Viper - Big Tits 4 U Errday (2015)

I can see how some might have reservations about this one, but I personally take the view that Viper is simply a man who understands his audience. Big Tits 4 U Errday seems to be part of a mammary themed cycle of releases, others in the series including Suck Her Tits and Luv Dem Big Milky Tits. Without wishing to seem like some beardy hipster whose tastes are limited to whatever you've never heard of, you can probably be forgiven for being unfamiliar with these works on the grounds that no-one seems to actually know how many albums Viper has issued beyond that it's been literally thousands in the last decade, albeit as downloads. Apparently his back catalogue is therefore mostly remixes or chopped and screwed variations on a theme, but for what it's worth, this is the third I've bought at random, and there are only three tracks I recognise, or at least which appear to sample material I've already heard; and against all odds, Big Tits 4 U Errday is every bit good as You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack and Kill Urself My Man.

Viper's sound is pretty startling when you first hear it. Wikipedia defines it as cloud rap, so I looked up cloud rap but the first sentence of the article referred to cLOUDEAD so I didn't bother reading the rest.

Let's try again.

Viper's sound owes a lot to the quarter speed cough medicine beats of DJ Screw and the like, but otherwise follows its own rules. It's hypnotic like vapourwave and sounds as though it was recorded on some cheap hunk of shit which probably cost about fifteen dollars. At first it sounds like an accident, hence the dubious classification of Viper as an outsider artist, but the more you listen, the harder it is to deny his power. Viper's baritone mumble, sounding as though it was recorded over messenger on a dial-up internet connection, slows to a crawl with percussion reduced to a distant ticking and a bass so distorted that it crumbles into digital slurry and genuinely leaves the cut resembling a dreamier version of something from one of those early Nocturnal Emissions albums, or even My Bloody Valentine transposed to Texas. It shouldn't work, but having now heard three albums of this stuff, I'm forced to conclude that it's no accident and that this guy is a visionary by some definition, at least musically.

Lyrically he's maybe a little basic compared to, off the top of my head, Nas, but nevertheless cuts what is very much his own furrow. For a collection named after boobs and sporting a picture of the same on the cover - or on the associated illustration seeing as this is download only - Viper is unusually respectful regarding women, and we find neither hoes nor bitches on this album so far as I noticed.

Girls love me 'cause I'm so real,
'Cause I'm laid back, 'cause I'm so chill.
Sharing they emotions and how they really feel,
That's why, with me, they make life-long deals.

I appreciate it probably isn't the full Andrea Dworkin, but it's nevertheless a long way from Bitches Ain't Shit. The same easy-going and strangely amiable vibe informs the entire album, meaning that regardless of whether he's trying to sell us crack or otherwise telling us how amazing he is, it's really difficult to dislike Viper. He somehow manages to peddle this schtick while seeming like a nice guy, or at least like it's not anything personal. You'll doubtless be disappointed if you're expecting A Tribe Called Quest, and I suppose it's kind of annoying how the titles bear no resemblance to the tracks they describe (and there aren't any songs about tits either), but this cranky underground weirdo keeps putting out albums which are better than anything by most of the big names. Don't be mislead by the je ne sais Sunday Sport ambience of the title, Big Tits 4 U Errday is a powerfully beautiful piece of work.

The Tubes - Remote Control (1979)

Amongst my memories of first discovering music, or at least music which wasn't the Beatles, the arrival of my first tape recorder is significant for reasons which are probably obvious. I don't remember hearing much music on the radio as a kid, but I heard enough to be aware of Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street. I used to go to stay at my grandparents' house in Kenilworth every other weekend, and there was a point at which whatever the usual arrangement had been, suddenly it was just my dad coming to fetch me home on Sunday evening, and because it was my dad, he had the radio on, usually tuned to the top forty countdown. This meant that I heard a selection of the same songs with such frequency as to imprint them on my memory as things I liked, and when I was given a tape recorder for my birthday, naturally the first thing I did was start taping things I liked from the radio; and Prime Time by the Tubes was in there right from the beginning, even though I'm not sure the dates add up right.

Later I learned that the Tubes were an American punk band, and later still I concluded that they were an example of how America never understood punk. I no longer quite hold either of these views, although I still maintain that a bunch of poets hanging around with Lou Reed in some New York loft was never, ever the birth of punk.

Anyway, I loved Prime Time so much that I immediately ran out and bought the album some forty years later when I happened across a copy in a crappy second hand store which seemed suspiciously like some guy's front room. I played it once and decided that I'd been right about Americans failing to understand punk.

