The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

Menu

Navigation

You are here: Home / Forum / Bingo Little’s 100 Favourite Songs Of All Time, nos 90-81

Comments

  1. 90. Fool For You – The Impressions

    Fool For You is a short, and otherwise relatively innocuous, Soul record possessed of a single feature that elevates it to utter greatness: a chorus blessed with the loveliest and most sugar-drenched vocals I have ever heard or ever expect to hear.

    The Impressions were, of course, Curtis Mayfield’s group before he fully became Curtis Mayfield. Formed in a Church choir, they built their brand on sharp suits and close harmonies, and eventually became the inspiration for both the look and vocal style of Bob Marley’s nascent Wailers.

    Having started out in the late 50s, the group went through a number of iterations: The Roosters, Jerry Butler & The Impressions, etc. By the early 60s the eponymous Butler had departed, and The Impressions, now a trio, had settled on a gospel sound with nods to the civil rights movement, which is largely where they still were come 1968 and the album from which Fool For You is taken: This Is My Country.

    Fool For You rattles into being on a triumphal wave of horns and crashing drums, all Soul sturm und drang, setting the scene for Mayfield’s vocal, and a weirdly incongruous first verse.

    Never liked nobody
    That’s been mean to me
    I’ve got a heart full of stone
    And I hate the misery
    Then you came along
    Into my life
    Destroying my mind
    Mounting up the toil and strife

    Essentially: I was miserable, utterly miserable, then you came along and made me more miserable still. It’s like a Morrissey lyric out here.

    And then, just as we’re contemplating where all this misery is heading, that first chorus hits. A deep, plunging swoon of a chorus, Mayfield’s voice joined by those of Sam Gooden and Fred Cash to punch the kicker line: “But I’m a fool for you”. Taken in context, it’s a man resigning himself to further romantic misery. But it sounds like the precise opposite, and therein lies the self-deception.

    The song works on tension and release. The verses are filled with urgent pleas for mercy, and underpinned by a guitar line that sounds like it’s tapping out an SOS in morse code. The choruses are an explosion of strings and gorgeous doo wop harmonies, the absolute triumph of hope over reality. Doomed romance given wings. And in the meantime, the horns weave in and out of it all like a taxi dodging traffic.

    I could listen to that chorus forever. The way it seems to come out of nowhere, the merging of those three great vocals, the way they stretch out the word “fool”. The way they throw in that “you don’t want me to stay” on the final round, with the voices all peaking on “stay”. Curtis Mayfield could sing like a motherfucker, and he sings his heart out here.

    It always blows my mind to put this next to People Get Ready, another absolutely brilliant single recorded 3 years earlier by The Impressions. Same vocalists, same lead, but they sound like an entirely different act. You get the occasional moment where Curtis drifts into his final form Curtis voice, but that’s about it. It works better for that tune, but the range is crazy.

    Fool For You is the always the first Curtis Mayfield record I reach for, and it’s one of those rare songs where the sugar rush of the first listen never seems to dissipate. I get the same buzz off it every single time, mainly because I can just sit there and imagine for a moment being able to sing like that. What it must feel like to have all the beauty flowing right out of you.

  2. Great choice! I absolutely love this number.

    I went on an Impressions jag some time ago and bought a load of their finest LPs – pretty much all fabulous.

    The ‘Complete A & B Sides’ double CD is soultastic brilliance from start to finish.

    • They were a remarkably consistent act, from what I can make out. The strength of the vocals just carries everything else along.

      Similar in that regard to The Four Tops, the act I always mentally file adjacent. Their Baby I Need Your Loving is the only other song I can think of with a chorus so gorgeously blessed.

  3. 89. Elephant Stone – The Stone Roses

    Sometimes, a band is fortunate enough to have a song that truly encapsulates everything that’s great about them. In the case of The Stone Roses, that song was Elephant Stone.

    Originally released in 1988 as the band’s third single, Elephant Stone was the first Roses track to fully showcase the strengths of the band, the first to feature Squire’s artwork on its cover, and the first to truly win my heart.

    Two different versions were released, a radio-friendly 3 minute long edit for the 7 inch single, and an extended, near 5 minute long full fat version for the 12 inch. It’s the latter we’re looking at here, not least because it’s the version I first encountered on Turns Into Stone.

    Elephant Stone has one of the great band intro openings of any tune, each element being added as the group form like Voltron. It’s my favourite Stone Roses record because of the way it unpacks the band and then packs them all up again after. Because of the circle it forms.

    We kick off with the sound of Reni’s cymbals, only they’re being played in reverse. Consequently, they sound like no cymbals you’ve ever heard before – they’re otherworldly, familiar but unfamiliar, the sound of water flowing upwards. It sets the tone beautifully; here you are in a dreamscape where nothing is quite as it seems.

    The cymbals are then joined by Reni’s drums proper, and he plays us in beautifully. Always the Roses’ strongest asset, this was the first time he was really sent to the fore, and Elephant Stone is very much his song. John Squire and Mani come in just before the minute mark, and build things out further.

    At this point we’re nearly two minutes in and there’s been no vocal at all, just an absolutely fire rhythm section, operating at or around the peak of their powers, totally locked in to one another. It’s also, regrettably, the section of the song that’s largely excised in the cut down 3 minute version. When people think of the power of the Stone Roses as a band, they automatically go to the extended outro of I Am The Resurrection, but they should really be coming here – it has all the same strengths, squeezed into a little over 90 seconds. If this was all they’d ever done they’d still be great.

    When Ian Brown’s vocal arrives, it’s one of this better efforts. Hushed, urgent and low in the mix, joining the instruments rather than jumping all over them. Ironically, given what’s ahead, this is a band completely in synch, entirely copacetic.

    The song’s outro is equally glorious. We’re rejoined by the backwards cymbals, the guitar work builds to a crescendo and then the components begin to drop away; first vocals, then guitar, then bass, then drums, until all we’re left with again is the cymbals. Right back to where we started, the circle complete.

    As a teenager, I spent ages trying to figure out what Elephant Stone was all about. That glorious opening refrain (“Burst into heaven/kiss in the cotton clouds”), all the nature imagery, the cry of “Seems like there’s a hole/In my dreams”. When I think of the Stone Roses and what was great about them, that’s the sound I think of: the whole band in full flight and that “Seems like there’s a hole in my dreams”. I don’t think they ever sounded better than that.

    Around the time I first discovered Elephant Stone I was reading Sam Keith’s immortal comic series The Maxx, the story of which concerns a homeless man who, in an alternate reality, is the protector-god of a heavily stylised Australian outback. The Maxx introduced me to the concept of the Aboriginal dream-time; the continuum of past, present and future in which all events have occurred or will occur.

    When I first heard Elephant Stone, and when I listen to it now, that’s what I hear. A grand, circular dream-space in which time can move forwards and backwards, but always in a circle, and in which myths are made and destroyed. Send me home on an Elephant Stone, and smash my dream of love. Water flowing backwards. The end is the beginning is the end. Even the heavy “bang bang bang” of the drums which occasionally punctuates the song and sounds like something on the outside trying to get in.

    The Roses made some other quite brilliant records, but this is the one for me. It’s weird and beautiful and sweet. It has an innocence to it that they’d lost by the time of the first album (all that braggadocio).

    I first heard it in my early teenage years and it will forever encapsulate the feeling of my by then fast receding boyhood, that era of make-believe and myth-building where time worked with me, not against me, and during which the thin veil that separated reality from my dreams never felt thinner.

    • Love it. I agree it is the most Stone Roses Stone Roses track. However, I do find myself listening to Fool’s Gold (long version) more often. That groove is incredible and IB is just mumbling in his lower register, keeping out of harm’s way. His vocal is much better on Elephant Stone. I think Mani is as crucial as Reni. Never liked the debut album much.

      By the way, have you heard Ringo’s cymbals on I’m Only Sleeping?

      • Didn’t like the debut album? Wow.

