Posts by Matthew Littlewood
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I’m sorry , but the first Velvet Underground record is possibly my favourite album of all time. Come back when you can write a song better than ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’, ‘Waiting for the Man’ or ‘Heroin’. Lou Reed’s muse radically expanded what it was possible to talk about in a pop song, and what a pop song could be.
Yeah, it’s probably my favourite too. For all its reputation of being a “primitive” record, it’s amazingly varied in terms of its mood and styles. I mean, further to the tracks you mentioned, it also features the striking, stark R&B “There She Goes Again”, the deceptive and unbelievably pretty “Sunday Morning” ( watch out, the world’s behind you…), and the squalling “European Son”, which anticipates the whole noise-thing of their second record. It’s an amazing record because it sets out so many different paths for others to take, and yet no one has quite captured it quite like they did.
White Light, White Heat basically invented the art of noise. It came from a band angry, accomplished and fresh off the road. And Loaded, the Velvets album I revere least and play most often, is, well, loaded, with tremendous songs. (But no, Doug Yule is not an upgrade from John Cale. Scientific fact.)
I agree with all that. However, I assume your passing over the s/t third LP was an oversight. It’s my second-fave Velvet Underground studio LP. Lou was never as funny, wise or as human again on record. Everything about the record is perfectly contained. It’s often breathtakingly direct and songs like “Pale Blue Eyes” and “Candy Says” arguably invented a whole sub-genre of singer-songwriter. But it still finds space for something as off-handed and groovy as “Some Kind of Love”, and as frenetic as “What Goes On”. Shame about “Murder Mystery”, mind.
However, I’m gonna cheat and say VU is my second-fave Velvets record, even if it’s technically an “outtakes” compilation. But bloody hell, it’s all aces- Lou may have re-recorded several of these for his solo LPs, but none of them sounded as good as they do here: “I Can’t Stand It” is belligerent and charged, “Lisa Says” & “Stephanie Says” are as affecting as they are sardonic, and the narcotic, languorous “Ocean” might be one of the greatest songs ever. It’s just the way it seems to be barely awake and yet utterly in control. (The versions on “Fully Loaded”, “Live 1969” and “The Quine Tapes” are also radically different, but equally remarkable).
I’m not much of a solo Lou man- although Transformer, Coney Island Baby and Berlin are all very excellent- and he didn't release much of worth in the last two or so decades. But hell, he did his bit.
(Incidentally, it was oddly good timing that Richard Langston was filling for Katherine Ryan’s “Nine to Noon” slot on RNZ on Monday morning- it gave him an excuse to play his favourite songs and preface each of them with “this band was also influenced by Lou Reed and the Velvet Undergound”. And he was right)
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Hard News: Everybody's Machiavelli, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
The people who find him an embarrassment at best would still do so, and whether you care to believe it or not, Brown is actually easier for the pragmatic right and business community to deal with than a flaky blank slate like Pallino. I could come up with more credible policy positions, and networks that are the pratical bread and butter of being a mayor in the real world, on the back of a cocktail napkin after an all-day liquid lunch.
I get the impression that Key was pretty happy to have Brown back as mayor- regardless of their political differences, Simon Wilson's excellent profile of Brown in Metro suggested the pair had a pretty good working relationship- insofar as Brown (via his council) would come to the table with a clear agenda and strategy. Certainly, Key's comments about Brown in the wake of the scandal imply as much.
Whether this Government will fully play ball with Brown's housing/City Rail Loop plans is another matter entirely, of course.
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Tom Tomorrow absolutely eviscerates the Tea Party in his latest edition of "This Modern World". Then again, over the last few months, real life events have gone so past parody that all he has to do is set the "latest developments" to illustration.
Seriously, he's been in astonishing form in the last few months, but he must utterly despair at times...
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Hard News: Another Saturday Night, in reply to Chris Waugh,
They're a fractious bunch, those Timaru cops.
Ha! Cute. I should've spotted that typo. I was "off-duty" ;)
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Hard News: Friday Music: The Story, in reply to Russell Brown,
It kinda brought home to me that most people actually haven't been paying close attention. There seems to have been an assumption, absent evidence, that she must be an exploited airhead.
I like the fact she's very articulate about the nature of her "collaborative process" with Joel Little. You get a sense of what both bring to the table. It's a very refreshing change from the likes of Gaga, Katy Perry, Miley and their ilk, who go out of their way to claim they write all their material by themselves- in spite of evidence to the contrary (some of the co-credits on those artists' records are mindbogglingly large- less songwriting than an industrial operation). It's an absurd ruse- Gaga comes across (to me) as selfish by her inclination to often not give credit where it's due. In fact, I would respect them more and find them more interesting if they talked about the process.
The history of pop music is built on the art of cooperation, or even picking the right artist to sing someone else's song. Why do we need to pretend otherwise? .
Of course, in some cases, such as many of the great Motown artists, it was a bit of both. For instance: I love Marvin Gaye's duets with Tammi Terrell as much as almost all his "solo" 70s work. I don't care a jot that Asford & Simpson, Norman Whitfield, etc wrote and produced most of those duets. But that's for another discussion, perhaps...
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Cheers for posting this. It's quite revealing in its own right- and the level of violence sticks out.
Of course, it would be remiss of me not to mention The Timaru Herald's Police Notebook, which captures the more banal and bizarre mutinae of the local cops' daily occurrences. I would like to think they enjoy contributing to it as much as we enjoy writing it.
Recent highlights include
A 46-year-old Temuka man found a blank cheque, filled it in and presented it to a bank. He has been summonsed to court.
