#he just knows the names of 5 nirvana songs in case an actual nirvana fan shows up to show dominance

[stilbiesrevivedclone]

Casual outfits! <3

[doomedandstoned]

I’ll Take a Sling of Singapore Sludge, Thank You

  Axis Mundi is the name. Learn it well. 

It wasn't two months ago that I stumbled upon 'The Depths' (2019), debut EP by sludge metal trio AXIS MUNDI. I'm aware of merely a handful of heavy bands from the Republic of Singapore (which is totally my fault, I'm sure), but it wasn't just the novelty of relative obscurity that gave the band its allure. When I listened to The Depths, it was its hard-biting heaviness, gritty realism, and (I confess) the courage to cover Nirvana that ultimately endeared me to vocalist Sathish Kumar, guitarist Vinod Dass, and drummer Mitch Goon. Following is my exchange with Vinod about the band's origins, the meaning behind their name, and what it's like to be oh so sludge in Singapore.

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I have to say, we haven't encountered too many sludge or death-doom bands in Singapore, but it's encouraging to see more and more with each passing year. Tell us, if you please, how Axis Mundi got its start and introduce us to the members of the band.

The idea to form this band came to me in early 2018 after coming back to home soil after staying abroad for about two years. I got my first exposure to the sludge and stoner doom in Melbourne Australia by getting my face completely melted off by Dixie and gang from Weedeater, it was one of the first gigs I attended in Melbourne and it really resonated with me as it was something completely fresh and different from the mainly thrash and death scene metal -- the whole lineup for this band all played and still play in death metal bands back home. (laughs) And seeing then drummer Travis Owens bouncing sticks off the floor while destroying the drums was a life changing experience no doubt.

I had some things to express and found myself naturally starting to write in the direction of sludge and doom and decided it was time to get some partners in crime, so I got in touch with Mitch for drums, since we played together in a previous band for close to a decade and I knew his hard hitting style would suit the sound I was going for.

I then hit up Sathish, who was the vocalist of his band I was sessioning bass for. I loved his low growls and aggression and thought it was a perfect fit for what I wanted. We formed around march of 2018, so it is a very fresh band although its members have been (and still are) close friends for more than a decade.

What is the significance of the name Axis Mundi?

The term Axis Mundi hit me after getting into the study of symbols and their significance to the human mind. I had always found them interesting and the deeper I read into them the symbol of the World Tree kept reappearing in art and media I resonated with, especially during the writing phase of this EP, so I let things take their course. Its basic idea is the center of the universe, the connection of higher and lower, heaven and earth, Consciousness and the Unconscious.

What are some distinctives of your style? Asked another way, how would you describe your sound to someone who has never heard you before?

What resulted from the three of us coming together was a blend of the sludge and doom riffs together with a faster tempo coupled with brutal vocals. I was listening to a lot of High on Fire, Monolord and Nails, my drummer was listening to Dyscarnate and Aborted and my vocalist was pushing Full of Hell and Comeback Kid. So ideas were pulled from all these sources!

You have a new EP! Walk us through it, please, track by track (sharing any background about each song's composition and recording, lyrical and thematic tie-ins, and any anecdotes that come to mind related to each).

Track 1 – The Depths

The Depths EP by Axis Mundi

The basic idea behind this track was it was going to be a noise track introducing the album and was meant to put the idea of being “down in the depths” to the listener, which was kind of how I was feeling as I wrote this record, so I though this was a good place to begin. I took this chance to give some Bladerunner 2049 worship. That movie was a goddamn religious experience sonically and visually.

Track 2 – Summoning the Serpent

The Depths EP by Axis Mundi

This song was the first song to be completed in terms of writing for the EP. It was one of the cases where I had a couple of riffs and had no idea how to bring them together or even if they were going to be part of the same song, but the moment the band came together, everything fit together like a jigsaw puzzle out of the blue, that kind of creative spark is the shit I live for. The basic idea for the song is the looking inside of oneself to come face to face with your fears and your flaws, to summon them up like a serpent and face them.

Track 3 – Revelations

The Depths EP by Axis Mundi

The opening riff of this song is the riff which gave birth to the band, it was one of the first riffs written, but it was also one of the last songs to be completed as we were writing for an album. The writing process for this song was really one of patience, I would try some ideas out with the band, they wouldn’t work and we would be back at the drawing board, but I remember I had to keep reminding myself not to rush things and cram some jackass riff in there just to finish the song. It had to feel right.

The driving force of this song was one of searching -- searching for clarity, for vision, for meaning. It ties in with Track 2 as Summoning the Serpent is like an admission of wrongdoing and Revelations is like a search for a new path.

Track 4 – Territorial Pissings

The Depths EP by Axis Mundi

I am a super huge Nirvana fan and I knew I wanted to cover one of their songs for this release. I also wanted to do it our way and put our own twist to it as I love it when bands do that. This was another song that came out the way it was in like 10 minutes, and now that I’m thinking about it, the chorus of this song actually ties in with Revelations. (laughs) Life is strange.

Who is responsible for the album art and what does it signify?

The album art work is done by Faris Samri, a killer drummer I used to play with in a black metal band! I happened upon some of his designs and thought he could take my rough demo for the album art to the next level. I came into contact with the Adinkra symbol "Hye Won Hye" which basically means "that which cannot be burnt," a West African symbol of endurance, which I thought was perfect for the EP. I then decided to recreate the symbol with the goat skull and Christ on the cross, which is the voluntary acceptance of suffering, symbolically speaking. The skull and cross was mirrored downward, creating the symbol of Hye Won Hye, as well as signifying the duality within a person, light and dark, love and hate and the struggle to balance them. Faris took it to the next level with the addition of flames to the lower half. Here is his take on it:

“The artwork was meant to resemble an Adinkran symbol of endurance. Reading more into its origins, it is said that the symbol got its meaning from traditional priests who were capable of walking on fire without being burnt. This made me inclined to include the element of fire from its history into my illustration.

I began by drawing the first goat skull, engulfing it in flames, scorching some of its original skeletal features. Before I began on the second skull, I realised I was not fond of the idea of having two identical burning goat skulls, as I could have easily duplicated the one i had just drawn and inverted it to complete the illustration. Referring back to the bed of fire the priests had to walk on, I decided to illustrate flames in the shape of the goat skull instead of the actual skull. These newly drawn flames will enter through the first goat skull, which exhibits the skull’s imperishability in such circumstances.

The next step was to colour the piece, which I did on Photoshop as I wanted to experiment with a selection of palettes I had come up with. The colours chosen mostly had a gore or horror vibe about them, referencing older metal album artworks from bands like Slipknot or Mastodon, to Horror film posters such as It or Blair Witch Project.”

What are some of the bands you play with in Singapore and, more specifically, how is the doom-sludge scene in your country?

Mitch and I played in a death metal outfit called Zaganoth, which was our first serious band and Sathish used to head another death metal band called Stillborn and both bands used to play shows with each other in the past!

Now besides playing in this band I play guitars for Truth Be Known a death/funcore veteran band that is heading down south to Australia for the Dead of Winter Festival! I also play in a band called Mucus Mortuary which is a -- well, I don’t have words to describe this band you have to see it for yourself. (laughs)

The sludge and doom scene in Singapore is pretty small even within the heavy music scene here (might be the insane laws against drugs but who knows eh?) however the bands that are currently holding up the banner are killer, check out Marijannah, Hrvst and Beelzebud!

Thank you so much for visiting with Doomed & Stoned! We wish you much success now and in the future.

Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to some music coming out of a dot in the world map! I am humbled and grateful for this opportunity and may The Doomed and Stoned Show last for many seasons to come!

God Luck and Good Speed.

The Great Axis Mundi Giveaway!

Come one, come all! Get your own copy of 'The Depths' (2019) by Axis Mundi by grabbing one of the available download codes below. Hurry, these will go quickly! Redeem them here.

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15 years ago, 'Rock Star: Supernova' rocked reality television

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/entertainment/15-years-ago-rock-star-supernova-rocked-reality-television/

15 years ago, 'Rock Star: Supernova' rocked reality television

Gillby Clarke, ‘Rock Star: Supernova’ winmer Lukas Rossi, Tommy Lee, and Jason Newsted in 2006. (Photo: Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

Before David Cook became the first rock winner of American Idol or Adam Lambert made TV history with his game-changing, Jeff Buckley-esque “Ring of Fire” cover, there was CBS’s Rock Star: Supernova — a search for the lead singer for a new supergroup comprising Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, ex-Metallica bassist Jason Newsted, and ex-Guns N’ Roses guitarist Gilby Clarke. (Lambert even credited Rock Star: Supernova runner-up Dilana’s “Ring of Fire” performance as an inspiration for his Idol arrangement.) 

The Dave Navarro-cohosted talent show, which premiered 15 years ago on July 5, 2006, was an “anti-Idol” of course, featuring covers of songs by Nirvana, the Verve, Hole, Radiohead, the Killers, Dramarama, Pink Floyd, R.E.M., Depeche Mode, the Kinks, Living Colour, Failure, Franz Ferdinand, the Police, Talking Heads, Cheap Trick, Bob Dylan, Soul Asylum, Stone Temple Pilots, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, and even the actual Jeff Buckley — at a time when that was unheard-of on all other singing competitions.

“It was real. It wasn’t like karaoke with somebody up there just singing some dumb s***. It was real music,” Lee tells Yahoo Entertainment. “I really think [Rock Star: Supernova executive producer] Mark Burnett was way ahead of his time in wanting to deliver that kind of thing to prime-time America. Like, ‘Here’s some real s***. These guys are going to look for a singer. They’re going to make a record. They’re going to go on tour.’ … It totally was ahead of its time.”

The blueprint for Rock Star: Supernova was arguably created a year earlier with Rock Star: INXS, a questionable and somewhat distasteful reality show set up by Burnett and the surviving members of Australian pop-rock band INXS to replace late INXS frontman Michael Hutchence. (Another future American Idol rock trailblazer, Chris Daughtry, actually unsuccessfully auditioned for that show.) Canadian glam-rocker Lukas Rossi eventually won Rock Star: Supernova after performing his self-penned original power ballad “Headspin” on the finale (which, again, was not typical for reality shows of the era), but he tells Yahoo Entertainment/SiriusXM Volume that when his friend suggested he try out for Burnett’s new Rock Star spinoff, he balked — because initially, Rock Star Season 2 was going to be a search for the replacement singer of another big, established rock group, not for the singer of a brand-new band.

Story continues

“My life seemed pretty grim at that point. I was in Montreal, going from friends’ to friends’ houses and trying to get my band, Rise Electric, off the ground. I was literally in minus-40-degree weather, living in an abandoned bowling alley and covering myself up with newspaper just to keep warm. I got a call out of the blue from a friend of mine, [EMI Music Publishing executive] Barb Sedun, and she was like, ‘Hey, there’s this show and they’re looking for a singer.’ And she mentioned another band. I was like, ‘I can’t replace that singer! That’s just not right!’ … It was Van Halen — that’s what she said to me. And I was like, ‘Absolutely not. I don’t want to pretend to be their new singer.’ I mean, I love Van Halen, but that’s just not my persona. I’d be lying to the fans and their fans and to myself.”

Rossi was homeless and destitute after leaving his home base of Toronto following a breakup with a cheating girlfriend, and he had focused all his energy on the fledgling Rise Electric. “I put all my eggs into one basket, because I’m a firm believer. My daddy used to say, ‘Whaddya got for plan B, after all this music s***?’ And I’m like, ‘If you need a plan B, that means your plan A is pretty s***ty, dude.’ So, I didn’t have a plan B. Or a plan C.” Still, Rossi admits that he was tempted to try out for what he believed was going to be Rock Star: Van Halen. “It was a hard freakin’ pill to swallow, because I was frickin’ broke, dude. I had nothing.”

However, a week later Sedun phoned Rossi again to let him know that Rock Star had changed direction, and its second season would instead center on a new hard-rock supergroup featuring A-list musicians, with superstar producer Butch Walker set to record their album. “I was like, ‘Hell yeah, dude! That’s what I was like!’” When Rossi had no way of affording a trip to the nearest audition city, Vancouver, Canada, Sedun footed the bill. “She’s like, ‘I’ll pay for you to get there. Just go and kick ass. I know you can do this. I believe in you.’ I packed up my backpack — I had all my belongings in a backpack — and I went there, terrified.”

Rossi confesses that he “drank a few too many pints” before he tried out with “Headspin” (which he’d written just a week earlier) and Live’s “Lightning Crashes,” and he initially thought he’d ruined his chances. “I was so nervous. I walk in, and there’s this dark room. It’s like really weird, like this little stage lit up with one light and the rest is this empty theater,” he recalls. “And then halfway through that I hear, ‘Why are you sweating so much?’ I was like, ‘Who said that?’ I’m looking around, and then I see Jason Newsted through the darkness. And I said, ‘Oh, hey, dude. I just had a couple of pints and it’s hot as s*** in here. That light above me is hot, dude!’”

Apparently the skunk-haired Rossi’s rock ‘n’ roll attitude — which likely would not have impressed the stuffier powers-that-be on, say, Idol or America’s Got Talent in 2006 — was an asset on Rock Star: Supernova. “There was a chuckle in the darkness,” Rossi remembers. Moments after he left that audition and started walking down the street with his guitar case in hand, a casting agent from the show chased him down and invited him to return the next day. And even later, when Rossi got on the show and botched his live, televised performance of Hole’s “Celebrity Skin” — when his “brain took a big dookie” and he forgot the words — that rawness and authenticity worked in his favor. “When you take your life too seriously, man, that only goes so far. That’s, like, a real person. [Rock musicians] trip over things once in a while. We do things wrong. You have to be yourself,” Rossi shrugs. 