        Elephant Stone is great, lovely write-up. BTW it is on the US version of the debut album (along with Fool’s Gold)

        Gonna go with She Bangs the Drum, I wanna Be Adored or Song for my Sugar Spun Sister personally.

            • Well it’s hard to say they were an albums band when they only made 2. However for me the debut is an incredible album, I only think Bye Bye Badman and Shoot You down are relatively weak.

                • It’s probably because I’m not really an albums kid, but I just never reach for the debut.

                  Give me Adored, Resurrection, Waterfall, Made of Stone, She Bangs The Drum and This Is The One and I’m basically all good. Five of those were released as singles.

                  Similar deal for the second album – the singles are pretty much all great, the rest of it less so (although to be honest I listen to it more often).

                  I also think at least half their best tunes never appeared on a proper album, which is unusual. Their B sides were often better than their album tracks.

                    • I think streaming is what did for me and albums.

                      There are a few records I would want to listen to in full and in sequence, but they’re few and far between these days.

                      No right or wrong way to listen, obvs. All just personal taste.

                      What I will say is that The Stone Roses has one of the best covers of any album I can think of.

            • I read a nice little piece of alternate history recently where the Roses basically did nothing but release singles throughout the nineties:

              “But while riding my bike through the lanes of Cheshire I began imaging an alternative history of The Stone Roses, one where they didn’t blow it but actually followed through from the high watermark of 1989/90…

              … a few weeks after the Spike Island and Glasgow Green gigs in the summer of 1990 Ian, John, Mani and Reni meet and sack manager Gareth Evans. They confront record label Silvertone about the highly restrictive contract they signed a few years earlier. Silvertone boss Andrew Lauder meets his lawyers who advise him the contract is a restriction of trade and very harsh, that a judge will find for the band and he’d be better to cut his losses now. The band settle quickly and start looking for a new label. US giant Geffen have promised millions but wiser heads around the band prevail. ‘Forget the money lads’, you’ ll make money anyway, go for the songs, make the records’, friends tell them and for once this most strong-headed and willful of groups agrees. Creation are interested but the band meet Jeff Barrett from Heavenly and like his talk, the promise of complete control and the young Heavenly label’s outlook. A few months later The Roses are in the studio and in early 1991 release a 12″ single, Ten Storey Love Song, the chiming guitars harking back to the debut but with a more muscular bass and drums backing. The 12″ rides high in the chart and a short UK tour in spring ’91 sees the group rapturously received by their fans.

              By now the weight of recording a second album weighs heavily on them but the recent run of singles- Fool’s Gold/ What The World Is Waiting For, One Love and Ten Storey Love Song- shows them a different way to work. ‘We’re gonna release some singles and EPs’, Ian tells the NME, ‘one after the other’. Autumn 1991 sees them record another EP, John’s predilection for heavy Led Zeppelin style guitars and riffs all over the tapes and songs. Heavenly link them up with Andrew Weatherall and in 1992 an EP of Weatherall produced songs, the Led Zep riffing underplayed now, plus a remix hits the shelves, the chiming 60s psychedelia of the first album now expanded by Andrew’s singular remix vision of the early 90s.

              Following the success of the EP the band are tight, spending time with each other and enjoying each other’s company. Creative juices flow, Ian and John writing together daily. They meet Brendan Lynch, then recording with the about to be reborn Paul Weller and he produces several songs, three of which come out as a 12″ in ’93. They have side stepped the nascent Britpop stirrings of Blur, Oasis and Suede and now look to expand in other directions, the less tribal, more genre hopping world of the mid 90s pulling them in other musical directions. Ian eases up on the weed, John eases up on stronger stuff, clarity prevails. Hit and run recording sessions, working quickly with different producers is working. They stop overthinking and start enjoying it. A session with Goldie takes Reni’s drums to completely new spaces. Heavenly’s connections with The Chemical Brothers opens doors and minds and the band spend several weeks in the studio, Ed and Tom flitting between their own sessions and those with The Roses. A stockpile of songs is built up, a four track Chemical Roses EP seeing the light of day in summer 1995, a few weeks before The Chemical Brothers’ Exit Planet Dust comes out. Blur and Oasis argue about the number one slot with two average songs, but The Roses are streets ahead, making mid 90s dance/ guitar crossover psychedelia, pushing boundaries as they once did with Fool’s Gold. They still miss out on headlining Glastonbury, John breaking his collarbone, cutting short an otherwise successful tour of the US. An invitation to headline Reading the following year is turned down- the group have reverted to their stance of only playing shows on their own terms. ‘We don’t want to be part of somebody’s else’s gig’, John says, the truculent interview technique of 1989 resurfacing. Instead they do a tour of seaside towns, fifteen dates in the summer of ’96, starting in Bridlington, then heading down the east coast and round the south coast, several dates in Wales, and then Blackpool, Southport and Morecambe, ending in Barrow.

              In autumn 1996 they spend a few weeks in the studio with Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and while not much is achieved two new songs are finished, one a dusty, cinematic trip hop groove, Reni and Mani looped by Barrow. The process of write, record and release 12″s and EPs works, the pressure of recording an album lifted and the band free to follow their noses. In 1997 Steve Hillage produces several sessions and though only a few songs are released everyone enjoys the sessions and the liquid, fluid but focussed psychedelia is well received. Several more songs sit in the vaults.

              In 1998, they falter but pick up with a tour of Europe and then record an EPs worth of songs with Mick Jones (The Clash/ BAD), Mick encouraging them to play facing each other, bashing out several songs of loose, ramshackle but melodic guitar pop. John declares that no more than two guitars are on any of the songs, hardly any overdubs and most of the songs sound like the work of a single guitar player. He switches from Les Paul to Telecaster and the thinner sound suits him and the new tunes. Mani helps Primal Scream out with some bass for their Vanishing Point album. In return Martin Duffy plays piano and keys with the Roses and another set of songs are recorded.

              As the millennium approaches the group see what they’ve achieved and eye the new century with a feeling of ten years of success behind them. They record some more songs, the influence of The Beta Band showing, Ian and John and Ian and Reni’s occasional combustible disagreements quickly solved by Heavenly’s laid back approach to managing the group. Mani and Reni find new inspiration in Neu! and Can and the band hit the studio again, Michael Rother (once a resident of Wilmslow so no stranger to north west England) at the controls. The Roses go kosmische, John playing in straight lines rather than blues, Reni in the motorik groove, his shoulders rolling as he plays.

              As New Year’s Eve approaches plans are afoot and on NYE 1999 drinkers at Chorlton Irish Club are bemused when a truck pulls up in the afternoon and three men begin hauling gear in. The Stone Roses turn up and begin playing at 8pm, opening with I Wanna Be Adored and then flitting between the songs from the debut album and the dozen single and EP releases since summer 1990. They finish at 9.30pm by which time word has spread and fans are arriving. Packing up quickly they head to Sale and set the gear up again in the scout hut at Raglan Road, the venue where John and Ian first played together as The Patrol in 1980. Simon Wolstencroft is there, manning the door with Cressa. Fans arrive, first come first served, about one hundred packed into the scout hut, sweat already dripping from the walls and ceiling. At 10.30 the band appear and begin to play, shimmering dance rock, motorik grooves, light headed psychedelia, backwards songs, and chorus heavy guitar pop. They finish with a cover of White Riot, John’s guitar squealing its last as the clock strikes midnight.

