FEATURE: Spotlight: FLETCHER

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

  

FLETCHER

_________

THIS is an artist I have featured before…

but I don’t know if I have included her in Spotlight. One of the most important voices in modern Pop, FLETCHER (Cari Elise Fletcher) is someone everyone needs to know about. Her breakthrough single, Undrunk, was released in January 2019 and became her first single to chart on the Billboard Hot 100. She put out her debut album, Girl of My Dreams, last year. The New Jersey-born artist is someone I have been a fan of since her early E.P.s like You Ruined New York City for Me (2019). FLETCHER put out I Believe You in support of sexual assault survivors in March 2018, writing a #MeToo-inspired letter to Billboard. FLETCHER is one of the most influential and important L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ artists. She is a huge supporter of organisations such as GLAAD, The Trevor Project, and It Gets Better. In December 2021, FLETCHER stated that she identifies as Queer. Before coming to a couple of reviews for Girl of My Dreams, there are some interviews from 2022 and this year around the album that I want to start off with. In October 2022, DORK spoke with the phenomenal FLETCHER:

“Fletcher is a pop star who encompasses a whole whirlwind of emotions and feelings. There’s no element of mystery. No boundaries and no filters. “My artistry is so closely tied with my personal life and my humanity,” she tells us from a hotel room in Australia. In case you hadn’t realised, Fletcher is global now. “It’s such a crazy moment, and I’m about to go on my fourth headline tour of this year,” she adds. See? Major. “My art becomes my personal lived experiences in such an in-depth, open your diary and read a page from it kind of way. The beautiful thing about my trajectory so far is that I’ve grown up with my fans. We have grown up together. Any feedback I get from them is like, oh, you’ve narrated my heartbreak or my first time falling in love or going through a really serious breakup.”

Those fans have followed Fletcher as she has detailed her ups and downs, culminating in a wide-ranging and emotionally fulfilling debut album. “My artistry has evolved,” she explains. “Lyrically or sonically, it has evolved as I have evolved and I have new experiences. Rolling out this album, I’m picking up where I left off two years ago. I’ve told things in a pretty chronological order of where I am in my life. It lands us at the girl of my dreams.”

The album is very much a continuation of the story that Fletcher has been telling right back to her debut single ‘War Paint’ in 2015. “I’m just bringing songs back around and changing the narrative and the story to how it fits in my current moment,” she says about some of the intriguing little easter eggs dotted around the record for fans to discover. Don’t worry, we won’t spoil the surprise. “Getting to share that with people who have become so keen on the personal details of my life and are privy to that information feels like a fun journey we get to go on together. You guys know all the tea, you know all the gossip, and it feels good to share it,” she exclaims.

In many ways, Cari Elise Fletcher was born to be a pop star, but she knew that she had to be a different kind of pop star. “I started with classical vocal training when I was five,” she explains. “Music was always a part of my life. I grew up singing in church, which was a journey I had growing up in a small conservative town, knowing that I was queer from a young age. I was a Disney Princess impersonator for kids’ parties, as well as Taylor Swift and Hannah Montana. That was my job in high school. I went on to attend the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at NYU’s School of Performing Arts, and it was there that I was taking classes in recording and marketing and business and all these different routes within the music industry.”

 Naturally chafing against this very regimented old-school approach, Fletcher began to imagine a different way forward. “I realised that all the examples of people in pop music that I grew up with were this very picture-perfect, polished version of what it looks like to be an artist,” she reflects. “I thought I’m never going to be an artist if this is what it is. I love this, and I love pop music, but I don’t relate. I really wanted to see someone expressing the depths of their soul and their humanity. Their mess ups and confusion, pain and suffering, joy and liberation – the whole range of emotions in an unfiltered way. From such a young age, I was like I need to be the artist that I needed when I was little. I want to be that for somebody else. Everything that I do is with that little version of me in mind. If I needed that, then odds are somebody needs that too”.

The album arrives in a moment characterised by a number of singular artists who do things on their own terms, unencumbered by prevailing expectations or the principles of what you should do as a pop star. It’s a lineage where Fletcher fits right in. “I do think we’re in a time now that conceptually people are less afraid to take risks in terms of the things that they’re talking about,” she explains. “I’m super inspired by Miley Cyrus, Harry Styles, Halsey and Billie Eilish. They are all artists that are so unapologetically themselves. They don’t really give a fuck about what other people are making, and that’s something that I admire so much.”

Ultimately, Fletcher’s journey over the past seven years has been one of progression but also reflection. It’s taken a lot of time and a lot of healing, but she knows exactly who she is and is ready to be the pop icon she always wanted to be on her own terms. “The title track sums up everything,” she concludes. “I’ve had all these lovers, and I’ve thought they were all going to be the one, but I’ve had my heart broken a million times, and why does tequila not hit anymore? Why does none of these things feel like they used to? What is it I’m missing, and It’s like, oh duh, it’s you. “Now I lay me down to sleep because I’m the only bitch I need, I’m all hers, and she’s all mine, and I’ll love her until the day I die”. If I’ve got that at the core, I can do anything”.

I can feel and see how FLETCHER’s music, narrative focus and confidence has grown since her E.P. releases. I think that Girl of My Dreams was one of the best albums of last year. It is one that I feel is quite underrated. This Billboard interview from last year is revealing. Growing up in a conservative area, it would have been hard for an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ artist to express herself. Songwriting was a way of doing that. FLETCHER also writes music for the listener. If the subjects can be quite personal, they are ones that many others can identify with and find strength in:

“But this time around, the focus has changed — while her album still explores the messy breakup dynamics that comprised the content of EPs like You Ruined New York City For Me and Finding Fletcher, Girl of My Dreams places Fletcher squarely in the center of her own narrative. “My writing has always mirrored where I’m at in my life, and the phases that I’m in — and so the track list very intentionally starts with ‘Sting’ and ends with ‘For Cari,'” she says. “I wanted to show what the growth process looks like for me.”

Girl of My Dreams operates as something of a “time capsule” for Fletcher, chronicling two and a half years of self-discovery and therapy (“I have a crush on [my therapist], which I feel like is problematic,” she admits at one point) that resulted in personal revelations that have reshaped the young star’s self-image. “This has been my narrative of growth over the last two years; the pain evolves from nasty heartbreak into some love for yourself.”

While Fletcher emphasizes the fact that healing from pain is “not linear,” the story told on her album is — the first 5 tracks pick up where her much-loved last EP The S(ex) Tapes left off; in the midst of heartbreak, pain and emotional chaos. Early standouts like “Guess We Lied” and “Better Version” map out a path of petty resentment and bitter dismissals.

Those feelings may not be entirely mature, something that Fletcher herself calls out on late album cut “Serial Heartbreaker” when she takes “accountability, saying ‘Fuck, why don’t my relationships work out? It’s because you are codependent and you need to look in the mirror and heal that person so you stop having these cycles of habits,'” as she puts it.

But that’s the point, as she tells it; everyone thinks messed-up thoughts every now and then. She’s just putting those thoughts to good use. “There’s never a recording session where I go, ‘Cool, the next two weeks, we’re writing for the album.’ No, I show up and say, ‘Listen up, I am a hot-ass mess, I just had the most unhinged thought, let’s make it a song,'” she says.

One of those “unhinged thoughts” came in a writing session when, scrolling through Instagram, she found a photo of her ex’s girlfriend wearing one of her vintage t-shirts. After accidentally liking the pic, she decided not only to leave the like, but to forever enshrine the moment in the song “Becky’s So Hot.”

Not only did the steamy single go on to earn Fletcher her first-ever entry on Billboard‘s Hot Alternative Songs chart, but it also opened the floodgates of Queer TikTok. As it turns out, “Becky” happened to be the name of her ex-girlfriend’s (influencer Shannon Beveridge) current partner; the pair made it very clear through a series of posts that they were unhappy with the song, and fans began intense debate over the ethics of Fletcher using Missal’s name in a song about thinking she was hot. “I can’t go on TikTok anymore — my algorithm has just become videos about me, which is so f–king annoying,” she says, chuckling. “Give me anything else aside from ‘Becky’s So Hot’ discourse.”

The singer concedes that making art out of her private life — and by proxy unofficially inviting outside audiences into it — is an active choice she’s made throughout her career, even if she finds herself regretting it. “Sometimes it’s like, ‘God damn it, Cari. Why did you set the precedent of telling everybody your business?'” she says, her eyes rolling up to the ceiling. She adds; “It’s just not that deep — I’m not actually out here trying to f–k anyone’s girlfriend.”

The name “Becky,” aside from being the name of Beveridge’s current girlfriend, carries with it a lot of cultural context that Fletcher is quick to provide. “The name ‘Becky’ is a pop trope that’s been used for decades. It’s ‘Becky with the good hair,‘ or ‘Oh my god, Becky, look at her butt, it’s so big,'” she says. “‘Becky’ is ‘the other woman.’ And the song is about the other woman!”

The singer-songwriter argues that part of her job is writing lyrics that people find their own truth in. It’s part of the reason, she says, why she got into this career in the first place. Growing up in the “conservative, religious town” of Asbury Park, NJ, Fletcher says that after spending years battling mental health, hiding her sexuality and being generally “burdened by my own existence,” she used songwriting as a means of expressing herself to others who might be stuck in a similar situation.

“It was all coming from the understanding of not wanting anyone else to feel so f–king crazy,” she says. “To be able to have resources, or even just a person verbalizing the crazy s–t that we think about, or the phases of our life that we go through; I desperately needed that, and I set out from day one to be that artist.”

But with the release of and subsequent discourse surrounding “Becky’s So Hot,” Fletcher noticed some online commenters shaming her for showing irresponsibility as a role model to other queer women in the world. That characterization of her, she says, is one she rejects.

“I never claimed that; I’m not a role model, I don’t want to be a role model, and I don’t think we should have role models,” she says. “Expectations are the root of suffering — I am not f–kin’ perfect, I make f–k-ups and mistakes, I have never been out here claiming to know what I’m doing, to be doing it correctly”.

In May, Rolling Stone Australia spotlighted FLETCHER. Since 2019, she has been establishing herself as one of the voices of her generation. An artist with a legion of adoring fans, her songwriting is among the strongest out there. She is someone who can be compared with the greats of modern music. I would urge everyone to follow FLETCHER:

“Acknowledging the non-linear nature of healing and self-care, Fletcher credits her fans with helping to keep her grounded when things get too chaotic.

“I feel so lucky that I have cultivated such an amazing connection with my fans and the people who listen to my music,” she says.

“From day one, I’ve always been like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here.’ I’m not pretending to have this all figured out; I very much don’t, I’m just a human being having human experiences. I’m just trying to make sense of those emotions and feelings through art.”

“I feel really lucky that my fans are the first ones to be like, ‘Bitch, take a nap! Drink some water! Do whatever it is that you need to do,’ – that’s the message I really wanna share in return, too. Take care of yourself. That’s the most important thing.”

With an album like Girl Of My Dreams, it’s easy to assume a particular image of FLETCHER; perhaps one that sees her thriving under the spotlight. And the stats don’t lie – she definitely has flourished since the album’s release.

Songs like “Becky’s So Hot”, “Sting” and “Better Version” demonstrate a songwriting range that envelops playfulness, vulnerability and a lean into a supercharged emotional space.

Still, behind the billions of streams, industry acclaim and online adoration, FLETCHER still grapples with existing in such a chronically online world, and with that, figuring out what she wants her place within it to look like.

Since the album’s release, FLETCHER has arrived at some realisations of her own; importantly, that she can revel in the success of her art but in prioritising her own self-care, she isn’t stalling momentum, or letting anyone down. Both success and prioritising yourself can exist at the same time.

“When you spend life on the road, it’s sometimes hard to live life and to have the experiences to write about,” she explains.

“I’ve taken a back seat from social media for a second. It’s so overstimulating, so unhealthy; every time I go on, my anxiety skyrockets through the roof. I used to think I was such a weak, over-sensitive person, but our nervous systems just aren’t cut out for how much information exists; how much is constantly being fed to us about how we should be perceived and appear. What our lives should look like.”

“I’m very much in this era of my life right now, where I’m crafting my life in a way that doesn’t need to be shown or seen all the time. I’m in a really deep overhaul of taking care of myself and what that means, what that looks like”.

Before getting to reviews, this recent NME interview is really important. I think we can all listen to and follow an artist like FLETCHER without realising how difficult it can be. In terms of pressure and the strain of touring. She spoke about the importance of practicing affirmations:

“The singer explained that starting to practice affirmations was the inspiration for her single ‘I Love You Bitch’, which has become a fan favourite at her live shows.

“I was listening to a podcast that was about [learning] how to love yourself in 21 days, and it [used] mirrorwork,” she said. “You had to look at yourself in a mirror and one of the exercises one day was like, ‘Say I love you and then fill in your name’. It was so awkward for me to do and I felt so uncomfortable and then I remember looking in the mirror and being like ‘I love you, bitch,’ and I was like, ‘That feels more like it’s on point’.”

She continued: “I’ve always struggled with pretty intense performance anxiety and before I go on stage I will make eye contact with myself and I will say, ‘You are that bitch. You are that bitch. You are that bitch. You can do anything, you can be anything, and I just say, ‘I love you’.

“When I first started doing that and practicing any sort of affirmations, it feels sort of wrong, it feels really uncomfortable, it feels really self-absorbed. But I think the more that you can grab onto your body, which has been something that I’ve been doing every day, I feel like we so often abandon our physical vessels and talk so mean about them and abuse them.

“The more that you can have gratitude for your body and be like, ‘Whoa, these legs, I was able to walk around today, they got me through the day. No matter what you say about yourself, you’re always coming up with a reason why it could be better and society reinforces that too. We live in a world that’s just constantly telling us that something needs to be different, something needs to look different. That’s just not true.”

Asked when she made more of a conscious effort to practice self-love, Fletcher said: “It was over the pandemic for me, where I went through a period of my life where I didn’t think I wanted to do music anymore and I was second-guessing myself. I just remember having the shift, where I was like, ‘If I can just show up in a way that feels more truthful and honest and bearable for me, then this is something I wanna do and commit to. That’s how it started to come about.

“But I think it’s like a forever journey and a process. You don’t arrive at something overnight and suddenly you’re like, ‘I am everything.’ Just start saying that you are, because you are. Everything you’ve ever needed has already been right here”.

I am going to finish off with some reviews. The Line of Best Fit  were among those who provided a positive review for Girl of My Dreams. It is an album that keeps revealing more each time you listen to it. If you have not heard it then make sure that you do now:

“Taylor Swift might have been dubbed the queen of break-up songs, but she’s got nothing on Cari Fletcher. Heartache, healing, clandestine make-ups and complicated feelings have saturated pretty much all her discography to date, and the same broken heart bleeds well into the first half of her Girl Of My Dreams.

The frantic opener “Sting” makes an immediate reference to THE S(EX) TAPES, FLETCHER’s 2020 EP that was made in collaboration with its muse: the ex in question who FLETCHER had chosen to quarantine with. Clearly still a fresh wound, there are references to that relationship throughout the album, including the sorrowful speculation of “Birthday Girl” and messy catharsis of “Becky’s So Hot.” Name-dropping your ex’s new girlfriend so publicly is definitely chaotic, but fits with FLETCHER’s mission to produce “the most honest, raw, and complete representation of the complex and sensitive-ass Pisces that I've always been.”

In its second act, the album looks inward. “I Think I’m Growing?” would have made sense as the album’s finale: short and sweet, set to minimalist production and soaring harmonies. Lyrically, we hear FLETCHER confront the self reflection that presumably came from self-isolation. It’s followed up by the title track, where all the insecurity and flaws she just encountered are replaced by a determined sense of self-love. Its bridge follows the likes of Metallica and Halsey in riffing off the “Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep” prayer, and leads into a euphoric final chorus that makes for a clear album highlight. “Guess We Lied…” is another standout - a revamped reproduction of “If You’re Gonna Lie” from her 2019 EP, you ruined new york city for me.

In comparison to these hits there are some misses: “Holiday,” “Serial Heartbreaker,” and “I Love You” - though the latter is charming and melodically reminiscent of Charli XCX’s “Gone” - are all at risk of obscurity. However, the actual closing song (aptly titled “For Cari”) is an undeniable triumph, and embodies all that this record set out to achieve. Raising a toast to herself, FLETCHER concludes that nobody’s love can compare to her own”.

I will finish off with a review from CLASH. There is a fantastic mix of introspection and personal investigation. There is also the uplifting and euphoric tracks too. It creates a great blend that shows different side to this phenomenal artist. I wonder what album number two will offer. Take some time out and listen to Girl of My Dreams:

“From having everyone in a chokehold with ‘Undrunk’ in 2019, which catapulted the fast-rising artist into mainstream attention, Fletcher has made her name through anthemic songs that crystalise the sapphic experience. The New Jersey-bred pop sensation, known for her openly honest tracks, has made a massive cultural impact by speaking her truth with total abandon and continues to expand on her fearless candid storytelling throughout her entire discography.  By blending tragic heartbreak with bittersweet, metaphoric revenge, the critically acclaimed queer icon has always been drawn to the nuanced, sometimes ugly emotions that people tend to shy away from. It’s that cards-on-the-table approach that sometimes stirs up controversy, but also brings in an audience who loves her authenticity, as she shares her dreams, fears, fantasies and all the fleeting feelings inbetween.

Described as an album that takes “a deeper dive into self-exploration”, Fletcher’s debut album, ‘Girl Of My Dreams’, is a chaotic, unfiltered project that unpacks and tackles insecurities head-on. The songs are built on a high energy, hypnotic sound, including everything from pop-punk to dance-pop and understated folk, that sees her exploring every raw emotion on a fluid, dynamic and supremely satisfying odyssey through all the joy and pain of relationships. It is an intense rollercoaster of supercharged pop but even in it’s painful moments, the record radiates an undeniable hope.

Recalling her softer pop-punk origins, ‘Birthday Girl’ and ‘Better Version’ share heavy-hearted expressions of post-breakup grief whilst lightly attacking electric guitars in hybrid fingerpicking styles. Remaining at a mellow pace throughout, the sorrowful speculation of ‘Birthday Girl’ sees a kaleidoscopic flurry of vocal percussion that opens up the chorus in the most beautiful, angelic way whilst ‘Better Version’, though still angelic, sports a rawer, more emotional tone through Fletcher’s confessional lyrics and stripped back ballad-styled chorus.

Taking on a glorious velocity with a dance-pop beat, ‘Serial Heartbreaker’ finds Fletcher owning up to her imperfections: “Sensitive but not enough. I’m not the best at breaking up. Too soon to rip the band-aid off. I’m a sucker for the f*ck me up.” It carries through ‘Girl Of My Dreams’, an album grounded firmly in the past with the hopes of healing in the present. Fletcher continuously dives into turbulent emotions in cutting-edge pop tracks packed with bracing lyrics and this album is no exception.

Although much of this record emerged from exacting introspection, Fletcher also offers up wildly euphoric tracks such as ‘Guess We Lied’ and ‘My Body Is Bible’ that spotlights her gift for crafting profoundly resonant pop songs with extraordinary specificity. Leading into euphoric choruses that makes for a clear album highlight, ‘Guess We Lied’ walks a fine line between bitterness and heartbreak whilst ‘Her Body Is Bible’ explores the tenderness of a sapphic relationship using religious themes. The subtly sexy track, which takes an r-rated twist to detail intimate interactions, catches the sentiments of escapism and perfectly mirrors the intimate experiences through the confessional build-up and tension pauses alongside the snappy lyricism.

At the end of the day, Fletcher loves being a storyteller. Where people shy away from harder, messier subjects, she sees it as an invitation to lay everything out bare. The catharsis and anxiety existing in that vulnerable space tends to bring an equal measure and closing in on her emotional journey, tracks ‘I Think I’m Growing’, ‘Girl Of My Dreams’, ‘I Love You, Bitch’, and ‘For Cari’ show true self-acceptance and obscurity. The introspective tracks, set to minimalist production and soaring harmonies, lyrically find Fletcher confronting self-reflection and replacing any insecurities with a determined and confident sense of self-love. As a queer woman who has spent plenty of time grappling with the feelings that often come from conservative, religious spaces, it’s refreshing to see her reflect on relationships from various points of her live and share how they’ve informed her own trajectory. It ends the record on an optimistic note, a letter to herself, as ‘For Cari’ is a toast to herself and her story so far showcasing that Fletcher is now, evidently, in a place to happily voice her own self-love.

With its unfiltered look at the most intimate emotional experiences life has to offer, ‘Girl Of My Dreams’ results in Fletcher’s most revealing and revelatory body of work to date. The candid storytelling of loss and trauma, the pain of personal growth, and the power of true self-acceptance opens up to serving soft pop-punk brilliancy in an exhilarating yet hypnotising project. It solidifies her position as more than just a queer artist and, with this self-liberation and self-love manifesto, it is one that embodies all Fletcher set out to achieve.

8/10”.

One of our very best artists, I wanted to spotlight FLETCHER because she is someone who has a big fanbase - even though more people need to know about her. I know that very big things lie ahead for her. The past year has been a bit of a whirlwind for FLETCHER. With Girl of My Dreams under her belt and some tour dates in the U.K. and Ireland later in the year, things are looking very bright. This is an artist that you…

NEED to know.

___________

Follow FLETCHER

FEATURE: Spotlight: Hak Baker

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

  

Hak Baker

_________

WHEN thinking about…

my favourite singles of the year, the top five is quite eclectic. I would have Iraina Mancini’s Cannonball at the top. Antony Szmierek’s collaboration with Jacana People, Twist Forever, is in that mix. I would also put Queens of the Stone Age’s Emotion Sickness in the top five (for that chorus alone!). Maybe Jessie Ware’s Pearls is in the top five. Rounding things off very nicely indeed is Hak Baker’s DOOLALY. It is a sensational song from an artist who is among the finest coming out of London. His Sprechgesang delivery gives the music this conversational aspect. A lot of modern artists deploy Sprechgesang. I am not sure why the phenonium has happened but, in the case of Baker’s music, I think it is the most affective way to get his amazing and vivid lyrics into the head. I am going to move to some interviews with Baker soon. I will also bring in reviews for his amazing debut album, Worlds End FM. It is one that you need to get! One of the best debut albums of the year, Baker has a busy year ahead in terms of gigs and dates. Before I get to interviews and reviews, here is some important background regarding the incredible Hak Baker:

“Hak Baker is a documentarian as much as he is a songwriter. Whether chronicling his own experiences or those of the people around him, his music offers an indispensable insight into the struggles of the working classes in 2019. The injustices, the hustle, the heartache: it’s all there to be discovered on ‘Babylon’, a 12-track mixtape which the 29-year-old singer showcasing his vast creative vision and astonishingly unadorned vocal talents.

“There’s no fairy tales in East London,” he rues on the title track in his thick cockney dialect, foreshadowing the hard truth that happy endings are in short supply. And yet Baker’s backstory is proof that real life is often as extraordinary as fiction. For, from chorister to convict, grime MC to folk singer, his protracted path to this point has been anything but predictable.

The third youngest of seven children, Baker was born in Luton before moving to the Isle of Dogs aged one, where he still resides today. His introduction to performing came as part of the Southwark Cathedral choir, which he joined at the encouragement of his mother. By his early teens Baker was gravitating towards grime, becoming part of the BOMB Squad crew for a few years, who achieved breakout success with support from the now-defunct urban music champion Channel U.

It was during this period that Baker began rebelling against his strict upbringing, getting into scrapes with the law, and by the age of 15 he’d left home and was getting by bunking on the floors of friends. With no rules to adhere to things spiralled out of control quickly, resulting in spells in prison. Discussing the experience today, Baker accepts full responsibility for his actions: “The things we got into, we put ourselves there: no-one forced us to do anything. They were difficult times, but that was the path that I took and I don't regret it. I learned so much.”

It was while incarcerated, aged 21, that Baker reignited his love for music, signing up for guitar lessons and further developing his technique via YouTube tutorials. The first song he learned to play on guitar was ‘Youth’ by Daughter, before he began branching out into his own compositions. The shift from grime to - what Baker terms - “g-folk” might initially feel like a wrench, but it’s less so when you consider how diverse his tastes have always been. Indeed, he speaks fondly today of a childhood spent being exposed to everything from reggae, dub, and jazz to classic pop, R&B, soul, and bashment, via various friends and family members.

Music mostly remained a private pursuit for Baker until 2016 when, at the behest of friends, he applied for and won a place on the Levi’s Music Project. Headed up by Skepta, the initiative provided Baker and 10 other aspiring musicians with access to equipment, mentors and studio time, and climaxed with a showcase at the V&A. The experience spurred Baker into action, and his debut single ‘7AM’ arrived in May 2017, followed by the ‘Misfits’ EP that November.

Two years on, Baker’s debut mixtape builds on that groundwork. Produced by childhood friend and long-time collaborator Ali Bla Bla, ‘Babylon’ is characterised by what Baker terms “spontaneous, intuitive music.” Baker’s loose, largely acoustic guitar-led arrangements and Sprechgesang vocal delivery lend the set a refreshing fluidity, and even when he does branch out with more ambitious arrangements - on the breezy, brass-flecked ‘Venezuela Riddim’ for example - it still feels disarmingly unstudied.

Thematically, Baker’s digging deeper than ever, tackling subjects including toxic masculinity (‘Lad’), drugs and alcohol-induced oblivion (‘Broomstick’), social inequality (‘Skint’) and death (‘Grief Eyes’). As Baker explains, the title ‘Babylon’ itself refers to the oppression we face as a society.

“I feel it's important to tackle [the] issues of our society. Babylon is a state of play - a social cloud - that we all live under. And the reason could stem from not having dads at home, or not having a good rapport with the police or the government, or repressing emotion, or psychological issues… We all feel low, we all feel looked down upon, we all feel like we don't matter, and we turn to drugs and drink and whatever to just get out of it. Because it's too hard. We all fall slaves to Babylon at some point or another.”

While Baker vehemently rejects the idea his music is political, when pressed on his long-term goals he speaks passionately about affecting positive change via his work, and inspiring others to do the same. “I want to be a figurehead of longevity and hard work, and repay what I owe to the communities that taught me so much. What's the point of getting somewhere and then forgetting where you come from? I wasn't born with no silver spoon, there weren’t no leg-ups: I came up from the floor. I'm a normal fucking boy. I've got something to say and I'm saying it”.

Before getting to an interview from The Independent released around the time his single Windrush Baby came out, I want to bring in a quick question and answer from Fredy Perry. We get to know a little more about Hak Baker’s music tastes and favourites:

“Name, where are you from?

My name is Hak Baker from Isle of Dogs, East London.

Describe your style in three words?

Nonchalant, Relaxed, Assured.

What’s the best gig you’ve ever been to?

I don’t go to many gigs, to be honest, It's something I tell myself I must start doing. I recently saw Lauryn Hill perform at Boomtown. That was just an inspiration. Seeing all the pain in her face released somehow through all these stories and words. With all the visuals of her life and misconduct in America behind her. Was just a powerful thing. When she performed the track 'To Zion' at the end. Icing on the cake - Big up Loz.

If you could be on the line up with any two artists in history?

It would be Gil Scott-Heron and Mr Bob Marley. I'm trying to fit in right in between both those two legends, to become the ultimate current storyteller. You gotta levitate right between them two ain't ya know what I mean.

Which subcultures have influenced you?

I’d say defo Ska and Punk. They both came at an important interval of time.
Where for whatever reason a sense of unity was needed amongst the tyranny. Music always prevails in these times. A reason for everyone to draw together. Beautiful and similar again to our current times. Ska defo represents that to me. Punk was just ferocious man. You need that shit too when you need to be heard. There are obvious other influences like reggae but that's not really a subculture anymore is it.

If you could spend an hour with anyone from history?

Bob Marley innit. Facing adversities from all angles. From his own people and country to his corporate and federal oppressors. You know death threats, shootings. Yet, still, the man persevered and sang his songs and passed his messages. I'd just like to cross-examine the man. See if we are on the same page. Did he feel the same head f*cks I feel. Did he nearly lose his mind. On the outside, he looked so calm in his proclamations. He was the heavyweight champ.

Of all the venues you’ve been to or played, which is your favourite?

Easily Bethnal Green Working Men's Club. The gaff is everything I stand for really. Well, it was, lol but you can still get the feel. Lads work all day and it’s a place to get together and that's what it felt like on my tour dates there. Full to the brim with Misfits with not a f*ckin' care in the world except for that moment. Double sweaty, mosh pits, pints flying all over the place, people smoking weed. That's how I NEED it. It was perfect.

Your greatest unsung hero or heroine in music?

Elana Tonra, from the band Daughter. She just pours her heart out man unapologetically. Man, it's awesome, learned a lot from her. She’s great”.

Windrush Baby was released as a single back in March. One of the standout cuts from Worlds End FM, this feature and interview from The Independent finds Hak Baker reflecting on generational trauma, his love for Jamaica, and inheriting his mother’s rebel spirit. There is so much truth and power from Baker’s music. I have already made some predictions regarding the artists who could be shortlisted for this year’s Mercury Prize. Next month, we find out which twelve albums from British and Irish artists will feature. I foolishly overlooked Hak Baker’s Worlds End FM! I think it will be in the mix and, if it is, one of the favourite alongside my ‘top three’ predictions – Jessie Ware’s That! Feels Good!, Loyle Carner’s hugo, and Dream Wife’s Social Lubrication:

“Britain isn’t me Motherland. Maybe it’s me Fatherland? I haven’t been to Grenada, which is shameless. Me dad’s gifts to me are words and prose. I don’t know if this is common in the Grenadian spirit but I must find out, me curiosity orders me to. But I have always felt an instant affinity with Jamaica. I was brought up with me mum, and me mum is a fire-breathing Jamaican. I can’t disassociate myself with it. Even though being a London boy is me, Jamaican culture is so entrenched in British culture, so it’s a double whammy. I was educated by the music and art that I saw in my house growing up. It’s in my soul. In my living room there were two pictures of Bob Marley and one of Nelson Mandela. I listened to Bob all the time. Sang me mum “Redemption Song” in the bath. Jamaica was the music. Bob encapsulated the spirit of Jamaica. The rebel lives through us.

PHOTO CREDIT: Nadine Persaud

What does Windrush mean to me? Don’t get me wrong, if me parents didn’t travel to Britain, I wouldn’t be alive. I wouldn’t know any of me mates and I wouldn’t be living the life I am today, mixing with the people I am mixing with. Me friends are multi-cultural and I wouldn’t have it any other way. We learn from each other and go crazy together. Our generation is reaping the benefits from being raised in London now. But racism still exists. My generation was lucky. Kids played with other kids, no matter of race or religion. But this was a bubble in the East End. Me mum always told me to be careful and watch out for the BNP. I got called a “coon” a couple of times, but I survived it. And when that happened me white friends would fight for me.

I’ve definitely got a hardened shell for bad news. Me mum got fired from her job because she was working two jobs. When you watch that happen it affects you and it affects the household. There is less money but it gives you a get up and go attitude. You go and seek money because you want to help mum and don’t want to take money off mum. People came over here for material wealth, at the expense of emotional wealth. But now everybody misses the emotional wealth. It was a lie. You work two jobs and get fired and struggle on the poverty line. We lost out on both. “I’ve done everything you told me to, Empire, to support my family, and you’ve given me nothing in return”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Nadine Persaud

“Windrush Baby” is about not being told what to do. I’m alive just to have a good time. I’m not working to live like me mum and grandparents. I want to enjoy myself through the skills I have learnt from them and London. I’m not trying to be like them, not in a bad way, but we are a new generation who wants to bring the power and money back to the Caribbean as a whole and we’re going to have a f***ing good time doing it. We’re not going to sit, beg and borrow, we’re gonna go out and get it and have a laugh. That’s how I tie it up, from the perils and the heartache of what me family have had to go through, the new generation is not going out like that. We’re not going to die with no money in our bank, not going to die with no house that we own. We are going to have it all. Thank you for teaching us the law of the land and how treacherous it. Now we have all the weapons we need to succeed and we’re going to learn and teach in the right way, not the barbarian-ship and hardship that the Empire taught and showed.

We’re going to grow some s*** and make some s***. We’re going to be successful and turn the Windrush story into a success story. We won’t cry. Now we are building our house on the land that was given to me mum by her mum in Jamaica. Me mum wanted me to be a lawyer and a doctor. I’m none of those things. I’m a singer now. She taught me spirit and soul and let me know who me people were from the get go. We weren’t just slaves. We learnt how to survive through the music, through roots reggae, and learnt who we were before slavery”.

I am going to move to an interview from The Guardian. As Baker highlights, London is pricing out the old guard. A lot of artists and creatives who would vibe from the energy of various communities and enclaves are being marginalised and forced out because of exorbitant rent prices and costs. It is a real shame. Something that needs to be addressed and tackled:

“Hak Baker is harking back to the east London of his childhood, before the oat milk lattes and experiential advertising creatives moved in. “Old boys taking me boxing, or to the scrap yard to flip tyres for 40 quid: that stuff gave me a sense of belonging,” he says. “But now when I look out my window, it’s just not the same. That old guard is being priced out, and if you say hello to someone in the street, they look at you like you’re weird. That’s not where I came from. Not at all.”

Gentrification is one of the glum topics on the singer-songwriter’s debut album World’s End FM, alongside a host of others: colonialism, surveillance, depression. Then there are joyous songs like Doolally, where Baker flirts and boozes around a party sounding like the Streets on Fit But You Know It. Few other British albums this year are as vibrant, and true to life’s contradictions. “When people are low and it feels like world war three is on the balance, it’s hard to believe in yourself,” he says of its paradoxically cheery end-of-days vibe. “But if we’re all gonna die, I don’t want to spend the time being sad about it.”

Born to Jamaican and Grenadian parents, Baker was raised on the Isle of Dogs, singing in church and raising his mother’s spirits after long shifts as a social worker. As a teen, he discovered grime via MCs at his local youth club (alongside one Dizzee Rascal), before finding his own schoolyard fame in rap collective Bomb Squad, a way “to be with your friends as much as possible – you felt safe in that bubble of brotherhood”.

In his mid-twenties, though, Baker was jailed for two years for robbery. “Where we’re from, you only know about keeping it moving, trying to provide for your family,” he says. “Prison gave me time to assess what I actually wanted for myself. If you’re not doing that in jail, then what the fuck are you doing?”

Inside, Baker learned the guitar, and having fallen for the wistful acoustics of British band Daughter, he coined his own genre, G-Folk, as a way to tell stories in his infectious cockney cadence. “I felt I could encapsulate the world of working-class people. It’s always shit, it’s always hard, but we still hold on to the idea of working together for a better place to survive. You never know; one day, whoever runs the country might actually listen to us.” But he doesn’t suggest that he and his people are always unified. Windrush Baby explores the heartache of cultural displacement: his mum crops up to complain that black Britons have “let go of the very strong values that we used to have”, but the song welcomes his burgeoning black audience, coming around to a genre-hopping sound. “A lot of black people are scared to back something that they don’t see as strictly ‘black’, like grime or drill. But rock and blues came directly from us and our struggles too. This is a way for me to connect.”

Baker has himself connected with other rowdy, socially conscious troubadours, and having recently supported Pete Doherty at the Royal Albert Hall, he’ll be appearing at Jamie T’s Finsbury Park all-dayer in June. “We went to the pub, got leathered, tried to make a tune, and just did that a few times until we were pals,” he says of Jamie T. “Pete was similar; he loved Wobbles on Cobbles [a song Baker released in lockdown] and invited me to support one of his gigs. He took one look at me backstage and went: ‘Cor, you’ve got some demons, ent ya?’ Even down to him coming onstage with me at Glastonbury last year, he’s always had my back.” Is there any chance of a potential supergroup between the three? “Oh, yeah, definitely. En route, I reckon.”

World’s End FM uses the framing device of Baker as a pirate radio DJ hosting a show, and on the closing track The End of the World, his friend Jack calls in to discuss the challenge of rebuilding himself after his mother’s suicide: recognition that amid the rabble-rousing East End defiance, it’s not always easy for men to keep calm and carry on. “Young men especially need a place to home in [on] their aggressions. As kids, trauma bonded us, but I think [aggression] creeps in more when we grow up and can’t rely on each other as much as we used to. It can be really sad and difficult for the lads”.

Let’s move to a couple of the many positive reviews for Hak Baker’s Worlds End FM. Without doubt among the finest and most stirring debut albums of 2023, I am a bit late to the Baker party. He is not a brand-new artists, yet he is coming through still and has many years ahead of him. If you have not heard his music, then go and follow him and check it out. NME had this to say about the mesmeric Worlds End FM:

“Hak Baker calls himself the ‘three island man’ – his mother was born in Jamaica, his father in Grenada, and himself on east London’s Isle of Dogs. On his intoxicating debut album ‘World’s End FM’ – presented as a pirate radio broadcast transmitting from the edge of the apocalypse – the Londoner brings all these perspectives together for a record that aims to provide a comprehensive portrait of the artist’s journey so far.

Since emerging in 2017, Baker has dipped into ska, reggae and punk, though his MC beginnings still permeate the energy of the music he makes today. Over the last year, he has supported The Libertines’ Pete Doherty at the Royal Albert Hall and will link up with Jamie T at his huge Finsbury Park gig this month (June 30), while Skepta and Celeste also consider themselves fans.

The significant jumps between genres and energies on ‘World’s End FM’ sometimes make the album feel unfocused and erratic, but it also feels true to both Baker’s cultural and musical backgrounds. On single ‘Doolally’, he sounds like a cockney Mike Skinner, throwing out observational quips and guiding the listener through a messy London night out with the same brilliant nonchalance as classic-era Streets. A minute later, he’s swapping dirty beats for breezy acoustic guitar and singing passionately of the abandoned Windrush generation (‘Windrush Baby’).

On ‘Windrush Baby’, he plays the role of traditional protest singer well, before bringing his gaze towards the technological age on ‘Telephones 4 Eyes’, a song that feels suitably itchy and anxious as he discusses the invasive role of smartphones. The sentiment is nothing new, but it’s the clear agitation with which he sings that makes the message cut through.