Unfortunately, the Rossi-fronted band that formed after the show’s finale was not nearly as successful as the show itself. First, there was a branding issue when the new group, which was supposed to be called Supernova, had to officially change its name to the clunkier Rock Star Supernova (minus the TV series title’s colon), after an established Orange County pop-punk trio named Supernova sued and was granted an injunction. (One key piece of evidence was a Myspace message from Butch Walker noting that Burnett Productions, CBS, Lee, Newsted, and Clarke had been informed that another Supernova already existed, but they had proceeded anyway.) 

The hastily renamed Rock Star Supernova’s surprisingly solid, Walker-produced self-titled album, which included “Headspin” as a single and featured Rossi’s writing credits on four other cuts, debuted at No. 4 in Rossi’s native Canada, where it eventually went platinum. (Check out two circa-2006 performances by the band at Yahoo’s studio below.) But in the U.S., the album stalled at No. 101 on the Billboard 200 and received virtually no radio airplay. It was likely that the reality-television stigma hurt Rock Star Supernova’s chances of being taken seriously in the hard rock world, despite the project’s A-list pedigree.

“I think a lot of people think it’s baggage, like it is not ‘authentic’ or whatever, like it’s the ‘Hollywood TV version’ of something,” Walker, who also appeared as a guest judge on the show, tells Yahoo Entertainment/SiriusXM Volume. “But that being said, I mean, that’s what people sign up for when they watch.”

“We toured everywhere, all the way to Australia and back, but I’m a firm believer that timing is everything, you know?” muses Rossi. “And honestly, I don’t know, because I went out there every single night and gave it my all, dude. Me and Tommy were hungry, but maybe the rest of them — I’m not gonna mention people — but maybe somebody wanted Dilana to win instead of me. We’ll just leave it at that.”

Dilana, who toured as Rock Star Supernova’s opening act in 2007, was actually happy and relieved to place second on the show, as she ultimately didn’t think she was the right fit for the supergroup’s music. “I wanted to get as far as I could, but after I heard their first original, I was kind of bummed,” she confesses to Yahoo Entertainment. “That was exactly when I knew: ‘I don’t want to be the singer in this band.’ I’m not dissing them — I mean, they’re great songs, and Butch Walker is a fantastic, amazing, creative artist — but they’re just not me. They picked me to be the first [contestant] to sing an original on the show, and it was a challenge for me. After that, I knew there was no way I would be in this band, singing this material. And I made the mistake by actually informing some people about it the night before the finale.

“Someone posed the question, ‘What are you going to say [if you win]? What’s your little speech going to be?’ And, I said, ‘Well, if I win it, I’m going to decline it,’” Dilana continues. “Everyone knew it was either Lukas or I, so I said, ‘Lukas, you’re going to get it.’ And I think they were videotaping us at that point. So, I have a sneaky suspicion that somehow the producers got word to the band, and maybe they decided to make sure that I didn’t get picked. … Maybe they told the band and the band was like, ‘We’re not going to get humiliated like that.’ But, maybe the TV people were like, ‘Oh, this would be great television!’ Who knows what happened? But everyone also knew that Lukas was definitely Tommy’s favorite from day one, so it worked out perfectly for me. I didn’t have to embarrass anybody, I didn’t have to get kind of nervous if I had won, and I got exactly what I wanted. I wanted the exposure, and that’s what I got.”

“There was a lot of people involved. There were a lot of cooks in the kitchen. Everybody had their own manager. I mean, you can just see how that’s going to go,” sighs Walker. “There were a lot of people trying to get squeezed through the same rathole with all of their ideas. But they were all great people. I really enjoyed the experience, and Mark Burnett is awesome.”

Rossi was disappointed when Rock Star Supernova lasted only one album/touring cycle, but like Dilana, he used the exposure to further his solo career, and he and Lee remain buddies to this day. (“He’s the best dude. He’s like my tall, skinny daddy. I love that dude,” Rossi gushes.) Most recently, Rossi sang two tracks on Lee’s 2020 solo album Andro, the original “You Dancy” and a cover of Prince’s “When You Were Mine.” And Rock Star: Supernova changed Rossi’s life in a more important and lasting way: Shortly after the show, Lee and Navarro fixed him up with their friend, former adult film actress Kendra Jade. “We met up at Barney’s Beanery and literally spent the next two whole weeks in bed. It was mental,” Rossi laughingly recalls of their first date. Lukas and Kendra eloped in 2007; adopted a son, Bryden, in 2015; and now happily reside in Nashville. 

“The music was secondary [to the Rock Star: Supernova experience]. Everybody I’ve met through that whole journey was so awesome,” Rossi adds. “Like I was telling you, I was on the street, I had nothing, and all of a sudden I get thrown into meeting all these wonderful people. … We were all there to do what we love most. Plus, we got to have free drinks and be on television and make a bunch of wonderful, wonderful fans. I mean, God, it was the best time of my life.”

Tommy Lee and Lukas Rossi (Photo: Jordan Strauss/WireImage)

“That’s all it ever was to be — it was a great experience,” says Lee. Rossi does wish that Burnett had continued focusing on rock ‘n’ roll reality shows instead of moving on to the more mainstream and less rockin’ NBC show The Voice (“Why? That’s like McDonald’s cutting off their Big Macs,” he quips), but Lee does believe that Rock Star: Supernova changed music television 15 years ago, attesting: “I think it paved the way for a lot of the shows that are here today, definitely.”

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:

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This above Lukas Rossi and Butch Walker interviews are taken from their appearances on the SiriusXM show “Volume West.” Full audio of those conversations are available via the SiriusXM app.

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[wazafam]

Like with any reality TV series, some of the cast members on Netflix's The Circle come onto the show already being well-known within the social media world as influencers. Others, meanwhile, slowly gather a following as episodes of the show stream. Regardless of how or when they acquired their followers, the cast of season 2 of The Circle includes both those who have thousands of followers already and those who only have followers in the four figures.

RELATED: Netflix's The Circle: The 10 Most Popular Cast Members, Ranked By Instagram Followers 

Chances are that by the end of the show, however, most, if not all, of the cast members will have doubled or tripled their social media following. For now, however, how do they rank?

9 Lisa (Lance Bass) – 2,805

Lisa came into the house fully confident that she would be able to fool everyone into believing she was Lance Bass from the '90s boy band NSYNC since she has worked as his personal assistant for years and knows him in and out. The problem is that most of the cast is in their 20s and doesn't even know who Bass is.

While Bass himself has more than half a million Instagram followers, Lisa (@liseed) only has a few thousand, ranking her last on the list. She seems fairly new to Instagram, however, with only about a dozen posts to date, the first of which was posted in December 2020.

8 Lee (River) – 5,681

Lee, a boomer pretending to be a 24-year-old gay man, is an author who has written several books, which he promotes via his Instagram account @leeswiftauthor. He has experience pretending to be someone else since he writes many of his books under a pen name.

He has written romance novels under the pseudonyms Kris Cook and Lana Lynn. Lee believes his ability to pretend to be someone else along with his gift for putting pen to paper (or voice to text, in this case) would help him in the game. But while he is famous in the novelist world, he isn't quite a social media influencer just yet.

7 Jack (Emily) – 8,046

Jack has a fun personality and believes he can fool everyone by pretending to be a young woman named Emily, using the photo of his actual friend for his fake profile. He has a long way to go on social media, though, as he has just over 8,000 followers on Instagram under his handle @jackatkins21.

RELATED: Fan Favorite Cast Members Of The Circle Season 2, Ranked 

That said, like all cast members, his following continues to rise so chances are he might have significantly more as time goes on. He doesn't promote much on the page, which seems fairly new with only 25 posts to date, even though the first is dated in 2018.

6 Terilisha – 17,800

While she went onto the show touting her job as a teacher along with her love of science, according to Terilisha's Instagram page, @terilisha, she is a recording artist, songwriter, and actress as well. She has a decent following of more than 17,000 followers that continues to grow as she sparks conflict in the house.

Her Instagram page promotes her own website as well, which features audio clips of her songs, a variety of photos, and links to her music on streaming sites like Apple Music and Spotify.

5 Courtney – 31,000

Courtney came into the game with a pretty solid social media following on Instagram already (@courtneyrevolution) thanks to his pop culture and celebrity gossip podcast Overheard In The Pantry and YouTube channel.

He posts mainly photos of himself on his social media, including ones he has turned into memes. He also posts a link to purchase merchandise and listen to his podcast and YouTube channels.

4 Deleesa (Trevor) - 56,300

While she doesn't have a six-figure following on Instagram (@leesaunique), Deleesa still has an impressive following for her account, where she shares modeling photos.

RELATED: The Circle: 10 The Challenge Players That Would Be Perfect For The Show 

She does include photos with her daughter as well as her husband Trevor, who she is playing as in the house. Deleesa also uses her platform to promote positive messages, including bringing awareness to the Black Lives Matter movement, a statement that has also appeared prominently on her clothing on The Circle. She also promotes the website for her Be Unique shop, which sells everything from clothing to lashes and accessories, and even recently shared details of the swag box she received from Netflix.

3 Savannah – 272,000

Also a real-life influencer as well as the first influencer in the game, on Instagram (@savpalacio) posts a lot of modeling photos and does some brand endorsements already. Her Instagram also promotes herself as a "digital creator."

At 25 years old, the Los Angeles, California native came into the game already a bona fide social media celebrity. So, it's no surprise that Savannah was instantly popular in the house, named one of the first two influencers of the season.

2 Bryant – 501,000

Fans might be surprised to know that Bryant, the meditation teacher, actually has the second-highest number of followers on Instagram (@bryant.give) at over half a million. This makes him an actual influencer, even if he didn't get that title on the show.

The 27-year-old Chico, California native uses his Instagram account to promote his business, Modern Nirvana, which offers services like personalized coaching and meditation videos. While he alluded to his past life on the show, what fans might not know is that he actually appeared on America's Next Top Model in 2015 when he was just 21, though he did not make it far.

1 Chloe – 1.4 Million

The reason that Chloe (@chloeveitchofficial) came onto the show already with more than a million followers is that she appeared on another Netflix reality show, Too Hot To Handle. This prior appearance, along with her bubbly and eccentric personality, has made Chloe a popular internet personality.

The 22-year-old woman from Essex, England posts lots of content on Instagram, including a series of beautifully posed photos in fashionable outfits or bikini wear, or doing fun and exciting things like drinking champagne in a bubble bath and hanging with friends. She has been active for some time, with close to 500 posts on the site.

NEXT: 10 Shows To Watch If You Like The Amazing Race 

The Circle Season 2: The 9 Most Popular Cast Members, Ranked By Instagram Followers from https://ift.tt/3tDs3bh

[lifeonashelf]

COBAIN, KURT

Dying was definitely the worst thing that ever happened to Kurt Cobain.

That may not read like a particularly brilliant statement. You’re saying: “Taylor, I’m sure if you solicited any random sampling of people to compile a list of the worst things they could imagine happening to them, dying would end up at the top of most of those lists” (although, it would land below “being married to Courtney Love” on mine). However, the reasons I’m positing this in regards to Cobain are only tangentially related to the most common side effect of death being an immediate cessation of one’s mortal presence on this earth. Explanation: Cobain’s too-short life was characterized by profound and abiding existential pain, so in his specific instance I presume ending that life at least came with the not-unwelcome corollary of providing a respite from his suffering. Besides, the manner of his death left ample evidence that he sincerely did not want to be alive anymore, so it’s unlikely he was overly concerned with side effects. In case there’s any misconception that I’m somehow endorsing Kurt Cobain’s suicide, please feel free to text me and I’ll gladly forward you a selfie so you can see the tears that are filling my eyes right now as I revisit the devastating final chapter of a man whose music means the world to me. Yet, somehow, the strip-mining of his memory that began the very day his body was found strikes me as a tragedy which nearly equals what was done to that body.

Tucked away on one of my shelves, you will find a bootleg box set entitled Into the Black (I mean that figuratively; you will not find it—if you really want to see it, I will get it down for you; seriously, don’t start touching my shit). I procured this anthology upon its release in 1994, and back then it had the distinction of being the richest available source of previously-unreleased Nirvana live performances and songs that were never included on any of their albums. Such a find would be largely meaningless today, when a quick internet search can immediately unearth all of those tracks within seconds. But for a distraught fan to whom the prospect of facing a world where there would never be any new Nirvana music again seemed unbearable, Into the Black was an immensely cathartic salve for me at a time when I desperately needed it. The scope of the compendium remains impressive—I think it’s a way better collection than the official With the Lights Out box set that came out 10 years later—and by presenting the included material in chronological order, all the way from Nirvana’s first demo cassette to a complete recording of their final North American concert, the seven hours of tunes on Into the Black provide about the most fitting and comprehensive Kurt Cobain encomium ever delivered.

Which is part of what makes the final track on the anthology arrive like a dagger to the soul and the ears. There really isn’t a name for this closing selection—after all, it isn’t even a song. But the creators of Into the Black had to call it something in the track listing. So they called it exactly what it is: “Courtney Love’s Complete Eulogy For Kurt Cobain.”

This recording was played for a crowd of several thousand despondent fans who gathered in Seattle for a public memorial on April 10, 1994, two days after Cobain’s body was found. Its manifestation occupies a limbo unique to itself, half significant historical document, half ghoulish tabloid spectacle. Though the song “Miss World” was released on March 28, in a very real sense, it was this Courtney Love recital that served as the first proper single from Hole’s Live Through This, which would be released forty-eight hours later and subsequently propel her music career to previously unthinkable heights—a result that arguably stemmed as much from Love’s deft public navigation of her grief process as it did from the fact that Live Through This is a fucking incredible record.

