D CDs #476: Ain't Arrogance If You're Right

Now I get it.

After the endless beige nightmare of Down Every Road, the thought of launching into another multi-disc album filled me with exhaustion. More fool me.  Life after Death is not the best album ever made - though it's exceptionally fucking good - but in the shallower pool of the "Best Double Album EVAH!" stakes (to not so much mix my metaphors as use a spiked mace to whisk them in a bowl of acid), I'm struggling to think of anything short of Mellon Collie... that could possibly outclass it.

Hell, even the Pumpkins greatest work loses out in a few respects. Biggie's last album might not reach its dizzying heights, but neither does it suffer its occasional lows. The absolute closest this album comes to filler in its... ooh, let's say 21 actual musical platters is the somewhat spartan "I'm Going Back To Cali". Even that manages to insult Tupac twice before the rap even starts, first by using voice modulation to encroach on Tupac's hit "California Love", and then by association making it clear that this track's title is about B.I.G. returning to the subject of loving California so he can rap about it right. A double gut-punch before Biggie even has to open his mouth? That is cold genius.

And everything else here is better (well, maybe not "Ten Crack Commandments..."). Yes, my baseline lack of interest in music so obsessed with masculinity and the acquisition of wealth remains in force (and as always, fuck homophobia in rap as in everywhere else). But the mark of the best lyricists is that they can make something you give absolutely no fucks about and make it interesting, and B.I.G. clearly had the knack for that. His boasts have just enough self-awareness, his tales of cold-blooded gangster excess are punctuated by moments of tragedy and comedy (see "Somebody's Got To Die" and "Niggas Bleed" respectively), and throughout the quality of wordplay is so superlative it seems churlish to argue for a greater range of topics. I mean, Rap Genius points out one of the songs here has a quadruple entendre. Biggie has essentially won English. How can I turn my nose up at the arrogance spilling from every line here when it's so obviously and completely justified?

Life After Death also gains points for structure.  Where many double albums are a messy splurge of output - even those like Mellon Collie... that have some ostensible theme to each disc - the two CDs in this pair have different focuses. The first disc is more thrilling, more brutal; the second CD is in many ways a more laid-back affair, closer to what, say Snoop (oops!) got famous doing.  There are crossovers in the atmosphere between the two discs, of course, but there's a clear get up/sit down separation here, which saves this from the long-player fatigue of most albums by those who refuse to believe they have less than seventy-three minutes of high quality product to shift. If I'm honest, I return to the first disc more than the second, but that's no criticism of the album's tail end ("The World is Filled..." is a particular highlight, and closing track "You're Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)" would be a storming closer even without the horrible connotations it had already acquired by the time of the album's release), just an admission that it doesn't include anything quite as superlative as "Hypnotize". Or "I Love the Dough". Or, naturally, "Mo' Money Mo' Problems", which thoroughly proves the old saw that "genius steals" as it sharpens the already fierce guitar pulse and strutting bass-line of Diana Ross' "I'm Coming Out" to unconquerable effect, keeping you hooked right up until the song hits the Kelly Price-sung chorus and somehow becomes even better.

Looking back at my short list of favourites, actually, it occurs to me that Biggie is at his best here paired with a powerful female voice to contrast against his deep, thick almost-drawl. Certainly Lil' Kim is the secret weapon in "Another", turning an otherwise ugly song about viciously disrespecting your ex-girlfriend into a far more interesting "he said, she said" about how two people can so easily believe the other one was one hundred percent to blame. It's still disquieting in tone, but, as with the tales of criminal violence, the full-throttle unpleasantness is undercut just enough to save things.

More often, though, nothing here needs saving in the slightest, and the female voices here are just sharp spice to an already delicious, satisfying meal.  It was, of course, the last meal Biggie ever got to cook, which makes its sublime nature all the harder to bear. But these 109 minutes survive him as a greater monument than many could manage had they worked for a lifetime.

B.I.G. is dead. B.I.G. is immortal.

Nine tentacles.

I For One Welcome Our New Marxist Overlord

Well not really, obviously. With Corbyn to my right, and Marx to my left, we can safely dispense with the idea that Corbyn's chief aim will be the inevitable overthrow of the bourgeoisie.

But it's precisely this inability of many in the country to accurately pin down Corbyn's leftist positions (either through ignorance or mendacity) that gives me hope for the following five years. I'm not talking about hope that Labour will win the election. Absent a major scandal and/or another financial crisis, Corbyn isn't going to take Number 10. But then neither were any of the other candidates. A second pure Tory term is close to inevitable at this point; with Cameron and Osborne having been re-elected despite years of teetering on the brink of further collapse, they should have no trouble winning another election in waters that are comparatively calm [1]. So no, Corbyn has not cost Labour the next election, any more than King Canute cost his people what the ocean reclaimed. Indeed, he may even increase Labour's share of MPs come the next election, if only because he's the last best hope of Scottish voters returning to the party they abandoned in droves four months ago.

