Thursday, August 28, 2008

my apologies

I know I promised a part II to my post on the girls vs boys musical debate, and trust me, it'll follow in September.

But, alas, not until then, as I will be returning to my spiritual home of the Czech Republic this week. I have never felt more at home, or more in love with anywhere, than when I landed in Prague as a fresh-faced and shit-scared nineteen year old on her gap year jaunt around Eastern Europe. Everywhere was dusted with snow, everyone in our hostel looked like an I.D. model, cigarettes were 50p a pack and the city streets were loaded with a thrilling feeling of mystery, beauty, drama and possibility. I remember looking out on the city in the wee hours of the morning from Petrin, buzzing on vodka and naive enthusiasm as the city opened its drowsy eyes, and not being quite sure if it was real, or if I was just having the most divine lucid dream. I didn't think there could be anywhere more enigmatic or romantic on earth.

And then I went to Cesky Krumlov.

So, I'm going home. I'll send you a postcard xxx

Monday, August 25, 2008

In response to your comment....



Your post (and the title of the book you quote from) made me think something else: what is the difference between the way teenage boys and teenage girls react to pop? The teenage girl's relationship with pop seems more genuine, less forced, to me. Boys don't abandon themselves to pop as much, or at least not in the same way - instead of cutting a rug, they make lists or collect everything their favourite band has ever done - anything to distance themselves from (and, in a way, deaden) the music.

Girls "get" pop more than boys do - they immediately find meaning where boys have to search for it. And it is more limited to a specific time, place and set of feelings - hence why women are often less lifelong in their passion for music. The glorious, estacy of teenage pop obsession exhausts itself for girls, whereas boys turn into neurotic, depressive rock fans (cf High Fidelity). Paddington


I largely agree with your analysis of the differences between the way teenage boys and teenage girls listen to pop, and indeed, music generally, particularly when it comes to girly pop versus boys rock. (I have less of an idea how this relationship differs in other genres of music though, although from the little I do know, I’d say that dance music, particularly DJ-based genres engenders dorky obsession, whilst hip-hop and its grimier cousins appears to be quite closely linked to abandon and cutting a rug, as it were.)

In answering your question, I feel compelled to conjoin my two big loves, music and books, into one big love-in and pull out my YA bible, Julie Burchill’s Sugar Rush. It’s probably no surprise that former NME writer Burchill, places such significance on pop music in her first-love novel, Sugar Rush. Significantly, here the first glimmer of sexuality, drinking, dancing, and all those delicious activities that are so magical when you are 16, and simply silly and a tad banal when you’re 26 (unless you’re me, in which case, they’re even better) are rooted in the protagonist, Kim’s, involvement in pop.

When Kim falls in love with the deliriously sexy and rebellious Maria, she is plummeted head first into what she refers to as GirlWorld.

“Girlworld makes daydreaming, water-treading sirens of us all. The posters of boys, torn from magazines, on the walls, the fruity cosmetics on the dressing tape, tiny tops from Morgan and Kookai strewn across the floor, the CDs out of their boxes, snatched off in the heat of the moment of having to hear THAT SONG, RIGHT NOW. Until after one and a half minutes you remembered the one you REALLY wanted to hear.”

Burchill captures nascent teen girls’ heady obsessions with boys and fashion by linking it to the impulsive, compulsive pull of pop music. In Sugar Rush, her characters discard their inhibitions and clothing with the same thoughtless, heartfelt recklessness that they tear their CDs from their cases “snatched off in the heart of the moment of having to hear THAT SONG, RIGHT NOW.” Everything is beautiful, momentary, fleeting, yet ultimately, disposable. (Unless the two things become married in a divine union. Then you get the undying devotion embodied in the soaking seats of concerts stretching from The Beatles to The Backstreet Boys et cetera et cetera, until, of course, they try to become “musically serious” or break up.)

Burchill’s image of CDs discarded across the floor, usurped by a better song summoned immediately in the heat of the moment reminds me of my eager, impatient habit of only listening to half-songs, ever a slave to the skip button. I am instantly reminded of my old boyfriend’s habit of stopping me from flicking onto a new song on the i-Pod until the previous one was finished, thereby disrupting the play count and disrupting the machine’s record of our listening habits. Often, by the time that song had finished, my desire had melted. The moment had passed.