Reactions to “Eulogy” (for lack of a better title) will inevitably vary by listener. If you view Courtney Love as an unfortunate casualty of Kurt Cobain’s war against himself, you will probably hear a shell-shocked widow valiantly facing her worst nightmare. If you view Courtney Love as one of the likely reasons Cobain loaded his shotgun on April 5, 1994, you will probably hear an unhinged harpy using the most intimate words her late husband ever wrote against him in a monstrously demeaning fashion. Over time, I’ve come to rest somewhere in the middle of those two poles, so I don’t quite know what to make of the recording now. What I do know is that I never want to listen to it again, and don’t really need to since it’s still vividly burned into my brain from past spins—I couldn’t bring myself to revisit it while authoring this segment about it. Because even in 1994 when I was playing Into the Black endlessly, even when I was struggling to make sense of something that seemed utterly senseless, and even when the message Love was delivering was allegedly intended for anguished fans just like me, my reaction to that audio was exactly the same as I assume it would be today: I shouldn’t be hearing this.

“Eulogy” essentially features Courtney Love narrating Cobain’s suicide note in its entirety. Since photographs of the document have subsequently surfaced in numerous places, a cursory review plainly reveals that despite Love’s proclamation on the tape that she elected to omit parts of the letter about herself and their daughter Frances “because they’re none of your fucking business”, she does in fact share nearly everything that appears on the page. Irrespective of that, her rationalization is a bizarre one—after all, it can be sensibly argued that nothing in that epistle was really the “fucking business” of anyone outside Cobain’s immediate circle. The mere reading itself denotes a sort of indecent invasion, but it is the peculiar spin the author’s self-appointed spokeswoman put on the broadcast that truly makes it astonishing. Love didn’t simply orate Cobain’s note, she annotated it, interjecting frequently to pose her own biting counterpoints to his words, sometimes leveling these ripostes directly at him, sometimes addressing her running commentary to the royal listening we. Her delivery veers between naked tear-choked agony that will move you no matter how you feel about her, and primal hissing vitriol—at one point on the recording she instructs the entire crowd to call the man they came to mourn “asshole.” It is the sound of a woman purging an entire spectrum of very private emotions in a very public way, it is an unseemly peek under the mortuary drape of a man who had just shot a gaping hole in the hearts of millions, and it is extremely uncomfortable to listen to.

I do not know Courtney Love. I have no desire to know Courtney Love. Only she could tell you how actively she calculated the channeling of her deceased husband’s musical legacy into the birth of her own. I cannot definitively state that Courtney Love exploited Kurt Cobain’s death to make herself famous; it’s not nearly that simple. I can state this again, because it’s true: Live Through This is a fucking amazing record, and it probably would have been a next-level hit even without the supernatural timing of its arrival and the uncanny way several of its key tracks seemed to capture what all of us who were shattered by Cobain’s suicide were feeling at that moment in time. But regardless of her intentions, the transmission she delivered at the Seattle Center on April 10, 1994 was undeniably indecorous. The very circumstance of it feels wrong, and witnessing it via that recording feels even worse. I didn’t want to know what that note said. I wish I didn’t know what that note said. And I wish I could listen to Live Through This—which is, to reiterate, SUCH A FUCKING GREAT RECORD—without inescapably pinpointing it as the moment Courtney Love became the first person to strike gold at Kurt Cobain’s gravesite.

Unfortunately, that was only the beginning of the excavation.

Elsewhere in my apartment, on the bookcase directly to the right of the desk at which I’m sitting, you will also find no fewer than six biographies about Nirvana. In relation to the sum of available material, my library isn’t even close to complete; after a while, I stopped buying every associated text as they were published (once you read a half-dozen volumes about a band that only existed for a half-dozen years, redundancy becomes an issue—also, reading about Nirvana is always a dispiriting experience because no matter how good the book is, you’re inevitably going to reach THAT chapter eventually). Filed next to those is Cobain, a coffee table book which assembles almost every Nirvana-related article that appeared in Rolling Stone during their career. And directly beside that rests an even larger coffee table book entitled Journals. Kurt Cobain is the credited author, which I suppose makes sense, since nearly every word therein is in his handwriting. Nevertheless, that attribution becomes difficult to digest when you consider that the tome was released in 2002—given that Cobain had been dead for 8 years when Journals came out, I’m naturally skeptical about the scope of his involvement in the project.

I have a hard time accepting that this book exists. On one hand, the drawings, correspondence, and scribbled musings which comprise its pages offer a rare and informal glimpse into the mind of one of my favorite songwriters of all time. Yet a much larger part of me can’t discount my impression that by glimpsing these things I have in essence sneaked into Kurt Cobain’s room and picked the lock on his diary. It seems highly improbable he would have ever published this material in this form of his own volition; actually, I suspect he would have been mortified if these logs were leaked while he was alive. The justification, one would suppose, is that Cobain is a singularly iconic figure and remains an object of fascination, therefore any piece of himself he took the time to immortalize in writing has intrinsic value (even a dip recipe he got from his mom, evidently). Except the absence of his agency over this particular venture indicates that the significance of the content showcased in Journals was determined solely by outside agents. Cobain was actually fairly prolific given the brevity of his career—it would take a book roughly the same size as Journals to assemble all of the lyrics he wrote for Nirvana’s catalog. Yet, like any artist, he put most of his work through rigorous internal scrutiny and editorial refinement before he unveiled it to an audience; he was the only person who decided if and when it had value. A lot of the poetry featured in Journals was eventually funneled into Nirvana compositions; those are the pieces we can presume he was ready to share with the world—because he, you know, did share them. But when it comes to the numerous drafts of personal letters that appear throughout the tome, it seems innately obvious he did not want those to be read; if he did, he would have fucking sent them to the people they were addressed to and they wouldn’t still be present in his notebooks to be pilfered.

When the release of this relic was announced, the rabid fan in me was of course curious, and I knew this was an item I wanted in my library. But the altruistic side of me always grappled with that desire; I could never quite concur that Cobain’s inability to object constituted a license for me to read work that he chose to keep to himself. Obviously, Journals was a guaranteed best-seller, which is precisely why it was published (oh, I was never snowed by that “a way for his fans to better understand him” bullshit; I have no doubt “a way for his fans to spend money” was the primary purpose this tome was meant to serve). It certainly has intriguing bits, particularly the sections that show sketches Cobain made for early Nirvana t-shirt designs that were never produced and the numerous mixtape track-listings he itemized (sadly, due to his fondness for bands so deeply obscure they are outside the scope of even a collection as large as mine, I don’t have all the listed tunes to faithfully reproduce any of them for my own listening pleasure).

Other articles such as a grossly-gushy sweethearts note to Courtney Love and a childish screed addressed to MTV are far less interesting to me, since the only parts of Cobain they help me “better understand” are parts I already know far more about than I care to. Good and bad are basically negligible designations here anyway, since the revelatory bits and the patently trivial snippets are all culled from the same invasive pedigree. It certainly didn’t assuage my conflicted feelings about reading Journals when I opened the book and saw that the very first sentence printed in it is, “Don’t read my diary when I’m gone”… a request that becomes somewhat clouded by what Cobain wrote two lines later: “please read my diary… look through my things, and figure me out.” I did look—I looked cover to cover—but since I listened to all of Nirvana’s records long before that, I already had Kurt Cobain figured out about as much as I imagine he wanted myself or any of his fans to. A photocopy that confirms he did ordinary things like pay his phone bill doesn’t do much to augment my appreciation of all the extraordinary things he did.

By exhibiting monumental developments like Cobain’s first stab at the lyrics to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” alongside snippets of humdrum humanity like his jotting down of the 1-800 number for NordikTrack, a chronicle like Journals is ostensibly meant to show that even a man who was exalted as a demigod used to put on his Daniel Johnston shirts one sleeve at a time just like the rest of us. If so, the very existence of Journals negates its own premise, since none of its content would be considered even remotely noteworthy if said content wasn’t scribed by Kurt Cobain—which only advances the misguided hero-worship that plagued his quintessence and encumbered a future suicide victim with spiritual baggage he never welcomed nor desired. Even with my limited understanding of what Kurt Cobain’s art meant to him, I am certain he would never have wanted a book like Journals to happen. Just as I am equally certain that the inflation of his esteem to such excessive heights that his admirers would be itching to read the undisclosed documents he kept in his underwear drawer played a large part in the events of April 5, 1994.

I guess this is as good a time as any to explain why a songwriter who was never a solo artist is the subject of his own entry here—especially since I just chastised the publishers of Journals for giving him special treatment. It’s true that nearly every piece of music Cobain had his hand in was issued under the Nirvana masthead (except for that collaboration with William Burroughs I wrote about a long time ago… but I’m trying to forget that ever came out since it’s not much more enjoyable to listen to than “Eulogy”). Yet, thanks to the same vulturous machinations I’ve been recapping throughout this piece, the Kurt Cobain discography does indeed include one solo album to date. There is an itty-bitty asterisk next to that item, though:

* Kurt Cobain’s solo album came out twenty-one years after Kurt Cobain died.

Oh, and * Kurt Cobain did not participate in the making of Kurt Cobain’s solo album.

Oh, and * Kurt Cobain’s solo album is not technically an album.

Oh, also * Most of the songs on Kurt Cobain’s solo album are not actually songs.

Oh, and lastly * When Kurt Cobain recorded this solo not-album of mostly not-songs, he had no idea that anyone was ever going to hear it.

The sort-of record I’m referring to was assigned the title Montage of Heck, which is needlessly confusing for anyone familiar with Nirvana’s history, since Montage of Heck was originally the title Cobain bestowed upon one of his earliest demo cassettes. The Montage I’m examining in this essay bears no relation to that one; rather, Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings is an ill-considered compilation that was released in conjunction with a congruently-monikered and congruently ill-considered 2015 documentary. Licentiously-hyped as one of the most profound musical portraits ever unveiled, Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck was directed by filmmaker Brett Morgen, who was granted unprecedented access to Cobain’s personal archives and shaped that material into an allegedly insightful study of the artist’s epigrammatic life and shocking death. Since she had already exhausted the potential for monetizing her late husband’s sketchpads, Courtney Love upped the ante for this project by allowing Morgen to use the family’s personal home videos as the film’s major selling point—evidently, neither party gave a shit that two decades earlier Cobain expressed how violated he felt when strangers invaded his private life in a song bluntly entitled “Rape Me”.

I’ll keep my review of the biopic Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck brief—mostly because I didn’t enjoy it at all and the overriding emotion I was left with after watching it was anger. But it is worth mentioning here, since it was similarly levied with the purported intention of making its viewers “better understand” its subject. Strange, then, that the two most memorable moments in the movie are unabashedly salacious, and both are focused on candid glimpses of Courtney Love’s behind-the-scenes comportment rather than her husband’s. If you’re wondering what Love’s breasts looked like in the early-‘90s, or if you relish the notion of watching her toddle around the couple’s apartment in a state of opiated incoherence in the presence of their baby daughter… then, brothers and sisters, this film is the Casablanca of that specific genre. But anyone seeking a meaningful exploration of what kind of person Cobain was outside the limelight is bound for disappointment since Montage mostly underscores his least appealing traits, the unpleasant facets of his humanity that we as fans have trained ourselves to banish from our thoughts as we continue applauding his inimitable artistic contributions. Aspects which, of course, Courtney Love is central to. Her odious presence throughout the documentary, and indeed in Cobain’s orbit, serves as a manifest reminder that a man we lionize for writing some of the most exquisite songs of all time was also deeply in love with a vulgar, revolting succubus. And perhaps this is a key reason why revisiting him via panegyrics like Montage of Heck and Journals always leaves a sour aftertaste—as long as Courtney Love has stewardship over his legacy, the worst thing Kurt Cobain ever did will be always be a principal figure in each new celebration of the best things he did.

In addition to her boobie videos, Love also turned over a box of cassette tapes to Brett Morgen (if memory serves, this batch of recordings was dutifully referred to as a “treasure trove” in every press release about the project I read). Morgen cherry-picked a few bits of music from this lot for usage in his movie, which were naturally cobbled into a soundtrack that was touted to fans as a cache of “previously-unheard music by Kurt Cobain.” Since the filmmaker was ostensibly the one who decided what portions of the tapes to appropriate, he is recognized in Montage of Heck’s liner notes as its “Executive Producer”—a dubious acknowledgement that gives Brett Morgen the distinction of being the only person in the history of audio engineering credited with producing an album whose recording he wasn’t actually present for, by an artist he never even met.    

Morgen’s pastiche job doesn’t merely form the basis of Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings, it is the disc’s entirety. Stripped of any historical provenance generous listeners may feel obligated to apply, what the proffered material basically amounts to is a half-hour of Kurt Cobain getting stoned in his living room and fucking around on a series of out-of-tune guitars. I wasn’t present for Morgen’s listening party, so I can only speculate on how much music was available for him to sift through, or what the stuff he rejected as inadequate sounded like. But this much is clear: the pieces he chose to disseminate on Montage of Heck range from drearily frivolous to blatantly insulting. The disc offers no real insights (unless you didn’t already know Kurt Cobain got high or played guitar, I suppose), and fans searching the conclave for Nirvana songs that might-have-been will merely discover that Cobain was sensible enough not to pursue an inane number called “Burn My Britches” any further than the two-minute segment he toyed with on his couch here.

Perhaps fittingly, the disc opens with the unmistakable bubbling of a bong, which effectively sets the tone for what follows: Cobain yodeling to warm his pipes up before launching into a rudimentary power chord sequence and yodeling over that for a little while for no apparent purpose (at least Morgen gave the cut a suitable title—it’s called “The Yodel Song”). Elsewhere, attempts are made to tie this cycle of doodles into the songwriter’s established canon, such as the inclusion of the promisingly-dubbed “Scoff (Early Demo)”. Yet, while the prospect of hearing a preliminary version of the 7th-best number on Bleach may seem like cause for celebration, the actual track lands like a slap to the face once you hear that this extract which Morgen judged as precious enough for commercial immortality merely consists of Cobain scat-growling gibberish lyrics over the tune’s main riff until the tape unceremoniously cuts off 38-seconds later; identifying this nothing-morsel as a rough draft of the song “Scoff” is akin to calling a piece of paper with the word “It” typed on it a rough draft of A Tale of Two Cities. Such is the caliber of material spotlighted on Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings, a “treasure trove” that would have been better left buried.    

