Hack at work
Paul McCartney’s sentimental journey: not just for grannies
Paul McCartney, Kisses on the Bottom, CD review
27 Jan 2012
John Lennon famously disdained Paul McCartney’s music hall tendencies as “nice little folk songs for the grannies to dig”. But the Beatles’ appeal owed as much to solid roots in Tin Pan Alley tunemanship as rock bite and experimentalism, lessons in classic song structure embedded in them from their parent’s generation.
For his 35th post-Beatles album (counting Wings, classical, soundtrack and electronic works), McCartney pays homage to songs he first heard his father play on the family piano. The mood is of warm and cosy nostalgia, laced with the qualities of magic and emotion familiar from McCartney’s own works of whimsy. He loves this material, and it shows.
<< read more: Paul McCartney, CD review – Telegraph.
Leonard Cohen: sometimes the old ideas are the best
Old Ideas, CD Review (Columbia)
GMT 27 Jan 2012
“He wants to write a love song/ An anthem of forgiving/ A manual for living with defeat/ A cry above the suffering/ A sacrifice recovering/ But that isn’t what I need him to complete,” whispers Leonard Cohen on the opening track of Old Ideas, his first album of original songs in seven years, and only his 12th studio album since 1967.
Writing in the third person about his struggles with his muse, Cohen slyly describes himself as “a lazy bastard living in a suit” but his legendarily slow working methods have less to do with sloth than depth, precision and judgment, the exacting standards of poetic genius.
The song that emerges from this particular struggle is Going Home, an elegiac act of surrender, in which there is little doubt about the final destination. As the angelic Webb Sisters add heavenly sighs, Cohen’s weary voice tenderly evokes a place without sorrow or burdens, where he will return “without this costume that I wore”. He is not referring to dapper double-breasted suits, rather the notion that he himself has been “nothing but a brief elaboration of a tune”.
At 77, Cohen’s drolly titled Old Ideas embraces not just his own age but ageless themes, mocking idealised serenity with reminders of his very human weaknesses.
<<Read More: Leonard Cohen, CD review – Telegraph>>
Simon Cowell’s DJ talent search could be the dullest programme in TV history
January 26th, 2012
Simon Cowell is planning a new live TV talent show to “find the world’s greatest DJ.” Unless he is also planning to revive Pan’s People, this will be the dullest television show since they stopped showing the Test Card. Think about it. DJs traditionally stand behind a turntable and play records that other people have made ( although the modern DJ is just as likely to trigger them from his Mac, with an automatic mixing programme). I don’t know how much nail-biting drama there is to be squeezed from shots of a man in headphones teeing up his next track, then maybe having a crafty fag and a beer while a 12-minute remix of Azealia Banks’s latest groove plays out. As for the judges, what are they supposed to say? “Nice one, mate. Have you got any ABBA?”
For sure, the DJ’s role has shifted over the years from background manipulators to main attraction, and many of the most successful modern DJ acts have developed a visual counterpoint to correspond with this shift in focus. But even with such hi-tech superstar DJs and DJ teams as Deadmau5, Daft Punk and Magnetic Man, this still usually boils down to costumes, laser lights and go-go girls. DeadMau5 wears a big mouse head. Good luck with making a prime time TV show out of that.
Lana Del Rey: “I’m 100 per cent sincere”
24 Jan 2012
Lana Del Rey is the girl of the moment. On a freezing New York afternoon, wind-chill factor -8C, she breezes into the lobby of an exclusive members’ club with the untouchable aura of someone transported within their own micro-climate. She looks immaculate, as indeed she has always looked since the world first sat up and took notice – perfectly turned out in tight blue slacks, green shirt and a suede jacket, like a beatnik princess. Long auburn hair falls in perfect lines around her face, deep brown eyes casting a frank, steady gaze beneath long, false lashes.In the flesh she still has a girlish slightness of frame, but in front of cameras she is capable of shifting swiftly from a kind of coltish innocence to vampish knowingness. It’s a quality that is hard to pin down but is present in the videos, songs and photo shoots that have suddenly and dramatically elevated her from the obscure margins of the internet to the centre of the pop zeitgeist, a kind of doubleness, a sense of duality and merging contradictions. She is a person into whom you can read a lot.Which is what the world has been doing. In May 2010, the unsigned Del Rey posted a home-made video on YouTube of a deceptively simple song called Video Games, in which she sang in a low, sultry voice about a remembered moment of idle and possibly idyllic love to an achingly sad melody, set to found footage of old Hollywood and sun-bleached shots of Del Rey. It’s a clip that has a strange, otherworldly power, emphasised, perhaps, by the absence of beats, the quiet poise of its artful construction, allied to intense yet understated emotion.By the end of the year, it had been viewed 20 million times, become a top 10 hit single on British indie label, Stranger Music, earned her a big deal with Universal Music, put her on the covers of magazines and at the top of ones to watch polls, and helped make Del Rey the most talked about new star of the year, hailed, in her own pithy phrase, as the “gangsta Nancy Sinatra”. Yet a lot of what was being said wasn’t particularly nice. She was accused online of being a fake, created by backroom Svengalis in some kind of nefarious pop conspiracy, a Botoxed, manufactured, spoiled, super-rich airhead being sold to a gullible world as an indie pin-up. Insults flew fast and furious, as commenters called her authenticity to account. It was as if Del Rey was too good to be true.“Its funny,” says Del Rey, although she’s not laughing. “I don’t really have any gimmicks. I don’t actually do anything that’s strange. I don’t even wear weird things. I have taken taking my music to labels for years, and everyone just thought it was creepy. They thought the images with the music were weird and verging on psychotic. And then, one day, its like people decided it wasn’t actually too strange, it was actually too perfect. The fact that it could even be considered pop is a revelation to me. You know what changed? It got played on the radio.”
