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movienotesbyzawmer · 4 years ago

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October 26: Friday the 13th Part VIII - Jason Takes Manhattan

(previous notes: Friday the 13th Part VII - The New Blood)

I know that this is devastating news for you but I'm almost done watching the Friday the 13th movies and posting here about them. Believe me it hurts me a lot less than it hurts you. Or something. Whatever, I'm not enjoying these movies so I look forward to moving on to a slightly more worthwhile project, such as those Fantastic Beasts movies. That's a joke get it, those movies blow.

So to recap… Jason drowned as a little boy in Camp Crystal Lake and his mom perceived negligence on the part of horny teenage camp counselors so she kills a couple of them before her son even drowns and then twenty years later she takes up that cause again bigly. She gets beheaded but Jason, still a boy in the lake, pulls his mom’s killer in the water which makes her very whelmed. Then a few years later Jason is an adult-sized monster who stalks that camp and the houses in the area, violently murdering everyone he can, and in different methods whenever that is feasible. At one point he gets so stabbed that he is apparently definitively dead enough to get buried in a spooky graveyard, but the guy that originally stabbed him so effectively thinks he needs to dig him up and extra-kill him. But lightning strikes a pole that got stuck in Jason so he just stops being dead and goes back to being a murder monster. He eventually gets anchored to the bottom of Crystal Lake but a girl who lives on the lake has powers which mostly involve moving things with her mind, but she also was able to inadvertently will Jason up from the lake so he could just keep doing the same death stuff. After many killings and poorly-thought-out chases through the woods, the magic girl uses her power to have her dead dad come up from the lake and pull Jason into it in such a manner as to convince her that Jason is just gone forever.

So then how can there be another movie I don't understand.

Maybe the first seven movies were all a dream, and this one is just a movie.

What does it tell you that I'm putting off starting this movie.

Again I haven't seen this eighth movie. It came out when I was 18, but even though it promised a tongue-in-cheek, self-aware, campy experience I just didn't fit it into my busy schedule of wanting girls to like me even a little. I do remember kind of rooting for it to be fun and funny, but based on having just watched the first seven movies in the series, my confidence that there will be any decent humor here at all is very, very low. Okay. It is time. This truly is the beginning of the end.

It begins and an unfamiliar narrator describes the intensity of The City as we see Manhattan-at-night imagery. Totally doesn't seem like the other movies right off the bat. Oh also the score is a pop song that sounds like it is approximately 36 months older than this 1989 movie.

Okay… we're actually apparently back to Crystal Lake, and now that narrator is apparently a radio DJ who is giving a shout-out to the graduating kids of Crystal Lake. For some reason he cares about them and says something that is strangely both welcoming and mournful about them coming to the city.

These two attractive people are getting busy on a large boat on the lake. It is Crystal Lake, that is established, but this boat is too large for this lake. This is like having a Jet Ski on an above-ground backyard pool.

They drop the anchor and it catches on a high voltage cable that is running at the bottom of the lake! It makes sparky electro-fire under there, and it jolts probably-Jason's body under some of the collapsed dock stuff and he un-dies and climbs out of the water! We even hear a warlocky "ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!"

Jason goes into the room where the couple is having another go, and he shoots a harpoon at the girl but misses! But he has some other stabby thing and he stabs the guy with it. The girl got away, but he finds her where she's hiding and kills her kind of slowly. Like, he very slowly bears down on her as she screams and it's like they have time for someone to save the day. But there is no one. No one saves the day. The day ends with her just getting stabbed with the harpoon.

Now it's new characters in a new place. Looks like the eastern seaboard, an ocean port, and some students are getting on a boat that is going to New York. It's the graduating students the DJ was talking about. There is a girl who interacts with a woman who is apparently her admiring teacher and a man in a suit who is her legal guardian. Something about her being troubled. Then there's this captain, and he's talking to one of the kids like they are father and son. His name is Shawn and he is handsome like a movie star.

0:16:00 - Whoa, Jason is suddenly on the ship! This is totally not Crystal Lake, and the ship has left the port, but Jason emerged from the water and grabbed onto the ship! Then Shawn runs into a creepy deckhand who tells him this cruise is doomed. That is important to the formula, apparently. It is then established that Shawn is the boyfriend of Troubled Girl. How troubled can she be if she has a boyfriend who looks like he was rejected by New Kids On The Block for being handsomer than the rest of the group.

The rollout of this motley cast of characters continues with a rocker girl and a longhaired filmmaking auteur. The rocker girl walks around with her guitar rocking, and the auteur films her for a video. But then they part ways, and she goes down below decks to experience the primo echo acoustics or something. She just rocks down there by herself with nothing but her rad axe. Not even an amp, even though she succeeds in playing loud rock music. But Jason shows up! He chases her a bit, gets his hands on her electric guitar and bashes her to death with it.

0:23:14 - Whoa, surprisingly ambitious shot they pulled off! In all one shot we see Jason come down some stairs onto like a promenade deck, then he looks at the porthole window of a room, and the camera goes through the porthole and continues through the room in a way that is not at all obvious to understand how they did it! Good job!

It's Troubled Girl's room. She has a vision of a drowning little boy. Little Boy Jason, I guess. If I’m supposed to know her relationship to Jason, I must have missed it.

So suit guy is Troubled Girl's uncle, I get that now. But also he is chaperoning the kids on this cruise so he's like a teacher. And he is very stuffy.

There are two new characters, boy-crazy girls, and between them and Troubled Girl there is a lot of hairspray in this movie's budget.

Uncle Suit walks in on Boy-Crazy 1 & 2 doing cocaine! He doesn't quite catch them in the act, so he just says something menacing about how one of them has a project due. But aren't they graduating? And on the "we made it" celebratory cruise? One of the Boy-Crazy girls (2 I think) is played by Kelly Hu, who has had plenty of success these past 30 years. But for now she is just Boy-Crazy 2.

Someone is in the sauna, this little ship has a sauna. I have no idea who the boy is in the sauna because he covered his face with a towel. Jason comes in and grabs a scalding hot rock, way bigger than the hot rocks that usually are in saunas, and kills the boy by shoving the big rock through his chest.

Boy-Crazy 1 has gotten it into her head that Troubled Girl is the one who got Uncle Suit to walk in on them doing drugs, so she bumps Troubled Girl into the water! Before getting fished back onboard she has a vision of Little Boy Jason pulling her down. Some other unrealistic interactions take place when she gets back on deck, but then she has really scary visions in the bathroom.

0:35:00 - In perhaps the most gruesome scene in this series so far… Boy-Crazy 1 is in her cabin wearing a silk robe. Uncle Suit walks right the fuck in and gets all huffy at her about "where's your biology project". He's serious! And she is ready for that question because she jettisons the robe to reveal that she has drawn some artful anatomy references on her underwear'd body! She's unambiguously seductive and kisses him and pulls him into bed! He is mostly not having it and eventually wriggles his way away from her scoldingly. But Auteur was filming! It was all a blackmail plan of some kind.

The next scene is Boy-Crazy 1, just moments after blackmailing Uncle Suit, getting out of the shower in her bathroom as Jason comes in. She sees him come in and look around and decides to just stay in the bathroom and be scared. But he smashes his arm through the door, tosses her around a little, smashes the bathroom mirror, and after another drawn-out approach, stabs her with a piece of the broken mirror.

In the very next scene, the ship's pilot is piloting when Jason creeps up from behind and kills him with something long and sharp and snippy. Then the Dad Captain comes in and finds the body, and just like that Jason is behind him with a knife. It's just a run-of-the-mill throat-slash but it's edited with a stylish frame-rate effect so it's still fresh and exciting.

Shawn finds this carnage right away and since he's the Captain's son he has some ship cred, maybe he can get the ship back to shore! But when he tries to radio for help, Jason cuts some cable somewhere to thwart it. And he just seems disappointingly clueless about what to do otherwise.

Everyone assembles in the cockpit - what do you call a cockpit on a ship, I forget - and Creepy Deckhand repeats his warning that the cruise is doomed, and this time he says he knows Jason Is on the ship to kill everyone, but Uncle Suit is so mad at that story that he grabs a knife and comes at the creepy deckhand! Others are around though so the fight is broken up.