              They release their second album the next day. In typically Roses style they mess it up- it’s New Year’s Day in the year 2000, no record shops are open. When fans finally get the album (unburdened by a heavy and ludicrous name like The Second Coming, it is titled Angry Young Teddy Bears) they find it is a triple disc record. Inside the gatefold is a piece of paper announcing the end of the group. They have nothing more to do. The album contains some of the songs released over the previous ten years and many unreleased from the various sessions, songs recorded with and produced by The Chemical Brothers, Brendan Lynch, Geoff Barrow, Mick Jones, one from a session with Lee Scratch Perry that no one can remember much about, two with Jagz Kooner, several with Steve Hillage and one ten minute epic with Michael Rother. The third disc contains a previously unreleased Weatherall remix from 1991, a Sabres Of Paradise remix from 1996, and a dubby, horn- led Justin Robertson remix. On the final side of the album is a twenty three minute track, the fruits of two different sessions joined together by John Leckie, the first ten minutes the result of a collaboration with Bjork and Graham Massey, John’s guitar and Mani’s bass and Reni’s drums locked in a vaguely 808 style groove, while Ian and Bjork sing a duet. In the second half of the song, Jah Wobble’s bass appears and Mani and Wobble trade rubbery basslines, the drums and FX pedals spiraling around, while Ian whispers sweet nothings about space exploration, conquistadors and new centuries. Sinead O’Connor is on backing vocals. The fade out is a long languid groove that could happily go on forever.

              A few weeks after the split there are rumours of a series of dates in Scandinavia but nothing happens. All four men are seen together socially, friends still and happy to leave the music industry behind, having achieved what they set out to- play gigs, make records, look good, give journalists a tough time in interviews, do it on their own terms. After all of that, from the halcyon days of 1989 when they broke through, and their constant desire to keep reinventing their sound through to 1999, there’s nothing left to do, nowhere left to go- they’ve done it all.”

              Via https://baggingarea.blogspot.com/2024/01/an-alternate-history-of-stone-roses.html . Think I would have preferred it that way.

      • Thanks, Tigger. You’re right about Mani, some of his absolute best work here.

        I gave IOS a listen this morning. I like the way it crashes into being in the first second and the backing harmonies on the chorus are nice, but it’s not my thing. I can just never get on with them.

    • Nerd fact: most people think Full Fathom Five is the 7″ version run backwards. It isn’t – it’s a third version. Better than the 7″, not as good (natch) as the 12″.

      (I expect Bingo doesn’t know what these numbers mean 😉 )

  4. 88. Kanye West – Young Thug

    Some songs make it all look so easy. You listen to them and think “I could have written that”, even though you don’t play a musical instrument, you’re functionally tone deaf and small woodland animals flee at the sound of your voice.

    Then there are other songs that you listen to and have to concede that you have absolutely no idea how they were made. Where the starting point was, how the architecture works.

    Kanye West is very much in the latter camp. Where most Hip Hop is built from the beat on up, this seems to take its starting point from the vocals. And what vocals. Young Thug’s voice leaps, dances and writhes like few others. He hops from style to style, he slurs and moans and cries out. Half the time you have absolutely no idea what he’s saying, and on the few occasions that some semblance of clarity arrives it’s invariably eyeball rollingly filthy or oddly romantic.

    The song is taken from an album on which Thugger named each track after one of his heroes. It was originally entitled “Elton John” before being switched late on to Kanye West. Lyrically, it has very little to do with either artist (bar a brief “blast off like the rocket man piano”) and neither artist appears on it. Wyclef Jean of the Fugees does play a role, repeatedly intoning “Jeffery” (Young Thug’s given name), half pleading, half recriminating. There’s another song on the album called Wyclef Jean – he’s not on that one.

    Kanye West is built on an aural bed of buzzing 808s, surging snyths and key runs. It opens with the sound of a Summer evening, replete with chirruping of cicadas, and the warmth of that sound carries through the whole production. It has a Caribbean vibe without being Caribbean music.

    The vocal is utterly hyperactive, full of inchoate desperation and desire – a 21st century James Brown. It ranges all over the place, cracking with emotion one moment, smooth as silk the next. Thugger raps, croons and seal barks his way through the song like a man possessed. If you head to YouTube you can find an isolated vocal from this track – it’s truly wild to listen to, a patchwork of styles and moods, like getting an earful of ADHD.

    From the wobbly, Doo-Wop style “oooh”s that crop up halfway through to the truly barking mad Wyclef verse (I’m pretty sure that super deep voiced bit is him run through some sort of processor), to the bizarre lyrics (“scream so loud, dolphins hear the signal”), the song is an overflowing box of tricks, ideas spilling out on top of one another. It’s full of soul and emotion while remaining largely and blessedly indecipherable. I have no idea how they pieced it all together, and I don’t want to know either.

    I love Kanye West because somewhere within it I detect tremendous warmth and innocence, which is unusual for music from this genre. I love it because it reminds me how versatile the human voice is, and how creatively it can be deployed. I love it because it sounds like nothing else I’ve ever heard, and it makes me excited for the kind of music that might be made in future. All of which connects me back to what first caused me to fall in love with Hip Hop – that experimentalism and sense of joy. Kanye West is pure joy (the song, anyway).

  5. 87. Set You Free – N-Trance

    Set You Free was first recorded in 1992 by Kevin O’Toole and Dale Longworth, then students at Oldham College, built off a piano line with which they had been tinkering. It was their attempt to capture the mounting euphoria of the late 80s/early 90s dancefloors on which they were growing up.

    Vocals, improbably, were provided by 16 year old Kelly Llorenna, plucked from a nearby school virtually at random: “Kevin and Dale came into my college and asked if anyone sung, and everyone replied ‘Kelly sings!'”. The lyrics were written in 20 minutes as O’Toole and Longworth waited for Llorenna to arrive and audition. Beethoven, this was not.

    The song was originally released on a white label pressing of 500 copies in late 1992 and didn’t find much of an audience. It was then re-released each successive year until 1995, when it finally clicked with the public and became a Top 10 hit.

    Set You Free is an unapologetic slice of HI-NRG 90s Europop, and probably familiar to anyone who graced a particular kind of dancefloor in the last 30 years. Its components are very simple; slow, faux-emotional bridges, frantic rave beats and an absolutely soaring chorus. It’s utterly cynical, completely contrived and probably without any real artistic merits, and yet……. if I’m to be entirely honest, Set You Free has been the soundtrack to some of the happiest moments of my life.

    Right from the start, it was the intention of Longworth and O’Toole that Set You Free should be the last song played at the end of the night (“When we used to go to the Haçienda, the song you remembered on the way home was always the last one played, and we wanted to create that”). The track opens with the rumble of an impending thunderstorm, partly to mask the endemic crackle of vinyl, partly to build atmosphere, but mainly to make it difficult for DJs to mix in mid-set. It was always meant to be the final crescendo.

    Set You Free is the song that plays in an utterly non-descript and properly unfashionable club at the end of a long night. It’s the tune that makes you immediately find your friends on the dancefloor, form a huddle and enjoy a moment of sweaty, exhausted group communion before the beat drops. It’s the song that slows time down and then speeds it up at will, that lets you swing between deep feelings and utter joy in just a couple of minutes.

    I have been in plenty of fashionable clubs, and danced to plenty of progressive, inventive music, but I have enjoyed very few life moments as beautiful as the ones that Set You Free provided – arms around each other, everyone full of love and life and music. In those moments, the quality of the song ceases to matter a single iota: all that counts is that you’ve collectively decided to allow yourselves to be moved by it. “Want to stay in your arms forever – only love can set you free”. You’re allowing yourselves to feel euphoria, even if it’s the cheap stuff.

    There are many remixes of the song, but the 1994 radio edit (perhaps fittingly) remains the one. The rain, that piano line, that towering vocal. Your upper tolerance for cheese being tested but ultimately left unbroken. That opening lyric (“When I hold you baby/feel your heart beat close to me”), written in tribute to a chance nightclub encounter O’Toole had with a stranger who ran up to him and hugged him so tightly he felt her heartbeat through her top. The iconic ascending “Oh oh yeah”s. It’s a visceral, intensely physical record that doesn’t care a jot what you think, only what you feel. The I Feel Love of the 90s.

    One of the revelations that changed my relationship with music is that, while some songs are genius that can be enjoyed in any context and whose charms travel easily across borders, others are all about utility; they can sound awful to you until one day you hear them deployed in their rightful setting, for their rightful purpose and everything clicks. This is particularly true of music designed to make people dance.