While all sides of both Baker’s taste and upbringing feel represented here, the overarching concept of ‘World’s End FM’ could be carried through a little more cohesively. Across the album, artists from Baker’s universe call in to the radio station to chat with him. Kurupt FM leader MC Grindah spits over a reggae/d’n’b hybrid on ‘Babylon Must Fall’, before indie star Connie Constance has a bone to pick with people stuck with their heads in their phones on Watford high street (‘Watford’s Burning’). Between these small interludes though, the concept feels, at times, lost.

While ‘World’s End FM’ itself falls an inch short of its lofty conceptual goals, it does successfully introduce Hak Baker as a 21st Century troubadour speaking to modern problems with empathy and requisite anger”.

I’ll wrap this up with CLASH’s take on the stunning Worlds End FM. Hak Baker speaks truth. His music, therefore, has this depth and power that a lot of artists cannot put across. Thought-provoking and powerful, ensure that you investigate such a fine and compelling debut album:

“Hak Baker speaks the truth. The East London artist has built his army, with fans flocking to his shows. They’re a motley crew, too – jaded indie fans, burned out rap fans, discontented pop fans, each searching for something different. A deeply alternative voice, Hak Baker has something no one else has – songs, anthems hewn from his own life, delivered with an absolute, unfiltered sense of honesty.

Debut album ‘World’s End FM’ epitomises this approach. The genre-hopping influences are distilled into something unified and unique, rough-hewn tales of life on the fringes. It’s not afraid to get dark, but there’s humour too – on record, as on the stage, Hak Baker is irrepressible.

‘DOOLALLY’ is an immediate highlight, followed by the bold statement of community that is ‘Windrush Baby’. ‘Collateral Cause’ has a wistful, moving quality, something that in the wrong hands might become mawkish – not here, though, with Hak producing something with genuine empathy.

‘Bricks In The Wall’ merges indie songwriting with electronic production, a kind of Jamie T meets Pet Shop Boys brew. Deft pop music, it deserves to ring out of every radio in the land. Equally, ‘Full On’ is slick but still impactful, the chorus staying in your head for hours at a time.

A true statement of his capabilities, ‘World’s End FM’ is styled as a kind of alternative universe pirate radio broadcast. Songwriting at its most illicit, the punchy vocal on ‘Telephones 4 Eyez’ is offset by the anthemics of ‘Brotherhood’ for example, or the beautiful introspection of ‘Almost Lost London’.

Indeed, there is admirable breadth on display here. Even the skits are perfectly utilised – Kurupt FM’s MC Grindah comes along for the ride, but then so too does the wonderful Connie Constance. Closing with ‘The End Of The World’, this is an album that dares to push aside the bullshit, and give you the truth.

8/10”.

Go and seek out Hak Baker. Such a brilliant young artist creating music that demands to be heard, I hope I was not putting too much pressure on him when I predict a Mercury Prize nod! I am not sure whether Worlds End FM has been put forward for consideration – it really needs to be! A future legend in our midst, it has been a pleasure spotlighting…

AN awe-inspiring talent.

____________

Follow Hak Baker

FEATURE: Revisiting... Jaguar Jonze - BUNNY MODE

FEATURE:

 

 

Revisiting...

 


Jaguar Jonze - BUNNY MODE

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AN artist I have…

 PHOTO CREDIT: She Is Aphrodite/Nettwerk Records

enormous respect for, Jaguar Jonze is the alias of Deena Lynch. The Brisbane songwriter is someone that everyone should know about. I want to revisit her 2022 album, BUNNY MODE. It is an album of trauma, catharsis, openness and this blend of thrills and fury. Recently, Jonze spoke with Rolling Stone Australia about a sensational live music project and concept that she performed at the Sydney Opera House. Boundary-pushing and utterly extraordinary, it signalled her as one of the most powerful and exceptional artists in the world! There are other great features relating to Vivid LIVE. This is what Rolling Strone Australia wrote:

“Of all the shows at this year’s Vivid LIVE, few sound as thrillingly thoughtful or physically visceral as Jaguar Jonze’s performance.

The Art of Broken Pieces is described as a “fusion of music, film shibari rope art and contemporary performance,” and will act as the artist’s “defiant reclamation of her body and artistic voice.”

“Moving between the dangerous and the beautiful, Jonze looks at the intersection of life and art, blending storytelling, her known elevation of provocative visuals, and intimate songs performed live for the very first time,” the event description reads.

There’s a lot involved in The Art of Broken Pieces, put simply. And yet Jonze – aka Deena Lynch – had minimal time to prepare for it.

“We’ve only had two months to develop it,” she tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ one nervous week before the one-off performance. “It’s been just months but everyone on the team keeps saying how this is a show that should take years! We’re being really ambitious with this show and it’s felt like a full-time job for the last two months.”

The monumental effort – the “blood, sweat and tears,” as Jonze puts it – will all be worth it in the end, because there are myriad special components involved in her endeavour.

For the Taiwanese-Australian artist, who came to this country as a young child, performing at Sydney Opera House will be a landmark occasion.

“It’s really emotional for me because it does really feel like a lifetime moment,” she says. “I had this map as a child where you had all these iconic destinations around Australia. I’m now going to have played two that I was obsessed with – I got to play at Wave Rock in WA and then the other is, of course, Sydney Opera House. It does feel absolutely surreal”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: SOH/Therese Hall

I hope that Jaguar Jonze comes to the U.K. and performs at some point, as there is a lot of love for her over here – and many venues that she could play and stun. BUNNY MODE was among my favourite albums of last year. I am not sure, like here and in Canada, there is a national music prize celebrating the best Australian albums of the year. BUNNY MODE should walk away with it! Australia is producing some of the most interesting and captivating music of the moment – in spite of listeners in Australia not really listening to homegrown artists. In any case, BUNNY MODE gained nothing but praise and respect. It is an album that everyone needs to hear and understand. I am going to come to a couple of reviews for one of the most important albums in recent times. PopMatters spoke with Jaguar Jonze ahead of the release of BUNNY MODE. We get some background and biography about this amazing artist:

“Persevering despite facing personal and professional obstacles, Lynch has been forthright about the perilous trip she has taken. Born in Yokohama, Japan, on 12 January 1992, she was raised by her single mother, who is Taiwanese, and moved to Australia (her father’s homeland) while approaching the age of seven.

Since then, Lynch has lived primarily in Brisbane, where she currently resides and also has spent time in Melbourne, Sydney, and Orange County. In elementary school, the youngster met Brisbane’s Joseph Fallon, who would later re-enter the picture as her guitarist, leading the way for the musical late bloomer.

Lynch’s education background included studying engineering at the University of Melbourne and business at Bond University. “I fell into writing music and playing guitar late in life, and it wasn’t really something I had in mind,” Lynch admits. “I was walking home one day from university and passed a garage sale, saw a guitar, and decided to buy it. I had just lost a close friend of mine and struggled a lot with the grief, and the guitar and songwriting became my catharsis. They weren’t great songs, but it was an important part of my life where I finally found a way to express myself and found passion in that. … At first, I just wanted the music to be a part of my life, and over time I wanted it to be my whole life.”

Initially using just her first name professionally, Deena was 20 in 2012 when she released the first of two independent albums — Lone Wolf. In February 2015, Black Cat followed, with Fallon on electric guitar and organ while Lynch sang and played acoustic guitar, keyboards, and organ.

“The guitar gives me the most joy to play, and I still write many songs on the acoustic guitar that I built myself,” Lynch notes. “I still don’t quite know how to play the guitar, I don’t know chord names or scales, but I always found the guitar to be so freeing because I can go with what sounds good and what sound I want to make on it.”

Of course, by then she was relying heavily on Fallon’s instrumental contributions. “Joseph Fallon has been on my right side on stage since I started writing music, playing shows, and making mistakes, ha ha. … He is an amazing classical guitarist, and I assumed it was all the same thing. It turns out it really isn’t, but luckily, Joseph is an incredible electrical guitarist, too,” reveals Lynch, whose family of musicians — and “biggest supporters” — also includes Aidan Hogg (bass/co-producer/synths) and Jacob Mann (drums).

Lynch broke loose as Jaguar Jonze in 2018, though the story goes she was initially called “Panther” by her friends. (See below in the bonus “Take 5” segment for more on Jaguar’s origin story.) That year, her first single as Jaguar Jonze — “You Got Left Behind” — was written and released, catching the attention of Nettwerk when “it miraculously got New Music Fridays AU/NZ and USA,” Lynch proclaims.

“Their Australian rep [who works for an independent marketing firm] believed in me, my hustle, and the project and put it across to [Nettwerk CEO, chairman, and co-founder] Terry McBride, who called me with so much passion and determination that I couldn’t go past it,” she continues. “Everything I do, I do with so much commitment and passion, and that’s what I wanted from anyone I brought onto the team. I made them wait a long time as I was so scared to sign my baby over, but they were true to their word.

“They respect and support my artistry and have even been so generous throughout the advocacy. Their support has allowed me to grow so much as an artist and as a person. I have grown up having to hustle, survive and be independent; it’s been a lonely process. Nettwerk has shown me that everyone deserves trust and a team, and just like with music — collaboration is how we go further. I love my team and am blessed to have some amazing, determined minds on it.”

Two EPs — 2020’s Diamonds & Liquid Gold and 2021’s Antihero — were released by Nettwerk as Jaguar Jonze and her other personas continued to develop. “Deadalive”, the lead single from Antihero she co-wrote with Hogg, was called “propulsive and thrilling” by PopMatters when the song made the “PM Picks Playlist” on 30 September 2020.

Stripping away Jaguar’s animal instincts toward music, Lynch was making her mark in other areas, too. Honored for her advocacy with the triple j Done Good Award and the Australian Independent Record Award for Outstanding Achievement, Lynch also was among Vogue‘s “21 Australian Women Who Defined 2021″. She collaborated with Christian Louboutin to create a concept film for their AW20 collection in 2020 and made a valiant effort that year to become Australia’s entrant for Eurovision’s international songwriting competition.

Even while moving forward and being applauded for her work as a feminist, activist, and performance artist seeking change in the Australian music industry and taking charge in Australia’s #MeToo movement, Lynch struggled to get BUNNY MODE off the ground. For one thing, COVID-19 landed Lynch in the hospital for 40 days when the global pandemic struck in March 2020”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: ABC Arts: Britt Spring

On an album that sends out a comprehensive and emphatic middle finger to abusers and oppressors – to slightly paraphrase what The Guardian wrote about BUNNY MODE -, the listener is moved and stunned. There is this strength and defiance that comes from the songs that makes the heart leap and the blood run. So many emotions run through BUNNY MODE. NME interviewed Jaguar Jonze about her sensational 2022 album. Just over a year old now, I am still listening to it a lot and being affected and moved every time I pass through it. Your heart goes out to someone who has had to deal with so much. There is no doubt that Jaguar Jonze’s music and words are helping and giving voice to other survivors of abuse and sexual assault:

“A turning point came when she unearthed ‘Not Yours’, a song she’d written in 2019 to “take the weight off my shoulders about what I’ve been through as a sexual assault survivor”. Writing it was a “cathartic process”, she says, but the state of her confidence back then meant she “was never going to let it see the light of day”. But when Lynch dusted off the original project file, she got goosebumps. “I saw how far ahead I’d moved from being that person – how I had grown and healed so much – and I forgot what it felt like to be where I used to be.”

Lynch has since turned the rough acoustic demo into a sizzling, swaggering ballad that twines a dirty blues-rock twang with swelling strings. She declares: “This body’s mine and not for you to feel and touch / Pretend you’re blind but I know that you’re not / You can never right your wrongs / Hope you change before you’re gone.”

 ‘Not Yours’ was the spark that gave way to an eruption of hard-earned confidence, fury and authenticity – all fully displayed on Jaguar Jonze’s debut album, ‘Bunny Mode’. Out today (June 3), the record – which she made with her band, Aidan Hogg (co-producer/synths/bass), Joseph Fallon (guitar/string arrangements) and Jacob Mann (drums) – is named for the coping mechanism Lynch developed to navigate the triggers for her complex PTSD. In the face of physical, psychological or emotional threats, Lynch would become still and quiet, mimicking the way a wild rabbit will play dead in the presence of a predator: “I would freeze, I would play dead, and I would just wait for the threats to wash over me.”

There are two sides to ‘Bunny Mode’, Lynch says: “This album is a way for me to say ‘thank you’ to my bunny mode,” she says, “for allowing me to survive up until this point… but also saying, ‘I don’t need you anymore.’ The biggest [step I’ve taken in my] healing journey has been to give myself permission to express the feelings and have the conversations that I was so scared to have with myself, and would repress and deny.”

Once she embraced the power of opening up to herself, Lynch channelled the energy she’d spent repressing into connecting with like-minded folks walking down the same paths she was. “That’s how we’re hardwired as humans,” she says, “by connection and community. That’s my favourite thing about music: I get to have this honest dialogue with myself, but I also have this give-and-take relationship with the people who resonate with my music.”

 ‘Punchline’ is a notable example of the ‘give’ in this exchange: fellow Brisbane artist Charlotte Marnee said she “instantly resonated” with the song’s perspective on “the fetishisation and stereotypes [about Asian women] enhanced by Australian and western media”. ‘Little Fires’ on the other hand, is a direct result of Lynch being galvanised by the solidarity shown by her community. The song, she says, is “a reminder about where we’ve come from, what we are fighting for, and what we can achieve when we work together”.

But this is not the part of the Jaguar Jonze story where Lynch rides off into the sunset, her mission accomplished and journey having come to its happy ending. She’s at an impasse between her art and her activism for women of colour and abuse survivors in Australian music – thankful for the praise she’s received for the latter, but frustrated that it often comes at the expense of her deserved recognition as an artist.

“My career has been completely taken over by the advocacy,” she admits with a sigh. “I want this album to say, ‘I am so passionate about my advocacy, but also, let me slap you in the face with my artistry.’ This is a landmark moment for me. It’s an album [of stories] that are extremely personal for me, and will always be emotional – but I want people to see that I have many stories to tell, and this album is just a taste of the breadth of genres and sounds and attitudes that I’m capable of”.

I want to come to The Guardian’s four-star review of the staggering BUNNY MODE. They echo a lot of what was said in other reviews: it is impossible not to be affected by Jaguar Jonze’s albums. It is an album that is still under my skin and inside my head; such is its incredible power and potency:

“I’m not gonna sleep below the glass ceiling,” Jaguar Jonze sings on her debut album, her voice barely a whisper.

Then, moments later with the volume turned right up: “You could’ve destroyed me, but then I got loud.”

This defiance is at the heart of Bunny Mode, an 11-track juggernaut that is cutting in its specificity. Its title refers to a survival tactic that the artist employed as a survivor of childhood abuse: a freeze response to any safety threats, like a frightened rabbit. The record is a middle finger to oppressors and abusers, as the artist – real name Deena Lynch – breaks free of their chokehold, rising anew.

The Brisbane musician, who released two EPs under the Jaguar Jonze moniker in 2020 and 2021, leans into an esoteric sound across Bunny Mode, fortified by the unbridled anger in her lyrics. Sonically and thematically, the record bears similarities to Halsey’s 2021 album If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power – both take cues from industrial music, building unapologetically feminist narratives and rebuttals upon glorious walls of sound. Despite the experimentation and boundary-pushing, it’s all still underpinned by pop and a knack for melody, as on the passionate slow-builder Little Fires, which Lynch performed as part of Eurovision’s Australian decider in February.

While there’s much to like musically – Bunny Mode moves away from the loopy spaghetti western sounds of Lynch’s early work to experiment with darker, heavier sounds, and the singer’s vocal chops are, as always, impressive – the album’s real power is in the lyrical details. It’s another piece of the activism puzzle for Lynch, who has spent much of the last two years on the forefront of fighting for change as a leader in the Australian #MeToo movement, shining a light on misbehaviour in the music industry. It also explores the more personal process of healing and recovery following trauma.

These many facets are visible through different threads of the album: on one of the more downbeat tracks, Drawing Lines, Lynch sings silkily of the importance of setting boundaries. The fury is more evident on tracks such as Who Died and Made You King, all angular guitars and punchy electropop beats, as Lynch spits, almost mockingly: “You’re sick and a victim of your own disease.” It’s thrilling to hear the tables turned on the powers that be in this way – a reclamation of space, a bold statement of self-sovereignty.

The highlight is Punchline, which turns a sharp eye on to tokenism and racism within the entertainment industry. In a similar fashion to Camp Cope’s The Opener, the Taiwanese Australian artist regurgitates box-ticking sentiments from corporate bigwigs to reveal their hollowness: “We love culture but make sure it’s to our very liking / Make it milky, make it plain and not too spicy.” Over wailing guitars and layered vocals, Lynch makes herself in her own image, rejecting the condescension of the white-centric industry that still sees artists of colour as an exotic other.

Lynch’s cohesive world-building across the album makes for a compelling, absorbing and often intimate listening experience. Her many creative personas – musically as Jaguar Jonze, visually as Spectator Jonze and photographically as Dusky Jonze – swirl through the record, but she emerges as a singularity: a woman who has, despite everything, survived.

After all the noise and the rage, the fire and the passion, it’s barely a whisper, again, that ends the record. The instrumentals cut out for Lynch’s controlled vocals to deliver their final, stinging words to the patriarchy and all that enable it: “It’s always been a man-made monster only a woman can destroy”.

I will end with this emphatic and impassioned review and feature. I cannot emphasis enough how important and inspiring the album it is. A deeply personal album, it is also one that will provide this strength and hope to those who can relate to Jaguar Jonze’s words. Such a potent and utterly unforgettable listen, this is an album that really needs to get more radio play around the world:

“Despite its title, there’s nothing timid about BUNNY MODE. Jaguar Jonze’s debut album is a bold listen that’s equally playful and punky, lacing dark subject matter with a comical edge into a rousing blend of industrial crunch and addictive pop hooks.

‘TRIGGER HAPPY’ takes aim at the toxic practise of love bombing and shoots back with a palette of twangy guitars and glitchy flourishes. ‘LOUD’ – fittingly – is an ode to standing up and speaking out, splicing in clips of Lynch’s many media appearances over the past 18 months.

‘I’m not gonna sleep below the glass ceiling,’ she purrs before roaring in the chorus: ‘I’m gonna be more resilient, I’m gonna be proud/You could’ve destroyed me, but then I got loud.’

On ‘PUNCHLINE’, the Taiwanese-Australian artist skewers music industry tokenism towards women of colour, their appearance exploited and stereotyped for a predominantly white audience.

‘We love culture but make sure it’s to our liking / Make it milky, make it plain and not too spicy,’ she sings over the cutting groove and chugging riffs. ‘Tell the press that you are something so exotic/Can’t remember if its east or west or in the tropics/Just make sure that it is underlined and made symbolic.”

She’s accompanied by an entourage of Asian women and non-binary folk in the visual, which like all of Jaguar Jonze’s music videos, was self-directed and edited. It’s another sign of an individual whose creativity can’t be contained by one medium, extending her art into the worlds of fashion, photography, and illustration.

BUNNY MODE will be many listeners’ first introduction to Jaguar Jonze, but it also demonstrates her growth as an artist.

Last year’s ANTIHERO EP already saw her moving forward from the spaghetti western twang of her 2020 EP, and her debut album builds further upon that sound by leaning into a more abrasive, pulse-quickening aesthetic without sacrificing her knack for melody and melodrama.

Even at its most vulnerable – such as the swooning ‘DRAWING LINES’ or the quieter builds that characterise ‘LOUD’ and ‘MAN MADE MONSTER’ – the album possesses an empowering feminist attitude, employing sonic invention to overcome deep-seated personal traumas.

Despite surviving terrible things, she never sounds like a victim. Whether at knockout volume or whispered like a threat, lines like ‘it’s always been a manmade monster only a woman can destroy’ demonstrate her skill for serving up stinging sentiments into rallying retorts against abusers, oppressors, and the structures that enable them.

BUNNY MODE’s title refers to an old coping mechanism Deena used to employ: going quiet and freezing up like a frightened rabbit in response to physical, psychological or emotional threats. It’s also a tactic she’s proudly outgrown.

“This album is a journey of saying goodbye to ‘going bunny mode'," she explains, a way of saying: "Thank you for saving me and allowing me to survive up until this point, but I don’t need you anymore."

As much as the fire of BUNNY MODE is fuelled by the advocacy that has defined so much of Jaguar Jonze’s airtime over the past few years, the album is also a sign-off to her past self.

Born in Japan, Deena moved to Australia at age six and spent years bouncing between homes while her mother awaited approval for citizenship. Her childhood was marked by physical and sexual abuse, and by her mid-20s, she had been diagnosed with complex PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).

“It’s pretty well known that I came from a turbulent childhood, so everything I did was for survival, security, shelter, food, etc. Music was permission for me to live my life and express myself freely.”

Jaguar Jonze may have started as an alter-ego – a tagline on her Unearthed profile once read “Eastern cowgirl howling at the rising sun” – but Deena acknowledges that the lines between herself and her persona have increasingly blurred. And her music is all the stronger for it.

“With Jaguar Jonze, it’s the childhood I never had. It’s playful and I’m doe-eyed looking into the world excited about the experiences I get to have.”

“Yeah, it is a serious album and being wrapped up in the #metoo movement for the Australian music industry has taken over my life in the past few years. I wanted this album to be a safe space for people to seek refuge, especially for survivors who’ve been through what I’ve been through.”

“But I’m also ready to go, ‘This is the end of this chapter and I’m ready to start a new chapter and have some fun with my music!’ It was important for me with the debut album to do this for myself and everyone else.”

“I’m excited to see what’s going to come after this as well.”

Us too, Jaguar Jonze. Us too”.

I shall leave it there. Among the absolute best albums of 2022, Jaguar Jonze’s BUNNY MODE is a unique and sense-blowing experience that seems to be a turning point and pivotal moment for her. Although it might have taken a while to come about and be released to the world, the impact it has made is phenomenal! I wonder where she goes from here and what follows BUNNY MODE. She appeared on two songs with HARU NEMURI in April, ANGRY ANGRY and don’t call me queen…so we might get yet more new music soon. This catharsis you hear on BUNNY MODE might clear a path for Jaguar Jonze to embark on a new era and direction. Whatever she comes up with next, you just know that it is…

GOING to be absolutely essential listening!

FEATURE: Raging in English: Inside Christine and the Queens’ Phenomenal PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE

FEATURE:

 

 

Raging in English

PHOTO CREDIT: Jasa Muller

 

Inside Christine and the Queens’ Phenomenal PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE

_________

A sensational album…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Kooiker

that must rank as one of the best of the year, there is something epic and truly staggering about Christine and the Queens’ PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE. An album that you need to buy and investigate fully, I wanted to spend a bit of time with it. I do not normally spotlight and dig into such a new album. It is so arresting and wonderful, I needed to go deeper. In addition to some of the songs on PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE, this is a the most personal and revealing of Christine and the Queens’ albums. Héloïse Letissier (a.k.a. Chris, Christine and the Queens, and Redcar) called the album "the second part of an operatic gesture", including Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue) (2022). Inspired by Tony Kushner's 1991 play, Angels in America, he opens and his heart and soul through PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE. An acceptance of and prayer of the self, there is something operatic when it comes to this amazing album. With three different acts - PARANOÏA, ANGELS, and TRUE LOVE -, you are engrossed in an album that comes from the depth of Chris’ soul. He has really created this true masterpiece for 2023! I love how there are some really cool samples on PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE. Tears Can Be So Soft contains a sample of Marvin Gaye's Feel All My Love Inside; Full of Life contains a sample of Johann Pachelbel's Canon in D, whilst Track 10 contains a sample of Emerson, Lake & Palmer's Lucky Man.

I will come to a couple of reviews for PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE soon. There are some fascinating interviews that take us inside the album. We also learn more about the inspiring and remarkable Chris. He recently spoke with Vulture about his songwriting process, and what it was like working with Madonna. It is fascinating reading his words. So insightful, articulate, intelligent and passionate, it is clear that PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE means so much to Chris:

“Recently, Chris — a.k.a. Christine and the Queens, or Redcar, or Red — began talking to angels. It had been a difficult few years for the 34-year-old French singer: He lost his beloved mother, went through a breakup, officially adopted he/him pronouns at an excruciatingly transphobic moment in history, and released an eccentric concept album (2022’s Redcar les adorables ètoiles) that, by his own account, baffled fans and critics alike. Calling on spirits was a way to gain wisdom and guidance through grief, and the practice eventually served as the inspiration for his latest project, Paranoia, Angels, True Love.

Chris’s music has always been tinged with the avant-garde, defying easy categorization and pushing the boundaries of pop. 2014’s Chaleur Humaine, a sparkling debut that vaulted him to stardom in his home country, saw him singing about “draw[ing] her own crotch, by herself” and “dying before Methuselah”; on 2018’s confident, sultry Chris, he mused cheekily about not “feeling like a girlfriend,” but “damn, I’d be your lover”; and his pandemic-era EP La Vita Nuova dug into bone-deep sadness and featured an accompanying short film in which he morphs into a seductive vampire. Paranoia, Angels, True Love (out June 9) is equally ambitious. Loosely based on Tony Kushner’s 1991 opus, Angels in America, about gay men manifesting their own angelic visions amid the AIDS epidemic, the album is overflowing with fresh, heady ideas and contradictions both sonic and philosophical.

You wrote some of these songs in 20 minutes?

Yeah. I rarely write lyrics first; I work on the production. I just turn the mic on and launch the horses. There’s devotion in that practice that infuses my life — I started working on how to be a better human so that the music could resonate with something greater. And I put more faith into my practice. I was not just trying to write songs. I was trying to understand something, waiting for visions. I was thinking a lot about non-artists who are struck by something invisible and moved to produce art. As I wrote the songs, I was in a state of self-hypnosis almost all the time. I’d wake up really early and write. And the rest of the day I was praying and walking for hours in L.A., doing poetry on my own, for no one.

When you say pray, is there a religious dimension? Who or what are you praying to?

I’m praying to the spiritual dimension of my work and my life. Religion is so interesting and tragic because it’s a language of power, made to install rules. For me, that’s not what spirituality is about. But I definitely love the form of praying as a way to believe in, notice, and observe energy. I became interested in the study of how music can create a cradle for everybody’s emotions. I started to think heavily about rock and roll, actually. I started really listening deeply to Led Zeppelin, which I didn’t know much about. I was like, What a fantastic piece of catharsis for someone to receive. The singer is a shaman, going wild, telling a story, telling the truth.

I’m always trying to think about how artists are relevant. Fame obliterates the function of an artist and of art, which is for me, coming from theater, a place for everybody to process their emotions. It’s hard to let yourself cry. Sometimes, I need a piece of music — maybe one that’s 12 minutes long, where I have the space to unwind — to help. So I thought, If I want to be that kind of performer who’s cathartic for other people, I have to be somebody who can surrender to music and see what happens.

Your last album was almost entirely in French. This one is almost entirely in English. You’ve swapped back and forth over the course of your work. What does each language mean to you artistically?

This record was made in America. So I surrendered to who I could be in America, which was more myself, at the stage that I was at. Sometimes you have to go where nobody knows you to have a different name. I started to use my pronouns. I feel like English is also a space for me to explore further away from my past. The French language is loaded for me. It’s a maternal language. It’s beautiful but intricate. English gives me new possibilities without losing my poetry. I wrote the whole record in English probably because I felt more comfortable raging in English. And I wrote Redcar as a letter to France; it was a distillation of my research in French, for the French people. But it got misunderstood, of course. I always joke that I did an experimental ’80s French record in France. They tend to chastise first, then embrace. [Laughs.] I always say, “Redcar 2026.”

 As in Redcar wasn’t understood in its time?

Oh, yeah. I was working with a very rough sound, like a dirty cathedral. And I’m talking about actually being a knight. It was risqué, for the dandyism of being risqué. I mean, I loved doing Redcar. I loved it as a piece of theater. It was only three nights of performance, and I wanted the record and the performances to be like a Jodoroswky-infused setup, where I was inserting myself like a key in a lock, to just understand why I wrote that record. It was dashingly experiment.

Let’s talk about Madonna. You first met in 2015 when she pulled you onstage during her Rebel Hearts tour, bent you over and spanked you, handed you a banana, called you “Christina,” and said she loved your work. Did you know in advance that all of that was going to happen?

Yes, her choreographer texted me, “Hey, do you want to appear onstage?” I feel like she tested me a bit. She’s a dominatrix, really. So when I met her, I just abided by and respected that: “You can call me Christina. Hopefully you’ll see me again, and maybe this time you won’t call me Christina.” [Laughs.] It’s playful. The funny thing is, I crossed paths with her again through a dancer that toured with her; Madonna is a legend inside the dance world, and I work so much with dancers. And Chris was so infused with her wit — she has a strong wit and a strong whip!

How did you end up getting her on this new record, and who is this Big Eye character she plays for you

Working with Mike, we ended up on a poem uttered on YouTube by one of those artificial, computer-generated voices. I was like, “That’s uncanny, but it sounds like Madonna. I wonder if the voice was shaped around such an iconic one for comfort.” So I started to think about an ambivalent character who is an all-encompassing eye. Kind of like the Laurie Anderson song “O Superman,” where you don’t know what the voice is — is it the all-knowing power of love? Is it just a computer in the end?

And I was like, Madonna could actually play a Broadway character on this record. She’s such a fantastic actress. So Mike took the phone and called her. I was like, “Ahh, I’m not quite there yet!” But I had to be ready in a few seconds, so I explained it, and she said, “You’re crazy. I’ll do it.”

You’ve always pushed against the corporatization of queer identity, this idea that visibility equals progress, and you’ve also spoken about the need for art to feel dangerous — that safety and glossiness is the death of art and of queer art specifically. Were these things you were thinking about when making this record?

Not really. This time I didn’t want to think about the metatext of queerness and gender at all. I think I am quite pessimistic on the state of that. It’s very normalized now to have everybody get excited about rainbow T-shirts for Pride Month, all while people are being killed and laws are being passed for inequality. Since I was very young, I always suspected when they asked these questions with gleaming eyes: “Oh, you feel like you’re queer?” Gleaming in a way that felt unhealthy — not with curiosity, but with fetishism. I felt so trapped early on. But writing this record, it was just an absolute experience of music. An unadorned moment. My life after this record — I became more acute in how I want to exist as someone who doesn’t abide by that system.

So coming back to the industry with the new knowledge of who I am, and expressing who I am, I was terrified that yet again I would be eaten by the big machine. It’s still commodified. We’re still classified as “queer artists,” which doesn’t mean anything. Because art is deeply queer. It’s a human choice, a free will that warps reality. Queer is the act of warping what is constraining. It should be more celebrated as a force than as a state. I don’t know if I am queer, but some of my gestures are deeply queer”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: Jasa Muller

There is one more interview that I want to come to. DAZED asked Chris about true love and the discovery of the self. I do see and feel PARANO​Ï​A, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE is a crucial moment of self-discovery. If the album can seem quite long (just over ninety-six minutes), it is well worth listening in a single go. It will definitely leave its mark on you! There is no doubt in my mind that this is one of the most important albums you will hear all year:

“It’s weird that life can be a process of solidifying your authenticity somehow, and then it’s all about conveying that to the outside world, which can be a process in itself.

Christine and the Queens: It’s fascinating. Even to see how the world answers differently when you create something differently for yourself. But yeah, I totally agree and that’s very well said – life is a solidification of your intention. I like the idea of life having meaning. Like, I am obsessed with love itself. Art devoid of love has no form of… I don’t know, I don’t even want to wake up.

You have a song called ‘True Love’. What is your definition of true love?

Christine and the Queens: I personally feel unable to vouch that I know true love because I feel like I’m not even there yet in terms of loving myself enough. True love seems to be this all-encompassing love that accepts everything. I am not at that stage in my healing. I feel like love is an experience of discovering my wounds as well… I want to work on a record called True Love actually – it’s just a very solemn title and a bit vulgar on its own. It's terrifying to me.

You speak about true love almost like it’s a spiritual entity, like in the same way people speak about God or something like that.

Christine and the Queens: I don’t know if it’s because I’m heartbroken or hopeful.

Sometimes I think that when you’re a child, or even a teenager, that’s your ‘true’ self and then you get further away from that and have to try and find that person again.

Christine and the Queens: For me, it’s linked to a big wound because my teenage years were the beginning of my dysphoria, which I attempted to push down. But I feel like my teenage years could be now. It’s often the case for people who transition later in their life. A lot is coming back actually: smells, things I felt… I pushed that shit down for a long time. Losing my mum also made me revisit all that shit.

PHOTO CREDIT: Jasa Muller

I guess when you’re a teenager people start projecting onto you. You become more ‘seen’ in a way you never were before.

Christine and the Queens: I remember the socialisation at 14, and my discovery also of the confines of patriarchy on women’s bodies… it was the start of this fight. I remember seeing it, panicking and being like ‘I see myself in none of it. I don’t even know where to take part in the fight.’

You’ve always been a proponent of fluidity in all senses of the word – artistically, personally, even in gender presentation. I feel like society is afraid of fluidity. Why do you think some find fluidity so frightening?

Christine and the Queens: I don’t know what people are afraid of. But human identity is still organised around these two poles. I’ve been having conversations with even my trans peers sometimes who were disrupted by me acting my masculinity but not for example taking hormones. Society itself is built on this approach. Even the French language itself is polarised between the masculine and the feminine. There aren’t the tools to think freely even in the conceptualisation.

So fluidity is acting a state of water, centred on the spirit. The spirit is revolutionary by nature, because society doesn’t understand the concept of the spirit. It only understands the concept of positioning through identity. For me, the spirit is about shedding the concept of identity. You just keep the heart. Sorry I’m abstract but it’s so painful for me. I feel like we are wasting our time, as well, trying to define queer. Queer is just a question. Queer is something that’s not straight”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: Jasa Muller

I am going to get to a few reviews. There has been so much love shown for the extraordinary PARANO​Ï​A, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE. The Guardian awarded it five stars when they sat down to listen. The structure, narrative and scope of the album is so unconventional. Almost a work of art rather than music. Chris taking us into his heart and desires. Into his fears, realisations and passions. Such a rich and astounding work:

“When Christine and the Queens first appeared in the anglophone world in 2015, the name was an alias for Héloïse Letissier: a French artist with an extraordinary line in immaculately cool, obliquely catchy, 80s-flavoured synthpop that mused on queer identity. By 2018, Letissier had become Chris – the eponymous, androgynous protagonist of her funky second album. Then, last year, the musician announced he was now using male pronouns as well as another moniker: Redcar, also the title character of his third album, Redcar les Adorables Étoiles.

That record, a reflective, slippery, not-quite-satisfying collection sung in French, was met with a muted reception. Now it seems simply a warmup for this masterpiece. Letissier’s clearly rocky path to self-realisation has been entangled with seismic grief – in 2019, his mother died – and Paranoïa, Angels, True Love is a howl of despair sublimated into astonishingly beautiful experimental pop, drenched in warm celestial light, punctured by spikes of confused pain. On Tears Can Be So Soft, loss is bluntly aired – “I miss my mama at night” – over a syncopated raindrops-on-the-roof beat and a minuscule snippet of Marvin Gaye. A distorted “fucking” is bellowed over sweet Johann Pachelbel strings on Full of Life. True Love couches romance in inescapable grief (“make me forget my mother”), the sound of a heart monitor and blasts of static.

The trademark nostalgia remains – trip-hop and 80s soul and dance-pop provide sonic templates, while Madonna appears as a deity-like narrator – but it has been warped, hauntingly, and interspersed with the language of contemporary rap (co-producer Mike Dean has worked extensively with Kanye). Hypnotically melodic, clever, stylish, serious, fun, addictively unexpected and euphorically danceable, it’s the kind of pop they don’t make any more”.

In another hugely passionate and adoring review, DIY talked about the album and its connection and discussions of religion. How this Pop music becomes religious. They also highlight how Madonna’s presence is as a disembodied voice. Almost as this heavenly spirit or spectre. It is such a compelling album from one of music’s innovators and geniuses. This is a listening experience that everyone needs to go through:

“On ‘PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE’ - the second, third and fourth parts to 2022’s ‘Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue)’ - Chris reembodies his concept character, Redcar. Following his mother’s death in 2019, Chris’s fourth full-length devours omnipresent grief, squelching its teeth into and reemerging from it like a worm into an apple, colliding with undiscovered seeds of pain to craft a musical bildungsroman of loss, divinity and rediscovery. Across 20 pop operatic tracks, Redcar undergoes euphoric devastation and metaphorical death, entering the brightest light with all the profound ecstasy of Prior’s visions in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, the play from which the album takes inspiration. This approach positions reality as narrative arc, wherein the performance of succumbing to pain is to find peace and rediscover joy. Take ‘Tears can be so soft’, a Marvin-Gaye-infused musing on the cathartic power of sobbing: “Tears can be so good for those who dive in them […] Let them roll on your face, girl,” he sings. Concurrent with the dramaturgy, Chris sets the bar high: the record’s brilliance lies in an innovative ocean of modern opera, blending elements of soul, pop, trap, R&B, drum ‘n’ bass and musical theatre. The presence of hip hop producer Mike Dean on the album lends a post-pop sound. On ‘PARANOÏA…’, modernity is conjoined to high art, an affinity for which reaches caricaturist highs on the transformational, visionary ‘Full of life’, which samples German composer Pachelbel. Meanwhile, the disembodied voice of Madonna across three experimental tracks paints a lucid picture of the artist as an embodiment of consciousness, motherhood and God (see triumphant standout ‘Lick the light out’). Pop music, then, becomes religious, while the meshing of anachronistic art, music and pop culture deities crafts beauty from the seemingly disconnected: transcendental poetic art pop sculpted - chiselled, in fact - from rapturous spirituality. A far way away from debut ‘Chaleur humaine’, yet just as unafraid, ’PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE’ is like no other exploration of grief - a new magnum opus”.

