Lil Nas X - 7 EP (2019)

As I write, Old Town Road is apparently the singular most enormous pop parade hit song of all time. Being old as fuck and isolated by choice from almost all aspects of contemporary culture, I only encountered the song whilst rummaging around on YouTube in hope of finding some evidence of rap music not having gone completely down the toilet; and thankfully, here is that evidence.

It's weird and disorientating to realise that I'm this old, and that my opinion of Lil Nas X doesn't make much difference one way or the other. I first heard of Billy Ray Cyrus when my friend Eddy did an impersonation of him in the pub in order to illustrate just how shit was Achy Breaky Heart, which would have been 1992; and Chris Rock's Bigger & Blacker was July 1999, at which point Lil Nas X would have been just three months old.

Three months old…

Anyway, no genre has been so historically ready to drown its own kids as rap, usually because someone dared to poke a toe out beyond the established boundary dividing fake from that which is kept wearyingly real; and it sounds a bit like rock music, or there are too many naughty words and it's not very empowering, or it lacks the lyricism of LL Cool J, or It Takes a Nation of Millions is the greatest rap album of all time, in my humble opinion…

If rap has a problem right now, it's probably due to trap poisoning, adult fans of My Little Pony, and grown men who think growling the word represent for three minutes constitutes a flow. Lil Nas X avoids the pitfalls by sticking to tracks which sound good rather than ticking boxes. If that's a problem, maybe just pretend you're listening to Outkast.

Old Town Road samples Nine Inch Nails and features Billy Ray Cyrus, autotune, and line dancing in the video - a recipe for disaster which has somehow resulted in sheer brilliance. I've now seen a few sneering reviews grumbling about it being a gimmick, just a meme, a novelty record, hardly comparable with Big Daddy Kane or someone else you weren't actually listening to first time round, but it's all bollocks. Old Town Road feels a lot like life in San Antonio, at least in certain respects, and does what it sets out to do to perfection, so I couldn't really give a shit if it's somehow a less important cultural artefact than Bohemian Rhapsody because says you.

Lil Nas's success is in making good use of all the shit which usually ruins a song, not least the autotune which features heavily here. Most often the effect turns an underwhelming vocal into a musical component, and one which sits poorly with whatever else is going on, reducing words to an extraneous embellishment. Our guy on the other hand gets the balance exactly right, using tracks which never get too crowded and yet pack enough of a punch in the equalisation department to sound pretty darn beefy; so the treated vocal has space and nothing gets clogged up in the pipes; and you don't have to call it rap if that bothers you, because it still works, and still does what rap should do.

Ridin' on a horse,
You can whip your Porsche,
I been in the valley,
You ain't been up off that porch.

There are also a couple of pseudo-trap numbers, but this is a bizarrely eclectic set without any two tracks quite sounding alike, and Bring U Down could almost have been on that last Pixies album, if that's any indication. Even Cardi B, of whom I didn't particularly think I was a fan, sounds blistering on Rodeo.

Whatever you want to call it, 7 is a fucking great set, pop music done right - simple without being stupid, moving without simpering, smart and snappy in all the right places, and it bangs like a motherfucker, as I believe is the parlance. My only criticism is that there doesn't seem to be a physical release, but never mind.

Charlatans - Some Friendly (1990)

I bought this when I was ill. I can't remember what was up with me but it was genuine for once. I was living in Lewisham and it was wet and miserable. I staggered out to the shops in hope of buying something which might cheer me up a bit, and this was the only album I could find in my local WHSmith which seemed even marginally promising, based mainly on The Only One I Know being so great a single as to have smashed through all of my growing resentment towards both baggy and what I have since come to think of as Austin Powers music. I got the album home and struggled back into bed. It sounded okay, if somehow a bit muted, but I nevertheless played side one again and again because I didn't have the energy to flip the record over; and it was quite a good illness soundtrack, possibly due to the neopsychedelic codeine swirls of Hammond organ reproducing the cotton wool effect of being confined to bed with a fever, drifting in and out of consciousness.

Weirdly, it still sounds as good now, perhaps even better. It may simply be an after effect of my hammering side one whilst feeling unwell, only coming to the flip a few weeks later, but Some Friendly feels a lot like a concept album, specifically one of those with the sides divided between head and dance floor. The first is powerfully immersive, a series of swells and lulls coming to a crescendo with the genuinely incredible Then and somehow reminding me of Faust IV. The second side veers a bit more towards Austin Powers music, requiring a few plays to dispel unwanted images of that fucking twat Mike Myers, but it gets there, and comes to resemble a more populist take on krautrock in a surprisingly short time, particularly Sproston Green, which seems an interesting parallel given that Happy Mondays were essentially a Can tribute act.

