#but when will we have a true horse song in mainstream media

[crazymuffin1]

kept hearing people mentioning the new fortnite emote had music from a hazbin hotel fansong so i had to check for myself and yeah it sure is.

[bananaofswifts]

For Women's History Month 2021, GRAMMY.com is celebrating some of the women artists nominated at the 2021 GRAMMY Awards show. Today, we honor Taylor Swift, who's currently nominated for six GRAMMYs.

When we met Taylor Swift in 2006, it was immediately apparent that her songwriting approach was like ripping a page out of her diary.

"Just a boy in a Chevy truck/ That had a tendency of gettin' stuck/ On backroads at night/ And I was right there beside him all summer long/ And then the time we woke up to find that summer gone," she lamented in the first verse of her debut single, "Tim McGraw(opens in a new tab)." The way the then-16-year-old Swift could turn personal anecdotes into instantly memorable hooks mirrored the prowess of an industry veteran, appealing to more than just the teenage girls that could relate to a short-lived high school romance.

Now, nearly 15 years later, Swift has introduced another layer of intrigue with a foray into indie folk, unveiling a pair of albums, folklore and evermore, last year. Recorded entirely in isolation after the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, folklore has been widely acclaimed(opens in a new tab) as Swift's best album, touted for its intimate songwriting and cinematic dynamics; evermore has received similarly glowing reviews(opens in a new tab).

folklore was 2020's best-selling album(opens in a new tab) and earned Swift five GRAMMY nominations at the 2021 GRAMMY Awards show, including her fourth Album Of The Year nod. (evermore will be eligible for the 64th GRAMMY Awards in 2022.) As her 10 previous GRAMMY wins suggest, though, this new chapter isn't an abrupt departure for the star—it's a masterful continuation of her evolution as a singer/songwriter.

If there's one thing that Swift has proven throughout her career, it's that she refuses to be put in a box. Her ever-evolving sound took her from country darling to pop phenom to folk's newest raconteur—a transition that, on paper, seems arduous. But for Swift, it was seamless and resulted in perhaps her most defining work yet. And folklore’s radiance relies on three of Swift’s songwriting tools: heartfelt balladeering, autobiographical writing, and character-driven storytelling.

While there was always a crossover element to Swift's pop-leaning country tunes, her transition from country starlet to pop queen began with Red. The album’s lead single, the feisty breakup anthem "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together(opens in a new tab)," was Swift's first release to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (and, ironically, scoffed "indie records much cooler than mine"). She declared a full pop makeover with 2014's 1989, but the response proved that her bold move was the right one: Along with spawning three more No. 1 hits, the project won Swift her second GRAMMY for Album of the Year.

From there, 2017’s Reputation, a response to media scrutiny, and 2019’s Lover, an often bubbly exploration of all facets of affection, followed. Although they shared similarly grandiose production, Lover featured a handful of poetic ballads, including "The Archer(opens in a new tab)," a self-reflective love song that teased Swift's folk sensibilities through storybook lyrics and ambient textures.

Swift’s ballads are key in understanding the full essence of folklore. They’ve regularly marked standout moments on each of her albums, both thanks to her poignant vulnerability and rich tone. Fearless standout "White Horse" earned Swift two GRAMMYs in 2009; Red's painstaking "All Too Well" was an instant fan favorite; 1989's "This Love" and Reputation's "New Years Day" provided tenderness amid otherwise synth-heavy sounds.

The raw emotion she puts into her downtempo songs comes alive on folklore, introducing a new wave of neo-classical sonics that elevate her fanciful penmanship to an ethereal level. Whether or not Swifties saw a full indie-pop record coming—at least not yet—the shift isn't all that surprising. Folklore’s romanticized lyrics and relatively lo-fi production are arguably what many fans have been patiently waiting on.

Lyrically, the super-personal nature of Swift’s music has always captivated fans and naysayers alike; diehards and critics dissected each of her albums for its real-life subjects and hidden meanings. While she played into those conspiracies at the time—whether she was revealing names in titles like "Hey Stephen(opens in a new tab)" and "Dear John(opens in a new tab)" or scathing the other girl on "Better Than Revenge(opens in a new tab)"—even Swift herself admits that her teenage method had an expiration date.

"There was a point that I got to as a writer who only wrote very diaristic songs that [it] felt unsustainable for my future moving forward," she told Apple Music's(opens in a new tab) Zane Lowe in December of 2020. "It felt like too hot of a microscope ... On my bad days, I would feel like I was loading a cannon of clickbait when that's not what I want for my life."

That realization is what helped make folklore so memorable: Swift stripped away the drama to let her artful storytelling shine. Sure, there are occasional callbacks to personal happenings ("invisible string(opens in a new tab)" references sending her exes baby gifts and "mad woman(opens in a new tab)" alludes to her legal battle with Scott Borchetta and Scooter Braun). Still, she largely shies away from her autobiographical narratives to make way for her imagination.

"I found myself not only writing my own stories, but also writing about or from the perspective of people I've never met, people I've known, or those I wish I hadn't," Swift wrote in a letter to fans(opens in a new tab) on social media the day folklore arrived. "The lines between fantasy and reality blur and the boundaries between truth and fiction become almost indiscernible."

folklore might be her first full project dedicated to creating characters and projecting storylines, but Swift has shown a knack for fantasy from the start. Tracks like "Mary's Song (Oh My My)(opens in a new tab)" on her self-titled debut and "Starlight(opens in a new tab)" on Red saw Swift craft stories for real-life muses ("Mary's Song" was inspired by an old couple who lived next door to Swift in her childhood; "Starlight" was sparked from seeing a picture of Ethel and Bobby Kennedy as teens). Even when songs did pertain to her real life, Swift often had a way of flipping memories into whimsical metaphors, like the clever clap-back to a critic on Speak Now's "Mean(opens in a new tab)" or the rebound relationship in Reputation's "Getaway Car(opens in a new tab)."

To think that we wouldn't have folklore without a pandemic is almost surreal; it's already become such a fundamental piece of Swift’s artistic puzzle. There was no telling what may have come after the glittering "love letter to love itself” that was Lover, but it seems isolation made the singer rethink any plans she may have had.

"I just thought there are no rules anymore because I used to put all these parameters on myself, like, 'How will this song sound in a stadium? How will this song sound on radio?' If you take away all the parameters, what do you make?" she told Paul McCartney in a November (opens in a new tab)Rolling Stone(opens in a new tab) interview(opens in a new tab). "And I guess the answer is folklore."

Even if she hasn’t been making indie music herself, Swift has shown an affinity for the genre over the years through curated digital playlists(opens in a new tab). Those included four songs by The National including "Dark Side of the Gym," which she references on folklore single "betty(opens in a new tab)," and "8 (Circle)" by Bon Iver, Swift's collaborator on folklore's gut-wrenching "exile(opens in a new tab)" as well as evermore’s title track. (“Exile” is one of folklore’s GRAMMY-nominated cuts, up for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance.)

The National’s guitarist Aaron Dessner co-wrote nine and produced 11 of folklore's 16 tracks, soundtracking Swift's imaginative tales with sweeping orchestration and delicate piano. Their partnership started with "cardigan(opens in a new tab)," a melancholy take on teenage love(opens in a new tab) that's up for Best Pop Solo Performance and the coveted Song of the Year. The team-up was a dream come true for Swift, a self-proclaimed National superfan and a career highlight for Dessner, who shared in an Instagram post(opens in a new tab) about folklore that he's "rarely been so inspired by someone." He sees the album as a pivotal moment for both Swift's career and pop music.

"Taylor has opened the door for artists to not feel pressure to have 'the bop,'" Dessner shared with (opens in a new tab)Billboard(opens in a new tab) in September. "To make the record that she made, while running against what is programmed in radio at the highest levels of pop music—she has kind of made an anti-pop record. And to have it be one of the most, if not the most, successful commercial releases of the year that throws the playbook out.

"I hope it gives other artists, especially lesser-known or more independent artists, a chance at the mainstream," he continued. "Maybe radio will realize that music doesn't have to sound as pushed as it has. Nobody was trying to design anything to be a hit. Obviously, Taylor has the privilege of already having a very large and dedicated audience, but I do feel like it's having a resonance beyond that."

Swift's other primary folklore collaborator was Jack Antonoff. He has been her right-hand man since they first paired up on 2013's promotional single "Sweeter Than Fiction(opens in a new tab)" (Swift referred to him as "musical family" in her folklore announcement(opens in a new tab)). Even after years of creating stadium-ready pop smashes, Antonoff said in his own folklore Instagram post(opens in a new tab), "I've never heard Taylor sing better in my life / write better."

As Swift recognizes herself, folklore ushered in a new way of thinking for the superstar that not only brings out her best, but sets a promising precedent for what's to come. "What I felt after we put out folklore was, 'Oh wow, people are into this too, this thing that feels really good for my life and my creativity,'" Swift added in her interview with Lowe. "I saw a lane for my future that was a real breakthrough moment of excitement and happiness."

Her enthusiasm is tangible on both folklore and evermore. Dubbed folklore’s sister record, evermore further expands Swift’s newfound mystical atmosphere. Much to the delight of many Swifties, the follow-up also calls back to her country beginnings on tracks like the HAIM-assisted “no body, no crime(opens in a new tab),” as well as her pop expertise on more uptempo cuts like “long story short(opens in a new tab).”

Together, the albums are a momentous reminder that Swift is a singer/songwriter first. Her wordcraft is some of the most alluring of her generation, and that’s never been lost on her music, regardless of the genre she’s exploring. But now that Swift also feels she's at her best, it’s evident folklore was just the beginning of Taylor Swift in her finest form.

[96thdayofrage]

September 11’s Never-Ending Story

Looking back on two decades of media self-censorship, scapegoating and stenography

Remembering the Last US Retaliation Against Terror

by Jeff Cohen (Column, 9/14/01)

“Outrage is the natural and appropriate response to the mass murder of September 11. But media should not be glibly encouraging retaliatory violence without remembering that US retaliation has killed innocent civilians abroad, violated international law and done little to make us safer.”

Nightly News Glosses Over Anti-Terrorism Act

(Action Alert, 9/27/01)

“The report–which ends by saying that ‘no one really knows how much authority the new security czar will really have’–suggests that to stay safe, Americans must surrender liberties without even pausing to ask which ones.”

When Journalists Report for Duty

by Norman Solomon (Extra! Update, 10/01)

“Restrictive government edicts, clamping down on access to information and on-the-scene reports, would be bad enough if mainstream news organizations were striving to function independently. American journalism is sometimes known as the Fourth Estate—but Dan Rather is far from the only high-profile journalist who now appears eager to turn his profession into a fourth branch of government.”

Retaliation: Reality vs. Pundit Fantasy

by Jim Naureckas (Extra! Update, 10/01)

“One non–Boy Scout the CIA worked with in the 1980s was none other than Osama bin Laden (MSNBC, 8/24/98; Atlantic, 7–8/91)—then considered a valuable asset in the fight against Communism, but now suspected of being the chief instigator of the September 11 attacks.”

Why They Hate Us: Looking for a Flattering Answer

by Jim Naureckas (Extra! Update, 10/01)

“Even before investigators identified Arab militants as the apparent hijackers, the media assumption was that the terrorists had ties to the Mideast. But rather than a serious examination of what political realities might contribute to an anti-American climate there, many media commentators offered little more than self-congratulatory rhetoric.”

Patriotism and Censorship: Some Journalists Are Silenced, While Others Seem Happy to Muzzle Themselves

by Seth Ackerman and Peter Hart  (Extra!, 11–12/01)

“War fever in the wake of the September 11 attacks has led to a wave of self-censorship as well as government pressure on the media. With American flags adorning networks’ on-screen logos, journalists are feeling rising pressure to exercise ‘patriotic’ news judgment, while even mild criticism of the military, George W. Bush and US foreign policy are coming to seem taboo.”

Us vs. Them

by Jim Naureckas (Extra!, 11–12/01)

“It’s still ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ in other words, and we are told to care very much when ‘we’ are in danger and are explicitly warned not to worry too much about ‘their’ lives. Saying that it ‘seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardships in Afghanistan’ (Washington Post, 10/31/01), CNN chief Walter Isaacson even announced that the network would air some kind of disclaimer whenever footage of dead or wounded Afghans is shown.”

Are You a Terrorist?

by Rachel Coen (Extra!, 11–12/01)

“The legal definition of ‘terrorism’ is crucial because the USA PATRIOT act gives law enforcement broad new powers to be used against ‘terrorist’ individuals and groups. The American Civil Liberties Union (10/23/01) warns that this new definition will ‘sweep in people who engage in acts of political protest’ if those acts could be deemed dangerous to human life.”

‘No Spin Zone’?

by Peter Hart (Extra!, 11–12/01)

“FAIR activists sent hundreds of letters to O’Reilly after his September 17 program, urging him to consider the ramifications of his rhetoric–and the fact that bombing civilian targets and using starvation as a weapon are war crimes.”

As if Reality Wasn’t Bad Enough: Dan Rather Spread Alarmist Rumors on September 11

by Jim Naureckas in Extra!, 11–12/01)

“But is it really inevitable that anchors will pass on uncorroborated stories to the public—and portray them as fact, not rumor? For days, New Yorkers expressed surprise that the George Washington Bridge story was not true—victims of a needless panic that Dan Rather had helped to spread.”

Network of Insiders: TV News Relied Mainly on Officials to Discuss Policy

by Seth Ackerman (Extra!, 11–12/01)

“No experts on international law appeared, even though a lively debate among international jurists has been brewing since September 11 over how the United States could respond legally to the attacks. Very few university-based experts on the Middle East appeared. (The main exception was [Fouad] Ajami.) This absence contributed to the networks’ striking lack of explanation of what United States’ policies in the Middle East have been in recent years.”

The Op-ed Echo Chamber: Little or No Space for Dissent From the Military Line

by Steve Rendall (Extra!, 11–12/01)

“Whether the mainstream daily op-ed page was ever a true forum for debate or for ‘nontraditional voices’ is questionable. But during the weeks following September’s terrorist attacks, two leading dailies [New York Times and Washington Post] mostly used these pages as an echo chamber for the government’s official policy of military response, while mostly ignoring dissenters and policy critics.”

The New Blacklist: The Nation’s Largest Radio Network’s List of ‘Questionable’ Songs

by Tom Morello (Extra!, 11–12/01)

“When the horrible attacks of September 11 are used as a pretext for squashing the opinions of dissident artists, people who are not beating the blood-lust drum feel alone and isolated. It’s in times like these when we most need intelligent, thoughtful discussion and debates about the issues of the day.”

‘This Isn’t Discrimination, This Is Necessary’ (Extra!, 11–12/01)

“Leave it to Ann Coulter—whose racism was too much even for the Arab-bashing National Review—to reduce the pro-profiling argument to its fallacious core: ‘Not all Muslims may be terrorists,’ she allowed, ‘but all terrorists are Muslims’ (Yahoo! News, 9/28/01).

“That’s just wrong, of course, as Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber and decades of clinic-bombing, doctor-shooting Christian extremists can attest. The fact is that ethnicity has never been a reliable indicator of who might be involved in terrorism, making racial profiling not only discriminatory but ultimately ineffective.”

Patriotic Shopping: Media Define Citizenship as Consumerism

by Janine Jackson (Extra!, 11–12/01)

“A number of pundits and politicians offered Americans a simple solution to the helplessness and anxiety they were feeling in the wake of the September 11 attacks: Go shopping!”

Covering the ‘Fifth Column’: Media Present Pro-War Distortions of Peace Movement’s Views

by Peter Hart (Extra!, 11–12/01)

“The distinction between ‘peace with terrorists’ and a peace movement rooted in justice and international law was blurred by the media in general, which rather than airing the views of anti-war leaders generally had pro-war pundits explain–and belittle–those views.”

Internet Samizdat Releases Suppressed Voices, History

by Jeff Cohen (Extra!, 12/01)

“A free press would be debating the issue of Washington’s relations with Islamist extremists in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and whether such movements are bred by US policy committed to suppressing secular reformers and leftists in Islamic countries. When the CIA funded the Afghan Mujaheddin in 1979 before the Soviet occupation, it hoped to destabilize a secular, Soviet-friendly government (initially led by Nur Mohammed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin), which supported land reform and rights for women.”

From Bozo to Churchill: George W.’s Post–September 11 Reinvention

by Mark Crispin Miller  (Extra!, 5–6/02)

“Countless leaders have been deified by national emergency, but few have been remade as quickly and completely as George W. Bush. In many cases, those who had misread him as a simple tool, braying automatically at his most trivial mistakes, now automatically revered him. Such converts suddenly agreed with those who had seen Bush’s flaws as signs of latent greatness—thitherto the notion only of a large plurality, but now the common wisdom.”

9/11 Anniversary Coverage Plans Fall Short

(Media Advisory, 8/26/02)

“Unfortunately, many media outlets seem ready to exploit America’s grief by replaying the trauma of the attacks, instead of honoring the date with a serious debate over where the country is headed”

Saddam and Osama’s Shotgun Wedding: Weekly Standard Beats a Long-Dead Horse

by Seth Ackerman (Extra!, 1–2/04)

“Hardline officials have spent the last two years leaking stories, writing op-eds, holding private briefings and making public insinuations, all intended to convince the country that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda worked hand in hand.”

The Media Politics of 9/11

by Norman Solomon (Media Beat,  3/25/04)

“On September 12, Bush’s media stature and poll numbers were soaring. Suddenly, news outlets all over the country boosted the president as a great leader, sometimes likening him to FDR. For many months, the overall media coverage of President Bush was reverential.”

A Record of Journalism in Crisis: Out of the Buzzsaw, Into the Fire

by Francis Cerra Whittelsey  (Extra!, 3–4/06)

“Not only was good reporting unusual and largely out of sight after September 11, it was also overwhelmed by the Bush administration’s public relations effort…. These journalists see themselves fighting an unrelenting public relations machine, whose effectiveness comes in large part from constant message repetition and automatic coverage of the president every day, even when he makes no news”

Gullibility Begins at Home: NYT Accepted False Reassurances on Ground Zero Safety

by Julie Hollar ( Extra!, 11–12/06)

“It’s not just the government that failed the workers and the public with misleading assurances; the New York Times itself must share that burden. Shortly after the attacks and into the ensuing years, the Times—as both a New York paper and a national paper—failed to mount a functional degree of skepticism toward city and federal government pronouncements about the safety of the air and dust around Ground Zero. They by and large dismissed fears of residents and workers about their safety—even as troubling studies and voices of dissent cropped up in the public and private sectors, and in other media outlets.”

The Media’s Mayor: Mythologizing Giuliani and 9/11

by Steve Rendall (Extra!, 5–6/07)

“[Jonathan] Alter dubbed Giuliani ‘the new Mayor of America,’ which soon morphed to ‘America’s Mayor,’ a moniker used by journalists as if it were a matter of public acclamation rather than a symptom of press corps hero worship.”

‘America Was Safer Under Bush’: Journalists Accept GOP’s Screwy Terrorism Scorecard

by Steve Rendall  (Extra!, 3/10)

“That George W. Bush kept America safer from terrorism than Barack Obama is a conservative article of faith these days—and corporate media seem little inclined to challenge the blatant falsehoods used to advance this childish GOP talking point.”

The Uses of September 11:To the Right, Terror Attacks Are Theirs to Exploit—or Dismiss—as They Like

by Steve Rendall (Extra!, 3/11)

“But the hallowed memory of September 11 is a conservative sham. While the attacks may be the gift that keeps on giving for GOP politics—when politically useful—the right frequently permits itself to diminish or deride the memory and symbols of the attacks for its own convenience.”

‘Waterboarding Worked’?: After bin Laden’s Death, Media Push Pro-Torture Message

by Peter Hart (Extra!, 6/11)

“Despite Bill O’Reilly’s assertion that his show was a lonely pro-torture voice, there were many media voices suggesting a reevaluation of whether torture should be an accepted practice for the U.S. government. Bin Laden may be dead, but the corrosive effect on public discourse of the “war on terror” lives on.

Losing the Plot: The Afghan War After bin Laden

by Jim Naureckas (Extra!, 7/11)

What was missing from these and most other corporate media discussions of bin Laden and Afghanistan was any recognition of the part that country played in the Al-Qaeda leader’s strategic vision. For bin Laden, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was not a threat to his plan for the triumph of his brand of right-wing Islam—it was the central element of that plan.

Fox’s Eric Bolling Fans on Terror Facts—Twice

by Steve Rendall (FAIR.org, 7/15/11)

“Glenn Beck’s temporary replacement in the 5 p.m. slot on Fox News, Eric Bolling, has started out with a bang. On the July 13 edition of his new show the Five, the host declared: ‘America was certainly safe between 2000 and 2008. I don’t remember any attacks on American soil during that period of time.'”

The Forever Wars: Media Enlist to Promote Unending Military Adventures

by Peter Hart (Extra!, 9/11)

“The shift from the US’s time-limited military adventures since the Vietnam War—in conflicts like Grenada, Panama, Somalia and Kosovo—to today’s seemingly interminable and endlessly multiplying military commitments is one of the most notable, yet little noted, features of the post-September 11 landscape. And corporate journalists seem all too willing to encourage Washington’s new ‘permanent war’ footing.”

The ‘Worst of the Worst’?: 9/11, Guantánamo and the Failures of US Corporate Media

by Andy Worthington  (Extra!, 9/11)

“On the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, media bear a large responsibility for having allowed cynical lawmakers to portray Guantánamo as a prison holding ‘the worst of the worst,’ despite so much evidence that Bush administration officials were lying when they first coined that phrase.”