<<read more Lana Del Rey interview: - Telegraph>>
Rock: still dead
January 12th, 2012
The BBC today reported comments by a leading British music industry boss, suggesting that record companies are “scared” to sign new guitar bands “because not much of it is succeeding”. Actually, “not much” can be translated as “none”.
Jim Chancellor, managing director of Fiction records, was talking up the chances of his own new guitar band, Spector. They are an interesting outfit, with a polemical drive and a strong pop sensibility, trying to bring a brash, modern swagger to classic sixties song formats, although it still strikes me as the kind of thing more likely to inspire NME editorials than contemporary audiences. The NME’s great guitar hopes of 2011, the Vaccines, barely dented the annual best-selling album charts, just scraping into the top 35. And they were the only new guitar band to make a breakthrough in 2011 at all.
It is not all bad news for rock music. U2 were apparently the highest earning musical act in America last year, and they didn’t even release a recording. Veteran rock still thrives in the live arena, where the genre’s very visceral sense of attack and communion has an emotional blockbuster impact that is hard for other genres to rival, at least for audiences who grew up on it. And Coldplay’s new album has just passed a million sales in the US. Whether you think they are the saviours of rock or the death of it is probably a matter of taste, although I think they should be applauded for pushing the sensibilities of rock music into keyboard-led, 21st century pop terrain.
Snoop Dogg’s drug case is a bust
Snoop Dogg’s drug case is a bust
11 Jan 2012
The news that Snoop Dogg was arrested for marijuana possession came as a shock to the music community yesterday. Who’d have guessed that the composer of ‘Smoke Weed Every Day’, ‘The Weed Iz Mine’ and ‘Smokin Smokin Weed’ was a habitual drug user? When he prevailed upon listeners to “smoke til your eyes get cataracts”, I always thought it was an ironic comment on healthy living.
The relationship between law enforcement and pop music is interestingly fraught. Since the rebellious hey day of rock ‘n roll, there has been a strong outlaw, boundary breaking and libertarian strand to pop culture, which is emphasised by the way most song lyrics are delivered in the first person, and is imprinted (rightly or wrongly) with a strong sense of autobiographical experience.
In the late sixties, police forces briefly went into overdrive arresting household name pop stars who openly espoused drug use, staging raids on the homes of members of the Beatles and Rolling Stones, leading to William Rees Mogg’s “who breaks a butterfly on a wheel” Times editorial. Despite many subsequent drug busts and the hounding in the US of serial provocateurs like Jim Morrison, Marilyn Monroe and Eminem (usually for obscenity), you would have to say there has been a kind of stand-off between pop and the police ever since, with a blind eye turned to the openly challenging content of both songs and interviews
Beyonce and Jay Z play the pop star baby name game
10 Jan 2012
+
=
or
?
So full of the joys of new parenthood is Jay Z, that he’s released a rap in honour of his and Beyonce’s new born daughter Blue Ivy. Despite the odd cringeworthy couplet (“the most beautifulist thing in the world / Is daddy’s little girl”) Glory is an unusually grounded paean to a new born, counter balancing the innate sentimentality of such parental classics as Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t She Lovely and John Lennon’s Beautiful Boy with the gritty drama expected of hip hop. I feel fairly sure this is the first baby song to discuss miscarriage and the alcoholism of a grandparent. Jay Z’s delight is, frankly, delightful, although I wonder if his daughter will feel the same way by the time she has grown up and has complete strangers approaching her and quoting “you’re my child with the child from Destiny’s Child”. By then, of course, she may be immune to embarrassment, which is presumably the point of saddling your offspring with a name apparently based on the skin colour of a person on a faulty intravenous drip.