Once we accept - as we should - that Corbyn's leadership will not make the difference between winning and losing in 2020, then, the question becomes how good Corbyn will be for the organised left. Here, I am cautiously optimistic. There are many people currently predicting a half decade of giggling and guffawing at each of Corbyn's "Loony Left" pronouncements. I'm quite sure that will happen, though right now there seems to be some confusion as to whether the narrative will be that Corbyn is a bumbling out-of-touch idiot or the greatest threat to British democracy since Operation Sea Lion [2]. But crucially, in order for your ideas to be laughed at they have to actually reach people. The attempts to brand Corbyn as some kind of proto-Marxist are only possible when no-one knows what being left of centre actually involves in practice, and that knowledge can be disseminated only when the Labour Party actually start espousing leftist views, rather than hoping they can win elections by being just a little bit less of an appalling bunch of self-interested money-grubbing shits. To make use of the classic Gandhi quote, we've been ignored for long enough; being laughed at is a step in the right direction.

That's my hope for the next five years. Not that it will end with Cameron being toppled - not that I don't live in hope, of course - but that genuine alternative ideas to austerity politics and neoliberal sneering are forcibly injected into public discourse. Yes, many will laugh. Yes, we can't even trust The Guardian any more to be happy talking about the value of being to the left of Ronald Reagan. But if this leadership contest has shown us anything, it's that all the hysterical hand-waving and boys crying "killer flaming Marxist wolf !" won't necessarily stop people from seeing what's really going on.

Whether Corbyn can be as successful planting ideas in the general electorate as he looks like he'll be in his own party remains to be seen. It's barren ground out there right now for those who would sew the seeds of economic justice. To my great shame, vast swathes of England seem to have totally abandoned the idea that we the less fortunate should receive anything but our scorn and judgment. But that has to stop sometime. And contra Burnham, Kendall, Cooper, you do not change anyone's mind by agreeing with them.

The counter to all the above  (as Jack Graham has already pointed out on Twitter) is that when Corbyn loses the election, it will be taken as a sign that a Leftist approach was always a bad fit for the modern Labour Party, and the only remaining credible threat to the Conservatives will once more promise to be just as cruel as the Tories, only whilst enjoying it less. Thus the party will have a Cameron Lite in charge just in time for Cameron Classic to finally run out of steam, leading to the second consecutive ousting of a Tory government corresponding to a right wing shift by Labour. This is a real concern, and I don't want to suggest otherwise. Crucially, though, it seems clear to me that had Burnham or Kendall or Cooper challenged Cameron in 2020 and lost (as they each would have), we'd still be hearing that the next stage for Labour would be to move further right. That's simply the narrative of the times; each time the right wins, it's taken as proof that the right can move more right, and that everyone else has to follow them into the valley of the shadow of endless sneering viciousness. It's a vicious circle building to a hurricane of evil as it moves eastward. consuming everything. Which means right now, our choice was between being told we [3] were being rejected after our views got an airing, and being told we were being rejected after another half decade of being utterly ignored.

I am certainly inclined to take the trade.

[1] Yes, that's an economical mixed metaphor. But then economics is all about mixtures anyway, specifically the mixture between obvious common sense and the reading of chicken entrails.

[2] In fairness, it's possible for someone to both be hilariously inept and a truly terrifying prospect for command; just look at Donald Trump.

[3] I'm using an exceptionally broad definition of "we" here, obviously. Corbyn isn't my desired mouthpiece for Leftist politics, he's just the least wrong politician with access to a decent-sized bullhorn.

Lazy Cat Blogging

In both senses; is there any topic for blog posts that requires less thought or effort? Still, I figured it was worth announcing the arrival of our new housemate, if only to give some context to later complaints about scratched furniture and nibbled miniatures.

So it's a grand Musings welcome for Splodge-cat. Long may she reign.

=>

General stuff out of the way first; It Follows is a great film, filled with smart ideas and neat little touches, with the standard cheap shocks almost totally absent in favour of unusually structured scares and a strange but unsettling electronic score (imagine Malcolm Clarke was alive today and re-scoring "The Sea Devils" to scare the absolute shit out of people). It's based around the astonishingly simple dream logic idea (by which I mean I've actually had this dream) of a creature that always knows where you are, and is always walking towards you. As well as being a literal nightmare, of course, this is the ultimate extent of the standard horror trope of a killer that never moves at more than a walk but somehow always gets in front of you.  The latter is discarded here in favour of simpler logic; whatever is following you is easy to evade, but impossible to shake off.