One of the few genuine items of interest among the detritus is “Reverb Experiment”, which consists of three minutes of droning throwaway instrumental noodling, but still sounds kind of cool since a lot of it sounds like the refrain of Slayer’s “Dead Skin Mask”. There’s also a fairly well-formed idea called “Desire” that might have been turned into something striking if its author had chosen to develop it, and the closing number “She Only Lies” is noteworthy since it features Cobain working out an idea on bass guitar instead. Regardless, nothing on Montage of Heck justifies the ballyhoo that accompanied its release, and even the marginally decent pieces are unworthy of mention on their composer’s resume—although, Brett Morgen certainly got a great resume item out of the deal; now he can call himself a “filmmaker / record producer.”

However, this was Kurt Cobain who documented these scraps on the battery-operated boombox in his apartment. And he’s an icon, remember? So—said Brett Morgen and Courtney Love and everyone at Universal Music who had their dollar-bill-mounted fishhooks in the water of this endeavor—Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings shouldn’t be treated like some gratuitous cash-grab collation of idle time-killers which Cobain thought so little of he didn’t bother revisiting most of them again. No, no, no. This is an Event. Try this: Montage captures a peerlessly illustrious artist as his fans have never heard him before, in his rawest, most intimate form, no studio, no audience, just a man and his guitar seizing inspiration out of the ether and channeling it into his instrument as he explores new incarnations of the sound that made Nirvana the band that launched a revolution. Well, hey, that sounds pretty good; we can really shift some units with an idea like that. The only problem is, if we’re going to treat this thing like a legitimate album, it has to have a legitimate hit single we can sell it with. And how do you dig a unicorn out of a pile of lo-fi cassette tapes that live in a shoebox?

Luckily, Brett Morgen found just the solution for this quandary inside that shoebox.

“And I Love Her” was issued with all the buzz of an actual lost Nirvana song—it was even pressed on 7” vinyl like a proper single. It didn’t really matter that the sound quality was wispy, nor that the performance wasn’t particularly polished. This was a recording of Kurt Cobain playing a fucking Beatles tune, dude, and not only was it previously-unavailable, no one even knew it fucking existed. And the internet went apeshit. The cosmic synchronicity of this find couldn’t have been scripted any better: the architect of the band who electrified the zeitgeist in the 1990’s covering the band who electrified the zeitgeist 30 years earlier, arguably the only other rock group in history whose rapid ascension to immortality Nirvana’s was comparable to. The concept alone was glorious, and it wasn’t merely some music nerd’s wetdream—this Moment in musical mythology Actually Happened.

Here’s the thing, though: Kurt Cobain’s rendition of “And I Love Her” only has significance because people desperately wanted it to, NEEDED it to. It was still just a lark the dude recorded in his living room one lazy night, and it still sounds just as slapdash as every other fragmentary living room lark featured on Montage of Heck: The Home Recordings. There isn’t anything especially revelatory about Cobain esteeming The Beatles so highly that he learned to play one of their songs—both his backstory and his discography are liberally sprinkled with evidence he appreciated the Fab Four’s work, and in case you missed the homages there, nearly every piece of literature ever written about Kurt Cobain has helpfully cited the “Beatle-esque hooks” in songs like “About A Girl” and “In Bloom” to underline his unambiguous approbation. Even casual Nirvana fans were surely already well aware that Cobain enjoyed playing songs by musicians he admired—the dozen-or-so covers in the band’s repertoire and the fact that nearly half the tunes which comprised their legendary MTV Unplugged performance weren’t written by Nirvana provided some telling clues on that front.

The level of hype which heralded the arrival of “And I Love Her” (and Montage of Heck as a whole) intimated that a vital missing piece of the Kurt Cobain puzzle had finally been unearthed. Yet the disc supplies nothing more than a disenchanting anticlimax once you actually listen to it and ascertain that the venerated songwriter’s busy-work wasn’t all that impressive. Perhaps this is more a result of a faulty selection process—I’m willing to imagine there is some truly fantastic material on those tapes which Brett Morgen overlooked for whatever reason—but whether or not Cobain’s archives are ripe with undiscovered gems, the resounding impact of The Home Recordings is much the same as that of Journals: nearly everything in that time capsule would be appraised as inconsequential nonsense if it wasn’t Kurt Cobain’s nonsense. Which takes us right back to the pitfalls of deifying any musician to such a degree that every note they ever played is assigned an implied indispensability, even the botched ones that actually make them sound like a less gifted musician than they were.

Besides, we Nirvana fans already got our missing piece. That happened in 2002, with the release of the band’s self-titled greatest hits package. The one I bought despite owning every record which sourced that compilation, solely because there were three minutes and thirty-eight seconds of music on there I had never heard—the one and only known completed and previously-unreleased Nirvana song: “You Know You’re Right”. (Although, Courtney Love had the audacity to debut that tune way back in 1995 when she performed it as part of Hole’s MTV Unplugged set—seriously, sometimes I wonder if every single thing she’s done in the past 25 years has been predicated on a willful and concerted effort to make everyone who loves Nirvana hate her; although, her campaign of terror has made it nearly impossible to even mention Nirvana without also mentioning her, so maybe she’s a fucking genius).

In stark contrast with the nebulous scribbles on Montage of Heck or the interesting but inessential rehearsal tracks which dominated With the Lights Out, “You Know You’re Right” is indeed a revelation of almost religious proportions, a roaring burst of dynamism that is as powerful as anything else in Nirvana’s catalog—the lone tantalizing taste of a fourth record the band would never get to make, a frozen moment of fragile optimism captured just before the world as we knew it ended. “You Know You’re Right” is fucking AWESOME, and its explosive potency is all the more impressive considering that the lone recording of it which exists was essentially the group’s first stab at it. It is one of my absolute favorite songs in a catalog bursting with favorites. And I cried the first time I heard it. And I cried the second time I heard it. And the third… And, 17 years onward, I cried when I listened to it moments ago.

Plenty of Cobain’s tunes have this effect on me. Still, “You Know You’re Right” is a singular case. And I know exactly why that song, above all others, devastates me the most. It’s not because the lyrics are especially poignant, even though they are. It’s not because the track’s intoxicating promise reminds me of precisely how much all of us lost on April 5, 1994, even though it does. The reason “You Know You’re Right” tears my fucking guts out every time I hear it… is because that was it. That was the final song Nirvana recorded. And after it came out, there would never be any more. “You Know You’re Right” was the moment I had to say goodbye to Kurt Cobain forever.

I did that. And I think it’s time for the rest of the world to let him sleep, too.

Over the years, I have accumulated bootlegs of more than 200 Nirvana concerts. Roughly 150 of those shows are phenomenal, and plenty of them are of strong enough audio quality to warrant an official disclosure. That is the true “treasure trove,” a nearly limitless stockpile of unreleased Kurt Cobain recordings that could fuel a supplementary Nirvana release every single year for the rest of human history. And we already know he wanted an audience to hear that music, because he stepped onto the stage and played it for them. Since the continued fracking of his legacy is inevitable, by all means, the Cobain estate should absolutely tap into that wellspring whenever the marketplace is clamoring for fresh product or Courtney Love is clamoring for further cosmetic augmentation. I’ll buy every goddamn disc they put out, and I’ll probably buy them all on vinyl, too. And if you, personally, feel the need to explore the more obscure corners of Cobain’s discography, there are already plenty of places you can look—start with the single for “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, where you’ll find the tremendous B-side “Even In His Youth” and a killer alternate recording of “Aneurysm” that blows the version on Incesticide out of the water.

Hey, I’m a fan first and a snarky asshole second; I get it. I can surely identify with the sustained hysteria enveloping his heritage. Cobain’s suicide was the single most traumatic event of my teen-hood, and all these years later I can still tell you where I was, what I was wearing, and even what I was eating when I first heard the horrifying news of his departure (my family’s comic book store in Anaheim Hills, a Groo the Wanderer t-shirt, and a foot-long tuna on white from Subway). Still, even then, I had a firm pragmatic grasp on my grief. Kurt Cobain wasn’t my mentor, my hero, someone who embodied the man I hoped to eventually be when I reached his epoch of then-unimaginable elder statesmanship (hey, when you’re fifteen, 27 seems like an eternity away—at the time I assumed when I was Cobain’s age I’d probably be doing all sorts of old-people shit like buying a house and raising babies… or at least finally having sex). He wasn’t deity to me, he was simply someone responsible for some of the most imperative music in my life; unfortunately, since music has always been a lot more imperative in my life than deities, his abrupt absence was crushing nonetheless.

But the nature of Cobain’s subsequent beatification seems to suggest that many of his fans choose to remember him as something more, a shooting star that painted a tapestry of light across the heavens before inexorably crashing down to earth, “the grunge-poet voice of a generation” and all that. Hell, to many people, he was. But despite his canonization by the masses, Kurt Cobain was not a messiah and never strived to be. He was flawed and beautiful and complex, and a mystery even to himself—in other words: he was just as fucked-up and human as any of us. Kurt Cobain is not some riddle to be solved; we will never decode him because he didn’t stay the course of his journey long enough to find out who “him” really was or would become. And his awful conclusion will never make sense, because there’s ultimately nothing sensible about putting a shotgun in your mouth and ending a life that meant so much to so many when it had barely just begun.

As we near the 25th anniversary of Cobain’s death, let’s resolve to (finally) allow him his humanity again, and to allow the still-buried pieces of his spirit he chose to keep solely for himself to remain interred with him. Because we’re only paying disservice to the topsoil of his legacy by continuing to dig. And besides, we have Bleach, we have Nevermind, we have In Utero, we have Unplugged, we have a few-dozen additional non-album tracks, and we have “You Know You’re Right”—Kurt Cobain already gave far more of himself to the world than any of us were entitled to ask for.

So if you want to “better understand” him, you won’t achieve that by reading his diary, or seeing his widow’s areolae, or hearing him offhandedly strum some ditty from his childhood to amuse himself. The best avenue available for those of us who never met Cobain to look through his things and figure him out is lighting a candle, putting on a set of headphones, and letting the breathtaking majesty of “All Apologies” surge out of those speakers and into our souls. There is no more intimate way to honor him than that. Nor should there be. Understanding Kurt Cobain isn’t necessary. As long as we understand his music, and we understand what it means to us.

We don’t need his secrets. We have his songs. And for anyone who truly holds the memory of Kurt Cobain in their heart, that’s enough.

 March 25, 2019

[stevecanmakeanythingnerdy]

Rrws4-32 RANDOM RECORD WORKOUT SEASON 4 Battle 32 A-Ha : Scoundrel Days (side 1) Vs. Falco: 3 (Side 1) A-Ha : Scoundrel Days (side 1) All I have to say are three words to describe these guys. Three simple words and you will know exactly who I am referring to. Those words are Take On Me. Yup, it's those guys...the guys with one of the coolest (in my opinion anyway) and innovative videos from the 80's. Very creative and fresh. It really captured the imagination and was basically a mini-movie. But we are not here to talk about that success, we are here to talk about their follow up album, Scoundrel Days. Unfortunately, and especially when talking about 80's one-hit-wonders, the sophomore follow up album doesn't always do well for the band. That is the case with this one too, but truthfully, I have no idea why. This album picks right up where they left off, and is in fact, more mature. All of the songs are great ambassadors of the 80's new wave sound...there is no reason this record shouldn't be right up the record buying public's ass. I am 100% serious when I say, there should have been many more hits off this one. By the way, in case you were wondering, A-Ha are a Norwegian band formed in Oslo in 1982. You may also be shocked to learn that At the Rock in Rio II festival in January 1991, A-ha shocked the international entertainment press by drawing an audience of 198,000 at Maracanã stadium for their top-billed evening concert — a Guinness World Record for paying audiences. In contrast, the other performers (George Michael, Prince, and Guns N' Roses) each drew less than a third of that audience, 60,000 each. Additionally, the lead singer holds a record for longest single note held and sung live. At 22 seconds it is impressive and hard to beat. The title track, "Scoundrel Days" is haunting new wave. Dark and brooding...basically Depeche Mode if they were an ABC cover band. It takes a minute to really kick in, but when it does, it is very produced and attention grabbing. "The Swing of Things" is a bit more bouncy house than typical 80's wave of this time. Plus, I couldn't really give it the justice it deserved, since my copy was very skip friendly on this track. Grrrrrrr. "I've Been Losing You" is ruled by keyboard lines here. I hear some very clear Morrissey/Smiths brand vocal inflections and warm bass work. A slower tune, complete with mental images of leaves falling, etc comes by way of "October". OK, maybe that is just because of the title. A-Ha save the best for last though. "Manhattan Skyline" has got to be the best song on this. A great mix of new wave and rock. Some heavy ass keys and a bit of rage added. Maybe this is the beginning of Emo music...?? In all seriousness Cap'n Jazz (a famous early 90's emo band) did cover the aforementioned "Take On Me"...so maybe? At any rate, The surprise hit/sound you never thought this band would produce. Overall, this album is more Bauhouse than funhouse. More Goth than stock. Pretty decent listen if you ask me. Falco: 3 (Side 1) Falco is an Austrian born singer made internationally famous by his several hits: "Rock Me Amadeus", "Der Kommissar", "Vienna Calling", "Jeanny", and "The Sound of Musik". "Rock Me Amadeus" reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts in 1986, making him the only artist whose principal language was German to score a vocal number-one hit in the United States . He wrote the song after seeing the film documenting the story of Amedeus. According to his estate, he has sold 20 million albums and 40 million singles, which makes him the best-selling Austrian singer of all-time. Falco is one of those interesting but tragic stories. Born into a working class family where his father abandon him at a young age, he reportedly showed great musical talent very early on. Keeping beat perfectly to songs on the radio as a toddler, and having confirmed perfect pitch at 5. He quickly formed bands and was part of the nightlife scene in Austria...where he may have picked up bad habbits. It seems he was also a fan of drugs and alcohol, and at age 40, it took his life in a car accident. It seemed inevitable he would end up making music, though. Falco had minor hits with Der Kommissar, but the group After The Fire recorded it and released it here in the U.S. It was not until "Rock Me Amadeus" that he became an international sensation. It is an homage to both the artist and the movie that gives the rappy history of Wolfgang Amadeus (who ironically ALSO lived a short but talented life...the entire timeline fits into one verse). This is the LP version too...so you get the full 8:18 minute version of an otherwise 3 minute song. The follow up, "America" is a very poppy, glockenspiel rocker! Und auf Deutsch! Well, Austrian-German anyhow. It seems Falco was going for a Mellencamp or Springsteen formula. I feel like he accomplished it. "Tango The Night" was a minor hit and juke B-side, I believe. At least it seems familiar to me. Though that could also be because the 1985 version of me owned a cassette of his album that I listened to fairly frequently. Electronic tango tune. Need I say more? "Munich Girls (Looking for Love)" is quite literally just a Cars cover. Seriously if you have ever wondered what Ric Ocasik would sound like with a thickly Austrian accent, then here you go. Falco does a bang up job hitting the high notes and little nuances of Ric's distinctive voice too. Perfect pitch I suppose. Lastly, there is "Jeanny" (note that is not a misspelling of the name). This is a somewhat controversial song because it appears to be sung from the perspective of a possible rapist or murderer. Also very Cars inspired and very feverish in parts. Unique in that it is partially sung in German (verses), and partially in English (chorus). Spoiler alert, though my German is not THAT great, I am fairly confident Jeanny dies. Or at least does something upsetting. There is a LOT of dramatic yelling. A. LOT. Overall, it is pretty decent and mildly cheesy. It is hard to remember too, that this was a different time. The wall was still firmly in place and Austria borders Germany, so pride is very big in the smaller Euro countries. Falco is STILL quite popular there. I have actually been to Austria and the record shop I was in prominently had a display of a signed copy of this very record. When I asked the owner, he said I could have owned it (for a small Austrian fee) but I chose instead to purchase GNR's "Use Your Illusion" both 1 and 2 in near perfect condition and an obvious bootleg copy of Nirvana's Nevermind. Sorry, Falco. Nothing personal. One thing for certain, you can clearly hear the American influence in all of these songs. A-Ha! Falco! Who will win? Well A-Ha took 21 minutes to burn 162 calories over 5 songs. That is 32.4 calories per song and 7.71 calories per minute. Falco took 25 minutes to burn 197 calories over 5 songs. He burned 39.4 calories per song and 7.88 calories per minute. It may be only tenths more, but Falco rocked his Amadeus and took the crown today! A-Ha : "Manhattan Skyline" https://youtu.be/WY2r28M1TrY Falco: "Rock Me Amadeus" https://youtu.be/cVikZ8Oe_XA #randomrecordworkout #randomrecordworkoutseason4