Boy-Crazy 2 wasn't with everyone who went to the cockpit; she decided to go look for Boy-Crazy 1. But when she finds her body, she runs around screaming! And instead of ending up someplace where there is anyone, she ends up in the unoccupied disco. Loud music is playing. Lights are swirling. Sensory overload. And Jason is there! He kills her by strangling her to the kind of music that all the kids like nowadays.

Auteur always has his camera, and now he is shuffling around the ship with his camera in one hand and a shotgun in the other. Someone suddenly appears in front of him and he accidentally shoots the guy. He starts to feel bad about that, although continuing to film, but then Jason shows up, knocks the camera away, and chases him. He kills Auteur by picking him up and throwing him so hard at an electrical console that all the electricity blows up and makes him be on fire and twitchy and dead!

Shawn's friend from before is just wandering scared on the decks when he runs into Jason, so he climbs a ladder up a mast. Even though he climbs up way past Jason, Jason can still somehow reach up and throw him on some stuff, we don't see what stuff, but it makes him be Dead Friend.

Pretty chaotic on this ship; Jason watches some of them trying to figure out a place to be. Uncle Suit, what is his deal. He had an argument with someone about using the flare gun. There's a storm so no one will see it, someone says, but Uncle Suit makes some sinister comment about there only being one person that needs to see it. The fire is super problematic from Auteur getting killed, and now the ship is flooding for some reason? Is the storm just that bad?

Uncle Suit yells at Shawn, he says "this is all your fault!" What the hell is he talking about. Shortly thereafter Creepy Deckhand shows up and Uncle Suit aims the flare gun at him, he just thinks he needs to shoot Creepy Deckhand with the flare gun, that was his strategy all along! That and blame all these violent murders on one of the kids who fancies his niece. But the flare gun does nothing and Creepy Deckhand was already about to die anyway because there is an axe in his back.

The survivors have all now gotten into a lifeboat, and now they are just rowing away on a lifeboat. It's taking forever to get anywhere, just how far off shore were they? Their rowing is extremely weak and devoid of urgency to a level that puts it among the more unbelieveable things in this movie.

Uncle Suit literally snarks at Shawn, "I hope you can find shore soon, CAPTAIN! We don't all want to drown out here!" I admit, if they make his death really violent it will be satisfying. Yes indeed. Well played, Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. Well played.

1:03:40 - Oh, the reason it was taking them so long to get anywhere in their little lifeboat is that they had to end up in New York harbor, right off Manhattan! They find a dock area and start looking around for help… and Jason also climbs up on the dock because he just was able to follow them there somehow.

Also, by the way, Troubled Girl's beloved dog came with them in the lifeboat.

They get mugged right there at the dock. Because Troubled Girl is pretty, the muggers take her away! They take her to their little headquarters in a gap between two warehouses, say "welcome to the casbah sister" and inject her with liquid narcotics… but Jason shows up and finds the needle that just got used, and he actually stabs the first mugger with the needle! Because he's Jason, he can stab someone so hard with a three inch needle that it writhes painfully all the way through his body and kills him! Another mugger tries to shoot Jason, but mugger bullets are no match for Jason Voorhees, so he clangs the guy to death on a metal pipe while Troubled Girl runs away.

One of the remaining students somehow runs afoul of Jason shortly thereafter, not sure how he got separated from the rest of the group. But Jason chases him onto a roof of a nearby building, and I'm sitting here typing this as many, many of this movie's seconds are spent with this student trying to beat up Jason with his fists! He just punches him and punches him and punches him repeatedly for a while, and Jason just sort of barely notices. Finally, Jason takes one swing and knocks the guy's head off.

Just as quickly as they all got inexplicably separated, the four remaining people from the cruise all run into each other with an NYPD cop, so it looks like everything is going to be okay… but when they get into the squad car, a mugger head is on the dashboard! Jason is there! He gets the cop! The rest are in the car so Troubled Girl drives away… but she has a stylish vision of Little Boy Jason, and that ends with Actual Jason on the ground inexplicably unmoving, the cop car ramming a building and exploding violently, and Troubled Girl's hair looking more fabulous than ever before. Three of them got out of the car before it exploded, but the teacher who was nice to Troubled Girl at the beginning isn't with them so maybe she blew up with the cop car.

1:17:00 - Oh a flashback! Young girl who is probably Young Troubled Girl is lake boating with Uncle Suit. POS that he is, he tells her that she needs to learn to swim or Jason Voorhees will get her, and he even pushes her into the lake so that she'll learn the hard way! What a tool! Little Boy Jason is down there, we see, grabbing at her ankles to hold her down.

Back to the present day, she confronts him about it and runs away. Then Jason gets up and walks at Uncle Suit! Why, he wasn't dead at all! Then a very strange thing happens which I don't think was a fully baked cinematic setpiece… Uncle Suit runs away into a building. Seconds later, Jason throws him out of a second floor window of that building. Then Jason is next to him in the alley where he fell, and he grabs him and shoves him in a barrel of sludge until he drowns.

All that's left are Troubled Girl and Shawn. She reveals that one of the reasons she's so troubled is that her parents died in a car accident and she was at school when she heard the news. Well of course she's a basket case, it's no wonder no one understands how to deal with her. That is the most intense story I've ever heard in my life. Or they just never got around to writing a more interesting story for this moment in the movie. But anyway, she and Shawn then shove their mouths together and it looks like that's the first time that's ever happened in all of human history. But Jason interrupts them and it's a chase down into the subway.

They get on a train. So much graffiti! What a dystopian nightmare! Is this the future the liberals want???!!! Jason is there though. There is no escaping Jason.

The train stops and Jason chases them down the tunnel. Shawn tackles Jason very bravely, and boy does that work out well for him because Jason totally fries up from touching that rail so hard. Shawn is fine though even though he was also rolling around and touching rails.

Troubled Girl and Shawn get up to the surface and are momentarily blinded by the dazzling lights of The Borough Of Manhattan, America's Most Exciting Borough, but then Jason, just fine as always, shows up. He chases them into a diner, makes some trouble there, and then chases them into a dead end alley. There is one way out though… through a manhole and down into the sewers!

They actually run into a sewer worker down there. Much of Manhattan has been inhabited only by gangs in this movie, so this is a pleasant surprise. He tells them that the sewer is about to have its regularly scheduled nightly flood of toxic waste so it's a good idea to not be in the sewers pretty soon.

But Jason catches up with them and kills the sewer worker by taking his wrench and clubbing him with it in a way that is cool shadows and blood spatter on the sewer wall.

Jason comes after Troubled Girl, but she spots a vat of toxic liquid and douses Jason with it! It messes him up! They are able to climb up a thing but all it gets them is a few feet above Jason’s head. But he can't follow because he's been toxic'd and that is making him gravely flummoxed. We hear the abstract sound of a drowning boy crying for help as a flood of toxic liquid rushes through, but just below where Troubled Girl and Shawn are clinging. It drowns Jason and when it goes away he is a little drowned boy. Shortly thereafter, they are strolling along Times Square and that dog finds them. It is the last thing that happens in the eight Friday the 13th movies that were released between 1980 and 1989.

So this movie was not campier or wittier than any of the others, and it didn't really try to be. It very much changed the setting, even though most of it was on that ship. It wasn't good. You should not watch it. I would advise against it. But if you do, may I please review your notes?

#friday the 13th

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thatnerdyblondegirl · 7 years ago

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ESC 2018- My thoughts to the performances

Ukraine: Singing vampire? Omg he’s playing piano. Burning stairs. God that’s a lot of fire. Calm down Brendon Urie. Good song though. Has a nice beat.

Spain: Awwwwww. They’re so cuuuutttee. Their voices harmonize really good together. I’ve got chills. Are they gonna kiss?? (From Commentator: “The perfect love song for High School Musical 4″)

Slovenia: A song i could see playing in a club. “Are you ready to sing with me?” *cue faces of I don’t speak your language tho* All in all, nice party song.

Lithuania: Oh that’s smart putting soft moments/memories on screen next to the singer. And there’s her husband holding her hand. A soft love ballad, very nice. She sounded like she was tearing up, lot’s of emotion in her voice.