I gave up trying to express my identity through my music some years ago. I’d appear insane or schizophrenic, and besides, daaarlings, I’m just too complex to be little more than a straightforward little indiegirl (my previous e-mail and music blog incarnation btw). Boys into their music have a tendency to wear their tastes and their carefully studied knowledge like a badge of honour. Similarly, I used to be like Kim in Sugar Rush - a girl who believed to be taken seriously, you had to take everything seriously, especially your music. Contrasting her musical identity with her love-interest, Maria’s, Kim explains:

“She held up a party-coloured box containing the sort of dance-tune compilation that I had often yearned over in Virgin but then turned my treacherous back on, because I am – was – a High girl, and High girls listen to Dido and Radiohead and hardcore rap about how many drive-by shooting you’ve pulled and how many bitches you’ve slapped, as we chew our pens over our algebra homework, because we’re, like so intelligent or something that we know they’re only ‘ironic’ shootings and slappings.”


Cut out the Dido and there’s me, aged 16, trying to be taken seriously and swearing off cheesy pop, or at the very least, hiding my Kylie behind The Velvet Underground. I catalogued my music, controlled my listening and spent a significant time on the internet, discussing music very seriously with like-minded, equally serious boys, writing for online music sites. I sacrificed all-night dance binges at the local nightclub in favour of much shoe-gazing and chin-scratching in boys’ cold bedrooms, the windows shoved open to get rid of the smoke as we analyzed Smashing Pumpkins/Jimi Hendrix/Nirvana et cetera et cetera.

But although the kind of music I listened to changed, the way I ate it up never has. I listen obsessively but shallowly, devouring individual songs and albums but barely digesting them. I only really took any nourishment from the truly excellent (Prince, Radiohead, Beastie Boys, The Clash etc.) and the personally significant (Fleetwood Mac’s Everywhere, Kim Carnes’ Bette Davis Eyes, Robyn’s With Every Heartbeat, The New Radicals' You Only Get What you Give), which are frequently, also, truly excellent, but centred not around the album, or the career progression, but the three minutes it takes to crystallize a memory, cement a relationship or force a decision.

Boys collect, collate, catalogue, analyze, order and sort. I find this level of anal obsession something of an aphrodisiac. To me, it demonstrates an intoxicating combination of passion, restraint and borderline psychosis, my top three qualities when seeking a mate (screw GSOH). I admire it, and for several years, did an okay-ish job of trying to replicate it. But given the choice, I respond to music impulsively, spontaneously, hysterically. Give me a dancefloor, a moshpit, or a mirror and a hairbrush over a league table any day. I’d rather lose myself than find patterns or time signatures.

I like music when I commute, when I work, when I play, when I cook, when I eat, when I drink, when I love, when I socialise, when I bathe, when I dress, when I work, while I sleep. I rarely sit and listen. Music is rarely something to analyze (although I do appreciate that too) but rather, a constant companion when no one else is around. When I have felt miserable, or joyful, fallen in love, or fallen out, the first thing to know will be my stereo. It reflects my momentary happiness or heartache back to me.

In Sugar Rush, music provides the soundtrack to Kim’s love affair with Maria.

She whooped, drained her glass, pulled me to my feet. She turned me to face the mirror, stood behind me, caught my wrists in her hands and began to move my arms wildly to that beautiful song – “Cos you’re FREE – to do what you WANT to do – you gotta LIVE YOUR LIFE – do what you WANT to do!” Her eyes were wide in mock horror.
“Ohmigod, Kim! Look! You’re just a dancing machine! A slave to the rhythm! You just can’t control your feet! You’re going to dance yourself to death! Stop! STOP! NOT ON A SCHOOL NIGHT, KIM!”
We feel backwards on to her bed, helpless with laughter – and in my case, rising nausea from unfamiliar Smirnoff on an empty stomach, bar a Belgian waffle – and it could have gone either way right then; I could have vomited or I could have fallen in love. As it turned out, I went for the latter option. But I often wish I’d just been sick, right there, and then on Sugar’s sweet-smelling GirlWorld bed, and disgraced myself with a short, sharp shame, rather than take the scenic route to sorrow, as I was later to do. But again, I get ahead of myself. There were loads of good times to come, before the morning after – that final morning after the one that never ends – that finally caught up with us.”

What I love about this is the utter cheesiness of the song she chooses. It’s absurdly optimistic and motivational, good but not groundbreaking, serious, but only for the short time that it exists. It’s meant to inspire a kind of deluded ecstasy, not cerebral engagement. In short, it’s about capturing and cherishing a moment that may, or may not be magical; that could end in vomiting, or falling in love.