(Spoilers below the fold.)

No Apologies For The Infinite Radness 1.1.2 - "Round Here" (Counting Crows)

Or, as they will forever be whenever my father spots me loading one of their albums into the CD player, "Whingeing Crows."

You can see his point. The band's debut album August and Everything After is so wet with self-absorbed tears of bitter loneliness the disc could double as a rice paddy. Every song on there is in the first-person, and every one is lament to lost love, dying love, love cut short, or love misapplied, save for the two about insomnia and, weirdly, Omaha. Even the track about the desire for fame basically comes down to singer and primary songwriter Adam Duritz wanting to become an MTV staple because it will increase the chance pretty girls in bars will fuck him.

But, like "Mellon Collie...", the album I started this series with a cut from, there are times - teenage times especially - when this level of defiant refusal to consider anything beyond the four walls of your skull is a necessary response to the crowded world pushing its way into your head. The cure in bulk can be more dangerous than the disease, of course. There are perhaps few more embarrassing sights than seeing someone obsess over an album because it shows them that they are unique, just like the person who wrote it. Taken with a pinch of salt, though, and as part of a balanced musical diet, such self-indulgence is no vice.

Particularly when the music tastes as good as this track. The opening song on "August...", this was the first Counting Crows song I ever heard, and it's still their best. Almost ridiculously sparse, less driven by its three note riff than dragged stumbling forwards by it, there's an astonishing economy here that's gloriously at odds with Duritz's anguished vocals and dense lyrics - at least until the balls-out bridge. Duritz is walking a thin line here, constantly threatening to fall into pretentiousness on one side and nonsense on the other, just like "he's walking on a wire in a circus". High-wire acts show up a lot in his lyrics, as do rain and angels, all of which feature here. We're always looking up at things, in wonder and dread, waiting for them to fall. But we're falling too, or at least Duritz is; he's "under the gun" (something else to gaze up at in fear) but somehow he's falling further still. Everything here is falling or suspended, like rain becoming fog; everything not already in downward motion will come to it eventually. The only things rising here are ghosts.

Which is curiously appropriate for this song. It's not even a Counting Crows song in some sense, it having been written by Adam and his fellow members of his previous band, the Himalayas. That's a band which I know almost nothing about other than they created this thing, this beautiful, sparse, melancholy thing, that lives on long after the band's death. And like any ghost, it is incapable of change, no matter how hard change is attempted. The Crows are notorious for the degree to which they fiddle with their back catalogue on tour - this makes them a rather risky proposition live, unfortunately - and "Round Here" has gone through more variations than any other. Even by the time the band released their third disc, actually a double live album - the song had mutated enormously, first into an even more stripped down version, then into an eight minute stadium monster filled with guitars that don't so much duel as collapse sobbing into a heap together.

In almost all of its endless iterations the song remains capable of doing its job. But that first-pressed version, placed at the front of their first disc like an endurance test for those looking for the comparative endorphin-rush of first single"Mr Jones", is what the song will always be. A beginning and an epitaph, a ghost of a confluence. No matter how many versions of that ghost story Duritz went on and goes on to tell, the truth remains here unchanging. Round here we stay up very very late. And we stay forever.

You Can Check Out Any Time You Want, But You Can Never Have Your Cash

Update: I was phoned by someone in Park Inn management today. They were unreservedly apologetic, immediately agreed to pay the bank fines incurred during this situation, and asked what it would take to make me happy and willing to use them again in the future.  Not being very good at haggling, I didn't manage to say anything particularly helpful at this point, but nevertheless I've been offered my next stay there in a superior room, with breakfast, at an almost two-thirds discount, so long as it's within the next year. I am perfectly willing to call myself happy with that offer. Obviously this doesn't change the basic message here: if you're planning on using Park Inn by Radisson, please make sure to pay in advance. The takeaway message from management was that the failure was in not letting me know the block can take a week to clear, rather than the block not working as intended. Paying in advance solves this problem in its entirety.

My thanks to my various twitter peeps who also tweeted the hotel to complain about how badly things had gone wrong).

For anyone following my ongoing problems with the Heathrow Park Inn by Radisson, I include my complaint to them below.  Be warned, it's not at all funny. I love amusing complaints as much as the next person, but I tend not to write them, partially because it takes time to come up with jokes that I'd rather spend on enjoyable writing tasks, but also because I don't want to run the risk that someone amongst this shower of incompetents and jobsworths might find my complaint amusing.

