How To Make A Great Song In America

Author: DC

Word count: 1,031

Every so often a song is written that captures the spirit and mood of a particular period of time. From “The Times, They Are A-Changin’” to “Tainted Love” to “Ice Ice Baby”[1], these tunes become cultural milestones that people refer back to when trying to understand past eras and the cultural artefacts that they produced. In general musicians have found it easier to write zeitgeist-capturing songs during good times than bad, which is perhaps unsurprising when you consider that the word “anthem” means “a song (or composition) of celebration”.

Take the happy-go-lucky years between 2000 and 2007 – this span of time produced not one but two bona fide defining anthems that, even if all other songs and photos and narratives from this period ceased to exist, would give a social historian looking back from 2150 a real sense of what things were like. M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” and MGMT’s “Time To Pretend” were irresistibly bubbly powerhouses of optimism and exuberance that perfectly documented a time in which the world seemed frothier and more replete with opportunity than it had done in decades. The fact that they made relatively little lyrical sense, and that the sugar-high sort of wore off once you’d listened to the songs a dozen or so times, further enhanced their credibility as noughties anthems, because the time period didn’t really make any sense either and the good times didn’t really last.

Since the mortgage industry collapsed, the bond market burst into flames and we fell headlong into the current economic crisis, artists have failed to write a song that perfectly reflects the strange, possibly unique mood of these times. We’ve had attempts from country singers that are too true-blue and optimistic to ring true, from rappers that have been too focussed on how the recession will impair their ability to afford syrup and grills, and from soulful acoustic whiteboys that have been just awful. Now, however, as we appear to be entering the second phase of the “double-dip” downturn, we have our song.

The song is called “I Need A Dollar” by soul singer Aloe Blacc, as re-created and rapped over by an MC called Marky on a remix that he calls “Rasta Monsta”. The original is a fantastic horn-driven song that first attracted the notice of many when it was used as the theme for HBO’s New York-set drama “How To Make It In America”. Unusually for HBO the show has turned out to be a shallow disappointment, but its music directors found a real gem to play over the credits, and Marky has if anything improved on the original with his addition of some thoughtful rhymes.

The vibe that Blacc and Marky capture so well[2] is the creeping yet eventually all-consuming nature of the current slump. This recession, for all of the historical comparisons, was not started or fuelled by a single cataclysmic event, as the Great Depression was by the Wall Street Crash. In the financial world Meltdown 2009 was heralded by one microdrama after another, each resulting in a few bankruptcies, a tranche of redundancies, disasters on small scales. When they are taken together, however, the staggering cumulative impact of the microdramas becomes evident. This is how the recession has been felt by many of us, in increments, in stages so small as to be almost imperceptible at the time but crippling when taken together. First our jobs got less secure, then our credit limits came down, then our mortgage rates went up. If you were lucky, then you managed to contain the damage and keep the lights on. If you just couldn’t keep the pieces together then perhaps your utilities got cut off, or your house was repossessed, or you had to declare bankruptcy. That is how the story went, bit by bit, blow by blow.

This is exactly the tale told by Blacc and Marky. You go from having “big dreams / to make it to those bright screens”, from being so positive that “after graduation I was on my high horse”. Then the boss “says he ain’t got no work”. Next, with Marky showing a killer eye for salient, heartbreaking detail, “Wachovia collapsed, my account’s still in the negative / Verizon cut my 3G[3] / funny thing about it, I don’t find that shit hilarious”. Suddenly “life wakes your ass up out your narcolepsy” and, in the words of Marky, you are left with only two choices. You can “rob Ray to pay Paul just to buy shit”, or you can find a change cup and beg folk, telling them that you “need a dollar, a dollar, a dollar is what I need”.

The artists also nail the sense that this experience could be as long-term psychologically tough as it is short-term situationally horrific. Marky doesn’t see any quick solutions, he knows that the state is overwhelmed with demands for bailouts and aid, and he doesn’t expect a handout – instead he takes the weight on himself. He chooses not to be angry, although many are and we have some right to be, with the naïve and corrupt market makers that hastened our descent into difficulty. Instead, he is personally ashamed, muttering that “I think failure’s embarrassing”. Above all, isn’t that how many of us feel right now? Embarrassed that after so many years of relative prosperity we’re struggling again? Embarrassed that we need help, be it a dollar or many thousands of dollars, from wherever we can get it? Embarrassed that in a way we brought this on ourselves by buying houses that we couldn’t afford, and running up credit card debts that we knew we couldn’t pay off? Embarrassed that, although we inherently know that things go in cycles, we let ourselves believe that the good times would never end?

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[1] I am not 100% serious about this one. However, I think you could make a strong argument that Vanilla Ice was the defining cultural figure of the 1990s. More on that another time, if the editors ever let me!