    Set You Free, whatever its origins, is the authentic spirit of the unfussy, unbothered dancefloor. The place where no one tuts, no one folds their arms and no one sits on the sidelines bemoaning the lack of proper music, because proper music doesn’t exist in this realm. You can switch off your critical faculties and just enjoy the feeling of moving in a crowd, being with your mates. It took me until my late teens to discover the joy of that act – how to turn my brain off and listen to my body – but once I figured it out I never looked back.

    I’m of an age now where these sorts of moments – surrounded by pals on a dancefloor, all present in the here and now, happy and full of love – are harder to come by, but they still arrive semi-regularly, and they mean ever more as they do so. Set You Free is a terrible song that makes me love music more than most of the really good ones. It’s the sound of life happening fast and slow. It’s the sound of the love you have for friends in the moments when friends seem to matter most.

  6. 86. America/Closing Time – Allen Ginsberg and Tom Waits

    I first read Allen Ginsberg’s America somewhere in my teenage years. While I’ve never been much of a fan of the Beats, the poem appealed because of how open and colloquial it felt; I hadn’t really seen this form of direct address used before, and many of the lines felt as immediate and quotable as song lyrics.

    I enjoyed the odd mix of frustration, resignation and defiance, in which the poem is steeped. Probably unsurprising, given that those are the traditional modes of being of your average teenager.

    America found its way back onto my radar in the early Noughties when I downloaded from Napster an audio file of Ginsberg reading it aloud. His voice seemed to grant the text new life; his rasping tones bringing out the emotion of the piece, his pacing granting it ebb and flow, and the text’s irregular structure and meter so clearly far better suited to being heard than read. Those long lines finding their flow, as Ginsberg himself had it: “all held together within the elastic of the breath”. It sounded like a voice from the past reaching forward to inform us all of our futures.

    This would have been somewhere in the interregnum between the Twin Towers falling and the bombs beginning to drop. As a good Western Liberal I was already well-practiced in the art of handwringing over the state of America, and I’d spent enough time talking to people in South American countries to be able to reel off a lengthy list of crimes and misdemeanours. As a good Western Liberal, I was also obsessed with America – the cultural exports, the politics, the history. Caught in that perennially uncomfortable spot between castigation and fetishisation.

    They were strange times, post 9/11. Obviously full of horror and concern for the future. But also weirdly exciting. My generation were children of the 90s: we’d grown up in an era where it felt like nothing much was happening, when the President’s sex life could be the major topic of concern for months of end.

    The abrupt resumption of history was a nauseating system shock, but there was also something oddly compelling about it if you were young. That sense that we might be about to live in interesting times after all, that all those super compelling disaster movies could actually happen in real life. I was listening to the audio of Ginsberg’s poem on my way to work some time in late 2001 when I realised that – if I was truly being honest with myself – I was actually guiltily disappointed that there hadn’t been further terror attacks. The narrative demanded it. You need things to happen when you’re young, because it’s painful when the real world refuses to move at the same speed as your own heart.

    Like many others, I also plunged into trying to better understand exactly what America had done to bring down this catastrophe upon itself. I had grown up reading the Guardian, so I knew it was important to triangulate exactly what crimes might have been committed to induce such misfortune. In the midst of this slightly feeble reckoning, Ginsberg’s America, with its courtroom tone and sense of head shaking disappointment, was the perfect soundtrack. But in lighter moments it also provided some eminently quotable lines – many a night out has been enlivened by asking the simple question: when can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

    By 2006, I was largely over all of the above. I’d spent some time in the US and learned that it wasn’t the great Shangri-La, I had assumed from books, movies and music, but nor was it the great Satan either. It was just a country. Messy, compromised and full of contradictions.

    And then I came across America/Closing Time. The Ginsberg poem mashed together with Closing Time by Tom Waits, courtesy of a random guy on the Internet named Peter Hale. Ginsberg stuck back in 1959 on the tail end of the second Red Scare, Waits in 73 in the process of delivering one of my favourite albums: taken together, utterly perfect for the 21st century. The two elements fitting together absolutely hand in glove. Closing Time adds a weird gravitas to the reading, its mournful shuffle the perfect dance partner. In particular, it really sprinkles its magic dust on America’s first half, which contains a number of one liners and couplets so great they could serve as micro-poems in their own right. Or maybe even that higher accolade still – t-shirt slogans:

    Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
    America, why are your libraries full of tears?
    America, after all it is you and I who are perfect, not the next world.
    Your machinery is too much for me/you made me want to be a saint.

    America/Closing Time is the perfect accidental confluence of words and music. It’s the best possible soundtrack to thinking about the mad, infinite promise of the idea of the United States, the many ways in which it breaks that promise, and how you’ll still be going on holiday there next Summer regardless, because an only halfway fulfilled America still beats most other destinations. It’s the last song of the night in the dancehall of your shattered illusions: battered and defeated, but oddly noble. It’s also the single best ambassador for that odd period between about 2004 and 2010 when mash ups seemed like such a good idea. Its genesis was utterly prosaic, and characteristic of the spirit of 2006: Hale had been changing CDs, went from one track to the other by pure chance, stitched them together and shared the results with a friend. The DIY era when virality occurred by accident, rather than calculation.

    Of course, in the intervening years, America the nation has only grown messier, more divided and more self-evidently compromised. We’ve probably all found ourselves thinking about the place more than we would have liked, and probably more than we really need to. That idealised notion of what the nation might yet be, already looking pretty jaundiced at the time of Ginsberg’s reading, feels like something born of fantasy at this stage, and the poem’s “America, when will you be angelic” feels more bitter than ever. Indeed, it’s tempting to wonder whether the poem might usefully reinstate its original ending: “Dark America! Toward whom I close my eyes for prophecy/and bend my speaking heart/Betrayed! Betrayed!”. That tone of hysteria is just so on point.

    Time will tell whether our Trans-Atlantic cousins are on the cusp of something truly ugly (or uglier – it’s all relative), or whether this is all just another spasm in the national amygdala. What remains certain is that I will still listen to America/Closing Time, and wonder at its perfect marriage of sound and word, and as the music swells and Ginsberg pleadingly intones “American stop pushing I know what I’m doing/America, the plum blossoms are falling”, my heart will continue to swell alongside, even as my illusions continue to fall away.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZQ1F45j8Vc

  7. 85. In My Eyes – Minor Threat

    Minor Threat. One of the greatest short-lived bands of all time. A meagre three years, 1980-1983, and two EPs before vanishing forever and leaving us the mighty legacy of US hardcore, a “fuck you”, wild-eyed commitment to authenticity that would go on to define independent music and the worldview of one Kurt Cobain, and of course the miracle that is Fugazi.

    Ian Mackaye is a hero. One of very few people in music to never sell out and never compromise. To actually mean what he said. To never strike a bargain with the world, end up making payments on a sofa or a girl. In February 1979, aged just 17, Mackaye snuck in through a bathroom window to attend the legendary performance by The Cramps at the Hall of Nations in Washington DC, stood alongside future members of Bad Brains, Black Flag and god knows how many other bands. Here’s how Mackaye described it:

    “The place was way over-packed, to the point where people were crawling in through the windows to get in. The Chumps and the Urban Verbs, two D.C. bands, played first and they were very different from one another, so I was already seeing that punk could mean different things to different people. The crowd was such a mixture too, challenging every aspect of convention in life, with fashion, and sexual politics and politics. And then when The Cramps played it was just incredible. Their presentation was very visual and they were great players and totally uncompromising in their vision… it was like ‘We’re all freaks, fuck you!’ And then Lux threw up onstage and it was just ‘Whaaaaaat?’ And then chaos just ensued. The tables that people were standing on collapsed, and then chairs started going through the windows, and everything just got wrecked. As an introduction to live punk rock shows, it was pretty memorable.”