I am going to end with The Line of Best Fit’s assessment of PARANO​Ï​A, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE. If you do not know about Chris and Christine and the Queens’ work, then I would implore you to go back to the 2014 debut, Chaleur humaine. There is this unfolding and evolution as you move through the albums. The transformation and awakening of the Nantes-born wonder. I cannot wait to hear Chris’ next move. I have listened to the album a fair bit, and it is one hard to shake or forget! Such an almost profound and moving album:

“Earlier this year, Chris dressed up as his alter ego Redcar, performing every song on his previous album Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue) with such intensity that every movement he made sharply conveyed the ache of fear and longing. The record served its purpose well: a prologue, quiet and unobtrusive, setting the stage for a grander, more monumental act. A self-reinvention could be foreshadowed by these subtle shifts in sound and storytelling – the melodies more mellow and slow-burn, lyrics more distant and abstract. His musical identity is transforming into new shapes, and we’re here to witness it in real-time.

The latest offering, titled PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE, is his largest, most ambitious album to date, spanning over an hour and a half. It’s as enthralling and enigmatic as the tales of the mystique, embellished in epic theatrics and artful references. Part of its glory is attributed to one of America’s greatest plays, Angels in America, from which Chris took inspiration. The main themes of the play – prophecy, escapism, tragedy, and change – also appear on the record as he dives into the waters of loss, identity, and, of course, true love. Each of these subjects reserves an expansive “section” of its own, resulting in the record having 3 total acts, like an actual play in the theatre.

Sprawling and deeply passionate, the music drifts effortlessly into seraphic soundscapes as Chris warbles about his troubles: more theatrical and slow-paced than it is bombastic and ear-catching. With infectious, dancy hooks traded for meditative yet at times eruptive atmosphere setters, PARANOÏA may steer the audience’s attention more towards the lyrical content and his elastic, hard-hitting voice, but the music itself never loses its significance as the narrative’s propeller. “A day in the water”, for example, has swirling synths behind his reverberating singing, words and phrases like “father” and “let me be” echoing, each time reinforcing the message of the song: expectations and grief heft off, and he’s free.

This project is massive, a sprawling odyssey that centres on the life of a person who is so in love yet, at the same time, so in despair. The thunderous riffs, angelic piano drips, and glitz of transcendental synths, which Chris concocted with Mike Dean, bring PARANOÏA forward not just as a record with 18 tracks, but also as a musical play rich with poetic and elaborate observations of human nature, even if some of which are considered more of an individualistic viewpoint. Like Angels in America, whose tormented characters seek shelter, a place to escape and cater to their desires, Chris embarks on a journey, skittering away from grief and its poignant suppression. “Angels of light, take me higher / Make me forget my mother,” he sings after a deeply vulnerable confession: “I need you to love me.”

A vast, ever-stretching platform that is PARANOÏA, Chris sets his artistic spirit free by broadening his musical scope, covering as many influences and genres as he deems fit. The tracks here morph from one form to another, becoming a spectrum that fuses electronic balladry with maximalist pop music. On the 11-minute “Track 10”, Chris cries “Sweet lover of mine!” over Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Lucky Man” sample, the potions of love in full effect. He’s so choked up by the alluring scent, the sweet, hypnotising moves of his lover, that he ascends to a realm lush with sparkly, hazy colours. His voice rises skyward along with the fervent drums, the resplendent choir gliding just behind him. Spoken words on 90s New York and his predecessors spill later into the song – shifting, fluid, monumental, mercurial. It’s unarguably his most impressive song yet.

Madonna, omnipresent as ever, joins Chris as the Big Eye on the terrific “I met an angel”, where he tackles with overwhelming sorrow. “Terrestrial food is of no importance now,” she coaxes him, destruction kicking under, ready to wreck his soul. His longing is immense, and he finds transient solace in believing that his mother is still with him in other forms. “She’s in the singing stream / She’s in the cats’ and the dogs’ eyes,” he sings with determination, tides of electric guitar gushing over him. “In the birds falling up from the trees.” She appears again on “Lick the light out”, in which Chris finally regains his footing, accepting his fragile state of mind, Madonna’s perilous voice disappearing as a result.

But before this revelation, 070 Shake accompanies him as he succumbs to indulgences bigger than himself on “True love” and “Let me touch you once”, the latter being one of the most sensual, enticing pieces on the record. Here his voice twists, bends, flexes out, spattering “I’m your man” and “parles-tu français ?” as if lost in a fog tinged with substances. Fortunately, this stage doesn’t last long; songs that follow slowly see him recuperating and finding himself once again: a glorious metamorphosis. In the end, Chris arrives at “Big eye”, the operatic 7-minute conclusion to the 3-act record. Over the uproar of jolting strums and strings, he claims that his word is his sword. To love with one’s whole heart, he discovers, is to “recreate it all, and forgive it all”.

What PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE truly is lands on this very line; elegant, soft, full of introspective meanderings, it offers its author a place to recreate and forgive, grieve and lavish. Poetry, for him, is a sword to slant every gasp of pain and suffering, and this record proves how much he’s devoted to it: metaphorical verses that mirror those of Kate Bush’s, draped in Björk’s eccentric, melodious production. Indeed, PARANOÏA isn’t without flaw; some tracks work more as spoken poems than as songs due to their slack, unmoving instrumentation. But at almost 100 minutes, Chris’ most astounding work yet expands his craftsmanship to territories surprisingly well-suited for him. He grips on to hope as angels do to their wings, and it’s unlikely that he’ll ever let go”.

I did want to spend some time with PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE. I don’t think we will see another album this year as ambitious and wonderous. He played the album out as part of his headline set at the Meltdown Festival (which Christine and the Queens is curating). It sounded like this ritual and spiritual unleashing in front of a London crowd. The Guardian were mesmerised:

“This is going to get more dramatic than I anticipated,” Chris proclaims after his drummer showers him with roses midway through the show. But it’s hard to tell how much of the dialogue between songs is scripted in this two-hour rock opera dramatising Christine and the Queens’ latest album, Paranoïa, Angels, True Love. Sometimes it’s filled with monologues about pride, or St Michael’s sword, at others tongue-in-cheek jabs at the audience for getting up to pee during the “ritual”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Matthew Baker/Getty Images

That’s how Chris describes his headline show at Meltdown festival multiple times: a ritual. Much like the angels in Tony Kushner’s 1991 magnum opus Angels in America, on which the album is based, music is presented as a disruptive force – one with the power to terrify and transform. The play follows Prior Walter, a young man dying with Aids in late-80s New York as he’s visited by angels in a series of visions and prophetic dreams. The stage design tonight brings some of this imagery to the fore. Performing among Rodin-inspired sculptures, fragments of staircases and a line of wooden chairs arranged like a church pew, the band play feverishly, pushing the songs to their limit in lockstep as if the whole night is on the brink of collapse.

They run through the album in full, its three acts demarcated by outfit and the mood changes brought about by the force of Chris’s physicality. In the first act he rips across the stage in suit trousers and a single glove like Michael Jackson by way of ballet school, moving with the drums as though he is physically connected to the kit and elevating sprawling songs such as Track 10, which can fall slightly flat on record, into moments of transcendence. The second act starts suddenly with Chris in the middle of the crowd, weaving between the rows and taking audience members’ hands in his. In the final act he sings in gorgeous falsetto on his knees in a red baroque-era skirt, black blazer and white angel wings, which are shed one by one until he’s stripped back to his trousers, commanding the stage again for love-soaked synth-pop ballad Big Eye.

Gripping and at times utterly overwhelming, the performance is imbued with all the phantasmagoric drama of Kushner’s play and its unlikely happy ending. Abandoned by his partner and the world, Prior nevertheless fights to stay in it, asking the angels for “more life” in a battle cry of a final monologue – and receiving it. Speaking about its influence last month, Chris said, “Subconsciously I picked that play because I wanted to manifest that for myself.” Tonight, it was clear that he wants it for all of us.

Chris has created this mesmeric and emotional work. Hypnotic and genre-blending, I would encourage everyone to listen to this album. A far cry from a slicker and more easy-to-define debut, PARANOÏA, ANGELS, TRUE LOVE is a creative and personal peak. Take some time out of your day to experience…

THIS astonishing album.

FEATURE: Louder Than a Bomb: Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back at Thirty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Louder Than a Bomb

  

Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back at Thirty-Five

_________

ON 28th June…

one of the most important albums ever released turns thirty-five. Even that is over a month away, I think that Public Enemy’s second studio album took them to new heights - and so should be celebrated readily. They hit hard with their stunning 1987 debut album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, but they ascended to fresh heights on the follow up. With tracks such as Louder Than a Bomb, Bring the Noise, Don’t Believe the Hype, and Rebel Without a Pause enduring as classics, the sonic assault and poetic lyrics (from Chuck D) mean It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back is one of the greatest and most influential albums ever released. It is that mix of hard-hitting and powerful lyrics together with innovative samples and compositions that make this such a deep work. Even if It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back did not chart hugely high in the U.S. upon its release in 1988 – though it did get to number one on the  US Billboard Top Black Albums -, in years since, its legacy and impact has been confirmed. I am not sure whether there is a thirty-fifth anniversary release planned for the seismic It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. In August, the world marks fifty years of Hip-Hop’s birth. It is such an important date. We get to look back at its foundations and recognise all the artists who have sharped the genre and changed music forever. There is no doubt that Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back is among the kings and champions. One of the biggest and most influential Hip-Hop albums in history. I want to get to some features and reviews, just to show how this incredible album has reshaped and redefined Hip-Hop.

Quite a few publications have told the story behind It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. It is an album that will be back under the microscope ahead of its thirty-fifth anniversary on 28th June. SLANT investigated and spotlighted Public Enemy’s classic in 2008. Two decades after its release, and it was clearly still such a seemingly fresh album. I think that, unfortunately, a lot of the issues and subjects addressed on the album are current today – in terms of inequality, police brutality, and violence towards the Black community. Its take on politics and society could be applied easily today. It makes me wonder why we have not seen a recent, modern-day It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back:

“In hindsight, it’s best to see Public Enemy as the first and maybe only successful hip-hop group whose music extended directly from their politics, and not the other way around. Born into activism and influenced by the now-outmoded ideas of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, Chuck D didn’t just unsettle the middle class—he lobbed a “loud, obnoxious” bomb at it, to steal a phrase from Rolling Stone’s review of It Takes a Nation in its list of 500 Greatest Albums. Public Enemy stole from rock in more ways than sound: They adopted the bratty swagger of a punk band, filtered it through a DJ’s turntable, and wrote about what it was like to be black. The success of It Takes a Nation was, in part, a product of its own insistence; on “Bring the Noise,” the closest thing to a Chuck D manifesto, he defies the listener, black radio stations, and rock critics alike to pay attention: “Whatcha gonna do?/Rap is not afraid of you.”

Calling Public Enemy “underground” is a misnomer. Though they agitated authority, their universal beats spoke to anyone and everyone with simple honesty. It was easy, even natural, to see Do the Right Thing’s frustrated Brooklyn nobodies bumping to “Fight the Power.” Chuck D uses It Takes a Nation as a sounding board. The famously hectic, swerving beats, samples, and sirens form the backdrop to his urgent political protest: At the same time they seduce, distract, and confuse the picture, they also force you to listen to the words he’s spinning. The classic Public Enemy song (“Bring the Noise,” “Don’t Believe the Hype”) starts with a sample that forms the basis for Chuck D’s sinewy stream of consciousness. Eventually, Flavor Flav, playing comic relief, will cut in riffing on a situation or a question (“Yo, Chuck, they’re saying we’re too black, man”), Chuck will answer, and so on. It feels like a busy conversation or a raucous party, but above the white noise, there’s always Chuck D, making sense of things. If hip-hop is “CNN for black people,” as the rapper suggested, then he’s its ultimate pundit.

Like a much funnier version of Green Day’s “American Idiot,” It Takes a Nation purposefully plays on paranoia about government, cops, and the media. Chuck D talks in street codes (he likes to call people “suckers”), but his lyrics build surprisingly complex narratives out of simple observations. On “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” an annoying draft letter becomes a symbol of the U.S. government’s handed-down tradition of slave-labor tactics: “I wasn’t wit’ it, but just that very minute/It occurred to me/The suckers had authority.” The static-like beats and jumbled words in “She Watch Channel Zero?!” stand in for television’s manufactured truth (the album’s intro famously says “the revolution will not be televised”), and “Night of the Living Baseheads” likens crack-cocaine use to an infectious beat. Above it all hangs Malcolm X’s quote, “Too black, too strong,” which Public Enemy plays twice and embraces as its own mantra. If the group plays to stereotype by acting like an angry mob, they also reclaim their outrage and use it to subvert wrongheaded ideas about black life.

It Takes a Nation is universally taken to be the best rap album ever made. That’s not opinion but empirical fact: Not only have Rolling Stone, NME, Vibe, and Q all said so, but it’s also the only hip-hop album that ranks in the first 100 on Rolling Stone’s Greatest Albums list. By comparison, the record peaked at a relatively low #42 on the Billboard album chart when it first came out. Because of the media sensation he created, we tend to think of Chuck D as a cultural authority, but in most obvious ways It Takes a Nation—the “greatest” hip-hop has ever produced—doesn’t fulfill the conventional expectations of its genre, which may go a long way toward explaining its unique popularity with rock critics.

The Bomb Squad’s avant-garde production made music out of a wreck of sounds. It wasn’t just the samples, from sources as varied as Queen and Stevie Wonder, but how they were used. Everyday noises like turntable scratches bumped up against live recordings of political speeches, a saxophone in “Show Em Whatcha Got,” and the rock crunch of the Beastie Boys-inspired “Party for Your Right to Fight.” Nothing if not democratic, Chuck D also didn’t self-mythologize in the same way as Notorious B.I.G. or Jay-Z. The clattering nature of Public Enemy favored more voices, not less, in the end fulfilling the hinted promise of crossover rap during the late ’80s: “Run DMC first said a deejay could be a band/Stand on its feet, get you out your seat,” Chuck D rhymes on “Bring the Noise.” He used the casual language of black culture, but he also took his own advice to “reach the bourgeois/Rock the boulevard”.

It is not exaggeration to say that It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back changed music and transformed the idea and perceptions of Hip-Hop. Demonstrating just how powerful and potent music could be, it is small wonder we are pouring over the album all these years later! Albumism had their say about It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back for an anniversary feature in 2018:

“The album changed the perception of what hip-hop music could be about. Three decades ago, the United States was in the final months of the Reagan administration, and inner-cities across the country were reeling from the effects of his policies. Crack use was at epidemic proportions. There was the genuine belief that not only was the Government not concerned with the plight of the Black population in the United States, it was openly hostile towards them. It Takes a Nation of Millions was the aural embodiment of the widespread rage generated towards this crooked government system.

Public Enemy was the perfect vessel to deliver this message. Carlton “Chuck-D” Ridenhour had the booming voice and presence of a respected statesman and activist. William “Flavor Flav” Drayton was the volatile court jester, an unpredictable version of Bobby Byrd to Chuck D’s James Brown. Norman “Terminator X” Rogers was the stoic, wordless DJ who moved with precision when behind the two turntables. And the Bomb Squad, Public Enemy’s notorious production team, created the perfect soundscape: a pulsating, chaotic, and intense wall of sound that could overwhelm the listener, but built on a foundation of soul and funk.

This isn’t to imply that Public Enemy was the first rap group to incorporate political content and social commentary into their music. Ever since “The Message,” rap music has dealt with the crumbling of urban society to crime and drugs, and I’ve written about artists like Boogie Down Productions, Stetsasonic, and others who have delivered a political message in their music. Public Enemy was overtly confrontational, irate, and focused in a way that few other artists were, across any genre.

Yet Public Enemy were dedicated towards educating, explaining the sources of the problems, identifying those working to improve things, and even inspiring the population to action. It’s an ambitious album that tackles complex issues, but doesn’t attempt to overly simplify their complexity. And despite the frenzied feel of It Takes a Nation Of Millions, listening to it never feels like a chore.

It Takes a Nation of Millions is one of those rare albums that lives up to all the superlatives that have been heaped upon it. With all the acrimony towards the mainstream media, I often wonder if Chuck D smiles when he reflects on the level of acclaim that It Takes a Nation of Millions has received over the past 30 years. It became revered both in the hip-hop and mainstream press, and influential towards hip-hop artists and other artists across many musical genres. The explosion of socially conscious hip-hop in the late ’80s and early ’90s can be traced to It Takes a Nation of Millions. Likewise, it inspired musicians outside of the realm of rap music. For example, it’s hard to imagine a group like Rage Against the Machine existing without this album’s release.

Public Enemy never shied away from the spotlight and the attention that they earned from the album, and continued their work as hip-hop’s foremost politically aware crew. Though the next few years would prove to be bumpy, the group continued to release great music in the form of Fear of a Black Planet (1990) and Apocalypse ’91 (1991). It also set the stage for the group to eventually be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013, 25 years after It Takes a Nation of Millions’ release.

Moreover, the success of It Takes a Nation of Millions allowed the group to tour the world many times over. It helped them shape the minds of generations to come, inspiring them to not blindly trust authority and to always seek out knowledge. It allowed the group to continue to work to empower those who live in the United States but whose existence is often barely tolerated by the police force and the local, state, and federal governments. That’s a legacy that few artists possess, but it’s one that Public Enemy has earned”.

I am going to move to Classic Album Sundays. They discussed how albums like It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back were reactions to what was happening in the U.S. under President Reagan. At a time when a lot of music was escapist and fun – perhaps as a distraction from a lot of building turbulence -, Public Enemy released an album that was confronting the issues, and not shying away. This was direct and radical music that heled start a revolution in Hip-Hop:

“The Bomb Squad, as Hank Shocklee, Keith Shocklee and Eric “Vietnam” Sadler’s production unit had been named, were developing a chaotic brand of hip hop. Hunkered down in Manhattan’s Greene St. recording studio, the team sought to push sampling technology as far as possible, extracting a plethora of sounds from an army of records, mapping them all to a song’s key and structure, and then playing each of the samples individually, as if it were a live performance. On album standout ‘Rebel Without A Pause’, they even had MC Flavor Flav play their Akai drum machine by hand for the entirety of the track’s 5 minute run time.

This was part of a conscious effort to shake listeners out of their comfort zones. As Hank notes, “We’re used to a perfect world, to seeing everything revolve in a circle. When that circle is off by a little bit, that’s weird… It’s not predictable.” Inspired by the turmoil and conflict of everyday life, distortion and messiness were desirable traits, the team often stomping on records they thought sounded a little too clean.

 It was through his lyrical exploration of complex subjects such a media complicity, black incarceration and political suppression that Chuck truly excelled as an MC. Often establishing song titles before their verbal development, the MC used contentious topics as a jumping-off point, exploring the broad scope of these issues in his signature stream-of-consciousness style.

Often credited as the Yin to Chuck’s Yang, Flavor Flav’s regular spasms of ad-lib fuelled irreverence were the vital counterweight to Chuck’s relentless Black Nationalist rhetoric. But while the differences between Chuck and Flav could have represented an irreconcilable split in black artistry and ideology, they instead proved that a satisfying whole could be formed between disparate voices.

And it was indeed the idea of community, for better or worse, which lay at the core of A Nation Of Millions’ ideology. Whether or not they wished it, rappers were to be hailed as mirrors of society, filtering a mixture of daily life and personal perception into a form of mass media which had the potential to affect major change in the way black and POC voices were perceived, both politically and socially.

The symbolic value of It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back remains as potent today as it did in 1988, a vital artery of contemporary counter-culture, both within rap and far beyond. Whilst ideas of what hip hop should or shouldn’t portray have only increased in complexity since the 1980s (and in the age of Donald Trump), the genre has assumed a vital and central role in popular culture – a radical means of youth representation.

If The Velvet Underground were punk’s DIY flashpoint, Public Enemy was undoubtedly the hip hop equivalent. And despite the wild intricacies and problematic flaws of their music, the underlying message now seems radically fundamental: Pick up a microphone and make the world listen”.

I am going to round off with a couple of other features. The first is actually a review. Pitchfork looked back at It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and its 1990 follow-up, Fear of a Black Planet, as both albums were remastered and reissued onto C.D. packages in 2014. I do hope that there is something in the way of celebration, or perhaps even another reseau, of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, as it is thirty-five very soon:

“In retrospect, Yo! Bum Rush the Show was a blueprint. What came after it was the work of a well-rehearsed unit keenly aware of its purpose and capabilities. Released the following summer, Public Enemy’s sophomore album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back was a brash refinement of the themes of Yo! and a jab at the jaws of detractors, high and low. “Bring the Noise” and “Don’t Believe the Hype” railed against the press, holding up the lurid sensationalism surrounding the group as a warning against trusting anything you read. “Caught, Can We Get a Witness?” is a nightmare where P.E. gets nabbed for sampling. (More on that later.) Nation teemed with a didactic social consciousness too. “She Watch Channel Zero?!” strikes out against junk television, while “Night of the Living Baseheads” addresses the crack epidemic, and “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” leads a draft-dodging conscientious objector through a vengeful jailbreak. Chuck’s booming ministerial baritone sparred with Flav’s piercing yawp in a masterful hero-and-sidekick interplay. The message couldn’t entice the masses without the levity; the levity was gimmicky without revolutionary grit giving it weight.

Nation found a way to expound on the explosive soundscapes of the debut without exhausting listeners or cluttering the mix. Chuck, Sadler, and the Shocklee brothers’ production as the Bomb Squad was as thick as its source material was diverse; it was rap, soul, rock, funk and musique concrète all at once. “Most people were saying that rap music was noise,” Hank Shocklee told Rolling Stone in 1989, “and we decided, ‘If they think it’s noise, let’s show them noise.’” "She Watch Channel Zero?!" pulls its central riff from Slayer’s thrash classic “Angel of Death”. “Night of the Living Baseheads” outfits a stable of trusty James Brown samples with over a dozen assorted soul and rap tidbits and bridges, folding in elements of ESG’s “UFO” and David Bowie’s “Fame”. Snippets of legendary speeches from Jesse Jackson and Malcolm X and stage banter from Public Enemy’s successful European tour formed connective tissue between songs for a unified listening experience that only let up briefly in the middle and finally, at the end. The Bomb Squad built beats like ships in a bottle, delicately stitching tiny pieces of black history into layered blasts of sound. Public Enemy looked and sounded a fright to the uninitiated, but careful attention showed every piece of this black radical machine moving in perfect concert.

Nation of Millions netted Public Enemy the elusive American audience and platinum sales their debut couldn’t, and it changed the face of rap music. The hip-hop landscape of ‘89-’90 was dotted with sample-heavy sons of Nation. Chuck sent early copies of the album out west to Dre and Ice Cube, and N.W.A.’s landmark Straight Outta Compton cropped up like a gangsta rap rejoinder to the Bomb Squad ethos. (Cube would later tap the team for production on his post-N.W.A. solo debut AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted.) De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique added a playful, psychedelic charm to the proceedings. Nation’s message of black self-sufficiency resonated through the proudly Afrocentric art of A Tribe Called Quest, X Clan, Brand Nubian and more. Beyond the ’80s, the music of Nation of Millions would continue to find new life in unexpected places: Weezer’s 1996 comeback single “El Scorcho” nicked its “I’m the epitome of public enemy” barb from “Don’t Believe the Hype,” and Jay-Z’s 2006 post-retirement salvo “Show Me What You Got” is a nod to Nation’s “Show ‘Em Whatcha Got.” (Without Public Enemy we don’t get Kanye West; in addition to sampling the Long Island legends liberally, Kanye inherited a bit of his fearless politics and kitchen sink beat construction from here.)”

I am going to wrap up now. One last thing I’ll drop in is from Rolling Stone. In an interview from 2020, Chuck D discussed (among other things), the legacy and importance of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. He has been in the U.K. recently, talking about his art, and the new book, Livin' Loud: ARTitation. Of course, when interviewed, questions come up about Public Enemy’s second studio album – especially as Hip-Hop turns fifty in the summer:

“So, ‘It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back’ jumped up to Number 15 on our new 500 Greatest Albums list. There was such a stylistic leap between that album and your debut, Yo! Bum Rush the Show. Was the change in your flow just from hearing people like Rakim?

Two guys helped me design a rhyme pattern which would help me with faster speeds. And that was Rakim, especially on “You Know You Got Soul,” and also KRS-One, particularly on the song “Poetry.” KRS-One and Rakim were able to take faster speeds and make the beats go to them. That was different from what Run-DMC and Schoolly D and Whodini and everybody were doing. They were rhyming to the beat and keeping up with the beat. And then people were able to figure out faster beats. A guy like Big Daddy Kane was just phenomenal once he went on took on faster beats, too. But nobody was messing around with our beat areas, like 109 beats per minute. So it was faster, it was stronger, and it was aggressive. So even to this day, you can’t mix Public Enemy records with a regular DJ set. It’s just totally different attacks on the music”.

It is amazing – though not surprising at all – that we are still finding new things to say about It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. As it approaches its thirty-fifth anniversary, we need to be thankful to Public Enemy because of what they gave to the world. I still think there are lessons that can be learned. If the group was tackling and confronting some ugly truths and broken politics back in the late-1980s, how far has the U.S. (and the world) come since then? Certainly, Public Enemy changed Hip-Hop and made their mark! I still think a lot of the lessons that Public Enemy laid down on It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back…

NEED to be revisited and learned.

FEATURE: Revisiting… Laura Mvula - Pink Noise

FEATURE:

 

 

Revisiting…

 

Laura Mvula - Pink Noise

_________

ONE of my favourite albums…

PHOTO CREDIT: Danny Kasirye

from the past decade came from the sensational Laura Mvula in 2021. I have always been a fan of hers, but her third studio album, Pink Noise, is her peak. Released on 2nd July, 2021, I wanted to look back at this wonderful album ahead of its second anniversary. I think that Pink Noise should have won the 2021 Mercury Prize. Although Arlo Parks was deserving with Collapsed in Sunbeams, Pink Noise was too good to be overlooked in that sense! Mvula signed with Atlantic Records in October 2018 – under two years after another major label, Sony, unceremoniously dropped her. Atlantic have given her a lot of support and freedom. They know that she is a great artist, so it is a big loss to Sony! Rather than focus on that, I want to bring in an interview from NME. Mvula was discussing Pink Noise and looking ahead. I shall come to a couple of reviews for an album that you need to revisit. One that deserves to be played more on the radio. It is one of the most infectious, accomplished and memorable albums from this decade. A thing of wonder:

“Fast-forward to July 2021 and it’s clear she made the right decision. Mvula’s new album ‘Pink Noise’ is a triumphant reinvention that streamlines her abundant vocal, songwriting and production gifts into a shiny, ’80s-inspired package. The delirious, Michael Jackson-channelling single ‘Got Me’ deserves to become one of the biggest hits of the summer – so let’s hope Love Island‘s music programmers are paying attention.

Today, she says having a new management team that fully understands her is really helping. “If I say, ‘I don’t want to do that’, or, ‘Can we do this differently next time?’, I don’t have to be worried about fulfilling the stereotype of ‘the scary Black woman’ who, as soon as she says something with any degree of assertiveness, gets called ‘threatening’ or a ‘diva’,” she says. “I can speak freely and I feel like everyone has a shared desire to make this thing go the furthest it can go.”

Still, artists are often complicated creatures, and Mvula says that while making ‘Pink Noise’ she actually thrived on the initial indifference of her co-producer Dann Hume, who’s worked with Wiz Khalifa and Troye Sivan. Because he “didn’t seem bothered” about working with her, she almost felt like she had to “woo him”. Before she bonded with Hume, a member of alt-rock band Evermore, Mvula spent 18 months going into songwriting sessions with various producers she had never worked with before. It was a new experience for an artist who considers herself “very self-sufficient” – and one she says she enjoyed – but an album concept stubbornly refused to emerge.

“I got so overwhelmed that I remember asking my manager, ‘What’s the protocol if I can’t deliver [the album] and have to break the contract?'” she admits.

The breakthrough came when she and Hume began working on ‘Safe Passage’, a glistening mid-tempo track from the album that begins with booming, Phil Collins-style drums. “I remember leaving the session and thinking, ‘This is it – this is the album,'” she says. Mvula had already made the “skeleton” of the song at home, but Hume helped her to elevate it. “I think it’s hard for any producer to work with me because I produce as well,” she says. “It’s about taking something that’s already there and making it shine even more. And I think that’s harder than giving a producer [a demo with] a vocal and a guitar and saying: ‘Make a whole musical world for me.'”

Because she clearly understands how a fellow artist works, Mvula declined to over-direct Biffy Clyro’s Simon Neil when they recorded ‘What Matters’. “Everyone at the label was like, ‘You should tell him exactly what you want him to do’, but I was like, ‘Nah’,” she recalls. Instead, Mvula says she simply texted Neil with the message: “I feel like you’ll know what to do with it.” When she got the track back a week later with Neil’s vocal part added, Mvula’s instant reaction was: ‘Oh my God – it’s amazing!’ So I mixed it and it was done – just like that,” she says. “The whole process was basic and organic.”

By this point, we’ve been talking for so long that Mvula is being asked to vacate her spot. “I will get up and go,” she promises, “but I keep looking around because I’m in Shoreditch House in the library and I’ve performed here once before. I remember that gig so well because it’s such an intimate space, and I want that feeling again with ‘Pink Noise’.”

This time, however, Mvula believes the would be quite different. “People would sort of lament to my previous albums because they were made to make you feel very deeply,” she says. “‘But ‘Pink Noise’ is loose – real loose.” She smiles excitedly. “You know, I can’t wait to see people shackin’ out to these joints.”

If you are new to Laura Mvula, it is well worth going back to her debut, Sing to the Moon. That turned ten in March. Everything leads up to the brilliant and inspiring Pink Noise. It makes me fascinated to see what she comes up with next! I am going to round off with a couple of hugely positive reviews. This is what DIY had to say when they immersed themselves in the phenomenal Pink Noise:

“Laura Mvula hasn’t had the easiest ride over the past few years. 2013 debut ‘Sing To The Moon’ captured praise for its stellar songwriting, orchestral flourishes and diamond-cut balladry, but peppy 2016 follow-up ‘The Dreaming Room’ arrived to muted fanfare despite the quality of its contents. Following this second effort she was suddenly dropped by her label (via email, pre-pandemic) which jump-started a few years off the mainstream grid. When listening to the sheer power of ‘Pink Noise’, it’s crazy to think Laura seriously considered the prospect of returning to teaching in this downtime. She directly channels recent setbacks into the heart of the LP: on ‘Conditional’ she sings of “another blow to the ego” among sludgy industrial synths and sudden maniacal bursts of saxophone runs. The record largely takes its cues from ‘80s synth-pop, an age of music frequently mined by artists but when it’s done well - as it most certainly is here - it can fashion some real showstoppers.

You can almost feel the dry ice submerging ‘Safe Passage’, a stark opener that lays down the laws of the land with its sparkling synth-play. ‘Magical’ is a chest-pounding love song that builds and soars, drawing back only at the point where it feels as if it’s about to genuinely pop; “Do you remember the time when we were together?” she howls as her voice lifts to the peak of its powers. It’s an album of varying moods, too. Vulnerability rears its head among the swelling brass notes of ‘Golden Ashes’ - “I lost my way again,” she sings before pleading the powers that be to stop her from drowning again. Almost every song here could pass as a single. The title track is catered with slices of tight funk guitar and slinky synths that Prince would be proud of, later ‘Got Me’ bops with its knowing nod to Michael Jackson. Simon Neil from Biffy Clyro guests on the slinky funk ballad ‘What Matters’ with his unmistakable delivery sparkling in the disco lights - a surprising, yet perfect casting. Punchy, fun and beautifully constructed, ‘Pink Noise’ is the triumphant sound of Laura Mvula finding her feet. A career-defining return that most artists can only dream of; pure synth-pop ecstasy”.

I’ll round off with this review from The Line of Best Fit. Awarding it 9/10, it is clear this was one of the defining albums of 2021. With Laura Mvula writing and producing alongside Dann Hume, this feels and sounds like a very personal and passionate album. An artist sounding as free and happy as they have ever been! Go and seek out this magnificent album:

“It’s hard to believe she was close to ending her music career and returning to teaching but three years ago, but after dedicated time focusing on her craft, we’ve been blessed with an album inspired by the decade she was born in.

Pink Noise is an obvious departure for Mvula, as she sheds her stripped back, acoustic style and ascends into the world of keytars, smoke machines and shoulder pads to boot. However, the religious undertones and hints of gospel remain in her work, keeping the album rooted in her style and familiar to listeners as she ventures into new pastures.

Starting off with, literally, a bang; Pink Noise opens with “Safe Passage” – an '80s drum masterclass swathed in funky basslines and synths apt for the Stranger Things soundtrack, along with a choral backing harkening back to tracks like “She” from Sing To The Moon. These vocals are prominent in the final act of closing track “Before The Dawn” too, and work as a fitting bookend to the album - showcasing Mvula’s talent for incredibly moving choral arrangements, but also beckoning back to her previous work to not lose sight of where she’s come from.

The aforementioned religious undertones take centre stage in “Church Girl” and deliver the most heartfelt message on the Pink Noise (“How can you dance / with the devil on your back?”), along with arguably her strongest vocal performance on the album. It’s a shame then that the other somewhat evangelical track “Golden Ashes” doesn’t really meet the standard of the album and seems to lose its flow amongst the complex chords and melodies – trying to go somewhere it doesn’t quite reach.

It’s strange to see Biffy Clyro’s Simon Neil appear on the track-list as he’s an odd choice for a collaboration on an '80s pop album. Somehow though it works, and Neil’s vocal blends into the slow-dance ballad of “What Matters” seamlessly. The track stands as a welcome breather on the album, and is carefully places to let you rest before the final two tracks explode the joy and colour of the '80s all over you.

Tracks such as “Remedy” and title track “Pink Noise” take the funk to the next level through ringing guitars and Prince-inspired riffs, basslines and spoken word moments that raise the sexiness of the track (“Give in / to the feeling”). Not to mention the wonderful “Got Me” that almost takes '80s to a tongue-in-cheek caricature of the style, using cliché instrumentation, a swung 6/8 time signature, and the attitude of a woman in a power suit swinging her keytar on stage in front of 50,000 people. It’s truly the high of the album.

All in all, Pink Noise is a roaring success for Mvula’s reinvention. It’s a joyous celebration of her past, her present, and all the success that is to come in her future. Laura Mvula is back, and she’s not going anywhere”.

In worthy need of a revisit, I feel that Pink Noise is perfect for the summer evenings. From one of our greatest artists, I love everything Laura Mvula put into Pink Noise. So sexy, funky and energising, this is an album that everyone needs in their life. You can even grab it on pink vinyl. Take some time out and lose yourself in…

THIS majestic album.

FEATURE: George Michael at Sixty: The Influence and Impact of the Music Legend

FEATURE:

 

 

George Michael at Sixty

PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

 

The Influence and Impact of the Music Legend

_________

THIS is another feature…

 PHOTO CREDIT: AFP/Getty Images

about the much-missed George Michael. I am writing about him, as 25th June would have been his sixtieth birthday. It is hard to believe that he is no longer around. The legend left us on 25th December, 2016. Without doubt one of the voices of his generation, there is so much to remember about him. I am ending with a career-spanning playlist, but I wanted to reflect on and dive into the influence and legacy of this incredible artist. Not only do I want to feature some pieces that describe his musical legacy and brilliance. I will end with an article that highlights his wonderful kindness. Someone who performed these incredible acts of generosity to those he didn’t even know! The debut Wham! album, Fantastic, was released on 1st July, 1983. With Andrew John Ridgeley, Michael helped create this incredible duo! The final Wham! album, Music from the Edge of Heaven, was released on 27th June, 1986. Michael launched his debut album, Faith, in 1987. His final studio album, Patience, was released in 2004. In his lifetime, he left the world with so much phenomenal music. I am going to get to some features that explore the legacy and influence of George Michael. Last year, Firstpost. wrote about how George Michael’s fight for artistic freedom and honesty inspired many. He definitely paved the way for others:

“Although most singer-songwriters know that with age comes wisdom in their songwriting, Michael’s music has always been a combination of sharp wit and cheekiness on the one side and introspection or defiance on the other. Which is why even in albums like Older which provide such an incisive look into Michael’s state of mind, you find that the songs travel through an entire gamut of human emotions.

His attitude towards protecting his individuality, honing his craft and controlling the narrative even when it isn’t in your favour, positioned George Michael as one of the most influential musicians of the 80-90s. His battle with Sony and eventual defeat paved the way for many record labels to be cognisant of the way they treat their talent. By their own admission in Freedom Uncut, George Michael may have lost the battle, but he did win the war.

You can see Michael’s distinct attitude in Adam Lambert, whose tremendous success with American Idol has only heralded him into a supremely talented openly gay singer; one who hasn’t needed to hide his sexuality to protect his career. That he reprises Freddie Mercury’s role in the band Queen feels almost like a generational passing of the baton with many intersections of music, creative force and sexuality.

Like Michael, Lambert too started off with a career that saw many female fans before becoming a gay icon. Although Michael got outted before he would’ve liked, he embraced his gayness in the later years, assured that he wouldn’t lose out on his female fan base. Lambert’s kohl lined eyes and mannerisms contribute greatly to his similarities with Michael as he struts on stage with the confidence of a man who recognises his own superlative talent.

Filling in for a vocal behemoth like Freddie Mercury can’t be easy; Michael too has maintained that singing at Mercury’s tribute concert shortly after his death was a humongous personal task but also a huge professional challenge. Today Queen can tour because Lambert has boldly taken on the mantle.

If Freddie inspired Michael who in turn inspired Lambert, this cross-generational influence transcends many other pop artists as well. Sam Smith, who has been deeply motivated by Michael’s song Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me with Elton John, said that it was Michael who gave him the confidence to become a solo queer artist. It had a lot to do with the former finding a way to bounce back from every curveball thrown his way.

For a singer who peaked at a time when Prince, Madonna and Michael Jackson were ruling the charts in the US, British George Michael carved a niche for himself and became a darling across the pond until he was arrested by undercover cops in Los Angeles over soliciting charges. He never had a #1 hit in the US after that. Despite that, Older charted six hit songs making it one of Michael’s best albums.

Over five years since his passing, George Michael remains somebody you ought to have faith in. His fans and budding musicians continue to do the same”.

