D CDs #468: No

You know what? I decline. We're not going to do this.

I mean, I know I do do this, all the time. Rating acts of cultural appropriation is all but unavoidable if you want to talk about music. Next up is Springsteen, for God's sake, an artist I love, but who I couldn't possibly doesn't owe a huge debt to the music Butterfield rifled through for this platter.

But an album which gets picked as important because of how wildly successful the thievery involved was - "Where American white kids got the notion they could play the blues", to quote the Rolling Stone article this series is based on - it becomes something different. The theft is no longer just some awkward, unavoidable fact about the "how". It becomes the "why", too. The applause isn't for something that has been stolen. It's for the act of stealing itself.

Are the songs good? Sure. They've taken from the best. Those lads who nicked the Mona Lisa from the Louvre knew what they were doing, too. And one can perhaps admire the competence, even the audacity of how they pulled it off. 

I'm not going to be calling them painters, though, am I?  

Ten creeping tentacles of white supremacy.

Friday Dreadfleet: Additional Squid

At last! The miniature I was born to paint! Four years after I first started her base, the Black Kraken is done.

And her little dog auxiliary, too!

I reckon this pushes me just past the halfway point of painting up the entire set (fourteen years after it was released), so here's a nice moody (read: without proper lighting) picture of everything done so far. Genuinely think this is the best painting I've ever done.

Trek Update: April

A double helping of Trek stuff from me this month. First, my essay on the first episode of Lower Decks is up on the other blog (along with a link to buy my first book in paperback, if you live in the UK).

Second is a podcast I was invited to do with the hosts of Pedagodzilla, an awesome site which uses sci-fi and fantasy stories as a starting point for discussions on pedagogy. I got to chat to them for a while about why the Kobyashi Maru is an absolutely wretched test from a pedagogical standpoint.

Go check all that out!

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.3.5 - "Take Me Home" (Wilt)

Post-hardcore was a pretty solid idea: answer the "What if we tripled the speed and intensity of punk?" question posed by hardcore itself with the yes-and of "What if we had some actual fucking tunes?". I've probably tipped my hand to the next half of this intro, though, which is that how well this worked out in practice came down into just how post the post-hardcore proved to be.

British post-hardcore had its moment early into the 21st century, happily coinciding with both my awareness that pop-punk was digging itself into something of a rut, and being able to visit my childhood home often enough to check out MTV Rocks for weeks at a time. As a result, I had both the motive and opportunity to watch the battle for dominance of the post-hardcore scene across These Isles unfold in real time.

For me there was only one winner. It wasn't Wilt, actually, who imploded not too after "Take Me Home" was released. There was a sense it might have been, though, had things been different.

"Take Me Home" is a malfunctioning machine of a song. Or maybe not malfunctioning, but certainly not operating in the manner intended. From the submerged opening riff to the jagged slash that heralds the verse resetting along a new vector, there's clearly moving parts generating momentum, but it's not clear that we're going anywhere.

This is an impression subtly alluded to in the video by the band performing inside a circle of what look not just like camera rails, but train tracks. The lyrics contribute here too, returning to diagonally-adjacent themes again and again, like a looped record inside a fever dream. Our narrator is bringing people through the ground, watching them travel through time, and exhorting them to escape, all while himself being trapped in what might well be an asylum, as he plays the role of holy madman.

There's a sense the machine is running out of time, too, not because (or not just because) of its own increasing erraticness, but because of an impending disaster. "Take the last plane if you can" our narrator begs, one of several lines which recall Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (again, this is underlined by the rain of ash that falls upon the band in the latter stages of the video). The machine is glitching, but so is the world; something is coming so powerful it will derail the concept of time itself.

And I guess I could relate, if only a little. It's objectively insane to link the concept of a global pandemic to coming to the end of your undergraduate degree - I didn't need COVID to tell me that. But thematic resonance has a habit of completely ignoring a sense of proportion. Especially sat in the house that I no longer lived in, about to leave the latest in a series of rented rooms I'd inhabited for a maximum of two years in a row each, facing a future in which the only certainty was how much of the past would no longer live on it.