[2] From now on, to avoid confusion, I am referring to the Marky “Rasta Monsta” remix of the song

[3] After all, for the modern man is a right to proper 3G reception not up there alongside life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

Dixon's Girl

Author: DC

Wordcount: 1,067

My mother was born in the 1950s, grew up and grew into the 1960s, and got her first adult job in the 1970s. She used to tell me how difficult it was being a young professional woman during that time. The technical barriers that had stopped woman progressing in the workplace had been removed, there were no longer rules dictating that management had to be a boys club through-and-through… but it still was one. Ten years before women couldn’t be promoted to the top of organisations, whereas now women could be but just weren’t. Over and above the process elements of promotion and career advancement, however, women like my Ma struggled just to be female in a male-dominated environment. She found it very tough to be an individual, with women instead forced to adopt one of three roles if they were to survive and prosper:

1. the sex kitten. You could be provocative and sexual, using your femininity and allure as a tool to get to where you wanted to be.
2. the ice queen. A women could be tough and uncompromising, which would attract a lot of negative attention and allegations that you were a “bitch” but at the same time projected an air of cool professionalism
3. the tomboy. Some women got by because they presented themselves as “one of the boys”, willing to go along with whatever their male cronies were planning[1].

Over time, Ma noted that some of her friends and colleagues got so used to having to act one of these three roles that they actually started to become the person that they had to pretend to be. The irony of it was that exactly the same thing happened to Ma, although she hadn’t spotted it. As she tried, successfully in the end, to develop her career and take on more responsibility she adopted an icy persona, a “you can’t bullshit a bullshitter” tough-lady character that she even started to bring home with her. While she could still be warm and loving, there were moments as I got older when I felt more like an employee and less like her son.

Many of the same issues that my Ma faced when trying to pursue her career have also been very relevant for women trying to force their way to stardom in the pop and rap music worlds. They have been forced to play particular roles in order to impress talent scouts, would-be managers, record executives, and then ultimately fans – or they feel that they are forced to. Undoubtedly, however, it’s easier to succeed in music if you are willing to play the game and adopt a pre-defined persona. Interestingly, the three roles that women in business often find themselves playing are the same as those that their musical counterparts are forced to adopt. You have you sex kittens, the Lil’ Kims and Keshas and Foxy Browns, whose material seems to range from moderately sensual to downright filthy. You have your ice queens, the Lady Gagas and Rihannas, who seek to distance themselves from us mere mortals by means of fashion and attitude. And lastly your have your Katy Perry and Pink tomboys (Perry’s last album was even called “One of The Boys”) who pride themselves on acting like guys, even down to kissing girls.

That’s what makes it so amazing to hear any album by a female artist with a truly individual voice, who hasn’t felt the need to fit into a generic mould in order to succeed. On “A Badly Broken Code”, the new album by female rapper Dessa, an affiliate of the Minneapolis-based Doomtree Collective, you get character and a hugely individual presence. It’s as if Dessa has made it her mission not to be pigeonholed, to talk about all of the different and contradictory aspects of being a girl in the modern world. Dessa and her characters are all over the place and conflicted (“she’s a latter-day saint / but she’s a Saturday sinner”), and they face and make difficult choices (“the pills keep her awake / her man can’t make her happy but he helps to still the shakes”).

This complexity is reflected in the nature of the music that Dessa makes. Her beats are intricate and varied, with smoky jazzed-up sections butting up against thumping beats and r ‘n b flourishes. Similarly entangled are her lyrics, as Dessa has no place for Trina-style sex-rap or Charlie Baltimore-esque thug posturing. Her rhymes are either oblique and literary or straightforward narratives detailing the exterior and interior lives of everyday – if artistic – people who are both noble and selfish, tormented but occasionally blissfully happy. Even her stage name clashes slightly with the tales she tells, with the lady who goes by “Dessa Darling” admitting that “I once kept an angel / in a box beneath my bed”. What a darling. Describing her words does them no justice whatsoever so instead, here’s the opening verse of the song that to date might be her best work, Mineshaft II:

“15 years from tonight, you have to make a decision,

The greatest love of your life is going to call during dinner,

From the home of the girl that he’s living with now.

And the guilt, he’ll say it’s killing him,

He’s wilted in the middle,

And he knows how bad he acted,

Knows he can’t have you back but the fact is,

You can’t be happy when you’re angry,

And you’re so angry, he’s says you’ve stayed so mad,

And he heard it on the street that you moved back in with your dad,

That you’re drinking something awful, and that makes him sad”

The greatest thing about Dessa is that while she’s a woman rapper with a distinctly female voice, she realises that to be a great female artist you have to do more than simply sing about being a woman. She defines herself primarily as a person, as a human, so her subject matter is far more universal than many female artists allow theirs to be. She and her characters are actors in a bigger drama, while at the same time being particular people facing particular problems. And writing about that, letting yourself be that, may be the way to reach and touch more people than most modern artists ever get to. As Dessa says on the gorgeous, jazz-inflected Dixon’s Girl, “it’s not much, but my money’s on you”.