Whistling Past the Wreckage of Civil Liberties: Watchdogs Slept Through a Decade of Rollback

by Janine Jackson (Extra!, 9/11)

“Media submerge the reality of the assault on civil rights every time they report the state’s overreaches as being about ‘terror-fighting tools,’ as the AP (5/26/11) described Patriot Act provisions. Under a system of civil liberties, people are regarded as criminals after being convicted of crimes—not deemed to be so beforehand to facilitate stripping them of rights.”

Richard Cohen Is Sorry You and He Got It Wrong

by Peter Hart (FAIR.org , 9/6/11)

“Someone who was really sorry for stoking war fever would be honest enough to point out that not everyone was on board. And of course Richard Cohen knows this—he was writing columns attacking those who weren’t ‘going along with it.’ As he wrote about Dennis Kucinich, ‘How did this fool get on Meet the Press?'”

‘Terror Returns’—but When Did It Go Away?

by Jim Naureckas (FAIR.org, 4/16/13)

“The fact that journalists assigned to cover this story could fail to remember that political violence has been part of the United States landscape for the past decade and more is testament to a narrow definition that dismisses right-wing domestic violence as not really terrorism—and to a will to believe, for partisan or psychological reasons, that George W. Bush ‘kept us safe‘ after 9/11. The reality is not so comforting.”

License to Kill: Little Scrutiny of Resolution That Greenlighted ‘War on Terror’

by Norman Solomon (Extra!, 5/13)

“While the Obama administration considers how to reorganize its war efforts, we should ask why the US media establishment took more than a decade to begin asking basic questions about the Authorization for Use of Military Force—and why the underlying premises of perpetual war continue to elude concerted journalistic scrutiny.

“The consequences of such media evasions have persisted in tandem with Washington’s political machinations. Rather than handling 9/11 as a crime committed by criminals, the ‘war on terror’ under the AUMF umbrella propelled US military actions that have killed hundreds of thousands in at least six countries.”

They’ll Be Watching You: Mass Surveillance Uses New Media to Track Every Move You Make

by Jim Naureckas (Extra!, 5/14)

“After the September 11 attacks, which reignited a xenophobic backlash against immigration, the Department of Homeland Security began recruiting local law enforcement agencies as the next front in the detection and apprehension of undocumented immigrants. What followed was a massive wave of deportations that increased under the Obama administration to over 2 million (Politico, 3/4/14).

“Like immigration, the ‘War on Terror’ is now being shifted to local law enforcement agencies who, in exchange for federal dollars, are deploying powerful surveillance tools with little oversight and applying these tools to everyday policing, not just ‘counterterrorism.’”

Forgiving Al-Qaeda in Pursuit of a New Enemy

by Jim Naureckas (FAIR.org, 3/18/15)

“There are indications (as noted by the blog Moon of Alabama—3/11/15) of a shift in the Western foreign policy establishment toward seeing groups like Al-Qaeda—that is, far-right terrorist groups who espouse a violent strain of Sunni Islam—not as the main targets of US military operations but as potential allies against the governments Washington has identified as more important enemies, namely Shi’ite-led Iran and Syria.”

NYT

Recalls Media’s ‘Journalistic Detachment’ Before Iraq War

(Extra!, 9/16)

“In his retrospective (7/19/16) on outgoing Fox News chief Roger Ailes, who lost his job amidst numerous charges of sexual harassment, New York Times media reporter Jim Rutenberg included this remarkable sentence:

It was Mr. Ailes who, after the September 11 attacks, directed his network to break with classic journalistic detachment to get fully behind the war efforts of the George W. Bush White House, which jarred the rest of his industry.

“Of course, Fox News was far from alone in abandoning ‘classic journalistic detachment’ (such as it is) in the lead-up to the Iraq War—the New York Times certainly not excepted. Times reporters like Michael Gordon and Judith Miller helped get the nation ‘fully behind the war’ with front-page stories touting ‘evidence’ of WMDs that did not exist, while others wrote ‘news analysis’ like ‘All Aboard: America’s War Train Is Leaving the Station’ (2/2/03) and ‘US Plan: Spare Iraq’s Civilians’ (2/23/03).”

After 1,379 Days, NYT Corrects Bogus Claim Iran ‘Sponsored’ 9/11

by Adam Johnson (FAIR.org, 7/6/17)

“In its reporting on a dubious lawsuit alleging Iranian meta-involvement in 9/11, the New York Times badly misunderstood the case and maintained for more than three years, in the paper of record, that the government of Iran ‘sponsored’ the September 11, 2001, attacks. The belated correction, issued late Wednesday night on two widely spaced articles on the topic, unceremoniously noted that Iran did not, in fact, help commit the 9/11 attacks.”

On 18th Anniversary of 9/11, Media Worry About ‘Premature’ End to Afghan War

by Josh Cho (FAIR.org, 9/11/19)

“The New York Times (8/2/19) gave a platform to retired generals Jack Keane and David Petraeus to lobby for keeping thousands of “Special Operations forces” in Afghanistan:

“US troops in Afghanistan have prevented another catastrophic attack on our homeland for 18 years,” General Keane said in an interview. “Expecting the Taliban to provide that guarantee in the future by withdrawing all US troops makes no sense.”

“The Times might have pointed out that the September 11 attacks were carried out by militants based in the United States and recruited in Germany.”

Actually, Giuliani Has Always Been Like This

by Ari Paul (FAIR.org, 10/10/19)

“Giuliani was heralded as a hero when the United States was desperately looking for one after the WTC attacks—despite the fact that his actions on the day of the attacks contributed to the deaths of emergency responders, and his insistence that the air at Ground Zero was safe to breathe without filtration no doubt led to the deaths of many more (Extra!, 11–12/06, 5–6/07).”

Krugman Recalls 9/11’s Silver Linings

(Extra!, 10/20)

“’Overall, Americans took 9/11 pretty calmly,’ New York Times columnist Paul Krugman tweeted on the 19th anniversary of September 11 attacks. ‘Notably, there wasn’t a mass outbreak of anti-Muslim sentiment and violence, which could all too easily have happened.’ Anti-Muslim hate crimes increased 17-fold after 9/11, the FBI reported (Human Rights Watch, 11/02)—but apparently that doesn’t qualify as ‘mass.’

“Krugman, after praising George W. Bush as someone who ‘tried to calm prejudice, not feed it,’ did acknowledge that he used 9/11 to ‘take us into an unrelated and disastrous war’—the almost 19-year-long occupation of Afghanistan, apparently, not qualifying as a disaster. Before alluding to Iraq, Krugman mentioned that in the wake of the attacks, “my wife and I took a lovely trip to the US Virgin Islands…because air fares and hotel rooms were so cheap.”

As Kabul Is Retaken, Papers Look Back in Erasure

by Gregory Shupak (FAIR.org, 8/19/21)

“In addition to the Taliban signaling that it could be open to extraditing the Al Qaeda leader in October 2001, according to a former head of Saudi intelligence (LA Times, 11/4/01), the Taliban said in 1998 that it would hand over bin Laden to Saudi Arabia, the US’s close ally; the Saudi intelligence official says that the Taliban backed off after the US fired cruise missiles at an apparent bin Laden camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, following attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania attributed to Al Qaeda. The outlets thus failed to inform their readers that, had the US pursued negotiations for bin Laden’s extradition, Afghans may have been spared 20 years of devastating war.”

[linkedsoul]

So, I was thinking last night. 

Honestly good representation is amazing and so, so, so important but y'know, medias and fiction's role isn't ONLY educating people. It's also entertaining, surprising, shocking, scaring, moving, etc. people. You know what IS made to educate people tho??

Yeah.

School.

And society, also, but school mostly has that educational role and we really can’t expect fiction and medias to be the only way to teach people about stuff in life/minorities/social issues/etc. Fiction is fiction: sometimes it’s purposely fucked up, sometimes it’s very personal to the author, sometimes it’s made to be controversial and make the reader think, sometimes, it’s just made to be entertaining and nothing else - art for art, and that only. 

Fiction will teach you a SHIT TON of things and thank god for it - and thus, thank god for good and accurate representation - but it’s not supposed to be your main and only teacher. 

(More under the cut, if tumblr agrees to put a cut there)

If fiction is your main and only teacher, that’s when things start getting tricky. It’s because school and society is just so BAD at teaching us about non-mainstream things that people just integrate what they see in fiction and mainstream medias and fake news and start believing that sharks are all evil or that autistic people are all that weird math genius trope or that having a mental illness is gonna turn you into a horror movie villain. 

It’s not like when we see something in a movie that everyone knows is wrong and we just shrug and remain aware it’s not correct. There’s no “yeah it’s actually not true” or “wtf that’s not accurate at all” or just “weird but I know it’s just for plot purpose and now how things really are”. We take it at face value because we have no other source and no one else telling us what’s really true. Sure, we can educate ourselves and it’s great!! But if you don’t know it’s wrong in the first place, you’re never gonna think about checking twice. And with time, the clichés and harmful stereotypes just become a part of our collective belief, and the damage is hard to undo, that’s when accurate representation becomes so damn important.

(Gonna give a harmless example: there’s that song called “Lakes of the Connemara” but because I was first taught it when I was doing horse riding as a kid, I learnt the title was “Ponies of the Connemara” and since I had no reason to listen to the damn song again or to believe it wasn’t the actual title, I never bothered to check. So yeah, I spent over, uh, 10 years believing the song was called “Ponies of the Connemara” until my roommate sang it next to me and I just “.... what do you mean it’s not PONIES????”)

Same for relationships: if your only teachers about what a relationship is are shows and books, knowing that those don’t make a mission to always portray a healthy relationship (purposefully or not), you might not get the best idea. If society and even school taught us that a healthy relationship (with family and friends and lovers) goes through mutual respect and trust and communication and working out things together and that kind of things, you bet there’d be no tumblr purity police screaming at the dark fictional content just because everyone would know it’s fucked up and no one should do that irl, and abusers wouldn’t be able to use it on their victims to continue their bullshit. 

Like, a lot of teenage books go: the nice girl meet the bad boy, he’s dark and brooding so she falls in love, she gets hurt a lot but she loves him so she clings on, and she changes him in the end!! Nice!! (or not, poor nice girl!!) 

Except when you see a lot of girls clinging on guys that absolutely don’t deserve them because somehow no one has told them “if he doesn’t respect you, leave him”, you just WISH you’d see more (teenage) books with healthy, happy, stable m/f relationships. (And same for the very common “super jealous possessive girlfriend” which passes as cute and normal somehow in m/f relationships but is actually the kind of person guys - anyone - should run away from. And I say m/f for those two examples but it’s valid for any relationship: it’s just very much in the collective imaginary of het people, to me.)

But the books themselves are just books. I bet a lot of people have read them and haven’t fallen for it or wouldn’t wish for such a relationship themselves because they were taught what a healthy relationship was. If society’s image of m/f relationships was just so much HEALTHIER, people falling into unhealthy relationships because they think it’s the norm would risk happening way, way less. 

(Like, my parents were a super good example of a healthy and good het couple, and I was told by mom “if he doesn’t respect you leave him”, but I’m aware a lot of peeps didn’t get that chance.)

Parent/child relationships are the same. We’re taught to love our parents no matter what. It’s a theme in fiction; it’s even more omnipresent irl. I’d even say fiction does a way better job putting the “found family” theme forward than society. Because society doesn’t tell us “you don’t need to love your parents if they’ve hurt you” or “it’s okay to accept that some things your parents have done to you were wrong and that you don’t have to forgive them for that” or just “family is who you pick: it can be friends and the only relatives that actually support you”. Much the contrary. 

So yeah, society hands us a lot of bad things and calls it the “norm” and it SUCKS. (And those were just two examples in a sea of an endless amount of other topics.)

Now, back to school. School is where you learn things. Where you educate yourself. 

And it fucking LACKS. 

I swear fanfics and doujins I wasn’t supposed to read taught me more about sex ed and queer sex ed than school. I was basically taught nothing about queerness except “being gay is okay don’t be homophobic”. I mean. It’s already a start. 

But no wonder middle school me didn’t define herself as queer while wishing to get a girl’s harem in high school. (Yeah, I was dumb. I never defined myself as straight, I guess, but I was DEFINITELY queer and I completely didn’t notice.) I’m not even talking about gender: it’s internet who taught me what non-binary was, and I was in highschool.

I got lucky: I found a bunch of queer and queer friendly people in highschool (basically gayest highschool in town) which allowed me to discover queer identities, swagger out of a closet I didn’t know existed at school, explore my identities, and be safe and happy doing so. It’s far from being everyone’s situation. 

Society and school also taught me SHIT about mental health and neurodivergence. I got into a really, really toxic friendship that fucked me over because I thought that that “friend”’s mental illness excused all her toxic behaviors, since no one had told me “uh, no, being mentally ill doesn’t excuse assholeness, lots of mentally ill peeps don’t act like that”. I thought my suicide ideation was FUCKING NORMAL until I found a post on tumblr which explained that wishing you were never born was also suicide ideation and I talked to other ND people who told me they’d never wished to disappear. Same for self-hatred: society is SO full on about teenagers being edgy and dramatic and full of conflict for no reason I thought hating myself was just basic teenage experience. Here again, until I talked to other ND people who went through shit too but never experienced self loathing. 

I discovered I was HSP (a Highly Sensitive Person) when I was 17. Up to now, I was convinced me being highly sensitive was a personality trait that I could change if I worked hard enough. Y’know, I was just being touchy. I had no idea it was just my brain which was wired that way, that not everyone experienced the world like I did, and that I couldn’t change my sensitivity. 

Seventeen fucking years spent trying to “toughen up” in vain and hating myself for not succeeding. Yay!!

I’m not even talking about executive dysfunction that I acknowledged LAST YEAR and ADHD that I suspect I might have. I used to think ADHD was like, “hyperactive kids” and “bad grades”. 

(I mean lots of ADHD kids struggle with school because it’s just so not made for ND people that bad grades happen lots but OBVIOUSLY it’s not inherent and the correlation isn’t to be made with ADHD itself, rather the fact that the school system is terribly not adapted.)

But since I had good grades and I could listen in class, I thought, y’know, any flaw of mine, my difficulties to focus and organize myself and start things or finish them, my short term memory or coordination problems, my inability to schedule... well, I was just not doing enough efforts to get my shit together. If only I tried harder!! I could be a fucking genius!! I could work and study ahead!! Just try harder!!!

(Ha. Ha. Ha.)

Then WHILE RESEARCHING TO REPRESENT AN ADHD CHARACTER CORRECTLY I discovered ED and what ADHD actually was and the wave of “fucking relatable” slapped me in the face like a bitch. 

I also completely reassessed what I thought I knew (or rather, my vague idea) of autistic people AGAIN BY DOING RESEARCH FOR A CHARACTER. Like. Nothing, no one had taught me about what it actually was before - and that I’d find some traits relatable, and that I’d get doubts about me being allistic. Now, I’m not self diagnosing or anything so me being autistic or ADHD are just pure speculations, but at least, it got me wondering. I got a sensory shut down once and I would have never had a word for my brain short circuiting because of 30mn of non-stop baby crying in my ears if I hadn’t researched about autistic people before. 

So, uh.

My point was!! 

SCHOOL should have taught me that. SOCIETY should have taught me that. The internet and fiction, as useful and amazing as they can be, shouldn’t have been my sole and first teachers on topics like sex, queerness, and neurodivergence. It’s also been my sole and first teacher on a shit ton of other topics, like disabilities, other cultures, religions, etc. and I wish it hadn’t. I wish I would have learnt about it at school too. I can’t imagine the number of people who go their entire life completely ignorant of a bunch of things and relying on false, preconceived ideas, because they’d never get the idea to browse the internet in order to revalue what they know - since nothing indicates they should.

School should have taught me to identify passive racism and answer to racist jokes. School should have taught me that me crying because of a grade below my impossibly high standards was, like, not normal. School shouldn’t have fed my impossibly high standards by expecting me to always be the perfect student (do you know how dehumanizing it is to have teachers poke fun at you because they caught you chatting ONCE in the entire year or telling you that they’re disappointed because you got 15/20, an actually good grade?? while not doing that for other, more average students??). School should have taught me that taking breaks is okay and your “best” fluctuates. School should have taught me not to burn myself over grades and results, and that it doesn’t define my human worth. School should have taught me more about other cultures because it’s super interesting, and I shouldn’t have had to wait highschool to learn the truth, or at least a deeper truth, about the shit my own country has done. (And at least I was clearly told it’s done shit and always considered it as super flawed, which I know isn’t the case in all countries.)

School lacks in a lot of things. Society lacks even more. Fiction can help educate us, but it can’t carry our education all on its own. School and society need to UP their game because it’s in school, and in society, that we first learn about life, about who we are, and about the world around us. 

We don’t only need better representation in fiction and medias - we need better education in school and society too. 

[purplesurveys]

447

Because everyone is doing those cute header thingies. Might as well jump in hahahahahaha, idk why I never thought of using these.

Have you done these things this year?

Smoked a cigarette? Nope. Never will.

Smoked a cigar? Definitely not.

Broken up with somebody? Nope.

Been broken up with? No. We’ve had big fights that kind of started leading to this conversation but we’ve always been able to handle it well.

Been to a rock concert? Nah. Paramore was last year but then again they don’t even count as rock anymore.

Finished more than ten books? HA, nope. I haven’t done that since grade school and I still had all the time in the world to drown myself in books.

Dyed your hair? Nope. Wow, this is really not the year to be adventurous lmao. What a way to turn 21.

Become a subscriber to anything? Okay, YES. I’ve subscribed to YouTube channels in the last few months but just can’t recall which ones they were.

Introduced someone to a band/artist you love? Indirectly, sure. I plug alt-J and The Japanese House on my Twitter account all the time.

Asked someone on a date? I ask Gabie out to dinner all the time but not in that way, because we’ve already been together for a while.

Been asked on a date? ^ Same answer as that but the roles are switched.

Kissed a complete stranger? No, not a fan of the prospect.

Done a road trip more than eight hours? Yes. My dad’s cars are his babies and he loves to, like, maximize them by taking us to road trips. I think the last road trip we had was 18 hours in total (from and to Manila).

Attended a wedding? Nah, no one I know has gotten married. I know Hannah’s sister did recently but I have no idea who her sister is haha.

Gotten married yourself? Nope.

Made your own popsicles at home? OMG I feel like such a bore...I haven’t done popsicles since I was like 8.

Started and finished a TV series? I haven’t had the time to, chief. January to May was just a time for acads. The only thing I had enough time to do this year so far was watch reruns of Friends, but not anything new.

Played an instrument? Sure. I played the keyboard, but it doesn’t mean I’m any good at it.

Written a song? I’ve never written a song, it’s just not this year.

Written a story? If feature news count as stories, then yes. ‘S pretty much mostly what I do in my course and in the org.

Met someone famous? Haha, funny story about that. So they've finally brought Popeye’s to in the Philippines so obviously there was gonna be some huge social media + media hype around it. My friends and I were free at the time of its launch, so we headed there. The news was big so it was a whole PR event, complete with balloons and giving away free biscuits and raffles, and there were ~social media influencers~ walking around the area plugging the event on Facebook Live.

Anyway, the line was super long (side note: it took us 3 hours just to line up and get our food) but for some reason, their marketing team thought my friends and I were perfect to be featured on their Facebook Live and Facebook page. They said someone was coming to interview us in a few, and true enough some dude went over and talked to us for 5 minutes shoving a camera to our faces, asking us stuff like “what brought you here” and “what menu item are you excited to try out.” The dude particularly focused on me since I had Popeye’s before, which was annoying because we told them to focus on Hannah who was more game to participate in the livestream thing. I had no idea who he was and still have no idea who he is, but after that encounter we saw a bunch of people lining up to take pics with him so I guess he’s pretty famous.

Lost something meaningful or valuable? UGH YES I lost my favorite pen this year. It was just a freebie that was given to me after I took an academic survey, but my penmanship was so nice with that pen and it made my notes look really clean. I left it in econ class but it was no longer there when I went back for it. None of the pens I tried buying afterwards even compare.

Done yardwork? I haven’t.

Been to the gym? No, I never had a membership or anything.

Watched a film at the cinema? Yes. Gabie and I watched Rainbow’s Sunset but it sucked. Mainstream Philippine LGBT films still have a long way to go.

Visited someone in hospital? Thankfully, no.

Met someone in person who you met online? I don’t think this happened so far.

Seen snow? Ha, bigger nope.

Made a new best friend? I became so much closer to Kate and Laurice in the last 5 months. Which sucks because a) Kate is graduating this year, and b) Laurice is going inactive from the org to serve in student council.

Picked up a new hobby? I was too focused on my studies to prioritize a hobby.

Seen something paranormal? Nah.

Travelled on a plane? Yup, going to another point in the country.

Had a meal with an ex-partner? I don’t have any ex-partners.

Been given a really lovely gift? Yes. Angela gave me quality time on my birthday. I was sulking that day as my 21st just plain sucked, but she went out of her way to spend the whole evening with me, even treating me dinner. That girl has really helped me through a lot and I don’t know where I’d be without her.

Moved homes? Nope, we’ve stayed in the same place for a little over a decade now.

Shared a shower with someone? Sure. Gabie and I took a shower together one time earlier this year. We don’t do it often though.

Called the police? The police here are useless.

Yelled at someone you love? Yes, but only because I was drunk and frustrated and upset.

Watched a scary film? Oh man, I haven’t watched a horror flick in three years.