The BBC marked thirty years of George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice Vol 1. Not as highly-regarded by critics as it should when it came out, it is now seen as a masterful work from an artist in a league of his own. It is quite an extensive feature. I have selected a few parts from it that are of interest. Nick Levine, in his 2020 piece, writes with such passion and admiration for the iconic George Michael:

“When George Michael released his second solo album Listen without Prejudice Vol 1 in September 1990, he wasn’t asking fans to embrace a captivating new persona as equivalent pop giants like Madonna and David Bowie did during their imperial phases. But in a way, he was attempting something just as audacious: he wanted to shed the misleading image he had created for himself as one of the most recognisable stars of the 1980s. Now he wanted to show the world more, though not yet all, of who he really was. “Today the way I play the game has got to change,” he sang on the album’s astonishing second single Freedom! ‘90, a song the producer Mark Ronson has described as a “funk groove masterpiece” and “the Mona Lisa”.

In the same song, Michael delivered the rather pleading refrain “I just hope you understand – sometimes the clothes do not make the man”, then drove home his message in the accompanying music video by torching his signature leather jacket from the Faith album campaign three years earlier. However, in a typically contradictory artistic statement, the video in which he asked us to embrace the new, more authentic him featured five huge supermodels of the era – Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford – but not a single glimpse of the artist himself. As singer-songwriter Leo Kalyan notes wryly, Freedom! ‘90 has “one of the most iconic music videos of all time – despite George Michael’s absence from it”. Indeed, Michael refused to appear not only in Listen without Prejudice Vol 1’s music videos, but even on its album cover. Though still only 27 years old, he already had the music industry clout to do exactly as he pleased.

Though Listen without Prejudice Vol 1 sold eight million copies worldwide and won Michael a Brit Award for best British album, it was widely regarded as a commercial disappointment after Faith’s blockbuster success. Michael felt his record label, Sony Music, had failed to promote it properly in the US and subsequently took them to court, alleging that the company treated him as “no more than a piece of software”. Because of this lawsuit, which Michael eventually lost, a planned follow-up album called Listen without Prejudice Vol 2 never materialised.

It’s fitting, though, that Michael gave three songs intended for the project – including the brilliant, hip-shaking hit single Too Funky – to Red Hot + Dance, an HIV/Aids charity album released in June 1992. Written by a closeted gay man at the height of the epidemic, Listen without Prejudice Vol 1 is an album steeped in the grief and confusion of the HIV/Aids era. Michael acknowledged in a 2007 Desert Island Discs interview that “Aids was the predominant feature of being gay in the 1980s and early 90s as far as any parent was concerned” and a major factor in his decision not to come out to his own family sooner. It’s little wonder that, as he became more emotionally honest in his music, he no longer sounded ready to party.

Now, nearly four years after Michael’s untimely death on 25 December 2016, Listen without Prejudice Vol 1 forms a cornerstone of his legacy – along with his early Wham! hits, 1987’s more ostentatious Faith and 1996’s fascinating and reflective Older album. “His music connects with so many people because he wrote classic songs about universal human experiences, but he always told the story through his individual lens,” says Kalyan.

Though he remained closeted and conflicted for another eight years following its release, Listen without Prejudice Vol 1’s steadfast rejection of pop star artifice is an important stepping stone in Michael’s journey to becoming the scrupulously honest man we now remember him as. He retained a certain mystique right up to his death, but Michael’s willingness to confront his public and private mistakes helped to pave the way for today’s more transparent pop landscape, where a superstar like Katy Perry feels comfortable discussing her depression in a radio interview, and other household names like Justin Bieber and Dua Lipa post apologies for tone deaf moments and past faux pas”.

It was an enormous shock to find out that he died. On Christmas Day 2016, the world had to find out that terrible news. In a year that claimed David Bowie and Prince, we lost another music genius! The outpouring of love and tributes proved that he was greatly loved. He had this huge and profound effect on so many. Truly, Michael was one of the artists of his generation. In a 2020 feature, we get some background and insight into a remarkable career:

“Stevie Wonder’s ‘I Just Called To Say I Love You’ then replaced ‘Careless Whisper’ before Wham!’s ‘Freedom’ finally saw George back on top for another three weeks. The song’s hit-run coincided with two other big milestones – the release of the Make It Big album and the group’s US breakthrough, which saw ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ top the Billboard Hot 100 in November. Wham!’s next single – a festive bonus for fans – looked certain to top the charts again, until George’s own participation in that year’s Band Aid single helped stall it at No.2. No matter. ‘Last Christmas’ would go on to be the biggest-selling single ever to miss No.1 in Britain and would remain in heavy rotation on December playlists ever after.

A world tour, supported by the song ‘Everything She Wants’, which made No.1 in the US in its own right (having been relegated in the UK to a supporting position to ‘Last Christmas’), led to the band being invited to be the first Western pop group to play in Communist China. The trip, in the April of 1985, marked the pinnacle of the pair’s international fame and was a PR triumph. While a new song, ‘I’m Your Man’, made No.1 in the UK and No.3 in the US that autumn, it was now clear that George was getting restless. His second solo single, ‘A Different Corner’, was released in 1986, showcased another dramatic shift forward in his songwriting and once again topped the UK charts.

The news the fans were dreading finally came when it was announced that Wham! would split that summer after a single concert at Wembley Stadium and a farewell release. ‘The Edge Of Heaven’, lifted from a final four-track EP, predictably topped the UK charts in time for the June live show.

George’s next move was a canny one. Pairing himself with the Queen Of Soul on the pop duet ‘I Knew You Were Waiting For Me’ rewarded him and Aretha Franklin with a transatlantic chart-topper and, crucially, helped lay the groundwork for his staggering domination of the US in the 18 months ahead. That campaign kicked off in the summer of 1987 with the release of ‘I Want Your Sex’, a Prince-inspired slice of pop-funk that got George banned from BBC Radio One’s daytime playlists.

In autumn, George’s solo album Faith hit the shops and, buoyed by the title track making No.1 in America and No.2 in the UK would go on to sell 25 million copies worldwide and make him the most successful star of the year stateside. ‘Father Figure’, ‘One More Try’ and ‘Monkey’ would all top the Billboard Hot 100, with some even reaching the R&B listings where white artists rarely made an impact. When Faith won Album Of The Year at the Grammys, George looked unstoppable. But in fact, an exhausting world tour to promote the record, and a growing sense of crisis around his private life, led him to reposition his career.

A two-year hiatus offered him pause for breath. The soberer Listen Without Prejudice Vol.1 was subsequently launched with the brooding ballad ‘Praying For Time’ and – controversially – no video. George felt overexposed and needed to pull back from the promotional blitzkrieg that had characterised Faith. While Listen Without Prejudice Vol.1 would sell respectably worldwide, its US performance, in particular, was muted, despite the inclusion of classic songs such as ‘Freedom 90’ and ‘Heal The Pain’.

The set’s more moderate sales helped exacerbate another row with his label, and a fresh legal battle and corresponding recording hiatus appeared to be looming. Still, George’s live schedule maintained a profile of sorts. Two memorable shows rewarded him with further UK No.1 singles – a duet with Elton John on ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down With Me’, which raised money for AIDS research, and another charity project that featured a set of covers largely drawn from his appearance at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in 1992. The same year, a new composition, ‘Too Funky’ – again raising money for AIDS research – had become a substantial radio and sales smash

In 1994, judges ultimately ruled in favour of George’s record company and, in time, an out-of-court settlement led him to join Virgin, where he finally released Older in 1996. In Europe, the record did well and included two British chart-toppers in ‘Jesus To A Child’ and ‘Fastlove’. The former was a tender tribute to the second man who changed George’s life. Anselmo Feleppa was George’s first true love but had died just a couple of years after meeting the star in 1991. This tragedy was compounded by the death of George’s mother, and the trauma appeared to tighten the artist’s reliance on drugs. With the US largely disinterested in his new material, the gaps between recordings grew longer while a scandal was about to blow the singer’s life apart.

George was arrested in an LA park after an April 1998 encounter with an undercover cop in a men’s toilet. The singer responded with typical grace and good humour, using the platform to confirm the rumours that he was gay, while an upcoming song from his hits collection later mocked the arrest in a memorable video for ‘Outside’. Calmer waters then appeared to characterise George’s life; there was the deepening relationship with a new partner, Texan Kenny Goss, and a 1999 compilation of covers, Songs From The Last Century, which showcased George’s amazing voice – if not, on this occasion, his own ability to craft a great song.

Duets with Whitney Houston and Mary J Blige gave George sporadic appearances on the singles charts while he appeared to be taking a more provocative turn with his solo work, most notably in the President Bush and Prime Minister Blair-baiting video for ‘Shoot The Dog’. But it would take until 2004 for another LP to appear. Patience featured another UK Top 5 success with ‘Amazing’, but sales were lower than George had likely hoped.

Like many before him, George took to the stage to reinvigorate his career and the 106-date 25 Live tour was a huge critical and commercial success worldwide. In 2009, he finally released another festive follow-up to ‘Last Christmas’, but the well-received new track, ‘December Song (I Dreamed Of Christmas)’, failed to create the same cultural impact as its predecessor. More dates followed in 2011 with the Symphonica tour, which saw George reinterpret his classics and revisit some covers, but he fell seriously ill in Austria and was lucky to survive a brush with pneumonia. A live album from the tour became the last LP released by George in his lifetime”.

Before wrapping up, there are a couple of features that are almost tributes. Ones where people discuss what George Michael meant to them. In 2017, The Guardian interviewed some big names to get their stories about how Michael changed and enriched their lives. His death truly left this massive void. We will never see anyone like him again:

“Elton John: ‘On Christmas Day last year I lost a beloved friend’

George was always great fun to be with. He was never afraid to speak his mind. Like me, he’d often get himself into trouble by saying what he really thought. He was straightforward, which meant you always knew where you stood with him – rather than someone who will be nice in front of you and then horrible behind your back. So meeting up with George was always an event because he had such a definite opinion on everything and when opinions clashed it would make for an interesting evening.

People genuinely adored George and it wasn’t just the music. They felt for him and they felt his struggles; he was completely authentic. He wasn’t touring all the time or putting records out year after year. He was a true star. When you saw George perform you were going to see someone who really could sing beautifully and move you with his music. It was a treat. With all his trials, tribulations and the publicity, people could relate to the imperfection. We’re all imperfect and we all have our flaws. He had his fair share of pain in life and this came out in his songs.

Throughout his problems he kept dignified and tried hard to stay private. George, like the rest of us, made mistakes and sometimes publicly, but people could see what I personally was lucky enough to know about George. That he was one of the kindest, most generous people that I ever met in my life.

Mariah Carey: ‘It was so nice to sit down and have a proper conversation with him’

He was in Wham! when I was in school, and I used to love Careless Whisper. My friend Rene and I would sing it in gym class. We used to sing that song all the time. That was before I really knew about George, about Wham! It was Faith that became my favourite of his albums. It was a masterpiece, and it inspired and influenced me. I loved it so much.

I was a new artist on Sony when all the drama around Listen Without Prejudice happened, when there was the issue of him not wanting to appear in any of the music videos. I was behind the scenes [Carey’s then-husband, Tommy Mottola, was head of Sony in the 1990s, when Michael sued the label]. I would hear the executives behind closed doors, and I didn’t like what I heard them saying because I was a huge fan of George.

We first met in England, somewhere in London. We went for a three-hour dinner, and we had a lot in common: we both had these big issues with Sony. I love Sony now, it’s a totally different place, but at the time we’d both gone through our own situations with the label, and we had quite the conversation about it. It was a little traumatic.

He was very kind. We both loved music. We both loved writing and making music. And I loved him. We had a long talk about a lot of things that I’m sure many people would be interested in knowing. It was a really nice experience for me. When you’ve grown up listening to somebody, and really admiring them and their artistry, it’s nice to be able to sit down and have a proper conversation with them. Some of his songs are my favourite songs ever. I was so happy we were given the opportunity to get to know each other”.

I am going to end with a feature from Smooth Radio. They highlighted some of the many incidents where George Michael displayed incredible generosity and thoughtfulness. His amazing charity work and good heart is something that defines him! He was always looking out for other people. Rarely ever putting himself first. Ahead of what would have been his sixtieth birthday, it is moving hearing how he impacted other people. He was always keen to help and assist wherever he could:

“George Michael gave stranger £15,000 for IVF treatment

A woman who appeared on Deal or No Deal was given £15,000 by an "anonymous donor" after she talked on air about her reasons for applying for the TV show.

Lynette Gillard appeared on the game show with the hope of winning enough money to fund her IVF treatment.

George Michael had been watching the show and secretly called Channel 4 call the next day, offering to cover the whole cost.

Richard Osman, producer of Deal Or No Deal and co-presenter of Pointless, confirmed the story after the Star's death.

Taking to Twitter he wrote: "A woman on 'Deal Or No Deal' told us she needed £15k for IVF treatment."

"George Michael secretly phoned the next day and gave her the £15k."

It wasn't until Richard tweeted the story that Lynette found out who had donated the money.

Taking to Twitter she wrote to the presenter saying: "For many years I wondered who had donated this money, and now I know.

"Thank you. RIP George what an amazing person."

Lynette went on to fall pregnant with a little boy in 2017 and named him after the star, Seth Logan George Hart.

George worked undercover at a homeless shelter

After his death on Christmas Day, 2016, George's old colleagues came forward to reveal he had worked side-by-side with them at a homeless shelter.

The star had often visited the shelter, but had specifically asked that his co-workers keep his work a secret.

Emilyn Mondo revealed on Twitter: "George Michael worked anonymously at a homeless shelter I was volunteering at.

"I've never told anyone, he asked we didn't. That's who he was."

George gave stranger £25,000 to cover their debt

Supposedly George was in a cafe when he overheard an upset woman discussing her terrible debt.

The Wham! star quietly wrote a cheque for £25,000 and subtly gave it to the waitress on his way out.

She was under strict instructions to only give the cheque to the woman after he'd left.

George never wanted any attention or thanks for his kind gestures.

He threw a free concert "just for nurses" after mother's death

George Michael put on a free Christmas concert "just for nurses" in 2006.

Before he took to the stage at the Camden Roundhouse in London he said: "Almost 10 years ago, during the last week of my mother's life, I told my friends and family that if I ever played my own concerts again, I would make sure to do a free one for NHS nurses.

"The nurses that helped my family at that time were incredible people, and I realised just how undervalued these amazing people are.

"So I want to thank them with a Christmas concert," he said.

Nurse Sally Lyons remembers the concert well, saying that her and her colleagues still talk about the special night.

Speaking the The Roundhouse she says: "A nervous George Michael took to the stage with a bad cold and told us he’d played in front of crowds all over the world but was anxious because he’d never performed in front of so many heroes before.

"[George] will always be a hero to all of the nurses at the Roundhouse that night."

He singlehandedly kept charities afloat with donations

Another story that emerged after George's death was that he gave so much money to certain charities that it was only because of his donations that the organisations were able to keep going.

Kate Waugh took to Twitter to say: "A lady from a children's charity once told me they were only still afloat because of George Michael."

After his death Childline's Esther Ranzen revealed George had given the charity "millions".

The charity found said: "For years now he has been the most extraordinarily generous philanthropist, giving money to Childline, but he was determined not to make his generosity public so no-one outside the charity knew how much he gave to the nation’s most vulnerable children."

He stopped in the rain to help a woman change her car tyre

After George's death a story emerged from an Irish woman who was stunned when George Michael stopped to help her change her car tyre in London.

Mary Ryan recalled leaving work in the 1990's when she noticed to her distress that he car had a flat tyre.

Mary told The Journal: "Back in the early 1990s I was working on Edgware Road in London near the Sony Studios.

"I came out of work to find my little 1974 Ford Fiesta had a flat tyre.

"George Michael was coming out of Sony as I was standing there in the rain and helped me change my tyre….I’ve never forgot how kind he was.

"Sadly, I didn’t have the nerve to ask for his autograph”.

I am going to finish it there. There is a complete and essential George Michael playlist at the end. It includes some of his best work with Wham! I wanted to use this feature to show how he helped changed the music world. The impact he had on other artists. How Michael left behind this vital and incredible legacy. On 25th June, the world will remember him on his sixtieth birthday. It is clear that his brilliance will never fade away! We were very luck to have the wonderful George Michael…

IN the world.

FEATURE: Good King Walter, Good King Don: The Uniqueness and Contemporary Relevance of Steely Dan

FEATURE:

 

 

Good King Walter, Good King Don

ART CREDIT: Mike Scott 

 

The Uniqueness and Contemporary Relevance of Steely Dan

_________

THIS will be the final time…

IN THIS IMAGE: Donald Fagen/ART CREDIT: Joan LeMay/Courtesy of the University of Texas Press

I mention Steely Dan for a while. There are a couple of reasons why they are back in my mind. For one, their second studio album, Countdown to Ecstasy, turns fifty next month (though I am not sure of the exact date). It is one of their absolute best. I am also still reading the excellent new book, Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan, from writer Alex Pappademas and artist Joan LeMay. It is wonderfully written and illustrated book that dives deep into the songs of Steely Dan. It occurs, the more I read, the fewer comparable artists to Steely Dan there are. I know others have been inspired by them, but when you consider the artists who have ‘followed them’ – Prefab Sprout, Deacon Blue, Everything But the Girl -, nobody jumps out of the list where you can see and feel that direct inspiration! Maybe it is the unique talents of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen that results in this sense of music preservation and protection – that nobody can ever really get their sound and reach their giddy height. There is definitely a ‘Danaissance’ happening right now! With the book release helping to reignite chat about the band, I wonder why there are few artists trying to replicate and reproduce the essence of Steely Dan. Maybe it is too much studio work and perfectionism. The music of Steely Dan is so rich and honed, you wonder whether it is hard to get that sort of brilliance through mortal measure! Whether Steely Dan are very much one of a kind. I don’t think the lack of similar-sounding artists is because Steely Dan are uncool or not known enough.

It is true their music is not played in the U.K. enough. Like so many artists, when they are played on the radio here, you often get the same few songs played – the ones that are pretty well known (Dirty Work, Hey Nineteen etc.), rather than the deep cuts. I am going to come on to some personal thoughts about Steely Dan and why their music is so inspiring. First, it is worth pulling in some recent articles about them. You can buy Steely Dan’s albums on vinyl but, until recently, it has been very hard to do. You would have to ferret around on auction sites and get expensive second-hand copies. Fortunately with their debut Can’t Buy a Thrill, and the Countdown to Ecstasy follow-up committed to vinyl, the supreme – and in my view, best of their albums – Pretzel Logic is soon on vinyl. On 28th July, in fact. Here are more details:

“Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic is to be the next album in Geffen/UMe’s extensive, high fidelity audo reissue program of the band’s classic records from their ABC and MCA Records years. First released in 1974, their third LP contained one of their best-known hits, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” and will be reissued on July 28.

The series sees the seminal group’s first seven albums returning to vinyl, in most cases for the first time since their original release. Pretzel Logic follows the launch of the program last November with Steely Dan’s debut album, 1972’s Can’t Buy A Thrill, followed this May by its 1973 follow-up, Countdown To Ecstasy.

Pretzel Logic has been meticulously remastered for the new edition by Bernie Grundman from the original analog tapes, and will be pressed on 180 gram black vinyl at 33 1/3 rpm. The album will also be available as a limited edition premium 45 rpm version on Ultra High-Quality Vinyl (UHQR) from Analogue Productions, which is the audiophile in-house reissue label of Acoustic Sounds. Analogue Productions is also releasing the Steely Dan series on Super Audio CD (SACD).

The third album by the tastemaking and groundbreaking band became their most successful to date on its first release, climbing to No.8 on the Billboard bestsellers in a 36-week chart stay. Pretzel Logic, which also featured such favorites as “Any Major Dude Will Tell You,” “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” and “Barrytown,” was certified gold in the US by the RIAA in May 1974, just three months after release, and went on to achieve platinum status in 1993. “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” the lead single, reached No.4, their highest-ever placing on the Billboard Hot 100.

The 45 RPM UHQR versions of the catalog will be pressed at Analogue Productions’ Quality Record Pressings on 200-gram Clarity Vinyl. They‘ll each be packaged in a deluxe box with a booklet detailing the entire process of making a UHQR disc, plus a certificate of inspection. Each UHQR is pressed, using hand-selected vinyl, with attention paid to every single detail of every single record.

Over the next year, the remaining albums from Steely Dan’s esteemed years on ABC and MCA (1975’s Katy Lied, 1976‘s The Royal Scam, 1977’s Aja and 1980’s Gaucho) will be given similar deluxe reissue treatment”.

Steely Dan are very much back in the spotlight right now. I have been inspired, a minor wannabe songwriter me, to think more in a ‘Dan’ way. At a time when so many important issues are not covered extensively in music – the L.G.B.T.QI.A.+ community, transgender rights, the environment, political corruption, and abortion rights, current affairs like the writer’s strike in the U.S… -, you want a new generation Steely Dan to bring out an album. I have been imagining song titles – Local Celebrity, Katy’s Switch , Can’t Buy a Thrill (a nod to the Steely Dan album of the same name: it is a (composition very much inspired by both Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, and Bernard Hermann’s Farewell and the Tower, from score for Vertigo) shame they did not write title tracks for Can’t Buy a Thrill and Countdown to Ecstasy) – and thinking about how all this new Steely Dan conversation and exposure will inspire musicians. As this article highlights, Donald Fagen and the late great Walter Becker’s (we lost him in 2017) music is having a renaissance at the moment:

“Steely Dan are having a moment. The 1970s jazz-rock duo are the subjects of a new book, as well as increasingly popular social media accounts such as “Good Steely Dan Takes” and “People Dancing to Steely Dan”, which now number tens of thousands of followers.

As with Fleetwood Mac before them, TikTok has introduced the band to a whole new generation of fans, who seem to care less about the aesthetic concerns that had until recently restrained the hipster music press from praising them. In 2000 the music publication Pitchfork gave the band’s comeback album, Two Against Nature, a score of 1.6 out of 10; it has now published retrospective reviews of the band’s most esteemed studio albums, with all of them rated 8.3 or higher.

If one is left to wonder how taste-making music journalists could have ever been so sniffy about tunes that blend bossa nova, jazz, and soul, then it is worth considering the fundamental conservatism of their lyrics.

For while the music of Steely Dan might have been revolutionary, their lyrics were ultimately jaded and cynical. Having previously been beatniks, the band’s Donald Fagen and Walter Becker became pop’s first postliberals, with their most celebrated songs railing against the progressive excesses and naïve dreams of the 1960s and ’70s.

Their first album was released in 1972, with their early hit “Only a Fool Would Say That” alleged to be a riposte to John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, which had been released the previous year. It criticised the hypocrisy of a man in a multimillion-dollar penthouse apartment singing about a world without possessions — I heard it was you/ Talking ’bout a world where all is free/ It just couldn’t be/ And only a fool would say that — and supposedly invited Lennon to consider what the ordinary working man would think of his message:

The man in the street dragging his feet/ Don’t wanna hear the bad news/ Imagine your face there in his place/ Standing inside his brown shoes/ You do his nine to five/ Drag yourself home half alive/ And there on the screen/ A man with a dream?

While Steely Dan songs are often about drugs or sex, and in some cases both, they nonetheless contain a critical awareness of the ultimate nihilism of this lifestyle. According to Alex Pappademas, one of the authors of the recent book, Dan lyrics are often “about people who can’t help driving headlong toward one form of destruction or another […] even when they know the truth” of what they’re doing.

Their 1976 song “Kid Charlemagne” — familiar to most under-40s from the Kanye West sample — was written about LSD pioneer Owsley Stanley. But after paying homage to his exploits in 1960s San Francisco, they lament that he was ultimately a failure.

Son, you were mistaken/ You are obsolete/ Look at all the white men on the street refers to the displacement of hallucinogens by cocaine. As Steely Dan knew in 1976, the expansion of drug consumption from a niche activity to something done by normies — whether in the San Francisco summer of love or the UK rave scene of the late ‘80s and early ’90s — led not to consciousness expansion and social and economic transformation, but more often to loneliness, mental illness and death.

Their song “Peg”, famously sampled in De la Soul’s “Eye Know”, was written about a woman desperate to find stardom, who ends up appearing in porn films (“foreign movies”). While she obtains the short-term fame and fortune she had sought, the chorus warns, Peg, it will come back to you — a salutary lesson for young women on OnlyFans today, who may feel a brief empowerment and even earn some money, at the cost of having their content on the internet forever, to be stumbled across by their children and grandchildren.

It is about time the hipster music press gave Steely Dan their due, but we shouldn’t ignore the core message of their lyrics. And it’s no surprise these words resonate with Gen Z TikTokers — in many ways a more cynical, sober, and even conservative generation than the two that came before them”.

As magnificent and unique as Steely Dan are, you would like to think that, somewhere in the musical wings, there is another band or artist who are hoping to emulate their sound or update their music. If the ‘originals’ are finding a new generation of listeners tune into their sound, what happens beyond this?! Is the reason we do not really have a modern-day Steely Dan is because of that (the music) is so detailed, contradictory at times, and altogether impossible to explain and easily define?! The Atlantic wrote a feature back in May that illustrated how Steely Dan’s music has captured a new generation’s hearts:

“Steely Dan’s music posed a question: Was it possible to be an ironist and a perfectionist simultaneously? Was taking rock and roll this seriously a high-concept joke, or the only way to unlock the music’s full creative potential? Or had Steely Dan somehow come up with a blend of both, a virtuosic balancing act of scathing satire and fervent earnestness? At one point, Pappademas describes Fagen and Becker as “cynical about their own cynicism,” a phrase that hints at the fierce idealism that runs beneath the surface of even their iciest music.

IN THIS IMAGE: Cathy Berberian from Your Gold Teeth (from Countdown to Ecstasy)/ART CREDIT: Joan LeMay/Courtesy of the University of Texas Press

Such contradictions made Steely Dan an anomalous presence in the landscape of 1970s rock. The band-that-wasn’t-really-a-band was devoid of the phallic swagger of, say, Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith. While Bruce Springsteen was redefining heroic authenticity and gracing the covers of national magazines, Fagen and Becker retreated behind their retinue of characters. Steely Dan’s ever-changing lineups deprived the band’s public of the personality-driven soap operas that fans thrilled to in groups such as the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac. The pair’s refusal to tour stood out as arena rock became a massive business; Fagen and Becker never even appeared on one of their studio-album covers. At a time when rock stardom was synonymous with being cool, the two of them seemed uninterested in being rock stars and completely indifferent to being cool.

Aja’s success was unusual, even for this unusual band. Released just weeks after Elvis Presley died and in the middle of the year that punk broke, the album became the biggest commercial hit of Steely Dan’s career, peaking at No. 3 on the Billboard album chart. Fans debate whether it’s the best Steely Dan album, but it’s certainly the quintessential Steely Dan album. An extraordinary fusion of styles filtered through the duo’s explosively ambitious songcraft and sonic architecture, Aja features more than 30 credited musicians, a who’s who of the world’s top jazz, rock, and R&B session players.

IN THIS IMAGE: Third World Man from Third World Man (from the 1980 album, Gaucho)/ART CREDIT: Joan LeMay/Courtesy of the University of Texas Press

An old joke about Steely Dan’s reliance on studio musicians has it that Fagen and Becker were writing music so difficult that they couldn’t even play it themselves. This isn’t true: Both were terrific instrumentalists and can be heard all over Aja. Still, the deployment of so many hired guns was one of the most controversial and misunderstood aspects of their endeavor; detractors, viewing it as proof of prefab inauthenticity, disparaged Steely Dan as essentially a factory dedicated to turning out the world’s most finely tuned musical product.

But enlisting studio players, far from an abdication of artistic vision, was a fanatical assertion of Fagen and Becker’s vision. The fantasy that rock-and-roll bands are democracies—melting pots of individual contributions and sensibilities, wholes greater than the sum of their parts—is deep-seated and attractive. By Aja, Steely Dan had dispensed with such notions (if its founders had ever embraced them): Fagen and Becker were the bosses, and everyone else was an employee. To use a famous example, the pair reportedly brought in as many as eight different guitarists to try playing the roughly 25-second guitar solo on “Peg.” (Jay Graydon finally got it, after what he later recalled as “four, five hours” of takes.)

From one angle, this looks like tyrannical micromanagement; from another, it looks like the sort of uncompromising rigor and sacrifice—of time, money, and other people’s individual talent—in the service of a relentless aspiration that certain great art requires. In the case of Steely Dan, listeners can find themselves under unforgiving pressure too: Insistent about making music entirely on their terms, Fagen and Becker deliver a sound defined by calculating precision, one that offers little of the visceral thrill of impulsivity that many fans expect from rock music. It’s a listening experience that some will find deeply alienating, others endlessly alluring”.

There are a couple of other features I want to bring in before I wrap up. There has been so much Steely Dan media movement in the past couple of months that I need to bring as much of it together as possible. It seems our capital, London, is very much tuned into ‘The Dan’. The U.K. book launch for the Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay tome was in London (I was lucky enough to attend and get a couple of signed copies). Time Out explained how London is going through this obsession with Steely Dan:

“Last month, I found myself in a darkened cinema in Homerton, listening to Steely Dan’s landmark 1977 album ‘Aja’. I was surrounded by dads accompanied by their thirtysomething graphic-designer kids, but also a significant number of people who definitely weren’t born when these cheesy-listening pioneers released their last great record, 1980’s ‘Gaucho’. The event was Pitchback Playback, which airs classic albums to eyemask-wearing audiences so they can shut off all their other senses and fully appreciate every dimension of production magic. More fascinating than all that, though, is that this wasn’t the only Steely Dan-dedicated event to have happened in London lately. Far from it.

Despite it being more than 50 years since the release of the band’s debut album – and the fact that Walter Becker, half of Steely Dan’s core duo completed by Donald Fagen, died in 2017 – London seems to be currently gripped in a bout of extreme Dan-mania. Once thought of as being too naff to make it into the hearts of the cool kids, the slick and intricate act are now all the rage. A covers band, The Royal Scammers, just completed a week-long January residency at Ronnie Scott’s in Soho, while Nearly Dan play Camden’s Jazz Cafe this month. There’s also still time to catch Stanley Dee, a third (third!!) Steely Dan tribute act, who play Nell’s in Kensington at the end of February.

That’s not all. Turn on deeply influential and zeitgeist-capturing independent radio station NTS and you’re more than likely to hear a Steely Dan track, especially if you tune into breakfast show hosts Flo Dill or Zakia Sewell, who are both extremely fond of starting the day at the Dalston studio with a dose of Dan. Elsewhere, Reading-born, London-based DJ and banger-machine SG Lewis revealed that ‘Lifetime’ – the lead single from his recently released new album – was deeply inspired by Steely Dan’s brand of hyper-intelligent yacht rock. London rockers The Family Dog have also cited their parents’ Steely Dan record collection as a key influence, while London-raised, Bristol-based experimental act Park Motive is in thrall to the ‘bizarre seediness’ of Donald Fagen.

There was always something a little off-kilter about Steely Dan, not least in the fact they took their name from a dildo

Look further afield than the capital, and Etsy is awash with knock-off Steely Dan T-shirts. On TikTok you’ll find cheerful teens dancing to the band’s iconic single ‘Peg’, a song that has ‘no right going off that hard’, according to one shimmying new fan. Even Netflix is in on the trend. Its recent ‘Knives Out’ murder mystery ‘Glass Onion’ contains a host of Steely Dan Easter eggs, from a massive tour poster to a Cuban Breeze cocktail – a reference to a lyric from Donald Fagen’s solo album ‘The Nightfly’ – and an assistant called Peg. Director Rian Johnson is, evidently, a huge fan. On Grammys night, notoriously grumpy music industry veteran Steve Albini took to Twitter to dump on the band, writing ‘I will always be the kind of punk that shits on Steely Dan’. Pretty soon the band’s name started trending, and a host of artists and fans jumped to their defence, including musicians Jenny Lewis and St Vincent, who wrote ‘For the record – I fucking love Steely Dan’.

So why all the Steely Dan love, and why now?

To find answers, we went to Flo Dill, who has officially played the most Steely Dan records of any DJ on NTS.

‘As I get older I’m less and less concerned with having “cool” music taste,’ she explains of her own personal love for the band. ‘Also, Steely Dan are interesting. It’s complex pop music and incredibly well recorded and amazingly mixed and produced.’ It’s that timelessness and sheer craft, then – as well as a lack of embarrassment about liking a band who might lack the obvious sexiness and edge of many of their 1970s contemporaries – which have made Steely Dan the hottest sound of 2023.

‘Whenever I play them on the show people in the chatroom love it,’ adds Dill. ‘And if you’re a Steely Dan fan and you hear someone else play Steely Dan, you’re going to make yourself known! They’re not an acquired taste, but they are cheesy in many ways and it’s definitely more acceptable to be a Dan fan than it used to be.’

Ben Gomori, who runs the Pitchblack Playback events, agrees: ‘My theory is that we’ve now reached a point in time and cultural history where anything that is of quality, or acclaimed in its time – and this goes for fashion as well – as long as you wear it or live it authentically and convincingly and cohesively, people don’t look down their nose at you anymore’.

Gomori cites the popularity of a recent Pitchblack Playback session he hosted for 1996’s ‘Travelling Without Moving’ by Jamiroquai – a band who have had their fair share of flak for being the antithesis of cool. ‘You’re allowed to like what you like, and nothing is beyond the pale,’ he says. ‘There's less snobbery, particularly as new audiences come through, who’ve grown up with less genre restrictions.’ He’s also keen to give a nod to the scene-setting approach of London’s favourite indie station, who this summer are hosting their first-ever music festival in Burgess Park. ‘Don’t underestimate the power of NTS – it can be extremely influential!’

Steely Dan: a history

The idea that younger listeners are less jaded rings true. There’s a whole generation out there who don’t care if something’s supposed to be trendy and just care if something’s good. And no matter what your opinion on the band’s output, it’s impossible to deny Steely Dan’s musical prowess.

For those not yet in the throes of a full-blown Steely Dan obsession, here’s a quick primer. The band was founded in New York by college friends Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. The pair moved to Los Angeles to record their 1972 debut ‘Can’t Buy A Thrill’. A platinum-selling hit, the singles are still instantly familiar half a century later: ‘Do It Again’, ‘Reelin’ in the Years’ and ‘Dirty Work’. Their personal distaste for flashy US mainstream rock belied their success and also their sound. Sasha Geffen’s 2019 review of the album for Pitchfork sums them up perfectly: ‘They wrote songs every bit as charming and delectable to the ear as the peers they claimed to despise.’ They sold albums by the truckload, but there was always something a little off-kilter about Steely Dan, not least in the fact they took their name from a dildo in William Burroughs’s 1959 novel ‘The Naked Lunch’.

Becker and Fagen spent the 1970s releasing acclaimed album after acclaimed album, before disbanding in 1981. Becker moved to Hawaii where he got off drugs and got on avocado farming, while Fagen worked on solo material. The pair reunited in the early 1990s. Though Becker died of oesophagal cancer in 2017, Steely Dan have continued to tour. Last summer, Fagen and the band played a run of 42 shows across the US, including a night at Los Angeles’s Hollywood Bowl. I was there and it was heroic. Did I swing dance on the steps of the legendary venue with a man that could have been my dodgy uncle to the sweet, smooth sounds of ‘Kid Charlemagne’? I sure did.

Also in the audience at January’s Pitchback Playback event was Hackney-based musician and DJ Lou Hayter. Steely Dan have long been her favourite band. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to one of those things, and “Aja” was the perfect album to hear in that environment,’ she says of the experience. ‘I played that album to death so it’s the one I play most sparingly these days, but I heard loads of detail I’ve never heard before, and was completely blown away all over again. They’re very visual, almost cinematic. I felt like I’d been transported to LA and back.’

IN THIS PHOTO: Lou Hayter (whose 2021 album, Private Sunshine, featured a cover of Steely Dan’s Time Out of Mind (from Gaucho)/PHOTO CREDIT: Elise Michely

Hayter got into Steely Dan in her teens after hearing jazz and soul DJ Patrick Forge play ‘Peg’ on the radio and recognising the sample from De La Soul’s hip hop classic, ‘Eye Know’ – which has just hit streaming platforms for the first time ever, bringing the sound of Steely Dan to even more ears. ‘I fell in love with it and went out and bought all their records, but I didn’t know anyone else that was into them. It was one of those things that I just listened to on my own.’ Slowly, that started to change. One of the first fellow Steely Dan fans Hayter met was Mark Ronson, discovering their mutual love of the band touring together when Hayter was in nu-rave act New Young Pony Club. Superfan Ronson can be seen wearing not one, but two different Steely Dan shirts in his 2021 Apple TV music doc ‘Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson’, and he recently referred to Fagen as ‘our lord of irony-imbued superjams’ on Twitter while wishing him a happy birthday.

Continuing to spread the good word about Steely Dan, Hayter is currently compiling a mixtape of the band’s affiliated acts, from Texan singer and model Rosie Vela to Merseyside new wave band China Crisis. She chalks up the current Steely Dan revival to the resurgence of soul music as well as the impact of our parents’ record collections.

‘There’s a warmth and soulfulness in those songs,’ she says, ‘but I actually listened to Donald Fagen talk about this himself, and he wondered if it’s because millennials’ parents were listening to Steely Dan, so it’s all about familiarity for them. But they’re also just the best band ever, so of course people are going to listen to them!’”.

Let’s finish off with extracts from NPR. They spoke with Alex Pappademas and Joan LeMay about their book, Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan. It is clear Steely Dan are a paradox. They are so original and of their time, and yet there are these enduring songs played on the radio today. Perhaps more common on U.S. radio, but I guess there are a dozen or so of their songs played fairly regularly:

“The chapters in this book give such deep studies of the personalities who populate Steely Dan's songs (and, by extension, of the musicians who brought them to life). Did your relationship with any of these songs change while writing about them, illustrating them, or otherwise getting inside the heads of these characters? Did you learn anything about the songs that genuinely surprised you while working on this project?