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[1] Think Peggy Olsen in Mad Men during Season 2, when she starts drinking scotch and mocking the less fortunate girls of the office

Are You Restless?

Author: DC

Word count: 1322

We’ve all had the conversation. Every person who has at some point realised that they aren’t just “into” music but are completely smitten with it has. It’s usually with someone older, but occasionally can be with someone your junior, but wise beyond their years. They tell you that you’ll grow out of “it”, “it” being your musical obsession. That as you get older and develop other worldly concerns, and take on more responsibilities, it’ll somehow come to mean less to you. That it will be able to do less for you, to be less transformative of your moods, to contribute less to your overall sense of psychic wellbeing. I have always wondered whether those people would come to be proven right, to have been talking sense based in experience. I have always hoped that those people are wrong, and never more so than now.

I don’t want to hash over how tough times are for many people at the moment, or how pressing and overwhelming the burdens of adulthood and responsibility in the modern world can be. We are all experiencing these things, or are discovering them, or are observing others go through them. However immediate or distant they may feel, we are all operating with them as the giant, foreboding backdrop behind us. We have talked in this space before about how music has been hugely consequential to some of us while we have been trying to work out how to deal with and how to survive these things, about how music can, on some level, ‘save us’ when things get really tough. We have shared how music has helped us an individuals, how it has affected each of us personally. Somehow, however, our discussion was limited because our experiences were just that – personal. They were so specific to us that it’s often hard to explain to others how much they meant to us, or to share some of the magic of the moment with people who weren’t there, and as a result our friends and families often can’t draw anything from them. Most of the time that’s enough, most of the time it is sufficient that that something has meant so much even if only to one person.

There’s just one problem – now isn’t most of the time. Now isn’t typical. These times are something else entirely. They aren’t historically unique, but for those of us who grew up in the 60s, 70s and 80s they are something very different. Recent statistics suggest that rates of depression are rising, that people’s self-reported levels of satisfaction with their lives are falling, that we are losing our collective ability to turn our backs on the bad stuff and just keep moving along. This, to me, suggests that many people out there haven’t fully realised and explored the uplifting, redemptive power of music – this may be a hopelessly naïve, romanticised view of the power of art, but I genuinely believe that hearing a good song played by a great band at the right time can change our outlook on everything else that is happening in our lives. Based on what you have shared with us before, I think that some of you feel the same way, and as fans and believers in this power I think it’s time that we tried to use it as a force for good. We must begin to export our music-derived joy. We must become evangelists for the feelings and transformation that can be created by some guys[1], some Fender guitars and some drums. And maybe a piano[2].

We must each develop new ways of curing what ails our fellow men, new prescriptions and cures. Here and now I will humbly offer one idea, to get things started. Find one, or ideally several of your blue, downcast, moping friends. Give them a couple of drinks[3]. And take them to see Against Me!!![4] I have written about these guys a ton before so I will only repeat the headline facts – punk band, Floridians, folk-tinged beginnings but with an increasingly anthemic leaning, political but not in a tedious way, love/hate relationship with the traditional punk community, overall pretty fantastic. The live show that they put on is a thrilling, loud, life-affirming mood turnaround plan. During their frenetic 90-minute sets they offer a remedy for anyone with a negative outlook, a salve for the sprit that is applied in three stages:

1) Empathy. Think about it – when you’re bummed out, do you want a shiny happy person to tell you how lovely everything really is, if only you could get over yourself and experience it? No, that would just piss you off further, and convince you that your well-wisher didn’t really understand your situation. Instead you want some empathy, some indication that they get where you are coming from. So Against Me!!! Start with that, outlining commonality of experience with songs that ask questions like “are you restless like me?” and “do you share the same sense of defeat?”, as they acknowledge that hard times can make even “open minds clog up with cynicism”. They feel your frustration; they share your sense of dread.

2) Stoking the fires. Having established some common ground, Against Me!!! then remind us that we all, regardless of how worn down we may feel, have some fire left within us, some reserves of spirit and courage to draw on. That we all have the potential to do something, to change something, even if it’s only our perception and our behaviour. They stoke this fire gently, before getting to the point – that it’s pretty much a human crime not to draw on that energy, and that once you’ve drawn on it it’s a terrible waste not to use it positively. The way out isn’t to direct your energy aimlessly, it’s not about “how to fuck things up”, but about how to focus it, to harness it, to “fuck things up right”.

3) Reinforcing. Against Me!!! then really drive things home, and make sure that your gloomy cohort don’t backslide as soon as they leave your venue of choice. Just as it’s easier to swear off alcohol in a safe room full of supportive twelve-steppers than it is to resist the bottle of JD waiting for you in the lonely confines of your home, the flashing-light crowd-adulation “nothing can stop us” vibe in a rock club can induce an artificial sense of positively that can easily be eroded when you return to the wet and cold world outside. And the band realise that they can’t be with your friends every step of the way; like a good therapist they must empower so that you people can go the final, hard yards by themselves. So they preach self-empowerment (“this night is gonna end / when we’re damn well ready for it to be over”) and seek to neutralise the voices of those who would seek to bring about recidivism (“they don’t know nothing about redemption / and they don’t know nothing about recovery”).