Austria: What a deep voice omg!! Kinda gospel-esque. Odd choice of wardrobe. DAMN THAT FALSETTO!! A song to clap to. (From Commentator: “The most beautiful tooth gap of the night”)

Estonia: You can tell she sings opera. Oh wow, how is that dress even real??? No wonder it’s the most expensive of the night. A beautiful soprano. (From Commentator: “That last note probably broke a lot of glass”) Stop being so mean narrator, it was beautiful.

Norway: Can’t type, gotta snap. Great animations, great job producers. Oh god he’s scatting.... is that really how you write a song?? Oh, a casual violin solo, cool cool. This boy is all smiles. I wish him all the best.

Portugal: Another ballad. They’re kinda half jamming out to their song and it’s kinda hilarious. There was like half a beat... and the second person barely sung... not digging the song tbh...

United Kingdom: Already a good beat. “I still believe in chasing rainbows”...same. Someone just tried to steal her mike... like i’m pretty sure he tried to pull a Kanye. How rude... But she still rocked the stage. At least she gets to perform again at the end.

Serbia: Is that Albert Einstein playing the recorder?? Started off ballad-y and now they’re dropping beats.. nice. Honestly they look like they just came from Roman Empire times and i’m here for it.

Germany: Oh it’s THAT song!!... did not know we voted that into the ESC... Ngl, when i first heard this song on the radio, I thought he sounded like Zayn. Really love the pre-chorus. Boy’s got some vocals. I’ve got chills. Boy deserves all the applause.

Albania: Ooh acoustic guitar. And now it‘s gone. Going full rock now. That singer’s got some lungs. WHAT A FALSETTO!! I really wish I knew what he was singing about.

France: Smoke. Lot’s of it. Song got me rocking back and forth. Merci indeed, France. Those shoes don’t really go with that outfit though... you can’t be straight edge black and then put on pink trainers.. Oh now we’re just throwing our fists in the air and singing Merci, Merci. Alrighty then.

Czech Republic: OHMYGOD YOU LOOK LIKE OLLY MURS IN HEART SKIPS A BEAT!! OH AND YOU’VE GOT A BACKPACK TOO!! AND NOW YOU’RE RAPPING???!!!! thank you for shaking thAT BOOTY. I LOVE THE BEAT!! I LOVE THE SONG!! I LOVE YOU!!

Denmark: VIKINGS. JUST VIKINGS. YEP. this sounds like a war song vikings would sing... Somehow those eyes are very piercing. Now there’s snow and fog. It really is as if we were on a viking ship sailing to battle.

Australia: Omg the vocals. Sing it girl!!! The crowd does not want to sing with you but i will!! AND A BREAK DANCE!! This song is making me dance. WE SURE DO GOT LOVE!!! (From Commentator: “She’s wrapped up like a present in that dress” she sure is buddy)

Finland: I was not expecting high notes from her. And now she’s spinning. God that would make me dizzy.. Those back up dancers are amazing wow. Another club song. Digging the beats. She really knows how to control the crowd. FIREWORKS!! AND STAGE DIVE!!

Bulgaria: This has a lot of soul. They’re really jamming out. Really great beat. Amazing vocals. The 5 of them harmonize really well. The song is cool. Didn’t understand the concept but that’s not what this contest is about.

Moldova: JESUS CALM DOWN!! JAZZY AND LOTS OF ILLUSIONS. Are you singers or magicians??? Such naughty hands... OH AND ANOTHER DANCE BREAK. AND SCATTING. Nice. Listen, the song was catchy and made me tap my feet. Good job.

Sweden: Wait is this a dude?? Yep.. That is a high voice. He looks like Kendall from Big Time Rush but dances like Michael Jackson. The song’s giving me both MJ and Timberlake vibes... not a bad thing tho. The crowd loves him and so do I.

Hungary: Oh god metal.... Dude’s got a good voice tho wow!! Sing it bro!! Again, lot’s of fire. Lot’s of head banging. NO SHOES!! WHERE ARE YOUR SHOES BRO??!! Dude sounds vicious but they seem like cool guys. Normally not a fan of metal but the song is not bad.

Israel: Weeaboo?? Sound board magic. Is she bawking like a chicken??? Are any of those words that she’s singing?? Yes i do believe she is bawking. She’s got good vocals tho. I think this is a song i would make fun of with friends but secretly jam out to in private... Definitely a guilty pleasure song.

The Netherlands: Ahhhh rock. Sounds like a country singer tho... Country rock?? The band knows some moves. AND THE FLIPS ARE THERE!! Leopard country boy/Bon Jovi imitation is pretty a-okay... don’t get the break dancing bandmates tho.

Ireland: (welcome back :)) Oh gosh a lonely lamppost and bench. He’s on guitar, she’s on piano ... already love them. OH AND THE DANCERS!!! THEY’RE BEAUTIFUL. PETALS FALLING!! SUCH CHEMISTRY!! LOVELY DANCE MOVES, SO FLUID!! A BEAUTIFUL SONG!! i can’t think of anything else but his voice and their dance moves..

Cyprus: WHOA!! CALM DOWN SHAKIRA!! THAT IS SOME BODYSUIT!! THOSE ARE SOME STRUTS!! AND A QUICK DANCE BREAK! This song is FIRE!! Literally... lot’s of fire.

Italy: I do love a song with a good message. A great comment on current events and humanity. It’s a very simple performance but that doesn’t make the song less powerful. Lot’s of heart and soul was put into that song. So many chills. LOVE IT!!

#esc 2018 #eurovison song contest #eurovision 2018 #all of my thoughts and feelings #a lot of good songs #a lot of weird songs too...

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madfermusic · 7 years ago

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Why I Fucking Love The Libertines Masterpost

Hey ho, this will be a kind of introduction post mostly aimed at people who are interested in The Libertines and the fandom but of course it’s also helpful for the ‘old’ hard-core fans. It’s also a super selfish post as I now have all the important stuff on one page and can come back here for reference. But well, you can use it as well and I might even get people to love The Libs through this post which would be super awesome cause they are amazing. And this post will of course be also very subjective when it comes to shipping, opinions on band members and songs and that stuff. I won’t list facts about the band here that you can easily read on Wikipedia or other sites dedicated to the history of the band, I’ll add other stuff here that is good to know but probably not serious enough for a site different than Tumblr *sigh*.

I’ll start off with the music – cause it’s kind of the most important thing. I guess with life in the fandom, meeting new friends, fangirling and that stuff we sometimes forget about the music. Not in the sense that we don’t listen to it anymore and only indulge in writing fanfics and having discussions with other fans, but in the sense that we forget that it was the music that brought us here in the first place. And you simply can’t be a part of a band fandom if you don’t like/know the music. Sorry, I don’t make the rules. You just can’t have the dessert before the main course. So let’s get started:

Up The Bracket

Released 2002

Punkish garage rock style with kind of rough and absolutely banging tunes

Really hard to choose favourites but I’ll do it anyway:

Death On The Stairs: This song isn’t only a favourite of The Libs themselves but also of mine. I might even go as far as calling it my favourite Libs song of all. This melody is pure heaven as it is so simple yet so genius and seeing as it’s about Carl’s depressive phases which I can deeply identify with this song just stuck with me. Apart from that I can’t really explain what for me personally makes this song superior to other Libs songs though. “So baby please kill me/ oh baby don't kill me/ but don't bring that ghost 'round to my door/ I don't wanna see him anymore/ please kill me/ oh baby don't kill me/ just don't bang on about yesterday/ you know, I wouldn't know about that anyway”

Horrorshow: This song is absolutely wild. It’s a loose-your-voice kind of song that makes you jump up and down when hearing it – especially live – and you will be crushed by other fans when they play it on a gig…the people just go mad. ”She said ‘I'll show you a picture/ a picture of tomorrow/ there's nothing changing/ it's all sorrow’/ oh no please don't show me/ I'm a swine, you don't wanna know me”

Time For Heroes: What fascinates me most about this song is that it has no refrain. Most songs live off their refrain, many people know nothing of a song but the refrain. And this song manages to go completely without it and still be stuck in your head. Plus the lyrics are genius: “It’s these ignorant faces that bring this town down/ yeah I sighed and sunken with pride/ you know I passed myself down on my knees” “And we'll die in the class we were born/ but that's a class of our own my love”

The Good Old Days: A classic. I don’t know what to say about it to be honest. It’s about living in the here and now, it’s about the good times in The Libertines. The lyrics are grand, especially the last line I chose has become a kind of motto of both the band and the fans as well. Also make sure to listen to an acoustic version in which Pete adds a little line and try to catch it ;) “But if you've lost your faith in love and music the end won’t be long/ because if it’s gone for you then I too may lose it and that would be wrong/ I tried so hard to keep myself from falling/ back into my bad old ways/ and it chars my heart to always hear you calling/ calling for the good old days/ cos there were no good old days/ these are the good old days” “The Arcadian dream has fallen through/ but the Albion sails on course”

I Get Along: This is Carl’s “Fuck ‘Em” anthem (literally, as this is a line in the song hehe) that is going to entrain you every time you hear it. You’ll want to smash peoples’ faces in a pacifistic way when listening to it. Played live this song is awesome. Also Carl’s voice oozes pure sex, you will melt. “People tell me I'm wrong/ fuck 'em“

This album is surely affected by Pete and Carl’s living situation, struggle to gain money, self-doubt, but most importantly by their shared dreams and them trying to make them come true.

