Now we're talking.
Thursday, 28 May 2020
Thursday, 14 May 2020
Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations 3.1.18
Poor "Coming Of Age". Not only is it chock-full of Wesley Crusher, not only does it kick off an ongoing plot that is unceremoniously abandoned just six episodes later, it now has the distinct misfortune to be the episode that I had to get through before writing about "Duet".
Tuesday, 5 May 2020
Lockdown Quiz Rounds 3
A rather gauche round, this time.
1) What alternative name is there for the exclamation mark in American English?
2) Which is the only British place name to include an exclamation mark?
3) Which UK band released a triple album entitled "Sandinista!" in December 1980, just twelve months after their previous album, "London Calling"?
4) Which American film has the alternative title of "Flying High!", with both titles including an exclamation mark?
5) In 1754 the Royal Academy of which country added an inverted exclamation mark to the list of punctuation for their written language?
6) The show Oklahoma!, first performed on Broadway in 1943, was written by which highly successful musical duo?
7) What is 3!+1!?
8) The video to which 2003 single features composer and lyricist Andre 3000 playing all eight members of his "band", The Love Below?
9) In which Canadian province is the city of St Louis du Ha! Ha!?
10) What is the first name of George W Bush's younger brother, who used that name followed by an exclamation mark as his campaign slogan in 2016 when running to be the Republican candidate for president?
1) What alternative name is there for the exclamation mark in American English?
2) Which is the only British place name to include an exclamation mark?
3) Which UK band released a triple album entitled "Sandinista!" in December 1980, just twelve months after their previous album, "London Calling"?
4) Which American film has the alternative title of "Flying High!", with both titles including an exclamation mark?
5) In 1754 the Royal Academy of which country added an inverted exclamation mark to the list of punctuation for their written language?
6) The show Oklahoma!, first performed on Broadway in 1943, was written by which highly successful musical duo?
7) What is 3!+1!?
8) The video to which 2003 single features composer and lyricist Andre 3000 playing all eight members of his "band", The Love Below?
9) In which Canadian province is the city of St Louis du Ha! Ha!?
10) What is the first name of George W Bush's younger brother, who used that name followed by an exclamation mark as his campaign slogan in 2016 when running to be the Republican candidate for president?
Thursday, 30 April 2020
Infinite Diversity, Finite Combinations 1.1.18
I hope you weren't too attached to IDFC having an episode count that's only in double digits.
Because THOSE DAYS ARE GONE.
Episode 100.
Because THOSE DAYS ARE GONE.
Episode 100.
Tuesday, 21 April 2020
Lockdown Quiz Rounds 2
Answers in comments!
1. Which soul singer covered "Yesterday" on a 1970 release, fourteen years before being shot by his own father in their Los Angeles home?
2. Which former Beatle covered "Yesterday" in 1970, alongside his fellow member of the Travelling Wilburys, Bob Dylan?
3. Which American superstar covered "Yesterday" on his 1970 album On The Stage, recorded seven months into his residency at the International Hotel in Las Vegas?
4. Shirley Bassey covered "Yesterday" in 1991, twelve years after providing her third Bond title song. Which of the Roger Moore Bond films was that song for?
5. Who covered "Yesterday" on their 1969 album "My Way"?
6. Which all-female R&B group release a cover of "Yesterday" on their 1992 album "Funky Divas", which also included the hits "My Lovin' (You're Never Gonna Get It)", "Free Your Mind", and "Give Him Something He Can Feel"?
7. Cuban-born singer La Lupe covered "Yesterday" in 1967's "El Rey y Yo". What are the English translations of "La Lupe" and "El Rey y Yo"? (1/2 each)
8. Opera singer Placido Domingo covered "Yesterday" in 1981, nine years before becoming part of which musical group?
9. Which piano player covered "Yesterday" in 1967, twenty years before his death and forty-six years before Michael Douglas played him in the biopic "Behind The Candelabra"?
10. Which teenage pop singer performed "Yesterday" at the 92nd Academy Awards this February?
1. Which soul singer covered "Yesterday" on a 1970 release, fourteen years before being shot by his own father in their Los Angeles home?
2. Which former Beatle covered "Yesterday" in 1970, alongside his fellow member of the Travelling Wilburys, Bob Dylan?
3. Which American superstar covered "Yesterday" on his 1970 album On The Stage, recorded seven months into his residency at the International Hotel in Las Vegas?
4. Shirley Bassey covered "Yesterday" in 1991, twelve years after providing her third Bond title song. Which of the Roger Moore Bond films was that song for?