The wonderful thing about Against Me!!! is that none of what they say is cheesy or fake in the way that a lot of ‘guidance’ is. And that’s because the songs weren’t written as self-help primers – they were written by a confused singer searching for his own answers, by a man trying to balance out the darkness that he seems around him with a realistic awareness of the power of human positivity. It just so happens that some of his answers seem relatively universal, that he can communicate some of his personal experiences in a general way, which we couldn’t.

If all of this doesn’t work, or if the temporary optimism shot in the arm only lasts a few days, then there is one simple solution – repeat. Find another band, another show, and another, and another, until the person you are taking has a magic moment of their own.

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[1] Or girls!

[2] No flutes though. Sorry, prog fans.

[3] Or, for you non-drinkers, some of your favorite mood-enhancing substance. Even if that is soy milk, straight-edgers.

[4] Yes, their name really does include all of those exclamation marks. It’s not just that I’m really excited about the band. Well, I am, but you’ll have to take my word for it when I say that I’m not a three-exclamation-mark kind of dude.

The Darker Half

DC, November 2009, 1,225 words

Last weekend I went up to the north of England to see two married friends of mine called Olly and Charlie, who recently moved up there to a city called Sheffield. I have written about both of them before, they are two of my best friends in the world, and something we’ve always had in common is a love of Halloween. This festival hasn’t traditionally been celebrated in England but we’ve always loved it, and have tried to ensure that whatever we are doing we celebrate it together every year. For Charlie, Halloween is doubly important as it coincides with what is for her a major religious festival. She is a very spiritual person but not one who feels comfortable with any of the major modern religions, so she pursues her own brand of neopaganism, choosing to glorify ancestors and the power of nature and the Earth. In her system, the end of October marks the festival of Samhain, or “summer’s end”. Samhain marks the passage from summer (or the “lighter half” of the year) to autumn and winter.

While I was with them, I was fortunate enough to be allowed to sit on a small ceremony that Charlie was having to mark Samhain. As part of this, Charlie asked us to write down on a piece of paper one thing that we wish to continue doing in the following part of the year, and one thing that we would like to “leave behind” as the seasons change. We then rolled the papers up and burned them in a candle flame, with the burning formally marking the transition from one stage of life to the next. This seemed to perfectly capture the sense that many of us get at this time of year, as the leaves fall from the trees and the days get darker for winter – that just as nature is changing, somehow so are we.

Given how powerful this feeling can be, it’s not surprising that many artists have chosen to incorporate it into their work. There are myriad paintings and photographs that try to capture the tipping point between the lighter and dark halves, and many songs have been written about it. Some of them are quite literal, attempting simply to capture the beautiful yet haunting quality of this particular time and the feelings that it engenders. However, others use the changing seasons as a metaphor that allows them explore issues of change in life and sentiment. There have been two examples of this in 2009, with the onset of autumn explored both by 1990s rock survivors Third Eye Blind (3EB) and spiky post-pop-punkers Taking Back Sunday (TBS). The songs are fascinating to listen to together as they capture perfectly the different ways in which we can be impacted by nature and the Earth.

3EB, in their song Summer Town, have written an elegy to times past, and to things swept away as the clock rolls forward. The central theme of the song is our frequent quest to hang onto the those times in our lives that we come to identify as perfect, or as close to perfection as we get – times that inevitably have a limited lifespan. Singer Stephan Jenkins talks fondly of an “old beach house, where we stood outside and sang out loud”, and how he “remembers the time that we drew a crowd and / I told you everything I knew in a manic rushing line”. Most of all, he wants the audience for his narration to know that “you gave me more than you took from me” – but therein is the problem. Whatever time he is recalling it is firmly in the past tense, with time having moved on since. Indeed, he records what changes have happened in detail, ranging from wistful remembrance (“Hey! Where did everybody go? / Everyone I know has blown the coast”) to desperate sadness (“’cause after Halloween / everything starts fading / I’m losing everyone / I go down like the sun”). However, Jenkins is not so self-absorbed as to assume that he’s the only one who feels this way, noting repeatedly that “you know what I mean”, and proposing a joint way forward, suggesting that “last summer is done / can we find another one? / Find another one?”.