LeMay: I learned so much. On our weekly calls, Alex always excitedly ushered me into the entrance of several wormholes he'd been traversing, and it was a constant delight. Thinking deeply about what these characters were wearing, what they might've been doing in the narrative beyond the narrative, thinking about their environment, how they held their faces, how they held their bodies — it was an immersive way to listen. I'd had ideas in my head about so many of the characters because I tend to think visually, but there were lots of fantastic surprises, like when we dug into Cathy Berberian, for instance. I'd never looked up what she looked like before.

Pappademas: I think what surprised me the most as I dug deeper into these songs was how much empathy Donald and Walter seemed to have for their characters. It's not something they're usually given credit for — the idea people have about them is that they're always snickering amongst themselves, making fun of the people they write about, but I think that's actually more true of somebody like Randy Newman than it is of Becker/Fagen. I think there's always a real sense of humanity's plight underneath whatever coldness or archness is more easily detectable in their work on first blush — even when the people they're writing about are doomed or deluded or depraved, you don't get the sense that they're judging these characters, most of the time. There's an attention paid to the human longing that motivates people to these weird actions and they don't judge the longing, of, say, the guy who's hung up on a sex worker in "Pearl of the Quarter" — whereas Frank Zappa, given the same storyline, would absolutely write about what a moron that guy is.

Steely Dan's lyrics are famously somewhat cryptic, and Walter Becker and Donald Fagen were quite averse to having their lyrics read as straightforward personal narratives. It's clear that so much research went into illuminating these songs, but there's also a healthy dose of creative speculation, too, both in how the subjects of the songs are described and how they're depicted.

LeMay: The only characters I painted that weren't 100% creative speculation (and really, less speculation and more my personal interpretation) were those having to do with actual, living people, like Cathy Berberian, Jill St. John and G. Gordon Liddy. I had a folder on my computer called "DAN CASTING GALLERY" full of images of people in my life, found photos, '60s and '70s fashion catalogs, advertisements and sewing pattern packaging. I painted from a melange of those images mixed with things that had been in my head forever, as well as from a ton of photos of my own body posing in different ways for reference. The most important thing to me was getting the humanity — the profoundly flawed humanity — of these characters right. 

Pappademas: And it works — I try to get across that humanity in the text, but having Joan populate this world with real human faces made the finished product into something greater than I could have gotten to on my own.

Anyway, my answer to the question above is that when I'm writing criticism, for sure, but also when I'm writing reported pieces, I feel like there's always an element of creative speculation in what I do. It's just more or less constrained by facts depending on what kind of piece it is. Even if you've sat in a room with somebody for hours you're ultimately imagining their inner life based on what they've told you, and sometimes on what they haven't told you. In terms of Quantum Criminals, yeah, Steely Dan definitely tried to discourage any attempt to read these lyrics autobiographically — and the fact that all their lyrics were composed by (or at least credited to) two writers was their first line of defense against that kind of reading, because even when they're writing in the first person you're conscious that the "I" in every Dan song is to whatever degree a fictional character and therefore a distancing device.

 But I think it's human nature — or at least it's my human nature — to intuit the opposite and look for places where the art seems to correspond to what we know to be the contours of an artist's life. Because the other thing about Steely Dan is they liked to obfuscate; the fact that they rarely owned up to their music having an autobiographical component (with certain exceptions, notably "Deacon Blues," which they admitted was pretty personal) doesn't mean it wasn't autobiographical. And at times — as with "Gaucho," a song about a duo torn apart by a third party who might be the personification of drugs or other forms of hedonism, recorded for the album Donald made mostly without Walter because Walter's addiction issues had pulled him away from the band — the correspondences became too tempting to not explore. Which is what happens when you write cryptically; it's human nature to decrypt.

I don't know; I guess I'm doing the same thing Taylor Swift's fans do when they decide that some opaque lyric is an Easter egg about this or that relationship of hers, or what A.J. Weberman was doing when he decided "The sun isn't yellow, it's chicken" was Bob Dylan confessing to faking his own death, or what the people who think The Shining was Stanley Kubrick exorcizing his guilt over faking the moon landing. The difference is that I think I'm right and I think those other people are all nuts, because I'm in my bubble and can't imagine the view from theirs.

 Finally, what do you hope readers — be they longtime devotees, newly converted fans or Steely Dan skeptics — take away from Quantum Criminals?

LeMay: I think that in a lot of ways, this book can be read as something that's about the ridiculous cacophony of what it is to be a person in the world, striving to do something you're happy with. In a lot of other ways, it is a real invitation to truly dive into what you love with reckless abandon — to dream about it hard, to see and hear and appreciate the small details and the big ways you feel as a result of giving yourself the gift of paying attention. I hope that readers come away from the book thinking about all the ways they have yet to enjoy not just Steely Dan, but anything that moves them.

Pappademas: I hope people come away from this book thinking about how, even though perfectionism can undo you as an artist and any book about how to make your art will tell you that over and over, there's still something noble and useful about aspiring to perfection — that there's magic in the falling-short but also in the reaching-for. I also hope these stories inspire young people to say no to drugs”.

At a time when A.I. is replicating artists and extracting vocals and parts of songs to make somethi9ng ‘new’, I am essentially asking whether Steely Dan can be replicated today. I think they are very much A.I.-immune, as their work is so much the work of sentient beings. Technology cannot replicate the sheer craft and warmth; the nuances and emotional blends you get in the songs. Let’s hope A.I. never attempts to make a stab at a ‘lost Steely Dan album’. I think Donald Fagen would have something to say about it! With this huge new burst of Steely Dan attention and awareness, it makes me wonder what happens when the musical dust clears. Can any artist in the modern age take the best elements of Steely Dan’s music and do something fresh? It would be nice to hear someone coming through that very much are the progeny of The Dan. They might not be able to get Donald Fagen’s vocal down. But they can write music that has rich and layered compositions together with frequently sardonic, witty and character-driven lyrics. It would ensure that Steely Dan’s legacy remains strong and inspires others. Are good kings Walter and Don (paraphrasing Can’t Buy a Thrill’s Kings: “We seen the last of Good King Richard/Ring out the past his name lives on/Roll out the bones and raise up your pitcher/Raise up your glass to Good King John”) destined to be without heirs?! It is wonderful they are very much resonating with new fans and getting all this love right now. I often think about whether we will see artists come through that genuinely can be compared with them. I think the superb Lou Hayter is the closest we have (she is phenomenal and a massive Steely Dan head!). Regardless, let us all hope, when it comes to this ‘Danaissance’, that it…

KEEPS on going strong.

FEATURE: Oldskool Rules: Are Great Album Covers and Videos Revered So Much These Days?

FEATURE:

 

 

Oldskool Rules

IN THIS PHOTO: A fantastic album cover from this year, for Arctic Monkeys’ The Car. The photo was taken by the band's drummer Matt Helders using a Leica M6 film camera, and it shows a white Toyota Corolla (E90) parked alone on the rooftop of a parking garage in Los Angeles

 

Are Great Album Covers and Videos Revered So Much These Days?

_________

I have always thought…

IN THIS PHOTO: The album cover for Miley Cyrus’ 2023 album, Endless Summer Vacation/PHOTO CREDIT: Brianna Capozzi

what design I would choose if I ever imagined an album cover. That would have been me in a different life. I am not an artist myself, but I like to imagine the album covers and music videos. I am very visually-minded, so I get this thrill from using photos and visuals in my blog posts. I guess, if things were different and I were a musician, the visual side of things would be so important. Maybe there would be an opportunity for me to compose a photo of myself at some point. It would be cool if I were interviewed or featured, and I get to choose the photographer I work with. I would use the photo chance as a representation of the creative mind. The foreground image of me with a bottle of alcohol in one hand. Maybe something else in the other hand. A curious and mysterious look up. In the background, there are things hanging in the air. A floor with vinyl (records), a typewriter, and various other items. The background would have some flecks of blood. The set would almost look like the inside of a brain, but in terms of the edges of the frame. The rest would be in a room with some cool and appropriate lighting. The concept would be delving inside a creative or music-minded mind and the sort of contrasts, challenges, inspirations and ideas that like within. It may sound a bit pretentious and self-indulgent, but I do think that it is striking and personal. It (somewhat long-winded) takes me to this thought about modern music. When I think about the best album covers and music videos, they are often for years and decades ago…

There are still some great album covers being produced but, considering the number of albums that come out a month, the percentage of genuinely inventive and astonishing ones is quite low. The same goes for videos. I know there are budgetary restrictions, but you can create something memorable and ambitious without too much money – definitely when it comes to an album cover. Maybe it is me, but I would get the most excitement from working on an album cover or doing music videos that stick in the mind. I know a lot of people do not watch videos so much anymore. It was the case in the past that this was the way to sell songs. So much stock was placed on the video. This was the way people heard and discover music, rather than through the Internet. Radio has always been really important. That excitement of watching a visual representation of a song. That does not happen now. I think most of the hugely-streamed videos on YouTube are from very popular artists. It is less about the quality and memorability of the video, and it is more to do with the artist. Spotify tends to be more popular than YouTube, as I don’t think people are griped by videos so much. The same goes with album covers. Vinyl sales are rising, but I think people are less concerned with buying albums that have amazing covers; it is more to do with ownership and actually paying for music. And vinyl has that sound quality and physicality that you do not get from digital music.

It is a shame that there is not more curiosity and endeavour regarding making these incredible videos and album covers. This year has been okay for album covers but, as features like this show, even many of the best are not that different or unique. There are few of those covers that stop you in your tracks or leave you intrigued. Again, this feature united some good album covers of the year. There are few that truly stand out. The same goes for videos. Look at the best of this year so far or the best of 2022. I mean, there are some really good ones, but I am trying to recall the last time I saw a video that could rank with the very best. Those that challenge the all-time greatest. Is there that desire and ambition in artists now?! Are music videos’ aims and objectives different now to what they were?! Time was when MTV featured the most striking and arresting videos. Because of that, you got these mind-blowing ones like Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer (1986). Artists still want a lot of views for the videos, but the aim is more on airplay and how many times people watch a video, and not necessarily how great the visuals are. People don’t really review videos, so it can seem like a waste if they put all of this effort in. I think one of my favourite videos of the year so far is Kylie Minogue’s Padam Padam.

 PHOTO CREDIT: Zachary Gray (2023)

This is a stylish and bold video that perfectly matches the song. Directed by Sophie Muller, it is a rare case of making a video as a piece of art! A separate entity that has its own brilliance and life. So many music videos, even from major artists, lack the same sort of punch and impression. I know there are some magnificent music video directors around but, considering the number of videos we get each year, so few actually resonate and linger in the imagination! Is it a case of over-saturation and it being far too easy to slip by some really good videos?! Maybe so. I just feel the ones I have seen, regardless of budget, are not that amazing. The visual is simply there because it needs to be, rather than an artist wanting to put something out there that will stand the test of time. I will drop a few music videos in here. I know that we do not really have music television. People can easily stream a song, so what is the attraction and allure of a video? I feel that a wave of wonderful videos would make the case that visual and that sense of cinema is still valuable. I think it is! We do need an alternative music show where incredible videos feature alongside live performances. Even if many artists feel like videos are less relevant now, I think that it is important to look at legacy. Years from now, do we want people still talking about the older videos?! Our minds will drift back to the '80s, '90s and '00s. It is important that there are some examples from the 2020s. These new and awe-inspiring videos that generations future can marvel at!

I think that the same goes for album covers. When we think of the classics and very best, we always think of the likes of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Nirvana’s Nevermind, The Beatles’ Abbey Road, and so on. I am trying to think of the newer ones that really stunned me. I like the cover for Harry Styles’ Harry’s House (2022). That is a simple-yet-impressive visual. Again, I will drop in a few recent album covers. Many that I see are so basic and lack that ambition. Especially as vinyl is a precious and loved format, one would think that the importance of a brilliant album cover would be front and centre of the mind! So that people in years to come will come across these albums and fall in love with that cover. Maybe buy the album because of the cover. I don’t think there is the same problem when it comes to music television and the relevance of videos. When it comes to albums, maybe the decline of C.D. sales means there is less need to make a great cover. Cassette sales are rising, but I think few people can listen to them – and the cover art is not a big reason why they are being bought. Vinyl is booming because it is a physical format that ensures and will never die. It would be interesting to hear other people’s thoughts on this one. Whilst features like this and this one rank some brilliant covers from last year, there is little of that wow factor when you look beyond them. Even the ten best of last year have a couple of somewhat ordinary and easy to replicate covers. I think that the visual side of things is important. Being able to grab attention because of a cover of video. So many of my musical memories are tied to visuals and artwork. The more digitised and consumable music becomes, the less human and tangible it becomes! Vinyl’s popularity gives us hope - but I hate to think that the album cover’s important is null or somewhat obsolete. Same with videos. If it is costly to make them and people do not really value the visual and concept merit, then why bother?!

IN THIS PHOTO: The cover for Harry Styles’ 2022 album, Harry’s House/PHOTO CREDIT: Hanna Moon

We do need to emphasis that the art and visuals are vital. Songs and albums will endure and be discovered generations now if these aspects are considered and conquered. People might come back at me and say there have been some awesome videos this year. Maybe give reasons as to why music videos do not matter. Same with album covers. There have been amazing ones in 2023, although streaming means people can listen to an entire album without needing to buy it or consider the true value of imagery. I think an album cover that catches your eye is as important as the music within! You see a boring or too weird cover and it can be off-putting. If people do not look at reviews and there is that opportunity to capture someone browsing or undecided, then the cover art needs to be as mesmeric as possible. Ditto regarding videos. They can be someone’s first exposure to an artist or album. I know many artists have a smaller budget. But, if they put out an original and impressive video, that can lead to big things. People can share the video online. That creates this new wave of focus and fandom that can boost album sales or get that artists talked about. I still seek out wonderful music videos and album covers. I like to imagine that we can leave some of the greatest videos and album covers from this year and the recent past. Challengers against the vintage ones! I cannot dismiss modern videos and album, covers, but there are fewer examples of these classics and next level ones. When I think of past decades, there was this higher ambition and quality. Sure, the best videos and album covers from this year and last are worthy and spectacular, yet I think that there are not that many truly moving and memorable examples. When it comes to music videos that are innovative and groundbreaking, and album covers that stagger and leave impressions in the mind, there are fewer being produced now…

AS there were in the past.

FEATURE: Be Runnin' Up That Stream: Why Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love Classic Hitting One Billion on Spotify Is a Big Deal

FEATURE:

 

 

Be Runnin' Up That Stream

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush and Michael (now Misha) Hervieu starred together in the video for Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

 

Why Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love Classic Hitting One Billion on Spotify Is a Big Deal

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APOLOGIES if I repeat myself…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Hogan/Getty Images

because I have written about Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) quite a bit through the years! About a year ago today, the song went to number one. Upon its release in 1985, it reached three in the U.K. - although it seemed to deserve better. I am not sure what it kept it off the top spot but, when it was released on 5th August, 1985, there was a lot of love for this extraordinary song. There are a number of reasons for that. Bush’s previous album, The Dreaming, was a great album that got some positive reviews. It didn’t really offer much in the way of an instantly grabbing and classic song. One that can be played on radio, sung along to and easily remembered. In the days and weeks leading up to Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), there were questions as to whether Kate Bush had disappeared. It had been just under two years since she released her Ireland-only single, Night of the Swallow. That did not do well, so many stirred up gossip and weird theories. Had Bush gone mad or retired after a sense of commercial disappointment with The Dreaming (even though it charted high, it was not as big and successful as EMI hoped). Was she stepping away from the music industry, perhaps? There were other rumours around her weight and drug habits (she didn’t have one, but the British press speculated none the less!). It is fitting and extraordinary that a song that was written over a summer’s evening in 1983 should get such massive love and streaming acclaim forty years later. I shall come to the reason why I am coming back to Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God). I am not sure where Bush was when she wrote Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), yet I suspect that she was at her family’s home or her bedroom. As she was building a home studio in the summer of 1983, she would have been dividing her time between London and her parents’ home at East Wickham Farm in Welling, Kent. This was a period where Bush was getting more space, not working herself to death, and committed to a healthy and happier recording process - compared to the relative strain and struggles with The Dreaming.

Generations have sung the song and heard it on the radio. Why listen to and stream it today?! Maybe overlook songs from the 1980s as they feel like they are dated and irrelevant. Kate Bush’s best-loved song is one relevant today. It is about understanding and, if two people could swap places and shoes, then all the struggles and obstacles would be easier to navigate. That empathy would mean any metaphorical or literal buildings, roads and hills could be conquered (“with no problems”). Talking about a huge and passionate love that was almost too big; Bush was trying to highlight the differences between men and women. A lack of communication and understanding meant that there was this struggle and disconnect. Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), whether compelled by an argument or disagreement she was having with her then-boyfriend Del Palmer (who played on and engineered Hounds of Love), or plucked from her imagination, it is a song that has been taken to heart by countless listeners. The Kate Bush Encyclopedia has collated interviews where Bush discussed the inspiration behind a song that reached number three in the U.S. last year (her highest chart position there). I can see this woman in her twenties in an idyllic setting penning a song she would never have imagined would be discussed and adored forty years later:

“I was trying to say that, really, a man and a woman, can't understand each other because we are a man and a woman. And if we could actually swap each others roles, if we could actually be in each others place for a while, I think we'd both be very surprised! [Laughs] And I think it would be lead to a greater understanding. And really the only way I could think it could be done was either... you know, I thought a deal with the devil, you know. And I thought, "well, no, why not a deal with God!" You know, because in a way it's so much more powerful the whole idea of asking God to make a deal with you. You see, for me it is still called "A Deal With God", that was its title. But we were told that if we kept this title that it wouldn't be played in any of the religious countries, Italy wouldn't play it, France wouldn't play it, and Australia wouldn't play it! Ireland wouldn't play it, and that generally we might get it blacked purely because it had "God" in the title. Now, I couldn't believe this, this seemed completely ridiculous to me and the title was such a part of the song's entity. I just couldn't understand it. But none the less, although I was very unhappy about it, I felt unless I compromised that I was going to be cutting my own throat, you know, I'd just spent two, three years making an album and we weren't gonna get this record played on the radio, if I was stubborn. So I felt I had to be grown up about this, so we changed it to 'Running Up That Hill'. But it's always something I've regretted doing, I must say. And normally I always regret any compromises that I make. (Richard Skinner, 'Classic Albums interview: Hounds Of Love. Radio 1 (UK), aired 26 January 1992)”.

Last year, everything changed for Kate Bush! Seen as a ‘resurgence’, Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) was featured on the hit Netflix series, Stranger Things. It scored an evocative scene featuring a character, Max Mayfield. This song literally saved her life. Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) got to number one around the world last year. It actually should have hit number one in the U.K. earlier than it did – the song was battling Harry Styles’ As It Was. Music Week spoke with the Official Charts Company Chief Executive (and Kate Bush fan) Martin Talbot last year about the chart confusion:

“Based on the raw streaming data exclusively available to Music Week, the classic 1985 track which features prominently in the latest series of Netflix’s Stranger Things was ahead of Harry Styles on Friday (June 10). As reported in our charts analysis by Alan Jones last week, Kate Bush racked up 7,470,792 premium audio streams, 1,029,666 ad-funded audio streams and 657,694 premium video streams - but still missed out on No.1.

That’s because chart rules on accelerated decline, or ACR (Accelerated Chart Ratio) as it’s officially known, mean that older catalogue tracks are penalised and have to stream at twice the rate of current releases to register the same chart ‘sale’. The thinking is that the Top 40 is for new music which shouldn’t be crowded out by people’s favourite songs of yesteryear.

Part of the reason for the ratio formula is that the OCC doesn’t get the data to be able to weight chart sales based on organic streams and playlist streams (the latter can favour catalogue and older tracks).

With individual chart sales for downloads and physical singles now eclipsed by streaming, the OCC had to come up with a formula for the streaming era and has refined it over the last few years. When a track is subject to accelerated decline, a single chart sale requires 1,200 ad-funded streams instead of the usual 600, and 200 premium streams instead of 100. (These rules are mainly applied to current releases after nine weeks on the chart and three consecutive weeks of decline to keep the chart moving.)

Some of the reporting of this story has referred to a ‘rule change’ this week for Kate Bush, but that’s not the case is it?

“No, it’s not a rule change. Whenever this comes up, people always act as if it’s the first time that it's been invented. But we introduced it in the summer of 2017, so it's been around for a while, and for the record it was introduced because we saw lots of old tracks that were sitting around in the chart and blocking the opportunity for newer music. We have mechanisms for things to be automatically reset if they reach a particular surge in plays. For a manual reset, if the label comes to us and says ‘look, this is really working’, they can apply for a manual reset. Sometimes they don’t. In this case, Warner did and that's what's happened. And the great news is that Kate Bush is on her way to having her first No.1 in decades, which will be fantastic.”

There’s been some talk about the Chart Supervisory Committee who can influence these decisions. Who are they exactly?

“It’s a panel of representatives from retail and from record labels. Ten people sit on it, as well as us. Five are from the retail sector, DSPs, retailers, etc, the other half are labels with representatives from all three majors, and BMG and PIAS. It meets four or five times a year to discuss the evolution of the charts, to discuss chart rule changes that might be necessary in the future. It's not that common in other markets to have this kind of committee. It's a function of our ownership, we’re owned by the industry, 50:50 by the BPI and ERA, and our job is to reflect the industry and what the industry wants to see.”

So how was the Running Up That Hill reset approved?

“You can reset a track whenever you want if you’ve got the right criteria. What happens is that the label in question will send us the information explaining why they want to reset something, that will then get circulated to the CSC. If there’s a debate, we’ll have a debate. If there isn’t, then we just go ahead and reset, and that’s what’s happened in this case. It’s obviously been surging anyway but there’s been some additional promotional activity around it, as you would expect for a track like this with the profile on Stranger Things. It’s a natural surge, but as all good labels do there’s an opportunity to amplify it. Everyone was comfortable that there was a real purpose [for the reset]. If there was a majority against a reset, we would not reset it. But that was never the case in this instance. I don’t think we’ve had a real fight over a reset application. There are some that are turned down, but that’s more because there’s not a proper campaign.”

If there’s an option for labels, why aren’t classic Christmas tracks not reset given the promotional activity that can accompany them?

“One of the issues that we wanted to try and address with accelerated decline was the fact that you get all the Christmas tracks surging in the chart. So we don't encourage people to reset Christmas tracks, and nobody does because they’re going to be there anyway. It's worth noting that there have been a couple of cases where an old track has reached No.1 while on accelerated decline. Three Lions did it in 2018, and also Last Christmas and All I Want For Christmas Is You have both done it in the last couple of years. We know it’s a disadvantage to the track, but in those cases they were able to reach No.1 anyway.”

Are you concerned that RUTH might encourage more attempts at resets for classic catalogue tracks?

“No, I don't think so. When we introduced this five years ago, it was to address a change in the market and the way that consumption would be measured, and particularly the fact that tracks from the streaming environment stay around for longer. And since then, there has been an increasing number of viral, reactive tracks because of TikTok. We're always alert to the possibility. We'll be keeping all of this under review, all the chart rules are always being reconsidered and discussed. I wouldn't say I'm concerned as such. But I think what's likely is that we'll spend some time looking at how older tracks tend to be reset and whether this works in the best way.”

 Labels are increasingly working catalogue. Is there a greater appetite for seeing these songs in the upper reaches of the charts now?

“Possibly. But, of course, labels are focused, the industry is focused and the chart is focused on surfacing new repertoire and helping new talent rise. Obviously, we want to reflect when something viral happens as is the case with Running Up That Hill. And the great thing is that it’s on course at the moment for No.1. So accelerated decline doesn’t stop tracks from getting towards the top of the chart. The main reason why this has become a high-profile talking point is because it's right at the top. She’s in a really good position to make No.1.”

Stranger Things has been key to the success, but has it been enjoyable seeing Kate Bush react to the single’s impact in 2022?

“I’m a Kate Bush fan as well as doing the job that I do. So it would be great to see her get to No.1, it would be fantastic. It shows what the chart means to people still, artists get excited about the possibility of being at the top of the chart. It’s a great thing.”

Spotify has its own global and national charts. Do the OCC charts complement them, and can you coexist?

“Retailers have always had their own charts. Spotify’s charts reflect what's happening on Spotify and Apple Music’s charts reflect what's happening there. Amazon have charts, lots of people have charts. The thing that differentiates us, and we feel it adds to their value, is the fact that we capture sales and streams from everywhere. For about 98%, 99% of all music consumption on a daily and weekly basis, we're collecting data for all of them. So that's our big point of differentiation. Most consumers only have access to one of these services. So, yeah, I think our big point of difference that we're very proud of is the fact that we capture [sales] from everyone. It's a long way from where the chart used to be - we celebrate the 70th anniversary in November - when Percy Dickins called 20 retailers and just asked what records were doing well that week. It’s not like that any more”.

As I type, Running Up That Hill (A Deal of God) is about to hit a billion streams on Spotify. Today (17th June), it is at 997,515,448. When that figure is reset this evening (before 9 I think), I suspect it will be at around 999,000,000 streams. That means, tomorrow or Monday, this song originally released in 1985 will hit a billion streams nearly thirty-eight years later. Many people credit it solely to Stranger Things. It definitely got the song back into the world and made a new generation aware of it and Kate Bush. The fact that it has this momentum and continues to be played goes beyond a T.V. placement. It is a fabulous accessible and relatable song. The phenomenal production by Kate Bush gives it warmth, this epic stir and power. It is both intimate and anthemic. There are so many layers to the song, so it means you are hooked by the track and find something new. I love the backing vocals by Bush and her lyrics. It obviously mentions God. Many artists talk about God, but more in the context of praying to him or worship. This is different. Doing a ‘deal’ with him. I am glad that the song is called Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), as it had to be changed from A Deal with God to Running Up That Hill, as it was seen that having the word ‘God’ in the title might offend or upset more Christian and religious nations. How ridiculous!

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with her dogs, Bonnie and Clyde, in an outtake from the Hounds of Love cover shoot/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

The track’s lyrics are inspiring. They have saved lives, relationships and friendships! This selfless request to be able to swap shoes with a man, so that they can each understand one another. That message and original aspect is something that is as relevant today as ever. I will wrap up by mentioning why a billion Spotify streams is so important. First, in a feature from last year, Rolling Stone highlighted the legacy of Hounds of Love’s first single – and one of Kate Bush’s most astonishing and personal favourite songs:

“Beyond its lyrics, the song’s production has given it a lot more longevity than many other songs of the era. Bush used cutting edge technology to create it – its chugging rhythm was composed on a LinnDrum drum machine, while she used a Fairlight CMI, a synthesiser with sampling capabilities, to craft its waifish strings – but the result sounds a lot grittier than other mid-80s pop music. This sound, combined with the song’s unquantifiable pop euphoria, has made it endure in a way that many other 80s time warps haven’t.

Despite the singular idiosyncrasies of ‘Running Up That Hill’, it has been a cover favourite for other artists, who all take a unique angle on it. Placebo’s 2003 reinterpretation turned the track into a ghoulish downtempo alt-rocker with even more youthful angst than the original. Their take on the track quickly became US TV’s version of choice, largely thanks to Bush’s refusal to sanction her original song’s use in shows like The O.C. and C.S.I. Chromatics also put a suspenseful, cinematic twist on the track in 2007, with Ruth Radelet’s lo-fi vocals emitting a diamond sharpness that turns the song into a nocturnal loner anthem.

More recently, country star Jade Bird performed a piano cover of the song for Radio 1’s Live Lounge, which stripped it back to voice and keys, conjuring loss and longing in her brusker baritone. UK artist Georgia delivered a dance-inflected though otherwise faithful rendition in 2020, while just last week pop singer Kim Petras released a cover for Pride Month, and offered her own thoughts on the classic track: “It means so much and it’s so elusive. You can definitely decide what you want it to mean. For me, it’s about equality. And my timing for this was strangely perfect!”

Kate Bush herself revisited her classic anthem in 2012, recording new vocals for a version that premiered at that year’s London Olympics. While the instrumental backing track remained the same, it was pitched down to accommodate Bush’s new vocal range – her voice was deeper than it was three decades prior. And so, not for the last time, ‘Running Up That Hill’ re-entered the UK top 10 – and it would return to the charts again two years later, when Bush announced her first live performances since 1979. That time, the world didn’t just go crazy for ‘Running Up That Hill’ but the entire Kate Bush catalogue, with eight of her albums shooting up the charts simultaneously, and her website crashing from the demand for tickets. At the residency at the Hammersmith Apollo, ‘Running Up That Hill’ was the only song that had previously been performed live, such is the special place it holds for Bush and her fans.

In an interview with Open in 1985, Kate Bush said that the song was “really saying if there’s a possibility of being able to swap places with each other that they’d understand how the other one felt, that when they were saying things that weren’t meant to hurt, that they weren’t meant sincerely, that they were just misunderstood”. A cry for empathy and for understanding – these are timeless themes. Looking at how Bush views the song herself, no wonder it’s endured for so long”.

It is only a matter of a day or two before we see this iconic song hit a billion streams on Spotify. 419 songs have surpassed a billion streams on Spotify. It is not unusual for artists like Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran to get those numbers. That is based very much on their contemporary popularity and their loyal fanbase. There are very few archived and older songs that have hit a billion. It is different for Kate Bush. She has a huge fanbase but, prior to 2022, maybe a smaller TikTok audience. Fewer young people would have been aware of this 1985 song. Because legacy artists are never going to be as visible and popular in the upper echelons of Spotify’s streaming, Bush’s success will definitely open doors. These classic artists are played online, however the generations who grew up with their music experienced them physically. They played and bought CDs, cassettes and vinyl. Those songs and albums were handed down this way. Even if their songs are on Spotify, there is not that promotion and spotlight on them, as they are not new artists or chart successes like Ed Sheeran. It is a bigger deal if a song like Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) gets to number one or hits a billion streams! Stranger Things got the ball rolling, but Kate Bush’s inherent genius and appeal kept the song in people’s minds. It would not be on the brink of a billion streams if it was a weaker song that got lucky.

The combination of this big T.V. moment and the sheer excellence and emotional potency of the song is why it is going to join an elite club. Legendary female artists like Madonna and Kylie Minogue have not reached a billion streams with any of their songs. Many of Bush’s peers from the 1980s might take years for any of their songs to reach that landmark figure. The success of Kylie Minogue’s Padam Padam (which is now in the U.K. top ten) shows that TikTok is a powerful and vital source of promotion for women who, when they pass the age of forty or fifty, are excluded from radio stations’ playlists like BBC Radio 1. It proves there is this demand for an artist and song, regardless of their age, so long as the music resonates and stays in the mind! It is inspiring that a female artist from decades ago can claim such an honour, but it is also a sign that there is appetite for music from the past. A song like Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) is unique and could only come from Kate Bush! She was thrilled about the song’s success. She took to her personal website and wrote about her surprise and thanks. In fact, there were quite a few updates from Bush. Another good thing about Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)’s new success is that we are hearing more from this icon! Signs that she is thankful to her fans and everyone out there! When the track reaches a billion streams today (17th June) or tomorrow – or, to keep us waiting, Monday -, I know fans around the world will…

CELEBRATE and salute a music queen.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Second Coming: Songs from the Best Sophomore Albums Ever

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: lookstudio via Freepik

 

Second Coming: Songs from the Best Sophomore Albums Ever

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THERE is that saying in music…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Maor Attias/Pexels

when an artist releases a great debut. There is that pressure of the ‘difficult second album’. Maybe the expectation and pressure of releasing something as good or better. Sometimes, a second album can be difficult also because the debut did not do well – and the artist needs to prove themselves and do something tremendous. It is an interesting phenomenon. Many artists are finding their feet and sound on the debut, so the sophomore album is a chance for that growth and realisation. Also, a second album may just be notable because it is so fantastic (and the debut from them was also awesome). There have been some brilliant sophomore albums released through the years. I know I will miss out some obvious ones…but I wanted to showcase songs from amazing sophomore albums. Below are a selection of cuts from those legendary second albums. Some are from huge artists you will know about, but there may be a few that take you by surprise. Take a listen to them below. This is a playlist of the best album…

 PHOTO CREDIT: cottonbro studio/Pexels

SECOND comings.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Asake

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

 

Asake

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AN artists I am a little late to…

the incredible Asake released his second studio album, Work of Art, on 14th June. Following on from 2022’s acclaimed debut, Mr. Money with the Vibe, I know there is a lot of love for him in the U.K. He (Nigerian-born Ahmed Ololade) holds a lot of respect for this country. I will end the feature with a review for the fantastic Work of Art. Prior to that, I want to get to a couple of interviews and news pieces. Before that, here is some biography concerning a titanic talent who is primed for worldwide domination:

“Asake, otherwise known as MR MONEY is an Afro-pop and Afrobeat musician from Nigeria. He was born Ahmed Ololade, in the late 1990s and brought up by Yoruba parents in Lagos, Nigeria. He is a singer and songwriter.

He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the Department of Theatre and Performing Arts at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Osun State.

He rose to prominence in 2020 after his freestyle “Lady” went viral, eliciting a tremendous response from several prominent internet influencers such as Broda Shaggi, Sydney Talker, NastyBlaq, and others.

His foray into music was entirely coincidental since he began as a dancer and worked with a variety of dance organizations and theatre companies in high school before attempting his hand at music.

‘’Mr Money,’’ his first song for 2020, re-emphasizes his confidence in himself and being loyal to his identity as he makes his mark as one of the fast-rising artists in the Nigerian music scene.

His hard work and perseverance earned him a nomination in three categories for the 2020 City People Music Awards, for which he received two of the three nominations, including the title of Most Popular Song of the Year.

Asake has also been on some of the year’s most anticipated tracks, including ‘’Star’’ by Broda Shaggi and DJ Xclusive’s ‘’Gegeti.’’ He collaborated with Afrobeats powerhouse Peruzzi and Zlatan on the remix for his 2020 smash track “Mr. Money”.

A tremendous artist who has had this sharp rise and really captured the attentions of a wide and passionate fanbase, his deployment of up-tempo Afro and Amapiano-styled production, combined with his singing in Yoruba and the use of slang in his songs, has really made a big impression. SSENSE featured and interviewed Asake earlier this year in London. Here is someone very much ready for the next level of his career. Work of Art confirms him as someone everybody needs on their musical radar:

“We have to go outside first,” the 28-year-old artist commands, removing his black leather Givenchy hat. He appears relaxed but adamant, and his russet-colored eyes shine in the dimly lit belly of the house. Outside the temperature is below zero and there are traces of days-old snow settled around the building. Born Ahmed Ololade in Lagos, he’s experiencing his first British winter—and the country at large. “I’ll have to come back in the summer next time,” he says later on, laughing.

After selling out his inaugural London date in minutes, Asake announced two additional shows. After all, hits like “Terminator,” “PALAZZO,” and “Peace Be Unto You” conquered the city’s nightlife, building anticipation for his arrival. The popularity of Afrobeats is nothing new in Britain; it's the result of over a decade of communal efforts by the West African diaspora in the region to celebrate and boldly claim their countries' cultural exports, especially music. Quintessential releases like D’Banj’s “Oliver Twist” in 2013, and Yemi Alade’s “Johnny” and Fuse ODG’s “Antenna,” both in 2014, graced university rave circuits and paved the way for the next generation of Black British musical experiences. It’s this audience that helped welcome early appearances from Wizkid, Afro B, Burna Boy, Maleek Berry, Mr Eazi, and Tiwa Savage across the region.

PHOTO CREDIT: Kenny Germé

“I love the people here. I love the energy they have here,” Asake says, grateful for his ballooning global audience. “The people understand the music, what’s going on. It’s good to see.”

Asake’s debut album, Mr. Money With the Vibe, set a record upon its release last September, becoming the highest charting Nigerian debut album of all-time, when it hit No. 66 on the Billboard 200. His single “Joha” has tens of millions of streams across platforms. The numbers prove that he’s one of Afrobeats’ rising stars, his etched innings becoming more entrenched by the day. The album’s effortless amalgamation of amapiano, fuji, hip-hop, jazz, and gospel exemplifies this generation’s proclivity for genre melding. Its instinctive infusion of burgeoning sounds—already popular on the continent—and mainstays demonstrate prowess and taste that transcends generations. Mr. Money With the Vibe is successful because it is equal parts heritage and contemporary vigor. Tracks like “Joha” and “Sunmomi” strut across sticky dance floors, announcing the world's musical future, while “Ototo” relies on the legacies of Afrobeats, jazz, and classical sounds.

PHOTO CREDIT: Kenny Germé

Despite being an emergent face in Western purviews, Asake has been a creator and artist for years, fervently working on his craft. His manager, Stephen Nana, has been working with Asake since February and he’s quick to point out his ability to work under any conditions. He’s seen him through both his signing to Olamide’s YBNL independent imprint—also home to trailblazer Fireboy DML—to his larger, international signing to EMPIRE, which was announced at the top of last summer. According to Nana, Asake’s “always been ready” for the success—he just needed the visibility and platforms.

“If there’s anything you can say about Asake, he’s a sucker for recording,” Nana says. “We’ve been in London for two weeks and he’s recorded three songs. That’s someone who has hit songs, someone who should chill.”

From EP to debut album in less than 12 months, Asake is an embodiment of the contemporary musical ecosystem, where a steady flow of content is the expectation. Both his EP Ololade Asake—the singer’s first release upon signing to YBNL—and Mr. Money With the Vibe show a determination to embody what he believes he was destined for. On “Trabaye,” the opening song on the EP, Asake proclaims that it’s “time to show the world'' what he’s all about. The focus on his journey continues on “Nzaza,” from Mr. Money, where he pleads with God to allow him to home in on his grind”.

Prior to coming to a review of Work of Art, there are a couple more things I want to drop in. I think that everybody should get involved with his music. If it doesn’t sound like your thing, I would implore you to do some more digging and dedicate some time to it. It has a knack of getting under your skin, inside your heart and staying in the heart. I want to take things back a bit. This article documented Asake’s responses in a 2022  interview for Hip TV. Among other subjects covered, he was asked about the challenges he encounters as this rapid-rising voice in music:

“I think now I don't know the differences between eye service and people that are not doing eye service because now everybody loves me, to an extent. Like everybody in my house, my friends, everybody loves me. Gateman loves me. Driver loves me. If I move on the road, everybody loves me. Before I can tell when person no love me because they'll be blunt. Now everybody just loves me so I don't know. I don't even know person wey no love me. I don't know anything again. If I open my Instagram like this, love. My Snapchat, love. Even to people that used to tell me before "bro your pimples", the pimples come sexy to everybody now. My stature before, people go tell me say "bro, your stature." Now everything is just perfect. If I wear green on yellow on brown, za! Dope! I just dope for everybody eye now.

