Music Dump - Kelly Clarkson's Tom Waits Does Bjork's Black Metal Chic

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A recurring feature where we compile the best and most interesting music articles from across the web.

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Tom Waits by Mark Richardson (Pitchfork): Not a fan of Tom Waits? Well, that’s no reason to deny yourself the pleasure of reading interviews with him! He’s an interviewer’s dream, seemingly able to put no effort whatsoever into being infinitely quotable. For example: “[The goal of computers] is to eliminate all the water on Earth so they can just hum in a room somewhere with each other, generating information” (in the Pitchfork article); “Put it this way: I'm not afraid I'm going to end up on a space station in aluminium-foil underwear" (from an interview in The Observer); “I think [a song I’ve written is] about one thing, but someone else will say, ‘That song is kind of a rhino in hot pants on a burnt rocking horse with a lariat shouting, “Repent, repent!”’ I think that’s great.” (from an interview in the New Yorker). There’s more interviews out there of course, what with his new album Bad As Me having just been released. Also, you should be a fan of Tom Waits!

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Drowned In Sound Meets Björk by Kevin E.G. Perry (Drowned In Sound): Björk’s new album Biophilia genuinely seems to be something new under the sun. It's less an album and more like a detailed interactive experience designed for Apple’s iPad. Perry’s lengthy five-part article wrestles with the whys and hows of Biophilia, with why Björk has gone in this direction -- it seems to Perry as if Biophilia has come out of Björk’s desire to be a music teacher. In her own uniquely Björkish way, she wants to explain her synaesthesia -- how she sees music through visualisations.

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The Ghostwriter by Andrew Romano (GQ): There’s not too many people you can legitimately say singlehandedly invented a genre. But, in a lot of ways: Hank Williams pretty much invented country music. When he passed away in 1952, he left a bunch of notebooks with song lyrics, many of which ended up unrecorded. It took until this year for a group of songwriters to assemble an album (curated by Bob Dylan) with music put to these "lost" lyrics. (Much like Billy Bragg and Wilco’s Woody Guthrie album Mermaid Avenue). Romano traces that story – of why it took so long – and in the process of listening to the various tracks on the album, tries to figure out why some tracks work and why some don’t; that is, what makes a good song.

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‘He’s A Fucking Maniac’: Rape, Black Metal And The Fetishization Of Illness by Brad Nelson (Tiger Beatdown): Black Metal is a strange beast, with incredibly dark subject matter and powerful negative emotions. Nelson argues that it fetishises mental illness; metal fans and musicians will approvingly refer to someone as a ‘fucking maniac’. (A recent study by the University of Melbourne found that teens who listen to metal seem more depressed than other kids, although it seems just as likely that more depressed teens are the ones that gravitate to metal -- it’s a kind of music that commonly discusses mental illness, after all.)

So what happens when someone who is approvingly called a ‘fucking maniac’ strangles his girlfriend until she’s unconscious and then rapes her with tattoo instruments? This happened. At least, Jef Whitehead of US Black Metal band Leviathan was charged with this crime by police. How should fans of the genre react? Have they been encouraging that kind of thing? Should they stop listening to that band? Or does the knowledge of Whitehead’s terrible actions make that music even more seductive for some?

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Out On The Perimeter by Dave Graney (Meanjin): Odd things happen to you when you’re a musician; you sometimes get asked to do strange gigs and sometimes you say yes. Dave Graney and his band headed out to the remote Cocos Islands, an Australian territory midway between Perth and Sri Lanka, to play a couple of gigs. Graney has always had a keen eye for odd undercurrents bubbling beneath a respectable surface, (a la David Lynch) and he uses such awareness to excellent effect here.

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The Boring Beatle by Bill Wyman (Slate):  Living In The Material World, a Martin Scorsese documentary about George Harrison, was shown recently on US TV to rapturous acclaim. (I’m sure it’ll be on Australian TV soon enough.) This article is required reading if/after you see the documentary. Wyman (the rock critic, not the former Rolling Stone) wants to puncture the documentary’s myth of George Harrison. Wyman argues that Living In The Material World is ‘schlockumentary’, a glorified advertisement for Harrison – after all, his estate could nix anything in the documentary it didn’t like. Wyman argues, the fact of this nixing means that Living In The Material World doesn’t go into George’s darker side, thus not addressing some of the more interesting and informative elements of who Harrison really was.

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Kelly Clarkson: ‘I Just Did It To Pay The Bills’ by Alex Macpherson (The Guardian): Nowadays, Idol and Insert Country Here’s Got Talent and the like are well established templates for budding commercial pop singers. But Kelly Clarkson says she had no idea what American Idol was about when she auditioned; her apartment had just burned down, and she figured they’d pay her and give her a roof over her head. It’s hard not to think that this is why her music career has lasted; she was skeptical about Idol, did what she wanted to do, and didn’t get sucked into that reality-TV “I was born to be a star” mindset. Interestingly, considering my recent argument that her Australian #1 single ‘Mr. Know It All’ was a bit Alanis and a bit Adele, she says she grew up listening to Alanis and says that she wants ‘to punch Adele in the face’ because she’s ‘too good’.

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Chic To Chic by Mike Hobart (Financial Times): Nile Rodgers is probably the most influential musician you’ve never heard of (a gold star to you if you already know all this!). Not only was he a member of the excellent 1970s disco-funk band Chic (whose tune ‘Le Freak’ was Atlantic Records’ biggest ever single, as well as being the sample used in ‘Rapper’s Delight’ by the Sugarhill Gang. Which pretty much invented rap as we know it), he also created much of the sound of the 1980s. He produced ‘Material Girl’ by Madonna and ‘Let’s Dance’ by David Bowie. He’s also had an interesting private life; his parents were heroin addicts who hung out with jazz pianist Thelonius Monk. And he says he was lucky, in these circumstances, to be a sickly child. Excitingly for Chic/Rodgers fans, he's on his way here early next year to play the Golden Plains festival in Victoria.

Tim Byron