In contrast, TBS very much pick up on the other side of the Samhain feeling, the desire to leave things in the past and move on, to put distance between yourself and difficult or troubling times. In contrast to the more reflective, nostalgic vibe of “Summer Town”, their own “Summer, Man” is a spiteful kiss-off to a season and all it brought. The specific object of the venom is never made explicit (though speculation has suggested that it could be about lead singer Adam Lazarra’s ex-wife, or the former TBS guitarist Fred “The Colour Fred” Mascherino), but that doesn’t matter – we can all identify regardless. We have all been through times or met people that we’d rather forget. “Summer, Man” seems to be trying to fast forward time rather than rewind it, to skip “June until September, three months to December”. Not only does the song express no nostalgia for the past, it actively denies that any such feeling should be reflected on a hard time, with Lazarra noting sarcastically that “let’s have a talk about the good times / oh boy, you were always giving in”. Any distance that can be put between present and past is encouraged, with Lazarra stating with a sense of relief that “the summer is over and I doubt / I doubt I’ll be seeing you around” – indeed, the past has already begun to fade from a vivid experience to a “black and white type” about which much is indistinct but the venom remains vivid.

The differing thematic content of the songs is embodied in the music as well as the lyrics. To support their narrative 3EB opted for quite a laid-back strummed tune with a campfire-singalong vibe. This low-fi sound complements the imagery of the song perfectly – you can almost hear the floorboards creaking when Stephan Jenkins songs about the “old beach house”. When taken together the music and lyrics transport you to your own version of the place that Jenkins has in his mind, and you come away knowing and understanding exactly what he went through. At the opposite end of the spectrum, TBS go hard on “Summer, Man”, which is a real turned-up-to-11 jam. The song passes in a headlong rush forward, as if the band is trying to accelerate time. The drums clatter round and over each other and guitars jab and spar, until the end of the song. Suddenly, just as things are drawing to a close, all of the instruments lock into a chugging rhythm, creating a sense that life is returning to normal after the chaos of the preceding season.

In a way, it’s nice to have another reminder that artists have the same preoccupations that we do, that they also struggle with the adjustment from the lighter half to the darker half. It’s no stretch to imagine that there are singers and songwriters, artists and directors, people of all kinds sitting in their living rooms and studies, thinking about the coming of winter and, just maybe, burning their own rolled-up papers in a Samhain flame.

He Did It All For The Tony

DC, 29^th October 2009, 1,575 words including footnotes

The fact that a theatrical musical is being written about the lives and careers of Run-DMC will probably only appeal to three types of people: serious hip-hop heads, the conspiracy theorists who think that Jam Master Jay was killed by the FBI, and serious potheads. I’m not sure which of those camps I fall into, but I found this news totally fascinating. During the past few years I have been vaguely aware of the trend of turning the back catalogues of musical acts into stage shows. In London, where I live, we have been offered the chance to see “songbook shows” about Abba (“Mamma Mia”), Queen (“We Will Rock You”), Blondie (“Desperately Seeking Susan”) and many others. However, these shows all seemed aimed at an older generation of music fans, and as such didn’t hold much interest for me. Plus, by all accounts the majority of them were awful - but when I read about the Run-DMC plans my immediate reactions were “that would be awesome” and “I really think that their songs and story might work as a musical”. This got me thinking… what is it that makes a songbook show successful and satisfying? And why do some shows fail despite boasting fantastic bodies of song, while others get by despite the underlying music being inherently sketchy[1]?

After a very serious scientific investigation consisting of me chatting with friends, watching the first 10 minutes of “Mamma Mia” before being overcome with concern about the future of the human race, and pondering the aforementioned Jam Master Jay death mystery, I think I’ve come up with three broad rules. Follow these, and your songbook show will at least draw a crowd proportional in size to the popularity of the band that you base it on[2]. Fail to observe them, and your all-singing, all-dancing mash-up of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the musical stylings of Vanilla Ice will probably never make it to Broadway…

Rule 1: The group you select must actually have good songs. Obvious, but we all have a band that on a rational level we know really sucks, but are inexplicably attached to anyway. So while a Run-DMC show might work, a Cobra Starship one probably won’t. You don’t want to hire a 50-person chorus just to have them sing that weird backing vocal from “Good Girls Go Bad”.

Rule 2: The artist should have songs that vary in mood and tone. A good musical has to have different types of song if it is to work – the crowd-pleasing hands in the air numbers, the ballads, the introspective jams. With all due respect to Soulja Boy, an entire show of party jams or braggadocious bitches n’ bling tunes would get boring pretty quickly[3].

Rule 3: In an ideal world, the career of the artist or the content of their songs should provide a ready-made narrative arc for the show. So Run-DMC might work as they had such an incredible career journey. Bruce Springsteen would work, as you could easily construct an everyman character would could sing all of his songs and have them sound personal. This isn’t as absolute a rule as the others – “We Will Rock You” set the songs of Queen in an absolutely ludicrous futuristic narrative about oppression and… well, sexual conquest in space[4].