[duluoz2]

Musicis historia mea, Pt. 1: Better Dead than Deadhead?

There was a time when I wouldn’t listen to the Grateful Dead. It wasn’t that I refused to listen to them; I just couldn’t be bothered. I actually once tried to listen to “American Beauty,” a copy of which I had received as a gift (a relative worked for Sony and had access to “original master recordings” and would give them to my brother and me; remember those?). I skipped to “Truckin’” and never got beyond that. They just didn’t grab me. I was never a hater, like many were and still are, but I did chuckle at the slogan “I’ll be grateful when they’re dead!” I was mainly an alt/punk fan, though I did have an appreciation for what would come to be called “classic rock,” the Doors, Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and others. But I never got the Dead. When I was in college, going to see them became all the rage. But, tempted as I was to see what the hoopla was all about, I never succumbed. The only intriguing thing about the Dead was their fans. I’m not talking about the waste cases, stale hippies, or trendy college kids who liked them because it was the thing to do; I mean people who took a scientific approach to the band. Some guys I knew in college were Deadheads, before it was trendy. They would talk about tape trading, about mushroom trips that throbbed in time to the music, about the different versions of songs and how each concert had its own certain, pardon the word, vibe. These guys weren’t stale hippies or waste cases, and they certainly weren’t trendies; they were fans, serious fans. The way they described the whole Dead experience always came back to the music. It was the music that attracted them, what hooked them, and what made them so “deadicated.” But I still didn’t get it.

Fast forward many years; a colleague from the college where I teach asked me to sit in with his band. They were a talented, experienced outfit, and they needed me to fill in for some gigs in the future. I was intrigued, but unsure. You see, the bulk of their repertoire consisted of Grateful Dead songs. Sure, I told them, I’d sit in, but I wasn’t too into the Dead. I’d acquire some CD’s and give a listen and we’d see if it all worked out. That’s where it all started

My cousin Marc worked for Rhino Records, the label which just happened to be the current purveyors of the Dead’s music. He got me some CD’s, among them Live Dead, From the Mars Hotel, Skull and Roses, and the long rejected by me American Beauty. I listened, purely for the sake of learning the songs, you see. Then I listened some more. One by one, the songs etched themselves into my receptive brain; accessible rockers like “Bertha,” “Playing in the Band,” “U.S. Blues,” and “One More Saturday Night;” country sounding tunes like “Mama Tried,” “Jack Straw,” and “Cumberland Blues.” Long set pieces like “Dark Star,” “The Eleven,” and “St. Stephen;” marathon jams like “Lovelight,” and “Hard to Handle;” and the song that, in my mind, best defines the Dead, “China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider.” Like a true budding Deadhead, I didn’t even bother with the cliché “Truckin’.” Even the once spurned “American Beauty” worked its heretofore ineffective magic on me; it quickly became one of my favorite albums. What happened? How did I give into whatever muse it is that makes people like the Dead (who I imagine is a dreadlocked guy who smells like incense named Devin).

Well, it’s the music. Sounds cliché, I know. But that’s the truth. Similar to the Beatles, the Dead have their particular fans for their particular eras. Some favor the early psychedelic Dead; others have a preference for the mid-seventies Dead; still others cut their teeth at Dead gigs in the eighties, so that’s their preference. My era? Well, there was a time in the Dead’s career when they were between versions of the band. They started in the early sixties as a folk and bluegrass outfit, then like Dylan, went electric, calling themselves the Warlocks. The Grateful Dead evolved from there into the psychedelic explorers of the late 60’s. They then morphed into the space cowboys of Working Man’s Dead and American Beauty. In that time, they added and then lost drummer Mickey Hart and keyboardist Tom Constanten. From 1971 to 1973 they were a 5 piece with Keith Godcheaux on piano. Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, at whose urging the Dead went electric, played organ and harmonica and belted out R and B and blues rave ups like “Lovelight,” “Hard to Handle,” and “Good Lovin’”. The band was less into long experimentation and more into plain jamming. They could still whip up a mean “Dark Star,” but they could also rock. This is the Europe ’72 version of the band. This is the era that produced my favorite version of “China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider,” my favorite song and one that I hope to hear in the afterlife (yeah, I know, hell for many, but fucking Nirvana for me). My appreciation of the Dead can be summed up in about seven minutes of music; the transition from “China Cat” into “Rider” is an aural masterpiece, a perfect rendering of melody and musicianship; it is transcendent.

Whew. Back down to earth.

Effusive, I know, but that’s the thing about the Grateful Dead’s music. At its best, it elevates existence; it is just so good that it makes you want to get down on your knees and thank Calliope. I’m open to the fact that many don’t see it the way I see it, or hear it the way I hear it anyway. But even for the naysayers, I think there has to be an appreciation for the fact that Deadheads are such advocates for their musical worldview. It’s the reason Deadheads are so dedicated to the band and why the remnants of the Dead are still at it as Dead and Company featuring John Mayer. The gigs still happen, the deadheads still attend, many by SUV and Land Rover, sure, but they still get there. And there are still the dreadlocked, unwashed, and perennially stoned crusty hippies of all ages to add to the ambience (and not always fragrantly). Despite the absence of Jerry, Phil, Pigpen, Keith and Donna, and Brent, the experience of a Dead show still manages to reach heights of musical bliss. And no, it isn’t the drugs; I’ve attended every Dead show in my short career as a Deadhead on nothing stronger than beer (and the secondhand vapor cloud of pot smoke that is a fixture of every Dead show, no matter where it occurs).  I’ve seen Ratdog, Furthur, the Dead with all the surviving original members, and the new version. I’ve seen Bob Weir solo. I’ve even seen Cubensis, a Dead cover band. And they were all great. During each show, there was at least one point where I felt the music go to a different level into an expression of pure and unbounded beauty. Yep, it is that good. And are some of the fans a bit, well, odd? Sure, but they’re also interesting, and most are cool people. 

The first time my wife accompanied me to a Dead show, we had to get through “Shakedown Street” which is the parking lot or grassy area of any venue hosting the Dead where the vendors selling t shirts, candles, stickers, and other goods illicit and otherwise congregate. It is where you find the folks who couldn’t get tickets, or didn’t need them, and who are gathered just to be there. They are, needless to say, a pretty down to earth bunch. Some look like they’ve been following the Dead since 65; others look like they don’t even know where they are, and still others just look like plain street people. As my wife and I made our way through the stoner scrum, she held tightly onto my arm while looking around with fear in her eyes. “Relax,” I reassured her, “these people aren’t going to hurt anyone.” We got through unscathed and made our way into the venue. The usual yellow jacketed security guards were making their presence known, but this was going to be an easy gig for them; the crowd was much too mellow to cause any problems. In fact, many of the people were having meaningful conversations with the security, looking earnestly into their eyes and patting them on the back. I even saw a few Deadheads hug the security guards. Yep, easy gig.

 So turn on your lovelight, come hear Uncle John’s Band, go truckin’. As I’m writing this, I’m listening to old British punk, so the musical dichotomy that exits for me can be yours as well (one of my favorite pictures is of a mowhawked Joe Strummer with Bob Weir; the best of both worlds). As the bumper stickers used to read (and probably still do): Listen to the Grateful Dead, even if only temporarily. Then we’ll talk.

[megadarkbouquettidalwavethings]

Five visions for the future of music

Welcome to the (not so) distant future.

The year is 2018.

Music is changing fast, but can the humans keep up?

Here’s a handful of possible outcomes.

Go boldly everybody.

1) Your favourite singer is not real

One of Japan’s biggest pop stars Hatsune Miku (above) is not a real person.

But that small detail didn’t prevent the humanoid singer from releasing another new music video last week.

She may also have some duets lined up – given that she’s already collaborated with Pharrell.

If the name of the fictional J-pop act is unfamiliar, then try this one on for size:

Roy Orbison.

The Big O died in 1988 but now his 3D hologram world tour will come to life, alongside the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, on 8 April in Cardiff.

His son, Roy Orbison Jr, who hopes his dad’s avatar will one day have a Las Vegas residency, says: “We’re really excited we got the opportunity to do this: the first big tour of a deceased artist with a hologram.

“I don’t think it’s possible yet for the hologram to walk out into the audience so there’s definitely a lot of potential for live application.”

He adds: “But most importantly this is just the icing on the cake.

“The cake is those amazing songs that my dad wrote and his incredible voice.”

Rapper, activist and actual woman M.I.A believes virtual alter egos can benefit living musicians too.

“Artists are at the cusp of embracing AI. But what is political activism in AI phase?��� she pondered at Meltdown.

“I think ‘Should I make my next video in virtual reality instead of me?’. I find that sexy – new technology.

“I could take the hippy route of singing to people face-to-face… or I could stream my virtual shows to people’s bedrooms around the world so you can be at my show wherever you are.”

She went on: “The amount of data AI can pick up on is so fast growing that the future me will be way better anyway!

“But will the future me be less politicised?”

Speak to James Skelly of Merseyside psych rockers The Coral and he’ll tell you he would have made the digital changeover years ago.

He says: “We wanted a holographic version of The Coral, when we were first doing well in about 2002, to tour Japan as us.

“If there was a group that could do another gig, as well as us, and we could split the profits, I’d be up for it!

“But you need songs – it’s always about songs.”

For all we know, the future may have already started for Guy Garvey of Manchester band Elbow.

“How do you know that we are not already holographic?” he quips.

Well, quite.

2) The live parameters have shifted

From the hippies at Woodstock in 1969 to Ed Sheeran and his loop pedal at Glastonbury this summer, the festival experience has been forever changing.

Bluedot Festival – Photo: BLUEDOT FESTIVAL

By next summer, virtual and augmented reality – as well as “3D mapping” – could mean they are more interactive than ever before.

Ben Robinson, creative director of Bluedot Festival at the Jodrell Bank Observatory (you know, the one in Hitchhikers Guide), is giddy at the thought of “shifting the parameters”.

“We had Orbital playing [in 2017] who, 20 years ago, were the very cutting edge, looking at lasers and light production making it more than just some guy standing on a stage,” he says.

“Now today the incorporation of visuals and the production that goes on is quite insane.

“3D mapping manipulates the look and feel of a 3D object. It’s been done on castles to make them look like they’ve fallen down.

“Now people can experience being on the stage with the artists. Or the gig could move off the stage.

“We are a generation spoiled with possibilities.”

Animated heroes Gorillaz hosted their own one-day festival, Demon Dayz, at Margate theme park Dreamland last summer.

Co-creator Jamie Hewlett told the Daily Star that he and Damon Albarn may be getting “too old” but Ben sees no reason why the show can’t go on without them.

“In the past a band’s legacy was they left a record and VHS recording of a concert. Now they can leave the tools for someone else and be just as effective 50 years in the future.”

3) The recording studio is in your laptop

Noel Gallagher confessed to Radio X’s John Kennedy last month that he had never actually met the bass player on his new album Who Built The Moon?

Jason Falkner was doing his thing down the line from LA, while Noel was having his mind blown in Belfast and London.

Noel said: “It was the entire opposite to the thing I’ve ever done. My thing with Oasis was being in a room with a bunch of people and eye contact.

