About a decade ago I heard some tracks by Green Day– they were from the album Dookie, I believe. Somewhat hilariously these shouty pop ditties were being marketed as the spearhead of a punk revival- even though the music was not scary, not raw, not subversive, nor even very rebellious. There was clearly no danger one of these ‘Green Day’ boys was ever going to kill his girlfriend and then O.D. on heroin, for example — rather they were going to sell lots of records to disgruntled middle class kids then buy themselves a big house or two and a bunch of expensive cars. As the band was clearly irrelevant to anyone above the age of 15, I decided never to think about them again. 

I kept that up until last week, when the BH editors asked me to do some digging into the band’s 2004 album American Idiot. Apparently Tom Hanks’ production company has bought the rights to make a film based on this record — no doubt in-between those periods when Mr. Hanks is pondering deeply about the causes of World War II, and America’s racial hatred of the Japanese and Arabs + anyone else who is ‘different.’ 

This is what I uncovered: 

American Idiot is a ‘concept’ album that tells a narrative story throughout its 13 songs. Green Day apparently drew inspiration from The Who, a band that in the 1970s released a couple of concept albums, the most famous of which is Tommy, the nonsensical tale of a deaf, dumb and blind ‘pinball wizard.’ Immediately this set off a red flag because although Tommy contains a few good songs, taken as a whole, it is pretentious to an ear-incinerating degree, while the accompanying film is unwatchable unless you are out of your box on magic mushrooms.  (more…)

A month or so back via my connections  in the nefarious literary underground I was offered a pre-publication copy of the first Lady Gaga biography, Behind the Fame by Emily Herbert. Not the kind of thing I usually read I must admit, but that’s why I wanted to read it, because there was no reason to read it. Follow me? No, I’m not sure if I do either.  Let me add that I’m not remotely interested in Lady Gaga, but that only increased my desire to read about her. I’d heard a few of her tracks, and they were better than average electronic dance music, with a few clever/provocative lyrics. Well not really clever, just cleverer than average. So really here was a phenomenon that I just couldn’t understand. Why did anybody care? What was all the fuss about? Perhaps the book would help me find out. Not that I cared, of course. 

Well, the book got off to a good start, sort of. Cunningly written in the style of a high school project, every sentence contained multiple clichés (“In the heyday of the 1980s, before it all came crashing down a few years later, it was a joy to be alive’); nevertheless, thanks to Ms. Herbert I rapidly learned some things I had not hitherto known such as: 

1) Lady Gaga’s real name is Stefani Germanotta. 

And 

2) She attended the same elite Catholic school as Paris Hilton. (more…)

Nobody has enjoyed a late career renaissance like Johnny Cash. The series of collaborations he made with Slayer producer Rick Rubin reignited critical interest in his work at a time when Cash believed he was destined to become a touring nostalgia act. The first of these, American Recordings is a fantastic album- raw, dark, stark, stripped down to the Man in Black’s baritone voice and primitive guitar playing. Cash had never sounded young, and he’d always been good with death, but I was shocked by the simplicity of the first lines, the frank, naked, blasé expression of brutality: 

Delia, O Delia
Delia all my life
If I hadn’t have shot poor Delia
I’d have had her for my wife  

Whenever I play American Recordings I find this opening as startling as when I first heard it well over a decade ago. Cash could get close to the darkness without screeching or posing. He was already there. He just started singing in that rumbling baritone and you believed. It’s so powerful that you forget he could also be funny- and indeed, the last track on American Recordings was a joke song, The Man Who Couldn’t Cry.  

Later I discovered that Delia was an old song, that Cash was covering himself. The American series always relied less on Cash’s abilities as a songwriter and more on his skills as an interpreter, even if he was reinterpreting an earlier version of Johnny Cash. Some of the songs covered were selected by Cash, others by Rubin. It was easy to tell which was which: Cash’s sensibilities were steeped in the broad country, gospel and folk tradition, while Rubin favored a narrower palate of heavy metal and alt rock. The miraculous thing was that it worked, most of the time. Cash could invest the adolescent self-loathing of Trent Reznor’s Hurt with the same authority and sincerity as an ancient standard like That Lucky Old Sun, a mournful lament for the difficult life of a working man. The songs on these records sat comfortably alongside each other because Cash’s experience, persona and interpretive gift enabled him to uncover the shared themes of God, pain, redemption, love, violence and longing in the unlikeliest bedfellows.  (more…)

Deepak Chopra is a deep thinker. Fooled you! Apparently some people think he is, however, foremost among them himself. And possibly his friends at the Huffington Post, where they recently posted not the usual pseudo- spiritual blabber he peddles on Oprah but rather a critique of Sarah Palin, the Tea Parties, Evil Right Wingers, and ultimately the entire American people. No, really. And it is quite an interesting piece, but not for the reasons our guru suspects. 