At 5am on Monday, about 20 black-faced sheep were found wandering on State Highway 1 near Saltwater Creek.
The D C Turnbull building in Strathallan Street was entered by someone who apparently climbed the spouting.
Down these mean streets a man must go indeed...
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Hard News: Friday Music: The Story, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
That's one way to put it - and with all due respect to Mr. Stone, I think he was doing more to " take away from the ridiculous racial tension" just by having a band with white folks (and women who weren't just there to sing backup and wiggle their arses, not that there's anything wrong with that) making incredible music. Yeah, it didn't eliminate racism and sexism. But I think you can make a pretty good case that Prince's best band - The Revolution - would have been a more monochromatic, testosterone-heavy beast without Sly and The Family.
Oh, absolutely! The lyrics for songs like "Everybody People" , "Everybody is a Star" and "Stand!" ask for tolerance and understanding without ever preaching about it. "If you get bitten/just hate the bite" and "different strokes for different folks" get their message out as clear as day, but give their listeners a helluva lot of credit.
It also helps that their "pleas for tolerance" are backed up by some of the most euphoric, melodic and downright funky music ever to be laid down in a recording studio. It's desperately sad that Sly is in his current state, but also, hell, he did his bit.
On another topic, I assume many PAS-ers have already read Lorde's clear-headed and striking op-ed this weekend. She really does seem like someone who knows the score, in the best sense of the term. And the fact she name-drops Patti Smith and Nicki Minaj leaves you in no doubt of her age, too!
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Hard News: Friday Music: The Story, in reply to "chris",
Which reminds me, oft sampled and drum machine pioneers Sly and the family Stone’s had the first number-one hit to feature a programmed rhythm track with Family Affair, though still in the funk/ soul vein. Anyway some random tracks:
Oh yeah. Everything about that record is seriously peverse, not least the fact he opted for the drum machine over his actual band, one of the great rhythm sections in popular music. Ironically, There's A Riot Goin' On is the only Sly & the Family Stone LP that feels like a complete work to me- it's wracked, paranoid and stoned out of its mind, but it's never short of conviction- "Muzak with its finger on the trigger", as Greil Marcus memorably put it.
My favourite Sly & the Family Stone record is still the original Greatest Hits LP. I could be glib and say it's because it's got the best songs, but it's the sheer variety of them- the rave-up of "Dance to the Music", the calm plea for tolerance of "Everyday People", the seemingly unstoppable "I Want to Take You Higher", the blissed-out "Hot Fun in the Summertime"...it's all there.
Incidentally, Guardian journalist Alex Petridis's recent interview with Sly Stone is utterly jaw-dropping. I mean, everyone knew he was far gone by now, but still this passage is just out of this world:
It's a remarkable story for any band to live up to, but then Stone's new idea sounds pretty remarkable too. "You know what? I'm looking for albino musicians," he says. "My feeling about it is that it could neutralise all the different racial problems." At first I think I've misheard him, which is remarkably easy to do. At 70, his voice is raspy and slightly slurred, perhaps the result of decades of hard living, or maybe something to do with a bizarre accident some years ago, when he apparently fell off a cliff in Beverly Hills while eating a plate of food: he declined to be treated for the injuries to his neck, a decision that has left him in constant pain unless he hunches over, his chin on his chest. Coupled with a patchy mobile phone signal and a bad transatlantic line, I occasionally lose the thread of what he's saying entirely. But this time I've heard him loud and clear. "To me," he continues, "albinos are the most legitimate minority group of all. All races have albinos. If we all realise that we've all got albinos in our families, it's going to take away from the ridiculous racial tension, if you're black or you're white, blah blah blah. That's why I've been trying to look for albino musicians and organise a group of people that are going to be right. That's what I've been rehearsing for. People will see us, all of us together – a real family, an albino family. People will get happy when they see that! People," he says firmly, "have got to be happy for that."
It's also worth reading as a pretty thorough and even-handed look at the man's influence, Petridis gets some revealing quotes out of his former band-mates.
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Hard News: nz.general: a speech, in reply to Stephen R,
Same here, but I think for different reasons. I never really had a record player, and used to buy cassettes which (inevitably) got eaten by one player or another.
CDs were a massive step up, because I’d copy them to tape, secure in the knowledge that when the tape eventually died, for the price of a blank I’d be able to get another copy.
These days, I rip them to HD, but my backup/disk management between old/new computers is sufficiently haphazard that I never really feel comfortable without that CD backup sitting in the cupboard
That sounds exactly like me. I haven't loaded all of my (legally obtained) collection onto the HD, and already it boggles the mind how much I own. I think it would take me literally a year to play everything once, if I did nothing else. And yet I still want/need more music.
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A fascinating article, Russell, and much to meditate on. Your comments on the music industry certainly made me rethink some of my knee-jerk stances, although I wonder whether it could've been so much different if the majors were so slow on the uptake and let Apple (via iTunes) steal such a huge march on them in the early 00s. Then again, back then, some of them were still waging their anti-CD copying campaign. God, that feels so quaint to talk about now.
But you're right, music is more multi-format now than it ever was before, and it is all about "bits" (although sadly I still buy CDs).
This will make a few PASers feel old(er), but my first "awareness" of This Thing dates back to 1993, when I read an article in the School Journal about a kid who was really into this thing called "the internet" and "message boards". I had no idea what those things were at the time, nor would I comprehend a future where I would be active in posting on one.
I also remember one of Telecom's "Internet Roadshows" back in 1996. remember being fascinated by it- I also remember looking up the Simpsons websites on their "demonstration computers".
We didn't get the internet in our household until 1998, FWIW.