Actually, despite theories that she is named after the Jay Z album Blueprint and Beyonce album 4 (in Roman numerals), Blue Ivy makes a fairly undramatic new entry into the rock star baby name lexicon. She is not even the first pop baby Blue. U2 guitarist Edge has a daughter named Blue Angel, named after his favourite Roy Orbison song. Presumably the child can only be thankful that Edge wasn’t more keen on Ooby Dooby.
Is Michael Kiwanuka’s retro soul really the sound of 2012?
January 6th, 2012
Is Michael Kiwanuka really the sound of 2012? He’s more like the sound of 1972 to me.
A Londoner of Ugandan heritage, the 23-year-old soul singer-songwriter was endorsed by Adele and Mumford and Sons before going on to top the BBC’s influential Sound of 2012 poll of critics, broadcasters and pundits.
With his soft-stringed acoustic guitars, flighty woodwind and mellifluous soul arrangements encasing a gentle, rich, languid voice, he spins listeners back to a world of laidback grooves: Bill Withers telling us about his Lovely Day and Van Morrison taking us on a Moondance. It is gorgeous, sophisticated and fills you with warm and fuzzy feelings. Which, frankly, doesn’t sound much like my idea of the year we have in store.
Kiwanuka certainly has the golden mix of artistic credibility and commercial sweetness to help him crossover from hipsters to every day listeners, although I doubt he will dominate 2012’s music scene in the way Adele’s retro blues soul sound did in 2011. It is all a little too laidback for world domination.
2012: who can save pop from itself?
05 Jan 2012
Despite the apocalyptic predictions of the ancient Mayan calendar, I don’t expect to witness the end of the world in 2012. The end of the music business is another matter. The sense of decline is inescapable, with a once mighty string of major global music companies reduced to just three in 2011, and quite possibly down to two by the end of this year (with Warner Music still looking vulnerable). Dwindling sales, collapsing profits, falling budgets and the general turmoil stirred by the advance of new technologies may be old news but that doesn’t make it any less grave.
For music fans, the shrinking of the industry may have been disguised by the avalanche of exciting music available to be heard , often for free. Looking ahead, however, there is little to suggest that 2012 is shaping up to be one of pop’s glory years. I just hope this is not a sign of chickens coming home to roost, with years of falling investment resulting in talented music-makers not being given the support they need .
So what mighty Amazonian warriors do we glimpse on the horizon, ready to save pop from itself? Last year, women ruled the charts, and in 2012 the original pop queen goes head to head with the pretender to her throne. Madonna has been the dominant female pop icon of the past three decades, but, at 53, has she still got the swagger and cutting edge to see off the challenge of Lady Gaga? Both are set to release albums and embark on world tours, with armies of fashion couturiers, milliners, production designers and choreographers drafted in to combat. May the best hat win.
2011: the year women took over pop
It was the year women took over pop. Adele had the biggest selling album in the world. Lady Gaga the fastest selling. They stood like twin beacons of the new girl power: Adele soulful and authentic, Gaga provocative and outrageous. Between their titanic successes, the gates swung open to admit a veritable Amazonian pop riot. Beyonce headlined Glastonbury festival, replacing screaming guitar solos with vocal pyrotechnics. Rihanna was booted out of a field in Ireland for her inappropriate dress code but pop charts proved more welcoming to her musical erotic review.
Katy Perry and Jessie J took a similarly salacious approach to marketing their wares but, as Adele demonstrated with character and talent, the new gender gap wasn’t all about the bottom line. Women were at the creative forefront. PJ Harvey made the album of the year with her Mercury Prize Winning Let England Shake, a deep and moving song cycle that laid its roots in the bloodshed of the First World War but found resonance in these war weary, recession embattled times. Laura Marling advanced across the folk front with the dark and sensuous A Creature I Don’t Know, at 21 already shaping up to be an all time great. Icelandic maverick Bjork attempted to completely reinvent the album for the app era with the beautiful and strange Biophilia. Rap provocateur Nicki Minaj threatened to do for the C-word what hip hop has already done for the N-word. Florence and the Machine affirmed her position on the top of the pedestal with Ceremonials, a flamboyantly gothic work of primal power that drew comparison to popular music’s most potent female icon, Kate Bush. But then the reclusive Bush reappeared herself, with an icily gorgeous winter masterpiece, 50 Words For Snow.
It may well be that the trend towards female artists is driven as much by internet click patterns (female fronted videos do significantly better than male videos online) as social empowerment but, pursued by record companies who never knowingly buck a fad, for the first time in pop history, men can be considered the weaker sex.
