The Who - Tommy (1969)

I realise I've done this the wrong way around, being entirely familiar with Ken Russell's 1975 movie while only just having heard the original due to the Who never having been fully on my radar; not that I ever had anything against them. I own a few singles, and still think of them as a mostly great singles band at least up until the second half of the seventies, but the albums always looked a bit messy with those faintly gimmicky titles. Listening to this, I find I miss Olly Reed's slightly flat, slightly forced singing at least as much as that of Ann-Margret, Tina Turner, Paul Nicholas, and even Jack Nicholson, so thankfully the quality of the material soon overpowers such reservations. I had assumed it would sound like a mere demo version of the Tommy with which I'm significantly more familiar, but it's really its own thing.

Tommy, as you will know unless you're very young or an idiot, is the tale of a deaf, dumb, and blind child who somehow excels at pinball, regains his senses as a fairly heavy handed metaphor for spiritual enlightenment, and ultimately acquires a cult following; and the story is told through song, hence the term rock opera. I'm sure I've seen Tommy credited as one of those many albums which was apparently the first concept album, but really, who gives a shit? Fuck off with your silly time signatures and your fake goblin ears.

I'm not actually sure how well the tale is conveyed as just music, given how well versed I am with the movie - which follows more or less the whole thing beat for beat - but it seems to communicate an emotional truth regardless, even if you're wondering why Tommy's mum - and indeed everyone else - sounds like Roger Daltrey. Against my expectation, it has quite a basic, jazzy production with very little reliance on effects, and the instrumentation is all kept beautifully clear and expressive, so much so that one would hardly think this bunch once had the reputation of being the loudest band in the world. Additionally, I've never been entirely convinced by Roger Daltrey's voice - there's nothing wrong with it, and that's what's wrong with it as someone or other said; and yet he's great here - the blustering rock bellow presumably being still to come.

Tommy includes some of Townsend's greatest, most powerful songs, in my opinion, here in a more vulnerable, raw emotional form than the version with the visuals and explosions; and although I still can't tell which version works the best, or even if there's a comparison to be made, the narrative seems arguably richer, more mutable, more open to variant interpretations in sound only. It's about enlightenment, but it's about abuse of power, and even about yesterday's underground becoming tomorrow's establishment - revolution and even enlightenment colonised and transformed into the new orthodoxy. The Who returned to that theme more than once, and it seems particularly fitting for the tail end of the sixties - and for right now, come to think of it.

Public Image Ltd. - That What Is Not (1992)

 

I came across an online review of 2012's This is PIL claiming it to be the best thing since 1984's This Is What You Want… This Is What You Get thankfully preventing the possibility of the PIL legacy concluding with one of those crappy nineties records. This irritated me because, aside from the possibility of Album actually being their finest moment, I happen to like those crappy nineties records despite their failure to deliver another Metal Box. That said, I wasn't actually sure about That What Is Not because I'd somehow forgotten its existence. So I dug it out, stuck it on the turn table, and there it stayed for the next couple of weeks.

It's still very much stadium PIL, perhaps even more so than the previous three with the occasional guitar solo which could have been lifted from REO Speedwagon, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it's probably more Pearl Jam than any of the seventies hairies. Above all, the strangest element is that it's almost an uptempo happy record, and Lydon is smiling on the back cover - not necessarily unusual but it's a genuinely cheery, unconditional smile rather than the one we're used to which suggests he's just seen Strummer go flying after stepping on a banana skin. It communicates the possibility that he was probably very much enjoying living in a significantly sunnier part of the world, which is something I understand very well, and - excepting the customarily caustic commentary - that's what That What Is Not sounds like.

I wonder if it would help if we thought of this as a John McGeoch album, because it's that too. I assume we haven't yet found a reason to sneer at McGeoch, although if we have I'm not really interested. That What Is Not has a massive, punchy sound, thanks in no small part to the horn section, harmonica and soulful backing vocals floating around in the mix just like on an eighties Rolling Stones record, and the bile is seasoned with a surprising quota of joie de vivre, or possibly just glee; and it would almost be a slightly more jagged Pearl Jam but for one of Lydon's greatest ever performances, at least technically. I know he mostly does just the one thing, but it's arguably at its greatest and most expressive here in voicing what may even be amongst his finest lyrics. Unfairground and Good Things are in particular face-punchingly wonderful and deserving of inclusion on whatever the next greatest hits package happens to be; and it's a shitload better than This is PIL while we're here.

So there.

Lil' Flip - I Need Mine $$ (2007)

As a disclaimer for the benefit of anyone reading this blog for the first time, I'm nearly a million years old, I write about what I like, and I make no claim to have had my finger on any pulse since around 1997 at the very latest. Barely literate comments along the lines of thiz opinon iz garbage Dogg Pound is tha $hit are pretty much wasted on me, even if you're not actually some little white dude lurking in his mother's basement. By the same token, I picked this one up because it was there and I enjoyed The Leprechaun. Flip could be the most successful rap artist of all time for all I know and you may already be bored shitless of the guy, but I can't really be arsed to do my research and you'll just have to humour Grandpa as he muses about this new fangled Beatles band.

No, I don't know if you're literally expected to pronounce it I Need Mine Dollar Dollar and it probably doesn't matter. The Leprechaun was decent, if not enough so to have me actively hunting down the rest. Nevertheless, this was in the rack and I had the money, so here we are.

Freestyle king or not, I don't recall Flip as being particularly gymnastic in the lyrical department, but here he's come on somewhat since the debut, and not in the direction I expected. Whenever I try to work out what happened to rap since I stopped listening - or at least got too old and too busy to continue giving it my undivided attention - I always seem to find trap music on the end of the line - guys I've never heard of growling out a few pages of bank statements over what sounds like an 808 being rogered by Sonic the Hedgehog, and all recorded on a fucking smartphone. If Lil' Flip ever went down that road, as I felt certain he probably would, there was no sign of it in 2007. Lyrically, if he's not quite Nas, you can tell he's thinking about this shit and putting in the work, developing his own voice beyond being one of those guys who turns up on someone else's CD to remind us that he also finds himself in a financially enviable situation; but two whole discs…

Not many rappers can manage the double disc thing, and yet Lil' Flip succeeds where other, possibly better publicised artists have fallen on their arses. The key seems to be variety. The standard is already high for this slightly expensive sounding album, with even those beats steering closest to the trap demonstrating a certain wide screen polish elevating them above the usual ringtones. Elsewhere we have tracks recalling the golden age of west coast g-funk and Real Hip Hop which swings across to the other side of the country, and it all blends seamlessly into a genuinely eclectic whole, feeling, if anything, a little like one of the Neptunes era Snoop albums. For someone so firmly rooted in his home soil - Houston, Texas for those unaware - Flip does a great job of covering all bases, in terms of both geography and even era, acknowledging the east coast roots of the culture as well as the usual roll call of greats; and we have guest spots from names similarly diverse as MJG, DJ Squeeky, Scott Storch, Mannie Fresh, Nate Dogg, Three-6-Mafia, Yukmouth and others. There's very little that's not to love about these - holy mother of God - thirty-nine tracks spanning social conscience to good old fashioned boasting, somehow amounting to a surprisingly soulful, feelgood set.

I probably need to have a look and see if he did any others.

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.