The Libertines

Released 2004

Indie rock, less rough with some very soft songs on it

Again I’ll choose 5 favourites to make it fair:

Can’t Stand Me Now: This is actually really heart-breaking as it is obviously about Pete and Carl and them not getting along very well because of Pete’s drug use. Also one of the songs that make you go “…they are so gay for each other” but more of that later on in this post. “No, you've got it the wrong way round / you shut me up, and blamed it on the brown/ cornered the boy kicked out at the world/ the world kicked back a lot fuckin' harder now” ^ also about this line: I always thought it was “…and blamed it on the brown, cornered the boy, kicked out at the world” like that there should be a comma after “boy” cause I think it would make more sense. The narrator (Pete) is still talking to the person who “shut him up” (Carl), or is he not? When people post this line “cornered the boy kicked out at the world, the world kicked back a lot fucking harder now” it always sounds as if they think the boy kicked at the world while I think that the person the narrator addresses first cornered the boy and afterwards kicked out at the world… Just wanted to get this out of my system at this has been nagging at me for a long time now.

Music When The Lights Go Out: The first softy song on the album and super sad and beautiful. Pete sings it in such an angelic voice. Can’t say much more to it – just listen. (It’s super hard to choose the fave lyrics from this song as it is perfect from head to toe.) “Is it cruel or kind not to speak my mind/ and to lie to you, rather than hurt you?/ well I'll confess all of my sins/ after several large gins/ but still I'll hide from you/ hide what's inside from you.”

The Ha Ha Wall: I have no idea if other fans even like this song? But I ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT! The rhythm and little guitar melody make me want to dance, it always cheers me up and gives me energy. Also only the Libs can pull it off to put a kind of Asian sounding middle part into such a song and make it sound super fucking good. “If you get tired of hanging around/ pick up a guitar and spin a web of sound” “It's been a long war and we’re tired and dirty/ still not dirty enough for you”

Campaign Of Hate: Also making me want to dance and feel more energetic instantly. It’s also critical of society so what more do you want? “Now remember why you came/ not to play follow the leader, no no/ poor kids dressing like they're rich (Mods!)/ rich kids dressing like they're poor (oh my god!)/ white kids talking like they're black” “Oh don't believe them when they say/ that you don't get nothing for free/ it's all for free”

What Katie Did: This is the song that made me fall in love with The Libs so obviously it’s super important. When I got diagnosed with depression I joined a forum for people suffering from it to find people who feel the same. There was a thread about music and what music helps you to feel better and a guy posted a video of Pete singing this song live. I really loved it and in the comments I read that in the original version a guy named Carl would be on vocals and so I listened to the original version to compare and what can I say? I fell in love with it as well, listened to more songs and simply fell in love with The Libs. I then read their Wikipedia article and was a bit confused as all of that kind of rang a bell. And then I suddenly remembered that I had read that whole article already as I had discovered them a while back already. I had listened to Don’t Look Back Into The Sun then and hated it… I was stupid when I was younger… “What you gonna do Katie?/ you're a sweet, sweet girl/ but it's a cruel, cruel world/ a cruel, cruel world/ safety pins are none too strong Katie/ they hold my life together”

This album is marked by the problems within the band caused by Pete’s drug use and I bet a whole lot of miscommunication. Sad, even if we got great music out of it.

Anthems For Doomed Youth

Released 2015

Still indie rock but different from the second album again? God what am I even doing here, I don’t know shit

5 favourites:

Gunga Din: This is the first song they released after so many years of nothing and I don’t just love it because of that fact but also because it has a catching rhythm and lyrics that make me go “THAT’S ME!”. And the melody is great too. So. Perfect. “Woke up again to my chagrin/ I’m getting sick and tired of feeling sick and tired again/ I tried to write, because I got the right/ to make it look as if I'm doing something with my life”

You’re My Waterloo: This is a classic, maybe even THE LIBERTINES SONG that they decided to record again. I have to admit I’m not really a fan of that new version, make sure to check out the old version that has been on the internet for ages. It has a kind of rougher, low-quality-honesty going for it whereas the new version is more clean cut and I’m also not really into the piano. I Don’t know, I bet many fans will disagree with me on that one but well, as I said: subjective. “You're my Waterloo/ I'll be your Calvary/ I'm so glad we know just what to do/ and everyone's gonna be happy/ everyone's gonna be happy/ everyone's gonna be happy/ but of course”

Heart Of The Matter: This is THE SONG of the album. Everyone will agree with me on that one. Don’t just listen to this song, watch the music video. It’s going to break your heart but you will be happy about it. I’m so proud of my boys for what they did with this song, it is brutally honest and I’m still super angry that they didn’t get the NME award for best music video in 2016 for it, they deserved it most. (but we were voted best fan base so let’s just have that *grin*) “With all the battering it's taken/ I'm surprised it's still ticking” “So hold a light to my misery/ but don't send it up in flames/ it's only I who takes the blame/ but try me anyway”

Glasgow Coma Scale Blues: This is a really cool track with a rock attitude and meaningful lyrics. Not much else to say. “And I see me, oh you won't even see me/ yeah I see you, in fact I'm looking straight through you” “The only thing that kept us apart/ was your cold unloving heart” “What happened to the joy in the hearts of the boys/ at the start of the part of the scene?/ they were part of the seams/ a dream shared and pulled apart/ one dream broken by two Libertines”

Dead For Love: This song is really artsy if you allow me this word. It’s got a mystic and echoing background sound and dark lyrics as well as a poem that gets recited at the end. I still haven’t worked out how it goes though, I’m not a native speaker and it’s not very clear. Anyway it’s super beautiful. “And everything he ever did/ he only ever did for love/ everything he ever said/ he only ever said for love/ and now, now he lies dead/ he's dead for love/ his mind's at ease, he sleeps in peace” “A guy like this needs to be sure/ no one was there when the devil rode out before”

All in all this album reprocesses the split up of the band many years ago. It’s a strong subject in many of the songs and you can see that there still isn’t everything said yet. Well, they’ll work this out, I’m sure.