Paid for something with a credit card? No. Haven’t even touched one. 

Been diagnosed with any illness? No. I did have a bad stomach bug after chugging down mudshake one night.

Danced in the rain? Nope. I don’t dance and I hate getting wet with clothes on.

Held a newborn baby? Nah, no one I know has given birth recently so there was no baby to hold.

Been overseas? Mmm nope.

Ridden a horse? Also no. I haven’t gotten on one since I was maybe 12?

Questioned your sanity? LOL. All semester long.

Been hiking? I haven’t.

Seen something you didn't want to see? In every sense of the phrase, yeah.

Bought a car? Nope. Have had the same one for 4ish years.

Made your own survey? I don’t make surveys, I just make them.

[abadzone]

A Weekly Song: Episode 11 – Goldie Presents Metalheads (or is that Metalheadz?)

Goldie Presents Metalheads - Inner City Life

There were a lot of anthems in the air in the mid-90s. By anthem, I mean popular tracks that stuck around; that seemed to exemplify a movement, a state of mind… for want of a better term, an attitude. Examples: Soul II Soul’s Keep On Moving and Back II Life (However Do You Want Me), The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony, Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy, Pulp’s Common People.

Each heralded an aspect of British youth poking its head above the parapet of the relative safety of its own dedicated teenage bedroom audience and making serious inroads into mainstream culture. Pop was already embedded in TV shows, movie soundtracks, documentaries, but now more “marginal” sounds were becoming a part of mainstream culture, making their voices heard in clubs and on pirate stations but also represented on TV and public radio. The old hierarchies were breaking down, just a little.

Some context: at the end of the eighties, everything changed in British yoof culture. First you had acid house and the dance/rock crossover, a sort of cross-pollination of club culture and the indie scene that itself grew out of post-punk, electronica and a broader early eighties multiculturalism (remember that? It’s become a dirty word now, as if human beings haven’t always been multicultural, as if people mixing socially is somehow now unfashionable. If you visit the town in the next valley over, that’s being multicultural. So is visiting your next door neighbour. Your identity and traditions won’t be erased by doing so). 

In the early nineties there was Madchester, then came shoegazing which begat a great many bands that later became household names via Britpop, a media-invented idea AKA Cool Britannia that grouped all manner of different bands and outfits under one cultural umbrella for easier export to the rest of the world. There was also British hip-hop (and trip-hop); you had techno and rave and its various sub-genres, there was bhangra, ragga, dark ‘ardkore which evolved into jungle and later, drum ‘n ‘bass. I remember first becoming really properly aware of it at the Notting Hill Festival in either 1993 or 1994 where I registered a sound system playing something that sounded like breakbeats and techno with dub or ragga inflections, something fast and new. It caught my ear and it got into my brain and burrowed right down into my digestive tract. I loved it. British youth culture was rapidly morphing into bountiful new shapes, a creative Hydra with many and ever more collaborative heads, each one abundant with new ideas and potentials.

Every year is the best year ever for music** because there’s always something new happening somewhere, but in retrospect (especially the middle-aged kind of hindsight) perhaps not every period is as fertile as others. There was a lot going on in the mid-nineties, and I, a music loving “underground cartoonist,” was in the middle of it.

That is, in early 1994, I had no idea what I was doing. I was recovering from an ill-advised and short-lived marriage plus a resultant nervous breakdown; I was skint, I was lonely and I was ambitious; I had big ideas of how I could so something different with comics and help make them into a communications and storytelling art form that would be as fluid and abstract as music. Little did I know, it was already doing that with or without me, but anyway, ah! …the hubris of youth. I was a ball of confusion, a knot of creativity with a burning need to put it somewhere. (I did, but that’s another story.) I wanted something to change, I wanted to be changed, but I didn’t know what or how.

It was around this time that I became aware of this. I forget when exactly I heard Inner City Life for the first time, but of all the anthems around, this one captivated me the most, made its way onto the internal tape loop in my mind. It sounded like it was from the future, but it seemed to coalesce from everything surrounding me.

Certainly I heard it in the DnB clubs that emerged around that time – maybe at the Mars Bar, to which me and my mate Caspar would trek from the western suburbs so we could experience the dizzy heights of happening central London nightlife. There were many drum ‘n’ bass anthems, for sure, but this one made it onto TV. Seeing the video on some late-night yoof show was cathartic somehow – it opened with a shot of a shopping trolley going over the balcony of a tower block not unlike the one my gran lived on.

“Come to me…”

Diane Charlemagne was familiar to audiences for her appearances with Urban Cookie Collective, who’d had a couple of chart hits, but this was something else. Suddenly she was a sepia-toned diva calling across the rooftops and the airwaves, acknowledging the loneliness and burden of pressures that living in the big city brings. She was joining dots as if all the different anthems were pins on the urban map of modern British music. The tower blocks and council estates were marked just as surely as the pennants atop the Houses of Parliament were.

“I need to be, I need to be…

Living free”

The track was credited to Goldie presents Metalheads (later Metalheadz), known to me for a track called Terminator, but Inner City Life was an entirely different beast, a kind of yearning mutant soul music fuelled by both paranoia and tenderness.

In mainstream terms, it wasn’t the huge hit that some of the other anthems mentioned at the top of this piece were, but for me it remains one of the definitive statements of 90s British music. It transcends all barriers, classes, backgrounds and yes, to my ears, it was a statement of the kind of hopeful (and multicultural) Cool Britannia a lot of other acts were being marketed as, but Inner City Life was the true dark horse, the outsider who found its way up from the streets.

Before finding its way onto Goldie’s sprawling debut album Timeless (as one movement in the opening title track), Inner City Life was remixed and re-released so many times, I lost count. I had the original 12” single and another pressing that featured mixes by other DnB luminaries, my favourite being Doc Scott’s version that showcased Charlemagne’s vocals.

I loved the way the music itself was so mutable and yet remained recognisable, no matter whose hands touched it. There was an egalitarianism to the way Goldie (and his partner-in-production Rob Playford) shared the track, allowing numerous interpretations. In fact, he’s still playing around with it – a new mix was made available last year for Record Store Day.

Over the years, all sorts of superlatives have been heaped upon Timeless, which is certainly a great album and a defining document of that mid-to-late nineties era of extreme creativity in British music, but I’m not sure anything could ever match the feeling the initial release and the remixes generated in me.

And just to give you a sense of what a beautiful song it is, one that stands the test of being stripped to its basics, here’s a version featuring Jhelisa Anderson – yes, she of The Shamen fame and a formidable solo artist in her own right. Listen and enjoy.

Notes

Diane Charlemagne died in 2015 of kidney cancer at the terribly young age of 51. She was rightly celebrated by the DnB scene and beyond. 

The cover version of Inner City Life featuring Jhelisa is by German Jazz outfit [Re:jazz] from their album Point of View and it also features on Goldie’s “Masterpiece” Ministry of Sound mix collection.

At the end of 2009 when I moved from the UK to the USA, the wrong box of vinyl was sent to a charity shop and I accidentally gave away both the original 12” single version of Inner City Life, several remixes, plus a whole load of other DnB vinyl I hadn’t intended to part with. Still kicking myself about that. Oh, well… someone found ‘em and enjoyed them and the money went to a good cause, so, good karma, eh? I still have the CD collection…

*Consider the similarity between the two videos of Bittersweet Symphony and Unfinished Sympathy. One has Richard Ashcroft walking down a British street in one single, unbroken shot, the other had fellow Brit Shara Nelson doing the same in east LA. Two people from two musical collectives walking towards each other, at opposite sides of the planet at different ends of western culture.

**To paraphrase David Stubbs. I think.

Not everybody loved Britpop.

Metalheadz - still going, listen more.

[mondofunnybooks]

USING A SUPER POPULAR FRANCHISE IN THE HASHTAGS TO TRY AND GET THE LIKES AND SHARES UP!' DEPT. (OR THE MARVEL MUSIC ONE, TAKING THE SCENIC ROUTE.)

 "I was talking with their marketing people, and they were like, 'You know, we just can't really sell Elvis or Bob Marley.' And I was like, 'What? There are companies that sell Elvis tampons, and you can't sell an Elvis comic book? What? People love Elvis, people love comics!' - Mort Todd (Marvel Music Head Editor.)

So, as many of you may have heard, Dark Horse will be publishing a 'Stranger Things' comic in September. It's a smart move and as long as the book is in keeping with the aesthetic and quality of the Netflix show, then it ought to be the evergreen cashcow Dark Horse have been desperately searching for since losing the Star Wars license to Marvel a few years back.

Ought to be.

There's a documented history of the comics industry managing to drop the ball with franchises that are proven money in other media, though. Sometimes it's the fault of the publishers being lazy and arrogant with the properties they're handling. Assuming that the books will sell purely on the back of the name alone and letting the actual creative work to be done by...Not Ready For Prime Time Players, we said diplomatically. Leading to low-quality comics that tend to leave punters less than satisfied. And with the reasonable impression that if that's how shoddy the big license stuff is, then there's no point coming back to check out the rest.

The state of the comics is part of the problem, although publishers like IDW have certainly done their best to improve the general reputation of films and other media to comics (We'd highly recommend their Mars Attacks, Suicide Girls, Garbage Pail Kids and Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas comics, off the top of our heads.) but there is also more that the shops could be doing to push the books. There's an unfortunate tendency for some comics retailers to order these sort of books as if they were just rank and file Wednesday stock that will hopefully last until Saturday and sell out with a few copies put aside for eBay if it's a hot book.

So, something like 'The Prisoner' is filed between 'Pitt' and 'Punisher', probably only visible by a third of the actual cover on the shelf. It fails to sell because no one can see it, it's regarded by both stores and publishers as a failure and customers don't hear about it until maybe issue 3 is out by which time the shop is down to ordering for standing orders. By which time it's too late for anything except buying 2nd hand off eBay, doing nothing for the sales figures of said comic.

Which brings us to a concept we were taught while in the gainful employ of West End Shop Legend, Comics Showcase. The notion of the evergreen comic.

The middle table of Showcase, older readers may remember, was filled with work off the mainstream of the industry but placed close enough to the counter that casual browsers could see titles that might appeal to them. Books like Love And Rockets, Cerebus. Jay And Silent Bob, R. Crumb, Eightball, The Bradleys/Hate, From Hell (the book AND the single issues, which tells you how long ago that was.) Naughty Bits, Bacchus. A whole bunch of comics that may not have found their audience in the first week of release but were believed in enough both in terms of quality and long-term selling power to be worth investing in.

It wasn't unusual to see someone go from randomly picking up a copy of Cerebus 0 for a couple of quid to getting a copy of the first collection a week later, and then carrying on with the subsequent volumes in rapid succession. As a new comic, Cerebus didn't sell very well. As a series of 15 odd trades with only the taste of the stories in that teaser book to hook them in, it did very well. The same was true for Hate, From Hell, Love And Rockets, Naughty Bits, etc.

If those comics were put out the way licensed comics are today, they'd have died on the vine, probably not even publishing enough issues to actually warrant that first trade.

So, when we were handed the reigns of Raygun East, we employed much the same trick and we even had it much, much easier than the Showcase days. By this time, both Image and Marvel had started doing their $1 teaser books. Using some of our more, er, interesting resources, we loaded up the shelf next to the counter with cheap copies of Sex Criminals*, Marvel Zombies, Criminal, Hip Hop Family Tree, Archie, the Goon. We talked up the books using our patented two sentence synopsis technique. People bought the samples. Then they came back for the Volume 1, Volume 2, etc.

We were especially proud of shifting a Boom Tube's worth of Occupy Comics, figuring it a comic that was well worthy of people's attention but just hadn't yet found it's audience since most places didn't feature it face out, thus obscuring the globally recognised 'OCCUPY' logo, which had penetrated much more of the public's psyche than 'The Outsiders' or whatever.

Some publishers recognise the value of keeping their titles in print, and some shops are smart enough to see that you can't just chuck everything on the same shelf and hope.

And with a double album length intro under our belts, we have an insight to what went wrong with the Marvel Music line.

Marvel, like all comic publishers of note, had tried their hand at music-related comics before. It's common and a bit lazy to write off all those attempts as awful by citing the K.I.S.S and Alice Cooper books as a fair representation of the entire effort, but really, how much can you do with KISS in the first place? We're quite fond of the George Perez pencilled Beatles comic (Marvel Comics Super Special 4, in case you were wondering.) and tie-in to Rock Musical Movie 'Rock And Rule', which featured Iggy and Jagger on the soundtrack and what appears to be animation cels as artwork that look beautiful. As well as all this, there are pictures of Debbie Harry, which would improve any comic ever published.

There's also 1991's Nightcat which is a piece all by itself and depends on us finding a copy of the eponymous record one day. We have a copy of the comic already. Filed next to our copy of Stripperella.

As 1994 rolled around and Marvel were in a state of flux, slinging almost anything at a wall and hoping it would stick. Which can be the only reason why then Marvel President Terry Stewart would look at an outfit like Revolutionary (who specialized in cheap hack biographies of pop music and were constantly being sued for unauthorized usage of band logos.) and say 'That. Let's try that.' To be fair, Stewart also became President Of The Rock N Roll Hall Of Fame.

Obviously, the two major differences Marvel made to the process were paying for some decent artists to write and draw the actual books and working with the musicians involved so a more mutually agreeable idea would be published. On paper, the proposed line up isn't bad at all, from a merch point of view.

Even in 2018, any Camden T-shirt stand is going to do alright with The Rolling Stones, Woodstock, Cheap Trick, Alice Cooper, Bob Marley, with Onyx, KRS One and a rumoured White Zombie on your roster. Much as we might be hard pushed to think of him as anything other than 'Miley's Dad.', Billy Ray Cyrus sold over 20 million copies of 'Some Gave It All' (which spawned the single 'Achy Breaky Heart.). Imagine if a tenth of that fanbase bought copies of his comic at shows or signings. (That's copies sold from publisher to customer. Not publisher to retailer.) and Image Comics would have been sick to the stomach.

So. 1994. Comics aren't selling in stupid amounts anymore because the speculators have realized it's a bad investment but the numbers aren't awful. Marvel Music isn't being tarnished with the same brush as the rest of their output as it's recognized to be a separate imprint and nobody knows about Marvel Mart yet (More on THAT another time.) There's a respectable set up for these books which feature the work of top-end talent like Kyle Baker, Neil Gaiman, Michael Zulli, Dan Barry and Dave McKean. While the Billy Ray Cyrus comic is at best ludicrous, but no worse than the later Eminem/Punisher, both 'Voodoo Lounge' and 'The Last Temptation' are timed to be released in conjunction with their counterpart albums. There's no way this could fail, right?

Well....

First off, Todd did not have the support of Marvel staff when pushing this project. Music tie-ins had been given such a sleazy reputation thanks to the actions of Revolutionary (who would go onto to become Bluewater and if you fancy a laugh, look up their biographies and you'll see the artistic standards we're talking about here.) that few in-house wanted the work enough to potentially run foul of Suge Knight and given Todd Loren (Head of Revolutionary) had been stabbed to death in a still unresolved murder a couple of years previously, it was probably considered not worth the page rate.

Marvel had to cede creative control to the musicians, not something they were used to doing and certainly not for the amount of money at stake here. 'The Last Temptation Of Alice' reads like a fill-in issue of Sandman. 'Break The Chain' is a visual accompaniment to the song bundled with the comic. The Onyx, Woodstock and Billy Ray Cyrus comics are...what they are. In most instances, it appeared to be a case of handing over lots of money for licensing, creator payment, 'other' and hoping what came back was publishable at best.

Although that alone shouldn't have been a factor. At the risk of continuing to abuse KISS fans, they are the apex of the concept that you can flog a devotee any old rubbish as long as it has the correct logo on it. Within 30 seconds of looking up proof of our theory, we were confronted with the existence of a KISS Waffle Maker. It's a waffle maker with Gene Simmons's Demon face on it. It costs $40. We are not making this up. If people were willing to buy that, then even the worst comic ever published would sell to a potential audience if it featured Green Day, Nine Inch Nails, Aerosmith and The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, right?

Pre-orders on the Marvel Music books were low. Relative to the hype, license fees and other expenses (At one point Mort Todd flew to Jamiaca to conduct research on the Bob Marley title.) the comics were making no money, with the highest ordered being Neil Gaiman's Alice Cooper book. To be honest, that was probably on the back of Neil's heat circa 1994 rather than anything to do with Cooper.

The whole imprint was hard to find within it's native home of comic shops who treated them like any other Marvel comics shipped that week, rather than thinking long-term that while Electric Blue Smurf Supermen and Purple Hoodie Spideys will come and go, there'll always be a Stones fan who has to have everything and will give you money if they see a rare item next to the till. Anyone who'd buy 'She's The Boss' on purpose deserves to be segregated from their money anyway.

'Onyx: Fight' would be Marvel Music's final output before the line was quietly cancelled in 1995. With the exception of the Gaiman/Cooper book, which was reprinted as a single volume by Dark Horse in 2005, the whole line remains out of print and are an utter nightmare to find due to the exceptionally low print runs.

We're experienced hunters of rare and ludicrious tat and in our twenty years have only seen 1 copy of Rolling Stones: Voodoo Lounge and 2 of 'KRS-ONE:Break The Chain', which we would happily call the very peak of the line. The saddest part of all this was that Dave Bowie was blown away by the Gaiman/Cooper thing and was looking to do a similar work for his upcoming '1.Outside ' album.

Thanks very much to those of you who voted and sitting through all this. We're dedicating this column to Charles Shaar Murray, one of the most rock n roll/funnybook fans we've been happy to meet and also cos it's his birthday and that.

See You In The FunnyPages!

[pardontheglueman]

The Lost Genius of The Go-Betweens

The next time you’re down the local boozer with your mates and there’s an uncomfortable lull in the conversation, consider striking up a discussion based on the following question - which is the best band never to have had a top forty hit?  Now, obviously, this is a version of the hoary old chestnut that’s passed many a drunken hour for the sports fan down the ages - who is the best footballer never to have played at a World Cup? The answer to that is a rather obvious one, of course, George Best. The musical variation of this question may be more stimulating.

Whilst Robert Lloyd and the various re-incarnations of his Brummie post-punk combo, The Nightingales, would make any respectable critics’ short list, his guttural, sub-Beefheart squeal was aimed more squarely at the underground than at the mainstream. The same uncompromising mindset also undermines the case for New York’s Suicide and David Thomas’ experimental avant-garage group, Pere Ubu.

Soon enough, however, somebody will alight upon the only truly acceptable answer, at least the only answer acceptable to me, and a good number of other men and women of a certain age, who are each the proud possessors of a pair of rose-tinted glasses. It simply has to be those doyens of guitar pop, the Go-Betweens. The inexplicable absence from the singles chart of these Australian Indie-pop pioneers remains a mystery to this day. Not once, during their illustrious lifetime, 1978-2006 (allowing for a hiatus from 1989 to 2000) did their melodic epistles ever threaten to deliver them pop stardom here, or in America. Incredibly, they even failed to secure a top 40 hit in their native Australia. This, surely, constitutes the greatest miscarriage in the history of popular music since the time Al Jolson blacked up for The Jazz Singer, declared brazenly “you ain’t heard nothing yet” and shamefacedly went on to make his fortune.

Just how the Brisbane based guitar heroes, led by singer/songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan failed to achieve even one solitary week in the top 75, despite crafting a plethora of heavenly pop songs that should have made them household names on both sides of the Atlantic, is a mystery that genuinely scrambles the brain. Indeed, it prompts the group’s longtime fans to ask the age-old question, the one that escapes from our lips every time we drunkenly stumble upon a recording of Barry Manilow’s ‘Bermuda Triangle blaring out of a pub jukebox; ‘why did you let this happen, dear Lord, why?’

Consider some of the flotsam and jetsam that has (dis)graced the charts since the advent of Rock ‘n’ Roll. In no particular order, I give you Vanilla Ice, The Bay City Rollers, Duran Duran, Milli Vanilli, Arthur Mullard and Hilda Baker, Black Lace, MC Hammer and Sting. And, that’s just the tip of a very embarrassing iceberg!

Even more puzzling was the regular presence on the chart of bands that might best be described as second-rate Go-Betweens. The very ordinary Deacon Blue springs to mind here, as well as the Trashcan Sinatras. And, how on earth do you explain the continued presence in the charts, throughout the eighties, of bands that made comparable music, both in terms of substance and style to the Go-Betweens themselves. Aztec Camera, for example, chalked up 12 hits and 74 weeks on the chart while Lloyd Cole, with or without his Commotions recorded 15 hits spread over 62 weeks.

After the band split up in 1989 Forster and McLennan each took a stab at solo stardom, in theory doubling their chances of a hit, but still, the record buying public remained unpersuaded. McLennan in particular, penned a succession of gorgeous ballads throughout the nineties, the best of which, ‘Black Mule’ (1991) and ‘Hot Water’ (1994) are arguably the finest of all his compositions.

Even the French, not exactly renowned for having their finger on the pop pulse, have made the Go-Betweens something of a cause celebre. A 1996 issue of leading rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles pictured the band on its front cover with the strap-line ‘Le groupe le plus sous-estime de l’histoire du rock?’ Which, broadly translates as -  The Go-Betweens the most underrated band in the history of rock? The magazine also ranked ‘16 Lovers Lane’ in its list of the best albums of the period from 1986-1996.        

           Publié en novembre 1996.