“Here I am at two in the afternoon talking to a guy on an iPad and for him it’s four in the morning and I can hear the song coming through his speakers and he’s saying ‘What do you think of this? Maybe if I do that?’

“And I’m like ‘this is so far out it’s unbelievable’.”

Butch Vig, former Nirvana producer and drummer with Garbage and 5 Billions in Diamonds, confirms such technology is also now available to new bands, who are short on cash but long on distance and imagination.

“There’s a new editing programme where you can be working on the same song in real time in different cities,” he says.

“You have to be creative with the tools you’ve got and, because of the digital technology, everybody can have a really powerful recording studio in your laptop.”

Beth Orton (who incidentally describes Hatsune Miku as “the music industry’s perfect woman”) embraced such kit on her latest album Kidsticks and in some cases preferred computer-generated sounds over actual instruments.

She says: “The ability to play the keyboard and the sound to be any sound possible was very freeing. That would influence the melodies that you created.”

But just a little of that human touch still goes a long way in the creative process.

“Even making an electronic record it was about the connection with the producer and the other musicians.

“I personally like a bit of imperfection.”

4) There’s a direct line between you and your favourite act

Jack White’s Third Man Records reward their subscribers with deliveries of exclusive limited edition pressings.

DJ Gramatik went a step further last week by becoming the first artist to “tokenise” himself, meaning fans who buy the token using the cryptocurrency Ether can potentially share in his future revenue.

Jeff Smith from music databse Discogs believes such block chain technology will “set a direct line from creator to consumer to be able to send things directly, without any form of piracy”.

He says: “We could see subscription platforms, like Third Man records, being able to send out Jack White exclusives without them being traded or shared in any way.”

That’s not to say that fans won’t still crave physical records and material from their new crypto-favourites.

“We’re definitely seeing a universal unplugging and physical music becoming a major part of peoples lives again.”

London hip hop star Loyle Carner is not currently available in token form and he’s happy to keep fans waiting for the follow-up to his Mercury-nominated 2017 album Yesterday’s Gone.

“A song comes out and people say ‘I like that – OK now I’m bored of that. Where’s the next one?’,” he explains.

“Singles are like chapters from a book and if you want to hear my music you’ve got to wait for it.”

5) But new music technology will not be for everyone

For all the head-bending future technology, for many, music always was and always will be about the people… man.

Neil Hannon from the Divine Comedy says: “I’m going to come across as a complete Luddite now but I believe music only gets worse the further you take people and humanity out of it.

“I foresee if they insist on going down this non-existent route then you’re only going to get another punk of some description that rewrites the rulebook.”

Punks like Irish rockers The Strypes maybe?

Bass player Peter O’Hanlon says: “Our fresh approach will be that we just come and play the gig! Everybody else is flying across the stage and we just stand in front of you and play.”

Guitarist Josh McClorey agrees: “The other stuff is cool, but it’s a gimmick.”

Compatriot Lisa Hannigan won’t be found jamming over the internet or appearing live as a hologram anytime soon.

“I don’t think that’s going to be my bag of chips!” says Lisa.

“I just like rocking out a jam with my friends. I can barely work the camera on my phone.

“Cancel the Lisa Hannigan Hologram tour. We’ve lost the cable!”

Just because you can, doesn’t always mean you should and as we hurl ourselves into the new age, fellow folkee Marcus Mumford prefers to hold on to the sacred spirit of the past.

He says: “I don’t know what the future of music is going to look like but if I’m not playing I don’t want no part of it.

“If it sounds good and people are having a good time, then it’s enough for me.”

Source: BBC

The post Five visions for the future of music appeared first on Breaking News Top News & Latest News Headlines | Reuters.

[b-sidemusic]

FEATURE:

(FROM THE ARCHIVE - Originally posted in January 2012)

FALLEN HEROES: #1: JACOB’S MOUSE

Jacob’s Mouse were a three-piece rock band from Bury St Edmunds.  Between 1990 and 1995, they released three albums, one compilation and a string of EPs, earning high-profile fans in John Peel and Kurt Cobain.  For the first in our new series celebrating Fallen Heroes of the local scene, B-Side's Seymour Quigley takes a guided tour of the band’s discography.

Back in the 60s and 70s, Bury St Edmunds town centre was, by many accounts, a little bit rough.  Bury had its own musical dive bar, the now partially-demolished Griffin, (which stood half-proudly on the narrow strip of land between Cornhill and St Andrews Street South now occupied by Officers Club and Karooze), where local bands could “cut their teeth” and where on weekend nights and market days, mods and rockers, juiced to the nines on booze and cheap speed, would spill freely out into the marketplace, merrily beating seven shades of intoxicated shite out of each other, the Police and anyone else who happened to be standing around.

When the first wave of punk arrived in 1976-77, with bands like the Sex Pistols and The Clash pushing an agenda of Total Freedom to Express Yourself, it unwittingly helped encourage its weaker-minded disciples to take acting like a total prick in public to its logical conclusion and made punk a cause célèbre for the frothing right wing.  So when The Clash visited the Corn Exchange during the Out On Parole tour of 1978 (in the face of strong opposition from the Council), popular legend has it that Bury’s punks, teds, mods and rockers were out in force and that the ensuing carnage saw blood on the streets, property destroyed, general indecency and the overall erosion of society.  Whether this was the case or not – by several written accounts, there was no trouble whatsoever, The Clash signed a few autographs and everyone went home happy – so began the start of a Council-imposed 19 year ban on gigs in any public buildings within the town (Conservative towns have a long memory – until 1997, when Councillor Jackie Smith finally broke the embargo with a tentative inaugural BurySound gig, well-meaning promoter after well-meaning promoter found themselves turned away with the mantra, “When The Clash played here in 1978…” ringing in their ears).

So the big names stopped coming to town, the scene dried up, the rougher pubs were shut down, and – as is time-honoured fashion in places where creativity is stifled – Bury became a pub rock bore.  Throughout the 80s, a small resistance movement of Goths, grebos and metallers kept the flame of DIY alive with local bands like The Never Never and Cutting Edge trying, but never quite managing, to lift the local scene out of the doldrums of endless cover band hell.

Then, at the dawn of the 90s, something miraculous happened.  A group of KEGS students (that’s King Edward VI Upper School to you non-Bury types) – twins Hugo Boothby and Jebb Boothby on guitar and bass respectively, and singing drummer Sam Marsh – inspired by the rumblings of US alt-rock and proto-grunge (Fugazi, Minor Threat, Big Black, Pixies, Hüsker Dü) and the nightly clatter of Radio One’s John Peel show, released a 5-track, 12”-only EP through Liverish Records, an imprint set up especially for the release by much-missed second-hand record shop and local institution, The Record Pedlar. The Dot EP – with its iconic “big black dot” sleeve – didn’t set the World alight, but its mixture of new wave-meets-exploding guitar-meets-shitkicker drums-meets-screaming rage plus violins pricked up the ears of indie (which, in the early 90s, was still short for “independent”) types all over the country.  Jacob’s Mouse had, in their own small way, arrived.

The Dot EP was followed in 1991 by the band’s first CD release, 8-track mini-album No Fish Shop Parking.  Released on the band’s own Blithering Idiot label, and named in tribute to a chalk-drawn sign outside the Elephant & Castle pub, No Fish Shop Parkingstill sounds, even by today’s standards, absolutely furious.  Recorded, like all their output, in a shed in Norfolk, No Fish Shop Parking perfectly encapsulates what it feels like to grow up, burdened by intelligence, in a town like Bury St Edmunds, with all the rage and frustration and inertia perfectly summed up in every seething groove of every twisted song.  From opener Tumbleswan, which sees mournful violins collide with triumphant guitars while incomprehensible lyrics spill higgledy-piggledy over themselves, through She Is Dead (only lyrics: “She is dead… now!”), to the syncopated, nonsensical dub-jerk-guitar-aargh of Carfish, to the actually-quite-frightening Justice and, best of all, on the truly phenomenal Twist (written and recorded months before Nirvana unleashed Smells Like Teen Spirit), No Fish Shop Parkingperfectly demonstrates what can be achieved when newly-tapped talent meets genuine, simmering anger, and when Sam screams, “I’M SO CONFUUUSED!” in the dying moments of final, blistering track The Vase, you know exactly what he means.

No Fish Shop Parking earned the band a mountain of hype, a string of high-profile supports with pretty much every big indie band of the day (from the Manics and Suede, to Swervedriver and Th’ Faith Healers, to Babes In Toyland and Nirvana, whose singer – I forget his name – went on record as stating that Jacob’s Mouse were one of his favourite bands), Peel Sessions aplenty and, best of all, a record deal with influential, London-based Wiiija Records (home to Therapy?, Cornershop and, later, BiS).

The band’s first release for Wiiija, 4-track EP Ton Up, was a curious affair, with the band seemingly determined to take relatively straightforward pop songs – Motorspareis pure frantic Hüsker Dü punk, This Room carries a reggae shuffle underneath semi-spoken vocals, Oblong manages to be both obtuse and catchy – but subtly warp the edges, tempering their more rockist tendencies with avant-garde flourishes (most effectively on closer Fridge, which follows a full minute of white noise with a gigantic drum fill and none-more-Sabbath guitars).  A minor triumph.

And then came I’m Scared.  Their first “proper” album in that it contains 11 songs, I’m Scared marks the moment where Jacob’s Mouse began to decisively sever their ties with the outside World, and began doing exactly as they pleased.  So whilst Kettleopens proceedings with a barrage of metallic angst, and album highlight It’s A Thin Sound applies dub grooves to shoegaze guitars, elsewhere things get really weird, really fast: Deep Canvas Lake is ushered along by urgent mandolins; Box Hole contemplates the nature of mortality via ear-piercing treble-shredding guitar; and Coalmine Dig  eschews conventional percussion for what sounds like an army of schoolchildren employed to dispatch the contents of the music cupboard with hammers.  Take that, woodblock!

If the music press – who generally gave I’m Scared ­baffled but appreciative reviews – weren’t quite sure what to make of Jacob’s Mouse by this point, the band’s next run of singles did nothing to help press relations.  From the point of view of sheer creativity, 1993-94 was a good era for the ‘Mouse, and three EPs (the band having long since decided that nothing appearing on a single should also appear on an album) followed in swift succession:  the deceptively poppy, 60s tinged, bass-led and thoroughly splendid Good, followed by the unsettling, down-beat, reverse-guitar semi-folk of Group Of 7, followed in turn by the splendidly-titled and genuinely odd Fandango Widewheels, the verses of which feature the band’s (clearly amused) neighbour reading random nonsense over angry grunge, before an unexpectedly anthemic chorus sees Sam screaming, “Ban the human being! / Kill the bastard!”  Decidedly not Oasis.

Although the three EPs seemed, in isolation, somewhat disparate, when collected together and re-released by Wiiija as the 10-track Wryly Smilers compilation, their jointly fractious nature gave the songs a context and some kind of sense.  It’s doubtful that there was any kind of masterplan – and, speaking many years later, Sam Marsh has indicated (in an unpublished interview for Mmmmm, Juicy! fanzine) that the band were literally throwing every idea they had down onto tape just to see what happened – but the sheer scope of Jacob’s Mouse’s creativity at this stage was truly astonishing.  So whilst, on one hand, Palace – arguably the band’s finest punk moment – is an almost-unbearably exciting barrage of noise, Sag Bag sees dark subject matter (a first-hand account of a road traffic accident ending with the calm observation, “I can see there’s a bone jutting out of me”) grinding against unusual chord progressions and unexpected recorder outbursts, whilst Keen Apple – an impassioned diatribe against an un-named misogynist – comes across like gypsy psychobilly.

And then it all went really weird.  In 1995, with Britpop in full swing, UK Indie Nation found itself gripped by a new-found, half-baked nationalistic desire for all things British.  Blur and Oasis went head-to-head for the Number One slot as part of a pointless flesh carnival to prove absolutely nothing.  Terrible bands called things like Sleeper and Powder were elevated almost overnight from backroom toilet venues to gigantic arena supports, simply on the strength of their hair.  More than ever, indie labels were snapped up as credible fronts for the majors and along with the salivating A&R men, the stylists swept into town, dictating a “look”, a “sound”, an “attitude”.  And did we mention cocaine?  A blizzard of the stuff.  A mountain of it.  Well, it takes the edge off the smack.

As the music biz types of London and Manchester left their souls in a taxi somewhere between a maelstrom of outrageous fortune and an orgy of self-congratulation, a newly-received wisdom spread through the indie World:  That pre-Britpop, everything had, in fact, been shit.  All those records you thought you’d like at the time were, it turned out, rubbish.  So unless you subscribed wholesale to the notion that only bands pushing an agenda of “Britishness” – Union Jacks, 1966, fish ‘n’ chips, The Beatles, Mary Poppins, cup o’ tea – were any good, and wore the exact clothes sported by Liam, Damon, Louise from Sleeper or one of Menswear, you were, quite frankly, dead in the water.  Overnight, mighty bands who’d helped shape the sound of things to come, from Pop Will Eat Itself (who, in the mid-80s, had dared to combine metal riffs with clumsy hip-hop and creative sampling, in the process inventing The Prodigy) to Carter USM (Glastonbury-headlining indie giants whose mixture of clever-clever lyrics, Kylie arrangements and rockabilly guitars influenced misfits like Art Brut, The Indelicates and the Arctic Monkeys) were all but written out of the equation in a Stalinist putsch/proto-New Labourite misconception that the only way to learn from history is to pretend it never happened.  There was, literally, no place in the World for a band like Jacob’s Mouse, and Jacob’s Mouse reacted by retreating from the World entirely.  And so it was in these jingoistic times that Rubber Room, the band’s 2nd (or 4th, depending how you look at it) and final album, landed to universal bemusement in 1995.