Now there are other songs you must know that aren’t on the albums but just on b-sides or that just got published on the internet. These include:

Albion: Later recorded in the studio and published on an album of Pete’s band Babyshambles this song got famous through the Babyshambles Sessions that I’ll add underneath these few songs. “Talk over/ gin in teacups/ and leaves on the lawn/ violence in bus stops/ and the pale thin girl with eyes forlorn” “I'll be waiting in the photo booth/ at the underground station/ so come away, won't you come away/ we could go to/ Deptford, Catford, Watford, Digberth, Mansfield/ anywhere in Albion”

What A Waster: “There's tears coming out from everywhere/ the city's hard, the city's fair” “When she wakes up in the morning/ she writes down all her dreams” “Meanwhile from under the covers she says/ save me from tomorrow, save me from tomorrow”

The Delaney: “On the bus the other day/ you could tell right from the start/ there's magic in all that you play/ but oh, can you play guitar boy/ can you play guitar?” “Some people run from trouble, some people meet it half way/ others are glad to pay their cab fare over/ and superficially you enjoy the company that you loathe to bear”

Don’t Look Back Into The Sun: Ho boy, Carl really knows what to do with his guitar (and I don’t mean putting his cigarette between the strings when he has to play instead of smoke when onstage), these little melodies he always thinks of are so amazing, I could cry. “Oh, my friend you haven't changed/ you're looking rough and living strange/ and I know you got a taste for it too” “Don't look back into the sun/ you've cast your plans but you're on the run/ and all the lies you said, who did you save?/ but when they played that song at the Death Disco/ it started fast but it ends so slow/ and all the time it reminded me of you”

Cyclops: I love the feeling of this song as well as the lyrics and I especially love how Pete and Carl sing the last line together (awwww). “What you try to do to me?/ it seems to come so naturally/ how you annoy me/ how you destroy me” “Wow, money's the church/ fame is the steeple/ everyone on the telly indoctrinate the people” “What you tryna do to me?/ what you tryna do to me?/ you make me happy”

Bucket Shop: “Well someone said you were an angel/ only what kind of angel/ would whisper 'hello'/ and shout 'goodbye'”

General Smuts: “Well life is short/ we spend all our time/ just fucking and fighting my friend/ well a soul can't be bought” “Well I've been stuck in a hole/ and it's dark down here/ every time I've thought I've seen the light/ well it just fades and disappears”

Skint And Minted: “No one got it right, no one got it wrong/ live outside your head, live inside a song/ oh love those long lost weekdays spilling over me/ and your outlines are all I can see”

Hooray For The 21st Century: “Every sweet little lie ever whispered to you now rings true/ no need to wake the sleeping dogs when they'll just turn on you/ I'll make my way instead to the foots of your ivory tower/ but no love do I find there amongst the leaves and the dying flowers” “What became of the working class/ Nike, Reebok, Adidas/ scratch cards, pittbulls, ecstasy/ hooray for the 21st Century”

Seven Deadly Sins : There are again two versions, the new recorded one is as a bonus on the third album, I like both versions, you should try out both. “Pride, lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath and envy/ its all in a hard days work for me” “Hand me my gun/ my friend we'll have some fun/ shoot down the spies in the trees/ and kick up the leaves/ in the morning breeze/ pay no mind”

Babyshambles sessions: 1 2 3

So then let’s get to the members! I’m not going to list their biographies here, you can easily google that yourself if you’re interested. So I’ll describe their personalities a bit and show you pics, cause that is more fun anyway.

Carl Barât:

1) Carl is smol and tiny.

2) Carl is a meme. I mean it. He is a total dork, cute, funny, awkward and most importantly super embarrassing. He makes me cringe regularly and you will feel the same.

3) I mean it kind of belongs to “Carl is embarrassing” but I think it deserves its own section: Carl is a bad bad Twitter whore.

4) Carl is super damn hot. Like ho boy I can’t breathe because of his beauty sometimes.

5) Carl is emo…

Sorry for not being more serious but you can’t always be. Carl has had a history with depression and nagging thoughts. There are also rumours he self harmed when younger. A fan said she talked with him about it and that he used to hide the scars with the bandanas he wears but that he actually wears them nowadays because he likes the look. I don’t want to sell it as a fact though as I never heard him admit this himself.

6) Carl only eats bananas.

7) Carl has tiny nipples.

I’m afraid this’ll look as if I don’t cherish Carl much but the opposite is the truth. I love this fella so much and I would die to meet him one day, even more than I would to meet Pete. I think we’d have more in common and I’d love to give him a big hug. Also I want to marry him. Fuck Edie and Pete. He’s mine.

Pete Doherty: 1) Pete manages to be super tall and super smol at the same time.

2) Pete is also embarrassing sometimes.

3) Pete is extra™.

4) Pete is beautiful.

5) Pete likes to walk around with his fly open.

Gary Powell: 1) Gary is an uncomplicated and good natured soul.

2) Gary is a bit crazy. The good kind.

John Hassall: 1) John rarely smiles.

2) But when he does ho boy.

3) If you hadn’t realised: he is beautiful.

4) John is done with Pete’s and Carl’s shit.

Which brings us to what you all waited for. I thought about naming this section “Conspiracy Theories” but it hardly is one, it is more like an official secret: Pete’s and Carl’s relationship:

Like in fandoms for TV shows, in this fandom (gay) shipping is really common. You just HAVE to believe in the (totally sexual!) romance between Pete and Carl. They always talk(ed) about there being a romance, a love between them themselves, here a few examples:

“I know of people who’ll love me when I’m dead, they won’t call me those things then. It won’t matter, they’ll say ‘he was unhappy and he’s better off’. They’ll say ‘I knew him and I spent time with him’. They’re lying. There’s only one man who knows me, who spent time with me, and he doesn’t now. One man I love in this world. One man I respect. He cripples me now.” - Peter speaking about Carl, Babyshambles.com, 2004

“I do love Peter so dearly. The thing about Peter, is that, ever since I first met him, he had this innate ability to just charm someone…Like to me he’d say: ‘I love you, you’re working class, but with a violent heart and a poetic temperament’. And I’d go, ‘wow, yeah, you really know me!’…But just that ability to sort of surmise people…and he’d do that…But um, where was I going with this? ….Just he’ll think of the tiny details that only a poet thinks of. He used to phone me up when he was miserable, when we were having one of our dramas. ‘Whatever. Ok, Pete, it’s fine. Where are you?’ And he’d go ‘In the rain!’ So endearing and so beautiful…The thing about Peter and I is that we’re both very old, very kindred souls. And for whatever we talk about, that’s kind of circumstantial. It’s like anything can happen. We could do anything. Individually, together, apart, to each other. But a conversation after six months, it’s the same thing. It’s euphoric…it’s…you know. I love Peter and …I think Peter loves me. A lot of times we don’t like each other, but the underlying thing is that love.” – Carl Barat, There Are No Innocent Bystanders

“Boys like physical contact. If you enjoy physical companionship, romance, something tender, you just want it to be true. That’s Libertine-ism: no barriers, no borders, no fakers, no forgers. Pleasure is pleasure.” – Peter Doherty, Attitude Magazine, 2002

“My heart melts that…[you] ask me about soulmates. Because you’re right, you know. It’s a beautiful thing that we should all believe in…Yeah, I missed my friend so much. I still don’t think we spend enough time together. And he’s my soulmate and I love him and that’s the truth…Something so pure and beautiful and true…They’re going to say a soulmate is a myth…[but] when they experience a soulmate then that’s what destroys the myth.” – Peter Doherty on Carl Barat, Vice Magazine 2015

“His story with Carl was not finished of course. Pete: Ah, it is not…but it will never end. Everyone has someone in their life whom they love, but in some way or another, the relationship was abandoned by one of them, or by both of them. You become strangers and you realize that the person you love most in the world, you do not know them anymore. Carl: We never separated…we separated, then we flirted a bit, and in 2010 we got back together, but we did not realize it. We were very uncertain about each other’s feelings. We only communicated through the press, granting interviews knowing that the other person would read them. I knew that I had to go see Peter, the friend that I love and that I missed, to know if this friend, and this friendship, still existed. It was terrifying, but I have been able to see things as they were, in all their beauty. My dear old friend, and my brother, with whom I grew up with in such an intense way. Pete: I feel even closer to him than I did before…there is no one else who I connect with at this level. (With) Carl, I know that there are things that no one else can give. It’s strange, but he really knows me. I forgot that there was someone else on this planet who could understand me in this way, it is mysterious, but it is comforting and beautiful, and I’d never really realized it before. Peter gives us a book to give Carl, writing a dedication on the page. It is “The Last Englishman”, the autobiography of AD Wintle. Carl: On my part, there is nothing to forgive I think. I love him so much, he is like a brother, these are unconditional feelings. Carl takes his mug into the adjacent album store, where with a stroke of luck, he immediately lands on an ideal gift to give back to Peter. It is the soundtrack to “Is Paris Burning?”, which Carl duly dedicates. “Perfect!” he says.” – Peter and Carl’s separate interviews in Rock and Folk, October 2014.