5. Who covered "Yesterday" on their 1969 album "My Way"?
6. Which all-female R&B group release a cover of "Yesterday" on their 1992 album "Funky Divas", which also included the hits "My Lovin' (You're Never Gonna Get It)", "Free Your Mind", and "Give Him Something He Can Feel"?
7. Cuban-born singer La Lupe covered "Yesterday" in 1967's "El Rey y Yo". What are the English translations of "La Lupe" and "El Rey y Yo"? (1/2 each)
8. Opera singer Placido Domingo covered "Yesterday" in 1981, nine years before becoming part of which musical group?
9. Which piano player covered "Yesterday" in 1967, twenty years before his death and forty-six years before Michael Douglas played him in the biopic "Behind The Candelabra"?
10. Which teenage pop singer performed "Yesterday" at the 92nd Academy Awards this February?
Friday, 17 April 2020
D CDs #473: Petty Hate Machine
The Smiths
Coming back to the debut album of one of the most beloved - and yes, legitimately best - bands of the '80s might seem like a mug's game. There are the general issues as regards the weight of expectations and the solidified layers of How It Was one needs to chip through- musical opinion fossilising rather quickly than did dinosaur bones. Then you've got the specific issues around The Smiths, by which - and let's not be coy, since the man himself only ever approved of that when writing lyrics, and not always even then- that absolute fuckwit Morrissey.
For all that "Still Ill" (which I focused on here) now reads less like satire and more like the rough draft of a manifesto, though, I can't deny that it remains a gorgeous song, filled with anger and sadness and a sense that things aren't actually going to get better in the way we were always told they would be, just so we'd stop complaining about how awful things are now.
This sense of discomfort with both the awful past and the surely awful future suffuses The Smiths. The fact that it's clearly Morrissey's personal discomfort is never less than obvious; as with literally the entirety of his career, you're never more than a few bars from him referencing some unknown figure he wants to lay into, or be laid by, or both.
But neither this laser-focus on his own problems, nor his later quixotic crusade to demonstrate one doesn't need a taste for a full English to be a lager-bellied shirt-shirking racist shit-heel, stops the album from working. Indeed, what's remarkable here is, not just that it works so well, but that it works so well as a Smiths album. To deny him the charity he so clearly doesn't deserve, it's not surprising that Morrissey was already so Olympically self-involved he could nail his "Woe is me, woeful is you" schtick at the first try. More positively, Marr's gorgeous, multi-layered guitar impossibilities explode from the ether fully formed. Opener "Reel Around The Fountain" doesn't so much set up his stall as burn down everything else in the market.
Has there ever been a debut album that so perfectly encapsulated what a band was, that so effortlessly staked out the territory it would explore throughout its existence? Not just in the sense of being rough sketches of what was to come, either. The one-two punch of "This Charming Man" and "Still Ill" is as fine a pairing as the band ever achieved.
I'm not saying the band never developed from this first platter. There's a looseness here, a fuzziness, a sense of playfulness that is rather less arch than what comes after. Still, while "...Fountain" or "Suffer Little Children" might not sound quite right if you stuck them somewhere on The Queen Is Dead, I'd be hard-pressed to explain quite why.
More than any other band I can think of, The Smiths arrived so fully-formed, and imploded so near the top of their game, that it sometimes feels as though time stood still for them - that every song arrived simultaneously from some other place, with Morrissey and Marr simply choosing which songs to dole out with every subsequent release.
Their choices here are tough to find fault with. There's a reason the musical landscape found itself transformed after The Smiths and The Smiths revealed themselves. The most glorious space-time anomaly opened up in 1982 Lancashire, only to close five years later. The kings may be dead, or at least their magic drained from the world, but this lush, louche remnant is a reminder of the time when the world was briefly theirs.
Eight and a half tentacles.
Coming back to the debut album of one of the most beloved - and yes, legitimately best - bands of the '80s might seem like a mug's game. There are the general issues as regards the weight of expectations and the solidified layers of How It Was one needs to chip through- musical opinion fossilising rather quickly than did dinosaur bones. Then you've got the specific issues around The Smiths, by which - and let's not be coy, since the man himself only ever approved of that when writing lyrics, and not always even then- that absolute fuckwit Morrissey.
For all that "Still Ill" (which I focused on here) now reads less like satire and more like the rough draft of a manifesto, though, I can't deny that it remains a gorgeous song, filled with anger and sadness and a sense that things aren't actually going to get better in the way we were always told they would be, just so we'd stop complaining about how awful things are now.
This sense of discomfort with both the awful past and the surely awful future suffuses The Smiths. The fact that it's clearly Morrissey's personal discomfort is never less than obvious; as with literally the entirety of his career, you're never more than a few bars from him referencing some unknown figure he wants to lay into, or be laid by, or both.