    The gig was to prove the opening shot of what would soon be a thriving DC punk rock scene, a movement of which Minor Threat, along with the Teen Idles, formed the vanguard, and an echo of which can still be found in the aesthetic of the Vans brand, still doing a roaring trade nearly 50 years later.

    Minor Threat were ferocious. Their songs were short and spiky, their lyrics acerbic. They were also born of two deep convictions; the first a suspicion of mainstream media and the music business in general, the second an aversion to drink and drugs. The former found its expression in their pronounced DIY ethos, which saw them produce their own records and merchandise and swerve all advances from major labels. The latter found its expression in perhaps their two most famous songs: Straight Edge and In My Eyes.

    Straight Edge, at all of 45 seconds long, is perhaps as close to a direct manifesto as any song has ever been, and inadvertently launched the movement of the same name. “I’m a person, just like you/but I’ve got better things to do/ than sit around and fuck my head/hang out with the living dead”. It’s an angry riposte to the indulgent rock cultures which had preceded US hardcore, full of disdain at their wastage, and all the needless death and misery that accompanied them and left their adherents politically immobile and unable to enact change.

    But it wasn’t Straight Edge I heard first. It was In My Eyes.

    I gave up alcohol when I was 15 years old. I have never smoked, and always avoided drugs. These formative decisions were made in the 90s, when seemingly no one was making such choices for reasons other than religion and/or addiction. Consequently, I spent the entire latter half of my teens pretty much apologising to everyone around me. Barely a night out would pass without my having to offer an explanation for my abstinence, and I had no idea how to explain it in terms that weren’t either fatally judgmental, or which otherwise made me sound a right prick. There was no straightforward path for this lifestyle, no visible role models. I didn’t know a single other living soul who was abstinent, and I had no real idea what I was doing. Nonetheless, I knew this was my path, and that I would have to figure it out somehow.

    In My Eyes was the first cultural contact I ever made with the idea that there might be other young people like me, even if they’d existed 15 years prior and on the other side of the Atlantic. It was also the first time I ever heard a human being refuse to apologise for their teetotalism. In fact, they were on the attack over it. This, of course, made In My Eyes a lifeline, in the way that only the right song at the right moment can be.

    We open with an entirely different tune. It doesn’t really sound like Minor Threat. In fact, it even sort of swings, hinting at the sound Fugazi would build their house on. This swiftly disintegrates in a haze of scratchy guitar before we restart with a new and ominous riff, and then we’re off to the races with a vocal. And what a vocal.

    “You tell me you like the taste
    You just need an ex-cuse
    You tell me it calms your nerves
    You just think it looks cool”

    I cannot begin to articulate here the absolute lightning bolt this opening verse sent through me. It was every goofy, awkward Friday night conversation I’d had about not drinking, suddenly and violently flipped on its head. Suddenly, it’s the drinker who is forced to explain themselves, and found wanting. I had never heard someone swim against the flow with as much righteous anger and indignation as I heard in Mackaye’s voice. “You just think it looks cool”. Fucking hell.

    By the time the song hit its first chorus I was in love. And what a chorus; a spiky, rapid mess with that bellowed “It’s in my eyes/It’s in my eyes”. That heady mix of stripped down punk and pure headed idealism. All conviction. And then the song’s peak, that magnificent rebel cry of “AT LEAST I’M FUCKING TRYINGGGGG…. What the fuck have you done”?

    In My Eyes was an important moment in my life, because it helped me realise I’d – quite unnecessarily – been playing defence over basic choices I’d made regarding my own life. I wasn’t obliged to explain myself to anyone. I didn’t need to articulate my reasoning in an acceptable fashion. I didn’t even need to have a reasoning to start with. I could just be myself and relax. So many good things flowed from that discovery – I started to get out of my own way.

    The song would go on to spawn a US subculture which still persists to this day. Straight Edgers eschew alcohol, drugs and casual sex. They’ve been known to violently attack strangers for smoking in their vicinity. All of which is highly ironic, because what Minor Threat were trying to articulate here was essentially the polar opposite of this sort of in/out group formation. In My Eyes is fundamentally a song about personal autonomy; about choosing the way you want to live your life, without self-delusion or mindless conformity, and about making no apologies for doing so. About how doing so could be a show of strength, if you just came at it from the right angle.

    Many years later I read this quote from Ian Mackaye and it resonated with me: “I wrote “Straight Edge” because I wanted to get it off my chest. I also wanted to sing it because maybe there were other people out there who didn’t drink; I wanted to connect with them. I reckon the lyrics spoke to a lot of kids who didn’t want to get high and didn’t want to be a part of that world. When they saw there were kids saying, ‘Fuck that! We’re not doing that!’ that’s all it took for them to say, ‘Yeah! I’m with you!’”. That what Minor Threat were for me – not a gang I wanted to join, not a movement I would be part of. Just a beacon letting me know that I wasn’t alone.

    In My Eyes does not sound pretty. It’s an angry, abrasive song that pushes hard against the listener, and it’s certainly not one I listen to all that often. But it’s on this list because of how directly it connected to my very soul the first time I heard it, but simple virtue of expressing a truth that was absolutely clear to me but which I couldn’t hear being spoken anywhere else. In My Eyes gave me permission, and for that I will always be grateful.

  8. 84. Bug Powder Dust (Chemical Brothers Remix) – Bomb The Bass

    One evening when I was around 9 or 10 years old, I somehow managed to sneak out of bed, make my way downstairs and hide myself behind the living room sofa, unbeknownst to my parents. From that vantage point, I spent a happy and terrifying couple of hours watching Assault On Precinct 13, John Carpenter’s immortal tribute to Rio Bravo.

    The movie had a big impact on me. It made me realise that life would involve far more interaction with bloodthirsty street gangs than I had first anticipated, and that one should always exercise caution when purchasing at the ice cream van.

    But it was the theme tune that really stuck with me. A brooding crawl of synthesizer hooks, electronic drones and drum machines, it set the perfect foreboding tone and sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before, albeit it sounds quite a bit like a lot of music I’ve enjoyed since.

    The year after the Assault On Precinct 13 incident occurred, two things happened. The first was that I heard a song on the radio that openly cribbed the central riff from the Precinct 13 main theme, stuck it on steroids and rocketed it into the future. That song was Megablast (Hip Hop On Precinct 13) by Bomb The Bass, and it took me straight back to my evening behind the sofa. It was retro-futuristic, hyperactive and full of ideas and illicit samples (including Sly & The Family Stone, Public Enemy and the Splash Band); I absolutely loved it.

    A couple of months later, a snippet from the track appeared on Xenon 2: Megablast – a side-scrolling shoot ‘em up by The Bitmap Brothers that quickly established itself as the absolute state of the art when it came to computer games. It was the first time I’d ever heard real music in a video game, and the sensation of soaring through space eradicating everything on screen with the game’s increasingly preposterous weapons while that glorious riff looped over and over again was simply undeniable. One of those moments in childhood where the world seems wondrous, as if the future is being built entirely according to you own personal specifications.

    Fast forward half decade and we’re suddenly in the mid-90s, my mid teens, and the downslope of the great sampling free for all that had begun in the 80s and produced Megablast. I’d completely lost track of Bomb The Bass, although I was heavily invested in a couple of producers named The Dust Brothers, who were running an already legendary night in Great Portland Street entitled “The Heavenly Sunday Social Club” and had put out a series of great remixes and one pretty solid EP.

    On some level, the 90s were about mashing different genres into one another; collapsing the walls between them. You felt it happening at club nights, and you saw it happening in the racks at Our Price. 1994 was a tipping point in the process, and at the very edge of said point was Bug Powder Dust. Released in late 1994, the track was immediate and uncategorisable: Justin Warfield running wild with the rhymes over a beat that wasn’t Hip Hop, or EDM or rock music but a little bit of all three.