The Smiths: The Queen Is Dead

Pixies: Doolittle

The Stone Roses: The Stone Roses

The Go-Betweens: 16 Lovers Lane

Portishead: Dummy

PJ Harvey: Dry

Tricky: Maxinquaye

Morrissey: Vauxhall & I

Massive Attack: Blue Lines

Beck: Mellow Gold

The Feelies: The Good Earth

REM: Automatic For The People

James: Stutter

The Divine Comedy: Liberation

The Smiths: Strangeways, Here We Come

My Bloody Valentine: Loveless

The La’s: The La’s

De La Soul : 3 Feet High And Rising

Bjork: Debut

Jeff Buckley: Grace

This re-appraisal of the band’s standing, together with an invitation to play at the magazine’s 10th Anniversary bash prompted Forster and McLennan to reform the group.

For a brief moment, true devotees of the group allowed themselves to believe that a great wrong might be righted. Perhaps the band might strike lucky and have a song included on the soundtrack of some mega Hollywood Rom-Com. There was a precedent of sorts. The Triffids, their compatriots from Perth and themselves a seminal indie band of the eighties, nearly managed to fluke a hit when their classic song, ‘Bury Me Deep In Love’, was chosen to play over the cheesy wedding scenes of Harold and Marge on the popular daytime soap, Neighbours. The band, profile duly raised, punched home their advantage; they’re follow up single, “Trick Of The Light”, spent a glorious week in the charts, at no 73, in early 1988.

Sadly, despite recording a batch of very fine comeback albums, particularly 2005’s  ‘Oceans Apart’, with its standout tracks ‘Here Comes A City’, ‘Born To A Family’ and ‘Darlinghurst Nights’,  a familiar pattern soon re-emerged - critical acclaim on the one hand and commercial indifference on the other. The Australian media wasn’t averse to chastising the band for their perceived failure either. ABC’S current affairs show The 7:30 Report announced their return to the stage in the following manner -

“The Go-Betweens have been described as the quintessential critics’ band. They made an art form of commercial failure. But as Bernard Brown reports, they’re happy to have earned the industry’s respect, even if the dollars didn’t follow.”

Good old Bernard concluded his report with “But the band’s influence far outweighed its record sales and they wear the tag of commercial failures”.

Any hope that the Go-Betweens could somehow turn the tide disappeared once and for all with the unexpected passing of McLennan in May 2006 at the age of 48.

Any discussion of great songwriting partnerships in popular music would rightly begin with the likes of Lennon and McCartney, Bacharach and David, Leiber and Stoller, or Jagger and Richards. You shouldn’t, though, have to look too far down the list before coming across the names of Forster and McLennan, probably bracketed right alongside Difford and Tilbrook or Morrissey and Marr.

McLennan and Forster, back in harness

Both were capable of writing supremely catchy songs and both had the propensity to pen an eye-catching lyric. Grant McLennan’s ‘River Of Money’, from the ‘Spring Hill Fair’ album (Beggars Banquet, 1984) whilst rather atypical of his output (it’s more of a prose-poem than a pop song) is such a unique lyric that it demands to be quoted in full.

                        River Of Money

It is neither fair nor reasonable to expect sadness to confine itself to its causes. Like a river in flood, when it subsides and the drowned bodies of animals have been deposited in the treetops, there is another kind of damage that takes place beyond the torrent. At first, it seemed as though she had only left the room to go into the garden and had been delayed by stray chickens in the corn. Then he had thought she might have eloped with the rodeo-boy from the neighbouring property but it wasn’t till one afternoon, when he had heard guitar playing coming from her room and had rushed upstairs to confront her and had seen that it was only the wind in the curtains brushing against the open strings, that he finally knew she wasn’t coming back. He had dealt with the deluge alright but the watermark of her leaving was still quite visible. He had resorted to the compass then, thinking that geography might rescue him but after one week in the Victorian Alps he came back north, realising that snow which he had never seen before, was only frozen water. I’ll take you to Hollywood I’ll take you to Mexico I’ll take you anywhere the River of Money flows. I’ll take you to Hollywood I’ll take you to Mexico I’ll take you anywhere the River of Money flows. But was it really possible for him to cope with the magnitude of her absence? The snow had failed him. Bottles had almost emptied themselves without effect. The television, a Samaritan during other tribulations, had been repossessed. She had left her traveling clock though thinking it incapable of functioning in another time-zone; so the long-vacant days of expensive sunlight were filled with the sound of her minutes, with the measuring of her hours.

Not the stuff of the three-minute hero, I appreciate, but the pair were equally comfortable writing the standard verse, chorus, verse pop song that chimed in at a radio-friendly 2.56 and wouldn’t have frightened the horses. From ‘Spring Hill Fair’ they released a trio of pristine singles. McLennan’s pop-by-numbers opener ‘Bachelor Kisses’ was the first to hit the shops (and stay there, in the bargain bin) followed by Forster’s heart-achingly sad confessional, ‘Part Company’;

“That’s her handwriting, that’s the way she writes

From the first letter, I got to this her Bill of Rights”

‘Man O Sand To Girl O Sea’, the final single from the album, found Forster in a more self- assured frame of mind;

“Feel so sure of our love

I’ll write a song about us breaking up”.

This sequence of starry-eyed singles should have seen the Go-Betweens clasped lovingly to the bosom of the pop establishment. Instead, they remained exiled in the wilderness, otherwise known as the John Peel show.

Still, at the time it seemed to be only a matter of time, before their streak of bad luck would break and the Brisbane boys would be basking in the sun-kissed glow of chart success. Two robust albums followed, ‘Liberty Belle And The Black Diamond Express’, (Beggars Banquet, 1986) and ‘Tallulah’, (Beggars Banquet, 1987) each spawned excellent singles in Forster’s ‘Spring Rain’, and ‘Head Full Of Pride’, as well as McLennans’ ‘Right Here’ and ‘Bye Bye Pride’.

The great British public, though, remained sceptical. Peel sessions, stadium tours in support of the band’s longtime admirers, R.E.M, contractual tie-in’s with a host of high profile record companies including Rough Trade, Postcard and Capitol, made not the slightest difference to the band’s outsider status. If a pop group can be described as persona non grata, then they were it! The frustration was beginning to tell, driving McLennan to comment that he’d;

“given up on the commercial success thing, which is very good for my state of mind”.

Forster, Morrison, Willsteed, McLennan, Brown - the line-up at the time of 16 Lovers Lane

The reality was, though, that their most “commercial” album, indeed their masterpiece, was still to come but in attempting to break into the charts the band would succeed only in breaking itself apart. The omens were not good from the outset. First off, bass guitarist Robert Vickers, who had been with the group since 1983, handed in his notice. His successor, John Willsteed, seemed the perfect replacement though, and his playing certainly brought a clarity and polish to the band’s sound, in keeping with their new direction of travel. He is credited by some insiders as having played a number of the more intricate guitar parts on ‘16 Lovers Lane’. Unfortunately, Willsteed was a somewhat disruptive personality who seemed to relish making enemies within the band.

Furthermore, Amanda Brown, recruited after contributing violin to the Servants sublime second single ‘The Sun, A Small Star’ began a relationship with McLennan. Suddenly, word leaked out that Forster and Morrison had been in a relationship of sorts for years. Battle lines had been drawn.

At the exact same time as the Forster/McLennan friendship, begun long ago in the Drama department of the University of Queensland, was starting to disintegrate, the power-brokers at the group’s management company were trying to push McLennan into the limelight at the expense of Forster. Author David Nichols, in his book The Go-Betweens, is clear about the re-alignment that took place “every promotional video from ‘Right Here’ onwards shows Forster completely back-grounded”. Seen today the video for ‘Was There Anything I Could do’ makes a toe-curling Exhibit A, with McLennan and Brown cavorting centre stage while Forster is stationed well to the rear. Morrison was deeply unhappy, particularly about the decision to draft in producer Craig Leon. In an interview with Sydney’s ‘On The Street’ she was scathing about the shift in emphasis;

“He was chosen to make this single accessible to people, to get us to crawl out of our cult corner.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGUxZvuRe9k  (Exhibit A)

Despite the recriminations that would inevitably follow, the next five Go-Betweens singles would all be McLennan compositions.

On a more positive note, Forster and McLennan were working on the songs for ‘16 Lovers Lane’ together, rather than working individually. The spirit of collaboration instead of competition at least extended as far as the song-writing! Released in August 1988 (Beggars Banquet /Capitol) and produced by Mark Wallis, who’d worked with the likes of Marianne Faithful, Tom Jones and R.E.M, ‘16 Lovers Lane’ was a sublime collection of glimmering guitar ballads and sugar-spun indie anthems so glossy and sun-kissed that you had to wear dark glasses just to listen to it.

On the release of their debut single ‘Lee Remick’ back in 1978, Forster and McLennan had talked about capturing “that striped sunlight sound” which Forster later defined as being;

“A romantic phrase, but it is abstract. It could be the sun coming through blinds as you play a record. It’s the shimmer of a Fender guitar. It’s harmonies and tough-minded pop songs. It’s lying on a bed beside a window reading a book in the afternoon. It’s the sun on a girl’s shoulder-length hair. It’s Buddy Holly in the desert the day they recorded ‘Maybe Baby’. It’s t-shirts and jeans. It’s Creedence. It’s Bob. It’s Chuck Berry.”

On ‘16 Lovers Lane’, made twenty years after they first articulated the concept, they came closest to perfecting its meaning.

Opening with the McLennan’s unashamedly summery ‘Love Goes On’;

“There’s a cat in the alleyway

Dreaming of birds that are blue

Sometimes girl when I’m lonely

This is how I think about you”

and ending with Forster’s majestically romantic ‘Dive For Your Memory’

“I’d dive for you

Like a bird I’d descend

Deep down I’m lonely

And I miss my friend

So when I hear you saying

That we stood no chance

I’ll dive for your memory

We stood that chance,”

‘16 Lovers Lane’ (once voted 24th greatest album of the eighties, by none other than Rolling Stone magazine) could also boast another pair of McLennan classics in the ‘Streets Of Your Town’ - a song that should have occupied a place in the nation’s pop consciousness in the same way that The La’s ‘There She Goes’ or The Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby’ have done, and the wistful, heart-breaking lament,’ Quiet Heart’.

“I tried to tell you

I can only say it when we’re apart

About this storm inside of me

And how I miss your quiet, quiet heart”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJfP6G0LSEA

‘Streets Of Your Town’ was such an obvious choice for a single that they had two cracks with it, releasing it first in October 1988 and then, refusing to accept defeat, the following summer. Sandwiched in between the twin versions of this neglected classic were two more ‘easy on the ear’ contenders, ‘Was There Anything I Could Do’ (McLennan) and ‘Love Goes On’. Both met the same miserable fate – they were steadfastly ignored.

The failure to impact on the charts, with such an obviously radio-friendly song as ‘Streets Of Your Town’, must have come as a crushing blow to Forster and McLennan and was probably the final nail in the Go-Betweens’ coffin. Broke and broken-hearted they went their separate ways.

That the Go-Betweens had swallowed their pride and danced to the tune of their paymasters, there could be no doubt. They’d flattened out the kinks in their song structures, planed off the angular edges and streamlined their sound until, with each passing record, they began to sound less and less like The Velvet Underground and more and more like Abba. Not that there is anything wrong with Abba or ‘16 Lovers Lane’ itself, indeed in parts it’s a breathtakingly beautiful record. It’s just that 3/5ths of the band didn’t really want to make that type of record anymore. The Go-Betweens sold their soul, but they still didn’t sell any records!

To make matters worse there wasn’t even the consolation of making their mark in the album charts, where more mature bands could be expected to have their egos massaged by a loyal fan base, successfully built up over a lengthy career. All the Go-Betweens could muster, though, was a week at no. 91 in June 1987 with ‘Tallulah’, and one week at no. 81 for ‘16 Lovers Lane’ in September 1988.

The Go-Betweens, however, did make minor inroads upon the UK Independent Charts. Before signing for Beggars Banquet the band had recorded for Rough Trade and Situation 2, qualifying them for inclusion in the Indie charts. Between 83 and 86 they had three entries in the top 40. ‘Cattle and Cane’, an autobiographical McLennan song voted by the Australasian Performing Rights Association in 2001 as one of the country’s 30 greatest songs of all time, reached no. 4 in March 1983, while ‘Man O Sand To Girl O Sea’ charted at no. 24 toward the end of the same year. A 12 inch only release of ‘Lee Remick’ peaked at no. 7 in November 1986. And there the trail runs cold.

To speculate, now, on the spectacular failure of the Go-Betweens is to set oneself an impossible task. Maybe, it was simply because they never really established a British fan base, maybe Australians appeared less cool than Americans or the dynamic duo just lacked sex appeal. It could be argued that both Forster and McLennan were not distinctive enough as singers, even that they sounded too erudite at times, for daytime radio. Maybe it was Forster’s controversial decision to play a Capitol Records promotional launch of ‘16 Lovers Lane’ in an olive green dress (the company scaled down the record’s promotional budget the very next day). Or, perhaps, it was just that fate was against them all along.

In September 1985 the band had signed with Elektra, hoping for better promotion and distribution of their work. Forster was in optimistic mood “We’ve gone with Elektra – start our LP in just over a week. Without any doubt the songs are our best, we are playing our best, and with ourselves producing this unknown masterpiece, it might be great.” Within weeks Elektra had gone belly up and the band was back to square one again, much to Forster’s chagrin;

“I do think we have a sense of anger – no one’s ever been able to present us to the British public in any sort of cohesive or intelligent way.”

One thing is for sure, they had a fistful of great songs and in Forster, they had someone who gave the band personality. His art-rock background led him to pay particular attention to his stage performance, although we can only presume his tongue was firmly in his cheek with this analysis of his ‘dancing’;

“Bobby Womack himself once told me that I am a soul man and that as far as modern music is concerned there are only three soul men left: himself, me and Prince. Prince came to Brisbane and took the colours, the moves, his whole act from me. It’s true! He’s seen my moves!”

Perhaps The Go-Betweens’ drummer Lindy Morrison, speaking in 1992 was nearer the truth than I, and others, would care to admit when she offered this overview;

“We might have been one of the most lauded bands in the country, but we sold bugger all records. That’s a shame. So let’s not go on about it being one of the most lauded bands in the country, cause who cares? We didn’t sell records, we weren’t a popular band, and I’m sick of hearing about the fact that we were so fabulous – because if we were so fabulous, why didn’t anyone buy our records?”

Forster managed a slightly more laconic response;

“It was quite freeing to realise, our group is so good, and we’re getting nowhere. After a while, the lack of recognition was so absurd it was funny”.

Following their initial break up, the compilation album ‘1978-1990’ was released and allowed the music press to pass their verdict on the life and times of the Go-Betweens. Melody Maker’s Dave Jennings could barely contain his anger; “The fact that the Go-Betweens never became massive is a disgusting injustice…..take the Go-Betweens to your heart, where they belong.” In 1996, writing for Select magazine Andrew Male wrote that “The only problem with listening to the Go-Betweens now is that they can’t help remind you of how crap the eighties were. The Go-Betweens produced records of quiet brilliance and got nowhere. Sting sang about a sodding turtle and became a millionaire.”  

Even now, though, there isn’t exactly a critical consensus. Simon Reynolds in his definitive account of the post-punk years 1978-1984, “Rip It Up And Start Again”, devotes only one sentence to our Antipodean protagonists; “The Go-Betweens, who hailed from Australia but had a spare, plangent sound similarly rooted in Television and early Talking Heads”. It should be noted, of course, that at this stage The Go-Betweens only had ‘Send Me A Lullaby’ and ‘Before Hollywood’ under their belt. Bob Stanley in his widely acclaimed book “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah: The Story Of Modern Pop” (2013) omits them entirely from his 800-page anthology.

Any discussion of Literate Pop, though, if you are inclined to concede that the genre actually exists, if you believe great pop can be thought through, rather than instinctively felt, be cerebral rather than corporeal, would have to take into account the Go-Betweens’ collective body of work. Their singular form of romanticism, their shimmering chorus’s, their quirky, idiosyncratic lyrics and their wry pop sensibility all combined to make them one of the great post-punk pop groups. They made two albums, ‘Spring Hill Fair’ and ‘16 Lovers Lane’ that would lose nothing in comparison with Costello’s ‘King Of America’, Lloyd Cole’s ‘Rattlesnakes’, Scritti Politti’s ‘Songs To Remember’, Mickey Newbury’s ‘Look’s Like Rain’ or the Manic Street Preachers’ ‘Everything Must Go’. In this context, their work will be remembered long after their more commercially successful contemporaries have disappeared from the recorded history of popular music.

To end, though, at the beginning. In 1978, after the local success of their debut single, ‘Lee Remick’, Forster dreamt of setting sail for England. Given the torturous fate that awaited them on these shores, his words seem remarkably poignant now.

“England, I think, has the greatest acceptance of new music, they’re more open-minded. They write it in the NME and people buy your records. Any country that can accept Jilted John, X-Ray Spex and the Only Ones……there’s a place for the Go-Betweens.”

http://www.go-betweens.org.uk/

[weregonnaneedabiggerblog-blog1]

Logan (2017); The Gritty Grounded Superhero Movie that Got It Right

Consumption of media has always had a set of phases that I’ve recently noticed;

  ·         Aspect of life gains much mainstream attention and is promoted and viewed greatly by the masses

·         The aspect is consumed to such extents that people will become tired of the concept, meaning companies will either choose to abandon the aspect and promote something else, or try and reinvent it to try and give it more relevance.

  And it’s not just companies that do this. General people with a fascination of art will eventually drive for the norm to evolve into something other, as was seen in the post-modernism movement of the mid-20th century that lead to the current group of society that relish in pushing the boundaries of what our expectations for certain parts of culture.

  I, and many others also in their late teens by this point in their lives, have grown up with the rise of the self-proclaimed “subgenre” of the superhero movie, self-proclaimed mainly due to the fact that the only real guidelines the genre has is that it must feature larger-than-life beings protecting someone or something. In this time, films like Sam Rami’s “Spider-man”, Jon Favrau’s “Iron Man” and Joss Whedon’s “The Avengers” have acted as landmarks for what I believe to be the first phase of the superhero movie consumptions; its peak. Now that it’s the year 2017 and that this collection of movies have been indulged by the masses for almost 20 years now, I believe we’re about to enter the second phase of this consumption; the evolution, with the movie “Logan” action as its beginning.

  Now many would argue that this isn’t the first time that a superhero movie has tried to break the mould of what is expected, with films like “Watchmen” from 2009 and “The Dark Knight” from 2008. However, I would argue with this for one main reason, and that is these films were too early in the lifecycle of this consumption. The same year The Dark Knight was release, we got Iron Man, the film as I mentioned earlier, marked a big part in phase 1 of this consumption as it was the film to start the Marvel Cinematic Universe; a never before seen collection of characters spanning across dozens of stories and movies. I like to think of perhaps the most major landmark in this consumption being with Bryan Singer’s “X-Men” in 2000, due to being a primarily big movie for its time acting as a superhero movie with a lot of talented actors and filmmakers being attached to the product, including of course Hugh Jackman and his now iconic role as Super-Soldier Mutant Wolverine, also known as Logan. And after all these years of staying with these movies and staying with this character after being there at the beginning, I find it only fitting that Jackman, and more importantly the character of Logan’s swan song act as the jumping-off point for the future, experimental phase of the superhero genre.

  No-where better does Logan address its objective than in its own title. This is by absolutely no-means a glossy, over-blown superhero epic that acts as if every single one of its actions could mean the difference between the end of the world and saving it. Rather this is a down-and-dirty look at Logan and how everything in the hundreds of years he’s been alive have led to this point in his life. This isn’t Wolverine’s movie, it’s Logan’s. This is seen in subtle call-backs to previous movies, such as when Logan speaks to Charles Xavier about how there hasn’t been a mutant child born in years, leaving Logan to think of his entire sub-species as “God’s mistake”, undercutting almost everything Logan and the X-men fought for in terms of Mutant civil rights in past adventures. On top of that, near the film’s conclusion, we learn that Logan himself has been carrying with him an adamantium bullet, the only thing in the world that can kill hum, in case he ever felt he couldn’t take the train on him anymore. Logan is attempted to be persuaded otherwise from his bleak outlook on life by Charles Xavier, no-longer acting as the head teacher at his school for you mutants, but now acting as the only real reason Logan is still living, given the several medical conditions he has obtained in his later years such as dementia and stroke-prone, something very dangerous with the powers that Xavier possesses. As Logan, as Charles puts it, “Waits for him to die”, he is given problems in the form of X-23, a genetically bread super-soldier with the nickname of Laura. As Logan is begrudgingly forced into escorting her away from her creators and former captives, due to him discovering her to be a genetic clone of himself and therefore his daughter in some-sense, Xavier tries to show Logan the good still left in the world as they help Laura to her destination, eventually spending a night with some local farmers whose horses the trio helped round up. However, this only leads into more death, as another clone of Logan attacks the house and brutally murders the residents, including Xavier himself, who gets no final words, and the following scene is buried by Logan and Laura before they move on. This acts as a prime example of the bleak, but never forced, tone of the movie, with all of these actions showing the mental pain Logan endures due to all the lives he’s lost and is responsible for loosing (some of which are implied to have included other X-men). And keeping with the non-conventional superhero structure, the film doesn’t have some big ridiculous ending where the villain is in full power and the hero must use what they’ve learned to defeat them, rather ending with Logan sacrificing himself so Laura and her fellow mutants escape from their creators. Whether he chose to do this due to some sense of obligation to Xavier or due to him actually feeling some sort of fatherly instinct to protect Laura, it still acts as an incredibly sad yet heroic farewell to the legacy of Logan.

