Konsumterror
IT COULD BE YOU
The following excerpt is taken from
Greil Marcus's rather wonderful
Lipstick Traces and, although being about the frenzy following the planned release of
Michael Jackson's Thriller concert tickets, is dedicated to everybody hoping to get
Glastonbury tickets this year. We wish you all the best...and hope we get tickets before you do.
'This was real life: dollars and cents. It was also a version of what Ulrike Meinhof called Konsumterror - the terrorism of consumption, the fear of not being able to get what is on the market, the agony of being last in line or of lacking the money to join the line: to be a part of social life. All over the country, people became happily afraid of tickets they could not afford to buy, of tickets they might not be able to buy even if they could afford them, of tickets that would seal them as everything and nothing, of tickets that, as the humiliating, exciting process began, were not even on sale'.
song of the week: shores of california (for lady quinoa)
And that is why a girl is called a tease
And that is why a guy is called a sleaze
And that's why god made escort agencies
One life to live and mace and GHB
It’s not flashy or jaw-dropping and so you might be forgiven for judging Shores of California as just a nifty little album-filler. But to my mind, it is the definitive Dresden Dolls song - and they didn't even play it the last time I saw them. *sigh*
The song’s chord-plunking, drum-bashing introduction, opens on a little battle-whoop from lead-singer Amanda, and instantly you know you are listening to something different.
But this isn’t a love story or a personal lament (as none of the Dolls songs really are, surely?) No, Amanda and Brian are telling you a story and the beginning is quiet, so listen carefully.
Amanda’s vocal performance on the first verse is a characteristic collection of softly lingering hushes and staccato whispers, gradually peeling back to reveal the full force of those pipes. You hear her gasps and breaths between lines on the production – she is in the room with you, alternately breathing down your neck and spitting in your coffee. The jaunty little piano accompaniment is like a musical accompaniment to a silent film telling the endlessly replicated sex-comedy of boy-meets-girl. Boy wants to see girl undressed. Girl searches in vain for that ‘fickle little bitch romance’ (nice assonance). Girl disappoints boy. Boy disappoints girl. Shame.
The first chorus is delivered with such understatement you barely even notice it: a series of delicately played piano chords as Brian sits on his drumsticks and wait for the verses to kick in again. Amanda delivers her lines like a governess explaining a well-worn parable to her receptive charges; 'That’s the way it is in Minnesota, And that’s the way it is in Oklahoma…’
The story continues with the simultaneous cat and mouse of the bass chasing the tail of of the melody, gradually escalating into a series of roly-poly piano scales, before exploding into thumping percussion and jingle-jangle piano, played like a Vegas show-tune standard. By the second chorus, there’s the sense that any minute now, Amanda or Brian will stand on their chairs, hands aloft, yelling ‘All together now! Clap your hands! Sing along if you know the words!'
A thumping, disjointed, aggressive little middle-eight, all fidgety piano and sulky drumming, confidently resolves for a bridge of crashing crescendos and clatter-happy cymbals. And then we get another throwaway verse before that wry, nasty, little line; ‘The girls are crying…The boys are masturbating’, supported by Brian’s beautifully androgynous backing vocals.
The beauty of this song is that it transforms the fodder for all major pop songs (boy meets girl, boy misunderstands girl, girl misunderstands boy, girl cries, boy calls girl a slut anyway) into a bittersweet ditty that is both a barrel of laughs and a cruel slap in the face. It turns the never-ending confusions between girls and boys, which are deep and tragic when they happen to you, into a pathetically funny little anthropological puzzle, culminating in a grand old sing-along that’s served with a smile and a side-order of bile. There is nobody like The Dresden Dolls, and if there was, they couldn't ever possibly be as good.
song of the week: Waltz 2 Suite for Variety Stage Orchestra (not from the Jazz Suite, apparently)
Foreboding, sinister and macabre, yet also beautiful, exuberant and uplifting. The stuff of highly enjoyable lucid nightmares.
arcade fire @ brixton academy 15th March
I can't really articulate how I felt watching
Arcade Fire on Thursday night. If I did try, it would sound something like gushgushgushgushgushgush, so I shall spare you the details. All I will say, is back at home in my teenage squalor, I slept next to a picture torn out of Q, of Thom Yorke on stage at one of Radiohead's European amphitheatre gigs, which I have imagined so many times that I can almost believe I went to it. In bold white text the caption reads 'Taking to the stage in front of an audience that treat them like a miracle unfolding, Radiohead play with a furious passion and an uncommon grace'. I guess, lost for words, I borrow that.
song of the week: all my friends
okay, so James Murphy isn't strictly all of LCD Soundsystem.