    The song is built around a bassline lifted from Open Your Eyes You Can Fly by Flora Purim, the lyric a tribute to The Naked Lunch – taking Burroughs’ cut up composition style and loading it with more cultural references than a Pop Will Eat Itself track (Jimmy Page, Lenin, Alan Ginsberg, Apocalypse Now, Lulu, Abbey Road, 1984, Jeff Spicoli and Men At Work all get a shout). Perhaps better than any track before, it delivers on the mission statement Bomb The Bass had articulated back in the 80s: his desire “to combine the art of sampling with the energy of rock & roll”.

    Bug Powder Dust was an immediate sensation, and it quickly inspired a number of quite brilliant remixes, including notable efforts by La Funk Mob and Kruder & Dorfmeister. But it was in the hands of The Dust Brothers, recently renamed The Chemical Brothers, that it would be taken to its ultimate heights.

    The Bug Powder Dust remix catches The Chemicals at their most exciting moment. Already established off the back of a series of fantastic remixes (Voodoo People, Nice Acre Dust, Bring The Pain, Packet of Peace), about to unleash their debut album and not yet reaching for Rock mag respectability/collaborating with Noel Gallagher.

    The remix is blessed with one of the all time great openings: absolute drums of death setting up the beat, trippy sound effects and then straight into that legendary first verse: “Check it, yo, I always hit the tape with the rough road styles/You heard the psychedelic and ya came from miles/Keep my rhymes thick like a Guinness brew/So you could call me black and tan when I’m a wreckin’ a crew”. The remix is careful with Warfield’s vocal, excising some of the chaff and drawing focus to his strongest lines: “Like an exterminator running low on dust”, “who’s that man in the window pane”.

    The production builds on the original and takes everything up a notch; greater urgency, greater energy. Where Bug Powder Dust ultimately sounds like it might play on the loading screen of a video game, the remix is the soundtrack to the greatest night of your life in the darkest corner of the dancefloor at the end of the universe. It’s also an absolute masterclass in the style of music the Brothers were to make their own: the horrendously named “Big Beat”.

    Looking back, the remix is the link between two worlds: the sampletastic, Hip Hop worshipping proto-Big Beat of the late 80s, as embodied by early Bomb The Bass singles such as Beat Dis and Megablast, and the places the producers and DJs of the 90s were about to take the same music. When I listen to Megablast now, I hear, very clearly, the germ of The Chemical Brothers. The same influences, the same wide ranging tastes, just a little less sophistication and, perhaps critically, a little less desire to make people actually dance. Taken in that context, the Bug Powder Dust remix is the Chems giving a nod to their forebears before blasting off into the stratosphere.

    I’m not aware of Bomb The Bass ever recording anything of real merit after Bug Powder Dust. His work was essentially done. The Chemical Brothers, meanwhile, released Exit Planet Dust – one of the most nakedly exciting albums ever recorded and still their best, before enjoying a long and ongoing career making sporadically brilliant music. Perhaps more than any other act, they took on the mission to combine the bedrock skills involved in sampling with the energy of Rock & Roll, only they also seemed to understand that Rock & Roll is neither the only energy source available, nor the best.

    The Chemicals’ remix of Bug Powder Dust remains an overwhelmingly exciting record whenever I hear it. Partly because it takes me back to the mid-90s, and to that moment when it became apparent to me that the right remixers could take an already pretty brilliant song and make it far, far better still. But mainly because it tacitly draws on that throughline that goes right back to Assault On Precinct 13; to hearing those doomy synths and falling in love with them, and then hearing them swept up into the maelstrom of Megablast, and then finally to the moment where the torch was passed from the innovators of the 80s to the innovators of the 90s.

    It’s a song that makes me feel that music will only ever become better, more exciting, and that the stuff I’m listening to today might yet end up as grist for the geniuses of tomorrow. And it still absolutely slaps.

    • and you know I LOVE this track. I think I still the prefer the original to any of the mixes I’ve heard, although if I had to pick one remix it’d probably be Muggs’ uncharacteristically breezy take, which takes the Burroughsian cut up nightmare of the original and transplants it to a summer BBQ

  10. 83. Philadelphia – Neil Young

    In 1992, Jonathan Demme – still flush from the enormous success of Silence of The Lambs – was busily working on his next major project, the Tom Hanks-starring Philadelphia.

    As an AIDS drama at a time when sympathy for the disease’s victims was, at best, pretty mixed, the movie came with a lot of immediate cultural baggage. Conscious that, even by his own recent standards, he was paddling in deep waters, Demme went looking for potential soundtrack partners who could give the project a more mainstream tilt.

    In particular, Demme was looking for two pieces of music. The first, a muscular, reassuringly heterosexual song to accompany the movie’s opening sequence of shots from around the city of Philadelphia. Something to let the audience know that they were in safe, familiar hands and that nothing too untoward would be occurring. The second, a more emotive, more sensitive track with which to close the movie, accompanied by footage of a wake.

    For the first song, Demme reached out to Neil Young. He’d realised he was looking for something in the vein of Southern Man, and decided it was best to go to the source and simply ask Young to produce a similar tune.

    As Demme was probably aware, a request for Young to help soundtrack a movie about AIDS was potentially fraught, given past history: a decade earlier Young had already had his say on the subject, telling Melody Maker: “You go to a supermarket, and you see a faggot behind the fuckin’ cash register; you don’t want him to handle your potatoes.” This didn’t deter Demme: he wanted musicians for the project who were not typically associated with the AIDS cause – Young was about as far removed as it was possible to get.

    Fortunately, Young had undergone some growth in the intervening years, and was happy to lend his support. Ignoring the brief, he quickly recorded the skeleton of the track – a ghostly piano piece, touching on love, regret and loss, and including backing vocals from, respectively, his wife and sister.

    The demo was passed back to Demme, who was so overcome with emotion on first listening to it that he had to pull his car over to the side of the road and cry. This was not the song he’d had in mind, but it was perfect nonetheless. Bruce Springsteen ended up soundtracking the opening, while Philadelphia was assigned to the closing section. Amongst the notes sent back to Young was a request that he modify his vocal to sing from the perspective of the movie’s lead character, and specifically that he sing as “a lost boy”.

    The movie was, of course, a roaring success. Audiences embraced it warmly, it helped change prevailing US sentiment on both AIDS and sexuality, and both Young and Springsteen were Oscar nominated, with the latter taking home the gold for his superb Streets of Philadelphia but warmly sharing the credit. Young donated most of the profits from his song to AIDS charities, and to some degree amends were made.

    I first heard Philadelphia in some backwater Odeon, sat with a couple of teenage mates and trying desperately to hold it all together as the movie ground to a close. To this day, I don’t think I have ever felt so immediately seen, weighed and destroyed by a single piece of music, and even now I listen to it sparingly because it legitimately upsets me. That’s partly because of the cynical deployment of the song in what is one of the sadder scenes at the close of a very poignant movie. But it’s mainly because of how much its lyrics resonated with me in that moment.

    I would have been 14 years old as I sat in that Odeon, and right in the midst of a very emotional and alienated teenhood, struggling – as teens do – with all sorts of questions about the world and my own place in it. Even though I was often surrounded by people, it was a lonely time –isn’t that so often the way – and I was already nostalgic for what I perceived as a lost childhood. Indeed, as a dear friend once observed to me: I was the only person who’d been actively nostalgic for our childhoods even when we were still living them.

    Heard in that context, Philadelphia pinned me to my chair, trapped between empathy for the “lost boy” at the centre of the song, and the fear that I might be fated to become him. That I was already somehow destined to end up alone and permanently misunderstood, that I would never find my people – the great fear which plagued my teens, and which (thank god) proved to be without foundation.

    “I’ve got my friends in the world/I had my friend/When we were boys and girls/And the secrets came unfurled”. The verse that just completely killed me. It’s all in there; the weary narrator looking back on a wasted and lonely life, contemplating his lost innocence and the moments in which it all went astray. The profession: “I’ve got my friends in the world”, that rings so terribly, terribly hollow. Perhaps the same thing might be wrong with him that was also wrong with me. It was as if a door had opened to an unwanted future, and I thought about it for months afterwards. Years afterwards.