Based on these rules, we can begin to sift through all of the musical acts dwelling in the dark corners of your record collection to identify those that might be most suitable for Broadwayisation. Surprisingly, some musical heavyweights can be ruled out quite quickly:

• The Rolling Stones, for example, just wouldn’t work, unless you think that people will flock to see a musical about an intrepid hero spouting off about the power of the blues for two hours, while having vaguely racist intercourse with “brown sugar” ladies. The lyrical content of their songs is just so all over the place as to be impossible to shoehorn into a coherent structure, though they certainly nail the “tonal range” criterion.
• Prince would also not work, regardless of how much my friend Roni would like to protest otherwise. For a start, all of his songs are too similar in mood to really suit the format. You want to take people through towering highs and crushing lows, whereas the journey of Prince would start, proceed and end with a mood of “pleasant funkiness”. You can’t bring people to tears while a guy molests a wah-wah pedal. The other problem with Prince is that, for a crucial period in his life, he set his own music aside and instead focused on raising the profile of the bands signed to his label. This is a problem for us as budding Broadway producers, as am fairly sure that you could be charged with war crimes for forcing a paying audience to sit through Morris Day and The Time songs[5].
• Poison. As much as I love these 80s metal legends, their career is just not suitable for stage translation. For it to accurately reflect their story, the actors would have to simulate sex 4,232 times a night – and as it has been proven by European Union physicists and Ross from Friends that you can’t take off tight leather trousers in less than 18 minutes, the show faces an insurmountable technical barrier[6].

Even after ruling out such luminaries, there are still many bands left that could be contenders for memorialisation in musical form. I’d love to hear your suggestions (other than you Roni – Morris Day is out. Really.), but here are some of mine to get the ball rolling:

• Jay-Z. One of the great musical stories, a classic meth-to-millions tale that has all the ingredients we need. There’s a built-in audience for the show among the millions of fans who revere him as the “God MC”, and his songs capture a huge range of moods and meanings. Just think of this: after a gritty early years Act soundtracked by “Blue Magic” and “Dead Presidents II”, can you imagine how good it would feel to hear “Empire State Of Mind” or “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” marking the start of the ‘we made it’ era? The only problem with this scenario is that it would be difficult to find a performer to play Jay-Z who had the charisma, charm and energy of the man himself.
• The Flaming Lips. What a show this would be, as their music is highly theatrical to start with, there’s a huge contrast between their more reflective, low-key songs (like “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots”) and the uptempo tracks, and there are semi-coherent sci-fi storylines already built into their lyrics. Again, there’s only one problem, and that is that their incendiary live shows are theatrical enough as it is, reducing the need for a stage adaptation. Plus, their giant hamster ball probably wouldn’t please the haute-coutured theatregoing crowd as it rolled over their heads.
• Limp Bizkit. Imagine this with me – a moving tale following Fred Durst as he escapes his life as a humble tattoo artist in Southern Florida, eventually becoming a multi-platinum recording artist, film director and misogynist[7]. The song titles already capture the essential elements of the arc. Fred just wants “My Generation” to “Take A Look Around”, realise that society just “Eats you Alive”, fight to learn “The Truth”, join forces and get “N 2 Gether Now”, begin a revolt and “Break Stuff”, before realising that you just want to be loved as you softly weep “Behind Blue Eyes”. Most of all, however, Fred wants you to know one thing: he did it all for the nookie. The nookie. The nookie. Such things Tony Awards are made of, people.

I’m sure you agree that all of those scenarios would be far better than sitting through a performance of Mamma Mia, but are they the best we can do? What are your ideas? Emails to the usual address, remember the rules, and above all else… no Morris Day.

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[1] Seriously, a two and a half hour musical entirely consisting of ABBA songs? I challenge anyone to say that they truly dig “Honey, Honey” or “When I Kissed The Teacher” from “More Abba Gold”

[2] Let’s face it, no-one is coming to see a musical about that one band who were signed to Equal Vision Records in 1999 that you really dug, but who got dropped before their second album

[3] For the Soulja Boy fan reading this: “Kiss Me Thru The Phone” does not count as an introspective song. Unless your show is entirely written from the perspective of the phone.

[4] Even the “simplified summary” of We Will Rock You begins by describing a key plot development thus: “The two heroes, Galileo and Scaramouche, discover musical instruments buried in rock, which they use to vaporise the head of the corporation (The Killer Queen), and send the Power Of Rock around the world to free the masses”. Perfectly logical, am sure.

[5] So as not to destroy a friendship, I have to stress that this view of Morris Day is that of the author alone, and not shared by his co-conspirators. Roni has frequently declared her love for Mr Day, his jheri curls and his “coked-up dance steps”.

[6] If technology ever advances to the point where this is not a problem, count me in. Who wouldn’t pay to go and see a Poison-themed show called “Lovin’ You’s A Dirty Job”?

[7] This footnote was originally going to include the lyrics to a particularly “interesting” Bizkit song about women, but there’s no way we could have published it. So instead, I leave you with this inspirational gem from the mind of the Durst: “may the bed bugs shrivel and die before they make it into your sheets to eat you alive”.

