RA the Rugged Man - Die, Rugged Man, Die (2004)

Casting my mind back to 2004, I vaguely recall RA's debut being greeted with the rolling of eyes and shaking of heads - not exactly the full thumbs down, but something along the lines of why now? RA was set to be the next big thing for about five minutes back before I was even looking in the right direction - presumably around the time he was hanging out with Biggie and trading lines with the same on the delightfully named Cunt Renaissance; and then suddenly nothing happened for the next ten years, meaning the debut also served as the comeback album, a bit. RA seems to blame himself for this, or maybe not blame so much as simply accept the fact of his being the eternal square peg in a round hole. Die, Rugged Man, Die gives a disgustingly thorough account of the lad's face failing to fit, additionally providing testimony as to the massive injustice of this given that he pisses over most other lyricists, possibly literally in a few cases. It's funny. In fact it's bed-wettingly funny without it even being clear whether the guy is joking; if he's joking.

The beats have got that underground thump of classic material, and RA keeps it so real that you're either going to have to buy a new one or just get used to the smell. I don't know how to describe this monster without getting it horribly wrong, because some of it is fucking appalling, but fucking appalling in a good way, which I wasn't even sure could be a thing. My fellow old age pensioners may recall that Kiss had their adventures immortalised in their own Marvel comic back in the seventies, and that each member of Kiss famously donated a quota of blood so that it could be added to the ink prior to printing. I'm not well informed as to the process by which vinyl and CD are manufactured, whether either medium is originated from the kind of vat of raw material into which an enterprising recording artist might take a massive dump, thematically underscoring their work with the physical material of its transmission; and if it's possible, if I didn't just listen to it, then I feel certain that RA has at least given it some thought.

Yes. That good!

WILDING ...and the GOLDEN HAMMER (2021)

Typographic affectations usually get on my nerves because often the most interesting thing about the artist will turn out to be the name, embellished as it is with extraneous bits of programming code,  meaning that the music usually sounds like the Cocteau Twins but with extra helpings of twee. On the other hand, I'm not going to argue with WILDING who has more than earned the right to render his name however he fucking well likes. Much like its predecessor, Hard Noise to Scumrise this is one of those rare albums which proves both terrifying and yet invigorating, like an hilarious funeral. It leans in far too close, gently intrudes a rough hand down the front of your pants, then looks you right in the eye as it delivers the most preposterous testimony you've ever heard; or at least that's what it does some of the time. There's less of the Hard Noise but musical abstracts continue to dominate, flowering from the arse end of growling blues numbers, even illustrating them in the case of the extended coda to Meal with bleeps and electronic squeaks which seem to depict the consumption of the postmortem corpse by whoever happens to be around - the whole heap of bacteria, who want to treat you like a cafeteria, as the lyric tells it.

 

Yes, the lyrics - Meal and Gezellum are particularly wonderful, although I also enjoy Music and Truck - which incorporates no less than 436 variations on the word fuck* and as such inspires fond memories of working in Catford. The lyrical wordplay is dexterous, vividly disgusting and massively entertaining all at the same time, inspiring me to lazy comparisons with persons whose work I don't actually know as well as I probably should - Beefheart, Vivian Stanshall, the rococo doggerel of Richard Stilgoe and his unbearable ilk buggered and transformed into brutalist vaudeville; or what we have is Peter Hope's Exploding Mind but funnier, except no way would you ever grow balls of volume sufficient to facilitate calling it funny to its face; and amidst all the seemingly nihilist revelations, it's curiously life affirming to find that 2022 has kicked off with an album which really doesn't sound quite like anything before.

*: I'm guessing here. I lost count at around thirty, and that was only a few lines into the song. It's a lot anyway.

Sid Vicious - Sid Sings (1979)

If there was ever a mythology which outstripped the individual from whom it was spun more than Sid - and there may well be - I can't think of anyone at the moment. The spectacle of Sid grew to such proportions following his death as to become indistinguishable from mainstream caricatures by Kenny Everett and the like, and so much so that it hardly seems worth stating. On the other hand, the image of Sid as some useless chump - lucky doesn't seem quite the right term here - who barely knew which end of a bass guitar was which, a man named after his own hamster - doesn't seem entirely fair either. As usual, the truth was probably somewhere in the middle. My friend Eddy remembers him as just some amiable, slightly lively bloke who turned up at all the early punk gigs, someone you'd say hello to without feeling you needed to know the story of his life - which seems to match the accounts given by other Sex Pistols. Rotten describes him as easily led, maybe a little guileless; although during the Vermorel interview he comes across as, if not a high-functioning genius then certainly far from stupid. Additionally, you can hear him idly plucking away on his bass at certain points on the tape and he's not actually bad even if his playing suffered following four-thousand pints and an arm candy chaser. At least he was technically no more basic than a million other punk bassists of the time.

This cobbling together of posthumous live recordings was massively cynical but naturally I bought one, even though it could be argued that the free Sid poster was probably closer to the spirit of the enterprise than the music on the record. The music is mostly Iggy or Dolls covers performed with various Heartbreakers, notably excepting Born to Lose from the final English Pistols performance, at least prior to the reunion. The quality isn't great but it's good enough and I've heard worse, and Sid was actually a decent vocalist. He didn't change the world but he was funny and he made things a little more interesting for a while.

C'mon Everybody and Something Else were both very important to me at the time, regardless of anyone trying to point us in the direction of better art or superior musicianship; and ignoring the bullshit, looking past the whole whining caboodle to Sid Sings as a record of some punky bloke having a good time on a stage, it's hard to fault.

Eminem - Infinite (1996)

Eminem's first album must surely be one of the most underpublicised debuts of all time, at least judging by the number of occasions I've seen it claimed that he kicked off with Slim Shady, prior to which there was just some white supremacist stuff which Ray Benzino felt duty bound to tell everyone about. Even accounts which acknowledge the existence of Infinite seem to downplay it as a stumbling ecologically themed demo dating from before our man learned how to say rude words, or even to rhyme them.

It's all bollocks. Infinite sounds very much a product of the era of Mobb Deep and Illmatic with its heavy brooding bass underscoring distant horn riffs - as distinct from the plinky-plonky Munsters themes of the more commercially viable years, despite being the work of the same people. Lyrically, it's a very different affair to Slim Shady, but then the whole point of Slim Shady was it being a character, a persona, even a parody to some extent - which is why not every last Eminem lyric since has been about taking drugs and shagging a farmyard animal. Infinite lacks the headline grabbing novelty and the delight taken in winding you up for the sake of it, but on the other hand, it's really not a massive thematic leap from the sort of more earnest, autobiographical stuff he's been focussing on since he grew out of the Esham influenced material - or at least the material which sounds as though it was influenced by Esham to me.

I love the hits as much as anyone, but this is still his greatest work in my view. The lyrical gymnastics were as spectacular as anything recorded since, and the mood - even more driven and hungry than on the Interscope albums - is crushingly powerful, soulful, funky as fuck, and all the more convincing for the absence of comedy turns to camera.

I really wonder how it all would have panned out for our man had this been the hit it absolutely deserved to be.