End Of Play 2010: A Hip-Hop State Of The Art Report
Evil unchecked. That’s what’s maddening. Critics scared of irrelevance without realising that kind of ‘irrelevance’ is entirely irrelevant. The biz and the press that cheerleads it is even more stuffed with hobbyists for whom hip-hop is purely exotic; tourism; never a political truth that’s close to home. Don’t get me wrong, part of hip-hop’s early appeal was the notion that you were visiting a world more dramatic and desperate than your own – but when that drama itself becomes a 2-d prosaism, just more post-watershed gun-play and witlessness, what’s the point of celebrating that monomania? I can’t figure out why a lot of rap’s defenders actually love it the more clichéd it gets, get snotty & suspicious if anyone dares to question it, mistake the tired repetition of old motifs as somehow ‘keeping it real’ and wouldn’t dare slag off much mainstream rap for fear of being called backpackers. As with rockcrit, there’s a fatal synonymising of ‘the facts’ with ‘the truth’ at the moment in rap, the laziness of thinking that if ‘the kids’ (whomever the fuck they be) love it you needn’t bother having a critical opinion, just assume the default position of prone reportage.
That unwillingness to try and find a way round/through/above/against the grisly shitpile we’re dealing with when we listen to mainstream rap (coupled with the instant ease we all now have in hiding in our own personal playlists & undergrounds) has left us with nowt but an amused chortling; an ongoing dialogue of condescension/ironic-hyperbole with the lowest-common-denominator of rap, whilst the underground keeps flaming on unheralded. Cos hey, why bother talking about what’s good and why it’s good and why certain things are bad when you can snigger about what’s mediocre and pretend it’s all equally godlike? Fuckin hipster cunts fucking it all up for everyone forever: not to piss on your parade pricks, this rag-mag bullshit’s fine if your life is spent giggling about pop, but for those of us who need it to make life worth living it’s simply not good enough. Too many writers aware of where pop should be fitted/filed on your ipod but utterly unaware of how pop fits with poverty, exhaustion, insecurity, fear, everyday life out here beyond NW1/BN1, where parents don’t pay for everything, where music & life have to battle. Critics believing all those commentards. The inability for writers to change the world they write about has meant they all accept that limitation in their ever-apologetic writing.
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix also plays in Liturgy, one of the best (that is, most progressive) BM acts to have emerged during the Great North American Wave of the early 21st century.
I avoided that whole DJ phase when I was a kid- there’s no branch of Cash Generator out there with the pair of Numark decks and cheap crossfader I sold a year after buying them. Maybe I’m experiencing a late adolescence because I’ve gone and made a DJ mix. It would also explain the pubes.
The Anti Christ Suite is mostly Drag, or Witch House, with a significant contribution from the genres that inspired chillwave’s dark twin, chiefly black metal and new wave. There’s even two cuts from the soundtrack to Inception, which you really ought to have seen by now.
Although I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a ‘concept album’ or claiming any sort of inspiration, it does have a set of samples from Lars Von Trier’s film Anti Christ. When I first saw the film at Norwich’s Cinema City in 2009 there was not only screaming and several walk-outs but a ghost caught on camera.
Click the image above to play or this link to download (134mb).
Full track listing after the jump: Continue reading
I think Sisters are one of those chillwaves that the young people talk about on their facebooks. I’m pretty sure Swirlies aren’t a chillwave. They sound more like a grunge. Tennis are too classy to be made of chillwaves- they’re bourgwavesie. Tony Conrad is as far from chillwave as it gets- he’s probably never seen a single episode of California Dreams or Malibu, CA.
Soil & “PIMP” Sessions are a six-piece Japanese Jazz band with a unhealthy predilection for using the term ‘pimp’ in their album titles. The two tracks below are taken from their 2006 album ‘Pimp of the Year’. Why post their songs? Well, do you have any Jazz on your iPod? I mean, any at all? There, that’s why.
Okay, a short story for you all today- this is part of the Big Important Novel that I noticed can work as a stand-alone piece, and it’ll teach you how to play the guitar part for a really great song.