Plus, atop everything else, Twelve Monkeys is an extremely off-kilter love story - a romance as presented by a broken Hollywood machine. Our narrator wants - needs - someone to take him home. But like James Cole is he looking for an escape route, or a place to live, or simply someone to lose himself in for a little while? Whichever it was, grappling with an approaching red line of a future, fighting to find the right pills to keep my head level, and defining myself by my singlehood in a way 45-year-old me feels nauseous recalling, Cormac Battle's anguished yell gave me everything I needed.

Someone. Please. Please.

Take me home.

B-side

Maps Of Legend

Happy March! New month, new blog post. I take some time out from charting the progress of 21st century Trek by looking at maps of a rather different kind.

IDFC 8.1.1

 Forgot to put this up, like some kind of chump. I've started the dispiriting process of picking apart Picard.

D CDs #469: Scoring The Score

Spacesquid's "White Boy Rap-Noodling Corner" returns. Sorry.

The Score was fucking everywhere in '96. In the UK at least, though, it'd be fairer to say "Killing Me Softly With His Song" was fucking everywhere. "Fu-Gee-La" had done decent numbers, and "Ready Or Not" would be the Fugees' second UK number 1, but "Killing Me Softly..." was just inescapable.

In many ways, it seemed an odd advert for the album. I mean, it clearly worked; the song was never released separately in the US, meaning people had to buy the album entire if they wanted to buy it. That's a move even Billy Corgan might label as overly arrogant, but the platter want platinum seven times over there, so: point proved.

But the stripped back, almost barren arrangement of a straight-up cover (they'd wanted to take more liberties with the source material, and end up doing so on the album, but technically they only had the rights to a cover version) are a world away from the fast beats and faster wordplay of the broader work. It's really just - "just" - a showcase for Lauryn Hill's phenomenal voice, Jean's occasionally interjections feeling less like actual contributions, and more like a naughty brother objecting to big sister's song getting her all the attention.

Which of course means the single is actually a perfect ad for the album: Hill will dominate, Jean will try to keep up, and Pras will be smart enough to mostly just stay out of the way.

One of the most illuminating comments on the making of The Score comes from producer Jerry "Wonder" Duplessi, who told Complex that: 

If I remember correctly, that song was the last record we did. Everybody was rapping,  rapping, rap, rap, rap. And we’re like. “Hold up, man, we have to have a song on this shit.".

The big joke here is that there are two songs on the album. Either Duplessi didn't really think Jean's "No Woman, No Cry" rewrite really counted as such (though it certainly isn't a rap), or - the funnier option - Jean insisted on getting his own song after Lauren recorded hers, and Duplessi simply completely forgot that this was a thing that had happened.

Not that Jean disgraces himself here. The first side of The Score ranks among some of the best rap I've come across in this project so far, and Hill isn't the only reason why. Ambitiously dense rhyme schemes, a constant flow of references that are clever, funny, and expansive, and all in the pursuit of making its point, it'd all feel like showing off if they weren't making it seem so easy. Lyrically, the album is less distant from the prevailing hip-hop concerns of the time than others have made out. The Haitian seasoning here is certainly tasty, but ultimately we're still presented with stories of surely fictitious felonies and extended treaties on how every other rapper in existence sucks in comparison to the ones currently holding the mics.

But then, you can't master a form if you're not going to work within it. And masterful seems the term here. Hell, the record does more with Hill's laugh than most can manage with anyone's voice. True, the momentum doesn't quite keep up - holding the two ballads for the back half helps hide the fact that the trio were running out of steam after the headlong charge through to the end of "Fu-Gee-La" (though Hill never really stops shining). At its best, though - and The Score is frequently, effortlessly at its best - it's hard to imagine how anyone could do this better. 

Except it turned out that Hill could.

Eight tentacles.