But neither this laser-focus on his own problems, nor his later quixotic crusade to demonstrate one doesn't need a taste for a full English to be a lager-bellied shirt-shirking racist shit-heel, stops the album from working. Indeed, what's remarkable here is, not just that it works so well, but that it works so well as a Smiths album. To deny him the charity he so clearly doesn't deserve, it's not surprising that Morrissey was already so Olympically self-involved he could nail his "Woe is me, woeful is you" schtick at the first try. More positively, Marr's gorgeous, multi-layered guitar impossibilities explode from the ether fully formed. Opener "Reel Around The Fountain" doesn't so much set up his stall as burn down everything else in the market.
Has there ever been a debut album that so perfectly encapsulated what a band was, that so effortlessly staked out the territory it would explore throughout its existence? Not just in the sense of being rough sketches of what was to come, either. The one-two punch of "This Charming Man" and "Still Ill" is as fine a pairing as the band ever achieved.
I'm not saying the band never developed from this first platter. There's a looseness here, a fuzziness, a sense of playfulness that is rather less arch than what comes after. Still, while "...Fountain" or "Suffer Little Children" might not sound quite right if you stuck them somewhere on The Queen Is Dead, I'd be hard-pressed to explain quite why.
More than any other band I can think of, The Smiths arrived so fully-formed, and imploded so near the top of their game, that it sometimes feels as though time stood still for them - that every song arrived simultaneously from some other place, with Morrissey and Marr simply choosing which songs to dole out with every subsequent release.
Their choices here are tough to find fault with. There's a reason the musical landscape found itself transformed after The Smiths and The Smiths revealed themselves. The most glorious space-time anomaly opened up in 1982 Lancashire, only to close five years later. The kings may be dead, or at least their magic drained from the world, but this lush, louche remnant is a reminder of the time when the world was briefly theirs.
Eight and a half tentacles.
No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.2.9 - "Fred Jones Part 2" (Ben Folds)
I'm not sure why this song resonated with me so much when Folds' first - and best - solo album came out. I got hold of it in the dying days of Autumn, 2001, which meant that a) I was barely past the halfway stage of my degree, and b) despite being crammed with half a billion arseholes, the Western World had lost every single stinking piece of its collective shit.
An odd time both personally and generally to fall in love with a song about a guy getting coldly fired twenty-five years into his career, then. I couldn't point to twenty-five years I had of anything, including existence. Something in the horrible, banal unfairness of it all still chimed with me, though. I already had a copy of Whatever And Ever, Amen, so I knew, per "Cigarette", that Fred was struggling as primary carer to his chronically ill and stupified wife. And now he's here having his professional life torpedoed because - well, why? Nobody seems to have thought it was worth letting him know. The implication is just someone higher up has decided that younger must necessarily be better.
I wonder why Folds decided to give his shitcanned newspaper man the same name as his struggling care giver. I suspect I do know why its a paper specifically that's the place he's being fired from - a reference surely to the lyrics of "Cigarette" having been ripped from a run-on headline Folds had read. But why make the link at all?
Maybe Folds was just thinking in terms of the thematic link between thankless jobs that were never going to end well. Whatever his intent, by putting Jones' stories into two different songs and separating them by four years, Folds highlights how completely irrelevant the guy's personal circumstances are to the asshole boss who's kicking him to the curb. Not personal; just business. As though the two are ever separate. Jones can't even relax with his hobbies any more. The hurt is just too deep.
This second chapter in the life of the luckless Jones is more subtle and measured. The melancholy of the piano chords is less overwrought, the lyrics of light and shadow and resignation and anger a more effective delivery system than simply singing a headline, no matter how oddly structured it was. It's maybe unfair to compare the two, really, given "Cigarette" is supposed to hit you sideways and then get out before the second count reaches three digits. The longer run-time of "Fred Jones Part 2" actually allows time for the sadness to permeate, though. No doubt this is helped by the cello - I've always been a sucker for a cello - though the backing vocals from Cake's John McCrea are a welcome addition too.
But it's those last two lines before the final refrain that linger longest.
And all of these bastards have taken his placeAll the anger the paper and his bosses and the restraints of the song's structure itself are finally cast aside while Fred howls at the canvas in his basement.
He's forgotten but not yet gone
Maybe that's what it is, the reason for this song landing so hard with me. The fury spat at the injustice engrained into a system that steals your labour from you every week until it eventually decides it can steal someone else's labour more effectively, and pretends you never really existef all. Perhaps even then, I knew on some level where all this was going.
It'd be nice to think so. Really, though, the chief suspect has to remain that cello.
B-side:
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