Stranger still, Wikipedia describes this as a problematic record with which the band were never particularly happy, not least due to having gone into the studio with only a handful of songs. Nevertheless, for my money it pisses over the efforts of most of their baggy contemporaries, but maybe it's just something to do with listening whilst unwell. It might also be something to do with their Birmingham origins, because Birmingham is better than Manchester.

Stex - Spiritual Dance (1992)

There was a point about halfway through the eighties at which it seemed like Some Bizarre were the only label of substance and I'd never need to bother with anyone else's records ever again. It seemed as though pop music had stopped being a wanker, or was at least doing something kind of interesting; and then the Smiths came along to restore order, to calm the fears of those who foresaw the extinction of proper music made by white blokes with guitars and a love of the jangly sixties, like we knew before all those - well, you know, can't say no names or nuffink but name me one good reggae song, yeah?

Then Cabaret Voltaire were suddenly on Parlophone, The The were similarly elsewhere, Psychic TV failed to be anything like as interesting as promised, and Stevo's thing had seemingly vanished off the map. Excepting a vaguely recalled clip of something trading as Blowzabella on some youth TV show, it had all gone quiet. I suppose it may be significant that this apparent disappearance probably coincided with my giving up on music papers, but I don't know, and the subsequent history of Some Bizarre is a strange and obscure tale populated by artists you've never heard of - Monkey Farm Frankenstein and others.

That said, I'm not sure I'd actually heard of Stex, but Johnny Marr of the aforementioned Smiths plays on this record so I assume it will have been paid at least some attention, even if I was looking in the wrong direction at the time; and I assume from the scarcity of posthumous information on the internet (a realm wherein one may learn even the birth dates and respective shoe sizes of all three members of Naffi Sandwich if you look hard enough) that they're probably still owed at least fourteen of their allotted fifteen minutes.

I say they're but, so far as I can tell, Stex was he, and specifically a he of Lewisham - which is actually where I was living in 1992, but never mind. Stex seems to have been something to do with the developing garage scene, and I gather that, aside from Johnny Marr twanging away on a couple of numbers, we also have the involvement of an Altered Images dude, with Dave Ball possibly twiddling something or other. Spiritual Dance is uptempo bluesy soul of a kind which was admittedly fairly common in 1992, but done with the sort of feeling which connects it firmly to its roots, and which therefore distinguishes it from the formless, generic pish gratuitously emoted by all of those Alexander O'Neal types. Guitars chop and chunk like Nile Rodgers, and the computer bass squelches with a warmth I hadn't even realised I'd missed, and the mood is uplifting without getting stupid, whilst smouldering like Imagination's New Dimension, or the broody opening bars of Diana Ross's Love Hangover; and really it's just a fucking tremendous soul album, a lost gem in every sense. Stex may have seemed an odd labelmate for Einstürzende Neubauten, but if you listen close it becomes difficult to miss the kinship with The The and even Cabaret Voltaire's funkier material.

What the hell happened, Stex? You should have been fucking massive.

Mrs. Dink - D(EE)P R(IS)K (2019)

Having followed Peter Hope down the acid rabbit hole, figuratively speaking, I now encounter Mrs. Dink, another name associated with the New York Haunted label and as such further evidence of its dedication to musical excellence and innovation. Mrs. Dink - whom it should probably be noted also has material available from her own Degenerate Trifecta label - crafts pounding progressive techno which overloads the senses with all manner of disorientating filtered clatter whilst keeping your ass locked firmly to the rhythm, thus overruling any problems derived from what you expected the music to do. Unusually for this sort of thing, it features that same blend of a light multilayered touch with something hard which once characterised the very best of Front 242, yet without any of the attendant testosterone poisoning. In fact Super-Mighty Pre-emptive Strike reminded me a little of John Barry, at least in terms of mood.

I'll shut up now, but this one is very, very good.

Get it here.

David Bowie - Tonight (1984)

Yes, I know, but it's not like he's going to be recording any new ones so it seemed like time I went in, just out of curiosity. After all, it might not be that bad.

Having been loyal to Bowie right up until Let's Dance, I spent most of the eighties looking in the other direction. It seemed as though he'd lost the plot from where I'd been standing, and I still loathe the plinky-plonky banality of ying-tong-iddle-I-China Girl, and it was surely only a matter of time before he turned up dressed as a foam rubber parrot on Celebrity It's a Knockout!

Anyway, I've grudgingly come to accept that I was wrong about Let's Dance - excepting Bowie's cover of Aneka's Japanese Boy - and I guess the same is true of this one, which is weird. I expected it to be worse, like Let's Dance with shoulder pads and blonde highlights instead of tunes. Firstly I should admit that both Blue Jean and Loving the Alien sounded all right as singles, even at the time, if admittedly not cut from quite the same cloth as Rebel Rebel or Drive-In Saturday. They've aged pretty well, particularly now that the glossy eighties production has begun to sound like a novel affectation rather than something from which there's no fucking escape. Loving the Alien actually comes surprisingly close to magnificent, particularly the Howard Goodall style staircase of ascending notes leading up to its suitably epic chorus.