“Do you want Peter to come back, to be honest? Carl: I do, of course I do (bursts into tears). Peter is the only person who I could trust for so long. I cannot express my feelings by words like ‘lonely’ or ‘left behind’. It’s like something was suddenly scooped out from the inside of me….To tell you the truth, I have a twin brother who died when I was a child. And Peter would say to me, 'Even if no one stays with you in the future, I will never leave you, because I am the reincarnation of your lost twin brother.’ I still believe what he said then. And I believe that he will come back to me, no matter how long it will take.” – Carl Barat, Rockin'on, September 2004

“I’m scared to share a microphone with him now because people say it’s a gimmick. Sometimes I do rush over [to the mic], but that’s only because after you have had a few drinks and smoked a certain amount you get that really nice smell on your breath. You know, like when your lover has got that winey, smoky taste. Not that Carl’s my lover…I’d rather toss off a frog.” – Peter Doherty, Time Out Magazine, August 2015

(source)

“For me and Pete, it wasn’t too different from falling in love.” - Carl for The Mail on Sunday, 2008

“There have been moments in our relationship where physicality has ensued. I’ll leave it there. I wouldn’t like to say.” - Carl for Attitude Magazine, 2011

(source)

They always denied that their relationship was sexual or even romantic in a coupl-y sense though…Anyway, probably good to know (or not, I don’t know) is that the ship name is Pearl.

Another indicator for their relationship is the lyrics in their songs. You can make up a lot of course and take some of the lines for what they are not BUT there are some lyrics that are evidentially about each other. The best example is You’re My Waterloo:

“So just say you love me/ for three good reasons”

and

“And you're the only lover I had/ who ever slept with a knife”

are the most obvious lines here. Sung by Peter, this song is definitely about Carl as stated by Carl himself:

“Carl: I actually used to sleep with a knife [in reference to the lyrics: “You’re the only lover I’ve had / Who slept with a knife”] Peter: Yeah, what’s strange is that he actually used to sleep with a knife.” – Les In Rocks, September 2015

The word “lover” and the official music video let it appear as a love song even if especially Carl says it is about friendship. (You directed this video yourself you weirdo! You didn’t have to include a kiss scene if it is just friendship???)

Another song that is sung by both of them at each other, even if it is about the problems in their relationship and them being mad at each other, is Can’t Stand Me Now:

“I know you lie, I know you lie/I'm still in love with you”

I could literally quote the entire song for you to understand their problematic relationship (a save place for this is always genius.com, there you have the lyrics explained very well) but this one line is enough to focus on the romantic aspect. “Being in love” usually means to have a romantic interest in someone else, not platonic.

I’m pretty lazy with looking for other song references now as this post is taking me ages as it is already, here have another two posts on that topic, about songs they wrote about each other both before and after the band broke up, provided by the lovely @missoneminute (who is one of two Tumblr Libertines blogs I can highly recommend. That sounds as if all the others were crap, which they aren’t, but if you are looking for long-term fans with profound knowledge on the fandom, who post regularly, @missoneminute and @albion-sails-on-course are THE two blogs for you).

Here you have some videos to watch that show how absolutely gay those two appear around one another. It’s one thing for them to deny any sexual relationship between them, but they can’t tell us they look ‘no homo’ on stage.

NME Awards with Pete and Carl reciting a poem together Don’t Look Back Into The Sun Glastonbury 2015 (especially 4:20 is super gay) You’re My Waterloo at Ally Pally Buffalo at 6:20 Backstage NME Awards Chas’n’Dave The Bismarck Joke Vertigo Glastonbury (1:18) I Need My Biggles Sadie Frost Gig at their home (Guerilla gigs) Pete and Carl 2001-2002 Pete and Carl 2003-2005 Pete and Carl 2014 Dry Humping Gobble Gobble Gobble

@missoneminute ‘s friend made body analysis posts for her for certain Pete and Carl moments, they are super interesting and gay and you can find them all here.

And these are some stories/excerpts from interviews that sound pretty gay/they-have-feelings-for-each-other-y:

The tea story - Carl having a jealous fit and interrupting Peter’s make out session with his girlfriend by angrily making tea and cursing.

The door slam - When Carl turned up to see Peter after ages apart and drunkenly brought Anthony with him so Peter slammed the door in their faces in a jealous rage.

The top to tail - When they shared a single mattress and one morning Peter claims Carl woke with Peter’s “massive boner in his face” and “couldn’t stop talking about it”.

The vertical smile - Peter rather graphically describing staring at Carl’s bare ass while they were both shagging girls in a loo: “An encounter where he and fellow band member Carl Barat had sex with two fans in a disabled toilet after a gig on their 2003 Scandinavian tour was typical. “We met a right old punk who took me and Carl under his wings and took us to the sleaziest club, a proper rock ‘n’ roll dive with all these garage kids,” said Doherty. “I remember fucking this girl in the toilets, on the floor, proper sort of sliding about the tiles and Carl came in with another girl, as cool as you like and bent her over the toilet. “Yeah, he had a smile on his face. And a vertical smile on his bum.”

The threesome - Peter’s ex Katie Lewis aka the Katie of What Katie Did describing a threesome she had with Peter and Carl after a wasted night out. She’s low on detail but CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE. Like seriously.

The naked cycle - That time Peter cycled naked back to the tour bus through the streets to try and get to a girl before Carl hooked up with her but failed to make it in time and was forced to watch them snog for hours instead. Also he had no clothes because the girl he had been with had locked him naked in a bathroom: Tandem-girl story from Kids in the riot: It was just girls, girls, girls. In Munich, I went off on a tandem with this girl, back to her place. She insisted on playing Suede. So it’s afterwards and I want to go back to the venue because there’s this other girl and I wanna get to her before Carl does, but the tandem-girl locks me in the bathroom so I think, ‘Disaster,’ and actually end up booting the door through and she was screaming, screaming, screaming and she was naked as well. She’s had my clothes away, and I’ve had to jump back on her bike and race through the streets of Munich with just a hat on, back to the bus. And at the end of the night we had to leave Munich because we couldn’t stay and Carl was just snogging this girl endlessly and I’m stood there like fucking Hancock, when Sid James has pulled and he hasn’t. That was the girl that I’d cycled back for.”

Arcadia and back - When Carl took Peter to his mother’s house and showed him the “wild woods” and “took him to Arcadia and back”.

(source)

Have you noticed changes in each other? Pete: ‘I never really used to take much notice before, but now we’re being asked to analyse the changes and the differences, just to placate the naysayers. I’m scared to share a microphone with him now because people say it’s a gimmick. Sometimes I do rush over [to the mic], but that’s only because after you’ve had a few drinks and smoked a certain amount you get that really nice smell on your breath. You know, like when your lover has got that winey, smoky taste. Not that Carl’s my lover… I’d rather toss off a frog.’ Carl: ‘That’s why he moved to France.’ Speaking of the two of you as lovers, have you read any Libertines fan fiction? Pete: ‘Don’t mention that! He gets really annoyed.’ Carl: ‘I wouldn’t even know where to look for it.’ Pete: ‘He’s lying. Someone pointed us in the direction of it. It’s fucking weird, man, isn’t it? A lot of effort has gone into it. There’ll be a poetic stream of consciousness and then suddenly, BANG! My cock will appear in Carl’s ear. I think it must be written by someone close to us, because apart from the actual sex side of things, which obviously isn’t true, some of it’s quite close to life.’ What advice would you give to a young band just starting out? Pete: ‘You should start that question “Is there any advice…”’ Is there any advice…? Pete: ‘No.’ Carl: ‘Nothing apart from “Keep the faith!” It’s the hardest thing in the world, and the easiest.’ Pete: ‘Just don’t listen to the naysayers who say that it’s a crap idea to put on this certain event at this certain place. Just do it. Play the really dodgy pub at the end of the street. You could meet a songwriting partner. You could get a blowjob. I don’t know.’ Carl: ‘You could get both, if you read the fan fiction.’