A Warped Worldview, or To Hate Or Not To Hate?

DC 11/09/09

Word count: 1,373

The wonderful new Nick Hornby book "Juliet, Naked" is in many ways essential reading for music fanatics like us. While telling a brutal story about doomed relationships and the choices people make, Hornby touches on many of the crucial questions that music fans have been debating for years. For me the most vital and interesting is this: is music something that can be evaluated and rated in absolute terms (e.g. "this record is good, this is bad"), or is it really something subjective that can only be assessed in terms of the impact that it has on a particular listener at a particular moment. To put it simply, can you or I ever say that the Black Eyed Peas suck, based on our in-depth study of all things musical, or does the fact that a 15 year old girl really digs "I Gotta Feeling" invalidate our opinion?

In Hornby's book, one of the characters is a music enthusiast called Duncan. Duncan is an avid fan of a singer-songwriter called Tucker Crowe, and he believes that he has listened to Crowe's albums so many times, has studied their intricacies in so much detail, that he can definitively say that they are "good music". By extension, he believes that he can say with certainty that anyone who doesn't appreciate Crowe's work is an idiot, or has no taste. This reminded me of the furore that surrounded the choice of bands on this year's Warped Tour. Throughout the summer punk bands were criticising Warped founder Kevin Lyman for picking electro-pop bands Brokencyde and Millionaires for the tour, often resorting to stating that the young bands "just made bad music". Influential and respected scene figures like Anthony Ranieri from Bayside, rapper P.O.S. and even relative newcomers like Florida pop-punkers Set Your Goals were quick to declare that the bands "sucked", without so much as an "in my opinion" or a "compared to..." to soften their distaste.

Up until this episode, I'd always struggled to frame my views on this subject. When we are young we are trained to think that behaviour, art, performance can always be evaluated in absolute terms. This is necessary, I suppose, if children are ever to obey parents and teachers, and to be encouraged to avoid things that are corrosive to young minds. After this, I'd arrived at University and had Professors spend three years telling me that nothing should be examined in such a way, that everything was about interpretation and relative experience. However, the Warped episode and reading "Juliet, Naked" have helped clear up my views. My immediate reaction to reading Ranieri's comments were "wow, it's slightly ironic to hear a guy who has spent years asking people not to be judgmental about music and to think about things intelligently simply dismissing something as "bad" without even acknowledging the fact that Brokencyde perform to hundreds of kids a day, kids who seemed to be drawing real joy from their performance". I thought that Ranieri was falling into the Duncan trap of assuming that his years of experience of punk rock entitled him to declare what was good or not, what was punk or not, what was Warped Tour or not.

The problem with the absolutist argument, it now seems to me, is about the standard that you apply when evaluating something. To feel able to say definitively that something is "good" or "bad", you have to have a measure to use, a set of criteria that serve to separate things. In this case, people have suggested a number of indicators of the suckitude of the Warped bands, including:

- "they suck, because [Influential Person X] says so". Bullshit, plain and simple. Look, I will admit to having deep feelings of reverence for certain members of the punk community. If Brett Gurewitz or Tom Gabel or Dustin Kensrue says something, then I tend to view it in a positive light because of the integrity that I believe those people possess. However, I would never assume that everyone else feels the same way, or that the opinion of those individuals should automatically override the opinions of anyone else. So I'm sorry Mr Ranieri, but there are no such things as "scene points" in real life, and your word can't be taken as gospel.

- "they suck, because they don't play instruments". Well, plenty of great musical performers haven't played instruments (off the top of my head, almost every top-class rapper fits this bracket). And while Mr Punk Rock might not view rappers as real musicians either, I think the Jay-Z / Noel Gallagher Glastonbury fiasco put that argument to rest once and for all.

- "they suck because they don't write their own songs". I agree that there is a genius inherent in writing a song. I admire people like Ryan Adams, who can do it seemingly at will. I think that to be seen as a truly great musician, you have to write your own material. But to be a performer, and that's all that Brokencyde claim to be and aspire to be, you just have to get on a stage and kill it. You don't need to have written what you play, you just need to play the shit out of it. And, as much as you or I (for I don't love their output, and think that songs like "Freaxxx" potentially encourage date rape, but that’s a separate issue) might not like them, they have fans who think their performances are brilliant.

There are other standards that people have tried to use, but I have similar problems with all of them. Which, again got me questioning my beliefs, and I came to this conclusion: the thing that I loved most about punk rock when I was first getting into it was that, to all intents and purposes, it was unjudgemental. Punk rock said to me, as a 16 year old who didn't quite feel like he fitted in, "you are welcome here, whatever you are into". You might like hardcore, it might be thrash that gets you off, whatever, it doesn't matter. An integral part of being a subculture is about having flexible standards - as punk rock fans we are saying to newcomers "listen, the mainstream may not seem right for you and that's fine, you have the right to be into whatever you are into". In the light of that, turning around and attempting to tell people what they should or shouldn't like seems hypocritical - if you feel angry when people tell you that your band or the music you love "sucks", why do you then perpetuate that by telling other people that what they like "sucks"? Why not accept that they aren't the same as you, that your tastes may be different, and get back to doing something positive?