Then he was asked, "How do you plan to remain relevant?" to which he said:

Number one is I have to be humble. I hear that a lot. People that don't know me feel like I'm proud because of my name, because they call me Mr. Money and because of how I carry myself. A lot of people see it as "that one, him proud." So I think I need to be more humble to people. I don't need to prove that point though. If you see me say I proud, take it like that. When you meet me, you'll know the kind of person I am. And if you see me say I humble at the same time, gracias, God bless you. I just need to stay calm. Everything still goes to being focused.

I want people to know me as that good guy, that not too perfect guy, but everything I'm doing is awesome. For someone that like put ghetto in their brain. Like no matter anything I be, no matter the luxury car I get, no matter the dope houses I have, I still have to like let people on the street know you can make it. You can actually make it. There are so many good talents in the ghetto”.

One more thing needs covering off before I get to a hugely positive review for Work of Art. There is always criticism against some artists who speak in their native tongue or not in the English language. How translatable and understandable it is for audiences. If it is a relative obscure or unknown dialect, it can be even more alienating for some. It is always important for artists to be true to their roots and heritage. That is no different when it comes to Asake! As we read here, he has had to respond to constant criticism about the language he speaks in:

“Nigerian singer, Ahmed Ololade, popularly known as Asake, has responded to critics who have continued to drag him for always singing most of his songs in  Yoruba language, saying it was simply his choice.

The singer has come under criticism from some of his fans, who warned that he would continue to miss out on international awards and recognitions if he refused to switch from singing mostly in Yoruba to a more universally acceptable language such as English.

But Asake, who is signed to Olamide’s YBNL records, seems to be following in the footsteps of his boss, Olamide, who also sings and raps mostly in Yoruba language.

Olamide had insisted that he was not moved by international collaborations and awards, hence his reason to stick to what works for him as a musician.

While speaking about why he sings in his Yoruba language, ‘Mr Money With The Vibe’ crooner said he sings mostly in his language because it is so important to him and many people understand it.

Asake disclosed this in an interview with ABC News and monitored by R on Friday.

He explained that listeners don’t really need to understand the language before enjoying the music.

He said, “Yoruba is so important to me and there are a lot of people that understand it. And to me, the way I understand music is like it’s a feeling; sometimes you don’t even need to understand the language to enjoy the music.

I am reading a lot of love out there for Asake’s second studio album, Work of Art. His most confident and compelling release to date, he has won a load of new fans! This is someone that is impossible to ignore. The Guardian were among those to show love for one of the best albums of 2023. If you are fairly fresh to Asake such as me, then you do need to check out his new album. It is a very personal yet accessible statement:

“It’s a shift reflected in the very appearance of Work of Art: while Mr Money With the Vibe arrived with a cover photo that looked not unlike a police mugshot – albeit a police mugshot in which Asake was smiling broadly, the better to reveal his grills – Work of Art bears a photo of the singer with the same slightly goofy grin, but clad in a pinstripe suit, surrounded by paintings, one of them apparently a self-portrait somewhat in the style of Picasso.

It fetches up less than a year after his debut. A man who appeared on nine singles over the course of 2022, Asake is nothing if not productive, clearly a believer in the theory that you need a constant torrent of new material to maintain your position in an overcrowded market and a world of short attention spans. Perhaps the speed and urgency with which he makes music accounts for the fact that Work of Art doesn’t shift dramatically away from the blueprint laid out on Mr Money With the Vibe: “log drum” bass and soft, deep house-y synths derived from South African amapiano; choral backing vocals that recall a softer variant of the call-and-response approach of Yoruba fuji, the latter genre’s influence particularly pronounced on the closing Yoga; lyrics in which hip-hop slang (“shawty”, “jiggy”, “cheddar”, “beefing”, “bitches on my right side”) leaps out from the lines in Asake’s native tongue, and Nigerian brand names (not least that of the synthetic cannabinoid Colorado) mingle with Louis Vuitton and Gucci; no lead vocal allowed out before first being lightly dressed with Auto-Tune.

Or perhaps Asake is disinclined to fix something that isn’t broken, and not merely on account of his last album’s success: the constituent elements still amount to a beguilingly lovely sound, summery and appealing.

PHOTO CREDIT: Walter Banks

Certainly, it doesn’t sound like an album that has been hastily thrown together. The production is beautifully done: the moment on 2:30 when the bassline slips into a stammering pattern that underlines the rhythm of Asake’s vocal, and the delicate snare rolls that punctuate the beat of Sunshine, are small things but they suggest a pleasingly keen attention to detail. It’s also more texturally rich than a rush-job would be, the palette of supporting sounds broad enough to encompass everything from a country-ish fiddle weaving through Mogbe to dancehall-influenced interjections to the rather Dire Straits-evoking guitar that opens Sunshine.

“I wonder, I wonder, American wonder,” he keeps repeating on Awodi, not the only sign on Work of Art that, Yoruba lyrics or not, Asake is taken with western pop success. There may be a song here called Lonely at the Top, but the lyrics suggest a man unbothered by fame’s alienating effect and eager for greater celebrity.

Sunshine, meanwhile, steals its hook from the Lighthouse Family’s 1995 smash Ocean Drive. You could view that as glomming on to British and American pop’s trend for the instant sugar-rush brought on by borrowing from immediately recognisable 90s and 00s hits, but in truth, Asake’s songwriting doesn’t need added novelty value. Every song on Work of Art is melodically really strong and so effortlessly commercial-sounding that it’s hard to pick out future singles, although the building chorus of I Believe is a striking earworm.

Like all second albums that offer only minor adjustments to a debut, Work of Art leaves you wondering a little about what the future holds. But such thoughts are easy to dispel during the half-hour it plays for: you’re too busy enjoying yourself to worry, which suggests Asake’s rise is unstoppable”.

MR. MONEY is creating music that is transcending language and genre barriers. Like innovative and instinctive artists, he knows how to make his music sound fresh yet relatable. There is a familiarity that sits alongside a singular and very distinct sound. If you are unaware of Asake, it is a perfect opportunity to acquaint yourself with someone who is going to go a very long way! After only his second album, he has won the music industry’s heart. He will not stop here. He is ambitious and hungry. With that talent and passion, there are few that will deny him! The wonderful Asake is…

A music sensation.

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Follow Asake

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: The Polaris Music Prize 2023 Long List

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

IN THIS PHOTO: Toronto-based artist U.S. Girls (Meghan Remy)/PHOTO CREDIT: Emma McIntyre

 

The Polaris Music Prize 2023 Long List

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AN important award ceremony…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Alvvays/PHOTO CREDIT: Norman Wong/Courtesy Grace Jones Publicity

that recognises the best Canadian (artists born or based there) albums of the year, the Polaris Music Prize (“The Polaris Music Prize is a not-for-profit organization that annually honours and rewards artists who produce Canadian music albums of distinction. A select panel of music critics judge and award the Prize without regard to musical genre or commercial popularity”) has announced its forty-album long list. It is a varied and exceptional collection of albums that people need to know about. I am not sure how many people outside of Canada know about the Polaris Music Prize. I guess it is the equivalent of the Mercury Prize in the U.K. I am going to get to a playlist featuring a song from each of the longlisted albums soon. Before, Pitchfork reported the news about this year’s nominees and ceremony:

“The Polaris Music Prize—an annual award for Canada’s best album of the year—has announced its preliminary long list of eligible nominees today. Alvvays, Feist, U.S. Girls, Andy Shauf, Badge Époque Ensemble, and more all have albums in this year’s first round of potential nominees. See the full list of nominees below.

A group of writers, programmers, and broadcasters determines the nominees; this year’s pool collected votes from 205 people, who considered 221 albums in all. The short list of ten finalists is coming July 13, with winners announced in mid-September. The winner receives a $50,000 prize with the honor. Pierre Kwenders won the 2022 Polaris Music Prize for his album José Louis and the Paradox of Love.

Polaris Music Prize Long List 2023:

ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT - Darling The Dawn
Alvvays - Blue Rev
Aquakultre - Don't Trip
Aysanabee - Watin
Badge Époque Ensemble - Clouds Of Joy
Begonia - Powder Blue
Bibi Club - Le soleil et la mer
BIG|BRAVE - nature morte
Philippe Brach - Les gens qu’on aime
Mariel Buckley - Everywhere I Used To Be
Daniel Caesar - Never Enough
Chiiild - Better Luck In The Next Life
Feist - Multitudes
Debby Friday - Good Luck
Gayance - Mascarade
Ghostkeeper - Multidimensional Culture
Home Front - Games of Power
JayWood - Slingshot
Khotin - Release Spirit
Thierry Larose - Sprint!
Murray Lightburn - Once Upon A Time In Montreal
Isabella Lovestory - Amor Hardcore
Dan Mangan - Being Somewhere
N NAO - L'eau et les rêves
Tami Neilson - Kingmaker
Eliza Niemi - Staying Mellow Blows
Nico Paulo - Nico Paulo
Planet Giza - Ready When You Are
poolblood - mole
Jessie Reyez - Yessie
The Sadies - Colder Streams
Jairus Sharif - Water & Tools
Andy Shauf - Norm
Dylan Sinclair - No Longer In The Suburbs
Snotty Nose Rez Kids - I'm Good, HBU?
Alexandra Stréliski - Néo-Romance
U.S. Girls - Bless This Mess
Witch Prophet - Gateway Experience
Yoo Doo Right - A Murmur, Boundless to the East
Zoon - Bekka Ma'iingan”

To mark an amazing long list for this year’s Polaris Music Prize, I have selected a song from each of the nominated albums and combined them in a playlist. There will be artists and albums you might not have heard of. Recognising phenomenal music from Canadian artists, take a listen to the playlist. I think that more eyes should be on…

THE esteemed Polaris Music Prize.

FEATURE: Dead EIRE: Why I Fear Shocking Diversity Figures Relating to Irish Radio Will Be Repeated in the U.K.

FEATURE:

 

 

Dead EIRE

IN THIS PHOTO: Dublin-born Sinead O'Brien released her amazing debut album, Time Bend and Break the Bower, in 2021/PHOTO CREDIT: Holly Whitaker

 

Why I Fear Shocking Diversity Figures Relating to Irish Radio Will Be Repeated in the U.K.

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I must start out…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Denise Chaila is an Irish and Zambian rapper, singer, poet, Grime and Hip-Hop artist based in Limerick, who released the Go Bravely L.P. in 2020/PHOTO CREDIT: Róisín Murphy O’Sullivan

by giving my thanks to Linda Coogan Byrne (she is a DEI Expert/Data Analyst/Equality Campaigner for Why Not Her?) and Why Not Her? for alerting me (and so many others) to the inequalities on Irish radio. It seems, even at a time when they are ruling and producing such amazing music, Irish women and artists of colour are still struggling to make it onto playlists of Irish stations. I shall come to that report in a minute. It is shocking but sadly not surprising. I am going to end by voicing my fears that the findings will be repeated in the U.K. If you think about the wealth of music in Ireland from some amazing women and artists of colour, why is there this gulf and gap?! I am going to focus on women for my thoughts, as I think we have less of an issue with racial diversity on the airwaves. Even if big stations like BBC Radio 2 and Capital do not feature a tonne of racially diverse music, there are other stations who are doing a hell of a lot better. I shall talk about that in a future feature. If BBC Radio 6 Music is trying its utmost (thought not quite there) ensuring that there is a fair gender balance on its playlists, they are in a minority. Sourcing from the Irish Times a damning and comprehensive new report highlights some figures that should shame and disgrace radio stations across Ireland. It is said that only one in every four songs on Irish radio is by an Irish artist. Just six percent of the top 100 were by Irish female artists:

“Irish women musicians and artists of colour are still having a much harder time getting airplay on Irish radio, research from Why Not Her? shows.

Every June, for four years now, Why Not Her? – a volunteer collective of speakers and media, communication and diversity and inclusion experts – reports on the top 100 most played songs on Irish radio and also the top 20 playlisted songs by domestic Irish artists. This year’s data reveals international acts and white, male artists continue to dominate the airwaves. Only the national broadcaster’s RTÉ Radio 1 has bucked the trend by consistently highlighting artists of both genders almost equally on its playlists over the last four years.

A lack of airplay has a direct impact on artists’ livelihoods – the music radio stations play largely determines which artists get signed to record labels or are asked to perform at festivals and concerts. Musicians who are not playlisted are far less likely to be able to make a living.

The latest Why Not Her? reports on the top 100 and top 20 playlisted songs which show musicians born or based in Ireland who are women or people of colour still get less airtime. Only 6 per cent of the top 100 songs on Irish radio were by Irish female artists (including collaborations with male artists), down from 13 per cent in 2022.

Between Jan and June 2023, international artists got 78 per cent of the airtime on all Irish radio and domestic artists got 22 per cent (including international and domestic collaborations at 3 per cent).

Most of the artists played in the top 100 in 2023 were white (71 per cent). People of colour accounted for 19 per cent and collaborations 10 per cent. Phil Lynott is the only solo or lead vocalist male artist of colour featured in this year’s report (excluding RTÉ Digital station Pulse), despite Ireland’s music scene having an abundance of black male artists.

When you drill down to the top 20, things are even worse – a number of local radio stations had playlists that were between 95 per cent and 100 per cent dominated by white men. Last year, RTÉ 2FM’s top 20 included 80 per cent male artists and this hasn’t changed. Other parts of RTÉ do better, however, notably RTÉ Radio 1, whose top 20 playlist was 60 per cent female. In its public service statement 2022, RTÉ states: “The public are clear they want an independent RTÉ that facilitates a progressive and inclusive society.” Clearly, there is work to be done on the playlists but at least RTÉ has a strategy and a publicly stated plan.

IN THIS PHOTO: RTÉ's Choice Music Prize for Album of the Year winner (for her debut album, If My Wife New I'd be Dead) CMAT has expserienced a lack of signifiant airtime on Irish radio/PHOTO CREDIT: Kieran Frost/Redferns

As the data shows, white Irish men have less problem getting air play. Unfortunately, their female counterparts are not always given the same opportunities.

Internationally successful artists or those also signed to labels that you don’t hear on Irish radio’s heavy rotation playlists include CMAT, Pillow Queens, Ruthanne (who has been two-time Grammy nominated for her work with John Legend and Diana Ross) and others. They’ve succeeded despite the lack of support from some Irish radio stations”.

Minister Catherine Martin and the new regulatory authority, Coimisiún na Meán, must determine if radio stations’ playlist choices are in the public interest. The Government needs to ensure that the voices and talents of this generation of women and artists of colour are heard, as four years of data has not changed their behaviour, beyond tokenistic competitions and statements. We would, however, suggest the Government simply insists that the terms of the Broadcasting Act be upheld. They include Section 66, which says, “The extent to which the applicant will create ... new opportunities for talent” and “catering for a wide range of tastes including those of minority interests”.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Dubliner Imelda May received fewer than one hundred plays on radio the week her album (2021’s 11 Past the Hour) went to number one/PHOTO CREDIT: Bill Waters

It is not enough for Irish stations to say they are doing all they can and there is not enough choice when it comes to women and artists of colour. Both assumptions are false and insulting! Look to the U.K. and, when it comes to women, I think most major stations have very uneven bills. I listen to BBC Radio 1 and 2. Neither do a particularly good job at making sure that enough female artists appear on their playlists. I think the situation has been better this year than last, but there is not an even split at all. I think there are even more incredible female artists than male that could feature on the playlist. Whereas Irish stations are not featuring homegrown female talent enough, I think the same can be said here in the U.K. Think about the international options, and it is staggering that stations here have any excuses. What is the delay when it comes to ensuring women across most genres are represented?! If we think of festivals, their excuse (for not including as many women as men) is that there is a pipeline issue. That not enough women are being signed and getting the same care and marketing as men – so they are not festival-ready and are maybe too busy touring to be able to do festivals. From rising artists to established acts, there is no shortage of choice when it comes to women. Again, if you think of demographics and genres, women are not lagging behind men! Any station in the U.K. could easily balance their playlists. It is not a case of there being no choice or the listeners tuning over. It is simply those higher up not doing enough or being bothered to change!

There is also ageism against women in music, which means that those of a certain age are relegated and restricted to one or two stations. It is baffling why, year after year, there is such slow progress. Or none at all! No radio station is bound when it comes to gender representation. They can play more female artists than make if they wish. They are not honed and restricted in terms of genre as much as you’d imagine either. Audiences have not expressly stated they prefer male artists. There is this perception that, by playing too many female artists, that might put people off. Something about their vocals and sound that would cause listeners to react negatively. There is sexism when it comes to how a woman’s voice is often described. Certain female broadcasters are attacked or demeaned because of their gender. Not seen as commending as men. Many might comment that they are too chatty or shrill. There is something in that which seems to apply to music. At least when it comes to station bosses. That feeling that women are inferior somehow or their voices are not as powerful or diverse as men’s. Whatever stupid and sexist excuses they have up their sleeves, I have got a horrid feeling that reports about U.K. radio stations will see yet more gender inequality!

How long can stations go on ignoring women?! It is not good enough to read reports, shrug shoulders and half-heartedly commit to change and improvement. I don’t think that there has been significant recognition and reaction in years. The more and more incredible female artists that come through, the worse it seems to get! Many are relying on social media platforms like TikTok to get an audience and their music heard. Radio will never lose its influence but, when looking out to women in music and getting their music heard, stations need to get their act together! That report about Irish stations from Why Not Her? has highlighted a huge discrimination and sexism. Artists of colour also being overlooked. Let’s hope that the statistics and words from them provokes and prompts reappropriation. There is a part of me that feels station executives will merely disregard it and carry on as normal. It is a crying shame when we consider the crop of female artists and what magnificent music they give to the world! I do have fears for the future. If stations are wilfully and ignorantly excluding women from their playlists, that is likely to discourage so many from getting into the industry. We could lose so much talent because of this! I already know of female artists who are struggling because they cannot get played on stations. Reports like the recent one concerning Irish imbalance should open eyes and shock. It needs to be met with true commitment and clear and precise plan of how things will be fixed. As it stands right now, so many radio stations are…

LETTING down the music industry.

FEATURE: Inspired By… Part One Hundred and One: Paul McCartney

FEATURE:

 

 

Inspired By…

IN THIS PHOTO: Paul McCartney in 2021/PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

  

Part One Hundred and One: Paul McCartney

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I am not sure whether I have…

 IN THIS PHOTO: From left: Heather, Paul, and Linda McCartney, with Stella, aged four, and Mary, six, at home in London on 4th April, 1976/PHOTO CREDIT: David Montgomery/Getty Images

included Paul McCartney in Inspired By… I have definitely featured The Beatles, but maybe not Paul McCartney. In any case, if I have, he is getting another outing! The reason behind this is the fact that his birthday falls on 18th June. The legend is worth celebrating, so I have put together a playlist of songs from artists definitely influenced by Paul McCartney. That or they have been compared to him. Before that, and as I do in these features, it is to AllMusic for detailed biography about the extraordinary and peerless Paul McCartney:

“Out of all the former Beatles, Paul McCartney by far had the most successful solo career, maintaining a constant presence in the British and American charts during the 1970s and '80s. In America alone, he had nine number one singles and seven number one albums during the first 12 years of his solo career, and in his native United Kingdom, his record was nearly as impressive. McCartney's hot streak began in 1970, when he became the first Beatle to leave the group. A little more than a year after the Beatles' breakup, McCartney formed Wings with his wife Linda and Moody Blues guitarist Denny Laine, and the group remained active for the next ten years, racking up a string of hit albums, singles, and tours in the meantime. Wings disbanded in 1980, but McCartney stayed near the top of the charts over the next five years, thanks in part to a couple big duets with Michael Jackson. McCartney revived his solo career in 1989 via Flowers in the Dirt and its accompanying international tour, setting a template he would follow into the new millennium, when he'd support his records by playing concerts around the world. Between these massive endeavors, McCartney pursued other projects, including classical compositions, an electronica outfit with Youth called the Fireman, and overseeing archival projects such as the Beatles' Anthology series. As the 21st century rolled on, McCartney continued to take risks, including recording an album of standards from the Great American Songbook and collaborating with rapper Kanye West, proving that there was no area of popular music he couldn't touch.

Like John Lennon and George Harrison, McCartney began exploring creative avenues outside the Beatles during the late '60s, but where his bandmates released their own experimental records, McCartney confined himself to writing and producing for other artists, with the exception of his 1966 soundtrack to The Family Way. Following his marriage to Linda Eastman on March 12, 1969, McCartney began working at his home studio on his first solo album. He released McCartney in April 1970, two weeks before the Beatles' Let It Be was scheduled to hit the stores. Prior to the album's release, he'd announced that the Beatles were breaking up, against the wishes of the other members. As a result, the tensions between him and the other three members, particularly Harrison and Lennon, increased and he earned the ill will of many critics. Nevertheless, McCartney became a hit, spending three weeks at the top of the American charts. Early in 1971, he returned with "Another Day," which became his first hit single as a solo artist. It was followed several months later by Ram, another homemade collection, this time featuring the contributions of his wife, Linda.

By the end of 1971, the McCartneys had formed Wings, which was intended to be a full-fledged recording and touring band. Former Moody Blues guitarist Denny Laine and drummer Denny Seiwell became the group's other members, and Wings released their first album, Wild Life, in December 1971. Wild Life was greeted with poor reviews and was a relative flop. McCartney and Wings, which now featured former Grease Band guitarist Henry McCullough, spent 1972 as a working band, releasing three singles -- the protest "Give Ireland Back to the Irish," the reggae-fied "Mary Had a Little Lamb," and the rocking "Hi Hi Hi." Red Rose Speedway followed in the spring of 1973, and while it received weak reviews, it became his second American number one album. Later in 1973, Wings embarked on their first British tour, at the conclusion of which McCullough and Seiwell left the band. Prior to their departure, McCartney's theme to the James Bond movie Live and Let Die became a Top Ten hit in the U.S. and U.K. That summer, the remaining Wings proceeded to record a new album in Nigeria. Released late in 1973, Band on the Run was simultaneously McCartney's best-reviewed album and his most successful, spending four weeks at the top of the U.S. charts and eventually going triple-platinum.

Following the success of Band on the Run, McCartney formed a new version of Wings with guitarist Jimmy McCulloch and drummer Geoff Britton. The new lineup was showcased on the 1974 British single "Junior's Farm" and the 1975 hit album Venus and Mars. At the Speed of Sound followed in 1976; it was the first Wings record to feature songwriting contributions by the other bandmembers. Nevertheless, the album became a monster success on the basis of two McCartney songs, "Silly Love Songs" and "Let 'Em In." Wings supported the album with their first international tour, which broke many attendance records and was captured on the live triple-album Wings Over America (1976). After the tour was completed, Wings rested a bit during 1977, as McCartney released an instrumental version of Ram under the name Thrillington, and produced Denny Laine's solo album Holly Days. Later that year, Wings released "Mull of Kintyre," which became the biggest-selling British single of all time, selling over two million copies. Wings followed "Mull of Kintyre" with London Town in 1978, which became another platinum record. After its release, McCulloch left the band to join the re-formed Small Faces, and Wings released Back to the Egg in 1979. Though the record went platinum, it failed to produce any big hits. Early in 1980, McCartney was arrested for marijuana possession at the beginning of a Japanese tour; he was imprisoned for ten days and then released, without any charges being pressed.

Wings effectively broke up in the wake of McCartney's Japanese bust, although its official dissolution was not announced until April 27, 1981, when Denny Laine left the band. Back in England, McCartney recorded McCartney II, which was a one-man band effort like his solo debut. Ironically, the hit single associated with the album was a live take of the song "Coming Up" that had been recorded in Glasgow with Wings in December 1979 and was intended to be the B-side of the 45, with the solo studio recording as the A-side. DJs preferred the live version, however, and it went on to hit number one. Later in 1980, McCartney entered the studio with Beatles producer George Martin to make Tug of War.

Released in the spring of 1982, Tug of War received the best reviews of any McCartney record since Band on the Run and spawned the number one single with "Ebony and Ivory," a duet with Stevie Wonder that became McCartney's biggest American hit. In 1983, McCartney sang on "The Girl Is Mine," the first single from Michael Jackson's blockbuster album Thriller. In return, Jackson duetted with McCartney on "Say Say Say," the first single from McCartney's 1983 album Pipes of Peace and the last number one single of his career. The relationship between Jackson and McCartney soured considerably when Jackson bought the publishing rights to the Beatles' songs out from underneath McCartney in 1985.

McCartney directed his first feature film in 1984 with Give My Regards to Broad Street. While the soundtrack, which featured new songs and re-recorded Beatles tunes, was a hit, generating the hit single "No More Lonely Nights," the film was a flop, earning terrible reviews. The following year, he had his last American Top Ten with the theme to the Chevy Chase/Dan Aykroyd comedy Spies Like Us. Press to Play (1986) received some strong reviews but was another flop. In 1988, he recorded a collection of rock & roll oldies called Choba B CCCP for release in the U.S.S.R.; it was given official release in the U.S. and U.K. in 1991. For 1989's Flowers in the Dirt, McCartney co-wrote several songs with Elvis Costello; the pair also wrote songs for Costello's Spike, including the hit "Veronica." Flowers in the Dirt received the strongest reviews of any McCartney release since Tug of War, and was supported by an extensive international tour, which was captured on the live double-album Tripping the Live Fantastic (1990). For the tour, McCartney hired guitarist Robbie McIntosh and bassist Hamish Stuart, who would form the core of his band through the remainder of the '90s.

Early in 1991, McCartney released another live album in the form of Unplugged, which was taken from his appearance on MTV's acoustic concert program of the same name; it was the first Unplugged album to be released. Later that year, he unveiled Liverpool Oratorio, his first classical work. Another pop album, Off the Ground, followed in 1993, but failed to generate any big hits, despite McCartney's successful supporting tour. Following the completion of the New World tour, he released another live album, Paul Is Live, in December 1993. In 1994, he released an ambient techno album under the pseudonym the Fireman. McCartney premiered his second classical piece, The Leaf, early in 1995 and then began hosting a Westwood One radio series called Oobu Joobu. But his primary activity in 1995, as well as 1996, was the Beatles' Anthology, which encompassed a lengthy video documentary of the band and the multi-volume release of Beatles outtakes and rarities. After Anthology was completed, he released Flaming Pie in summer 1997. A low-key, largely acoustic affair that had some of the same charm of his debut, Flaming Pie was given the strongest reviews McCartney had received in years and was a modest commercial success, debuting at number two on the U.S. and U.K. charts; it was his highest American chart placing since he left the Beatles. Flaming Pie certainly benefited from the success of Anthology, as did McCartney himself -- only a few months before the release of the album in 1997, he received a Knighthood.

On April 17, 1998, Linda McCartney died after a three-year struggle with breast cancer. A grieving Paul kept a low profile in the months to follow, but finally returned in fall 1999 with Run Devil Run, a collection that primarily included cover songs. The electronica-based Liverpool Sound Collage followed a year later, and the pop album Driving Rain -- a successor, of sorts, to Flaming Pie -- came a year after that. The live album Back in the U.S. appeared in America in 2002 with the slightly different international edition, Back in the World, following soon after.

McCartney's next studio project included sessions with super-producer Nigel Godrich, the results of which appeared on the mellow Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard, released in late 2005. The album reached the Top Ten in more than a dozen countries, including the U.S. and U.K. McCartney performed every instrument (not including the strings) on 2007's David Kahne-produced Memory Almost Full, a bold but whimsical collection of new songs, some of which had been recorded before the Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard sessions. It too reached the Top Ten across the world. A live CD/DVD set, Good Evening New York City, appeared in 2009. The following year, McCartney kicked off an extensive reissue campaign with a box set of Band on the Run, and he supported the reissue with an American tour in the summer of 2011.

Later in 2011, McCartney released his first ballet, Ocean's Kingdom, and less than a year later followed with another first -- his first collection of pre-WWII standards. The latter work, titled Kisses on the Bottom, topped the U.S. jazz charts and reached the Top Five in seven different countries. His busy year continued during the summer, when he ended the opening ceremony of London's 2012 Olympics with a set that included a customary extended version of "Hey Jude." A surprising cap to 2012 came that December when he appeared on-stage with the surviving ex-members of Nirvana as part of a benefit concert for victims of Hurricane Sandy.

The year 2013 brought recording sessions with four of McCartney's favorite producers: Paul Epworth, Ethan Johns, Giles Martin, and Mark Ronson. His initial intention had been to hold trial sessions with each producer, aiming to select one of them to oversee the whole of his next album. However, each of them had a hand in producing New, his first album of original material in six years, which appeared that October. New debuted in the Top Ten in more than a dozen countries and McCartney supported the album over the next two years with a series of international tours. In 2015, he continued his ongoing Paul McCartney Archive Collection with deluxe reissues of Tug of War and Pipes of Peace. The next summer, he released Pure McCartney, a personally curated overview of his solo career available in two separate incarnations: a double-disc set and a four-disc box. Flowers in the Dirt arrived in early 2017 as part of the singer's Archive Collection. In September 2018, he delivered the Greg Kurstin-produced Egypt Station, his 17th solo album; it was preceded by the singles "I Don't Know," "Come on to Me," and "Fuh You." Egypt Station became McCartney's first number one album in the U.S. since Tug of War; in the U.K. it debuted at three.

A couple of non-LP tracks from the Egypt Station sessions appeared in 2019, then McCartney released an Archive edition of Flaming Pie in July 2020. The bigger news for 2020 was the recording and release of McCartney III, an album McCartney wrote and recorded on his own during the global lockdown of 2020. McCartney III appeared on December 18, 2020, giving McCartney his first number one album in the U.K. since Flowers in the Dirt; it debuted at two in the U.S. and spawned a 2021 album of "reinterpretations, remixes, and covers" called McCartney III Imagined”.

To mark the upcoming eighty-first birthday of Paul McCartney on 18th June, below are songs from artists who have been influenced by him. McCartney’s impact and importance will continue for generations more. He is the greatest musician ever, so it is no wonder artists have been linked to him. Whether part of The Beatles, Wings or as a solo act, his catalogue is the finest and most diverse in all of music. It only leaves me to wish Paul McCartney…

A very happy birthday.

FEATURE: George Michael at Sixty: Three Essential Solo Albums from the Icon

FEATURE:

 

 

George Michael at Sixty

  

Three Essential Solo Albums from the Icon

_________

I am going to do…

 IN THIS PHOTO: George Michael in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: John Swannell

a career-spanning playlist nearer the time. George Michael is sixty 25th June. We lost the legend on Christmas Day, 2016. As a member of Wham! and a solo artist, he left behind so much magnificent music! Undoubtably one of the most important artists ever,  his voice was beyond compare. There was nobody in the music industry quite like him! I know there will be a lot of celebration and remembrance of Michael when we mark his sixtieth birthday on 25th June. In the first feature, I highlight three essential George Michael albums everyone needs to own. I will include some Wham! music in the playlist feature, but for now, I am turning my attention to Michael’s solo work. His fifth and final solo album, Patience, was released in 2004. It is a shame that we did not get a sixth album from the master! To mark his upcoming sixtieth birthday, below are three solo albums from George Michael that…

EVERYONE needs to own and play.

__________

Faith

Release Date: 30th October, 1987

Producer: George Michael

Labels: Columbia/Epic

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/413315?ev=rb

Standout Tracks: Father Figure/I Want Your Sex (Parts 1 & 2)/Monkey

Review:

“In 1986, George Michael wandered deep into himself. He realized that, at some point in the five years he had recorded and toured with his bandmate Andrew Ridgeley in Wham!, he had completely lost track of who he was. With Wham!, Michael had achieved his childhood dream of becoming unreasonably famous; he glided across stages, and fans’ eyes waded in his direction. His enormous blonde hair looked like a work of relief sculpture, and his voice pulsed with brightness, like a lightbulb about to burst in its socket. He was one of the world’s biggest pop stars by the time his retro-pop duo fell apart; he was also 23, only just beginning to figure out who he was and what kind of music he wanted to make.

Michael felt isolated, anxious over what to do next—the future seemed elusive and unstable, as precarious as a song’s placement on the pop charts. He was sinking into what he would later characterize as an eight-month long-depression, wondering if he even wanted to return to music. In the spring of ’86, two months before the final Wham! Show at London’s Wembley Stadium, Michael released a solo single called “A Different Corner.” Accompanied by a stark, black-and-white video, it was a sad and strange song that seemed to disappear as it happened, the brief snowflakes of synth and Michael’s tenor evaporating into air. It’s as gorgeous as it is uncertain of itself, quietly stealing back every emotion it offers, leaving behind a crumpled blankness. “The problem was just that I had developed a character for the outside world that wasn’t me,” he said. “So I made the decision to uncreate the person I had created and become more real.”

A little over a year later, he drew a thick, Princely scribble in empty space. It would become the first single for his solo debut, 1987’s Faith, a song called “I Want Your Sex.” A near-total photonegative of “A Different Corner”’s lustless vacuum, built out of the boiling dark of the clubs Michael loved to dance in, “I Want Your Sex” employed a sudden fluency with sexuality to define his post-boy band maturity. He fastidiously programmed every detail of the song—even the mummified sub-rhythms that kick like pistons underneath it, which were produced by an error in a synthesizer pattern from a different track. Michael was so charmed by the accidental thicket of snares and kicks that he built “I Want Your Sex” directly on top of it. “I’ve danced to records like this for years and I buy records like this all the time but I’ve never really had the courage to make one,” he said.

The song was immediately banned by the BBC and strategically suppressed by radio, but it eventually blossomed as a single on MTV once Michael added a safe sex disclaimer to the beginning of the video. The clip focused almost inflexibly on Michael’s face, shadowed by an unfocused haze of stubble, singing in a frayed sub-frequency of his former boyish tenor, all interchanged with shots of body parts: legs walking in a garter belt, water cascading over feet and torsos, Michael writing “EXPLORE MONOGAMY” in lipstick on his then-girlfriend Kathy Jeung’s thigh and back.

In interviews about “I Want Your Sex” and its video, Michael always redirected the subject toward monogamy. He didn’t want the song to be misconstrued as an untamed celebration of casual sex in the midst of the AIDS epidemic; at the time, monogamy seemed to Michael not only a thoughtful response to AIDS but dimensionally sexy in and of itself. “I wanted to write a song which sounded dirty but which was applicable to someone that I really cared about,” he told Interview in 1988. “I mean, it is the perfect situation to really love someone to death and to want to rip their clothes off at the same time, isn’t it?” But it’s a song so sunken into its desire for someone that Michael’s cautious exploration of safe sex gets lost among the chorus’ seductive synth wobbles and the liquid blend of lust and angst with which he sings the word “sex.”

Michael himself seemed unable to glimpse “I Want Your Sex” beyond its controversy, already looking to exchange it for a different song, a different impression, a different corner of himself to exhibit to the world. In the video for his next single, Faith’s title track, a jukebox needle skates away from “Sex” and gently lowers onto the surface of a new disc. The chorus of an old Wham! single, “Freedom,” bruises slowly into the silence, played on a Yamaha DX7 synth tuned to its “cathedral organ” setting.

The melody is funereal instead of flourescent, as if Michael were entombing his teen-pop past in the bellows of a vast pipe organ. It’s among the first instances of Michael commenting on his music as he made it, embedding his songs with footnotes and reprised themes that connected with his early career. Michael became fascinated with continuity, with how things could change when they were revisited, sometimes revising his songs whole-cloth (“Freedom ’90”) or lightly modernizing them for a new decade (“I’m Your Man ’96”), making his form of pop music a rich and intertextual network of references and repeating motifs.

Out of the deep mournful glow of the organ, emerges… an acoustic guitar? Strumming the Bo Diddley beat? It sounds almost frail playing against a rhythmic skeleton of snaps, handclaps, and whispers across the snare rim. The camera drifts over Michael’s new image: leather jacket shrugging loosely from his shoulders, his gaze buried somewhere beneath impenetrable sunglasses, pretending to strum a sunburst archtop guitar.

In 1987, popular rock music was trying fill arenas with enormous waves of echo; “Faith”’s chords sounded crisp as the blue jeans pasted to Michael’s ass in the video. He was employing rock as a texture, as a signifier of history and depth, absorbing the guitar rhythms of the ’50s and ’60s just as he embedded the drums of the Motown songs from his youth in tracks like Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” It made Michael’s work as serious as it was playful, taking established songforms and converting them into modern pop.

The rest of Faith embodies this approach, a montage of different colors and tempos from pop’s unabridged past—the fluttering rockabilly of the title track, the deluxe synthetic bath of “Father Figure,” and the hardboiled synth funk of “I Want Your Sex” all occur on the same side of an album, like alternate histories talking to each other through time, all before “One More Try” wafts in like wind through an empty cathedral” – Pitchfork

Key Cut: Faith

Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1

Standout Tracks: Praying for Time/Cowboys and Angels/Mothers Pride

Review:

“AMONG THE DISTINCTIONS he has gathered along the slick road to pop superstardom, George Michael found himself the object of a funny Saturday Night Live skit a while back, when Dana Carvey lampooned the famous hip shakes in Michael’s “Faith” video. It was a parody that stuck. Picking up his Grammy for Faith, which sold 15 million copies, Michael tried to be a sport about it — and about the idea that his videos and his ubiquitous butt had rendered his recordings moot. Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1 (Vol. 2, said to be more dance oriented, will follow next June) is designed to turn this impression around. For the most part the album succeeds in its effort to establish Michael’s seriouness and deliver him from caricature.