Chopra begins, complaining about Sarah Palin’s latest ‘seductive untruth’ delivered at the Tea Party convention: 

Her complaint about the Christmas bomber “lawyering up” wasn’t about finding the right policy against terrorists. It was a come-on to the Tea Party’s prejudices, egging them to believe that what Muttalab deserved was a dose of good old fashioned torture.   (more…)

As I am a foreigner, the first I ever heard about the Super Bowl’s tradition of mid-show entertainment was the now notorious Janet Jackson nipple incident whereby Justin Timberlake ‘accidentally’ unleashed Ms. Jackson’s breast upon millions of unsuspecting Americans. I was living in Moscow at the time and even the Russians were quite obsessed by the role of Ms. Jackson’s mammary glands in a sport none of them played or cared about. 

Six years later and it is clear that the Super Bowl’s organizers are still terrified of Janet Jackson’s nipple, that it comes to them at night and haunts them in their sleep, threatening to embroil them in scandal and to lose them millions in sponsorship deals. For what else can explain the entertainment decisions made by the Masters of the Bowl ever since that fateful Sunday afternoon in February 2004? 

Let’s take a look at who has played in the years since:  (more…)

Marc Almond is best known as the singer for Soft Cell, a duo that had a huge hit many moons ago with ‘Tainted Love’* although metal-oriented readers may be more familiar with the version recorded by the mediocre Alice Cooper impersonator Marilyn Manson. But whereas Manson’s interpretation was characteristically both overblown and juvenile in its attempt to conjure up an atmosphere of depravity, Soft Cell’s clinical electronic backing and smooth vocals were effortlessly decadent. 

Tainted Love was the beginning and the end of Soft Cell in the USA as far as I’m aware, although in the UK the group had a string of hits while Marc Almond acquired a reputation for mind-bending excess. After that, he went on to pursue an eccentric/eclectic solo career that saw him duet with Gene Pitney, record the songs of Jacques Brel  and join the Church of Satan, founded by tedious baldy Anton LaVey, AKA the most boring man in the world. 

And yet in spite of that last affiliation (shared with Marilyn Manson) Almond is a genuinely bold artist, willing to take great risks, even if they don’t always pay off. A few years ago he released the hardly commercial Heart on Snow, an album of English versions of popular Russian songs. Almond knew the subject matter well- he had been performing regularly in Moscow since the early 90s, perhaps attracted to the city’s atmosphere of 1920s Weimar style madness. Even so, Heart on Snow is an uneasy mix of rock, folk, pop and soviet ballads, of electronic arrangements and military choirs. As Russian music emphasizes lyrics over melody the songs also seemed a bit amorphous, even though the translations were not terrible. Heart on Snow is certainly an interesting curio, but hardly necessary.  (more…)

So anyway, last week I was asked to review the accompanying CD for tonight’s upcoming The People Speak documentary. Mindful of my journalistic duty, I immediately emailed the good folks at Verve Music Group asking for a review copy. Alas, they never got back to me. Thus as I certainly wasn’t going to spend any of my own ca$h on something that featured knuckle-headed dullard Eddie Vedder (the Sean Penn of the rock music world) covering Dylan, I was forced to review the 25 second previews on Amazon instead. So here goes:

Track 1: Do Re Mi by Bob Dylan: I used to have the Woody Guthrie version of this song on my iPod. After about three years I noticed I had played it twice, so I swiftly deleted it along with the rest of the incredibly tedious ‘Pastures of Plenty’ CD. From the brief snatch I heard of Dylan’s version he’s rasping away as usual, but it still sounds better than the original, which is rotten.

Q: Didn’t Dylan explicitly distance himself from this whole protest thing in his memoir published a few years back?