The prosecution should probably also take into account that Bowie does cod reggae on this record, and twice, and one of those times in the company of his famous friend Tina Turner. It should be awful but somehow isn't, although I've never really had a problem with cod reggae, apart from finding it funny. It additionally provides a clue to why Tonight turned out as it did, at least once we take into account that it's produced by Hugh Padgham, father of the gated snare and other eighties crimes: Bowie wanted to be Sting.

Play Tonight enough and it sounds okay; another few days and it sounds decent once you've stopped noticing the haircuts and the jackets with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow; and by the end of the second week, it sounds better than either Low or Heroes, or if not better, at least like it had some idea of what the fuck it was doing.

Everything I've ever known is wrong.

Göran Lundh / Lars Larsson - Beppria Bepria (1984)

Following on from Att Förstå Ensamhet, here's some more Swedish goodness delivered in cassette form by Stockholm's AUT label. This time it's a sort of reissue, or would have been a reissue had the thing been released back in 1984 as intended, which apparently never came to pass. The previous label, Psychout Productions, famously first released Controlled Bleeding's Knees and Bones as well as material by HNAS, but this, a tape split between two individuals involved with En Halvkokt I Folie, remained sadly in the can.

Beppria Bepria very much sounds like something from 1984 in terms of technology, but nevertheless retains the element of shock through sonic effects seldom heard since we all discovered fancier, slicker means of doing this sort of stuff. Mostly it's heavy use of tape collage, with someone giving their pause button a serious hammering in the process, combined with what I'm pretty sure must have been a Boss DR55 drum machine with the tempo wacked up and used as a source of sound rather than rhythm. The DR55 - or whatever this was - is pretty basic, just clicks and pops with a stab of hiss in lieu of snare, and the result is arresting and hypnotic, particularly when multitracked with itself, achieving more than one might expect on such a budget; and apparently it was on loan from Roger, later of Brighter Death Now, if that makes a difference for anyone.

Lars Larsson's side of the tape is more reliant on tape collage, musical rather than spoken. As with Göran Lundh's half, a lot of the material seems to come from Swedish radio, so I'm probably missing something given my being unable to understand the language, but the overall effect suggests the sonic equivalent of collages by Hannah Höch or John Heartfield. Furthermore, contrary to any impression I may have given of this having been some noisy lo-fi exercise, Beppria Bepria seems to have been constructed mostly from tapes chopped up on a reasonably fancy music center, so we have the high resolution clarity of an expensive sampler without the usual predictable rhythm or gloss. Quiet sounds, breaths and clicks spill from the speakers without warning, amounting to something quite powerful, full of tonal variation, and almost hallucinogenic - weird and outstanding stuff.

Availabubble yonder.

RZA - Bobby Digital in Stereo (1998)

Just to get it out of the way, I vaguely recall the Analog Brothers - featuring Ice-T, Kool Keith and others - as having been some sort of response to the RZA's Bobby Digital, although there doesn't seem to be any obvious reference to anything Wu-Tang on the Analog's Pimp to Eat. In any case, if the Analog name truly flips the bird at the RZA as something lacking - off the top of my head - authenticity or warmth, it seems peculiarly misjudged. Bobby Digital is simply a pun on Robert Diggs yielding a whole set of associations upon which to hang images - the RZA's superhero identity for the duration of the record rather than any sort of technological manifesto set forth as a challenge; and besides, regardless of how it was recorded, the RZA's work seems defiantly organic in composition, making a virtue of all the dirt, the awkward pauses, the mistakes, and the crackle of the old Motown sound back when it was something noisy and dangerous.

The retrofuturism of Bobby Digital in Stereo makes for a strange record, even by Wu standards. It's minimal and understated with the feel of having been recorded on a Playstation in someone's attic, possibly due to the personal, autobiographical, and occasionally nostalgic ambience of the RZA excavating aspects of his own childhood. It's low on hooks, being mostly subdued grooves heard through a haze of either dope or memory, the sort of sound which imprints itself on you during childhood illness, tucked up in bed with a fever. So - if this is making any sense to anyone whatsoever - it's as though the whole record occurs as something not quite seen out of the corner of an eye, or I suppose an ear. Typically it was greeted with a certain quota of indifference when it appeared back in the nineties, which I suppose is inevitable for something so personal. Myself, I'd say it's one of the best things ever to come out of the Wu, right up there with Supreme Clientele, Liquid Swords and so on. I've been listening to it for the last twenty years, and it still does something different every time.