“Everybody’s got to sell/But when you shake your ass/They notice fast,” Michael sings on “Freedom 90.” This is a far cry from the George Michael who, with sidekick Andrew Ridgeley, unabashedly titled a Wham! album Make It Big and scored a Number One U.S. single in 1985 with “Careless Whisper,” a danceable ballad dying to sound soulful. By the time he released Faith, in 1987, Michael seemed to want more from his music than just sales. So, for his crisp productions of “Faith” and “Father Figure,” for example, he concocted silken rockabilly riffs and very simple, effective Middle Eastern bridges in such a way that both white and black kids couldn’t miss — or resist — them.

He was a pop-craft natural, even though memories of “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” — Wham!’s first U.S. smash hit and a savage test of one’s sense of humor — clung to Faith, as well as to the hit “I Want Your Sex,” his provocateur move. Even if his strong, smooth voice sometimes seemed as concerned with set decoration as with the dramatic situations in his songs, Michael proved on his first solo album that he could write and produce music — specifically, a deceptively simple kind of professional, hummable pop.

Michael, like Lionel Richie, has a definitive Eighties pop sensibility — Sixties-style virtuosity or Seventies studio obsessiveness isn’t for him — and on Listen Without Prejudice he broadens and refines it. With his opening songs — “Praying for Time,” the lead single and a distraught look at the world’s astounding woundedness, and “Freedom 90,” which buoys dance beats with revitalizing gospel choruses — Michael challenges and shares confessional secrets with his audience.

In “Praying for Time,” testifying against slow descending chords, Michael offers the healing passage of time as the only balm for physical and emotional hunger, poverty, hypocrisy and hatred. In “Freedom 90,” as the accumulation of syncopated accents signals compulsion as much as it spices the groove, Michael wonders whether, in the past, “it was enough for me/To win the race?/A prettier face/Brand new clothes and a big fat place/On your rock and roll TV.” The tune, in which Michael eventually asserts that “today the way I play the game is not the same,” tumbles out as the dramatic shoptalk of a pop idol ready to trade in his sunglasses for some manner of rock & roll respect.

The rest of Listen Without Prejudice demonstrates exactly what Michael has in mind. Although his bigger ballads, like “Mothers Pride,” a portrayal of sons perpetually learning the ways of war from their fathers, and a live, churchy version of Stevie Wonder’s “They Won’t Go When I Go,” push too hard for momentousness, Michael shines when he puts his new attitude into more modest practice. “Cowboys and Angels,” a dreamy, if blue, romantic affair that glides along on international rhythms, and “Soul Free,” an uptempo groove that uses Motown woodwinds, are as seamless, balanced and complete in themselves as Michael wants them to be. This is also true of his singing on the album, at its best. When, to a straightforward bass line and simple guitar strumming, Michael assumes the passion of Bono and engages the hypnotic melody of “Waiting for That Day” — a song with a brokenhearted narrator who finds that his memory serves him “far too well” — he fashions just the kind of bold pop with rock and soul overtones that Listen Without Prejudice aims for.

And that Michael now seems completely committed to. This time around, George Michael has begun to think that he should provide something to his fans beyond fun and games. Fun and games at Michael’s level needn’t be underrated — as he sings on “Freedom 90,” such stratagems happened to yield a captivating sound for millions of people who like to listen to the radio. On this anxiously titled album, though, he’s operating from the proposition that a damn good sound is only the starting point for how much pop music can achieve. If Listen Without Prejudice starts a trend among Michael’s pop generation to move beyond image to integrity, it could make “rock and roll TV” sound more consistently and convincingly like music” – Rolling Stone

Key Cut: Freedom! '90

Older

Release Date: 13th May, 1996

Producers: George Michael/Jon Douglas

Labels: Virgin/Aegean/DreamWorks

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/george-michael/older

Standout Tracks: Jesus to a Child/Older/You Have Been Loved

Review:

“THERE'S DANGER in emotional ties. George should know that. After all, he was the one who told us so in the first place, way back when life was one big swimming pool full of bleach-blonde soul girls desperate to get their hands on the shuttlecock lurking within those shorts of his.

How times change. Six years and one gruelling court case on from the largely fab 'Listen Without Prejudice Volume One' (home of the almighty 'Freedom '90', remember), and George is more downbeat than ever. The sleeve, a sombre silver'n'grey affair, has one side of George's face swathed in shadow like a man deprived of one eye, while the music, aside from the occasional commercial glitz, is bedtime sophisto-soul; the sort of thing that could convince any pretty girl from Hollywood to High Wycombe to slip between the sheets should the evening have exuded the necessary amount of, erm, sophistication.

There it is, that word again. Because George, for all the angst he so brazenly wears on his sleeve, remains the embodiment of suburban wish-fulfilment. Times may have changed, and his fans may have dipped into the real world, full of the dreary stuff ­ responsibilities, families, getting older ­ but the music still fits the mood like a glove; air-conditioned, gossamer-lite, upwardly mobile.

Lyrically, George is still fighting off maturity with all (young) guns blazing. "My friends got their ladies/They're all having babies/But I just want to have some fun!" he declares on the impeccable 'Fast Love'. On 'Move On' he even invokes the chinking-glass intro of 'Club Tropicana', but makes sure that it leads into a gorgeous, jazz club schmooze, just what his audience are after these days. No more passing out under tables at Club 18-Dirty, George seems to be saying. Let's do it the classier way; dining out at Mezzo, a cool-eyed seduction at his place and then, well, breakfast at Tiffany's.

Upbeat the rest of it is not. 'Jesus To A Child' we know about, while the eerily arabesque 'The Strangest Thing' and 'To Be Forgiven' find George lost in a flood of distant, mystical flutes and even the faint twang of sitar. Cool.

He has his customary dig at the fame game in 'Star People' ("Who gives a f­­ about your problems, darling?" George growls cattily, the victim of one too many glittery ligs) while the final track, 'Free', shimmers to a close wordless, before George, the sweetie, whispers, "It feels good to be free" in its dying seconds.

What more could you ask for? Simply Red may go for the jugular every time with their unnervingly upbeat pop razzle, but George is just too much of an old soul boy smoothie for that. He knows that the art is to never look like you're trying; no matter what the provocation, no matter how frustrating the six-year hiatus might have been.

The real return of the mack then, despite the beardy haircut and the fact he's still so touchy about bad press, NME had to buy their own copy of 'Older' to hear it.

He really needn't have worried. 9/10” – NME

Key Cut: Fastlove, Pt. 1

FEATURE: Second Spin: Dannii Minogue - Neon Nights

FEATURE:

 

 

Second Spin

 

Dannii Minogue - Neon Nights

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THIS album choice is quite relevant…

and timely, as Dannii Minogue’s 2003 album, Neon Nights, is twenty. There is an anniversary/reissue release that you can order. Originally released on 17th March, 2003, this was Minogue’s fourth studio album. Reaching the top ten in the U.K. and the top twenty-five in her native Australia, it seems like a good moment to put it back int eh spotlight! I would urge people to buy a vinyl copy of this album and give it a spin. Although it was applauded and celebrated in 2003, I am not sure how much it is played today. Do you hear tracks from this excellent album on the radio?! Maybe you will more now. Dannii Minogue has recently released We Could Be the One. A chart success that has sat alongside her sister Kylie’s Padam Padam, the Minogue sisters are in peak form! Dannii Minogue also presents the reality dating show, I Kissed a Boy. I always hear Dannii Minogue spoken about in comparison to her sister, but she is her own artist that does not copy or replicate what Kylie does. There is a difference. Neon Nights is an album that everyone should check out. This is what Rough Trade say about the new reissue of one of the best albums of 2003:

“First released in 2003, Neon Nights perfectly captured the dance-pop zeitgeist of its time. Propelled by a veritable pick and mix of the European dance production scene, the album spawned four UK Top 10 smashes with 'Who Do You Love Now?' (No.3), 'Put A Needle On It' (No.7), 'I Begin To Wonder’' (No.2) and 'Don't Wanna Lose This Feeling' (No.5). The album debuted at No.8 on the UK Official Albums Chart and was certified Gold, and in Dannii’s native Australia it was nominated for Best Pop Release at the 2003 ARIA Music Awards.

After Dannii’s previous album Girl had paved a blueprint for pop dance crossovers of the noughties, Dannii had parted ways with her label, and had not released music for almost half a decade. Dannii was philosophical then and now, “I knew the crazy world of music was not always fair, but I also knew I’d had amazing experiences and done a lot of awesome stuff. I didn’t think my music career was going to come back, and that was fine. I just thought: ‘Well, that was it.’”

Out of the blue, an invite from Pete Tong would provide an unexpected catalyst. As A&R at London Records, Tong asked Dannii to collaborate with Dutch duo Riva on a rework of their club hit ‘Stringer’. The resultant single ‘Who Do You Love Now?’, would be a worldwide smash.

The single’s success was infused with the dance energy of Ibiza, with many live gigs at iconic venues that were the start of great friendships with the mega Summer Residence DJs, Carl Cox and Roger Sanchez. Dannii was once again upfront and centre in both pop and club culture.

Dannii was signed up by London Records for an album deal and work on Neon Nights commenced. “With Girl, I was given wings,” Dannii says now of the recording process. “With Neon Nights, I was allowed to fly”.

There are a couple of features that I want to highlight before wrapping things up. Albumism recently marked twenty years of a wonderful album that is perhaps Dannii Minogue’s best work. She has not really lost a step or put a foot wrong since her Danniii /Love and Kisses of 1991. 2007’s Club Disco is her latest album. Let’s hope that there are more studio albums from her. Even if you are not familiar with Dannii Minogue., Neon Nights is a great starting point:

“At the time of its release in 1997, Girl presented Australian vocalist Dannii Minogue in top form. An energizing mix of dance and pop, her third studio album was meant to reposition Minogue commercially and critically. Though its reviews were promising, its sales were tepid. Still, Girl gave the singer many opportunities, touring and otherwise.

One such opportunity presented itself to Minogue in 2001. Approached by the Dutch disc jockey duo Zki and Dobri, also known collectively as Riva, Minogue was invited to provide vocals for a hot and heavy dancefloor track they had put together. Minogue took the gentlemen up on their offer and “Who Do You Love Now?” followed shortly thereafter in that same year. Audiences in Europe and beyond, both mainstream and underground, went crazy for the track.

Minogue's partnership with Riva was, without a doubt, enduring proof of her credibility—and marketability—in dance music circles. Minogue could have stayed comfortably nestled in that environment, but she was ready for the next step. With an acute working knowledge of dance genre principles cultivated over three albums, Minogue sought to plot a record that could bring these components together—but with a pop perspective.

Not long after “Who Do You Love Now?,” brainstorming for Neon Nights, Minogue's fourth studio long player, had gone into high gear. On Girl, the force behind its power was personal, but ironically, Minogue had relinquished its content construction to her creative team. Neon Nights saw Minogue put her hands back into shaping the songs, which were daring, indulging a side of Minogue that had previously only peeked around the corner of certain selections in her canon for those paying attention.

Now, given an entire album to express itself, this area of Minogue's performance psyche embraced the totality of her ego and her sexuality. She would wield these two aspects of herself through the album's assembled material. The songwriting and production personnel—notables including Ian Masterson, Terry Ronald, Hannah Robinson, Savan Kotecha, Henrik Korpi, Matthias “Blackcell” Johansson, Karen Poole and Jean-Claude Ades—were pivotal in working with Minogue to draft canvases suitable for this persona to come to life.

Neon Nights is a retro-contemporaneous fantasia, showcasing Minogue's encyclopedic awareness of dance music devices to incredible effect. Euro-disco, in a juicy assortment of colors and flavors, displays itself on “I Begin to Wonder” and “Come and Get It,” the latter a sly hidden track within the album's closing piece, the lone cool down number, “It Won't Work Out.” Minogue's enduring fascination with American aestheticism, as politely harvested from electro-funk, R&B and hip-hop origins, are accounted for on “Put the Needle on It” and “Creep.”

And while there are plenty of original sonics to feast upon here, Minogue's love of previously established jams is not disguised on Neon Nights. From the mesmeric interpolations of funk/jazz maestro Tom Browne's “Thighs High (Grip Your Hips and Move)” (on “Mighty Fine”) and avant garde futurists Laidback's “White Horse” (on “Push”), Minogue's tastes are first-rate.

Minogue, ensconced within her record's glowing rhythms and grooves, enjoyed her club siren transformation. The set's verses, bridges and hooks are dressed to the nines on “For the Record” and “Don't Wanna Lose This Feeling,” affirming Minogue's ability to integrate the finer points of pop lyricism into discothèque oriented song structures. Collectively recalling the floor filling vibes of Ibiza, London and New York City—in either 1985 or 2002—Neon Nights was ready to take club culture to the general public like never before.

Racking up three hits—“Put the Needle on It,” “I Begin to Wonder,” “Don't Wanna Lose This Feeling”—Neon Nights achieved gold certification in the United Kingdom. Sweetening her chart jackpot was the LP's critical consensus. Almost unanimously, the music press showed support in their assessment of Neon Nights as Minogue's breakout moment. Neon Nights was gorgeously reissued in 2007, packaged with a bountiful supply of B-sides, outtakes and remixes.

Twenty years later, Neon Nights remains a distinct dance-pop marker, its influence apparent to the discerning ear. Nowhere else could one come in contact with such a glamorously assembled gaggle of influences that cross decades and sounds to unite the hedonism of the dance floor with the accessibility of pop radio”.

I am going to wrap up with a review from AllMusic. Neon Nights has won plenty of adoration. Comparable with early/mid-2000s albums from Kylie Minogue and Madonna, Dannii Minogue’s strong and versatile vocals and songwriting is evident throughout. The sequencing is great too, so that the singles and bigger songs are nicely distributed and not all at the top or bottom:

“There's something about those Minogue sisters. No matter how many times they seem to be down for the count, a surprise comeback hit is always just around the corner. Dannii has never quite achieved the level of superstardom that sister Kylie has attained, but she has shown equal tenacity. Released in 1997, Girl may have been a commercial failure, but it succeeded in repositioning her as a sophisticated club artist rather than a B-list pop singer. That album caught on in the burgeoning trance scene of the mid-'90s, and Neon Nights partially follows that trend into the 2000s on tracks such as "Who Do You Love Now?," the out-of-nowhere comeback collaboration with Riva that gave Dannii the biggest hit of her career. However, Neon Nights is a more varied collection, a veritable pick and mix of the European dance scene at the turn of the century. Songs such as the sleazy "Put the Needle on It" and the pulsating "A Piece of Time" are pure electroclash, whereas the bouncy "For the Record" and "Mystified" caught on at the beginning of the major '80s revival that took off in a big way over the next few years. Despite the variety of influences, the album flows better than any of Dannii's albums have before, with only the overly crass "Vibe On" even approaching filler status.

Minogue is no faceless vocalist either; she infuses the tracks with her persona, sexually charged but smart and slightly aloof. There is a revelatory performance on the album's closing track and only ballad, "It Won't Work Out." Against a chilly, spare musical backing, Dannii delivers a heartfelt, unadorned vocal somewhat reminiscent of the best moments of Everything But the Girl. Although the album contains no cover versions, the success of the singles was augmented by the bootlegging craze. "I Begin to Wonder" was mashed with Dead or Alive's "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record") for the clubs, and "Don't Wanna Lose This Feeling" became the first track ever to be granted permission to sample from Madonna's "Into the Groove." These mixes helped these songs reach the widest audience of Minogue's career, topping U.S. club charts as well as those in the U.K. and Europe. Without a doubt the most confident and forward-thinking release yet for Dannii, it didn't quite make her the major star it should have, but it did give her the best run of hits of her career, and continued to show she was much more than the sum of her family name”.

Go and listen to the awesome Neon Nights. I always urge people to get the album on C.D. or vinyl is they can actually spin the thing and get that physical experience! Dannii Minogue’s 2003 album is perfect for these summer days and warm nights. With a reissue version about to come out, it will put this album right back in the spotlight. It is exactly where…

IT deserves to be.

FEATURE: Time & Place: The Queens of the Stone Age Buyer’s Guide

FEATURE:

 

 

Time & Place

PHOTO CREDIT: Andreas Neumann

 

The Queens of the Stone Age Buyer’s Guide

_________

TOMORROW sees the release…

of Queens of the Stone Age’s eighth studio album, In Times New Roman… It is a great title for an album that sort of refers to the old Roman Empire, and how it is very much modernised and present in modern-day America. Also named after a particularly boring font type, there is something exciting, personal, powerful and emphatic about In Times New Roman… It is a sensational album from Queens of the Stone Age. It ranks alongside their very best. Because a new album is out, I want to go back and provide a buyer’s guide to Queens of the Stone Age. People may be new to them, so I will suggest the essential albums, an underrated one, plus the very best one (in my view). Before that, here is more detail about In Times New Roman…

“Queens of the Stone Age release their long-awaited 8th studio album, In Times New Roman... on Matador.

In Times New Roman... is raw, at times brutal and not recommended for the faint of heart. And yet, it’s perhaps the most beautiful and definitely the most rewarding album in their epic discography. Founder Joshua Homme's most acerbic lyrics to date are buoyed by the instantly identifiable QOTSA sonic signature, expanded and embellished with new and unprecedented twists in virtually every song. With In Times New Roman… we see that sometimes one needs to look beneath scars and scabs to see beauty, and sometimes the scabs and scars are the beauty.

Feeling a bit out of place, and having difficulty finding music they could relate to, the members of QOTSA did as they are wont to do:  In Times New Roman… is the sound of a band creating the music its own members want to hear, while giving the rest of us a sonic forum in which to congregate. “The world’s gonna end in a month or two," sings Homme, begging the question: What do you want to do to with the time you’ve got left? Homme, Troy Van Leeuwen, Dean Fertita, Michael Shuman and Jon Theodore may not be able to save us, but they’re giving us a place to ride it out.

In Times New Roman… was recorded and mixed at Homme’s own Pink Duck (RIP), with additional recording at Shangri-La. The album was produced by Queens of the Stone Age and mixed by Mark Rankin. Artwork and double LP gatefold packaging designed by long time collaborator Boneface”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: Andreas Neumann

Before getting to a review for In Times New Roman…, NME recently visited Queens of the Stone Age’s lead Josh Homme in California. He spoke about his personal struggles (including a divorce) and what we can expect from the new album. One of the most frank and refreshingly open artists out there gave insight into the band’s new phase and album:

“NME: Were there times when you thought you might not make another album?

Homme: “Kinda. I think when you’re dealing with the extreme ups and downs of life, you don’t stop and go: ‘I should really make a record.’ Those things don’t exist in that moment. If your roof is flooding, you don’t say: ‘We should make a record about this!’ You have to stop yourself drowning in a flood. We recorded it probably two-and-a-half years ago, but it just sat there waiting to be finished. I didn’t sing it until last November. I wasn’t done living. Honestly, I was probably afraid. I wasn’t ready. You need the flood to be over, and then you can decide whether you can accept the flood. I think with this being a record about acceptance, you need to actually get there yourself.”

NME: This record feels as direct and as personal as anything you’ve ever written, is that fair?

Homme: “Yeah, of course. That’s what this is. You start dropping the armour that protects you from your insecurities, and once you drop a piece of that armour you can’t put it back on. I think on this journey of Queens of the Stone Age, there’s no armour left. It’s only about walking deeper into the darkness. That’s the way it should be. Kowtowing to my own insecurities or fears at my age is not a good look. It should be more vulnerable, not less. I also think that a lot of people are making these tuned, to-the-click records that are trying to blend in with pop music. ‘We’re rock, but we’re kind of pop too, are you okay with that?’ We wanted to be like: ‘No, we’re going to make something that sounds as brutal as it feels to be alive right now.’”

NME: The title ‘In Times New Roman’ comes from closing track ‘Straight Jacket Fitting’, which alludes to similarities between modern-day America and the fall of Rome…

Homme: “There are so many reasons that it’s funny to me too. The most boring font being named after one of the greatest empires of all time! The place that brought you the vomitorium, the orgy and the vomitorium in the orgy! I also think it’s OK to acknowledge that Rome is burning and the Titanic is sinking. I don’t see a problem with that. In dealing with the concept of acceptance, you have to acknowledge reality. You can’t be kidding yourself.”

NME: On ‘Made To Parade’ you sing: “Give your best years away/To a bloated corporation/Who’ll work you like a slave/Best think twice”. Another relatable comment on our times?

Homme: “Selling you fear, to make you afraid, to box you in, so you’ll do what other people want – I’ve always despised that so much. Everyone’s selling it so hard now. My old man is always like: ‘I know you’re afraid, what does that have to do with it?’ Being afraid should be the thing that starts you doing something, not the thing that stops you from doing it. You run the gauntlet, but you do come out the other side. As long as you keep going.

“I kind of got obsessed with merry-go-rounds on this. Those keyboard parts. Did the merry really go round? Aren’t you really stuck on some wheel that’s telling you: ‘We’re having fun’, but after a while you’re like: ‘No I want to fucking barf, let’s get off this thing’? There’s a lot of sonic references to merry-go-round shit all over this record.”

NME: That sense of acceptance comes through on ‘Emotion Sickness’. Why was that the lead single?

Homme: “It’s a strange single. I don’t pick those, because I don’t care, but I was surprised because it’s such a Frankenstein’s monster of a song. The verse parts are all so grounded, and then the chorus is like taking a hang-glider and running off this cliff. We’ve never done a Crosby, Stills and Nash three-part harmony before. Again, that’s about as much about acceptance as you can get.”

You sing: “People come & go on the breeze/For a whole life? Possibly”

Homme: “I’m admitting I don’t fucking know. Are they going to be there forever? I don’t know. Some will, I guess? Once I realised it was about acceptance it was such a relief. ‘Lullabies to Paralyze’ is the Brothers Grimm fairytales, as a way of explaining things through that sort of eye. With [supergroup Them Crooked] Vultures it was all animals: elephants, lions, vultures, leeches. I get sort of fixated like that. I need to know what it’s about. It has to mean something. When I sang this, it was all by candlelight. Trying stuff and being like: ‘I’m afraid. I’m afraid to write this. I’m terrified.’”

NME: Why?

Homme: “Just because it’s so harsh. So much has gone on. It’s like… how’s this going to go? But then realising: ‘Oh shit, it’s about acceptance, no matter what it is.’ I was so relieved”.

Northern Transmissions provided their take on the new one from the mighty Queens of the Stone Age. Maybe not their absolute best, it is still an important and big album from a band who have remained inventive, forward-moving and excellent since their debut. I would suggest every Queens of the Stone Age fan goes and get this album:

There was and always will be a devilishness to Queens of the Stone Age’s grubby desert rock and their long-awaited 8th LP ‘In Times New Roman…’ maintains the group’s proclivity for the dark and macabre, with a liberal dose of catchiness. 6 years on from the Mark Ronson produced ‘Villains’, the Joshua Homme-fronted gang are back with a muscular stomp through the shadier enclaves of rock ‘n’ roll, that according to the outfit explores the blemishes and imperfections of life “with ‘In Times New Roman…’ we see that sometimes one needs to look beneath the scars and scabs to see beauty, and sometimes the scabs and scars are the beauty.”

Stylish, primal and sinister ‘In Times New Roman…’ is QOTSA embracing a raw brutality that’s not only represented by their sonic signature but the record’s artwork. A bequiffed rockabilly character is depicted with a leather jacket and slicked back hair that’s been possessed by a rabid wolf-like creature, as demonic hands with razor sharp claws encircle the album’s titular focal point. It’s as wicked and as sinful as you’d expect from a unit of outlaws peddling sleazy tunes that walk a fine line between good and evil.

If ‘Villans’ was the group’s embracing a rock ‘n’ roll playfulness, ‘In Times New Roman…’ is the fivesome ratcheting up the attitude for something altogether denser and meaner but not without a decent helping of hip-wiggling sassiness. Thematically, Homme’s lyrics appear to be left open to interpretation but with that, they reveal themselves to be, at times, personal barbs aimed at toxic behaviours and self-inflicted wounds. Opener ‘Obscenery’, with its thick, meaty sound has the totem pole-like frontman direct his ire at someone with self-destructive tendencies “self-help but you won’t help yourself/you must be pleased with the misery you’ve designed”. Notably, the record’s first track comes in hard with its full-bodied riffs and thunderous drums but it’s not a straight forward A to B rock song, as it meanders into a cinematic mid-section before circling back to a cacophonous din. With Homme as the record’s preacher, you’re guided through the world of ‘In Times New Roman…’ by his astute observations and cutting commentary; ‘Negative Space’s slow, guttural stomp captures the frontman in a reflective mood as he ruminates “we’ll never get back to where we were/starring into oblivion/oooo/it hurts” with a bellowed delivery.

‘What The Peephole Say’ comes out swinging with a shimmy and shake that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on ‘Villains’ and amongst the toe-tapping frivolity a message of impending doom pokes out between the cracks like weeds in a perfectly manicured flowerbed “I don’t care what the people know/the world’s gonna end in a month or so”. Then there’s the menacing rumble of ‘Made to Parade’ that depicts a subservient culture and seemingly a disparaging side eye aimed at life in the corporate machine “climb that ladder/you gotta hold your tongue” and “a bloated corporation/they work you like a slave” sound all too relatable for the cubicle, desk jockeys among us. ‘Time and Place’ is another track that showcases the band’s virtuosity, as the song evolves from stunted staccato to woozy psychedelia with a touch of the wild west as Homme observes a ne’er-do-well who’s rotten to the core “the space in your heart baby/it generates your hate” while describing this figure as someone who’d better watch their back “you’ve got a lot of nerve coming round this place/if you’re a pretty boy/you’ve got to save face”. ‘In Times New Roman…’ comes to a head via the sprawling nine-minute odyssey of ‘Straight Jacket Fitting’ which on the surface sounds eerie and demonic. It’s here where Homme exposes his fleshy vulnerabilities during the record’s final throes “hold me close/I’m confused and I wanna go out”. Sonically again, this is where the band switch multiple gears from beefed up rock to something the resembles medieval.

Times New Roman might be one of the most vanilla of font choices but make no mistake, the QOTSA LP of the same name is anything but ordinary. In fact, it’s a spicy sucker waiting tantalise your musical taste buds.

To celebrate some much-needed music from Queens of the Stone Age, below are the albums of theirs you need to know about. From their debut of 1998 (which is twenty-five in September), through to their latest, it is clear there is nobody in the music world…

QUITE like them!

______________

The Debut

 

Queens of the Stone Age

Release Date: 22nd September, 1998

Labels: Loosegroove/Roadrunner/Man's Ruin

Producers: Joe Barresi/Josh Homme

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/queens-of-the-stone-age/queens-of-the-stone-age

U.S. Chart Position: 122

Standout Tracks: Walkin on the Sidewalks/Mexicola/I Was a Teenage Hand Model

Review (Reissue):

“Well, first off this album was put out by three labels on its initial release, and now isn’t on any of them. Man’s Ruin, the label of poster artist Frank Kozik (whose sleeve design has been preserved for this reissue, and still looks godawful), and Stone Gossard’s Loosegroove have both since folded; Roadrunner, who released the CD outside of the States, have been inexplicably unfussed about keeping Queens Of The Stone Age in print, and have now ceded copyright to Homme’s own imprint, Rekords Rekords, in collaboration with Domino. (Another entity who look very different now than in 1998, when they probably never envisaged putting out a record by any American band who weren’t on first-name terms with Will Oldham, let alone this one.) So now you know.

Other changes of note are a full remaster, which has actually made a palpable difference to the plumpness of the bass in songs like ‘Hispanic Impressions’, and three extra tracks, all released on split EPs prior to this album coming out. They haven’t ruined it or anything daft, but also aren’t cooking at the level of most of the actual album, and would have been better placed on one of Homme’s jam-heavy and ‘zany’ Desert Sessions releases from the time.

Various ex-Kyuss types taking that band’s gargantuan, retro-metal foundations and building on them.

No, not really: even ‘various’, which implies more Kyuss personnel than Homme and drummer Alfredo Hernandez (Nick Oliveri wouldn’t become a member until 2000’s Rated R). The guitarist’s thick, valve-massaging tone didn’t radically alter from one band to the next, but QOTSA was evidently an outlet for him to play with structure, form and influence in a way Kyuss didn’t. A sly jangle amidst the semi-romantic psych-rock of ‘You Can’t Quit Me Baby’; ‘You Would Know’, as dually surreal and resigned as the Meat Puppets. Meanwhile, the songs you could see as a poppier redux of his old band – ‘Walkin’ On The Sidewalks’, ‘How To Handle A Rope’ – are just great, unfussy open-road hard rock burnups.

In amongst the massed banks of superheavy guitar is ‘Regular John’, which sounds like Black Sabbath covering Stereolab (honest!),

Basically, the above is saying that this kid hasn’t listened to Neu! yet, and not much Sabbath either for that matter, but if you can figure out that it means a super-strict motorik beat and some chuggy metal riffs, it’s done its job, as ‘Regular John’ features both those things. For my money, it’s still the best thing Queens have ever done, and the fact that it didn’t usher in a new and recognisable subset of heavy rock is no fault of theirs; more likely the fact that in the late Nineties, every town in Europe and North America had its own band gamely, fruitlessly trying to be as good as Kyuss by aping them.

and the dreamy tomfoolery and terrifying FX of ‘I Was A Teenage Hand Model’.

‘Terrifying’ might be stretching a point, but there is some dead loud Moog-y noise at the end of this song, the album’s closer, which might make you jump slightly if you’re not expecting it. Otherwise, matters are fairly dreamy, if only because Homme sings like he’s just woken up, and the electric piano and hand percussion wheeling him along isn’t much more energetic. It occupies the same position on the album as ‘I Think I Lost My Headache’ on Rated R, and is cut from a similar cloth.

Mmm, lovely.

Mmm, insightful. Circa 1998, though, Queens Of The Stone Age was a breed apart from almost everything else, as much as the year yielded scads of fine records. The fact it’s been frequently tricky to actually buy the thing makes it look a mite, how you say, Ipreferredtheearlierstuff to suggest it’s their career highpoint, but at the very least it contains several individual moments of outstanding achievement. It’s probably also helped by the fact that it recalls a time when to see a band list Queens Of The Stone Age as an influence wouldn’t have told you they were going to be shit, as it now does” – Drowned in Sound

Key Cut: Regular John

The Three Essential Albums

 

Rated R

Release Date: 6th June, 2000

Label: Interscope

Producers: Chris Goss/Josh Homme

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/queens-of-the-stone-age/rated-r-2

U.S. Chart Position: 16

Standout Tracks: Feel Good Hit of the Summer/Monsters in the Parasol/Tension Head

Review (Deluxe Edition):

“Everyone needs a mantra. For Josh Homme, Nick Oliveri, and the rotating cast of Queens of the Stone Age, it was short, catchy, debauched: "Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy, and alcohol." And for good measure: "C-c-c-c-c-cocaine." Over and over again. Sixteen times. For the first song on their second album it was a rallying cry, the perfect chorus, a clever verse, and a sort of philosophical exposition. But it was also a misnomer.

Rated R was tagged as stoner rock almost immediately upon release in 2000, in part because of those seven substances, but mostly because the band rose from the ashes of early-1990s Palm Desert sun gods Kyuss. Homme, a plangent, riff-obsessed guitarist, and Oliveri, a manic golem of a man and a mighty bass player, formed the backbone of that band with a mechanized sense of bang-and-smash structure. Studied repetition and precision are unlikely virtues for weedheads, but then these are unlikely musicians. When Homme formed the Queens after Kyuss disbanded, he carried that sense of exacting musculature with him but also brought a surprisingly seductive croon-- able to burrow low and also swing high into falsetto. After a modest, chugging self-titled debut, his frantic pal Oliveri joined the band.

What they forged was familiar but also wildly different from that stoner rock-- a term Homme has always rejected. In turn, they made one of the last great modern hard rock records and something deceptively tuneful, groove-bitten, and even melancholic. As soon as the mantra is laid bare, QOTSA begin to dance away, with things like "The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret", which amounts to a really great Blue Öyster Cult song, and the funk stroll of "Leg of Lamb". Suddenly a pattern, from mellow grace notes to head-smash riffs, sometimes colliding into each other, begins to set in.

Homme has never been much of a lyricist, preferring to weave in fragments of thought and word puzzles. Rated R is rarely about things, more often about feelings-- a chest-beating energy, a confusing head trip, or a dissipating sadness. Former Screaming Trees frontman and longtime Homme buddy Mark Lanegan began his relationship with the band on "In the Fade", an intoxicating and solemn song that has gone a bit unnoticed as the years have passed. Lanegan eventually became a full-time member of the band, but he was never better than the first time. When the song concludes, a reprise of the mantra kicks back in, a fitful reminder to shake the melodrama and remember the cocaine.

Ten years later, Rated R sounds vital, if a bit unusual. Credible hard rock is a tough sell these days. It's been three years since Queens released their last album, Era Vulgaris, and six years since Homme fired his old friend Oliveri-- a notorious party monster who consumed with vigor and often performed in the nude, his bass strapped across his crotch like a phallic totem. They grew bigger, recruiting Dave Grohl to play drummer and writing more riff beasts, but they've never been as fearless. To celebrate the decade since, the band has included the perfunctory bonus disc, with seven B-sides, including a goofy cover the Kinks' "Who'll Be the Next in Line", an even sillier Carly Simon parody called "You're So Vague", and a surprisingly sly take on Romeo Void's new wave classic, "Never Say Never". They've also tacked on a nine-song live set from the 2000 Reading Festival that features Homme hilariously saying, "This is a song for you," to the audience before four consecutive songs. Stoners.

But it's the unlikely things about Rated R that stick with you: The bongos that open "Better Living Through Chemistry"; Lanegan's existential wail on "In the Fade"; Rob Halford's backing vocals on "Feel Good Hit of the Summer". The gentle, acoustic interlude "Lightning Song" feels like a cold splash of sea water after Oliveri's scorched-earth demon screech on "Tension Head". There are no down or off moments here. "I Think I Lost My Headache" closes things with a squealing three-minute brass outro; it's a typically unexpected move from a band making a surprising leap. Rated R didn't defy convention because it didn't seem to have a working text. Only a mantra” – Pitchfork

Key Cut: The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret

Lullabies to Paralyze

Release Date: 22nd March, 2005

Label: Interscope

Producers: Joe Barresi/Josh Homme

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/queens-of-the-stone-age/lullabies-to-paralyze-1

U.S. Chart Position: 5

Standout Tracks: Everybody Knows That You’re Insane/Someone's in the Wolf/The Blood Is Love

Review:

“Before heading into the studio in early 2004 to record the fourth Queens of the Stone Age album, Lullabies to Paralyze, the band's guitarist/vocalist/chief songwriter, Josh Homme, kicked out bassist Nick Oliveri for undisclosed reasons. Since Homme and Oliveri were longtime collaborators, dating back to the 1990 formation of their previous band, Kyuss, this could have been a cause for concern, but QOTSA is not an ordinary band, so ordinary rules do not apply. Throughout their history, from Kyuss through Queens of the Stone Age's 2002 breakthrough Songs for the Deaf, Homme and Oliveri have been in bands whose lineups were as steady as quicksand; their projects were designed to have a revolving lineup of musicians, so they can withstand the departure of key musicians, even one as seemingly integral to the grand scheme as Oliveri -- after all, he left Kyuss in 1994 and the band carried on without him. Truth is, the mastermind behind QOTSA has always been Josh Homme -- he's the common thread through the Kyuss and QOTSA albums, the guy who has explored a similar musical vision on his side project the Desert Sessions -- and since he's wildly indulging his obsessions on Lullabies to Paralyze, even hardcore fans will be hard-pressed to notice the absence of Oliveri here. Sure, there are some differences -- most notably, Lullabies lacks the manic metallic flourishes of their earlier work, and the gonzo humor and gimmicks, such as the radio DJ banter on Deaf, are gone -- but it all sounds like an assured, natural progression from the tightly wound, relentless Songs for the Deaf. That album contained genuine crossover pop tunes in "No One Knows" and "Go With the Flow," songs that retained QOTSA's fuzzy, heavy neo-psychedelic hard rock and were channeled through an irresistible melodic filter that gave the music a serious sexiness that was nearly as foreign to the band as the undeniable pop hooks. Homme has pulled off a surprise of a similar magnitude on Lullabies to Paralyze -- he doesn't walk away from these breakthroughs but marries them to the widescreen art rock of R and dark, foreboding metal of Kyuss, resulting in a rich, late-night cinematic masterpiece. One of the reasons QOTSA have always been considered a musician's band is that they are masters of mood, either sustaining tension over the course of a six-minute epic or ratcheting up excitement in the course of a two-minute blast, all while using a familiar palette of warm, fuzz-toned guitars, ghostly harmonies, and minor-key melodies. While Lullabies is hardly a concept album, its songs play off each other as if it were a song cycle, progressing from the somber Mark Lanegan-sung opening salvo of "This Lullaby" and steadily growing spookier with each track, culminating in the scary centerpiece "Someone's in the Wolf." The key to QOTSA's darkness is that it's delivered seductively -- this isn't an exercise in shallow nihilism, there's pleasure in succumbing to its eerie, sexy fantasies -- and that seductiveness is all musical. Specific lyrics don't matter as much as how Homme's voice blends into the band as all the instruments bleed together as one, creating an elastic, hypnotic force that finds endless, fascinating variations on a seemingly simple sound. Simply put, there is no other rock band in 2005 that is as pleasurable to hear play as QOTSA -- others may rock harder or take more risks, but no one has the command and authority of Queens at their peak, which they certainly are here. They are so good, so natural on Lullabies to Paralyze that it's easy to forget that they just lost Oliveri, but that just makes Homme's triumph here all the more remarkable. He's not only proven that he is the driving force of Queens of the Stone Age, but he's made an addictive album that begs listeners to get lost in its ever-shifting moods and slyly sinister sensuality” – AllMusic

Key Cut: Burn the Witch

...Like Clockwork

Release Date: 3rd June, 2013

Label: Matador

Producers: Josh Homme/James Lavelle/Queens of the Stone Age

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/queens-of-the-stone-age/like-clockwork

U.S. Chart Position: 1

Standout Tracks: Fairweather Friends/Smooth Sailing/I Appear Missing

Review:

“Josh Homme and his all-star pals prove the virtue of taking your sweet time on a record that’s as self-assured as it is damn sexy. Most bands don’t leave their fans waiting six long years for a new album. They don’t then promote said record by getting a creepy robot to leave their fans unsettling voicemails. And they definitely don’t enlist a chef to write the album notes. But Queens Of The Stone Age aren’t most bands. As badass menu maverick Anthony Bourdain says in ‘…Like Clockwork’’s accompanying bumf: “[Josh] Homme has consistently demonstrated a business plan of not giving a shit.” The heroic frontman and kingpin of these desert titans might not care about industry whys and wherefores, but Josh Homme gives every single last fuck when it comes to crafting blow-your-mind-and-incinerate-your-crotch rock’n’roll.