    It’s a song that sets out to move you, and in that sense it’s probably profoundly cynical, and maybe a little trite to so cheaply surrender the very reaction for which a request has been submitted. Maybe it’s silly to let what is, ultimately, a pop song upset you. The fact is I don’t care. Life is about allowing yourself to feel, or to recognise that you’re feeling. To put a name on that sensation building within you, and maybe to realise that others are feeling, or have felt it, too. And in the shared moment to glimpse that none of us is ever really alone. That’s the beauty of music, of whatever stripe: even in its saddest moments, it’s the precise opposite of alone.

    The entire lyric of Philadelphia is an exercise in self-delusion: “I know I’ll be alright”, “love lasts forever”, “tell me I’m not to blame”. It’s a man continuing to hope, even after hope has long since been lost, and that’s what makes it the saddest and most solitary song I know. A few weeks after that day in the Odeon, I watched Young on TV, performing the track alone onstage at the Academy Awards, and the feelings came flooding back. That lone figure in a single spotlight. The pin drop silence surrounding him.

    Now, life worked out pretty well for me in the end. I got out of the narrow little world I was living in, away from the racism, the ignorance and the crushing conformity. I found my folk, found love in abundance and was able to broker some sort of basic peace with both the world and myself. To the extent I’m an ebullient person, it’s largely because life has given me so much more than I’d ever allowed myself to expect. I’d like to say I never looked back, but that’s not true – I often think of that kid, in that moment, telling himself that it wouldn’t always be this way, and that it was simply an accident of geography that was leading to all this alienation: the wrong place at the wrong time. I know I’ll be alright.

    Philadelphia is a song I ration out these days, in the same way I ration out Bo Burnham’s That Funny Feeling. If I listen to it too much, I become quite melancholy – possibly because it’s a sad song and reminds me of a sad moment, but also because I know deep down that the clock hasn’t yet run out, that the future has yet to be written, and that it’s not too late to end up that alone. That lost.

    The song is a beautiful warning, a reminder to have empathy for those around you, and a perfect impetus to take stock of what you’ve got and ensure you appreciate it all. So that’s what I try to do: appreciate it all, while it’s still here. And in amongst that appreciation, sometimes I really do think that I know what love’s all about.

    • Pieces. Bingo, your choices often aren’t mine – I don’t give a toss about the Stone Roses or Kanye West, for instance, but those Impressions, yes – but your writing is absolutely top drawer. I read it even if I can’t bring myself to listen. Chapeau.

      • Superb writing.

        I’m surprised how much songs are enhanced by placement in a movie. If I hadn’t heard Lose Yourself, Fight The Power and Que Sera Sera in a cinema, I don’t think I would have been so moved by them. I didn’t fully appreciate More Than This until I saw Lost In Translation.

      • Mike – that’s really nice of you. “I read it even if I can’t bring myself to listen” both made me laugh and is all the encomium I could ask for.

        I’m afraid there are a fair few more songs yet to come that will probably please no one but me!

  12. Gosh, Bingo, that’s great stuff, the macro and micro intertwined. I especially liked, and utterly chimed with, your mention of feeling nostalgic for childhood whilst experiencing it.

  13. 82. The Morning – The Weeknd

    Every now and then music offers up a fresh new thrill. Perhaps a band or artist whose work makes you feel young again, or a sound you’ve not heard before. Sometimes, if you’re really lucky, you get to watch a long-cherished genre being reinvented in front of your eyes. In this case, R&B.

    I’ve never really understood the suspicion of modern R&B. For me, the likes of Usher, Aaliyah and Miguel exist along a very clear continuum that also takes in Sam & Dave, Booker T & The MGs, Isaac Hayes and all the 60s Soul records that have so brilliantly illuminated our lives.

    It’s a more sonically restless genre than Rock has proved to be, capable of seemingly endless reinvention, and every time you think it’s reached some sort of final destination it twists and writhes into strange new shapes. That’s a huge part of the appeal: what’s next.

    R&B’s last great “what’s next” moment occurred just under 15 years ago, and was spearheaded by two artists: Frank Ocean (of whom more later) and The Weeknd.

    The Weeknd’s House of Balloons, part of an opening salvo of three mixtapes released in early 2011, was a meteor strike on the genre. The EP’s sound was something we simply had not heard before: at a time when the focus was mainly on fusing R&B with EDM and mining a party sound, this was heading in a different direction entirely: a “Dark R&B” taking inspiration from Goth and Punk just as much as Trap. Indeed, the first time I heard House of Balloons, the immediate go-to in my head was The Cure. To me, this sounded like The Cure, and that legitimately wasn’t a statement I’d ever expected to make of this sort of R&B.

    The sound was deceptively simple. Abel Tesfaye’s haunting falsetto, now ubiquitous, but then still entirely novel, arranged over a series of moody and melancholic electronic productions; this was not party music, this was music for the moment when the party is over and the sun is incoming but no one is stopping. It took R&B’s celebration of life and excess and flipped it completely on its head.

    The record also arrived without a discernible artist identity with which to anchor it: The Morning had originally been uploaded to YouTube under the name “xoxxxoooxo” and “The Weeknd” (the additional “e” removed to avoid legal issues with Pop Rock band The Weekend) was a name which sat squarely outside genre expectations. This comparative anonymity sat in direct contrast with what were at the time the central tenets of R&B and invited greater connection with the audience; where the life of (say) Usher seemed glamorous but remote to most, the Weeknd’s tales of nihilism and lost weekends struck a far more direct chord and forced listeners to confront their own loneliness at the end of the party. It’s the sound of numbness and shared despondency, and nowhere is that numbness and despondency more profoundly felt than in The Morning.

    The Morning is the fourth track on the mixtape. It arrives immediately after House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls, a seven minute long tour de force which takes Siouxsie & The Banshees’ Happy House and transforms it into a swirling, crooning twilight nightmare, and which serves as perfect opener of a great one-two punch. Where Glass Table Girls goes hard and wild, The Morning is its dead-eyed denouement.

    The track opens with warm synths and a gorgeous, snaking guitar line, and it’s that guitar line that fully won my heart. It’s so fragile sounding, so crystalline, and its arranged in so much empty space, flitting from background to foreground and back again. The song it always brings to mind is Brothers In Arms. That same exhaustion, that same sense of muted desperation, but coming from two such different places. It’s easy to fill music with sound; to add more, more more. It takes a certain degree of courage to leave all that open space, to simplify and refine. To make silences work for you.

    The Morning is a cold, cold track. From a soundbed that sounds like it was recorded in an ice palace to Tesfaye’s immaculate vocal, there’s absolutely zero warmth to be found. Fundamentally, it’s a song about endlessly partying with prostitutes, but there’s no pleasure, no animus, just anomie. A warning that if you chase money and fame too hard, this is where you might end up, and it’s not a place you want to be.

    Nonetheless, it’s full of memorable lyrics, from the opening “Morning to the evening/complaints from the tenants/got the walls kicking like we six months pregnant” to “her love is too damn foreign” to “a house full of pros that specialise in the ho’in” and the chorus: “all that money/the money is the motive”. It’s the kind of song you feel complicit listening to, and it always reminds me of a conversation I once had with an old school friend and recovering addict, who eulogised with a look in his eyes more wistful than regretful “those mornings where the sun’s fingers start to creep through the window, so you close the shades and carry on”. Zombies of the night, indeed.

    The Morning is a track that remains dear to me, because I remember the shock and awe of that first listen. That feeling of hearing something you’d not heard before, and so brilliantly executed. Plus, I’m an obvious sucker for music that flips the script on the usual invitation to excess. I like an aftermath.

    I have heard echoes of The Morning’s production in so many songs that have followed, and it seemed to kick down a door which allowed so much brilliant music to travel in its wake. Nearly a decade later it made an appearance in the Safdie brothers’ excellent movie Uncut Gems – The Weeknd himself performing it under blacklight before being attacked by an enraged Adam Sandler – and it felt like greeting an old friend.