  Much of the technicality also makes this film excellent. Hugh Jackman, as expected, gives a marvellous final performance, as does Sir Patrick Stewart as sometimes-kind hearted sometimes-bitter elder to the group that adds a great amount of leverage to the film, helping in being able to care from and sympathise with these people, regardless whether you grew up with or have experienced any of the other x-men movies. The relatively unknown Dafne Keen, portraying the young mutant Laura, also gives what is possibly one of the best child performances of the year, always having a sense of unknowing of what she’s thinking, primarily due to her major lack of dialogue for a majority of the runtime, instead having a very cold expression to a majority of what happens around her. As well as this, the primary dry, dusty scenery of the Texan-Mexican border setting is also surprisingly powerful, and almost gives the movie a road-trip-esc feeling with the stops the main trio make, from casino hotels to abandoned lookout-posts. This execution is likely in no small part due to director James Mangold’s experience with his remake of western “3:10 to Yuma” (also returning from directing 2013’s “The Wolverine”, which hinted greatly at his greater understanding and love for the character, despite falling that film falling short in many areas). Those mistakes however are likely circumvented with his greater involvement with this movie, being also credited as co-writing the screenplay with Scott Frank, a returning writer from “The Wolverine” who also helped with penning Spielberg’s 2002 effort “Minority Report”, another film with an excellent sense of incoming danger.

  Many years ago, the genre of the Western was also in a state of popularity that the Superhero sub-genre is currently flourishing. However, the genre sadly never chose to evolve into anything more and eventually burnt itself out, leaving us with a genre that, whilst helping to inspire the scope and scale of films to come, only has one film every few years now. I feel that where superhero films differ is that it has proven itself many times already to evolve and become more, and hopefully if my predictions comes true, then this final nail in Logan’s coffin will also act as the final nail in the era of nothing-but-formulaic, filler superhero adventures, and the birth of something bigger than the character himself could ever be.

[timclymer]

The Go-Betweens

The next time you’re down the local boozer with your mates and there’s an uncomfortable lull in the conversation, consider striking up a discussion based on the following question – which is the best band never to have had a top forty hit? Now, obviously, this is a version of the hoary old chestnut that’s passed many a drunken hour for the sports fan down the ages – who is the best footballer never to have played in the World Cup? The answer to that is a rather obvious one, of course, George Best. The musical variation of this question may be more stimulating.

Whilst Robert Lloyd and the various re-incarnations of his Brummie post-punk combo, The Nightingales, would make any respectable critics’ short list, his guttural, sub-Beefheart squeal was aimed more squarely at the underground than at the mainstream. The same uncompromising mindset also rules out the likes of New York’s Suicide and David Thomas’ experimental avant-garage group, Pere Ubu.

Soon enough, however, somebody will alight upon the only truly acceptable answer, at least the only answer acceptable to me, and a good number of other men and women of a certain age, who are each the proud possessors of a pair of rose-tinted glasses. It simply has to be those doyens of guitar pop, The Go-Betweens. The inexplicable absence from the singles chart of these Australian Indie-pop pioneers remains a mystery to this day. Not once, during their illustrious lifetime 1978-2006 (allowing for a hiatus from 1989 to 2000) did their melodic epistles ever threaten to deliver them pop stardom here, or in America. Incredibly, they even failed to secure a top 40 hit in their native Australia. This, surely, constitutes the greatest miscarriage in the history of popular music since the time Al Jolson blacked up for The Jazz Singer, declared brazenly “you ain’t heard nothing yet” and shamefacedly went on to make his fortune.

Just how the Brisbane based guitar heroes, led by singer/songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan failed to achieve even one solitary week in the top 75, despite crafting a plethora of heavenly pop songs that should have made them household names on both sides of the Atlantic, is a mystery that genuinely scrambles the brain. Indeed, it prompts the group’s long time fans to ask the age old question, the one that escapes our lips every time we drunkenly stumble upon a recording of Barry Manilow’s ‘Bermuda Triangle blaring out of a pub jukebox; ‘how could you let this happen, dear Lord, how?’

Consider some of the flotsam and jetsam that has (dis)graced the charts since the advent of Rock ‘n’ Roll. In no particular order, I give you Vanilla Ice, The Bay City Rollers, Duran Duran, Milli Vanilli, Arthur Mullard and Hilda Baker, Black Lace, MC Hammer and Sting. And, that’s just the tip of a very embarrassing iceberg!

Even more puzzling was the regular presence on the chart of bands that might best be described as second rate Go-Betweens. The very ordinary Deacon Blue springs to mind here, as well as the Trashcan Sinatras. And, how on earth do you explain the continued presence in the charts, throughout the eighties, of bands that made comparable music, both in terms of substance and style to The Go-Betweens themselves. Aztec Camera, for example, chalked up 12 hits and 74 weeks on the chart while Lloyd Cole, with or without his Commotions recorded 15 hits spread over 62 weeks.

After the band split up in 1989 Forster and McLennan each took a stab at solo stardom, in theory doubling their chances of a hit, but still the record buying public remained un-persuaded. McLennan in particular, penned a succession of gorgeous ballads throughout the nineties, the best of which, ‘Black Mule’ (1991) and ‘Hot Water’ (1994) are arguably the finest of all his compositions.

Even the French, not exactly renowned for having their finger on the pop pulse, have made The Go-Betweens something of a cause celebre. A 1996 issue of leading rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles pictured the band on its front cover with the strap-line ‘Le groupe le plus sous-estime de l’histoire du rock?’ Which, broadly translated as – The Go-Betweens the most underrated band in the history of rock? The magazine also ranked ’16 Lovers Lane’ in its list of the best albums of the period from 1976-1996.

Publié en novembre 1996.

1. The Smiths: The Queen Is Dead

2. Pixies: Doolittle

3. The Stone Roses: The Stone Roses

4. The Go-Betweens: 16 Lovers Lane

5. Portishead: Dummy

6. PJ Harvey: Dry

7. Tricky: Maxinquaye

8. Morrissey: Vauxhall & I

9. Massive Attack: Blue Lines

10. Beck: Mellow Gold

11. The Feelies: The Good Earth

12. REM: Automatic For The People

13. James: Stutter

14. The Divine Comedy: Liberation

15. The Smiths: Strangeways, Here We Come

16. My Bloody Valentine: Loveless

17. The La’s: The La’s

18. De La Soul: 3 Feet High And Rising

19. Bjork: Debut

20. Jeff Buckley: Grace

This re-appraisal of the band’s standing, together with an invitation to play at the magazine’s 10th Anniversary bash prompted Forster and McLennan to reform the group.

For a brief moment true devotees of the group allowed themselves to believe that a great wrong might be righted. Perhaps the band might strike lucky and have a song included on the soundtrack of some mega Hollywood Rom-Com. There was a precedent of sorts. The Triffids, their compatriots from Perth and themselves a seminal indie band of the eighties, nearly managed to fluke a hit when their classic song, ‘Bury Me Deep In Love’, was chosen to play over the cheesy wedding scenes of Harold and Marge on the popular daytime soap, Neighbours. The band, profile duly raised, punched home their advantage; their follow up single, “Trick Of The Light”, spent a glorious week in the charts, at no 73, in early 1988.

Sadly, despite recording a batch of very fine comeback albums, particularly 2005’s ‘Oceans Apart’, with its standout tracks ‘Here Comes A City’, ‘Born To A Family’ and ‘Darlinghurst Nights’, a familiar pattern soon re-emerged – critical acclaim on the one hand and commercial indifference on the other. The Australian media wasn’t averse to chastising the band for their perceived failure either. ABC’S current affairs show The 7:30 Report announced their return to the stage in the following manner –

“The Go-Betweens have been described as the quintessential critics’ band. They made an art form of commercial failure. But as Bernard Brown reports, they’re happy to have earned the industry’s respect, even if the dollars didn’t follow.”

Good old Bernard concluded his report with “But the band’s influence far outweighed its record sales and they wear the tag of commercial failures”.

Any hope that The Go-Betweens could somehow turn the tide disappeared once and for all with the unexpected passing of McLennan in May 2006 at the age of 48.

Any discussion of great song-writing partnerships in popular music would rightly begin with the likes of Lennon and McCartney, Bacharach and David, Leiber and Stoller, or Jagger and Richards. You shouldn’t, though, have to look too far down the list before coming across the names of Forster and McLennan, probably bracketed right alongside Difford and Tilbrook or Morrissey and Marr.

Both were capable of writing supremely catchy songs and both had the propensity to pen an eye-catching lyric. Grant McLennan’s ‘River Of Money’, from the ‘Springhill Fair’ album (Beggars Banquet, 1984) whilst rather atypical of his output (it’s more of a prose-poem than a pop song) is such a unique lyric that it demands to be quoted in full.

River Of Money

It is neither fair nor reasonable to expect sadness

to confine itself to its causes. Like a river in flood,

when it subsides and the drowned bodies of

animals have been deposited in the treetops, there is

another kind of damage that takes place beyond the torrent.

At first, it seemed as though she had only left

the room to go into the garden and had been delayed by stray

chickens in the corn. Then he had thought she might

have eloped with the rodeo-boy from the neighbouring

property but it wasn’t till one afternoon, when he

had heard guitar playing coming from her room and

had rushed upstairs to confront her and had seen

that it was only the wind in the curtains brushing

against the open strings, that he finally knew she

wasn’t coming back. He had dealt with the deluge alright

but the watermark of her leaving was still quite visible.

He had resorted to the compass then, thinking that

geography might rescue him but after one week in the

Victorian Alps he came back north, realising that snow which

he had never seen before, was only frozen water.

I’ll take you to Hollywood

I’ll take you to Mexico

I’ll take you anywhere the

River of Money flows.

I’ll take you to Hollywood

I’ll take you to Mexico

I’ll take you anywhere the

River of Money flows.

But was it really possible for him to cope with the

magnitude of her absence? The snow had failed him.

Bottles had almost emptied themselves without effect.

The television, a Samaritan during other tribulations, had

been repossessed. She had left her travelling clock

though thinking it incapable of functioning in

another time-zone; so the long vacant days of expensive sunlight

were filled with the sound of her minutes, with the measuring of

her hours.

Not the stuff of the three minute hero, I appreciate, but the pair were equally comfortable writing the standard verse, chorus, verse pop song that chimed in at a radio friendly 2.56 and wouldn’t have frightened the horses. From ‘Springhill Fair’ they released a trio of pristine singles. McLennan’s pop-by-numbers opener ‘Bachelor Kisses’ was the first to hit the shops (and stay there, in the bargain bin) followed by Forster’s heart-achingly sad confessional, ‘Part Company’;

“That’s her handwriting, that’s the way she writes

From the first letter I got to this her Bill of Rights”

‘Man O Sand To Girl O Sea’, the final single from the album, found Forster in a more self- assured frame of mind;

“Feel so sure of our love

I’ll write a song about us breaking up”.

This sequence of starry-eyed singles should have seen The Go-Betweens clasped lovingly to the bosom of the pop establishment. Instead, they remained exiled in the wilderness, otherwise known as the John Peel show.

Still, at the time it seemed only to be a matter of time, before their streak of bad luck would break and the Brisbane boys would be basking in the sun kissed glow of chart success. Two robust albums followed, ‘Liberty Belle And The Black Diamond Express’, (Beggars Banquet, 1986) and ‘Tallulah’, (Beggars Banquet, 1987) each spawned excellent singles in Forster’s ‘Spring Rain’, and ‘Head Full Of Pride’, as well as McLennan’s ‘Right Here’ and ‘Bye Bye Pride’.

The great British public, though, remained sceptical. Peel sessions, stadium tours in support of the band’s long time admirers, R.E.M, contractual tie-ins with a host of high profile record companies including Rough Trade, Postcard and Capitol, made not the slightest difference to the band’s outsider status. If a pop group can be described as persona non grata, then they were it! The frustration was beginning to tell, driving McLennan to comment that he’d;

“given up on the commercial success thing, which is very good for my state of mind”.

The reality was, though, that their most “commercial” album, indeed their masterpiece, was still to come but in attempting to break into the charts the band would succeed only in breaking itself apart. The omens were not good from the outset. First off, bass guitarist Robert Vickers, who had been with the group since 1983, handed in his notice. His replacement, John Willsteed, seemed an upgrade, though, and his playing certainly brought a clarity and polish to the band’s sound, in keeping with their new direction of travel. He is credited by some insiders as having played a number of the more intricate guitar parts on ’16 Lovers Lane’.

Unfortunately, Willsteed was also battling a massive drink problem and it didn’t take him long to make enemies of the rest of the band.

Furthermore, Amanda Brown, recruited after contributing violin to The Servants sublime second single ‘The Sun, A Small Star’ began a relationship with McLennan. Suddenly, word leaked out that Forster and Morrison had been in a relationship of sorts for years. Battle lines had been drawn.

At the exact same time as the Forster/McLennan friendship, begun long ago in the Drama department of the University of Queensland, was starting to disintegrate, the power-brokers at the group’s management company were trying to push McLennan into the limelight at the expense of Forster. Author David Nichols, in his book The Go-Betweens, is clear about the re-alignment that took place “every promotional video from ‘Right Here’ onwards shows Forster completely back-grounded”. Seen today the video for ‘Was There Anything I Could do’ makes a toe-curling Exhibit A, with McLennan and Brown cavorting centre stage while Forster is stationed well to the rear. Morrison was deeply unhappy, particularly about the decision to draft in producer Craig Leon. In an interview with Sydney’s ‘On The Street’ she was scathing about the shift in emphasis;

“He was chosen to make this single accessible to people, to get us to crawl out of our cult corner.”

Despite the recriminations that would inevitably follow, the next five Go-Betweens singles would all be McLennan compositions.

On a more positive note, Forster and McLennan were working on the songs for ’16 Lovers Lane’ together, rather than working individually. The spirit of collaboration instead of competition at least extended to the song-writing! Released in August 1988 (Beggars Banquet /Capitol) and produced by Mark Wallis, who’d worked with the likes of Marianne Faithful, Tom Jones and R.E.M, ’16 Lovers Lane’ was a sublime collection of glimmering guitar ballads and sugar-spun indie anthems so glossy and sun kissed that you had to wear dark glasses just to listen to it.

On the release of their debut single ‘Lee Remick’ back in 1978, Forster and McLennan had talked about capturing “that striped sunlight sound” which Forster later defined as being;

“A romantic phrase, but it is abstract. It could be the sun coming through blinds as you play a record. It’s the shimmer of a fender guitar. It’s harmonies and tough-minded pop songs. It’s lying on a bed beside a window reading a book in the afternoon. It’s the sun on a girl’s shoulder length hair. It’s Buddy Holly in the desert the day they recorded ‘Maybe Baby’. It’s t-shirts and jeans. It’s Creedence. It’s Bob. It’s Chuck Berry.”

On ’16 Lovers Lane’, made twenty years after they first articulated the concept, they came closest to perfecting its meaning.

Opening with the McLennan’s unashamedly summery ‘Love Goes On’;

“There’s a cat in the alleyway

Dreaming of birds that are blue

Sometimes girl when I’m lonely

This is how I think about you”

and ending with Forster’s majestically romantic ‘Dive For Your Memory’

“I’d dive for you

Like a bird I’d descend

Deep down I’m lonely

And I miss my friend

So when I hear you saying

That we stood no chance

I’ll dive for your memory

We stood that chance,”

’16 Lovers Lane’ (once voted 24th greatest album of the eighties, by none other than Rolling Stone magazine) could also boast another pair of McLennan classics in the ‘Streets Of Your Town’ – a song that should have occupied a place in the nation’s pop consciousness in the same way that The La’s ‘There She Goes’ or The Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby’ have done, and the wistful, heart-breaking lament,’ Quiet Heart’.

“I tried to tell you

I can only say it when we’re apart

About this storm inside of me

And how I miss your quiet, quiet heart”

‘Streets Of Your Town’ was such an obvious choice for a single that they had two cracks with it, releasing it first in October 1988 and then, refusing to accept defeat, the following summer. Sandwiched in between the twin versions of this neglected classic were two more ‘easy on the ear’ contenders, ‘Was There Anything I Could Do’ (McLennan) and ‘Love Goes On’. Both met the same miserable fate – they were steadfastly ignored.

The failure to impact on the charts, with such an obviously radio-friendly song as ‘Streets Of Your Town’, must have come as a crushing blow to Forster and McLennan and was probably the final nail in The Go-Betweens’ coffin. Broke and broken-hearted they went their separate ways.

That The Go-Betweens had swallowed their pride and danced to the tune of their paymasters, there could be no doubt. They’d flattened out the kinks in their song structures, planed off the angular edges and streamlined their sound until, with each passing record, they began to sound less and less like The Velvet Underground and more and more like Abba. Not that there is anything wrong with Abba or ’16 Lovers Lane’ itself, indeed in parts it’s a breathtakingly beautiful record. It’s just that 3/5ths of the band didn’t really want to make that type of record anymore. The Go-Betweens sold their soul, but they still didn’t sell any records!

To make matters worse there wasn’t even the consolation of making their mark in the album charts, where more mature bands could be expected to have their egos massaged by a loyal fan base, successfully built up over a lengthy career. All The Go-Betweens could muster, though, was a week at no. 91 in June 1987 with ‘Tallulah’, and one week at no. 81 for ’16 Lovers Lane’ in September 1988.

The Go-Betweens, however, did make minor inroads upon the UK Independent Charts. Before signing for Beggars Banquet the band had recorded for Rough Trade and Situation 2, qualifying them for inclusion in the Indie charts. Between 83 and 86 they had three entries in the top 40. ‘Cattle and Cane’, an autobiographical McLennan song voted by the Australasian Performing Rights Association in 2001 as one of the country’s 30 greatest songs of all time, reached no. 4 in March 1983, while ‘Man O Sand To Girl O Sea’ charted at no. 24 toward the end of the same year. A 12 inch only release of ‘Lee Remick’ peaked at no. 7 in November 1986. And there the trail runs cold.

To speculate, now, on the spectacular failure of The Go-Betweens is to set oneself an impossible task. Maybe, it was simply because they never really established a British fan base, maybe Australians appeared less cool than Americans or the dynamic duo just lacked sex appeal. It could be argued that both Forster and McLennan were not distinctive enough as singers, even that they sounded too erudite at times, for daytime radio. Maybe it was Forster’s controversial decision to play a Capitol Records promotional launch of ’16 Lovers Lane’ in an olive green dress (the company scaled down the record’s promotional budget the very next day). Or, perhaps, it was just that fate was against them all along.

In September 1985 the band had signed with Elektra, hoping for better promotion and distribution of their work. Forster was in optimistic mood “We’ve gone with Elektra – start our LP in just over a week. Without any doubt the songs are our best, we are playing our best, and with ourselves producing this unknown masterpiece, it might be great.” Within weeks Elektra had gone belly up and the band was back to square one again, much to Forster’s chagrin;

“I do think we have a sense of anger – no one’s ever been able to present us to the British public in any sort of cohesive or intelligent way.”

One thing is for sure, they had a fistful of great songs and in Forster they had someone who gave the band personality. His art-rock background led him to pay particular attention to his stage performance, although we can only presume his tongue was firmly in his cheek with this analysis of his ‘dancing’;

“Bobby Womack himself once told me that I am a soul man, and that as far as modern music is concerned there are only three soul men left: himself, me and Prince. Prince came to Brisbane and took the colours, the moves, his whole act from me. It’s true! He’s seen my moves!”

Perhaps The Go-Betweens’ drummer Lindy Morrison, speaking in 1992 was nearer the truth than I, and others, would care to admit when she offered this overview;

“We might have been one of the most lauded bands in the country, but we sold bugger all records. That’s a shame. So let’s not go on about it being one of the most lauded bands in the country, cause who cares? We didn’t sell records, we weren’t a popular band, and I’m sick of hearing about the fact that we were so fabulous – because if we were so fabulous, why didn’t anyone buy our records?”

Forster managed a slightly more laconic response;

“It was quite freeing to realise, our group is so good, and we’re getting nowhere. After a while, the lack of recognition was so absurd it was funny”.

Following their initial break up, the compilation album ‘1978-1990’ was released and allowed the music press to pass their verdict on the life and times of The Go-Betweens. Melody Maker’s Dave Jennings could barely contain his anger; “The fact that The Go-Betweens never became massive is a disgusting injustice… take The Go-Betweens to your heart, where they belong.” In 1996, writing for Select magazine Andrew Male wrote that “The only problem with listening to The Go-Betweens now is that they can’t help remind you of how crap the eighties were. The Go-Betweens produced records of quiet brilliance and got nowhere. Sting sang about a sodding turtle and became a millionaire.”

Even now, though, there isn’t exactly a critical consensus. Simon Reynolds in his definitive account of the post-punk years 1978-1984, “Rip It Up And Start Again”, devotes only one sentence to our Antipodean protagonists; “The Go-Betweens, who hailed from Australia but had a spare, plangent sound similarly rooted in Television and early Talking Heads”. It should be noted, of course, that at this stage The Go- Betweens only had ‘Send Me A Lullaby’ and ‘Before Hollywood’ under their belt. Bob Stanley in his widely acclaimed book “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah: The Story Of Modern Pop” (2013) omits them entirely from his 800 page anthology.

