to tragedy. It's hard to watch those you care about dealing with things that they have little control over, and the only help you can really offer is a shoulder to cry on and the distracting power of alcohol. To me, this song will always be about the strength my friends have, strength I didn't even know about, to endure and to triumph even when life is shitting on them from the greatest of heights.

  Broken Social Scene's You Forgot It In People moved them beyond the ambient sounds of their first record into the expansive post-rock collectivism that would come to define them. Released in 2002, it was bought in 2007 at Amoeba Records in San Francisco by Tim Maytom, who proclaimed it "the tits".

  I have 100 songs left to listen to. The next post will talk about them, and the post after will look back at this whole glorious endeavor.

Rediscovered Gem

"Tapas" by Action Bronson

Play To Z: Drastic Fantastic to Feel Good Lost

This is the first time I've managed to cover an entire letter in one of these posts, and it's not even the biggest chunk of music I've covered. "E" proved to be the shortest letter so far, but that's not to say it's been bereft of great music.

Some Observations

"Dueling Banjos" from Deliverance has so successfully lodged itself into popular culture as an indicator of redneck, backwoods locations that I'd wager most would recognise it, but few will have actually listened to the blistering skill displayed by the two musicians. It's one of those songs you're tempted to keep rewinding because you can't quite believe the talent on display.

Blondie's "Atomic" remains an essential piece of new wave beauty. One of the most flawless songs of its era, it doesn't put a foot wrong, weaving the propulsive beat and bass line with Debbie Harry's almost gospel-like delivery of the lyrics and that instantly recognisable guitar riff.

The Weeknd's trilogy of mixtapes peaked early with House of Balloons, but Echoes of Silence still has plenty of great songs on it, especially his slow, paranoia-infused cover of "Dirty Diana" by Michael Jackson.

"A Better Son-Daughter" is one of the best and most accurate portraits of depression I can think of. There's a weird catharsis in listening to someone explain how you're feeling more precisely than you ever could yourself.

Fantastic Playroom by New Young Pony Club is a great album that I always forget to listen to more. It's kind of weightless, but it's sexy electro-pop fun, so you don't exactly want it diving into existentialism, and it's short enough that it doesn't repeat itself or outweigh it's welcome. It's a perfectly formed sly little treat.

Intention, Meaning and the Five Star Rating

I was listening to Feel Good Lost today, Broken Social Scene's 2001 debut, from back when they were at their most ambient and instrumental and it got me thinking about intention in music, and applying Barthes' "Death of the Author" thesis to music.

  Rather than give everything on iTunes a star rating, which sounds exhausting and doesn't allow for a lot of factors, I simply give things no stars or 5 stars. 5 stars means a song meets a loose set of ill-formed criteria; am I happy to listen to this song no matter my mood? Does it have enough of a musical identity to make it easy to recognise? Does it have some emotional connection or effect on me? Is it, for want of a better term, great?

  Some albums manage to be great but lack in 5 star tracks. For example, Electro-Shock Blues by Eels is an album I would point to as being fantastic, but only about half the songs merit 5 stars. The rest, while no means bad, don't stick in my mind enough to warrant 5 stars, but help make up the overall meaning and atmosphere of the album. Some songs can be the key to understanding a record or even an artist, but fail to tick some box somewhere in my brain.

  The problem Feel Good Lost presented is that, as a piece of largely instrumental, ambient post-rock, it sort of blends together and fades into the background, but that is, I'd imagine, the intention. As an album, it's meant to create this sort of dreamlike, meandering etherium, and it does so entirely successfully, but few individual tracks stand out. It's a good album, but that doesn't translate to great tracks.

  So, when I'm thinking about marking a track down as "great" in my own personal tally system, do I take into account where a track sits in the wider context of an album? Do I allow for an artists' intention? For how they want the track to be consumed? If I do, then how? And if I don't, then that album will, in all likelihood, be listened to less. It's a tricky proposition, and one without an easy answer.

Ho hum.

Rediscovered Gem

"Can't Do Nuttin' For You Man" by Public Enemy