But he might as well be.
I promise you, my heart popped into my mouth listening to the new
LCD Soundsystem album,
Sound of Silver. Clean, smart, subtle and beautiful, it has been a struggle to settle on which song I'd pick for the week. The closest album experience I can relate it to is the first time I listened to
Beck's Odelay; goosepimpley and excited and like I've just stumbled upon something weird and valuable and pretty. As this is my blog, and I can write whatever I like, I can't talk about the song of the week before first mentioning
Someone Great, also on
Sounds of Silver. It's like
The Human League made a baby with
Talking Heads. I missed my stop on the tube when I first heard it; I was spellbound.
I've actually tried to resist choosing
All My Friends, because it's almost too easy - this is immediate heart-racing dance music, it needs no time to creep under your skin, being one of those rare songs that you listen to and feel like you have known for years. But I guess this song is
Sound of Silver's Daft Punk is Playing at my House; iconic and unforgettable without being overblown and klaxon-screaming. I have a feeling it's the song they'll use to soundtrack montages of beautiful sunkissed teenagers on boyfriends' shoulders at Glastonbury this year or they could stick it on the end credits of some glossy
Sofia Coppola flick.
Yes - in fact, that's exactly what
All My Friends sounds like. [big rant coming up] It sounds like
Death in Vegas's Girls before
Sofia Coppola trashed it by playing it behind the extra features section on the
Lost in Translation DVD. Or her depressingly vacuous use of
The Jesus and Mary Chain's Just Like Honey in the same, gorgeously filmed, emotionally empty (and not in a good way), desperately overrated, waste of the godlike Bill-Murray, piss-poor indie flick. There, I said it.
Lost in Translation is rubbish.
The fact is, Ms C, your films are some of the most exquisite looking around, but then, so are
Dave LaChapelle's, and his music videos are only 3 minutes long, so take a hint, and give some slouchy indie band a call, and keep your damn hands off
my music.... Oh, and while we're on the subject, you do know it's
your fault
Air are crap now, don't you? [end rant]
With an opening that sounds like
Steve Reich quarrelling with
Bruce Springsteen, All My Friends stretches out into a (now, don't take this the wrong way) lo-fi
Killers-esque anthem, which as everybody knows, roughly translates into a barely disguised
U2 rip-off. But, and herein lies the secret, there is never any soaring guitar riff, no stadium-shaking handclaps or loud/quiet/loud breakdown. Instead, it's just an intense mix of stabbing piano, disco hi-hat and winsome keyboards, with lone electric guitar squeaking, mixed way down in a style that draws more inspiration from
Sonic Youth than
The Edge. There is no heraldic climax, just a compulsive, hypnotic blur falling into a blistering fade out. This is well considered, complex but yet emotionally immediate dance music, and frankly, there are very few people as good as this.
song of the week: pull shapes
After seemingly years without any decent girl-presence in music, we seem to be in the midst of a full-on girl-power renaissance. While last year's cute little indie boy bands set about releasing their bloated sophomore albums, a gang of smart arse ladies have exploded into pop and stole all their thunder - and thank god. Boys are
well boring.
The gradual take-over has been delicate and subtle. As boybands are crushed underfoot by the stilettos of the dazzling
Sugababes and
Girls Aloud, all those weedy oh-so-sincere male acoustic bores have been chewed up and spat out by the likes of soul-madam
Amy Winehouse and
Lou Rhodes in the folk camp (so pack your bags
Lemar and
James Morrison - your kind ain't welcome round here). Even America has woken up and realised that
Lady Sovereign is the new, acually, no,
better than,
Eminem. We have the naughty
CSS representing dance, the gothic beauty of
Monsters are Waiting ,
Howling Bells for art-rock,
The Gossip finally breaking free of their cult following and coming up trumps with some real indie clout, all following quality new output from fairy godmothers
Sleater Kinney,
Cat Power, Fiona Apple, Amanda Dresden Doll, Christina Aguilera and
Kate Bush in the last 18 months. I don't even have to stoop to mentioning the likes of
Natasha Bedingfield or (ick)
KT Tunstall to beef up the numbers now. Things are
really looking bright when I don't
even have to mention
Lily Allen - and
Alright Still isn't half bad.