Then, another year or so on, I dig the thing out for a second play and find that it has something, even if hanging onto the idea of the Tubes as an American equivalent to the Pistols is obviously a waste of time. I guess they were punk in so much as that they were a bit freaky, relatively speaking, and none too bothered about fitting in; plus there was a fairly low calorie anti-establishment message centered around the idea that too much telly is bad for you. I don't know about the earlier material, but musically this one is operatic and conspicuously well played, a little like a weird conflation of Kiss and Devo but coming out sounding a bit like Styx in their Mr. Roboto period. It's so theatrical it's almost Rocky Horror. Guitar solos, mullets, vocal harmonies, futuristic monosynth and sax solos: ordinarily I might duck for cover before Michael J. Fox shows up and tries to teach me a thing or two about what it's like to be young, but fucking fuck it - this is a great album. The songs, big pompous poodle-haired wedding cake compositions though they may well be, have got serious pull, never mind just Prime Time. There's TV is King, I Want It All Now, Only the Strong Survive, and about the only song I was less struck on is the ballad, Love's a Mystery (I Don't Understand) but my wife has been going crackers over that one, so everybody's happy.

Yella - One Mo Nigga ta Go (1996)

Of all the former members of NWA, Yella seems to have been the most overlooked in terms of the ensuing legend, at least unless you want to start talking about Arabian Prince and others whom even those who were actually in NWA have trouble remembering. This is probably because Yella was never quite so visible as the rest, and we never worked out what he actually did. I mean we know he was the DJ, or he was the other DJ, but er…

Of course, whereas the other four have had post-NWA musical careers which kept their works within the general vicinity of the wider public attention span, Yella shuffled off to produce independent art films catering principally for a male audience, so you could argue that he sort of switched lanes.

Well, sort of, except for producing, or at least having something to do with tracks on a few of the later solo releases by Eazy-E, releases which were actually pretty fucking great, contrary to the history established by people who write for the Source and others; and prodding the internet reveals that Yella produced a whole shitload of records which did well, back when he was still pushing the buttons; and actually there was this solo album, which didn't quite set the world on fire but is nevertheless solid as fuck.

That said, One Mo Nigga has such a laid back, mellow vibe that you can pretty much listen to the entire album without noticing it, then wonder what happened to track two as the disc spins to a stop in the player, at least at first. It's mostly a g-funk variant of light jazz funk-soul-R&B-all of that good shit, taking it slow and smooth and so polished that it wouldn't sound out of place on a Sting album; but the more you listen, the more you begin to feel it, and there's a lot of feeling on this one - it being a memorial to Eazy-E who had recently passed and who was the one still talking to Yella, I guess. It works because, among other factors, Yella knows his strengths and, aside from a few particularly poignant spoken pieces, leaves the vocals to others - BG, Knocc Out, Kokane and various Ruthless vets. There's nothing which punches you in the face like you might get with an Ice Cube set, because even with the few darker, street level numbers, the vibe is set firmly at four in the morning. It's music which knows what it's like to lose a buddy, and which knows there's not always anything to be said, so you just have to deal with it. One Mo Nigga ta Go probably proves the truism about the quiet ones at the back. It's not that it's unlike anything you've heard before, but nothing you've heard before will have sounded quite like this album.

Full Blooded & HOUND Faculty - Untamed (2001)

Thank God for the internet, otherwise I probably wouldn't have discovered this one ever having existed. Full Blooded's Memorial Day of 1998 made a big impression on me. It didn't quite sound like any other album released by No Limit, or even any other rap album for that matter - not trying to suggest Full Blooded was ever the rap equivalent of Farmer's Manual or whoever, but it very much had its own sound and its own mood. Unfortunately, Memorial Day doesn't seem particularly well remembered and didn't get much of a push, subsequently sinking to the level of one of those other No Limit releases alongside the Gambino Family, Sons of Funk and the rest. This probably didn't quite count as a crime on the scale of failing to keep Fiend in the stable - although admittedly I'm not actually sure what happened there with regards to jumper and pushee - but Full Blooded is a fucking great rapper and it seems bizarre that No Limit never got around to issuing a follow up album, or even the promised debut from his group, Hounds of Gert Town.

Never mind because there's this, as I've discovered nearly two decades later - independently released, probably sold six copies, but nevertheless doing every bit of whatever business you might need it to do. Untamed actually makes Memorial Day sound kind of expensive with its relatively lavish production from Beats by the Pound, with this one being maybe a bit more bedroom in terms of scale, and with more than a hint of someone's Casio keyboard; but it plays to its strengths, underpinning everything with a bass that just won't take no for an answer, and emphasising Full Blooded's blues heritage with soulful, occasionally even mournful electric piano - and it all pulls together with such feeling that you cease to hear the budget.

