Mwahahahahaha!
Darlene Love – ‘(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Gonna Marry’ (from Back To Mono)
Spiritualized – ‘She Kissed Me (And It Felt Like A Hit)’ (from Amazing Grace)
The Crystals – ‘He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)' (from Back To Mono)
Isaac Hayes – ‘Ike’s Rap / You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’ (from To Be Continued)
Righteous Brothers – ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling' (from Back To Mono)
Those internets were on fire with rational debate last week. New Yorker critic Sasha Frere-Jones opined that his dream of musico-racial miscegenation had crashed on the rocks of a cruddy, whinging-whitey Modest Mouse album and some Trick Daddy records that were “too black, too strong”, or something. Slate columnist Carl Wilson said the problem’s not race, but god only knows it’s class. Specifically, he identified a caste of Generation Y-ers who refuse to get jobs after university, so are ruining things by still listening to indie pop when they’re in their thirties.
The internets seem to think Carl Wilson won, probably because he let Sasha Frere-Jones go first. But both critics think that something’s gone awry. Can it be true? A Galactic Mystery!
In December 1956, the Million Dollar Quartet of Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis got together for a jam session at Sun Studios,
In both cases, we have groups of rich men selling working-class black music to middle-class white kids, laughing amongst themselves as they do it. Both brought together the dominant popular music forms of the day – in the former case, gospel, country and rock-n-roll; in the latter case, club-rap, pop-rap and rap. But which is best, and has pop music moved on? GMS breaks it down:
Hair
The best pop music is full of great hair.
Billion Dollar Remix The late 80s wasn’t rap’s golden age for nothing: hi-top fades, jheri curls, rap mullets. These days? A poor showing. 3
Million Dollar Quartet is full of great hair. Yes, even Jheri Lee Lewis. 10
Brevity
The joy of great pop is that you don’t have to listen to it for very long.
BDR is in and out like a crack team of management consultants. A one shot deal. 9
MDQ took all day about their business – literally! Until Cash went to do some Christmas shopping, and Elvis nipped out for a cheeseburger and some sex. 4
Lusty rabble-rousing
Go cat go.
BDR have been linked to their fair share of honeys, despite Jay and Fiddy having faces only a mother could love. 6
MDQ Marrying your 13-year-old cousin? Check. Shooting the telly? Check. Causing a forest fire while full of drugs? Check. Winding up June Carter and attacking a sink in a highly-praised but rather plodding biopic? Check. 9
The Lord Jesus Christ
The first pop star?
Those MDQ boys loved their mommas, and the Lord Jesus Christ. Most of their session is spent singing about how they’re going to meet him and have a chat. 9
BDR seem like a godless bunch, though Jigga has started rapping in Hebrew a bit. But maybe they’re just channelling their god-lust into the accumulation of worldly wealth. Praise him! 6
Investment portfolio
I get money, money I got.
MDQ were the first r’n’r megastars, and set the bar for TCB – takin’ care of business, that is! 7
BDR 50 took quarter water, sold it in a bottle for two bucks, Coca Cola bought that shit for twenty mill – what the fuck?! Diddy and Jay both have a Masters in Business Administration from the Correspondence College of Tampa, Florida. 9
“The pocket of the beat”
The best pop musicians discover the beat’s pocket, then set up shop in it. © Status Ain’t Hood.
BDR 50 struggles to keep pace (on his own beat). Diddy blithely monotones like he does on every track. But Jay saves the day with his limber, off-key flow, ducking and weaving, stretching his vocals out, picking “the pocket of the beat” like the artful dodger of pop that he is. Hmm. 6
MDQ Back in the day, the pocket of the beat had a different name: “shooby-doo-bop”. No egos on display for the Million Dollar Quartet – they all get involved. 7
Quality of death
C’mon, dying is rad.
MDQ Elvis carries the torch here, as Cash and Perkins passed on with some dignity, and Lewis is still with us. But Cash “shot a man in
BDR Much as they glorify death, and the administration of such, all of these guys are alive. 0
Vehicle of choice
If there’s one thing that unites pop musicians, it’s automotive transport.
BDR 50 names all the different types of expensive car, and mumbles so that they rhyme. 9
MDQ were just hung up on Cadillacs. 5
Ghostwriting
BDR Diddy’s ghostwriter earns his cheddar here, penning amusing non-sequiturs about “riding round in
MDQ hardly wrote any of the forty-odd songs they play, the big frauds. 4
Searching critique of race and class
Frere-Jones would vaunt MDQ’s commitment to musical miscegenation, and Cash went on to record social protest pieces like Bitter Tears and ‘The Man In Black’. But in 1956 these boys weren’t exactly readers. Plus, erm, what Chuck D said. 5
BDR Digested Chomsky? Yeah, Diddy did it. Protested the WTO? Yeah, Diddy did it. 8
Total
Million Dollar Quartet 67
Billion Dollar Remix 64
There we have it. Pop was slightly better fifty years ago. The three-points gap in the totals seems to imply that it’s neither class, nor race, but religion that’s made the difference. Maybe if that nice, god-fearing Kanye West had joined in, things would have levelled out. So, no need to fret, pop fans!
Million Dollar Quartet (Presley, Cash, Lewis, Perkins) – ‘Just A Little Talk With Jesus’
Million Dollar Quartet (Presley, Cash, Lewis, Perkins) – ‘I Shall Not Be Moved’
Million Dollar Quartet (Presley, Cash, Lewis, Perkins) – ‘Down By The
I like punk rock. It’s got a cool beat, and I can bug out to it. Plus, if I want to shake my fist in the general direction of The Man, it’s just the ticket. Screw you, The Man!