This week, I have mostly been listening to
The Pipettes, one of last year's strongest new girl groups. I've progressed from sort-of liking them, to absolutely adoring them. Last summer's top 40 single
Pull Shapes is so perfect I could almost weep. This is the teen music I feel like I have been waiting for since
Kenickie split up (oh, how I miss Kenickie) and
Ash became crap. Now, before all you stinky boys start talking up the role of their male backing-group,
The Cassettes, I concede, part of the beauty of
The Pipettes is that lush combination of manufactured pop meets lo-fi
Phil Spector (if you can imagine such a thing).
But nobody cares about
The Casettes - they could change their line up faster than
The Red Hot Chilli Peppers used to lose guitarists - nobody would care. It's those beautiful seaside English vowels, occassionally parading in pseudo-American accents and covered in Max Factor Red that makes
The Pipettes so immediate. Oh so pop-conventional girl-group harmonies, exuberant, boisterous shouty hand-clappy bits, gutsy girly vocals, half
Bananarama, half
Shangri-Las, every syllable summoning me to grab my hairbrush as microphone, parking myself in front of the mirror for a one-off solo bedroom gig.
Pull Shapes is pop perfection of the highest quality, weighing in at a joyful 2 minutes 58 seconds and throwing in break-downs, hand-claps, lush twilly strings and crowd cheers. Why anybody in their right mind would rather listen to blazered public-school boys fighting for musical credibility or, even worse, friggin
Fall Out Boy *gag* is beyond me. As a
Pipettes' amazon review writes, 'Quick! Somebody give Smash Hits CPR.' After years of boys in baggy jeans rapping over dated drumbeats, pallid boychildren with no genitalia singing about flying without wings or some such crap and identikit
Stone Roses and
Joy Division rip-offs, pop music is back on the map. Phew.
song of the week: let the river run
I am almost certain that I have the heady combination of
Melanie Griffith and
Carly Simon to thank/blame for giving me the bravery/stupidity to hand in my notice at work this week.
When I was a little girl, I figured work would be full of glittering skyscrapers, ruthless backstabbers, grey power-suits and white Reebok high-tops. Somehow I'd assumed that I would breeze through all that crap, emerging sparkling and filthy rich, infamous and celebrated for my head for business and a bod for sin, just like
Tess McGill in
Working Girl. Instead I'm still in the same dreary suburban office block, in my scuffed Miss Selfridge heels, surrounded by the same old ruthless backstabbers.
When a good friend of mine left our rather culty little office, I made her a special compliation tape of absolutely appallingly classic music, with a picture of
Melanie Griffith on the front and the title,
'What would Tess McGill do?'. Tess was our icon - and if you follow her sexy, subtle but professional lead, you're sure to end up with your own corner office,
Carly Simon wailing behind you in your own perfect happy ending.
Let The River Run, the theme tune to
Working Girl has got
everything;
a) choral introduction picking up the climax to the chorus
b) single piano and female vocalist delivering a down tempo, prayer-like introduction, probably beneath a spotlight on the live video
c) electro-drum beat building in emotional manipulation (a'la
Elton John's Circle of Life - the prime example of such heart-tugging treachery, and oh, another Oscar-Winner, a sure sign of dubious quality)
d) overdone quasi-religious lyrics, gradually building in scale
(
Let the river run, Let all the dreamers,Wake the nation, Come, the New Jerusaleme) explosive female scream, cues the gospel choir
(We the great and small, Stand on a star, And blaze a trail of desire,Through the dark'ning dawn - *shudder*)
e) squealing '80's guitar solo
f) female harmonies against increasingly evangelical choir and "soulful" guitar peals against apparently endlessly repeating chorus, delivered alternately with staccato intensity or diva-like wails;
'We're coming to the edge, Running on the water, Coming through the fog, Your sons and daughters.' I know it's terrible, but I LOVE this song - and so does my Mum, so blame her for encourging my whole
Carly Simon obsession, turning to
Working Girl for comfort on a hungover Sunday afternoon.
By Sunday night, I felt so sick and sad at the prospect of going into work, that I found myself asking that fundamental question;
'What would Tess McGill do?' and after yet another blue Monday, handed in my notice. Walking home that Tuesday night, I imagined a camera picking me out at Vauxhall underground station, triumphant amongst all the suits, passing a vast billboard with the words 'Freedom to Choose' behind me
(yes, it's really there) as
Carly Simon belted out her ridiculously overblown anthem for the American Dream.
Unfortunately, I am not American and I am not
Melanie Griffith. I am now simply unemployed. Now, again I ask you,
'What would Tess McGill do?'