Part II of this post to follow later this week…

Sunday, August 24, 2008

do not enter



in every dream home a heartache












Architectural Rescue, Southampton Way, Peckham







what we did on the weekend

Thursday, August 14, 2008

completely boy


At the denouement, the final dramatic unraveling, the music stops and we talk it. Tony is shot and Maria picks up the gun and makes that incredible speech, 'How many bullets are left?' My first thought was that this was to be her biggest aria. I can't tell you how many tries I made on that aria. I tried once to make it cynical and swift. Another time like a recitative. Another time like a Puccini aria. In every case, after five or six bars, I gave up. It was phoney...
Leonard Bernstein

Song of the Week: Jet Song (and everything that follows for the next 2 hours) - Leonard Bernstein


Me and my little sis, Monkey2 went to see West Side Story at Sadler's Wells last night as part of her birthday treat. It's a very conservative, conventional production, with some excellent performances from last night's Maria and Anita, and a A* rendition from Action and the Jets of Gee Officer Krupke, Sondheim's lyrical high-point with its terrifically funny attack on well-meaning liberalism. The seething, angry, sexy choreography of Cool positively bristled and pulsed with hormonal tensions. Finally, the costumes for the dance; Jets in slippery silvers, cold-blooded greens, golds and the occasional feminine burst of yellow or orange; the Sharks in a tropical array of hot pinks, reds and purples that screamed sexy teen exuberance, were inspired. But as usual, with any performance of West Side Story, the star was Leonard Bernstein's incredible score.

So, today I hand the baton onto Lavinia Greenlaw, and excerpts from her chapter on West Side Story in The Importance of Music to Girls. It's (almost) impossible to pick "the best" song from this, the best of all musicals ever ever ever. America's a guaranteed crowd-pleaser, I cried in the theatre during Somewhere and Maria (what a cheeseball) and Something's Coming is brimming with youthful hunger and expectation. But my favourite, always, is the musical's opening Prologue. It's just a taster of the delights that are to come, and it segues wonderfully into the Jet Song, which, aside from being a joyfully macho kick-starter to the action, is the song I rather bizarrely chose to choreograph and perform in front of my primary school as part of a Year 5 assembly. And for this reason, it will always hold a very dear place in my heart. And I still know all the moves off by heart.

I was Riff, natch.

*
West Side Story was a fire-engine-red album cover with high-rise black lettering propping up a fire escape on which the sharp silhouettes of a man and woman danced (fell? fought?). From the first whistles and clicks, the spasmic strings and bass, it erupts into a drama of such extension and motion that I gave myself up to it. This music has its own architecture, machinery, circulation, boundaries and weather. I got lost and found myself back where I started. I passed places I'd seen earlier. I found dead-ends, alleys, shocking open spaces, blind corners and always the pleasurable sense of something building. A city still buidling itself - what could be more exciting and alive?
And these characters who spat or sang were neither adult nor child. Until I saw the film, they weren't characters at all but each a formulation of feeling,. I was astounded that they could be talking, quite ordinarily, mroe than ordinarily, and from there, burst into song. I thought people either stood around talking or stood around singing, but here was a new possibility; you could go about your life and then, when the mood took you, you could dance, you could sing, and everyone around you would know the words and the steps, and just like that the world would be musical.
Here were boys, bristling and strutting and unlike London's floaty hippies, the end-of-the-pier Teddy Boys or prissy Mods, they were completely
boy. They fought, smoked and swore even as they sang and danced. The opening scene in which the Jets strut through their territory, threatening and teasing and showing off, is described in the libretto as 'half-danced, half-mimed' as if the whole of it lay in movement.
Song and dance are explosion and interruption, and sometimes the only way to keep up with what's happening. Mid-strut, the boys pause, spine and glide, their arms opening into a
port de bras (which means 'the carriage of the arms' and it was as if they were carrying arms), parting the airt as if to reclaim a space they felt themselves losing. They could sing and dance and then get back to business; they could have feelings, they could recover from them...
...Leonard Bernstein wrote in his West Side Story Log in 1956 (by which time he and Arthur Lorenz had been ruminating on the idea of West Side Story for seven years): 'Chief problem: to tread the fine line between opera and Broadway, between realism and poetry, ballet and "just dancing"... The line is there, but it's very fine, and sometimes takes a lot of peering around to discern it.' Like the narrowest tenement, West Side Story is built on this fine line which is why it is such a volatile structure, why it keeps falling and rebuiling. The score is kept teetering by the use throughout of the destabilising tri-tone. This is an interval of three tones, or six semitones, which sounds powerfully unsettled. So much so that in the Middle Ages if was known as diabolus in musica. It is the augmented fourth, the diminished fith. Play middle C and F sharp on the piano and your ear wuill insist that something has gone wrong or has been stretched too far.
The Jets and Sharks meet at a dance in the gym. No one speaks but everyone dances through a sequence of 'Blues-Promenade-Mambo-Cha-Cha'. These dances are expletive, plosive, headline and subtext. This is war and even the girls, who mostly simper and flounce, produce some brutal moves. It wasn't the girls I idenitifed with, nor was it Tony and Maria, the simepring Romeo and Juliet. I identified with the music.