(source)

Now excuse me for adding so many gifs to underline the gayness that you will never see the end of this post:

So then let’s get to The Libertines as a whole again. These are some clips concerning the whole band that you have to see: The Libertines In The Van encore shenanigans Music moment of the year very young Libertines

Other funny Libertines stories:

Steve’s teeth story: Did you make much from busking? Pete: “Then there was that time with Scarborough Steve [Bedlow, former singer/cohort]. It was about nine in the morning, a Sunday, and we’d run out of booze so he suggested we go out busking. He’d just had some of his teeth knocked out and had some temporary ones in. Falsies. We were all absolutely mangled by now and it was afternoon by the time we got down to the bridge. A boiling hot day. These Japanese girls walked past and said, ‘Do Twist and Shout!’, so we started singing: ‘Well shake it up baby now’, and when we got to ‘You know you look so good’, Steve’s tooth fell out.” Carl: “It landed in an old Nescafé tin that we had as our pot. Then a car ran over it. Those girls were disgusted.”

Umbrella story from Kids in the riot: “We’d been up all night, bombing around Tokyo, breaking into bars. We found this funny complex where the lifts went up to different bars and we found ourselves on this level where the bar was actually locked so we bust open the door and the pair of us stole bottles of gin and an umbrella.”

Christmas interview(or “ I used to take him to Arcadia and back “): What’s your favorite Christmas carol? Pete: “Oh, that French one, Carol Debois, she’s lovely.” Gary: “Mine is (sings) Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg, Batmobile lost its wheel, then the Joker got away, hey!” Carl, where will you be this Christmas? Carl: “I shall be in Watership Down. That’s where my mum lives. The cat brings in rabbits from time to time. I saw that, the cat got frisbeed last year by a fucking juggernaut.” Pete: “I used to go there and meet his mum…” Carl: “Er, with me.” Pete: “…and he used to take me into the wild woods.” Carl: “I used to take him to Arcadia and back.” Pete: “It was pitch black. And I’d see (Greek God) Pan.” Carl: “He saw Pan and he came running with his tail between his legs. We didn’t even know he had a tail ‘til then. Since then he’s kept it very short.”

On the road with the best new band in Britain by Neil McCormick The rock band is making a deafening comeback. Neil McCormick jumped on the bus with the Libertines to see if the rituals of the rock tour were back too. Forming a crazy quilt of laddered stockings, tartan mini-skirts and torn T-shirts, four girls stretch out across twin beds in a hotel room in Glasgow. The mini bar door hangs open, the barren interior looking as forlorn as a bank safe after a raid. Empty bottles of spirits, beer and wine litter the floor, several filling up with ash and fag ends. John Hassall, thin, pale bassist with the Libertines, lights up another hand-rolled ciggie and enquires in a polite, dazed voice: "Whose room is this anyway?" It is 2am on the 10th day of the Libertines' European tour, and Pete Doherty and Carl Barat (joint singers, guitarists, songwriters and polemicists for the London quartet) have slipped away to wander the corridors, looking for another mini-bar. What they would really appreciate (they let it be known in an odd slang of their own invention) is some "bugle" or some "brackle", the exact pharmaceutical ingredients for which they leave to the imagination. But they settle for a bottle of red wine in the chambers of a man from Rough Trade records who has come north to watch his young charges perform. "Can you ever get a buzz better than that?" asks the soft-spoken, otherworldly Doherty. He is not referring to drugs or alcohol. He is talking about tonight's performance: the clattering of guitars, the charge of bass and drums, the swarm of bodies in a climactic stage invasion. "You can't get that feeling anywhere else. It's communion. It's like being washed away in the ocean, carried aloft on a wave." "High seas, low seas, swab the decks, all hands on," mumbles the foppish Barat. An acrid smell of sweat hangs around the two young bandmates, who appear to be still dressed in the distressed threads they were wearing on stage. Someone suggests that they might avail themselves of the shower facilities before reboarding the tour bus in half an hour to make their way to the next city. "I don't look that bad," says Doherty, offended. He runs his fingers through a greasy tangle of barbed wire curls. "It's 'cos I've hardly had any sleep. I've been hallucinating all night. I've looked worse, though." "I haven't washed my hair in years," says Barat. "Never had any complaints." "If you don't wash your hair, it cleans itself," reports Doherty. "That applies to the human body as well." I fear for the health and sanity of the Libertines. A ramshackle garage rock quartet whose Up the Bracket album sounds like the savage young Beatles colliding with the Jam and the Clash in a pop culture spin-dryer, they may one day be established among Britain's greatest combos. But first they have to survive life on the road. Let me take you on a tour round the cramped bus that acts as home for several weeks for four band members, their beefy roadie Paul, exasperated road manager Rob, implacable soundman Nick the Hat, the imperturbable Moose the driver and various strays collected along the way. Downstairs, behind the driver's cabin, there is a recreation room that resembles a much abused pimp's suite, complete with white leather sofa spotted with suspicious stains. Amid the empties, there is a TV, video, stereo and Playstation 2. Above asink has been taped a notice: "Your mum is not here. Please clean up yourself." No one has been paying it any attention. Occupying pride of place in the toilet is the award which theLibertines collected when NME readers voted them "Best new band in Britain". Upstairs, there are 10 bunks, overflowing with luggage, guitar cases and stray items of clothing. Aft is another small recreation room. To the fore is a tiny cubby hole which Doherty has claimed for himself. It is not a pretty sight. Strewn with socks and underpants, bras and stockings, butts and empties, rank with the stench of body fluids, it has the ambience of a cupboard in which someone has held a bachelor party. Interlopers have been banned from the bus in a vain attempt by management to curb certain destructive influences. Nonetheless, Doherty has contrived to spend the overnight journey from Sheffield to Glasgow cooped up with four female acquaintances, all squeezed together on his single bunk. The results are not pretty. When Rob finally departs, Barat pokes his nose round the door and reels back in a display of olfactory horror. "Well there's been four stowaways in here all night, sweating it out in the dark with no air vents," wheedles Doherty, defensively. "Of course its gonna be a bithumid." "There's a massive roof hatch," Barat points out. "Yeah but you can't open it without the key," counters Doherty. "I wasn't going to wake Rob up and say, 'The hostages are getting restless, can we open the air vent' was I?" "Hostages, was it?" says Barat. The friends both start to laugh. The girls, however, are looking rather alarmed to notice that the much feared Rob has returned before they could make good their escape. Doherty turns to his disgruntled road manager with eyes of twinkling innocence. "And imagine my surprise," he declares. It is astonishing to think that even after half a century of this rock and roll lark, touring (certainly at the start-up level) remains as chaotic and ridiculous as ever. It is a life positively encrusted in unhealthy rituals built around bad meals, worse drugs, casual liaisons, sleep deprivation and lack of hygiene. Between service stations and chain hotels, killing time with uppers, downers and inbetweeners, days consist of endless waiting, waiting for that one adrenaline-fuelled burst of activity on stage. Afterwards there is only the slow comedown, the desperate attempts to maintain that high with hedonistic abandon, culminating in a gradual estrangement from reality, a sense of dislocation that hangs around everyone who boards the bus. And the truth is: this is what most of them really want. Pop culture myths of decadence and debauchery are embraced with naively open hearts. After all, everybody knows that sex and drugs and rock and roll go together like stock markets and crashes. Booze and hangovers. The Libertines' requirements, to be placed in their dressing room before each show, includes the following: "48 large cans quality lager, 8 Red Bull, 24 cans coke,1 bottle good white wine, 2 bottles vodka, 1 bottle whisky". "I like touring," says Doherty, swigging a huge tumbler of vodka and Coke backstage at King Tut's in Glasgow. "It's like a school trip." Which makes you wonder what kind of school he went to. "We get more comfort on the road than we do at home," claims Barat. For the record, he makes this statement while sprawling on a threadbare couch, in a tiny windowless room jammed with sweaty bodies, the floor strewn with cigarette butts. "At least we've got hot and cold running water here," says Doherty. "We haven't got that at home. I have to flush my toilet with Evian. Only the best forthe Albion rooms." Doherty is a notoriously unreliable narrator. The grandly named Albion rooms are, in fact, a run-down East End rental where Doherty and Barat reside. The Libertines' chief ideologues have created for themselves a fantastical aesthetic of theimagination they refer to as the Arcadian dream, to which they have set sail on the good ship Albion, the latter referencing their arch nostalgia for a certain indefinable quality of Englishness. They name-check Oscar Wilde, Disraeli, Dickens, Galton and Simpson, Steptoe and Son, Tony Hancock, and a holy trinity of Sids: Sid James, Syd Barrett, and Sid the Sexist. "People accuse us of being in love with the colours of an old world and dusty tins," says Barat. "But it's an age that exists now. You can own the tin now," says Doherty, taking up his co- conspirator's train of thought with the deftness of a double act. "Its not like time-travelling or pretending you live in another era. You can appreciate the beauty of something whenever it was made, whether it's a charming image of rollers and quaint fags hanging out of the corners of mouths." The pair can go on like this for hours, and frequently do. Two girls on assignment from a local college magazine gaze on as if beholding the fount of all earthly wisdom. "What are your feelings about going to war?" asks one. "I'd never say I wouldn't fight a war," says Doherty, who has a penchant for Crimean army uniforms. "In different ages I would have done. I'd have fought the Vikings." King Tut's is jammed to capacity. Condensation drips down the walls. The crowd heaves in expectation. Gary Powell, the incongruously urbane black American drummer, says: "I don't think we should get anybody up tonight." Paul the Roadie concurs. "No stage invasions. It's too dangerous. All right Pete?" Doherty just gives them his innocent smile. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out what's going to happen next. At the conclusion of a performance that is a jolting explosion of primal energy, Doherty and Barat start pulling fans on to the stage. It is one of their oft-repeated tenets that there should be no barrier between performer and audience. Soon the band have disappeared in a swell of bodies. Someone starts up the anthemic I Get Along and 30 or 40 interlopers jump up and down bellowing the lyrics. Barat's guitar is unplugged but he sings instead. Doherty occasionally surfaces, looking utterly ecstatic. "There's no way my stage can take that," mutters the promoter. But the mood in the room is euphoric. It's a big punk rock blast. It is, as Doherty would have it, communion. Then it's over. The band fight their way offstage. "You can't do that again, Pete," warns Powell, who has been fighting people off his kit. "It was beautiful, Gary," says Doherty. "You cannot do that again," Powell reiterates. Doherty looks longingly back from the side of a stage still teeming with invaders, chanting for more. "Shall we go out and do another one?" "With what?" roars Rob. "They've nicked all the fucking mics!" The night after Neil McCormick's departure, the Libertines were due to play in Hamburg. On arrival, however, singer Pete Doherty was diagnosed with bronchial pneumonia, and the band were forced to cancel the rest of the tour.