So in no way think of this as writing to entertain. I just thought people might want to know how useless this chain has been in dealing with my problem.  Bear in mind that whilst this complaint is now written, as you can see, I haven't actually sent it, because the "email us" page at the Park Inn website doesn't seem to work. Irony? Crushing inevitability? It can be so hard to tell...


Dear Park Inn by Radisson

I was expecting to hear from your management team about this problem already, but since that hasn't happened (far from the first time I have been misled by your hotel chain) I shall comment here.

My stay was perfectly fine, but the financial snarl your hotel left me in following that stay was thoroughly unacceptable. Upon checking in, I was asked to provide the card I would pay for my stay with so it could be verified. Nothing was mentioned about blocking money in my account, but this is exactly what happened. This caused minor problems as I was sharing a room and my room-mate had not yet transferred his half of the money, meaning for the whole of Saturday 8th August I had effectively paid for the hotel (if I can't touch that money because you have blocked it, it is no different to you having taken it) despite your staff telling me I need not do it until the following day.  This problem was compounded by your staff failing to mention that the £50 deposit (which I had not been informed of prior to check in) was PER PERSON, meaning a further £100 was blocked in my account, all without my permission.

All of that I would have happily forgiven were it not for the fact that when I checked out of the hotel on Sunday and paid for my stay, your hotel didn't remove the block. As a result I had £172 removed from my account for my stay and a FURTHER £272 that I was not allowed to access for a full working week.

Some of the £272 you failed to unblock - I was promised by your staff the money would be unblocked immediately upon payment for the room - was money set aside various other payments due to come out of my account over the FULL WEEK you kept the block in place, which of course now could not go out.  I am therefore being charged by my bank for failing to make payments I had budgeted for and your chain then rendered impossible.

I did not remain idle during the five days you let the block linger. On Tuesday 11th August I phoned your Heathrow hotel to complain. I spoke to someone at the front desk who - after initially insisting this was a problem for the bank to solve, something I already knew untrue, and after following some persuading - agreed to phone my bank branch (Barclays, Durham) to cancel the hold, and to email me once this was complete.  No email ever arrived.

On that Tuesday I also made contact with the Park Inn twitter account, which started following me to offer more assistance. Despite multiple tweets to this account from me, this account only sent me one message a day. On the Wednesday (the day after I had complained to Heathrow Park Inn and received no sign of them working at my problem) I was tweeted to ask if the problem had been resolved. I replied at 9:32am that it had not. 20 HOURS later, I received another tweet asking for my reservation details (already given to the hotel in question) and email (likewise already available to you). 24 hours after THAT - almost five full days after I had paid for my room and almost three full days since my initial complaint - I received another tweet asking I give you 48 MORE hours to resolve the problem (a problem that could be solved by one phone call to my bank, let us not forget). By this point the hold had reached the end of its seven day life span and was automatically terminated. When I tweeted your account to let you know the situation had finally been resolved despite you taking no obvious action, your response was to tell me that this had always been a possible result of the system you use, information that would have been vastly helpful seven days earlier, but at the time it was given amounted to nothing but blame shifting (you implied in that tweet that my bank may have been at least partly to blame).

To sum up, then, I was not made sufficiently aware of a deposit being needed before arriving at the hotel (perhaps this was written somewhere and I didn't see it, but that in itself suggests it should be made more obvious), I was NEVER told that deposit was per person even when the money was being blocked, I was NEVER told my money would be blocked in the first place, the block wasn't cancelled even after I paid for our room, I was told this problem would be resolved on Tuesday 11th and it was not, and it took the Park Inn twitter feed almost three full days to get around to asking me for two further full days to solve this exceptionally simple problem. Having so totally failed at every stage to inform me of what you were doing and acting in any way to put right what you had gotten wrong, you then sent me a message saying this is just what happens, and maybe my bank was the problem.

The total cost of the fines I have incurred as a result of this catalogue of errors and failures is £8, which I fully expect to be reimbursed by you - a small amount, yes, but one I absolutely should not have to pay. It will take far more than that most minimal of gestures to ever persuade me to stay in one of your hotels again, but it would at least be a start.

Back To The Old House

When I first saw Cabin in the Woods I was not at all kind to its ending. But having found the film for three quid and given it another go, I'm rather less annoyed. I mean, it still sucks on a story level, but after further thought I can see two ways the allegorical force of the film's ending can help to at least lessen the damage done.

(Spoilers beneath the fold)