*

And herein lies West Side Story's biggest problem. Tony and Maria are our Romeo and Juliet, an innocent pair of star-crossed lovers. But everyone cares far more for the boisterous Riff, the hot-tempered Bernardo, the sultry Anita: their appetite for Shakespeare's more violent delights makes them much sexier, stronger and much more appealing. I feel far more watching Riff tumble at Bernardo's blade than watching Maria andTony feverishly collapse on each other's lips. And I think Bernstein feels the same. Like Milton with Satan before him, he gives the bad kids all the best lines.

Until the end that it is, hence my choice of picture. All the music - kaput; just silence amidst the horror of the Jets' rape of Anita and the lone gunshot that murders Tony. All that beauty and squealing joy of the earlier scenes has gone. The same passion that brings forth such ecstasy ends in misery. How wonderfully...Shakespearean. Just Maria, howling "Now I can kill because I hate now."

Yes. I cried. Gets me everytime.

Monday, August 04, 2008

song of the week: S.O.S - ABBA



After thoroughly loving the utter pile of crap that is Mamma Mia! at the cinema with my mum and sister on Sunday, I had to pick my favourite Abba song as SOTW. In short, Mamma Mia! succeeds where Baz Luhrmann previously failed, by trading all nods at irony, knowing, gloss and cool credibility for overblown slapstick, histrionics and mawkish sentimentality.

The film itself is a shambles - there's dubbing dodgier than a 60s Tamil film, absurd plot holes and continuity errors and no emotional depth (yet still I wept like a baby at the creepy, emotionally manipulative image of Amanda Seyfried curled up in Meryl Streep's lap, having her toenails painted as Meryl crooned Slipping Through My Fingers. *shudder*).

But...for your ticket price you get Colin Firth singing (oh, he shouldn't have), Stellan Skarsgaard's buttocks (yes, we've all seem them before, but why not?) , Meryl Streep doing "kooky" in dungarees, Piers Brosnan being (shock horror) er, charming, and, well...a bit dishy, (my taste was chucked out with the popcorn box), plus the charming, gorgeous Amanda Seyfried letting her big blue eyes and seaswept blonde hair act for her as she plays weird Freudian Daddy's-girl-games with the three leading men.

And Julie Walters falls into the sink! (Trust me, you have to be there.) And sings Dancing Queen into a tube of cotton pads! I mean, what do you people want, blood?

I hate hate hate hate this sort of thing normally, but, it was effing brilliant. "So bad it's good" is a cliche that should really only be reserved for a masterpiece like this. Mamma Mia! is the nightmare car crash of a film you'd get if Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge got Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You grotesquely plastered and did the dirty on the Greek island of Kitschos. Or, Much Ado About Nothing in a three-way with Eldorado and TOTP2.

Just (sigh of filthy pleasure) a-MAY-zin'.

As for S.O.S...

This is crushing heartbreak pop at it's most affecting. Although Piers Brosnan and Meryl Streep play this for laughs with backing vocals provided by stock comedy-Greek peasants (they even sing on opposite sides of a wall, a'la Kylie and Jason in the Especially for You video) such ludicrous staging can't undermine the elegant desperation of the "When You're Gone...." climax to the chorus.

Sunday, August 03, 2008

song of the week: Je suis la tigresse - Delphine Desyeux

Apologies for the tardiness in posting this week; I've been busy booking my summer holiday (returning to my spiritual homeland, the Czech Republic - woo!) and planning my future.

Last week's blissful sunshine and the ressurrection of all my frilly summer dresses and flirty cut-off t-shirts meant that frothy French ye-ye happily dominated the i-Pod. This uncomplicated, exuberant and oh-so-girly '60s pop kind of replicates what the inside of my head does when the sun comes out (i.e: la-la-la-la, mmmn ice-cream, la-la-la-la, what pretty pink flip-flops, la-la-la, seriously, Sophie Kinsella can really write - okay, maybe not the last bit). Delphine Desyeux's Je suis la tigresse ticks all the boxes - it's the biggest load of candyfloss girly twaddle and so indulgent and inconsequential that I defy you not be just a little bit happy when you hear it. It's proto-girl-power (or, as I like to think of it, sexism in it's most naive and innocent form) lyrics brilliantly reinforce the song's mix of faux-innocence and cynical marketing of young female flesh. I tell you, it's a dream. Unfortunately, youtube only has the original Lulu version of the song...which doesn't sound anywhere near as good, but does come accompanied with this gem of a video. Forget drunken office-party snogs or farting in front of your boss...this is professional suicide of the most impressive kind.