Full Blooded occupies approximately the same part of the rap table of elements as Fiend, maybe a few squares along from Mystikal or even ODB, but lacking the need for throat lozenges. He sounds punch drunk, verbally dancing around the beats like he's in the boxing ring, lines dropped as though he's hurling them at the song. So it's imprecise, nothing to set your watch by, and the form mirrors the subject. Untamed really is modern blues straight from a Louisiana porch with the paint flaking off, no flossing here just grinding poverty, and doing what you have to do, and maybe not feeling too great about it. It took a couple of plays, but this one really gets its hooks into you and makes for essential cathartic listening on a shitty day; which is pretty good going for such a terminally underpublicised album. I don't even know if this guy is still alive, but if he is, I hope he gets a kick out of someone still spinning this shit two decades later. He really should've been a contender.

Beatles - Magical Mystery Tour (1967)

This is the first album I ever owned - actually the fourth, but the first which I can still listen to without it exclusively being an exercise in nostalgia. I was given the record for Christmas, 1976. I was ten.

My exposure to pop music was fairly limited as I was growing up - Top of the Pops, the radio in the cow shed when my dad was at work, and that was probably more or less it. I remember liking certain songs - Drupi's Vado Via and Rubber Bullets by 10cc, for example - and on occasions when my mum and dad went out for the evening, I'd slap on the greatest hits of either Elton John or Simon & Garfunkel and dance around the front room like a fucking idiot. I noticed the Beatles music because a lot of it used to turn up on television programmes in the background, and so much so that I began to recognise bits and pieces and ask what they were; and so my parents bought me this. I'm fairly sure my dad would have preferred that I'd fixated on the Rolling Stones, and I still don't know what my mother made of my pre-pubescent musical preferences. She grew up in Liverpool and was a teenager just as the lads had begun to make a name for themselves, but I think she was more into Bob Dylan, poetry readings, and black polo neck sweaters. She saw the Beatles at the Cavern Club at one point, but was, for whatever reason, unimpressed.

Anyway, seeing as I was ten, I guess this must have seemed like a safe bet - plenty of recognisable hits, they're dressed as animals on the cover and there's a cartoon strip, so it's kind of like a children's album anyway, aside from the tonnage of drugs ingested during its recording. Also, as I now appreciate, there's an artistic dimension to this music, or at least an aspiration. McCartney had been listening to Pierre Schaeffer and it shows in places, and I expect my mum had anticipated getting humpy having to endure yeah yeah yeah and woooh blasting from the front room day after day.

This album led to Yellow Submarine about a month later once I'd saved up the pocket money, then Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper, and nothing else for a long time because I was never very good at saving. Years passed with many hours spent looking at the Beatles section in WHSmith and trying to imagine what it would be like to buy some of the others, and then punk finally filtered through to my corner of the universe and the fifth proper album I bought was Devo's first. I'd overdone the Beatles thing and wouldn't really need to listen to them again for a long time, and other things sounded better, and actually I was getting kind of sick of still hearing the Beatles all the fucking time along with certain persons still going on about them after all these years. It took me a while, but I picked up Beatles For Sale back in the nineties because it was the only vinyl album in the store I could imagine wanting to hear; and yeah - it was better than I'd expected, bringing with it the novelty of Beatles songs I hadn't yet heard played to death on shitty mainstream radio stations; and now, a million years later, I've picked up the rest, feeling a little as though I owe it to my ten-year old self. Time has passed and I can once again listen to this stuff without having Jimmy Savile or Dave Lee Travis or Jeff Lynne or any of a million other extraneously gurning wankers getting in the way. So it is that I've come back to Magical Mystery Tour, spinning that original disc for the first time in nearly forty years.

The first thing to occur to me is that I have apparently taken better care of my records than I realised, because there's hardly a pop or a scratch despite the clockwork monstrosities by which I first listened to this one.

The second is that, regardless of the repetition, these songs have lost none of their power. There was something genuinely special about this combination of four people, something which was lost once they brought in mumbling muso bores to augment less satisfactory solo efforts. Lennon, for all his personal failings, always had a wonderfully acidic edge without it ever quite spilling over into fully sour - the dash of piss and vinegar to offset McCartney's folksy romance, and digging this out after all this time has made me appreciate that Paul really does have a gorgeous voice, something in the realm of sunlight breaking through clouds after the storm. These four have become such easy targets that it's too often overlooked how great they could be when the stars combined.

Anyway, as I presume was part of my mother's masterplan, Magical Mystery Tour was a great place to start, possibly the best, with George Martin testing the limit of what you could call a pop song, building up those peculiar layered codas, mindscapes of half heard voices and psychological processes painted in sound - psychedelia without the cultural baggage. It was inevitable that I should be drawn in given how hard those Pertwee-era Who soundtracks affected me; and strangest of all, this record may even have primed me for the Sex Pistols given the similarly layered coda of Friggin' in the Riggin', the flip to first Pistols single I knowingly encountered.

