The thirty-fifth in a series of posts where we bring to you the most interesting and stimulating music articles we found this week.
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1995: Live, Bush, & Alanis Morissette Take The Pop Path by Steven Hyden (The AV Club): These days, people will talk about how they were such big fans of bands like Pavement, Guided By Voices, and Fugazi in 1995, but you know what? In 1995, let's face it, you probably listened more to Live, Bush and Alanis. Admit it. (Hyden has been writing a history of 1990s alternative music in the last few weeks, year by year, and all of it has been excellent, and is worth reading if you have the slightest interest in such a thing.) This week's installment is about how the music industry learned how to take grunge and commodify and sell the industry version.
How To Hate The Beatles by Nitsuh Abebe (Vulture): Nitsuh Abebe's pieces are usually full of insight, and so it's actually refreshing to see him do comedy: here, he shows you how to hate the Beatles, or at least, how to go about saying you hate the Beatles for fun and profit. Best line, just after suggesting that you should have a Beatles song that you do like, just to confuse people: “When in doubt, “Dig a Pony” is always a good choice, because people like ponies.”
Short Stack: This Is Bat Country by Darren Levin (Mess+Noise): Melbourne music writer Craig Mathieson was looking about the V Music site when he saw that all three members of Short Stack had reviewed an album. Upon seeing Short Stack bass player Andy Clemmensen's review of Kanye West's album, Mathieson
noticed that a large proportion of it was almost word-for-word from his review for The Age, and it turned out that the rest was plagiarised from elsewhere. Mess+Noise editor Darren Levin then decided it might be a good idea to review Short Stack's new album - including portions nabbed from TheVine - with hilarious results.
Sex Clark Five by Kim Cooper (Oxford American): I'd never heard of the Sex Clark Five before reading Cooper's piece, about discovering them on a now deceased friend's mixtape and being spellbound by their mysterious ways. But you know what? Cooper could have written this exact same article about a dozen bands; it's less about the Sex Clark Five, and more simply about the joy of discovering music.
Let The Red Rag Fly: In Defense Of Simply Red's Picture Book by Wyndham Wallace (The Quietus): Wyndham Wallace is a brave man. Mick Hucknall has to be one of the most hated men in pop music, and he here is defending them! But it's fascinating to find out that Hucknall was one of those rock stars inspired by seeing the Sex Pistols' tour in 1976 (a la Morrissey and the Buzzcocks), and that he started out making post-punk before discovering he could sing.
Bubblegum Pop: All The Young Dudes by Bob Stanley (The Guardian): The music writer Lester Bangs thought that, if you take away the rage, violence, and anomie, rock and roll music is basically bubblegum. And so here Stanley celebrates the best of bubblegum music over the years, and puts it into cultural context. Stuff like 'Sugar Sugar' by the Archies, or 'Quick Joey Small' by the Kasenatz-Katz Singing Orchestra Circus may not be rocket surgery, but the charms of music don't have to be complicated.
File Not Found: The Record Industry's Digital Storage Crisis by David Browne (Rolling Stone): You know those records from 1967 that you get remastered and expanded deluxe versions of every few years, nowadays? They're on reel-to-reel tape, and studios still use that tape today. Sometimes the tape gets a bit fragile after being stored for 40 years, and needs to be baked in an oven first! But it's still usable and you can update it. On the other hand, since the 1980s, most music has been made on computers. And so it's stored on hard drives. Possibly in obsolete file formats that modern computers and programs may not recognise. And hard drives, over time, are more fragile than reel-to-reel tape. And so it's quite possible that the hard drive that has the original mixes to, say, Bush's
Sixteen Stone is just kaput. And that'd just be digital for you.
John Lennon vs Bono: The Death Of The Celebrity Activist by William Easterly (Washington Post): John Lennon – at least in the period where he gave a shit about politics – was an idealist. 'Love is the answer', he sung. And he was genuinely seen as dangerous by the authorities, as you'd know if you ever saw the documentary
The US vs John Lennon. In contrast, Bono hobnobs with the leaders of the world, and champions wonkish technocratic solutions to the world's problems. Easterly argues that Bono's style of activism doesn't change anything, that it only reinforces the current world power structure. And after all, “Give Peace A Chance” makes for a better song title than “Let's Meet The MDG Targets By 2015”.
Tim Byron