Any discussion of Literate Pop, though, if you are inclined to concede that the genre actually exists, if you believe great pop can be thought through, rather than instinctively felt, be cerebral rather than corporeal, would have to take into account The Go-Betweens’ collective body of work. Their singular form of romanticism, their shimmering chorus’s, their quirky, idiosyncratic lyrics and their wry pop sensibility all combined to make them one of the great post-punk pop groups. They made two albums, ‘Springhill Fair’ and ’16 Lovers Lane’ that would lose nothing in comparison with Costello’s ‘King Of America’, Lloyd Cole’s ‘Rattlesnakes’, Scritti Politti’s ‘Songs To Remember’, Mickey Newbury’s ‘Look’s Like Rain’ or The Manic Street Preachers’ ‘Everything Must Go’. In this context, their work will be remembered long after their more commercially successful contemporaries have disappeared from the recorded history of popular music.

To end, though, at the beginning. In 1978, after the local success of their debut single, ‘Lee Remick’, Forster dreamt of setting sail for England. Given the tortuous fate that awaited them on these shores, his words seem remarkably poignant now.

“England, I think, has the greatest acceptance of new music, they’re more open-minded. They write it in the NME and people buy your records. Any country that can accept Jilted John, X-Ray Spex and The Only Ones… there’s a place for The Go-Betweens.”

Source by Kevin McGrath

from Home Solutions Forev https://homesolutionsforev.com/the-go-betweens/ via Home Solutions on WordPress from Home Solutions FOREV https://homesolutionsforev.tumblr.com/post/188064333480 via Tim Clymer on Wordpress

[homesolutionsforev]

The Go-Betweens

The next time you’re down the local boozer with your mates and there’s an uncomfortable lull in the conversation, consider striking up a discussion based on the following question – which is the best band never to have had a top forty hit? Now, obviously, this is a version of the hoary old chestnut that’s passed many a drunken hour for the sports fan down the ages – who is the best footballer never to have played in the World Cup? The answer to that is a rather obvious one, of course, George Best. The musical variation of this question may be more stimulating.

Whilst Robert Lloyd and the various re-incarnations of his Brummie post-punk combo, The Nightingales, would make any respectable critics’ short list, his guttural, sub-Beefheart squeal was aimed more squarely at the underground than at the mainstream. The same uncompromising mindset also rules out the likes of New York’s Suicide and David Thomas’ experimental avant-garage group, Pere Ubu.

Soon enough, however, somebody will alight upon the only truly acceptable answer, at least the only answer acceptable to me, and a good number of other men and women of a certain age, who are each the proud possessors of a pair of rose-tinted glasses. It simply has to be those doyens of guitar pop, The Go-Betweens. The inexplicable absence from the singles chart of these Australian Indie-pop pioneers remains a mystery to this day. Not once, during their illustrious lifetime 1978-2006 (allowing for a hiatus from 1989 to 2000) did their melodic epistles ever threaten to deliver them pop stardom here, or in America. Incredibly, they even failed to secure a top 40 hit in their native Australia. This, surely, constitutes the greatest miscarriage in the history of popular music since the time Al Jolson blacked up for The Jazz Singer, declared brazenly “you ain’t heard nothing yet” and shamefacedly went on to make his fortune.

Just how the Brisbane based guitar heroes, led by singer/songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan failed to achieve even one solitary week in the top 75, despite crafting a plethora of heavenly pop songs that should have made them household names on both sides of the Atlantic, is a mystery that genuinely scrambles the brain. Indeed, it prompts the group’s long time fans to ask the age old question, the one that escapes our lips every time we drunkenly stumble upon a recording of Barry Manilow’s ‘Bermuda Triangle blaring out of a pub jukebox; ‘how could you let this happen, dear Lord, how?’

Consider some of the flotsam and jetsam that has (dis)graced the charts since the advent of Rock ‘n’ Roll. In no particular order, I give you Vanilla Ice, The Bay City Rollers, Duran Duran, Milli Vanilli, Arthur Mullard and Hilda Baker, Black Lace, MC Hammer and Sting. And, that’s just the tip of a very embarrassing iceberg!

Even more puzzling was the regular presence on the chart of bands that might best be described as second rate Go-Betweens. The very ordinary Deacon Blue springs to mind here, as well as the Trashcan Sinatras. And, how on earth do you explain the continued presence in the charts, throughout the eighties, of bands that made comparable music, both in terms of substance and style to The Go-Betweens themselves. Aztec Camera, for example, chalked up 12 hits and 74 weeks on the chart while Lloyd Cole, with or without his Commotions recorded 15 hits spread over 62 weeks.

After the band split up in 1989 Forster and McLennan each took a stab at solo stardom, in theory doubling their chances of a hit, but still the record buying public remained un-persuaded. McLennan in particular, penned a succession of gorgeous ballads throughout the nineties, the best of which, ‘Black Mule’ (1991) and ‘Hot Water’ (1994) are arguably the finest of all his compositions.

Even the French, not exactly renowned for having their finger on the pop pulse, have made The Go-Betweens something of a cause celebre. A 1996 issue of leading rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles pictured the band on its front cover with the strap-line ‘Le groupe le plus sous-estime de l’histoire du rock?’ Which, broadly translated as – The Go-Betweens the most underrated band in the history of rock? The magazine also ranked ’16 Lovers Lane’ in its list of the best albums of the period from 1976-1996.

Publié en novembre 1996.

1. The Smiths: The Queen Is Dead

2. Pixies: Doolittle

3. The Stone Roses: The Stone Roses

4. The Go-Betweens: 16 Lovers Lane

5. Portishead: Dummy

6. PJ Harvey: Dry

7. Tricky: Maxinquaye

8. Morrissey: Vauxhall & I

9. Massive Attack: Blue Lines

10. Beck: Mellow Gold

11. The Feelies: The Good Earth

12. REM: Automatic For The People

13. James: Stutter

14. The Divine Comedy: Liberation

15. The Smiths: Strangeways, Here We Come

16. My Bloody Valentine: Loveless

17. The La’s: The La’s

18. De La Soul: 3 Feet High And Rising

19. Bjork: Debut

20. Jeff Buckley: Grace

This re-appraisal of the band’s standing, together with an invitation to play at the magazine’s 10th Anniversary bash prompted Forster and McLennan to reform the group.

For a brief moment true devotees of the group allowed themselves to believe that a great wrong might be righted. Perhaps the band might strike lucky and have a song included on the soundtrack of some mega Hollywood Rom-Com. There was a precedent of sorts. The Triffids, their compatriots from Perth and themselves a seminal indie band of the eighties, nearly managed to fluke a hit when their classic song, ‘Bury Me Deep In Love’, was chosen to play over the cheesy wedding scenes of Harold and Marge on the popular daytime soap, Neighbours. The band, profile duly raised, punched home their advantage; their follow up single, “Trick Of The Light”, spent a glorious week in the charts, at no 73, in early 1988.

Sadly, despite recording a batch of very fine comeback albums, particularly 2005’s ‘Oceans Apart’, with its standout tracks ‘Here Comes A City’, ‘Born To A Family’ and ‘Darlinghurst Nights’, a familiar pattern soon re-emerged – critical acclaim on the one hand and commercial indifference on the other. The Australian media wasn’t averse to chastising the band for their perceived failure either. ABC’S current affairs show The 7:30 Report announced their return to the stage in the following manner –

“The Go-Betweens have been described as the quintessential critics’ band. They made an art form of commercial failure. But as Bernard Brown reports, they’re happy to have earned the industry’s respect, even if the dollars didn’t follow.”

Good old Bernard concluded his report with “But the band’s influence far outweighed its record sales and they wear the tag of commercial failures”.

Any hope that The Go-Betweens could somehow turn the tide disappeared once and for all with the unexpected passing of McLennan in May 2006 at the age of 48.

Any discussion of great song-writing partnerships in popular music would rightly begin with the likes of Lennon and McCartney, Bacharach and David, Leiber and Stoller, or Jagger and Richards. You shouldn’t, though, have to look too far down the list before coming across the names of Forster and McLennan, probably bracketed right alongside Difford and Tilbrook or Morrissey and Marr.

Both were capable of writing supremely catchy songs and both had the propensity to pen an eye-catching lyric. Grant McLennan’s ‘River Of Money’, from the ‘Springhill Fair’ album (Beggars Banquet, 1984) whilst rather atypical of his output (it’s more of a prose-poem than a pop song) is such a unique lyric that it demands to be quoted in full.

River Of Money

It is neither fair nor reasonable to expect sadness

to confine itself to its causes. Like a river in flood,

when it subsides and the drowned bodies of

animals have been deposited in the treetops, there is

another kind of damage that takes place beyond the torrent.

At first, it seemed as though she had only left

the room to go into the garden and had been delayed by stray

chickens in the corn. Then he had thought she might

have eloped with the rodeo-boy from the neighbouring

property but it wasn’t till one afternoon, when he

had heard guitar playing coming from her room and

had rushed upstairs to confront her and had seen

that it was only the wind in the curtains brushing

against the open strings, that he finally knew she

wasn’t coming back. He had dealt with the deluge alright

but the watermark of her leaving was still quite visible.

He had resorted to the compass then, thinking that

geography might rescue him but after one week in the

Victorian Alps he came back north, realising that snow which

he had never seen before, was only frozen water.

I’ll take you to Hollywood

I’ll take you to Mexico

I’ll take you anywhere the

River of Money flows.

I’ll take you to Hollywood

I’ll take you to Mexico

I’ll take you anywhere the

River of Money flows.

But was it really possible for him to cope with the

magnitude of her absence? The snow had failed him.

Bottles had almost emptied themselves without effect.

The television, a Samaritan during other tribulations, had

been repossessed. She had left her travelling clock

though thinking it incapable of functioning in

another time-zone; so the long vacant days of expensive sunlight

were filled with the sound of her minutes, with the measuring of

her hours.

Not the stuff of the three minute hero, I appreciate, but the pair were equally comfortable writing the standard verse, chorus, verse pop song that chimed in at a radio friendly 2.56 and wouldn’t have frightened the horses. From ‘Springhill Fair’ they released a trio of pristine singles. McLennan’s pop-by-numbers opener ‘Bachelor Kisses’ was the first to hit the shops (and stay there, in the bargain bin) followed by Forster’s heart-achingly sad confessional, ‘Part Company’;

“That’s her handwriting, that’s the way she writes

From the first letter I got to this her Bill of Rights”

‘Man O Sand To Girl O Sea’, the final single from the album, found Forster in a more self- assured frame of mind;

“Feel so sure of our love

I’ll write a song about us breaking up”.

This sequence of starry-eyed singles should have seen The Go-Betweens clasped lovingly to the bosom of the pop establishment. Instead, they remained exiled in the wilderness, otherwise known as the John Peel show.

Still, at the time it seemed only to be a matter of time, before their streak of bad luck would break and the Brisbane boys would be basking in the sun kissed glow of chart success. Two robust albums followed, ‘Liberty Belle And The Black Diamond Express’, (Beggars Banquet, 1986) and ‘Tallulah’, (Beggars Banquet, 1987) each spawned excellent singles in Forster’s ‘Spring Rain’, and ‘Head Full Of Pride’, as well as McLennan’s ‘Right Here’ and ‘Bye Bye Pride’.

The great British public, though, remained sceptical. Peel sessions, stadium tours in support of the band’s long time admirers, R.E.M, contractual tie-ins with a host of high profile record companies including Rough Trade, Postcard and Capitol, made not the slightest difference to the band’s outsider status. If a pop group can be described as persona non grata, then they were it! The frustration was beginning to tell, driving McLennan to comment that he’d;

“given up on the commercial success thing, which is very good for my state of mind”.

The reality was, though, that their most “commercial” album, indeed their masterpiece, was still to come but in attempting to break into the charts the band would succeed only in breaking itself apart. The omens were not good from the outset. First off, bass guitarist Robert Vickers, who had been with the group since 1983, handed in his notice. His replacement, John Willsteed, seemed an upgrade, though, and his playing certainly brought a clarity and polish to the band’s sound, in keeping with their new direction of travel. He is credited by some insiders as having played a number of the more intricate guitar parts on ’16 Lovers Lane’.

Unfortunately, Willsteed was also battling a massive drink problem and it didn’t take him long to make enemies of the rest of the band.

Furthermore, Amanda Brown, recruited after contributing violin to The Servants sublime second single ‘The Sun, A Small Star’ began a relationship with McLennan. Suddenly, word leaked out that Forster and Morrison had been in a relationship of sorts for years. Battle lines had been drawn.

At the exact same time as the Forster/McLennan friendship, begun long ago in the Drama department of the University of Queensland, was starting to disintegrate, the power-brokers at the group’s management company were trying to push McLennan into the limelight at the expense of Forster. Author David Nichols, in his book The Go-Betweens, is clear about the re-alignment that took place “every promotional video from ‘Right Here’ onwards shows Forster completely back-grounded”. Seen today the video for ‘Was There Anything I Could do’ makes a toe-curling Exhibit A, with McLennan and Brown cavorting centre stage while Forster is stationed well to the rear. Morrison was deeply unhappy, particularly about the decision to draft in producer Craig Leon. In an interview with Sydney’s ‘On The Street’ she was scathing about the shift in emphasis;

“He was chosen to make this single accessible to people, to get us to crawl out of our cult corner.”

Despite the recriminations that would inevitably follow, the next five Go-Betweens singles would all be McLennan compositions.

On a more positive note, Forster and McLennan were working on the songs for ’16 Lovers Lane’ together, rather than working individually. The spirit of collaboration instead of competition at least extended to the song-writing! Released in August 1988 (Beggars Banquet /Capitol) and produced by Mark Wallis, who’d worked with the likes of Marianne Faithful, Tom Jones and R.E.M, ’16 Lovers Lane’ was a sublime collection of glimmering guitar ballads and sugar-spun indie anthems so glossy and sun kissed that you had to wear dark glasses just to listen to it.

On the release of their debut single ‘Lee Remick’ back in 1978, Forster and McLennan had talked about capturing “that striped sunlight sound” which Forster later defined as being;

“A romantic phrase, but it is abstract. It could be the sun coming through blinds as you play a record. It’s the shimmer of a fender guitar. It’s harmonies and tough-minded pop songs. It’s lying on a bed beside a window reading a book in the afternoon. It’s the sun on a girl’s shoulder length hair. It’s Buddy Holly in the desert the day they recorded ‘Maybe Baby’. It’s t-shirts and jeans. It’s Creedence. It’s Bob. It’s Chuck Berry.”

On ’16 Lovers Lane’, made twenty years after they first articulated the concept, they came closest to perfecting its meaning.

Opening with the McLennan’s unashamedly summery ‘Love Goes On’;

“There’s a cat in the alleyway

Dreaming of birds that are blue

Sometimes girl when I’m lonely

This is how I think about you”

and ending with Forster’s majestically romantic ‘Dive For Your Memory’

“I’d dive for you

Like a bird I’d descend

Deep down I’m lonely

And I miss my friend

So when I hear you saying

That we stood no chance

I’ll dive for your memory

We stood that chance,”

’16 Lovers Lane’ (once voted 24th greatest album of the eighties, by none other than Rolling Stone magazine) could also boast another pair of McLennan classics in the ‘Streets Of Your Town’ – a song that should have occupied a place in the nation’s pop consciousness in the same way that The La’s ‘There She Goes’ or The Human League’s ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby’ have done, and the wistful, heart-breaking lament,’ Quiet Heart’.

“I tried to tell you

I can only say it when we’re apart

About this storm inside of me

And how I miss your quiet, quiet heart”

‘Streets Of Your Town’ was such an obvious choice for a single that they had two cracks with it, releasing it first in October 1988 and then, refusing to accept defeat, the following summer. Sandwiched in between the twin versions of this neglected classic were two more ‘easy on the ear’ contenders, ‘Was There Anything I Could Do’ (McLennan) and ‘Love Goes On’. Both met the same miserable fate – they were steadfastly ignored.

The failure to impact on the charts, with such an obviously radio-friendly song as ‘Streets Of Your Town’, must have come as a crushing blow to Forster and McLennan and was probably the final nail in The Go-Betweens’ coffin. Broke and broken-hearted they went their separate ways.

That The Go-Betweens had swallowed their pride and danced to the tune of their paymasters, there could be no doubt. They’d flattened out the kinks in their song structures, planed off the angular edges and streamlined their sound until, with each passing record, they began to sound less and less like The Velvet Underground and more and more like Abba. Not that there is anything wrong with Abba or ’16 Lovers Lane’ itself, indeed in parts it’s a breathtakingly beautiful record. It’s just that 3/5ths of the band didn’t really want to make that type of record anymore. The Go-Betweens sold their soul, but they still didn’t sell any records!

To make matters worse there wasn’t even the consolation of making their mark in the album charts, where more mature bands could be expected to have their egos massaged by a loyal fan base, successfully built up over a lengthy career. All The Go-Betweens could muster, though, was a week at no. 91 in June 1987 with ‘Tallulah’, and one week at no. 81 for ’16 Lovers Lane’ in September 1988.

The Go-Betweens, however, did make minor inroads upon the UK Independent Charts. Before signing for Beggars Banquet the band had recorded for Rough Trade and Situation 2, qualifying them for inclusion in the Indie charts. Between 83 and 86 they had three entries in the top 40. ‘Cattle and Cane’, an autobiographical McLennan song voted by the Australasian Performing Rights Association in 2001 as one of the country’s 30 greatest songs of all time, reached no. 4 in March 1983, while ‘Man O Sand To Girl O Sea’ charted at no. 24 toward the end of the same year. A 12 inch only release of ‘Lee Remick’ peaked at no. 7 in November 1986. And there the trail runs cold.

To speculate, now, on the spectacular failure of The Go-Betweens is to set oneself an impossible task. Maybe, it was simply because they never really established a British fan base, maybe Australians appeared less cool than Americans or the dynamic duo just lacked sex appeal. It could be argued that both Forster and McLennan were not distinctive enough as singers, even that they sounded too erudite at times, for daytime radio. Maybe it was Forster’s controversial decision to play a Capitol Records promotional launch of ’16 Lovers Lane’ in an olive green dress (the company scaled down the record’s promotional budget the very next day). Or, perhaps, it was just that fate was against them all along.

In September 1985 the band had signed with Elektra, hoping for better promotion and distribution of their work. Forster was in optimistic mood “We’ve gone with Elektra – start our LP in just over a week. Without any doubt the songs are our best, we are playing our best, and with ourselves producing this unknown masterpiece, it might be great.” Within weeks Elektra had gone belly up and the band was back to square one again, much to Forster’s chagrin;

“I do think we have a sense of anger – no one’s ever been able to present us to the British public in any sort of cohesive or intelligent way.”

One thing is for sure, they had a fistful of great songs and in Forster they had someone who gave the band personality. His art-rock background led him to pay particular attention to his stage performance, although we can only presume his tongue was firmly in his cheek with this analysis of his ‘dancing’;

“Bobby Womack himself once told me that I am a soul man, and that as far as modern music is concerned there are only three soul men left: himself, me and Prince. Prince came to Brisbane and took the colours, the moves, his whole act from me. It’s true! He’s seen my moves!”

Perhaps The Go-Betweens’ drummer Lindy Morrison, speaking in 1992 was nearer the truth than I, and others, would care to admit when she offered this overview;

“We might have been one of the most lauded bands in the country, but we sold bugger all records. That’s a shame. So let’s not go on about it being one of the most lauded bands in the country, cause who cares? We didn’t sell records, we weren’t a popular band, and I’m sick of hearing about the fact that we were so fabulous – because if we were so fabulous, why didn’t anyone buy our records?”

Forster managed a slightly more laconic response;

“It was quite freeing to realise, our group is so good, and we’re getting nowhere. After a while, the lack of recognition was so absurd it was funny”.

Following their initial break up, the compilation album ‘1978-1990’ was released and allowed the music press to pass their verdict on the life and times of The Go-Betweens. Melody Maker’s Dave Jennings could barely contain his anger; “The fact that The Go-Betweens never became massive is a disgusting injustice… take The Go-Betweens to your heart, where they belong.” In 1996, writing for Select magazine Andrew Male wrote that “The only problem with listening to The Go-Betweens now is that they can’t help remind you of how crap the eighties were. The Go-Betweens produced records of quiet brilliance and got nowhere. Sting sang about a sodding turtle and became a millionaire.”

Even now, though, there isn’t exactly a critical consensus. Simon Reynolds in his definitive account of the post-punk years 1978-1984, “Rip It Up And Start Again”, devotes only one sentence to our Antipodean protagonists; “The Go-Betweens, who hailed from Australia but had a spare, plangent sound similarly rooted in Television and early Talking Heads”. It should be noted, of course, that at this stage The Go- Betweens only had ‘Send Me A Lullaby’ and ‘Before Hollywood’ under their belt. Bob Stanley in his widely acclaimed book “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah: The Story Of Modern Pop” (2013) omits them entirely from his 800 page anthology.

Any discussion of Literate Pop, though, if you are inclined to concede that the genre actually exists, if you believe great pop can be thought through, rather than instinctively felt, be cerebral rather than corporeal, would have to take into account The Go-Betweens’ collective body of work. Their singular form of romanticism, their shimmering chorus’s, their quirky, idiosyncratic lyrics and their wry pop sensibility all combined to make them one of the great post-punk pop groups. They made two albums, ‘Springhill Fair’ and ’16 Lovers Lane’ that would lose nothing in comparison with Costello’s ‘King Of America’, Lloyd Cole’s ‘Rattlesnakes’, Scritti Politti’s ‘Songs To Remember’, Mickey Newbury’s ‘Look’s Like Rain’ or The Manic Street Preachers’ ‘Everything Must Go’. In this context, their work will be remembered long after their more commercially successful contemporaries have disappeared from the recorded history of popular music.