All You Need is Love still sounds a bit brown around the edges thanks to years of overexposure, but otherwise this is astonishing, and somehow it doesn't even sound like an old record. It's really nice to have them back.

Mrs. Dink - Diabolique (2019)

Having dedicated myself to the arguably pointless task of writing about music and the attendant construction of statements such as sounds like Pink Floyd in short trousers if Gordon Ramsey had been in the original line up, Mrs. Dink's Diabolique presented me with a dilemma, namely that I initially had no idea what to say about it beyond yeah, this is really amazing, which would seem a bit bland as reviews go. Then, just this morning, it came to me by virtue of my listening to this album immediately after giving Cabaret Voltaire's Seconds Too Late a spin; and it came to me because I can now hear what sets Diabolique apart from others of its kind. I could tell it was something special, but couldn't quite put a finger on what was different.

It's techno and an absolute banger, as the internet's Gary Goblins points out on Bandcamp; so we're talking sequencers, squelches, samples, filters, four to the floor beats, and bass that gets you right in the colon, but otherwise it feels unusually organic with sounds and melodies which come and go like absent-minded thoughts. Much like Seconds Too Late, it doesn't feel programmed and somehow gives the impression that much of what it's doing is in the bits you can't quite hear, like techno at a right angle to the sort of thing with which we're maybe more familiar; plus there's a sort of eastern feel without it necessarily being anything you can put your finger on, nothing obvious. I suppose - to follow this train of thought - it's like the point at which the machines start talking to themselves, except it turns out that they're saying something quite unlike whatever we tried to predict.

To translate the above into English, yeah, this is really amazing, you can move your arse to it, and Classy as Shit - as vocalised by the ever wonderful Peter Hope is an instant classic, although not the only one here by a long shot. The law of diminishing returns suggests that by this point of its evolution, techno probably should have devolved into a squelching noise heard on the soundtrack of trailers for televised sporting events, but instead has flowered into something which almost eludes description and which apparently lives on Jupiter. Additionally, this one is a benefit for the Lambert House, a charitable establishment providing resources for LGBTQ yoots in this age of witch hunts and angry shitheads; so Diabolique speaks well for the future of the human race in more than just one respect. We need more like Mrs. Dink.

Purchase ye this minstrelry yonder.

Marcel Duchamp - The Entire Musical Work of Marcel Duchamp (2017)

Aside from being a big deal in terms of Dada and anti-art, Marcel Duchamp could probably be regarded as the father of post-modernism through being the man who arguably introduced choice to the art world as a technique in its own right. Duchamp chose a urinal for one piece and it therefore became art, thus doing away with all of that mucking about with brushes and canvas and so on. Duchamp is therefore probably directly to blame for Damien Hirst and all of the other useless wankers who missed the point in much the same way that Malcolm McLaren missed the point of the Sex Pistols. The urinal, the bicycle wheel, the bog brush - it was provocation, a massive fuck you to the establishment delivered by refusing point blank to play its game, to acknowledge either its aesthetic or its values. If it was art - and the answer to that one is sort of inherent in the term anti-art when you think really fucking hard about it - then it was art which dared you to reveal yourself as a complete arsehole by treating it as such. The continued canonisation of found art therefore seems akin to the collective retort of the herd in Life of Brian.

Yes, we are all individuals.

That's my take on it anyway.

All the same, Duchamp was responsible for some great art, albeit great art which was massively unconventional by the standards of the time, not least of these being the Large Glass. It could be argued that his anti-art was exploratory, just one avenue of research. This was another, and one of which I was only dimly aware before I found this record in the racks of Half Price.

The music here was composed through numerous ingenious and peculiar means of generating random numbers, wooden balls dropped into the cars of a toy train set as it passes beneath a funnel and so on, with each wooden ball representing a different note. The notes were transcribed, presumably back in 1913, then performed on a variety of instruments - piano, voice, flute, trombone and so on. As one might imagine, the numerical sequence yields notes but has nothing much to say about intervals, timing, or emphasis, so these details were left to the performers.

Comparisons with Beethoven are inevitably a bit of a waste of time, and this music more closely resembles the experiments of Stockhausen and Xenakis in terms of chance notation and anti-melody; but the strangest thing is that for all the momentary clashes and passing dissonance, Duchamp's music - thus credited having been generated by the man - is surprisingly pleasant and even relaxing, possibly thanks to the even tempo at which random piano notes fall from the instrument. I may be simply admiring the formalistic properties of the fire extinguisher mounted on the wall next to the gallery's exit, but Duchamp's music is actually sort of beautiful, even powerful, and enough so as to change the nature of the space in which one listens.

Needless to say, it was also about a million years ahead of its time, foreshadowing degrees of experimentation which few would consider for at least another couple of decades; and it was easier on the ear than Russolo's noise machines.