dexys week: merry xmas everybody!

dexys were to the eighties what slade were to the seventies: eccentrically-attired top of the pops mainstays singing oddball pop masterpieces in thick regional accents. in both cases, their reputation as novelty acts, but their albums revealed much greater depth. both bands made minor inroads into the US, but remained essentially, parochially, defiantly, british. here's the sort of thing that doesn't happen any more: dexys covering slade's inescapable 'merry xmas everybody', beamed into millions of living rooms on christmas day, 1982.

dexys week: featuring darts legend jockie wilson

dexys are easy to lampoon, but GMS suspects they were usually in on the joke. here's their classic top of the pops performance of 'jackie wilson said' in front of a picture of diminutive scotish darts legend jocky wilson.

dexys week: the young ones

moving on to the raggle-taggle armpit-bearing dungaree-sporting fiddling-gypsy celtic-soul schtick of too-rye-aye, dexys' second album. for all their pretension, passion and sentimentality, dexys have always had a broader streak of humour than most bands. here we have them setting up shop in the young ones' bathroom, to perform van morrison's 'jackie wilson said (i'm in heaven when you smile)'.

dexys week: 'i couldn't help it if i tried'

searching for the young soul rebels was sold on its succession of up-tempo foot-stomping soul-shouters. but it's the slow-burning centrepieces, 'keep it' and 'i couldn't help it if i tried', which deserve as much attention, coming closer to edwin starr than to geno washington.

dexys week: "welcome the new soul vision"

sticking with dexys in their projected passion revue rabble-rousing punk-soul ram-jam irish-literature-loving, clean-living, master-tape-stealing, manifesto-spluttering, marching-on-the-spot docker-chic phase, here we have 'there there my dear', released as a single in 1980. unlike its predecessor, 'geno', it didn't reach number one. but then, it was up against 'xanadu' by olivia newton-john and the electric light orchestra. don't f- with qubla khan, kevin. 'there there my dear' olivia newton-john & elo 'xanadu'

the bomb

GMS takes a break from dexys week to point you in the direction of this excellent observer article on british protest music and the anti-nuclear campaign - featuring, among others, michael foot, tony benn, peggy seeger, billy bragg and GMS-favourite Martin Carthy.

CND is fifty this year, and this weekend sees the anniversary of the nagasaki bombing. music, maestro:

uncle tupelo - 'atomic power' (louvin brothers cover, live, 1992)

yo la tengo - 'nuclear war' (sun ra cover, from prisoners of love)

nation of ulysses - 'atomic bomb' (from 13-point program to destroy america)

the crystals - 'little boy' (from back to mono)

derrick harriott - 'fat man' (from trojan - jamaican hits)

george clinton - 'atomic dog' (from computer games)

rivers cuomo - 'the bomb' (ice cube cover, from alone)

dexys midnight runners week

hello readers! it's dexys midnight runners week all week here on GMS.

over the next seven days, we'll be revisiting the peaks and troughs of kevin rowland's brilliant, eccentric career. by re-visiting, i expect i mean posting some youtube videos. we'll also be exploring dexys' intriguing relationship with UK tv comedy. by exploring, i expect i mean posting some youtube videos.

we'll start at the beginning, with 'dance stance (burn it down)' from 1979 - one of the greatest opening tracks, from one of the greatest debut albums, from the greatest british band evarr. except maybe pulp. play it loud. "jimmy? yeah! sal? yeah! for god's sake burn it down..."

Raekwon goes to the cinema (erm, in a time machine)

...after a quick stop at the bodega.

Raekwon has always been one of the Wu's most perverse characters - sullen and belligerent where most of his fellow MCs are playful and nerdy, insular and defensive where his long-time foil, Ghostface, plays the ebullient, effusive, eccentric extrovert.

Raekwon's debut album, Only Built For Cuban Linx, is an undisputed classic - groundbreaking and sumptuous, consistently ambitious in its widescreen mafia fantasies, yet endlessly rich in its vivid details, classy production and impenetrable slang. His decision to follow it by replacing producer RZA with a string of no-name, low-rent New York beat-makers, and to swap Ghostface for his clumsy, embarrassing posses, American Cream Team and Ice Water, resulted in one of the most dramatic creative down-turns in rap history. Can he rescue his career with the long-threatened Cuban Linx II?

Raekwon and his third-favourite producer

Raekwon's performance at this year's All Tomorrow's Parties festival offered few clues. The rapper recreated his debut song-for-song, assisted by Ghostface and Theodore Unit, adding a few classic Wu verses here and there (mostly the same ones Ghostface had performed the previous evening). There was no new material and little showmanship, beyond some ostentatious cognac-drinking and a rather fetching beard. GMS is partial to the sight of muscular chaps lumbering around a stage, shouting in unison into microphones while a DJ makes gunshot noises, but many people weren't. The crowd thinned, more rapidly than Ghostface's audience, and more rapidly still once Broken Social Scene brought their Fleetwood Mac-style communal indie drivel to the main stage.

Raekwon may not know much about entertaining ambivalent hipsters, employing handy weed-carriers or beat selection, but he sure knows his way around a dense crime narrative. Not content with re-hashing 'Scarface', Scorsese and John Woo, 'Musketeers of Pig Alley', the best track from his middling third album, The Lex Diamond Story, takes inspiration from D.W. Griffith's pioneering 1912 short noir of the same name. If you've got 15 minutes to spare, the whole film is below, and comes highly recommended by yours truly, and, erm, Raekwon.

raekwon (feat. masta killa & inspectah deck) - 'musketeers of pig alley' (from the lex diamond story , 2003)

'musketeers of pig alley' (1912)

More D.W.? 'The Reformers', from the following year, is a priceless skewering of moralising interventionist liberals, as 'Dickensian' in its way as 'Musketeers'. Word to Scott Templeton. The League of Civic Purity - now there's a posse.