But I’d like to learn more about these street-punks and their snotty ways. In the first (and possibly the longest) of a regular series, GMS seeks higher learning the language’s best and biggest repository of FACT, the Oxford English Dictionary. Here’s a definition:
punk rock n.
Originally: rock music played in a fast, aggressive, or unpolished manner. In later use: spec. a genre of rock music originating in the late 1970s, characterized by a deliberately outrageous or confrontational attitude, energetic (and often chaotic) performance, and (freq.) simple or repetitive song structures; the subculture or style associated with this music.
Gold Blade – ‘Punk Rock’ (from Do You Believe In The Power Of Rock’n’Roll?)
Straightforward enough, but there’s still debate about what, or who, counts as punk. Recently John Lydon suggested Green Day’s spiky hair and ripped clothing made them less like punk and more like “gorgonzola in old boots”. True punks might take this sort of argument outside. GMS takes it to the OED:
punk n.
b. A performer or fan of punk rock; a person who adopts the style or attitude associated with punk rock. In terms of appearance a punk is typically characterized as having coloured spiked hair, wearing deliberately ripped clothing, and using safety pins for adornment, either as a decoration on clothing or as a piercing through the ear or nose.
One-nil to Green Day. But wait:
1976 New Musical Express
Honours even, then, for attire and attitude. Some mp3s:
But which bands does the OED use to define punk? Hands up whoever said Sleater-Kinney and Green On Red.
punk band n.
2006 Chicago Tribune (Nexis) 29 June C25 Sleater-Kinney emerged out of the early '90s riot grrrl movement, a loose coalition of female punk bands.
punk style n.
b. With past participles (in sense A. 5), as punk-influenced, punk-related, punk-styled, etc., adjs.
2005 Uncut June 163/1 Their punk-informed country underpinnings evoke fond memories of fellow travellers like Green On Red.
Like the OED, punk is continually evolving. The latest addition to the dictionary’s definitions is punk-funk (added: September 2007). That sounds about right: about three or four years ago people were going “ape” for bands like Radio 4 and the Rapture. Rubbish, weren’t they? Turns out, though, “teeny-bop” act T. Rex invented punk-funk. Just ask the staff of
punk funk n. any of various styles of music incorporating elements of punk and funk; cf. FUNK n.2 2.
1974 Sunday Gleaner (
punkfunk for real. 2004 Uncut Mar. 58/2 The more experimental wing of the post-punk brigade,..the abrasive, sky-strafing guitar stylings of PiL's Keith Levene, the Banshees, or the non-linear, noisenik punk-funk of Gang Of Four.
Who invented punk? The
Magnetic Fields – ‘Punk Love’ (from 69 Love Songs)
One of the best that ever did it. As GMS' man on the street, C-Sonic, put it: "FUCK! He was my favourite Coren."
I love the English language. Even when I’m not speaking it, I use it for thinking or for writing a blog. But I’m not sure I love it as much as Sir James Murray, who constructed the Oxford English Dictionary in his garden shed at
My favourite words tend to be the rude ones. Used judiciously, they can spice up polite conversation. What’s new for fall? Cock-blocker:
cock-blocker n. coarse slang (orig. and chiefly
2004 R. BYRNES Trust Fund Boys 272 You're compounding things by being a cock-blocker.
Back to the point: OED is also my preferred tool for keeping up with the latest pop trends. NME and Pitchfork are constantly inventing new musical genres, but how am I to know what it all means, especially when Barrington Ennui, the bassist out of Burning Wednesday’s Veil, keeps saying his band isn’t really math-emo at all?
In a new series, maybe starting tomorrow, GMS casts a critical eye over the cutting-edge types of pop that youngsters are playing these days with their key-tars. Will ringtone rap get the OED seal of approval? Can glitch-tronica be defined? Any takers for Morrissey-esque? Can words describe the sheer um-ness of In Rainbows? You’ll have to wait and see.
Magnetic Fields – ‘All My Little Words’ (from 69 Love Songs)
Black Star – ‘Definition’ (from Mos Def and Talib Kweli are … Black Star)
Has it come to this?
Welsh seven-piece Los Campesinos make a breathless embrace of every indie pop sound ever into their calling card. From their fellow countrymen alone you get Helen Love-style saccharine speed-punk, Gorky’s blend of the wistful and the weird, and (as Drowned In Sound pointed out), even the ghost of Pavement-esque skronk-shouters Mo-Ho-Bi-Sho-Pi. The group’s democratic approach to vocal duties and to genre also encompasses some right-on ethics – songs about misogyny in the UK music press, organic free trade t-shirts, songs about All Tomorrow’s Parties (which they get to play, courtesy of Pitchfork), and about their touring buddies (‘You Throw Parties, We Throw Knives’). All very winning, though, like You Say Party, best delivered live, with giddy charm and brevity.
More fun:
Los Campesinos – ‘The International Tweecore Underground’, a ‘gimme schmindie rock’ for the myspacers.
Think Differently, an indie off-shoot of the Wu empire, recently released the 2005 gig that half the Wu-Tang Clan (GZA, Raekwon, Deck, U-God) played with live funk band the El Michaels Affair.
Tony for Mayor
Here’s ‘Triumph’, with the Wu amusing themselves by doing impressions of RZA at the end. For an incisive verse-by-verse analysis of ‘Triumph’, head here.