    When House of Balloons first released, Abel Tesfaye was still working a retail job at American Apparel. His co-workers would listen to and discuss his music, not knowing that he was behind it. Within 12 months Usher, the biggest R&B star on the planet and perhaps the biggest Pop star full stop, would release Climax, a song which self-consciously apes the entire style of The Weeknd. The cultural capture of R&B was complete: a palace coup staged from the stockroom floor. Very few artists have come from nowhere and so abruptly disrupted their chosen field.

    The Weeknd, of course, has gone on to superstardom, and rightly so. He took his Dark R&B, polished it up, sanded off the weirded out edges and upped the synths. He made legitimate party music with a smile on his face, and embraced the mainstream. And that’s what he’s meant to do. But it’s worth every now and then thinking back to where it all began, to the source of that sound that ate the world, and that source is House of Balloons. And right at its very centre is The Morning, the dark heart of it all.

    It’s my firm belief that if Curtis Mayfield were born this century, this is the music he would be making. Or perhaps he would be out there somewhere, working retail and brewing up the next great pivot to take us in a strange and unexpected new direction: no name, no press photos, just a sound you’ve not heard before and a message that meets the moment. A new morning.

    • Totally agree about modern R&B. I also like its evolving overlap with Hip Hop. Weeknd is a great example. Black Panther is a fantastic movie with enormous cultural relevance. Pray For Me with Kendrick Lamar is absolutely stunning. I’m well over sixty & I’d go to war for them too!

  14. 81. No Remorse (I Wanna Die) – Atari Teenage Riot & Slayer

    Several historic preoccupations collide here in what can only fairly be described as an unholy communion.

    First and foremost, a childhood obsession with comics. Many happy hours spent trawling the bins of the South East’s finest comic emporia (Comics Showcase! They Walk Among Us! Skinny Melink’s!). Strong opinions on gatefold vs die cut covers. At one stage I had favourite inkers. Comics were my childhood, and most of my adolescence, and being a 90s kid that meant Todd Macfarlane’s Spider-man run, and then his self-published creation, Spawn.

    Spawn wasn’t actually all that good, but it was beautiful to look at, because everything Todd drew was great, and it burnished its reputation by smartly featuring guest spots from some of the industry’s most esteemed writers in its early run: notably Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Dave Sim. While Spawn was never truly my deal, the character was an absolute figurehead of the 90s comic industry, which meant that when a movie was announced in the latter part of the decade there was some excitement.

    That excitement only built further when it was announced that the soundtrack to said movie would be comprised of collaborations between erstwhile leading lights of the EDM and Metal scenes.

    This was not a new concept, truth be told. Pretty much anyone who was a teenager in the 90s will have enjoyed the minor stir caused by the epochal Judgment Night soundtrack, which took up where Walk This Way had left off by marrying artists from the guitar and Hip Hop worlds, with mixed results. Albeit, the results didn’t really matter: we didn’t need a collaboration between (say) Teenage Fanclub and De La Soul, or Sonic Youth and Cypress Hill to actually be any good – for the time being we just needed to know that such things could actually happen. That was excitement enough. Just imagining what it might all sound like. In some ways, Judgment Night laid out the blueprint for Nu-Metal, or at least created some of the groundswell of demand for it.

    The Spawn soundtrack would repeat the trick, only this time for electronic music. The difference being that, unlike either the Spawn movie or the Judgment Night soundtrack, the Spawn soundtrack was actually pretty good. A number of the tracks were definitely passable (Filter and the Crystal Method’s Can’t You Trip Like I Do, Henry Rollins bellowing over Goldie) and some were genuinely great (Kirk Hamnett of Metallica adding some crunch to Orbital’s immortal Satan, the Prodigy and Tom Morello – a match made in heaven – powering through the excellent One Man Army).

    But in amongst the hits and misses, one track towered above all others. And that track was No Remorse (I Wanna Die) by Atari Teenage Riot & Slayer. Probably the greatest combination of two apparently disparate elements since Romeo & Juliet, albeit with a lot more screaming and riffing, although a similar volume of direct death threats.

    Now, I love Slayer. Everyone sane loves Slayer (early Slayer, at least). But at the time this came out I was well and truly knee deep in an ill-advised obsession with Atari Teenage Riot, Alec Empire and the Digital Hardcore label in general. I was rhapsodising Christoph De Babalon to anyone who would listen. I was importing Bomb 20 albums. I was actually listening to Nic Endo’s White Heat EP, a record that makes Metal Machine Music sound like Mambo #5.

    To this day, I have no real clue what the appeal was. All that screaming, glitching and teutonic menace. All that terrible, glorious noise. Atari Teenage Riot were gloriously uncool, utterly preposterous and should probably never have existed. And yet…. I found them wonderful. They were pitched in the exact right spot between absolute sincerity and deep silliness. They were quotable. And they introduced me to the idea that if you have enough energy and force of personality, you don’t really need melody. Or rhythm. Or legitimate musical ability. Or to even be pleasant to listen to. Or look at. Everyone probably has a band like that.

    No Remorse (I Wanna Die) is essentially a collection of bludgeoning riffs and breaks, the track pinballing down a narrow mountain road, utterly out of control and with smoke pouring from the engine and a maniac at the wheel. The Amen Break is given an absolute beating here, fed amphetamines and pressed into service about as far from home as it ever got.

    The track contains nods to virtually every genre of heavy music that was ever popular in the 90s. The opening is straight Drum & Bass. Just before the minute mark the track twists into chuntering Metal. At around two minutes we get what is very nearly a Hip Hop beat. At three and a half, a detour into Hardcore. Everything is ultra-processed, airless and relentless. And over the top of it all, Alec Empire’s ridiculous vocals and Hanin Elias’ squeals, shrieks and cries. It’s not so much a song as the battle cry of an army of demented cyborgs.

    Obviously, I loved it all. It was the pinnacle of a certain type of tasteless, aggressively furious teenaged agit-everything. It made me laugh just as much as it excited me: who could keep a straight face during Empire’s preposterously slurred “what’d you want me to do? What’d you want me to do?”, or during that ridiculous time-stretched sample from Neophyte’s Gabba classic Braincracker: “Remain calm… I’m coming to your house to kiiiiiilllll yoooooouuuuuu”. I laughed out loud the first time I heard that.

    No Remorse is, clearly, a terrible, terrible song by any objective measure. Quite possibly the worst song on this list. But I still absolutely love it, because it has this weird, shameless energy: it exists entirely outside all traditional notions of cool, it legitimately doesn’t care if you like it, and it’s heavy as fuck. It was a sugar rush for me at 18 years old, and it’s still a sugar rush now.

    Atari Teenage Riot went on to eventually make one genuinely passable album. 60 Second Wipeout has some actual songs on it (not least the legitimately great Ghostchase), and captures what was best about the band before they more or less flamed out.

    The Spawn movie was a catastrophe. It looked cheap as chips, still found a way to lose tons of money and probably set comic book movies back about a decade. Soundtrack albums mixing genres ceased to exist beyond the 90s – there was so much genre mashing going on out in the wild that such things were no longer novel or necessary.

    I still listen to No Remorse all the time, because – to my mind – there is no other song like it. Those beats, those riffs. All that shouting. All those sudden beat switches, and throughout it all that repeated cry, simultaneously joyous and furious: no remorse. No remorse indeed.

    • I really do love a big stupid noisy racket. I mostly avoided Spawn at the time, but I certainly have happy memories of the Judgement Night soundtrack, memories I feel are best left in the past.

      On the off chance you wanted any more of Slayer being beaten to a pulp by the Amen break, may I recommend this? It is unlistenable in the best way.

      • Bloody hell – I’d never heard that. I am eternally grateful that this did not come onto my radar in the late 90s or I’d almost certainly be regularly listening to it now.

Leave a Reply