“My God, that gives me such a boner.”
She meant my guitar, the EDS-1275. We were in my room, possibly cell, above the coffee house. We had, until this point, always stayed at Adele’s- my motivation being shame at my whole situation vis living. A young woman who often made it clear, even when it wasn’t appropriate, that her parents were millionaires and her childhood home was ‘a honest to God fuckin’ mansion’, deserved to be somewhere finer. Not, I should point out, in strictly bourgeois surroundings but in and amongst genuine aesthetic beauty, suitable to her idiom (for example, the Vatnajökull glacier).
“You wanted to see it… so… there.”
“How old is it?”
“Forty-one years. Some parts, like the tone control knobs, have been replaced but the body’s still solid mahogany.”
“Forty-one years… This is American history. It is a manifestation of our collective will.”
“It’s really just an instrument- I know to a lot of people it’s important, or ‘iconic’ or whatever, but it’s a tool to accomplish a certain task.”
“Then you should play it.”
“It’s late and if I play it through the amp I’ll wake Mr. Rosenberg-”
“It’s a tool to accomplish a certain task, und that task is making girls go all wet und quivery over othervise boring guys like you.”
“It’s not meant to be played acoustic-”
Adele held me around the waist and whispered “One song and you can fuck me wherever you want.”
“Is that anatomy or geography?”
She held up four fingers in front of my face.
“Okay, you want to play hardball, fine: there are four parts of me which can make you have an orgasm. For every second that goes by where you aren’t playing a song your access to one of them gets revoked. One, tw-”
I played. It was an intro in the chord C. I knew that she knew the song. It was important to us both.
“Two, one, two, three, four.”
I’m going to skip ahead to the next day with the two of us and my guitar and her drums in her apartment, mic-stands carrying Shure SM-58s in front of us and a formation of amplifiers behind.
Adele’s drums came in on the ‘four’ and I played the intro over after tap-dancing over the switches on a DS-1 and Bigmuff, then in G.
Adele, standing upright at her drumkit, leans into her mic. I’ve written out the chords above the lyrics and the strumming pattern should be pretty easy to pick up if you listen to the original. Continue reading
I’m not going to talk about Cocorosie’s album Grey Oceans. That I don’t want to talk about it shouldn’t be taken to mean that is beneath my contempt or unspeakably awful- I don’t talk about the vast majority of music that I listen to. I have no strong feelings about Cocorosie. I can imagine hearing them at a polite but not formal dinner or an ethnic-organic cafe. To me they’re the musical accompaniment to Hummus.
What I want to talk about is the article on Stereogum that has caused me to write three blog posts about Cocorosie in almost as many days and spend more time with their music than I have with anything that I am genuinely excited by. Continue reading
Metal videos are one of those rare things, like Hip-Hop album covers, that can never be good. This one’s for Odyssey, by Zoroaster, from their new album Matador and the lack of ideas on display is stunning. I’m not saying that every metal video should be early nineties vintage Spike Jonze, but can we at least all agree that showing a bunch of ugly dudes rocking out and only a bunch of ugly dudes rocking out might not bring the genre the critical and commercial success it deserves?
What we need is… Continue reading
Terror and Fabulous are two words that sound unreasonably good when put together, so there's no reason that they should be monopolised by an acclaimed 90s Dancehall DJ and can't be used as the title of a blog by Gareth Watkins of near to London, England.
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Okay, there's a theme: Things Are Not Okay, but this site will ignore the way things are and promote the work of artists and intellectuals who show us hints of how things could be.
I post MP3s. I do this to promote awareness of certain artists and to encourage critical engagement with their music. If you are an artist whose work I have featured or the owner of any copyrighted material that appears on this site then your first step should be to consider how I've advertised your product for free and how sending me further .mp3s to feature would be good business sense, or to send an email to terror.fabulous(at)gmail.com requesting the removal of specific songs from the site, which I will respond to as quickly as I am able.