To end, though, at the beginning. In 1978, after the local success of their debut single, ‘Lee Remick’, Forster dreamt of setting sail for England. Given the tortuous fate that awaited them on these shores, his words seem remarkably poignant now.

“England, I think, has the greatest acceptance of new music, they’re more open-minded. They write it in the NME and people buy your records. Any country that can accept Jilted John, X-Ray Spex and The Only Ones… there’s a place for The Go-Betweens.”

Source by Kevin McGrath

from Home Solutions Forev https://homesolutionsforev.com/the-go-betweens/ via Home Solutions on WordPress

[republicstandard]

Lower Learning: The Collapse of Higher Education

The fundamental divide of our time is hereditary nationalism versus globalism. The defining struggle is the nation-state and the right for all people to have self-determination versus the supra-national corporatocratic Leviathans. A plethora of dystopian and totalitarian futures are presently on the table, but so is the return to the nation-state with real, enforceable borders and a people united in purpose, spirit, and common ancestry.

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Nationalism itself is exclusively the province of the Right —borders (for Western nations at least) now being anathema to the Left— and is calibrated along the civic nationalist-to-ethno-nationalist axis. Civic nationalism is a very enticing siren song, but it is a lethal illusion. Most non-Whites do not share the same values as Whites, and a truly “Proposition Nation” is doomed to fail. In the Western context, the Left has inadvertently tipped its hand by attempting to de-construct “Whiteness,” with the implicit acknowledgment that Western civilization and the White race are inextricable. This does not mean it is exclusive to Whites, as we have “fellow travelers” of soul and spirit, but it does mean that, to quote Sam Francis:

In so far as White Americans still care about their culture — the Constitution, religion, science, art, language, literature, aesthetics, social institutions, and morals — they must care about the race that created them and sustains them and without which they cannot exist. [The new racial rhetoric of publications like American Renaissance] does not, as far as I can recall, argue that race by itself is sufficient to create and sustain our civilization, but it does insist, clearly and unequivocally, that race is necessary.

The spread of “liberalism” has proven to be little more than the intentional knocking down of the foundational pillars of Western civilization, and the “dismantling of Whiteness” necessarily takes on an increasingly genocidal character in such an environment. Witness the consequences of the “championing of democracy” in South Africa and Rhodesia. Does it look like reconciliation and national harmony, or does it look like ethnic cleansing under the guise of redress of past wrongs? Returning to Francis:

A concerted and long-term attack against the civilization of White, European and North American man has been launched, and the attack is not confined to the political, social, and cultural institutions that characterize the civilization but extends also to the race that created the civilization and continues to carry and transmit it today. The war against White civilization sometimes (indeed often) invokes liberal ideals as its justification and as its goal, but the likely reality is that the victory of the racial revolution will end merely in the domination or destruction of the White race and its civilization by non-White peoples.

In a country that has been utterly fractured demographically, the only tie that binds is a shared hatred for Whites—and reinforcements arrive daily. Our immigration policy is geared specifically to demographically swamp the Whites that built this country, and it also serves another ideological purpose: Victor Davis Hanson points out that the bulk of the immigrants—legal and illegal—that arrive in America are low-skill and have low educational attainment, and when they fail to immediately achieve parity, the Democrats can start screeching about inequities and systemic racism. The academy has become both a forward operating base for anti-White indoctrination and genocidal rhetoric, as well as but one arm of the multi-billion-dollar “diversity” and grievance-mongering racket, which has burrowed itself like a tick into every corporation, every law firm, every federal department of something-or-other, and every university, engorged with self-righteousness and others’ capital, buttressed by a multiplicity of bloated “non-profits” and advocacy groups.

In today’s colleges and universities, things are worse than ever; the race-baiting of the Obama administration exacerbated an already strained campus environment:

During the Obama administration, the Education Department…received 1,073 complaints about racial harassment in higher education. Generally, the number of complaints a year is up, compared to prior years. Since 2010, the smallest number of complaints in a fiscal year is 137 (in 2010). In the five years prior to the Obama administration, the number of complaints never exceeded 95 and was generally smaller than that (in the 50s).

As college becomes a veritable “rite of passage” for today’s youth, it means a growing number will be forced to endure at least four years of relentless pro-Cultural Marxist indoctrination. There is a very good chance they have been marinated in it from an early age as well, given the state of the teaching profession and its unions. Once on campus, Steve Salerno gives us a disturbingly far-from-comprehensive overview:

New York’s Hunter College promotes coursework for poli-sci majors in “the abolition of Whiteness.” Stanford examines “abolishing Whiteness as a cultural identity.” Elsewhere, to cite just a few examples, classes at Grinnell and UW-Madison confront “the problem of Whiteness.” New Mexico’s St. John’s College takes on the “depravity” of Whiteness. Moreover, academic theorists crusade to purge Whiteness from STEM courses, because critical thinking and research are regarded as tools of “White hegemony.” Engineering students at Purdue must contend with the school’s indictment of “racist and colonialist projects in science,” while a UC-Irvine professor condemns even “technical prowess” as a White male construct. A Linfield college Gender Studies professor even condemns her peers for putting “stellar” colleagues in leadership roles, because stellar individuals, she notes, tend to be White and thus have benefited unfairly from “a logic of meritocracy that is built on this racist assumption that everyone has had the same access and opportunities.” UCLA pays students a stipend to act as professional social justice activists who will diagnose, expose, and combat “Whiteness” and “the patriarchy” in all campus manifestations.

So it’s not just anti-White, anti-Western Marxism, but misandry as well—selectively applied, of course. If their protected classes of various colored peoples “act out,” the behaviors will be explained away as reflecting some iniquity of the White Male Patriarchy. The University of Texas just launched “MasculinUT: Healthy Masculinities Project by Voices against Violence in the Counseling and Mental Health Center,” yet another program dedicated to the feminization and excoriation of all things “male.” The Left wants men to basically be sea-horses. It is gestation in this milieu that produces creatures such as recent New York Times hire Sarah Jeong. As Heather Mac Donald informs us:

There is a multi-million dollar diversity bureaucracy on most college campuses today that is dedicated to the very propositions that Sarah Jeong embodies—things like “Whiteness” is a source of all evil in the world, lethal to people of color; a contempt for objectivity and truth-seeking; a belief that all females exist in a state of oppression by “rape culture.” This diversity bureaucracy hits students with this ideology from the moment they step foot on campus, putting them in the throes of a very terrible delusion. American college students are the most privileged human beings in history, simply by virtue of their access to vast educational opportunities and yet college presidents on down tell them that they are the subject of ubiquitous racism on the college campus itself.

Regarding the uniform defense of Sarah Jeong’s anti-White tweets by the Left and the “Muh Principles” Conservatism, Inc. drones, Rod Dreher addresses the former group:

What’s awesome is how progressives are defending Harvard Law graduate Sarah Jeong’s racism because she’s “punching up.” A graduate of Harvard Law School. Punching up. My God, the left today is a demented, privileged joke.

Not only that, but Sarah Jeong’s race—Asians—are the highest-earning race in America, with a median household income over $16,000 greater than that of the Whites she’s “punching.” The Left defines racism as power plus privilege. Jeong is the walking embodiment of privilege and yet somehow her defenders on the Left have arrived at the conclusion that she is a champion of the oppressed. Universities such as UCONN with their “Social Justice Organizing” minor are becoming more blatant in their commitment to churning out a steady supply of “professional activists” and agitators. As Heather MacDonald explains:

[Universities] are hatred machines. There is a conveyor belt from the academy into the world-at-large into corporations, into the media…Sarah Jeong was treated with a big yawn by mainstream media and by liberal institutions because her ideology is banal. It is simply the state of the art right now, whether it’s the New York Times, CNN, or the Washington Post.

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When the students hit the job market, they can expect to be advantaged or disadvantaged based on race just as in the college admissions process. The cost of compliance is prohibitive; in 1991, what amounts to a whopping 4% of GDP ($225 billion) was spent on enforcing and complying with the various procedures and regulations of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a number that grew to $347 billion by 2005 and $540 billion by 2008, to say nothing of the opportunity cost of being forced to hire an under-qualified candidate based solely on race or ethnicity. The US government offers a certain percentage of its contracts to companies that are minority-owned—with no consideration given to price or quality. Despite the fact that both the 1964 and 1991 Civil Rights Acts explicitly ban racial quotas, and the fact that Affirmative Action is unconstitutional, the practice not only continues, and has not only become even more entrenched, but it has expanded as well. The EEOC is but one arm of the vast federal Leviathan that lavishes minorities with entitlements, advantages, special legal protections, and various programs and benefits over and beyond what the average White American can expect to receive. The average negative budgetary impact of a single black individual over the course of their lifetime is $750,000! For Hispanics, it is $500,000, but for Whites, it is a positive $220,000. The average White will, in the course of their lifetime transfer close to $400,000 in taxes to a single black individual. As of 2012, 54% of all native Hispanic households and 55% of all native black households used some form of welfare, as opposed to 23.1% of Whites and 21.8% of Asians.

As presented in Edwin S. Rubenstein’s “Affirmative Action and the Costs of Diversity,” Harvard economist Richard Freeman noted that young black male and young White male college graduates had achieved income parity by the 1970s. Black college-educated females out-earn White college-educated females by 125% and they are also awarded more college degrees as a percentage of the population. Women, in general, earn 60% of Bachelor’s degrees, 60% of Master’s degrees, and 52% of PhDs. Single women under thirty out-earn the men in their peer group in 147 of the 150 largest cities in America, and female CEOs of all age groups out-earn their male counterparts. Yet we incessantly hear about “racism,” discrimination, and pay gaps. For once, the Left is right, but the only thing is they got their races and sexes mixed up.

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine https://ift.tt/2nZb8zz via IFTTT

[gritgirl]

HOW BTS & RICH CHIGGA RECONTEXTUALIZE ASIAN MASCULINITY IN AMERICAN AFTER “GANGNAM STYLE”

Until earlier this year, PSY’s “Gangnam Style” had held the position of most viewed video on YouTube for almost five years.Today, it has 2.96 billion views. It was the first Asian song to successfully cross-over to the American market, making it to #2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart and even being featured on numerous talk shows and even the NFL. However, without the polished glamour and sex appeal of other pop songs, PSY’s success begs to answer the question: Why did so many Americans watch “Gangnam Style”?

While most people would attribute the song’s success to its comedic absurdity, others believe that there are more negative and nuanced reasons for an Asian entertainer to skyrocket to the top of the charts. Michael K. Park suggests that one reason for PSY’s popularity is rooted in how his performance reinforces the emasculated Asian male discourse in American media. In “Gangnam Style”, the men are unattractive and clownish (PSY, Yoo Jae Suk, and Noh Hong-chul are all professional comedians) while the women are hyper sexualized (e.g. 4Minute’s Hyuna, the women doing yoga, and female dancers in tight outfits.) According to Park, this juxtaposition emphasizes how Asian men are not only sexless but how that lack of masculinity is supposed to be funny. In addition, when PSY was featured on mainstream American television (The Ellen Show, SNL, and the Today Show), he was often not given the opportunity to introduce himself as an entertainer, and usually delegated to performing his comical horse dance repeatedly. Like how minstrel shows would entertain at the expense of African Americans in the early 19thcentury, Park argues that PSY joins William Hung, The Green Hornet’s Kato, and The Hangover’s Mr. Chow as Asian characters that are laughed at for who they are more than anything else.

Despite Park’s scathing analysis of America’s perception of Asian male entertainers, there are two Asian male musical acts that are gaining traction in the American music market: K-pop boy group BTS and even more recently, the teenage rapper Rich Chigga.

A hip-hop/R&B idol group originally marketed to Korean teen girls, BTS has exceeded expectations by becoming popular internationally and breaking numerous records for a K-pop group in Asia and the Western music market. Some of their greatest accomplishments have been: the Mnet’s Asian Music Awards (MAMA) 2016 Artist of the Year, Korean Consumer Forum’s Brand of the Year Award’s Artist of the Year and most recently, having 1 million copies of their new album “Her” pre-ordered. In the American music market, they won Billboard’s 2017 Top Social Artist award and sold-out their five-stop US tour earlier this year. The New York Times even published an infographic based on Youtube views from January 2016 to April 2017, that places BTS as the 44th largest music fandom in America. The fact that BTS sold tens of thousands of tickets from New York to Chicago in a matter of minutes shows that the group is certainly popular—but for a different reason than their Asian-American predecessors and PSY.

As a fan of BTS myself, I attest their popularity in America to the same reasons that K-pop idol groups flourish in South Korea. People enjoy listening to their music, admire their performances and learn more about their personalities through variety show and livestream appearances. In an industry saturated with company produced love songs, BTS distinguished themselves by being able to pull off the norm, but by also championing their self-composed songs about more controversial topics that affect young adults. The song “No More Dream” encourages their young audience to follow their true dreams, rather than those of their parents and society. Member Suga’s self-produced mixtape “AgustD” addresses his own experiences with depression and social anxiety. Their music video for “I Need U” depicts the members dealing with mental illness, violence and loneliness, as well as the joys of being in the moment, reckless behavior and friendship. Another music video, “Dope“, brags about how hard the boys have worked to get to their position as top artists and has reached 221 million views as of today.

Apart from the topics they sing and rap about, BTS have also differentiated themselves from the electronic pop songs that dominated the late 2000s (e.g. SHINee’s “Replay”, BIGBANG’s “Lollipop”, Super Junior’s “Sorry Sorry”, etc.) with their musical style by debuting as a hip-hop/R&B group. Hip-hop originated from minority-dominated American neighborhoods in the South Bronx rife with poverty. Since the 1980s-1990s, rap music has been associated with gangsters, crime, and violence–– qualities that are also associated with black masculinity. By crafting rap as their own, BTS highlights their own manliness and rough qualities in a similar fashion. Though their lyrics do not focus on the same topics, some of the imagery associated with American hip-hop has been adopted by the group: The chorus of “We are Bulletproof part.2” features the members singing “click click/bang bang” while they perform choreography that mimics pointing guns at the audience. BTS’s musical style is not only reflected in their music but also in their stage outfits. In their first performances, the group wore black shirts with gold chains, bandanas underneath snapbacks and basketball shoes (though still wearing eyeliner and stage makeup.) A performance trailer shows the members marching in formation, wearing military uniforms and dancing to heavy metal music with gunshots in the background. Even their marketing includes masculine imagery: “BTS” stands for the romanization of their Korean name, which translates to “Bulletproof boy scouts”, their official fan club name is A.R.M.Y., and their light stick is in the form of a bomb.

However, BTS (like many K-pop groups) usually changes their concept for every comeback; in terms of message, musical genre, styling–– and because it’s the topic of this post, even their masculinity. They appeal to multiple audiences for not only embracing their tough hip-hop image, but by also fitting typical beauty standards and boyish qualities expected of idols. Their fan club name A.R.M.Y. actually stands for “Adorable Representative M.C for Youth”. They partake in what some would categorize as effeminate: they wear makeup, sport brightly colored contacts and hair, and have performed in choker necklaces and scarves. And despite how this may clash with their rough, hip-hop image, their looks matter. This is because idols’ appearances and their objective attractiveness to their fans is an intrinsic part of K-pop: it is typical for a group to a have a designated member(s) who are “in charge of visuals”– the conventionally good-looking members of the group. It is expected of idol groups to perform cute actions called aegyo, sexy dances or even have their shoulders measured for broadness to appeal to fans. Commenters on YouTube videos of K-pop performances and online forums such as Reddit and NAVER mention the song quality and dancing just as frequently as they do on how idols look. In fact, when BTS attended the May 2017 American Billboard music awards, one of their “visual” members, Jin, grabbed attention for his good looks: viewers unfamiliar with the group labeled him as “the third member from the left”, which became a trending topic on Twitter. The group’s ability to straddle the lines of gender norms is a shift from the strict views that Americans have towards masculinity, mainly because in the K-pop industry these expectations are absent. What’s more is that fans from all around the world are loving it: Amazon and a Sony subsidiary have allowed pre-ordered or stocked BTS’s new album, their most recent single “DNA” has reached the #67 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for the week of Oct. 14. as well as other success on the World Album and World Digital Song Sales charts.

BTS’s rise to popularity in America, while record-breaking for a K-pop act, was based on grueling pratice and promotion since the members were teenage trainees. This is completely different from another Asian male musician to recently break into the mainstream market: an eighteen-year-old Indonesian rapper named “Rich Chigga.” His song “Dat Stick” has 69 million views on YouTube since its debut in early February 2016, went on to sell at least 500,000 units and lead to a nation-wide tour.

Though “Dat Stick” is a legitimate rap song, the track was originally only “half-serious.” Brian Imanuel, Rich Chigga’s real name, had been posting comedic videos on Vine and Twitter starting from age eleven and still wants to purse comedy as his long-term goal. In the music video, Imanuel wears a pink polo shirt and a fanny pack and is surrounded by three friends as they drive around, show off alcohol and hang out. In a reaction video that helped “Dat Stick” become viral, rappers (including popular artists such as Desiigner and Ghostface Killah) comment on the juxtaposition between the tough rap song and the fanny pack; presumably because a fanny pack is more often associated with someone’s middle-aged father, rather than an up-and-coming hip-hop artist. One reactor, 21Savage, comments “[The song]’s aight. Yeah. The music don’t match him, though.” Another rapper named Cam’ron says “This kid’s like 16. His voice is mad deep, he don’t look nothing like he sounds. It was dope though.” Despite Imanuel’s appearance, the rappers unanimously end up positively reviewing the song.

As it became a viral hit through Facebook newsfeeds and YouTube, “Dat Stick” gave Rich Chigga the achievement of being the first good Asian rapper to break into mainstream American music market. And though Rich Chigga was “verified” by other rappers, it can’t be said that the popularity of “Dat Stick” is solely due to his rapping abilities. First off, his name “Rich Chigga” immediately brings attention to race: not only his Asian heritage (even though he is Indonesian) and but also because it references the n-word. Many of the YouTube comments on “Dat Stick” are racist jokes that poke fun at how Rich Chigga differs from the Asian stereotype.

A big factor in “Dat Stick”’s appeal is the irony that Imanuel doesn’t look or act like the typical American rapper: but to determine whether or not his popularity is due to his race being used as a spectacle or his skills as a rapper are taken seriously is difficult to say. Could audiences enjoy “Dat Stick” because they think it’s funny to see what they perceive to be an emasculated Asian man spit hyper-masculinized rap? It’s possible. But it certainly isn’t as strong of a case for neo-minstrelsy like PSY in “Gangnam Style.” While Rich Chigga’s deep voice and lyrics are hyper masculine, this masculinity isn’t emphasized visually. But he isn’t emasculated either (unless you count wearing a pink shirt): there are no over-sexualized women and none of the boys do anything outwardly funny. Rich Chigga’s subsequent releases have followed this trend, with “Glow Like Dat” and very recently, “Chaos” having 25 and 5 million views respectively. It will be the success of these and future songs that will give more insight about what Rich Chigga symbolizes to his audience.

Unlike other Asian performers in the American entertainment industry, such as JabbaWockeeZ and Far East Movement, who have distanced themselves from their Asian identities by using sunglasses or masks, neither BTS and Rich Chigga attempt such precautions. Perhaps this is since they are from different countries where Asians make up most the population and did not grow up with the nuances of racism understood by Asian-Americans.

Neither Rich Chigga or BTS have reached the astronomical success of PSY, but they also do not match the emasculated Asian male stereotype as much as he does. BTS frequently highlights their masculinity in their performances, while Rich Chigga’s raps continues to attract millions of views. The popularity of both musicians could imply a changing American perspective about Asian masculinity for the better. “Gangnam Style” was released only five years ago, and these younger male artists’ entire careers have been made in even less time—if times are changing because of a new generation that challenges stereotypes, it could happen sooner than we think.