Rubber Room is the sound of a three-piece band falling apart.  It makes no sense whatsoever.  Every beat of every drum, every distorted vocal, every skewered noise, every incongruous bleep and blatter and skronk that roars out of the speakers is the sound of three people gone completely insane.  In terms of pop-gone-wrong extreme mentalness, at its most deranged it makes fellow artistic masterpieces of the era like the Boo Radleys’ Giant Steps and the Manics’ The Holy Bible sound comparatively tame.  It is, needless to say, incredible.  Of the 12 tracks on offer here, only two – unlikely single Hawaiian Vice and reasonably conventional US alt-thunderer Blither – could reasonably be described as “commercial” in any recognisable sense, but still see their vocals fuzzed up and mixed down so low as to be near-indecipherable.  The rest of the album takes in looped keyboard jazz terror (Poltergeist), psychedelic dub grunge (Public Oven), unsettling acoustic/electric guitar trade-offs (Domestic) and, in general, jarring barrages of noise and confusion.  But the absolute and inarguable album highlight, suicide note and distillation of all that made Jacob’s Mouse such an intensely wonderful band is Foam Face.  Essentially the sound of three people playing three different songs at the same time, Foam Face is, simultaneously, a trance bass groove, a metal guitar workout, a softly-intoned paean to God knows what, and a full-on noise whiteout, culminating in the sound of a lawnmower committing suicide.  To this day, no other band on a reasonably large indie label has released anything quite this unique.

By Sam Marsh’s estimation, Rubber Room sold less than a thousand copies; the band called it a day shortly afterwards, and as the 90s rumbled towards their tiresome conclusion (The Verve without Nick McCabe, Stereophonics everywhere, Turin Brakes, the much-vaunted “death” of guitar music as Fatboy Slim conquered the globe), Jacob’s Mouse were all but forgotten.  In recent years, whilst one-time peers (and fellow early 90s Peel favourites) Th’ Faith Healers have reformed and found themselves embraced by the ATP set as returning heroes, Jacob’s Mouse have been seemingly happy to let rabid dogs lie.  So while Sam has continued to write, record and release music (firstly solo as The Machismos, later with hardcore legends The Volunteers and short-lived dub types The People’s Choice and Zen Reggae Masters), Jacob’s Mouse have remained, for the most part, a footnote in John Peel’s autobiography.

But their influence is out there.  The first hints could be seen, 10 years back, in the NME’s tenuous “No Name” scene, with the 80s/90s alt-rock influenced likes of Ikara Colt and, in particular, the mighty Mclusky sporting a distinctly Mouse-esque line in seething bass-propulsion, abrasive guitars and off-kilter lyrics.  And on a purely empirical basis, your correspondent has been bowled over in the past few years by the number of music-loving types from all over the UK who, at the mention of Foam Face or No Fish Shop Parking in any kind of “favourite songs/albums” discussion, have responded with some variation on, “Oh my GOD!  Jacob’s MOUSE!  They were fucking INCREDIBLE!!!”  The love is out there, and the love is strong.

Jacob’s Mouse mattered.  From a musical point of view, they were a phenomenal band who released a string of incredible, genre-defying, increasingly deranged but always brilliant records, without ever sounding like they were trying too hard.  But from a personal point of view, they were important because they demonstrated, single-handedly, that a band from Bury St Edmunds could achieve some degree of success, and make records than truly, genuinely, speak to you about how it feels to be in a certain place at a certain time in your life, with all the uncertainties of what the future might hold.  Jacob’s Mouse may never receive the recognition they deserve; but they made the records they wanted to make and, for those who took the time to notice, they made a difference.

The entire Jacob’s Mouse Wiiija back catalogue (with the exception of 'Wryly Smilers') is now available on all major digital platforms.

HISTORY: Formed in the late 80’s in Bury St Edmunds, disbanded in 1995.

PERSONNEL: Hugo Boothby – guitar Jebb Boothby – bass Sam Marsh – drums/vocals

DISCOGRAPHY: The Dot EP (5-track EP, Liverish Records, 1990) No Fish Shop Parking (8-track album, Blithering Idiot, 1991) Ton Up (4-track EP, Wiiija, 1992) Company News (2-track single, Rough Trade, 1992) I’m Scared (11-track album, Wiiija, 1993) Good (3-track EP, Wiiija, 1993) Group of 7 aka Chocolate Cake 100 (3-track EP, Wiiija, 1993) Ton of Scum (2-track single, Wiiija, 1993) Fandango Widewheels (4-track EP, Wiiija, 1994) Wryly Smilers (10-track compilation, Wiiija, 1994) Hawaiian Vice (1-track single, Wiiija, 1994) Rubber Room (12-track album, Wiiija, 1995)

LINKS: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jacobsmouse/ Unofficial MySpace: www.myspace.com/jacobsmouse Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob%27s_Mouse

[ricardosousalemos]

Green Day: Dookie

When he was 10 years old, long before he sang about masturbation losing its fun, Billie Joe Armstrong lost himself in music. His father had just died of cancer, and in Rodeo, Calif., a smallish East Bay suburb next to an oil refinery, Armstrong retreated into MTV, the Beatles, Van Halen, and a Stratocaster knock-off he nicknamed Blue. He grew close to schoolmate Michael Pritchard, who had his own family grief and who introduced Armstrong to British heavy metal giants like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. Pritchard later earned the sobriquet Mike Dirnt, for his constant dirnting on bass guitar.

In high school, Armstrong and Dirnt smoked pot and played in a band called Sweet Children, finding their tribe in a tiny clique of DIY punks. By 1988, Sweet Children had their first gig at 924 Gilman Street, the Berkeley punk mecca opened the previous year by Maximumrocknroll zine founder Tim Yohannan, and Armstrong told his waitress mother he wouldn’t be graduating. Sweet Children signed to Lookout Records!, changed their name to Green Day, and put out a pair of rough but promising EPs. They brought in Frank “Tré Cool” Wright, a drummer known equally for his musicianship and his mischievousness, and with their sharply improved LP Kerplunk!, Green Day arrived.

As Kerplunk! landed on shelves in December 1991, Nirvana’s Nevermind zoomed to the top of the album charts. A band with Green Day’s momentum and punk pedigree was obvious bait for the major labels. Still, it was Armstrong’s voice, sneering and congested, that initially put one A&R exec off of Green Day’s demo. Luckily, he passed it to his producing partner, Rob Cavallo, whose father had been Prince’s manager circa Purple Rain and who, despite signing respected L.A. pop-punks the Muffs, was sorely in need of a hit.

He found one. Co-produced by Cavallo and the band themselves, Green Day’s Dookie was released on February 1, 1994. To date, the band’s Warner/Reprise debut has sold more than 16 million copies worldwide. Most of those album buyers probably know nothing about its makers’ humble origins. But that story helps to explain the unique series of balances, between showmanship and disaffection, dogmatic punk ideals and romantic stadium dreams, sweetness and scatology, partying and pain, that have turned Dookie into one of the greatest teenage wasteland albums of any generation. Armstrong’s Dookie guitar? His childhood’s trusty old Blue.

What set Dookie apart from the grunge rock bellowers of its day was Armstrong’s voice, foggy and vaguely unplaceable. “I’m an American guy faking an English accent faking an American accent,” he teased at the time. Though Armstrong’s tone was bratty, his phrasing had that lackadaisical quality that left room for listeners to fill in their own interpretations. On Dookie, Armstrong channeled a lifetime of songcraft obsession into buzzing, hook-crammed tracks that acted like they didn’t give a shit—fashionably then, but also appealingly for the 12-year-old spirit within us all. Maybe they worked so well because, on a compositional and emotional level, they were actually gravely serious. Sometimes singing about the serious stuff in your life—desire, anxiety, identity—feels a lot more weightless done against the backdrop of a dogshit-bombarded illustration of your hometown by East Bay punk fixture Richie Bucher.

“Longview,” Dookie’s outstanding first single, smacks of the most extreme disengagement: a title taken from Longview, Washington, where it happened to be played live for the first time; a loping bass line supposedly concocted while Dirnt was tripping on acid; and a theme of shrugging boredom that placed it in the ne’er-do-well pantheon next to “Slack Motherfucker” to “Loser.” Adolescent interest may always be piqued by lyrical references to drugs and jerking off, the way a 5-year-old mainly laughs at the Calvin and Hobbes panels where Calvin is naked or calling Hobbes an “idiot.” But as beer-raising alt-rock goes, this is also exceptionally bleak, with the narrator’s couch-locked wank session transforming into a self-imposed prison where Armstrong semi-decipherably sings, per the liner notes, “You’re fucking breaking.” No motivation? For a high-school dropout hoping to succeed in music, that mental hell sounds like plenty of motivation.

The other singles mix Armstrong’s burgeoning songwriting chops with deceptively lighthearted takes on deeper topics. The opening line, “Do you have the time/To listen to me whine?” is endlessly quotable, but the self-mocking stoner paranoia of the irresistible “Basket Case” was inspired by Armstrong’s anxiety attacks. As late as 1992, Armstrong still had no fixed address, and “Welcome to Paradise” reaches back to those nights crashing at dodgy West Oakland warehouse spaces. It also brashly embodies punk’s trash-is-treasure aesthetic at its most American. But the closest Armstrong came to a pop standard, one that any guitarist who knows four power chords can play at a home and a more established star could likely have made an even bigger hit, was the midtempo “When I Come Around”—a smoldering devotion to the then-estranged lover who would become the mother of Armstrong’s two children. They’re still married.

Elsewhere, the bouncy, brief “Coming Clean” is from the perspective of a confused 17-year-old, uncovering secrets about manhood that his parents can’t fathom; Armstrong has forthrightly related the song to his own youthful questions about bisexuality. “Seventeen and coming clean for the first time/I finally figured out myself for the time,” he declares, in one particularly sublime bit of wordcraft. Teenage angst pays off well: Now he was bored and almost 22. Likewise, the rest of the album tracks often further showed what an accomplished songwriter Armstrong had become. “I declare I don’t care no more,” from breakneck slacker anthem “Burnout,” would be a classic first opener on any album, even though by now we know it contains an element of false bravado. The contrasts that made up the band’s identity also helped elevate Dookie above its shitty name, couching anti-social childishness in whip-smart melodic and lyrical turns. When, on the last proper track, the nuke-invoking “F.O.D.” (short for “fuck off and die”), Armstrong vents, “It’s real and it’s been fun/But was it all real fun,” it’s his Dookie-era way of saying he hopes you had the time of your life.   

Critics have been kind to Dookie, but not overwhelmingly so. It’s tempting to wonder how many of these lyrics could’ve been influenced by Robert Christgau’s two-word, two-star Village Voice review of Kerplunk!: “Beats masturbation.” Still, he gave Dookie an A-, and the album made it onto the Voice’s 1994 Pazz & Jop year-end critics’ poll at No. 12. But the backlash against Green Day in the pages of Maximumrocknroll was real and visceral. The June 1994 cover showed a man holding a gun in his mouth with the words, “Major labels: some of your friends are already this fucked,” with Yohannan sniffing inside, “I thought it was oh so touching that MTV decided to interrupt playing Green Day videos to overwhelm us with Nirvana videos on the day of Kobain’s [sic] death.” At Gilman, where major label acts were banned, graffiti on the wall proclaimed, “Billie Joe must die.” So it’s an album many people adore, but like loving the Beatles, proclaiming your adoration for it doesn’t necessarily win you any special recognition. Oh, you were in seventh grade and learned every word of a Green Day album? Duh.

Time has worked on Dookie in strange ways. Most blatantly, the post-grunge alt boom allowed an album like this to exist in the first place. Green Day were masters at pulling stoner humor out of malaise, and that is what the so-called alternative nation needed. One of Dookie’s great light-hearted touches, the image of Ernie from “Sesame Street” on the back cover, has been airbrushed away from later physical editions, ostensibly due to legal concerns. Among the many things streaming has ruined was the old ’90s trick of including hidden tracks on the album buried without notice at the end of the CD, so all digital releases treat Tré Cool’s novelty goof “All By Myself” as its own proper track. The unfortunate “Having a Blast,” about wanting to lash out with a suicide bombing, is understandably absent from most recent Green Day setlists.

Then again, so many of the fights that Dookie started have happily become moot. In 2015, Green Day played their first show at Gilman in 22 years. Whichever Maximumrocknroll readers were mad at Green Day for trying to make it out of their working-class suburban beginnings probably have more adult worries today (the zine, however, hasn’t forgotten). Though Green Day never quite embraced the term pop-punk and certainly didn’t invent it, they were pegged as its popularizers; you could hear their echoes several years ago in records like Wavves’ King of the Beach, but younger pop-punk torchbearers like Joyce Manor, Modern Baseball, or You Blew It! have been more likely to name-check the more tightly genre-fitting Blink-182. In interviews, Armstrong still claims the “punk” mantle, but over the years Green Day emerged as a classic arena-rock band, noted for their pyrotechnics.

These days, Armstrong knows how to fire up crowds by promising them they’ll have a good time. Fans are brought up on stage every night to take their instruments and play a song. A T-shirt cannon is somehow involved. Green Day have matured in all the ways the biggest bands usually mature, and that’s their right. Immature but crafty, punk but pop, American pretending to be English pretending to be, well, whatever, Dookie-era Green Day were, for a time, in a class alone. Call them pathetic, call them what you will. They were all by themselves, and everyone was looking.