'the reformers' (1913)

Pop Just Ate Itself: Clipse release a turd

Every year, come December, bloggers compile lists of their favourite albums of the past twelve months. And every year, without fail, rap-loving bloggers start to argue about whether mixtapes count as albums.

Those who would exclude mixtapes from their imaginary competition insist on the need for a level playing field. They find one in the legal and commercial constraints governing the creation of albums. Mixtapes' illegal use of un-cleared samples, borrowed beats and previously-available songs, they argue, makes it impossible to judge them on equal terms with commercial releases. Defenders of mixtapes argue that market forces and intellectual property rights provide an arbitrary and unhelpful framework by which to judge works of art. Mixtapes, they argue, offer artists freedom to express themselves without the need to gratify record company marketing departments; they also allow the use of samples that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive.

An aesthetic argument runs in parallel. Critics argue that mixtapes are often uneven, hastily thrown together, and poorly-mastered, and that they offer instant gratification rather than anything of lasting value. Supporters counter that, originality notwithstanding, mixtapes are frequently more coherent and satisfying than albums. Why bar Wale's excellent Mixtape About Nothing from an end-of-year list on the grounds that it was given away for free? Why make apologies for Nas' patchy Untitled when his N****r Tape stands as one of the best releases of his career?

After all, the idea of an album as a 'statement' or free-standing original work of art only developed in the mid-sixties: its gold standard has always been a certain type of predominantly male, white rock music. Hip hop, with its traditions of freestyling and DJing, has more in common with folk music, where performers constantly adapt, re-interpret and add to existing tunes and lyrics. Using the idea of the 'album' to judge rap distorts our appreciation of the art-form: for instance, many consider Kool G Rap one of the all-time great MCs, but he rarely appears on lists of great rap albums, let alone great albums.

None of this matters, of course. Artists will continue to make music, and will, on the whole, struggle to make a living doing so. Bloggers will continue to bicker and list. My opinion? Of course mixtapes aren't albums. They're mixtapes. The clue's in the name.


None of which makes me any the wiser about what the hell's gone on with the new Clipse album, The Clipse present the Re-Up Gang. Is it a mixtape? Is it an album? One thing's for sure: it's bloody awful.

The Virginia duo's series of mixtapes, We Got It 4 Cheap vols. 1-3, saw them adding vocals to familiar beats, frequently improving upon the originals. On Present the Re-Up Gang, they reverse the formula, recycling verses from Volume 3 that originally accompanied tracks by the likes of Shawty Lo and B.G., fitting them instead with original beats. If new rhymes over old beats makes a mixtape, what about new beats under old rhymes? Further muddying the waters, Present appears to have secured a commercial release, via Koch Records - a label that operates in a grey area between albums and mixtapes, offering artists one-off album deals, together with an unusual degree of creative control, low overheads, fast turnarounds, competitive royalty rates and an allegedly relaxed approach to sample clearance. Finally, the logic of claiming to 'present' the Re-Up Gang is baffling. The Gang is made up of the Clipse plus Philadelphia rappers Ab-Liva and Sandman, who featured heavily on all three mixtape volumes, and were given equal billing with the Clipse on the third. What is the point of this album?

None of this would be a concern if Clipse's round-about manner of creating original music was at all successful. Instead, the recycling process has diluted any distinctive qualities the group ever possessed. Fulfilling the dictum that a free market tends towards homogeneity and mediocrity, Clipse have hit the golden mean of turgid drugs-and-money-rap: something like a G-Unit album, but with slightly sharper metaphors and less memorable beats.

When not damping their once-chilling drug-talk with dead-eyed celebrations of wealth, Clipse use the album to air rap's dullest and most self-indulgent theme: record label politics. This mind-numbing tendency, a favourite of the world's most boring rapper, 'Regular' Joe Budden, has become so prevalent that prissy complaints about altered release dates and threadbare promotion budgets have even tainted the latest album by the Roots - an otherwise creative and intelligent group. Clipse's attempt to make a fast buck by recycling lyrics and rush-releasing a sub-par album renders such complaints insincere. The apparent ease with which they reconcile money-talk and self-pity while expecting fans to pay for work vastly inferior to that given away for free six months ago raises questions about their integrity and judgement.

It's interesting that one of the album's recycled verses features threats against Lil' Wayne, another successful mixtape rapper. Where the Clipse's heavy release-schedule has seen them creeping steadily towards mediocrity, Wayne's constant output has seen him embrace eccentricity. The resulting commercial album - though entirely uneven - has already sold over two million copies. Clipse Present the Re-Up Gang would do well to equal G-Unit's Terminate On Sight, which has yet to sell a tenth of that.

homunculus wingding

good news from freak-folk-land, readers!

GMS had long considered devendra banhart a respectable tyrannosaurus rex tribute act who would never raise his game and pen 'ride a white swan'; always destined to be indie-rock's second-best r. kelly fan.

but here's his new video, for the tropicalia-style 'carmensita'. it brings back memories of watching the mahabharat on saturday afternoons in the early 90s. the BBC needs to bring that back - it was like the wire, only in 9th-century-BC India, and with cardboard weaponry.

'carmensita' also contains mention of a homunculus. uncle lawrence would be proud.



more fun:

tyrannosaurus - 'deborah' (live at kempton park, 1968)