[demitgibbs]

Jaimie Wilson Plays to His Own Beat

Brody Levesque Jaimie Wilson, 21, is rambling along in his custom Jeep Wrangler 4×4, headed for a gig to perform his beloved country music in his adopted home state of Florida. Shirtless, tanned, fit, and blond-haired, he looks like most every other young man his age who is entering adulthood trying to figure out where his path will take him. As the Jeep rolls down the freeway, his guitar and overnight bag perched in the back seat, windows rolled down, he sings along to the radio, the oversize off-road tires humming as the miles fly by. But life wasn’t always like this for his handsome young man. In fact, getting to this point was actually pretty difficult for Jaimie. He grew up the youngest of four children in rural Livingston County, Michigan, near its county seat of Howell. This is an area of Michigan that is deeply red, religious, and conservative. He and his three older brothers lived on their family’s horse farm. It was there that and Jaimie kept a secret which he knew he couldn’t share with his closest friends or family. He knew, from as early as age five, that he wanted to be a boy! Jaimie, you see, was born a girl. He described growing up as difficult, hardly permitted to be a tomboy by his deeply religious and conservative family, who were opposed to anything related to the LGBT community, to the point there was never, ever, any mention of LGBT people. Jaimie waited until the second semester of his senior year of high school to come out, knowing that his family was hardly affirming. February 4, 2015, though, became Jaimie’s red letter day. “When I realized that I was “different,” I decided I would never come out. It just wasn’t an option for me because I knew how my family would react. It was something I was just going to have to bury deep and deal with. But I woke up one morning and decided I was done living a lie. A few days earlier I had watched a viral video by Ruby Rose entitled Break Free and it was like a lightbulb went off. I needed to break free! So I called a nearby salon and made the earliest appointment I could. I cut my long-flowing locks. I didn’t tell anyone I was doing it. I just came home that day with short hair and dressed in men’s clothing.” Jaimie had spent countless hours searching YouTube and other internet portals trying to find others like him, trying to find himself. He describes grabbing hand-me-downs from his older brothers, without their knowledge, to wear when he was alone. He related that he’d tuck his long flowing hair up under a baseball cap, throw a pair of jeans and a shirt and transform himself, at least for the moment, into his ‘real self’. That winter day when he decided that he needed to live as his true and authentic self was traumatic. “My mom and dad did not react well. There was a lot of crying and confusion. A lot of ridicule. They made it impossible for me to stay with them. Still in high school, I was forced to move out and fend for myself. One of my brothers initially was supportive but his opinion changed shortly after I came out. My family (mom, dad and brothers) have progressively just gotten worse about my transition and we no longer have a relationship.” Jaimie’s anchor in what had become a tumultuous and oft-times drama-filled life was his love of music. He had started playing piano at around the age of five and picked up playing guitar when he was 16. His mother had an old guitar she was getting ready to throw out and she offered it to him first. Music, he says, became his escape. One of the primary outlets for his musical creativity became YouTube. In a video posted on October 15, 2013 prior to his transition, Jaimie wanted to raise awareness regarding suicide among LGBT youth with an original song he’d written. “My hopes for this song is not to make you sad…but to inspire you to reach out to others, because a friend, can sometimes be a life-saver. Every single person is important, and if anyone ever needs a friend or someone to talk to I’m here.” Music, he explains, is much more than just a personal passion: it is a way to contribute, to give back. “Being transgender, I have always struggled with trying to make others happy but I want to show that it’s okay to break free. I’m hoping with these words I can bring the community together and encourage others in similar situations to be true to themselves.” It was the realization that his family was going to remain unsupportive and unyielding in their opposition to his decision to live his life authentically that crystallised his decision to move away from the confines of his Michigan hometown. “I like sun and water and warm places, so moving to South Florida made sense,” he said. Jaimie knew now he had to be open about himself. He documented his journey in countless pictorial posts on social media as he made his transition to help fellow female-to-male trans people like himself. He picked an Instagram handle that was his bench mark, the date of his medical transition, June 15, 2015. His selected screen name? Tboy61915. “I started my medical transition on June 19, 2015 and [had my] top surgery in September 2015. It was important to me to get top surgery because I didn’t identify with having a female chest,” he said adding, “it was an amazing day and a weight off my shoulders!” “I started my Instagram account June of 2015, a few days before starting hormone therapy. I started the page to document my transition and changes. In the early stages of realizing I was transgender, I would look at FTM guys on Instagram and look at their progress and top surgery and voice changes. It was extremely helpful and inspiring. I wanted to make sure I had a place to document my journey as well so I started an Instagram for that.”

“My motive for being a trans activist is spreading awareness. I am in a position to be able to help others and be visible, so I do what I can. I had no support from family or friends so I know how helpful it can be to have someone give out binders, donate to their GoFundMe campaigns, speak for them when they don’t have the voice. It’s very important to me,” he said. As he continues to rack up thousands of views on his YouTube videos and has built an audience of nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram, he pursues his musical career, interweaving his music with an unabashed commitment to his trans advocacy. On the subject of music and genre he explained, “I grew up listening to country music so that’s really my roots and what I enjoy to write and sing. I love all genres of music and get a lot of requests for pop covers as well. Recently I’ve gotten more into the production of music. I used to have my songs recorded at a studio but now I’ve been doing all the production, recording, mixing and mastering myself. I’m looking forward to working with more people in helping them take their ideas and make them a reality.” One recent song, “Soldier,” posted to his YouTube channel last month, talks about his take on personal battles people face daily, but also his conflicts as a trans man. “I wrote the song to speak to everyone because, whether they show it or not, every single person is going through struggles in their life. We are all soldiers fighting our own battles. In the song I express that although life is difficult, love can help you overcome anything. For me personally, the song “Soldier” was about living my own truth while battling against hurtful words and actions. Even though coming out was very hard for me and I endured a lot of pain, I did my best and do my best to keep love by my side. Again, love can help you overcome anything.” He also DJ’s around Florida and performs at gay bars, Pride events, and charity events. When asked why he wasn’t living in either Nashville, home to Country Western or even Memphis, he was direct and blunt: “Nashville and Memphis are not trans-inclusive as far as the country scene goes. Country music does not have very much LGBT representation. I would really like to break that barrier.” Is there room for a transgender country music star? Jamie is convinced there is. “Absolutely. I think doing so would really help make trans visible. I am a country singer who happens to be trans. For me it is very important to be open about being transgender, I take it as a opportunity to spread awareness.” He sees fellow musician Steve Grand as someone to follow. Grand is a singer and songwriter who’s been acclaimed by some to be the first openly gay male country performer and the first to attract mainstream attention after building a massive following on social media and the Internet. But Jaimie is dedicated to continuing his work building his own following and his own fan base. He continues to also remain dedicated to his advocacy work as a vital component of who he is as a person, and as a performer. “Music is something I do to make myself feel complete; I would still be writing and singing even if no one wanted to hear. I don’t write with a specific audience in mind. I never want to limit myself or listening audience. I just sing and write what comes naturally to me, and I’m very grateful for anyone who enjoys!” Asked if he would consider auditioning for one of the popular talent shows such as The Voice, the X-Factor, or America’s Got Talent, he was coy but didn’t rule out those possibilities . “I do gigs around Florida, but I’m not limited to Florida. I have a 10-state tour and two international stops coming up this year.” For now at least, he’ll continue to pursue his dream, working hard on building his fan base, writing and performing his songs, dee-jaying gigs, and strumming his guitar to his own unique tune. Brody Levesque is journalist and currently the chief political correspondent for The New Civil Rights Movement Web Magazine and the former Washington Bureau Chief for LGBTQ Nation magazine. Photograph courtesy of Jaimie Wilson

from Hotspots! Magazine https://hotspotsmagazine.com/2017/05/16/jaimie-wilson-plays-to-his-own-beat/ from Hot Spots Magazine https://hotspotsmagazine.tumblr.com/post/160734151970

[cynthiajayusa]

Jaimie Wilson Plays to His Own Beat

Brody Levesque Jaimie Wilson, 21, is rambling along in his custom Jeep Wrangler 4×4, headed for a gig to perform his beloved country music in his adopted home state of Florida. Shirtless, tanned, fit, and blond-haired, he looks like most every other young man his age who is entering adulthood trying to figure out where his path will take him. As the Jeep rolls down the freeway, his guitar and overnight bag perched in the back seat, windows rolled down, he sings along to the radio, the oversize off-road tires humming as the miles fly by. But life wasn’t always like this for his handsome young man. In fact, getting to this point was actually pretty difficult for Jaimie. He grew up the youngest of four children in rural Livingston County, Michigan, near its county seat of Howell. This is an area of Michigan that is deeply red, religious, and conservative. He and his three older brothers lived on their family’s horse farm. It was there that and Jaimie kept a secret which he knew he couldn’t share with his closest friends or family. He knew, from as early as age five, that he wanted to be a boy! Jaimie, you see, was born a girl. He described growing up as difficult, hardly permitted to be a tomboy by his deeply religious and conservative family, who were opposed to anything related to the LGBT community, to the point there was never, ever, any mention of LGBT people. Jaimie waited until the second semester of his senior year of high school to come out, knowing that his family was hardly affirming. February 4, 2015, though, became Jaimie’s red letter day. “When I realized that I was “different,” I decided I would never come out. It just wasn’t an option for me because I knew how my family would react. It was something I was just going to have to bury deep and deal with. But I woke up one morning and decided I was done living a lie. A few days earlier I had watched a viral video by Ruby Rose entitled Break Free and it was like a lightbulb went off. I needed to break free! So I called a nearby salon and made the earliest appointment I could. I cut my long-flowing locks. I didn’t tell anyone I was doing it. I just came home that day with short hair and dressed in men’s clothing.” Jaimie had spent countless hours searching YouTube and other internet portals trying to find others like him, trying to find himself. He describes grabbing hand-me-downs from his older brothers, without their knowledge, to wear when he was alone. He related that he’d tuck his long flowing hair up under a baseball cap, throw a pair of jeans and a shirt and transform himself, at least for the moment, into his ‘real self’. That winter day when he decided that he needed to live as his true and authentic self was traumatic. “My mom and dad did not react well. There was a lot of crying and confusion. A lot of ridicule. They made it impossible for me to stay with them. Still in high school, I was forced to move out and fend for myself. One of my brothers initially was supportive but his opinion changed shortly after I came out. My family (mom, dad and brothers) have progressively just gotten worse about my transition and we no longer have a relationship.” Jaimie’s anchor in what had become a tumultuous and oft-times drama-filled life was his love of music. He had started playing piano at around the age of five and picked up playing guitar when he was 16. His mother had an old guitar she was getting ready to throw out and she offered it to him first. Music, he says, became his escape. One of the primary outlets for his musical creativity became YouTube. In a video posted on October 15, 2013 prior to his transition, Jaimie wanted to raise awareness regarding suicide among LGBT youth with an original song he’d written. “My hopes for this song is not to make you sad…but to inspire you to reach out to others, because a friend, can sometimes be a life-saver. Every single person is important, and if anyone ever needs a friend or someone to talk to I’m here.” Music, he explains, is much more than just a personal passion: it is a way to contribute, to give back. “Being transgender, I have always struggled with trying to make others happy but I want to show that it’s okay to break free. I’m hoping with these words I can bring the community together and encourage others in similar situations to be true to themselves.” It was the realization that his family was going to remain unsupportive and unyielding in their opposition to his decision to live his life authentically that crystallised his decision to move away from the confines of his Michigan hometown. “I like sun and water and warm places, so moving to South Florida made sense,” he said. Jaimie knew now he had to be open about himself. He documented his journey in countless pictorial posts on social media as he made his transition to help fellow female-to-male trans people like himself. He picked an Instagram handle that was his bench mark, the date of his medical transition, June 15, 2015. His selected screen name? Tboy61915. “I started my medical transition on June 19, 2015 and [had my] top surgery in September 2015. It was important to me to get top surgery because I didn’t identify with having a female chest,” he said adding, “it was an amazing day and a weight off my shoulders!” “I started my Instagram account June of 2015, a few days before starting hormone therapy. I started the page to document my transition and changes. In the early stages of realizing I was transgender, I would look at FTM guys on Instagram and look at their progress and top surgery and voice changes. It was extremely helpful and inspiring. I wanted to make sure I had a place to document my journey as well so I started an Instagram for that.”

 “My motive for being a trans activist is spreading awareness. I am in a position to be able to help others and be visible, so I do what I can. I had no support from family or friends so I know how helpful it can be to have someone give out binders, donate to their GoFundMe campaigns, speak for them when they don’t have the voice. It’s very important to me,” he said. As he continues to rack up thousands of views on his YouTube videos and has built an audience of nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram, he pursues his musical career, interweaving his music with an unabashed commitment to his trans advocacy. On the subject of music and genre he explained, “I grew up listening to country music so that’s really my roots and what I enjoy to write and sing. I love all genres of music and get a lot of requests for pop covers as well. Recently I’ve gotten more into the production of music. I used to have my songs recorded at a studio but now I’ve been doing all the production, recording, mixing and mastering myself. I’m looking forward to working with more people in helping them take their ideas and make them a reality.” One recent song, “Soldier,” posted to his YouTube channel last month, talks about his take on personal battles people face daily, but also his conflicts as a trans man. “I wrote the song to speak to everyone because, whether they show it or not, every single person is going through struggles in their life. We are all soldiers fighting our own battles. In the song I express that although life is difficult, love can help you overcome anything. For me personally, the song “Soldier” was about living my own truth while battling against hurtful words and actions. Even though coming out was very hard for me and I endured a lot of pain, I did my best and do my best to keep love by my side. Again, love can help you overcome anything.” He also DJ’s around Florida and performs at gay bars, Pride events, and charity events. When asked why he wasn’t living in either Nashville, home to Country Western or even Memphis, he was direct and blunt: “Nashville and Memphis are not trans-inclusive as far as the country scene goes. Country music does not have very much LGBT representation. I would really like to break that barrier.” Is there room for a transgender country music star? Jamie is convinced there is. “Absolutely. I think doing so would really help make trans visible. I am a country singer who happens to be trans. For me it is very important to be open about being transgender, I take it as a opportunity to spread awareness.” He sees fellow musician Steve Grand as someone to follow. Grand is a singer and songwriter who’s been acclaimed by some to be the first openly gay male country performer and the first to attract mainstream attention after building a massive following on social media and the Internet. But Jaimie is dedicated to continuing his work building his own following and his own fan base. He continues to also remain dedicated to his advocacy work as a vital component of who he is as a person, and as a performer. “Music is something I do to make myself feel complete; I would still be writing and singing even if no one wanted to hear. I don’t write with a specific audience in mind. I never want to limit myself or listening audience. I just sing and write what comes naturally to me, and I’m very grateful for anyone who enjoys!” Asked if he would consider auditioning for one of the popular talent shows such as The Voice, the X-Factor, or America’s Got Talent, he was coy but didn’t rule out those possibilities . “I do gigs around Florida, but I’m not limited to Florida. I have a 10-state tour and two international stops coming up this year.” For now at least, he’ll continue to pursue his dream, working hard on building his fan base, writing and performing his songs, dee-jaying gigs, and strumming his guitar to his own unique tune. Brody Levesque is journalist and currently the chief political correspondent for The New Civil Rights Movement Web Magazine and the former Washington Bureau Chief for LGBTQ Nation magazine. Photograph courtesy of Jaimie Wilson

source https://hotspotsmagazine.com/2017/05/16/jaimie-wilson-plays-to-his-own-beat/ from Hot Spots Magazine http://hotspotsmagazin.blogspot.com/2017/05/jaimie-wilson-plays-to-his-own-beat.html

[hotspotsmagazine]

Jaimie Wilson Plays to His Own Beat

Brody Levesque Jaimie Wilson, 21, is rambling along in his custom Jeep Wrangler 4×4, headed for a gig to perform his beloved country music in his adopted home state of Florida. Shirtless, tanned, fit, and blond-haired, he looks like most every other young man his age who is entering adulthood trying to figure out where his path will take him. As the Jeep rolls down the freeway, his guitar and overnight bag perched in the back seat, windows rolled down, he sings along to the radio, the oversize off-road tires humming as the miles fly by. But life wasn’t always like this for his handsome young man. In fact, getting to this point was actually pretty difficult for Jaimie. He grew up the youngest of four children in rural Livingston County, Michigan, near its county seat of Howell. This is an area of Michigan that is deeply red, religious, and conservative. He and his three older brothers lived on their family’s horse farm. It was there that and Jaimie kept a secret which he knew he couldn’t share with his closest friends or family. He knew, from as early as age five, that he wanted to be a boy! Jaimie, you see, was born a girl. He described growing up as difficult, hardly permitted to be a tomboy by his deeply religious and conservative family, who were opposed to anything related to the LGBT community, to the point there was never, ever, any mention of LGBT people. Jaimie waited until the second semester of his senior year of high school to come out, knowing that his family was hardly affirming. February 4, 2015, though, became Jaimie’s red letter day. “When I realized that I was “different,” I decided I would never come out. It just wasn’t an option for me because I knew how my family would react. It was something I was just going to have to bury deep and deal with. But I woke up one morning and decided I was done living a lie. A few days earlier I had watched a viral video by Ruby Rose entitled Break Free and it was like a lightbulb went off. I needed to break free! So I called a nearby salon and made the earliest appointment I could. I cut my long-flowing locks. I didn’t tell anyone I was doing it. I just came home that day with short hair and dressed in men’s clothing.” Jaimie had spent countless hours searching YouTube and other internet portals trying to find others like him, trying to find himself. He describes grabbing hand-me-downs from his older brothers, without their knowledge, to wear when he was alone. He related that he’d tuck his long flowing hair up under a baseball cap, throw a pair of jeans and a shirt and transform himself, at least for the moment, into his ‘real self’. That winter day when he decided that he needed to live as his true and authentic self was traumatic. “My mom and dad did not react well. There was a lot of crying and confusion. A lot of ridicule. They made it impossible for me to stay with them. Still in high school, I was forced to move out and fend for myself. One of my brothers initially was supportive but his opinion changed shortly after I came out. My family (mom, dad and brothers) have progressively just gotten worse about my transition and we no longer have a relationship.” Jaimie’s anchor in what had become a tumultuous and oft-times drama-filled life was his love of music. He had started playing piano at around the age of five and picked up playing guitar when he was 16. His mother had an old guitar she was getting ready to throw out and she offered it to him first. Music, he says, became his escape. One of the primary outlets for his musical creativity became YouTube. In a video posted on October 15, 2013 prior to his transition, Jaimie wanted to raise awareness regarding suicide among LGBT youth with an original song he’d written. “My hopes for this song is not to make you sad…but to inspire you to reach out to others, because a friend, can sometimes be a life-saver. Every single person is important, and if anyone ever needs a friend or someone to talk to I’m here.” Music, he explains, is much more than just a personal passion: it is a way to contribute, to give back. “Being transgender, I have always struggled with trying to make others happy but I want to show that it’s okay to break free. I’m hoping with these words I can bring the community together and encourage others in similar situations to be true to themselves.” It was the realization that his family was going to remain unsupportive and unyielding in their opposition to his decision to live his life authentically that crystallised his decision to move away from the confines of his Michigan hometown. “I like sun and water and warm places, so moving to South Florida made sense,” he said. Jaimie knew now he had to be open about himself. He documented his journey in countless pictorial posts on social media as he made his transition to help fellow female-to-male trans people like himself. He picked an Instagram handle that was his bench mark, the date of his medical transition, June 15, 2015. His selected screen name? Tboy61915. “I started my medical transition on June 19, 2015 and [had my] top surgery in September 2015. It was important to me to get top surgery because I didn’t identify with having a female chest,” he said adding, “it was an amazing day and a weight off my shoulders!” “I started my Instagram account June of 2015, a few days before starting hormone therapy. I started the page to document my transition and changes. In the early stages of realizing I was transgender, I would look at FTM guys on Instagram and look at their progress and top surgery and voice changes. It was extremely helpful and inspiring. I wanted to make sure I had a place to document my journey as well so I started an Instagram for that.”

  “My motive for being a trans activist is spreading awareness. I am in a position to be able to help others and be visible, so I do what I can. I had no support from family or friends so I know how helpful it can be to have someone give out binders, donate to their GoFundMe campaigns, speak for them when they don’t have the voice. It’s very important to me,” he said. As he continues to rack up thousands of views on his YouTube videos and has built an audience of nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram, he pursues his musical career, interweaving his music with an unabashed commitment to his trans advocacy. On the subject of music and genre he explained, “I grew up listening to country music so that’s really my roots and what I enjoy to write and sing. I love all genres of music and get a lot of requests for pop covers as well. Recently I’ve gotten more into the production of music. I used to have my songs recorded at a studio but now I’ve been doing all the production, recording, mixing and mastering myself. I’m looking forward to working with more people in helping them take their ideas and make them a reality.” One recent song, “Soldier,” posted to his YouTube channel last month, talks about his take on personal battles people face daily, but also his conflicts as a trans man. “I wrote the song to speak to everyone because, whether they show it or not, every single person is going through struggles in their life. We are all soldiers fighting our own battles. In the song I express that although life is difficult, love can help you overcome anything. For me personally, the song “Soldier” was about living my own truth while battling against hurtful words and actions. Even though coming out was very hard for me and I endured a lot of pain, I did my best and do my best to keep love by my side. Again, love can help you overcome anything.” He also DJ’s around Florida and performs at gay bars, Pride events, and charity events. When asked why he wasn’t living in either Nashville, home to Country Western or even Memphis, he was direct and blunt: “Nashville and Memphis are not trans-inclusive as far as the country scene goes. Country music does not have very much LGBT representation. I would really like to break that barrier.” Is there room for a transgender country music star? Jamie is convinced there is. “Absolutely. I think doing so would really help make trans visible. I am a country singer who happens to be trans. For me it is very important to be open about being transgender, I take it as a opportunity to spread awareness.” He sees fellow musician Steve Grand as someone to follow. Grand is a singer and songwriter who’s been acclaimed by some to be the first openly gay male country performer and the first to attract mainstream attention after building a massive following on social media and the Internet. But Jaimie is dedicated to continuing his work building his own following and his own fan base. He continues to also remain dedicated to his advocacy work as a vital component of who he is as a person, and as a performer. “Music is something I do to make myself feel complete; I would still be writing and singing even if no one wanted to hear. I don’t write with a specific audience in mind. I never want to limit myself or listening audience. I just sing and write what comes naturally to me, and I’m very grateful for anyone who enjoys!” Asked if he would consider auditioning for one of the popular talent shows such as The Voice, the X-Factor, or America’s Got Talent, he was coy but didn’t rule out those possibilities . “I do gigs around Florida, but I’m not limited to Florida. I have a 10-state tour and two international stops coming up this year.” For now at least, he’ll continue to pursue his dream, working hard on building his fan base, writing and performing his songs, dee-jaying gigs, and strumming his guitar to his own unique tune. Brody Levesque is journalist and currently the chief political correspondent for The New Civil Rights Movement Web Magazine and the former Washington Bureau Chief for LGBTQ Nation magazine. Photograph courtesy of Jaimie Wilson

from Hotspots! Magazine https://hotspotsmagazine.com/2017/05/16/jaimie-wilson-plays-to-his-own-beat/