Ultimately, the thing that made up my mind, the thing that convinced me that Hornby is right in advocating the relativist view, was rock and roll. Last week, I watched a video of Against Me! playing at a festival in Florida a couple of years ago (you can see it here: http://nationalunderground.org/national-underground-recordings/29-against-me-the-fest-4 The second video is particularly amazing, if only for the phenomenal runthrough of "Problems" and the stage invasion at the end of "We Laugh At Danger (And Break All The Rules)”). Their performance was just wonderful, powerful and passionate, everything I love about music. And I realised, while lost in the energy of it all, that some people would hate it. Would note that Tom Gabel can't really sing and that the guitars are slightly out of tune and that a lot of their songs sound kind of the same. And you know what? I would love to debate that with them, I would love to try to convince them to see things my way - but if at they end of the day they didn't see it I would hope that they would accept that my opinion was as valid as theirs, and that we would part as friends. That's the problem with the "they just suck argument", it robs us of both the excitement of the debate and then the camaraderie of agreeing to disagree. Losing those things... well, that would just suck.

A Flight and A Crash

DC 22/07/09

A Flight and A Crash

As the saying goes, sometimes bad things happen to good people. That was my immediate response to reading recent interviews in which Chino Moreno and other members of metal group Deftones discuss the car wreck that plunged their bassist Chi Cheng into a coma. The band seem like good people, who have been, as you would expect, scarred and saddened by their experience. On that personal level, this has been a tragic turn of events and clearly all sympathies should be directed to those involved.

As well as the personal issue, I think there may be a musical loss here too, which while clearly insignificant in the broader context is also a shame. The loss is this – just at the time when the band were hit with Cheng’s crash, they may have been about to push modern metal forward again.

This doesn’t mesh well with the predominant critical take on Deftones, which is that they were late-90s innovators in the hard rock field who have since settled into a boundary-respecting groove. And this is true to a point – their self-titled record did seem a little stagnant and free of new tricks. However, this view also underestimates the brilliance of their last record, the unjustly overlooked “Saturday Night Wrist”, which was packed with excitement and innovation.

“…Wrist” met the unfortunate fate that some long-gestating works of art do – it became known more in relation to the tortured process of its creation than in terms of its music. The narrative surrounding its release was that the record was the product of a band riven by personality disputes and internal conflict – and as a result of this the vast majority of reviews failed to analyse it in any depth beyond saying “holy hell, it’s amazing this disc even got made!”

That was a mistake, as “…Wrist” got closer to achieving something than almost any other hard rock record has. That something is to capture feelings of romanticism, lust, longing, eroticism and craving, within the structures of modern metal. Metal has always been a useful channel for certain emotions – anger, be it political (Rage Against The Machine) or personal (Nine Inch Nails). Aggression (take a bow, Limp Bizkit). Pure sexual lust (Motley Crue). All of these emotions are relatively easily communicated by means of crunching riffs, spiralling solos an driving drumbeats. What metal has never been good at is capturing less extreme, more heady, more complex feelings – and particularly those relating to romantic love and longing.

This was where the genius of “…Wrist” sat. It’s swirling textures and melodies, topped by the gorgeous croons and screams of Moreno, began to paint those feelings. And it did it without sacrificing heaviness – in fact, the ferocity of the delivery system was crucial to the mapping of the more conflicted parts of the heart. Every minute of this record, from Moreno’s moans on Hole In The Earth and plaintive cries of “I’ll be waving goodbye” on Xerxes to Steph Carpenter’s mating-whale guitars on Cherry Waves dripped sensuality. This was underpinned by Cheng’s flexible, keening basslines, the musical equivalent of bedroom eyes. All of this is pretty hard to pull off while also rocking a moshpit.

And that’s where the musical tragedy of all of this bites. While “…Wrist” was a brilliant record, you felt that Deftones could have taken things still further. You hoped that they would be brave enough to try, rather than turning back to the easier task of writing musical that was purely angry or heavy for heavy’s sake. And then they revealed that their 2009 album would be called “Eros”, surely a sign that the band was rising to the challenge. How could a record with a title like that not explore the finer points of love and sex?

As a result of Cheng’s crash, however, Eros has been shelved. The band made the brave choice not to release the record, as Cheng had been such an integral part of its creation that the other members didn’t feel that it was right to play the songs without him. Instead, the Deftones are writing a new record inspired by his accident. I am absolutely sure that this is the right course to take, and I look forward to the record that they do release greatly. But the fact that that record won’t be “Eros” is a minor tragedy nevertheless, set against the backdrop of a much greater one.