As contemporary hard-as-nails guitar music’s most imposing figure – and not just because he stands at 6 foot 4, has a fondness for triple denim and looks like a pre-Raphaelite, Triumph-straddling Elvis – Josh has earned the right to do what the hell he wants. Thankfully, that’s gathering his world-beating buddies in his Pink Duck studio in LA and laying down an unrelenting juggernaut.

Much has been made already of the high-end guests. The core collaborators from QOTSA’s classic ‘Songs For The Deaf’ are scattered across the release, Josh once again motoring across the crest of Dave Grohl’s brutal drums with Mark Lanegan and Nick Oliveri popping up briefly to ride sidecar. Then there’s turns from Arctic Monkey Alex Turner, Scissor Sister Jake Shears, Nine Inch Nail Trent Reznor and, bafflingly, brilliantly, Sir Elton John. Not that you’d know any of this unless you were told. Their restrained assistance means there’s no danger of this turning into a sprawling, unfocused ‘Josh and friends’ record.

Considering their lengthy absence, to return with a double album would have been more than acceptable, but ‘…Like Clockwork’ comes in at a mere 10 tracks. The crap filter has been whacked up to 11 and the groove-o-tron set to interstellar for the band’s slickest offering to date. Al Turner slinks through the saloon doors for ‘If I Had A Tail’, a track predatory enough to warrant a restraining order. “I wanna suck/I wanna lick/

I wanna cry/I wanna spit”, growls Josh, against a grimy strip-bar swagger. It’s the perv-funk sound of drunkenly sinking into sticky leather couches for steamy make-out sessions in dimly lit Hollywood smut-pits.

The same filthy feeling abounds on the ferocious but perfectly polished ‘Smooth Sailing’. “I’m in flagrante/In every way”, confesses Josh, before adding, almost as an afterthought, “I blow my load over the status quo”. Quite. Yet there’s also a more meditative flipside to ‘…Like Clockwork’. ‘The Vampyre Of Time And Memory’ is a startlingly low-key piano hymnal, even with its flashes of Giorgio Moroder synths and cocaine-soul guitar solo. Its confessional lyrics, set against a twisted power ballad melody, come on like an even more fucked-up Fleetwood Mac. “Does anyone ever get this right?/I feel no love”, purrs Josh. ‘Kalopsia’, featuring Reznor, is another haunting slow jam, but pulls a flick-knife chorus on you, amping up the menace with eerie backing vocals that echo the melancholy “sha-bop- sha-bop”s of The Flamingos’ version of skulking doo-wop ode ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’.

‘…Like Clockwork’ closes with the title track, perhaps the least QOTSA-sounding song ever. If MGM are hunting the next Bond movie theme creator, this should swing it for Josh, as he indulges his dexterous falsetto, channelling the sweeping, string-laden ’60s scores of John Barry, with production help with the man from UNKLE, James Lavelle. Last year, Biffy Clyro’s Simon Neil praised Queens Of The Stone Age for their ability to make sexy records. “Which I think is hard to do in a rock band,” he said. That’s because Queens Of The Stone Age aren’t most rock bands – they’re the rock band” – NME

Key Cut: My God Is the Sun

The Classic

 

Songs for the Deaf

Release Date: 27th August, 2002

Label: Interscope

Producers: Josh Homme/Adam Kasper/Eric Valentine

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/queens-of-the-stone-age/songs-for-the-deaf

U.S. Chart Position: 17

Standout Tracks: Go with the Flow/Do It Again/God Is in the Radio

Review:

 “On their third album, Songs for the Deaf, Queens of the Stone Age are so concerned with pleasing themselves with what they play that they don't give a damn for the audience. This extends to the production, with the entire album framed as a broadcast from a left-of-the-dial AM radio station, the sonics compressed so every instrument is flattened. It’s a joke run wild, punctuated by an ironic mock DJ, and it fits an album where the players run wild. As usual, Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri have brought in a number of guests, including Mark Lanegan on vocals and Dean Ween on guitar, but they’ve anchored themselves with the drumming of the mighty Dave Grohl, who helps give the band the muscle sorely missing from most guitar rock these days, whether it's indie rock or insipid alt-metal. QOTSA may be a muso band -- a band for musicians and those who have listened to too much music; why else did the greatest drummer and greatest guitarist in '90s alt-rock (Grohl and Ween, respectively) anxiously join this ever-shifting collective? -- but that’s the pleasure of the band, and Songs for the Deaf in particular: it’s restless and pummeling in its imagination and power” - AllMusic

Key Cut: No One Knows

The Underrated Gem/For the Diehards

 

Era Vulgaris

Release Date: 12th June, 2007

Labels: Interscope/Rekords

Producers: The Fififf Teeners (Chris Goss and Josh Homme)

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/queens-of-the-stone-age/era-vulgaris-1

U.S. Chart Position: 14

Standout Tracks: Into the Hollow/Misfit Love/Suture Up Your Future

Review:

“I’M ONE OF a kind,” Josh Homme boasts on the new Queens of the Stone Age album. “I’m designer!” Well, that’s one way to put it. There aren’t any others like him, that’s for sure, and he’s never been an easy one to figure out. Here’s a rock star who seems to shuffle his band’s lineup as often as he shaves his back, yet who always sounds like himself, making fun of solemn art types but working harder than any of them. He manages to be the token metal dude for indie kids and the token punk for headbangers, without compromising for either camp. Homme makes music in all kinds of incarnations — the Queens, Eagles of Death Metal, his endless Desert Sessions projects. But he always seems to inhabit his own musical world, a zone where lost kids chase the desert acid-trip vibe of classic Seventies midnight movies like Vanishing Point and Two-Lane Blacktop. Really, the scene in Vanishing Point where the naked hippie chick cruises across the desert sand on her Harley, blasting Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen,” could be the starting point for every song on this album.

Era Vulgaris is Homme’s fifth Queens album, and like the others, it’s intricately crafted, meticulously polished and ruthlessly efficient in its pursuit of depraved rock thrills, with robotic rhythm machines like “Turning on the Screw” and “I’m Designer.” Last time, Homme got slept on with the excellent but underrated Lullabies to Paralyze — people were thrown off initially by its down-in-the-dumps mood, which may be why the music took longer to kick in for some fans. But Era Vulgaris is a lot cockier than Lullabies, clobbering you instantly with guitars louder and uglier than a psychedelic biker party at Joshua Tree’s Skull Rock. “Misfit Love” is the ultimate Queens anthem, all low-register guitar crunch, with a percussion track that sounds like tennis balls the size of Betelgeuse crashing into a Moog factory. Homme snarls, “I wanna see my past in flames,” and he gets his wish.

Supposedly, his party buddies at the Era Vulgaris sessions included Trent Reznor, the Strokes’ Julian Casablancas and regular guest Mark Lanegan. But none of them are really audible — are you surprised? Instead, we get the many moods of Josh Homme, most of which concern the miracle of physical love and the procurement thereof. He’s always said he wanted the Queens to be a band for the ladies, not the menfolk, and from the vocals to the bass lines this is his most crotch-tensive music. “Make It Wit Chu” is an old Desert Sessions song, revamped into a ridiculous lover-boy plaint, with Homme doing his sleaziest falsetto over a lounge-lizard cousin of Neil Young’s “Southern Man.” “Into the Hollow” is a surprisingly tender purple-haze ballad, with Homme’s vibrato amid a gently quivering wah-wah and the usual assload of bass. “Run Pig Run” is staccato jackhammer blues metal, “3’s and 7’s” sounds like prime Nirvana and “Sick, Sick, Sick” is manic punk riffing, offering “a lick on the lips and a grip on your hips.” All excellent news for Brody Dalle.

Homme is a man of many surprises. Here’s something you wouldn’t expect about Era Vulgaris: the influence of New Wave synth geek Gary Numan is all over this record. Even rave-ups like “Battery Acid,” “Suture Up Your Future” and “3’s and 7’s” have vintage-synth hooks copped from The Pleasure Principle — it may sound crazy, but if there’s one thing you should have learned about Homme by now, he’ll heist a badass riff from anywhere. In “I’m Designer,” he sings about his “generation” and means it, his fey falsetto a parody of hippie cosmic aspirations. But even though the joke is a great one, you hear that falsetto, and you realize it’s here for one main reason, just like every other sonic flourish on Era Vulgaris: Josh Homme loves how it sounds” – Rolling Stone

Key Cut: Sick, Sick, Sick

…The One Before In Times New Roman…

 

Villains

U.S. Chart Position: 3

Standout Tracks: Feet Don't Fail Me/The Way You Used to Do/Head Like a Haunted House

Review:

“Queens of the Stone Age’s new album opens with a spot of self-mythologising. “I was born in the desert, May 17, in 73,” croons Josh Homme on Feet Don’t Fail Me. “When the needle hit the groove, I commence to moving / I was chasing what’s calling me.” Since the departure of frequently nude bassist Nick Oliveri 13 years ago, Queens have had a largely stable lineup, familiar to most listeners as Homme and some other blokes who could have “I’m in Queens of the Stone Age” tattooed on their foreheads and still provoke the question: “I’m sorry, what band are you in?” The myth-making is likely all Homme’s.

Over the course of Queens of the Stone Age’s 20-year career, he has been adept at making it clear what the band represent, and manipulating perceptions. Their breakout song, 2000’s Feelgood Hit of the Summer – whose entire lyrics were repetitions of “Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol, c-c-c-c-c-cocaine” – helped create the image of chemsex desert vikings, riding out of the mountains on choppers to set up generator parties at which all attendees swallowed kilos of pills and had it off with anything that moved: man, woman or motorcycle.

Yet, for all the machismo of their image, Queens of the Stone Age have rarely actually sounded like that. “Rock should be heavy enough for the boys and sweet enough for the girls,” Homme once said, and there has always been something strikingly feminine about Homme himself. He might be tall, and undeniably less lithe than the average rock star, but his voice never snaps into the traditional rock snarl. He frequently ascends to a falsetto to supplement the croon; he sounds more like a glass of Baileys than a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, the only hard rock singer who audibly owes more to Mel Tormé than Rob Halford.

There’s also the fact that Homme would be be unable to maintain his insane work rate if he actually were spending all his time having it off. This is the seventh Queens album, and there have been four Eagles of Death Metal records, one with Them Crooked Vultures, 10 Desert Sessions EPs, a collaboration with Iggy Pop, assorted production jobs and more: 31 other collaborations of varying degrees of seriousness. Perhaps, then, “what’s calling me” is actually a strict Protestant work ethic rather than the open road, a woman and a bag of drugs.

Though QOTSA never employ the single-minded focus of Status Quo or the Ramones or AC/DC, you can be fairly sure that certain elements will recur, as they do on Villains. There will be robotic boogie (The Way You Used To), there will be a riff reduced to the point of barely existing (Domesticated Animals), there will be something doomily psychedelic (Hideaway). There will be nods to old heroes too, though this time it seems they weren’t summoned to the studio – they content themselves with briefly nabbing the guitar hook from Neil Young’s Hey, Hey, My, My (Into the Black), on Fortress.

The presence of Mark Ronson as producer hasn’t made a whole lot of difference (regular engineer Mark Rankin is in place anyway, and one suspects his contribution is substantial). There are bursts of synthesiser, but Queens of the Stone Age were always funky, so Ronson didn’t have to draft in horn sections and samples and attempt some grisly cut-and-shut of Uptown Funk and Regular John. Feet Don’t Fail Me, in particular, sounds like it could work on a dancefloor, a less brutish iteration of the kind of choppy minimalism that gave No One Knows such force.

The nearest Homme and co come to sounding unlike Queens of the Stone Age is on the closer, Villains of Circumstance, which erupts from a brooding, subdued verse into a sunlit shuffle of a chorus that recalls a beefed-up version of Tears for Fears’ Everybody Wants to Rule the World. That reference alone provides the reason a Queens of the Stone Age album is of interest outside the worlds of denim and leather: they rarely see a song to completion for reasons of heaviness alone. There has to be melody, and Homme has the voice to support melodies substantially sweeter and more supple than hard rock normally deals with.

Queens of the Stone Age will never regain the shock value they had when Rated R came out, 17 years ago. But they don’t need to. Despite Homme’s self-mythologising, they long since ceased to be a desert rock band; they’re simply a great rock’n’roll group” – The Guardian

Key Cut: Domesticated Animals

FEATURE: The Foundation of Hounds of Love: 15th June, 1983: With Failure Comes Opportunity…

FEATURE:

 

 

The Foundation of Hounds of Love

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush photographed in 1983, in a shoot where she wanted to replicate the cover of Depeche Mode’s A Broken Frame/PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Griffin

 

15th June, 1983: With Failure Comes Opportunity…

_________

JULY is a busy month…

for music. You get some of the best albums released this month. I am looking ahead and excited about that. When it comes to Kate Bush, she had some eventful and important Julys in her career. When looking at that timeline, I found an important June date I wanted to discuss more. On 15th June, 1983, something quite important happened. I am going to look back forty years at a key date in Bush’s career. For a bit of context, her fourth studio album, The Dreaming, was released in September 1982. It was a chart success and did earn some positive reviews, though some were confused and befuddled by a denser and more experimental sound. Maybe expecting something more accessible and radio-friendly, some were not sure what to make of the phenomenal The Dreaming. Bush rested a bit after the album, but there was the business of promotional interviews and appearances. It was asked whether Bush – who solo produced The Dreaming – would produce her next studio album. EMI were not happy The Dreaming took a while to complete, and they were hoping for bigger album sales and chart plaudit. As I discussed in previous features, 1983 was a pivotal and important year for Bush. She was finishing promotion of The Dreaming and looking ahead for her next album. Even if she was pleased with the results, she knew something needed to change going forward. Long working hours, very little outside time and a poor diet meant, when she emerged from recording, she was perhaps not in the best state of mind and body. 1983 provided this chance to revitalise, retune and recharge.

1983 was a year of transition and releases. I will come to the releases. After The Dreaming did succeed on the charts and arrived a few years after her first tour, there was pressure on her to tour again. I think a lot of the pressure arose when one considers that only one single, Sat in Your Lap, was a success. All other single releases were a disappointment. Bush has always said she enjoyed 1979’s The Tour of Life. But maybe she needed another album under her belt so that she had more options regarding setlist and concepts. Rather wonderfully, I guess also as a way of getting Kate Bush’s music to new people, there were plans for a memoir. Leaving My Tracks was planned and then scrapped. Some say that was scrapped in 1984, but I think it was as early as May 1983 when she sat that aside. It makes me wonder whether there were moments after that when she thought about picking up pen and paper – though her career sort of got in the way of that I guess! Bush did some writing and demo work for the album that would become 1985’s Hounds of Love. The rest of 1983 was busy with plans of expanding her impact and popularity. In November '83, EMI came up with the idea of touring the Live at Hammersmith Odeon video around the American colleges. It went as far as thirty-two venues being set up. There was a competition for the college radio programmers for the best presentation. The prize was a trip to the U.K. to interview Kate. It was a bit of a nuts idea! I think there was this desire for Bush to connect more with American audiences.

Her music was starting to touch audiences, but I think college-aged music lovers were a particularly key demographics that might not have been fully on board. The Dreaming did get into the US Billboard 200, and there was growing awareness of Bush and her music. Although Bush did not tour and play in America, she did do promotion there. She would be over there in 1985 to talk about Hounds of Love (though some of the interviewees were not that informed or up on her music, causing some awkward moments and facial poses!). Forward to November 1983, and Night of the Swallow is released as a single in EIRE (with very little success). As a way of both completing the promotional cycle for The Dreaming and packaging what she had done so far, The Single File video compilation was released in November '83. Bush did some personal appearances in London and Greater London. There was a lot happening early in 1984. I will cover that in a future feature. Although many in the media asked, mere weeks before the arrival of Hounds of Love was announced, whether Kate Bush has disappeared or gone mad, it was clear that she was very busy and on the radar! Even though she was not releasing albums, there was music out there. Bush was both finishing with The Dreaming, promoting The Single File, discussing plans with America. There was also this look towards making album number fifth birth successful and less strenuous and draining than The Dreaming.

Slap bang in the middle of a very interesting and busy 1983, something happening overseas directly impacted her plans at home. There was a bit of personal hesitation when it came to releasing the Kate Bush E.P. in the U.S. On 15th June, 1983, it was released there. Still relatively unknown, the E.P. peaked at No. 148 in the US Billboard Pop Albums chart. It was also released in Canada too. Bush was better known and loved there (arguably, it took until 2022 for America to fully embrace and get Kate Bush!). The cover, not the very best, I think was designed to be striking and eye-grabbing – and it depicts Bush in a still from the video of Babooshka (from 1980’s Never for Ever). Bush wanted Sat in Your Lap to be included (and it was), but she was not overly-happy with the track selections. You can see that it is a bit random and not concerned with quality. More about the range of her material. She did like that Un baiser d'enfant (the French recording of The Infant Kiss from Never for Ever). Both The Rolling Stone Album Guide and Spin Alternative Record Guide gave it mixed reviews. The Single File box set came in 1984, whilst her first and only greatest hits album, The Whole Story, was released in 1986. It was quite new, in June 1983, for Bush to see her music in a compilation. Maybe dubious of the fact it was a cash-in or a last-ditch attempt to win territory and make her more visible, the thought of promoting the E.P. in the U.S. would have been a bit shoulder-shrugging and ill-timed!

Bush did have to promote her albums, but as this was an E.P., it did seem a bit excessive. After a busy 1982, she was thinking about having some downtime and chance to focus on a new album. After a U.S. tour was booked in promotion of Kate Bush, it was cancelled at the last moment because of engine failure on the Queen Elizabeth II. Kate Bush and the late Queen didn’t always have the best of luck and connection! Maybe it was a blessing in disguise that her ship was grounded. In April 2013, Bush met The Queen when she was awarded a CBE. Years before, in 2005, she met The Queen for the first time and asked her for an autograph that she would give to her son, Bertie. Breaking protocol, she was politely told that this was not possible! Bush took it in good humour but admitted she had made a tit of herself. Bush and The Queen had this interesting and eventful history. Anyway, the fact Bush could not get to the U.S. – she had a fear of flying and guess a flight there was not an appealing prospect! -, that gave her opportunity to focus on her music. I think that she was relieved she could not get to the U.S. during a busy time. She loved her fans there, but priorities closer to home were at the front of her mind. As we mark forty years (15th June) of the Kate Bush E.P., we also mark forty years of a moment when the foundations of Hounds of Love were being built. Quite literally.

Following that tour cancellation, the realisation of a long-planned project begins with the construction of Kate Bush’s own home studio. Initially equipped with 24 tracks, then expanded to 48. Construction and equipping would take six months (an Early Christmas present!). Right near her East Wickham Farm family home, I can imagine Bush discussing American plans and going there for a tour, before being told it was not happening due to the Queen Elizabeth II. She could then use that bit of luck to push ahead with something she had in her mind for a while. Bush did like the idea of working in different studios and getting that experience, though the fatigue and cost of recording ta multiple studios for The Dreaming was a moment of clarity. It was clear, as she wanted to produce her fifth album and not compromise that, recording across expensive studios for months was not happening. Instead, as she had earned a bit of money and had the means to get her bespoke home studio constructed, this was instrumental regarding Hounds of Love’s sound and success. I don’t think the songs and album would have been the same or hit as hard if it were recorded at professional studios where Bush was going through the same experiences and endless hours whilst recording The Dreaming. She needed to make some big personal and professional decisions. Having the blueprints handed over and work started on this studio, it would be this great recording space with a dance studio/area where she could re-focus on one of her great loves.

Rather than heading to the U.S. and spending time on the road pushing an E.P., instead Bush could watch as her idea of a home studio was coming to life! It would take until the end of the year to fully take shape, but she was busy in the second half of 1983. There would have been ideas and seeds of songs. I think that the concept for The Ninth Wave (the conceptual second side of Hounds of Love) was in her mind. I love the fact that summer 1983 saw Bush able to find some personal time and space. The studio was more or less completed by January 1984, so it was a mixture of seeing it grow and become more real by the day, combined with some time with her family and boyfriend. A few months prior to ideas and demos coming about for her to disconnect. 15th June, 1983 was an important moment. If Bush went to the U.S., it would have put on hold the studio. Not that it would have changed the course and success of Hounds of Love, but it would have pushed things back. Would Bush appearing in America have boosted her profile and made Hounds of Love more successful there? As it was, the album reached thirty on the US Billboard 200, in spite of a few less than kind reviews there (Hounds of Love was a number one album in the U.K.). I don’t think Bush promoting in the U.S. would have changed things too much! Let’s celebrate the fortieth anniversary of a fortuitous event that is one of the earliest moments of Hounds of Love: the home studio going from conception to fully being committed to. On behalf of all Kate Bush fans, I felt that this event and important date was…

SOMETHING worth marking!

FEATURE: Fast Out of the Gates: Five Incredible 2023 Debut Albums

FEATURE:

 

 

Fast Out of the Gates

IN THIS PHOTO: Kara Jackson/PHOTO CREDIT: Lawrence Agyei for The New Yorker 

 

Five Incredible 2023 Debut Albums

_________

AS we are half-way through 2023…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Blondshell (Sabrina Teitelbaum)/PHOTO CREDIT: Jonathan Weiner for NME

I wanted to put out a few features that collates the best work so far. I have done features regarding albums and singles. There have been some incredible debut albums released this year. The debut is one of the hardest releases, as you need to get attention right away - though it can take artists a few albums to really hit their peak. However, there are those debut albums that are instantly magnificent! It sort of takes a bit of the pressure off when it comes to a follow-up. This year has been a good one when it comes to new artists, but we have also seen some brilliant debut albums. I want to focus on five that you need to know about. These are artists/bands who have put out debuts that are going to stand the test of time. I don’t think it will be a case of eyes being on them to see if they can top the debut. Instead, it will be the excitement of hearing new music from incredible artists who hit the ground running! Below are five tremendous albums from this year. They are all…

 IN THIS PHOTO: The Waeve (Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall)/PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Gullick

AMAZING opening statements!

__________

Blondshell – Blondshell

Release Date: 7th April

Producer: Yves Rothman

Label: Partisan

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/blondshell/blondshell

Standout Tracks: Olympus/Sepsis/Tarmac

Review:

“That lead single – “Olympus” – introduced the foundations of the project’s songwriting: diaristic confession, caustic lyricism, and 90s alt-rock hooks in the vein of bands like Hole. Since that first single, she’s quickly become an exciting rising star on the indie scene, releasing a series of tracks all leading up to her debut self-titled record. Those who have been listening likely know the contours of the record going in, especially since five of its nine tracks have already been released as singles. Still, it’s a testament to the songwriting on display that Teitelbaum largely delivers on the hyped promise of her debut.

The album opens in explosive fashion with the grunge-tinged edges of “Veronica Mars”, which quickly builds from a tense, thrumming opening into a searing guitar-laden finale. Those quiet-loud builds that once were a staple of alt-rock radio come out in full force throughout the record, delivering captivating bursts of angst, anger, and longing on tracks like “Kiss City” and “Tarmac”. Meanwhile, other tracks find Teitelbaum crafting tightly written pop-rock gems. “Sepsis” and “Salad” layer on the sharp hooks and biting lyrics in equal measure, while the sun-dappled sheen of “Joiner” makes for a gentler sonic detour, full of crystalline beauty.

The record feels thoroughly steeped in these 90s influences, evoking Gen X’s generational touchstones like Live Through This and Exile in Guyville. However, Teitelbaum avoids sounding like a mere imitator. She isn’t simply trying on an aesthetic but instead finding where her songwriting voice lies. Before Blondshell, Teitelbaum had been building momentum under the moniker Baum, leaning far more heavily into the indie pop zeitgeist of the pre-pandemic years. In contrast, the songs on Blondshell came together during the lockdown era, when Teitelbaum had the chance to retreat inward, reconnect with her musical roots, and make the music she truly wanted to hear.

If there is a single throughline that connects Baum and Blondshell, it is Teitelbaum’s talent for searing and brutally honest lyrics. As an album, Blondshell is relentlessly confessional, full of moments of unflinching self-examination and withering fury. Through much of the album, Teitelbaum is angry – at herself, at her partners, at patriarchy, and at men writ large. She leads the listener through a dense maze of complicated emotions, exorcising her hurt, fear, and anger in songs that feel like a glimpse into the thoughts that keep her up at night.

She sneers on “Sepsis”, “He wears a front-facing cap / The sex is almost always bad / I don’t care cause I’m in love / I don’t know him well enough / What am I projecting / He’s gonna start infecting my life / It’ll hit all at once / Like sepsis.” Elsewhere, “Sober Together” reflects on watching someone you love get pulled back into addiction, while “Kiss City” deals with the desire to be desired, finding witty poetry in Teitelbaum’s longing (“Kiss city / I think my kink is when you tell me that you think I'm pretty”). Finally, the record closes with the shimmering balladry of “Dangerous,” encapsulating the record’s themes in a final confession: “And it’s so dangerous forming an attachment to something / Now that every time I love it might pull the rug out / And I know when I leave the house / Anything can take me down.”

As Teitelbaum has described, Blondshell was written in the midst of a particularly painful and chaotic era for her. Songwriting acted as her lifeline, and years later she was left with Blondshell, the album she has said she always wanted to make. More than any sing-along chorus, that personal touch and sense of relentless honesty are what shine through most on the record. It is the sound of an artist finally getting to let loose and say the things that have stayed locked up inside for too long. In turn, Teitelbaum offers an exciting introduction to a talented songwriter and a thoroughly rewarding debut” – The Line of Best Fit

Key Cut: Veronica Mars

The Waeve – The Waeve

Release Date: 3rd February

Producers: Graham Coxon/Rose Elinor Dougall (The Waeve)/James Ford

Label: Transgressive

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/the-waeve/the-waeve

Standout Tracks: Can I Call You/Kill Me Again/All Along

Review:

“’The WAEVE’, this self-titled debut from the pairing of Blur guitarist Graham Coxon and journeywoman songwriter Rose Elinor Dougall is a curious collection of contrasts. Most notably, that between the protagonists’ own voices; Rose’s a strong, smooth and often deep one with an almost RP accent; Graham’s his signature twang, faltering and vulnerable. The rough and the smooth rub up against each other - the squall of Graham’s guitar juxtaposed against slick brass, soaring strings or - in the case of ‘Undine’ - appearing just as the lyrical content threatens to veer into soppy territory. A contrast between Graham’s perceived persona - spiky, contrary, a man who refused to participate once Blur’s exploration of pop culture’s depths went too far - and the lyrics he’s boldly presenting here (“Find the right dream / Taking a chance on forever”). That said, the duo know when to complement each other, too: ‘Drowning’ makes like its title, its layered cacophony creating aural overwhelm. And the clear highlight, ‘Someone Up There’, revels in its convergence: whirring guitars, a punkish bassline and an ‘ooh ooh ooh’ chorus refrain of “You’ve lost your power / It’s all gone sour.” Cinematic in scope, often luscious in its arrangements, it’s a singular gem” – DIY

Key Cut: Drowning

RAYE - My 21st Century Blues

Release Date: 3rd February

Producers: Rachel Keen (RAYE)/Mike Sabath/Punctual/BloodPop/Di Genius

Label: Human Re Sources

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/raye/my-21st-century-blues

Standout Tracks: Hard Out Here./Black Mascara./Body Dysmorphia.

Review:

“RAYE closes her debut album by thanking her nearest and dearest. Celebrating the friends, family and collaborators who supported the making of the record, she explains on ‘Fin’: “I’ve waited seven years for this moment, and finally ‘My 21st Century Blues’ is now out forever.”

It also marks the culmination of the arduous battle the 25-year-old has faced to release her first full-length album. After releasing her debut EP ‘Welcome To The Winter’ in 2014, RAYE penned a deal with Polydor the same year aged 17. Since then, there have been further solo releases (including several EPs and 2020 mini-album ‘Euphoric Sad Songs’), collaborations with chart-dominating dance whizzes (Jax Jones, David Guetta, Disclosure) and co-writes for the likes of Beyoncé and Mabel. Yet RAYE’s own debut album failed to materialise, and, by June 2021, she’d had enough. “I have been on a FOUR-ALBUM RECORD DEAL since 2014! And [I] haven’t been allowed to put out one album,” she tweeted. “I’m done being a polite pop star. I want to make my album now, please that is all I want.” Three weeks later, she got her wish: “Today, I am speaking to you as an independent artist,” she told her Twitter followers.

Since then, RAYE has been releasing music that feels unapologetically her own. There’s the electrifying, affirmative ‘Hard Out Here’, which sees the singer take aim at the patriarchal music industry: “All the white men CEOs, fuck your privilege / Get your pink chubby hands off my mouth, fuck you think this is?” The euphoric ‘Black Mascara’, meanwhile, demonstrates RAYE’s knack for penning floor-filling dance hits, albeit by switching things up from her previous club anthems by coupling darker, bubbling beats with devastating lyrics (“I’m here now fucked up, thinking this why I’m out here sinking in these dark nights“).

The album’s real triumph, though, is the trip-hop-influenced, 070 Shake-featuring ‘Escapism’. The slinky single first dropped in October before gradually climbing the charts, hitting the summit last month to give RAYE her first UK Number One single. “As tough as it’s been, in the darkest of times, it’s the ultimate validation,” she told NME of the victory.

The rest of ‘My 21st Century Blues’ follows suit from these lead singles. Gritty, honest lyrics, delivered by RAYE’s gorgeous voice, are paired with weird and wonderful genre-spanning instrumentals. ‘Oscar Winning Tears’ is a searing takedown of a crumbling, toxic relationship that’s built upon swooning strings and cinematic piano licks that support its creator’s powerhouse voice. The stripped-back ‘Mary Jane’ transports you to a jazzy speakeasy through its biting guitar riffs and subtle rhythm section, while the funk-laced ‘Worth It’ could be a lost Silk Sonic track. The brass-heavy ‘The Thrill Is Gone’ is an excellent modern soul offering, its lush instrumental arrangements evoking Amy Winehouse’s ‘Back To Black’.

Lyrically, RAYE doesn’t pull any punches. ‘Environmental Anxiety’, which borrows spaced-out production tricks from Coldplay, sees her sing: “Come on kids, it’s time to vote / Boris Johnson’s sniffing coke / All the children are depressed / Not the future we had hoped.” ‘Body Dysmorphia’ tackles her own difficult relationship with her body, while ballad ‘Ice Cream Man’ is a brutally honest account of an abuse of power where RAYE recounts her experience of sexual assault at the hands of a producer: “And I was 7, was 21, was 17, and was 11 / It took a while to understand what my consent means.”

RAYE recently said that such bold and brave declarations wouldn’t have been released had she still been signed to a major label. Granted her creative independence, though, the hard-fought ‘My 21st Century Blues’ is unequivocally RAYE from start to finish” – DIY

Key Cut: The Thrill Is Gone.

Kara Jackson - Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?

Release Date: 14th April

Producers: Kara Jackson/Kaina Castillo/Sen Morimoto/Nnamdi Ogbonnaya

Label: September Recordings

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/kara-jackson/why-does-the-earth-give-us-people-to-love

Standout Tracks: no fun/party /therapy/why does the earth give us people to love?

Review:

“Although she began collecting awards for her poetry as a teen, including being named National Youth Poet Laureate in 2019, Chicagoland's Kara Jackson is far from a writer who dabbles in music. She started piano lessons as early as age five, has referred to singing as her first love, and released her debut singer/songwriter EP within weeks of the laureate designation. Even though the EP, a spare acoustic-guitar outing, garnered positive attention for its blunt observations and turns of phrase as well as Jackson's husky, authoritative voice, it may have done little to prepare the music world for the stark theatricality and poignancy of her first album, Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? Parts Daniel Johnston and avant-cabaret show, it demands attention from the opening clatter of a cassette recorder and ensuing dinked-out piano and spoke-sung rhymes of the one-minute "recognized." ("Some people roll dice...Some people look nice...Some people snort lines...Some people tell lies to be recognized.") In an almost sharp contrast but for its continuation of the album's unrelenting starkness, the episodic "no fun/party" adds intermittent swooping strings and ghostly synths to its opening section's broken guitar chords. It then changes tempo, mode, and mood for a mournful B section that interrupts with thoughts like "Every person that I've dated/Tells me I'm intimidating" with a sinking melody. When the more tuneful A part returns, additional instruments, multi-tracked vocals, and effects are used sparingly for spacey, sometimes startling emphasis rather than band-like accompaniment. From there, the album's unpredictability is another defining trait. As Jackson continues in similar fashion through songs with titles like "dickhead blues," "therapy," and "rat" (featuring Ohmme's Macie Stewart on violin), she continues to reveal intimate details of her own struggles while painting memorable scenes and characters. Appearing relatively late in the track list, the showstopping title track was reportedly the first song Jackson wrote for the album, after a mentor received an identical cancer diagnosis to a friend who had recently died. Alongside the nearly hour-long record's most haunting melody, it begins with the eternal question, "Why does the earth give us people to love, then take them away out of reach?" In true theatric fashion, the album closes with a reprise (of "recognized") and a brief parting song, "liquor," whose mocking, rising-and-falling tune considers self-medicating after being discarded for someone deemed better looking” – AllMusic

Key Cut: pawnshop

boygenius – the record

Release Date: 31st March

Producers: boygenius/Catherine Marks

Label: Interscope

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/boygenius/the-record-5

Standout Tracks: $20/Cool About It/Leonard Cohen

Review:

“With You Without Them” is a kitchen hymn sung under soft morning light; it is a song about history, inheritance, and in that spirit carries on with the swooning folk harmonies last heard on the EP’s closer, “Ketchum, ID.” Dacus, Baker, and Bridgers express gratitude to the preceding generations who shaped the people they love—their father, their father’s mother—and ask to take part in this lineage, sharing storylines until they and their intimates become a kind of family too. “Give me everything you’ve got/I’ll take what I can get,” the trio sings a capella, then reciprocates the request: “I’ll give everything I’ve got/Please take what I can give.” The first four tracks of The Record were written independently, and “With You Without Them” is so evidently by Dacus, a ditty she’d sing while washing dishes; it shares a bloodline with her Historian cut “Pillar of Truth.” Here and elsewhere, her voice provides a warm and sturdy foundation, cradling the others’ like a well-loved rocking chair.

Being a touring musician might mean only a brief layover at home, and so the next song drags you out the front door into the Sprinter, Converse laces untied. Led by Baker, the rabble-rousing idealist who was railing against George W. Bush as a 10-year-old, “$20” is a madcap adventure that invokes the spirit of a famous Vietnam protest photo as it tells a story of youthful recklessness. The Tennessee singer taps into her past as a hardcore frontwoman, fulfilling her wish for More Sick Riffs; she also activates a combustive, daredevil streak in her bandmates, who ditch the refined patience of their EP to scream like hell. Later on, the three trade verses on the headbanging “Satanist,” in which they play adrift kids scrounging for shady ecstasy and trying on renegade poses. “Will you be an anarchist with me?/Sleep in cars and kill the bourgeoisie,” Bridgers sings—then a minute later unleashes wails that sound both like the victim trapped in a burning building and the fire engine racing to the rescue.

Banter flies while Baker is at the wheel, and at other parts of the ride, it’s like the passengers have lapsed quietly into their own thoughts. Guided by the cashmere fog of Bridgers’ voice, “Revolution 0” and “Emily I’m Sorry” exist less within the Boygenius milieu than the rippling, snow-lined headspace of Punisher; the other band members seem only to enter in the form of graceful backing harmonies. Bridgers alludes to real-life incidents whose details remain obscured, former lovers who occupy an uncertain position in her life. The backdrop to the hushed, crumbling apologia “Emily I’m Sorry” seems to be a defamation lawsuit that strained an already-fraught relationship; Bridgers’ mind wanders to apocryphal wastelands, to Montreal, as she entreats the person she loves to forgive her for going astray. “I’m 27 and I don’t know who I am,” she confesses.

The closer you get to somebody, the more you can fail them, and The Record recoils with the humiliating reminder of our own insufficiency: Surely, we imagine, they can do better than us. On the skydiving country-pop song “Not Strong Enough,” the trio offers a rejoinder to Sheryl Crow as they profess to lack the toughness, the solidity, to be what another person needs: “I tried, I can’t/Stop staring at the ceiling fan.” It’s a cowardly and relatable strategy, preemptively curbing disappointment by shrinking away. Elsewhere, they wonder whether distance would have been better in the first place. The Simon & Garfunkel redux and album highlight “Cool About It” explores the anxious, conciliatory phase after a breakup when you emerge from a relationship into a wilderness of pleasantries and deceptions. Friendliness is its own agony: “Wishing you were kind enough to be cruel about it,” Baker sings.

To be wounded, actually and acutely: this is the price of real intimacy. And real intimacy is what you find on The Record, the melding of what’s yours and mine—a favorite Joan Didion quote, songs by Iron & Wine and the Cure, passages from Ecclesiastes—until what’s left is something greater than the sum. Reimagining the EP standout “Me & My Dog” from a new and wiser vantage point, the album closer “Letter to an Old Poet” is, in one sense, an account of Bridgers moving on from a terrible crush. But it’s also subtle testament to the influence of our friends as we carry on in life. The song alludes to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, a Dacus staple, as it seems to actualize a wish in one of her best-known lyrics: “In five years I hope the songs feel like covers/Dedicated to new lovers.” As we evolve into new versions of ourselves, our friends accompany us into the unknown, bearing witness to and taking part in our transformations. They may hurt us sometimes, but it’s worth it; in the end, better than anything is being understood” – Pitchfork

Key Cut: Without You Without Them