[stevecanmakeanythingnerdy]

RANDOM RECORD WORKOUT SEASON 4 Battle 22 (The) Pixies: Surfer Rosa (side 1) Vs. Fashion: Fabrique (face 2) (The) Pixies: Surfer Rosa (side 1) I would hope, for your sake, you are familiar with this seminal pillar of the indie rock and alternative music community. But just in case: The Pixies (or just Pixies) are an American alternative rock band formed in 1986 in Boston, Massachusetts. The original lineup comprised Black Francis (lead vocals, rhythm guitar), Joey Santiago (lead guitar), Kim Deal(bass, backing vocals) and David Lovering (drums). The band disbanded acrimoniously in 1993, but reunited in 2004. Deal left in 2013 and was replaced briefly by Kim Shattuck before Paz Lenchantin joined for the band's 2014 tour, and has remained in the lineup since. Basically, Pixies are the "fight club-where is my mind" band. Not just a delicious chocolate nut and pretzel snack, or small, winged, mischievous, woodland fairies. Although the latter did play into WHY the band name was chosen. While not their first release, Surfer Rosa is their first proper studio album. It was recorded by Steve Albini (Nirvana fame), completed in two weeks, and released in early 1988. Surfer Rosa gained the Pixies acclaim in Europe; both Melody Maker and Sounds gave Surfer Rosa their "Album of the Year" award. American critical response was also positive yet more muted, a reaction that persisted for much of the band's career. The album was eventually certified Gold in the U.S. in 2005, but American "success" eluded the band most of their early active years. As aforementioned, the movie Fight Club used the song "where is my Mind" which really kickstarted their comeback, at least unofficially. This album is, flat out A-MAZING from start to finish. Side one contains hit after hit, starting with " Bone Machine". It is all the little nuances, like the off time hook and the brilliant chaos that make this so distinctive and catchy. Male and Female harmonies mixed with an almost "waltz" time signature which inadvertently describe the band perfectly. The band comes at you in 3's. You get more discordant disaster with "Break My Body" and an almost instrumental, save for a few feedback drenched yells, with "Something Against You". As if that were not enough, one of my personal favorite weirdo tunes is next, "Broken Face"- hold that one note and wrap a melody around it. Punk rock but nothing like it all at once. Those odd, painful vocals...those strange lyrical content pairings...it is macabre and distinct. So cleverly original. "Gigantic" is another, well, gigantic hit for fans. In fact, it may be arguably just as famous as the fight club selection. Deal takes a stab at the lead on this one, and I honestly wish Frank would have let her do it more often, as the results are pretty amazing. He was/is (?) pretty controlling of that though. It is probably their most radio friendly tune. Lastly is "River Euphrates"- i love all the little nuances on this one too. Such as leaving studio noise and mistakes, proving it is raw, unfiltered, and REAL. In many ways a blueprint. On the face of it, this is almost an unfair battle, who can compete with the freaking Pixies!!!?!?! They are still active too, in fact, as of this writing a new album is set to drop this fall. Classic album by a classic, god - like - status band. Masterpiece certainly applies to this indie rock classic. I was almost just as excited to review it as I was when I saw it on the random selection! Fashion: Fabrique (face 2) I must be a gambler at heart, because I take a lot of risks on records that look to be promising or interesting musically. I like the obscurity of it all, and sometimes I discover some really great, otherwise unknown music. It gives me the feeling that I know a secret I suppose. Fashion were one of those gambles. Time frame seemed right (early 80's) looks and style and the art were enough to imply this could be some good new wave synth pop. The result is: this is just bad! And not in a Michael Jackson's 1987 Thriller follow up type of way. Not even in an 80's context where bad means good. No, just...bad. Audio vomit. Successful in that the music makes me think of ridiculous fashion runway shows and over the top clothing on thin, drug addled models with too much mascara. You know the kind of outfit like peacock feathers paired with shit brown paper grocery bags for pants. I feel like this was one man's vision, and the remaining band members just wanted to be in a band so they followed suit. So who is Fashion? From their wiki : Fashion was formed originally as Fàshiön Music, in Birmingham, England, in 1978, and consisted of John Mulligan (bass, synthesizer), Dik Davis (drums), and Al James (lead vocals, guitar). James became known as Luke Sky, or simply Luke or Lûke (short for "Luke Skyscraper" - a reference to the Star Wars character Luke Skywalker and the fact that James was tall and thin), while John Mulligan was known simply as Mulligan and Davis as Dïk. At that time, they also founded their own Fàshiön Music label, and they released their first three singles: "Steady Eddie Steady", "Citinite", and "The Innocent". Their sound was varied, playing punk, post-punk and indie repertoire, although Mulligan at that time also had a synthesizer which later characterized the future electro years of the band (sounding like rock bands of the day, as Magazine, The Cure, and Joy Division). Now, if they sounded like any if those comparisons, I would be much more a fan, so apparently I need to start at the beginning. What I have is their later, and honestly probably more notable and successful album, Fabrique. With this album the band saw a significant change in line-up, with James having left the band and Harris and Recchi joining. A more electronic and disco influenced sound arose. Songs like "Love Shadow" and the torturously long "It's Alright" which sounds like an outtake of Stevie Wonder's "Higher Ground". The 80's keys are there, but not highlighted. It is almost as if they were living in denial in 1983 that new wave was taking over, and they begrudgingly added keys to keep up with the times. "Whitestuff (shortcut)" is probably the ultimate dick punch here. Goddamnit! Who knew synth- disco 80's was a thing! Screw this! I think my ears are bleeding. Apparently this song was a large part of a Miami Vice episode. "Do You Wanna Make Love?" Is at least MOSTLY 80's, but Frankie Goes To Hollyweird. I actually had t talk myself through the last two tracks. "Slow Blue" especially, and emphasis on the S. L. O. W! Argh! Painful!! Please, just make it end!! Whew! That was intense. I guess you have to balance the good with the bad. The Pixies took 15 minutes to burn off 124 calories over 6 songs. Frank and company averaged 20.67 calories per song, and 8.26 calories per minute. Fashion were a little more forward and took 22 minutes (felt like 50) to burn off 174 calories over 5 songs. That is 34.8 calories burned per song, and 7.91 calories per minute. It should go without saying that the Pixies caught the wave, and surfer Rosa-ed to the top! Pixies win, hands down! (The) Pixies: "Broken Face" https://youtu.be/YgxAwIybQ0g Fashion: "Whitestuff (shortcut )" https://youtu.be/_e1fvIiJiNk #randomrecordworkout #randomrecordworkoutseason4

[megadarkbouquettidalwavethings]

Five visions for the future of music

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Hatsune Miku: She’s not there

Welcome to the (not so) distant future.

The year is 2018.

Music is changing fast, but can the humans keep up?

Here’s a handful of possible outcomes.

Go boldly everybody.

1) Your favourite singer is not real

One of Japan’s biggest pop stars Hatsune Miku (above) is not a real person.

But that small detail didn’t prevent the humanoid singer from releasing another new music video last week.

She may also have some duets lined up – given that she’s already collaborated with Pharrell.

If the name of the fictional J-pop act is unfamiliar, then try this one on for size:

Roy Orbison.

The Big O died in 1988 but now his 3D hologram world tour will come to life, alongside the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, on 8 April in Cardiff.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Rob Orbison: In Dreams and now in holograms too

His son, Roy Orbison Jr, who hopes his dad’s avatar will one day have a Las Vegas residency, says: “We’re really excited we got the opportunity to do this: the first big tour of a deceased artist with a hologram.

“I don’t think it’s possible yet for the hologram to walk out into the audience so there’s definitely a lot of potential for live application.”

He adds: “But most importantly this is just the icing on the cake.

“The cake is those amazing songs that my dad wrote and his incredible voice.”

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption M.I.A finds technology ‘sexy’

Rapper, activist and actual woman M.I.A believes virtual alter egos can benefit living musicians too.

“Artists are at the cusp of embracing AI. But what is political activism in AI phase?” she pondered at Meltdown.

“I think ‘Should I make my next video in virtual reality instead of me?’. I find that sexy – new technology.

“I could take the hippy route of singing to people face-to-face… or I could stream my virtual shows to people’s bedrooms around the world so you can be at my show wherever you are.”

She went on: “The amount of data AI can pick up on is so fast growing that the future me will be way better anyway!

“But will the future me be less politicised?”

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Can the real Coral please stand up

Speak to James Skelly of Merseyside psych rockers The Coral and he’ll tell you he would have made the digital changeover years ago.

He says: “We wanted a holographic version of The Coral, when we were first doing well in about 2002, to tour Japan as us.

“If there was a group that could do another gig, as well as us, and we could split the profits, I’d be up for it!

“But you need songs – it’s always about songs.”

For all we know, the future may have already started for Guy Garvey of Manchester band Elbow.

“How do you know that we are not already holographic?” he quips.

Well, quite.

2) The live parameters have shifted

Image copyright Bluedot Festival

Image caption Bluedot Festival

From the hippies at Woodstock in 1969 to Ed Sheeran and his loop pedal at Glastonbury this summer, the festival experience has been forever changing.

By next summer, virtual and augmented reality – as well as “3D mapping” – could mean they are more interactive than ever before.

Ben Robinson, creative director of Bluedot Festival at the Jodrell Bank Observatory (you know, the one in Hitchhikers Guide), is giddy at the thought of “shifting the parameters”.

“We had Orbital playing [in 2017] who, 20 years ago, were the very cutting edge, looking at lasers and light production making it more than just some guy standing on a stage,” he says.

“Now today the incorporation of visuals and the production that goes on is quite insane.

“3D mapping manipulates the look and feel of a 3D object. It’s been done on castles to make them look like they’ve fallen down.

“Now people can experience being on the stage with the artists. Or the gig could move off the stage.

“We are a generation spoiled with possibilities.”

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Gorillaz

Animated heroes Gorillaz hosted their own one-day festival, Demon Dayz, at Margate theme park Dreamland last summer.

Co-creator Jamie Hewlett told the Daily Star that he and Damon Albarn may be getting “too old” but Ben sees no reason why the show can’t go on without them.

“In the past a band’s legacy was they left a record and VHS recording of a concert. Now they can leave the tools for someone else and be just as effective 50 years in the future.”

3) The recording studio is in your laptop

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Noel Gallagher: “I’m in the UK – what time is it there?”

Noel Gallagher confessed to Radio X’s John Kennedy last month that he had never actually met the bass player on his new album Who Built The Moon?

Jason Falkner was doing his thing down the line from LA, while Noel was having his mind blown in Belfast and London.

Noel said: “It was the entire opposite to the thing I’ve ever done. My thing with Oasis was being in a room with a bunch of people and eye contact.

“Here I am at two in the afternoon talking to a guy on an iPad and for him it’s four in the morning and I can hear the song coming through his speakers and he’s saying ‘What do you think of this? Maybe if I do that?’

“And I’m like ‘this is so far out it’s unbelievable’.”

Butch Vig, former Nirvana producer and drummer with Garbage and 5 Billions in Diamonds, confirms such technology is also now available to new bands, who are short on cash but long on distance and imagination.

“There’s a new editing programme where you can be working on the same song in real time in different cities,” he says.

“You have to be creative with the tools you’ve got and, because of the digital technology, everybody can have a really powerful recording studio in your laptop.”

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Image caption Beth Orton: Perfectly imperfect

Beth Orton (who incidentally describes Hatsune Miku as “the music industry’s perfect woman”) embraced such kit on her latest album Kidsticks and in some cases preferred computer-generated sounds over actual instruments.

She says: “The ability to play the keyboard and the sound to be any sound possible was very freeing. That would influence the melodies that you created.”

But just a little of that human touch still goes a long way in the creative process.

“Even making an electronic record it was about the connection with the producer and the other musicians.

“I personally like a bit of imperfection.”

4) There’s a direct line between you and your favourite act

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Image caption Jack White: “It says ‘Dear Stephen’, thanks for your support’

Jack White’s Third Man Records reward their subscribers with deliveries of exclusive limited edition pressings.

DJ Gramatik went a step further last week by becoming the first artist to “tokenise” himself, meaning fans who buy the token using the cryptocurrency Ether can potentially share in his future revenue.

Jeff Smith from music databse Discogs believes such block chain technology will “set a direct line from creator to consumer to be able to send things directly, without any form of piracy”.

He says: “We could see subscription platforms, like Third Man records, being able to send out Jack White exclusives without them being traded or shared in any way.”

That’s not to say that fans won’t still crave physical records and material from their new crypto-favourites.

“We’re definitely seeing a universal unplugging and physical music becoming a major part of peoples lives again.”

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Image caption Loyle Carner: Fighting for your right (to not release more music yet)

London hip hop star Loyle Carner is not currently available in token form and he’s happy to keep fans waiting for the follow-up to his Mercury-nominated 2017 album Yesterday’s Gone.

“A song comes out and people say ‘I like that – OK now I’m bored of that. Where’s the next one?’,” he explains.

“Singles are like chapters from a book and if you want to hear my music you’ve got to wait for it.”

5) But new music technology will not be for everyone

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Image caption Neil Hannon: People person

For all the head-bending future technology, for many, music always was and always will be about the people… man.

Neil Hannon from the Divine Comedy says: “I’m going to come across as a complete Luddite now but I believe music only gets worse the further you take people and humanity out of it.

“I foresee if they insist on going down this non-existent route then you’re only going to get another punk of some description that rewrites the rulebook.”

Punks like Irish rockers The Strypes maybe?

Bass player Peter O’Hanlon says: “Our fresh approach will be that we just come and play the gig! Everybody else is flying across the stage and we just stand in front of you and play.”

Guitarist Josh McClorey agrees: “The other stuff is cool, but it’s a gimmick.”

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Image caption Lisa Hannigan: “Can you plug me back in at the back please?”

Compatriot Lisa Hannigan won’t be found jamming over the internet or appearing live as a hologram anytime soon.

“I don’t think that’s going to be my bag of chips!” says Lisa.

“I just like rocking out a jam with my friends. I can barely work the camera on my phone.

“Cancel the Lisa Hannigan Hologram tour. We’ve lost the cable!”

Just because you can, doesn’t always mean you should and as we hurl ourselves into the new age, fellow folkee Marcus Mumford prefers to hold on to the sacred spirit of the past.

He says: “I don’t know what the future of music is going to look like but if I’m not playing I don’t want no part of it.

“If it sounds good and people are having a good time, then it’s enough for me.”

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Media captionJade Bird, The Shelters & The Lumineers share their visions of the future of music

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