But what was the biggest selling band this year? At this point, we might normally expect power chords to ring out and boys with guitars to swagger to the fore. In 2011, however, the honour (in the UK at least) belongs to a couple of dudes pressing buttons on synths and samplers. Chase And Status made a guest-filled album (including contributions from Dizzee Rascal, Tinie Tempah and Plan B), No More Idols, that sounds like a compendium of everything exciting about British dance music, from drum n bass to dubstep. They were followed onto the dancefloors by other purveyors of stadium sized urban electro, Nero, M83 and Example. With Katy B as its pin up girl, this is really the sound of Britain in the second decade of the 21st century, reshaping the dynamics and drama of rock into a technopop blast building towards euphoric release: hard-hitting beats, bone rattling bass, and, surprisingly often, lyrics that reflect the hard lives and legitimise the escapist desires of its youthful audience.
As for the electric guitar, well, it has been said before and I’ll say it again: rock is dead or dying, even if nobody with skinny jeans and a Stratocaster is quite ready to roll over and give up the ghost. NME’s band of the year was The Vaccines, whose formulaic garage powerpunk barely rippled public consciousness. The former stars of Britpop, Noel and Liam Gallagher, continued their unseemly squabbling but both their new offerings sounded like variations on Oasis and did nothing to assuage the sense that rock has become a sideshow rather than the main event. REM broke up from lack of interest, The White Stripes shut up shop, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers comeback was a commercial dud. U2 concluded the highest ever grossing world tour, which would seem to suggest that rock still has the ear of the world, but rapidly fell into a kind of existential crisis, openly questioning their continued relevance. “I don’t know if it is possible for us to make something that is current that is meaningful, not just to our audience but to the times we live in,” Bono admitted, and he could have speaking for every guitar toting combo who no longer have any purchase on the pop charts. Rock is the new jazz, only its commercial reach over the past five decades ensures its twilight years will be played out in stadiums, rather than dingy basements.
U2 headlined Glastonbury, to a mixed reception. It seemed the moment when Coldplay officially stole their crown. You rarely hear a good word said about Coldplay, yet when they play there’s always tens of thousands of people being carried away to the point of euphoria. I am just not convinced they are really a rock band. They seem to me a particularly cinemascopic pop group. What connects them to rock is the sense of grandiose scale and ambition, qualities shared by Arcade Fire and Elbow. Maybe, somewhere in that highly aspirational, physically visceral, spiritual and emotional music, rock will be reborn as a genuinely potent force. Or maybe the thriving sub cults of metal will force their way to the surface again. But for now, rock seems to be dominated by aging legends playing to die hard fans whose listening habits are entrenched.
The veteran market has become isolated in its own musical bubble, where audiences still buy concert tickets and CDs, and nothing really changes. Bob Dylan and Paul Simon turned 70 in 2011, continuing to perform to adoring crowds. The Stone Roses and Black Sabbath are the latest groups to reunite. But the future of pop won’t be found in the past. Outside the bubble, EMI has fallen, the last great British record company having its bones picked over by former rivals Sony and Universal. Together with Warners, there are only three global music companies still standing. The music business is undergoing paroxysms of change, with no one quite certain what the commercial prospects are in a digital world where the new price of everything is free. But still, somehow, great music is being made, by artists who need to make it, blurring boundaries and taking shapes that don’t fit any tidy summing up. So let me, at least, acknowledge the important part played in my year of listening by Bon Iver, Kanye West and Jay Z, Little Dragon, Okkervil River, Feist, James Blake, Drake, Silver Seas, Kill It Kid, Arctic Monkeys, Agnes Obel, Josh T Pearson, Tom Waits, The Waterboys and even former X Factor contestant Rebecca Ferguson.
We lost some great talents in 2011, amongst them Gil Scott Heron, Gerry Rafferty, Clarence Clemons, John Barry, Gary Moore, Bert Jansch, Poly Styrene and Jackie Leven. But the death that shook the world was Amy Winehouse, at just 27. She was a strikingly brilliant singer, songwriter and personality who probably did more than anyone else to kick start this wave of female pop empowerment. Like any great talent who dies before their time, we are left wondering what might have been. But her many sisters in arms have kept this particular torch brightly burning.
The moment that made me love my job: The privilege of being in Abbey Road studio to watch Amy Winehouse and Tony Bennett record a spine-tingling duet of Body And Soul, up close and personal.
The moment that made me want to quit: Watching a packed O2 Arena respond with ecstatic enthusiasm to a bikini clad Britney Spears’ desultory lip syncing and lazy dancing to pre-recorded backing tracks.
SONGS OF THE YEAR:
Jessie J: Price Tag
Adele: Someone Like You
Chase and Status: Blind Faith
Lana Del Rey: Video Games
Azealia Banks: 212