A: Yes he did. (more…)

2009 marks the 40th anniversary of many famous things, ranging from the mind-bendingly fatuous (John and Yoko’s bed in) to the truly historic (the moon landings) to the not as good as they used to be (Sesame Street), to the never any good in the first place (Woodstock). But in addition to all of the above, 2009 is also the 40th anniversary of something much less celebrated: a very strange record that only gets stranger with the passing of time, King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King.  

Consisting of four skilled musicians plus one lyricist from England’s West Country (among them the now legendary guitarist Robert Fripp) King Crimson enjoyed a rapid ascent to fame and success. The band formed on January 13th 1969; were declared the ‘best band in the world’ by Jimi Hendrix in April; played with the Stones at Hyde Park in July; recorded their first album In the Court of the Crimson King in July and August; released it to great acclaim in October; then played their last gig together on December 14th in San Francisco, having imploded while on tour. (more…)

For most non-Teutons the idea of German rock is not very appealing. The fatherland of Bach and Beethoven may well have produced many interesting experimental groups (Kraftwerk,  Einstürzende Neubauten etc) but on a global, top 40 level it’s an entirely different matter. Consider: 

1) The Scorpions- hair metal popular in the 80s, approximately as good as Winger.

2) KMFDM- plodding industrial metal from the late 80s/early90s.

3) That Nena chick of ‘99 luftballons’ fame. 

In short, a roster of acts so unnecessary that we could safely consign them to the same dark abyss as Croatian thrash or Russian hip hop and the human race would be none the poorer for it. And yet fortunately for the glory of popular Deustche musik this is not the end of the story- for in the mid 90s what rough beast slouched towards Germany to be born? Breathing flames and reveling in death and all manner of deviancy, its name was Rammstein. 

Formed in the early 1990s by veterans of several crap East German groups, Rammstein consisted of six men in their 30s who had grown up under communism. They took their name from Ramstein, a US military base where a terrible disaster had occurred during an air show in 1988, adding an extra ‘m’ to dislocate it slightly. With the Berlin Wall fallen, the band was now liberated to steal as many sounds and ideas as they desired. These included elements of classic heavy metal, industrial metal and gothic synth pop such as Depeche Mode; not to mention liberal appropriations from Laibach, a Slovenian group fascinated by the links between mass culture, pop music and totalitarianism. (If you have a few minutes I recommend you watch Laibach’s reinterpretations of Queen’s One Vision and Opus’ Life is Life: the originals will never sound the same again.) (more…)

One day a few years ago, back in Scotland, my brother and his friend Kenny were reminiscing about the knocks and scrapes of growing up. It was all fairly normal stuff until Kenny suddenly blurted out: 

‘Yeah, it’s like the first time you win a square go with your dad!’ 

Now for those among you who did not grow up in West Fife let me explain the meaning of ‘a square go.’ This is a game that requires you to take turns punching your opponent in the face as hard as you can, until one of you passes out or begs the other to stop. 

Naturally my brother looked at Kenny in shock. And for the first time in his life Kenny began to suspect that smacking your dad really hard in the face and vice versa was not necessarily a universal bonding experience.  (more…)

David Letterman has been much in the news lately due to his fondness for the flesh of young female staffers, and the alleged blackmail plot regarding his exploits in that direction. It seems that old Dave is a bit of a lech who — like many powerful and wealthy individuals — uses his high social status to gain access to the sexual organs of women who would not look at him twice were he not so illustrious a figure. And so the furious debate rages in the papers, online and on cable news — will Dave survive the scandal? Will his audience follow him? The mystery for me however is much simpler — how did Letterman ever achieve the status he enjoys today? 

Allow me to explain. I’m not from around these parts. I grew up in Scotland, spent a decade in Russia, and arrived in the US three years ago. As something of a night owl I soon found myself confronted with America’s strange, televisual dream-world of nocturnal gibberish, and the even more perplexing national obsession with the personalities, rivalries and ratings battles that played out between the competing purveyors of this gibberish. The big one of course was Leno vs. Letterman, but who could forget the death struggle for comedic dominance between Conan and Craig Ferguson? Then there was the mystery of Jimmy Kimmel, floating around like some moth that had lost sight of the moon, detached from these wars as if no one expected him to succeed anyway. And lurking in the deep, deep darkness was the awful horror that is Carson Daly: charmless, entirely unfunny and visibly drowning in his own misery.  (more…)