(source)

Apart from smaller edits on pics, there is much much creativity going on in this fandom. Not so much fanart (though it exists), but comics, memes and above everything else: so many fanfictions. I’m afraid I can’t give credit to all the artists cause I’ve found most of this stuff on the internet without a source but if you know who’s responsible for a certain piece, just tell me and I’ll add their name:

Pictures & Lyrics by @exarcadiaelux

Ridiculous “Carl and boys” post by @audreyhornee

These are all the fanfics I have saved on my computer, ask if you are interested in some and I’ll send them to you: A Carl Trap For Peterlumps – ? A Certain Romance – rain_phoenyx A Christmas Crime – ? A kiss With a Fist – ? A Labyrinth Of Mirrors – pherber9 A Lesson In Observation – katie_delaney A Present For Peter + Payback For Peter – el_gardner After Carl’s Operation – swallow_sunny Afterwords – smutriot Albion Central – ? Albion in the Park – plastic-beads Ariel & Raphael – pherber9 Assembling The Crew – ? Barcelona – mimioomin Being a woman – ex_stellares61 Berlin – esclarmonde2907 Blood – katie_delaney Boarding – katie_delaney Boyband Threequel – dachelle Carl As Teacher And Pete As Student – shut_out_light Carl The Stripper – madam_ray Counter Attack by edithandstan Death Fires – katie_delaney Düsseldorf – katie_delaney Dwindling Innocence – katie_delaney English Lessons – katie_delaney Football – ? France – katie_delaney Frustrations – katie_delaney Fuzzy’s Magnificent Carlos The Whore Fic – fuzzy_bumpkins Gary’s Tourbus Tales – ladyland7 Gay For Christmas – albionstocking Give Me A Reason + Partners + The Good Stuff – flaaa_blah Glory Days – tizian23 Groupie – albion_lass Heat – katie_delaney Heat – ex_stellares61 I don’t want to go to Chelsea - katie_delaney In The Dark – jacyna Is That The Bone Or A Vein? – ? Italy – katie_delaney Lola – nice_faces Lost In The Moores – caramel_69 moulin rouge Thursday – cestmonreve My Word That Was Fun – ex_stellaros61 NME Awards – katie_delaney Notebook – cyclictic Oh, the arrogance! – ohsailors One Plus One Makes Three – alchemywow Peepshow – ex_stellaros61 Pete And Carl Drabbles 1 + 2 – light_fingers Phone call – swallow_sunny Playing Games – light_fingers Poetry and Pornography – niconoire Positioning Pete – ex_isabellas222 Purple and Pearls – ? Reactions – katie_delaney Romances Sans Paroles – ? Shadow Men – ? Shower Scene – callisto_ares Side Of The Road – ? Slow Down Boy – ahothouseflower Speakerphone – naanie Swallowed By Brown Eyes – ex_isabellas222 Take Away – katie_delaney Tease – rain_phoenyx The Blinding – mimioomin The Bone Dance – ? The Curious Incident of the Jackal in the Nighttime – mimioomin The Escalator - 0_clay_0 The Model – swallow_sunny The Morning After – ladyland7 The Wedding Suit – edithandstan Two Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest – mimioomin Under Neon Loneliness – yfli Under Pressure – albion_lass Unfold Your Wings - Becoming a Veela for Dummies – tizian23 Wittenberg – katie_delaney Written In Blood – mimioomin Zebra Striped Shirt – ?

(Some of those aren’t finished or I didn’t save all the parts yet.) An absolute classic here is The Zebra Striped Shirt. If you are interested in smut, then you should definitely check out katie_delaney. She’s a goddess and publishes both on albion-fic.livejournal.com (which is THE platform for Libertines fics) as well as on her own blog katiedelaneyfics.wordpress.com. An absolute favourite writer of mine is mimioomin. She’s got a private account you can visit at the age of 18 if you have an account of your own. Just send her a friend request and she’ll surely accept you, she’s a sweetheart. For more fics ask @the-libertines, I know she has a load, I actually got some from her.

I’ve done my fair share of horrible Pearl stuff, so here is everything I ever did:

An Awkward Secret That Someone Denies (oneshot)

East Of Eden Chapter 1 2 3 4

Close Off Your Senses (And Turn Out The Lights) Chapter 1 2 3 4a 4b 5 6 7 8

Identities (oneshot)

A Letter From Pete (oneshot)

Bang Bang You’re Dad (oneshot)

I’m definitely going to hell

Comic - Tiny Carlos Chapter 1 2

Beer Group and other conversations 1 2 3

Advent Calendar 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12-16 17-20

And this was it. Phew. That took me ages and I have grey hair now. But I’ll still be here gaying the world if you need anything. Bye.

P.S.: if the links don’t work just tell me, I have all the videos saved.

#the libertines #pete and carl #pete doherty #peter doherty #carl barat #carlos barat #gary powell #john hassall

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dinamicus · 4 years ago

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Thursday’s Child https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2014/01/21/thursdays-child/

One summer day some ten years ago, I was helping to paint a house. On the boombox was Best of Bowie: a long, chronological march from the beachhead of “Space Oddity,” with most songs met by indifference and occasional hums. The caressing synthesizers of “Thursday’s Child” began, and as Bowie started crooning, a fellow painter stopped mid-swipe and looked over at the CD player.

“What happened to that guy?” he said.

We’d made it through “Dancing In the Street” with a few chuckles and “Under the God” without comment. But “Thursday’s Child,” on that hot afternoon, sounded awful: treacly, gaspy, wan; the limp expiration of a career. When heard as the close of a sequence that runs through “Rebel Rebel,” “Ashes to Ashes,” “Modern Love” and “The Hearts Filthy Lesson,” “Thursday’s Child” sounds like a man falling down in the street, a hasty end scene tacked onto an overlong Act V. “I’m done with the future: here’s a song for your grandmother.” Dies, borne off stage right.

Sure, any slow, fragile-sounding number could’ve gotten a raspberry that day from our collection of young and recently-young NYC snobs. It’s not as if “Thursday’s Child” is an ill-constructed or poorly-sung track: if anything, it’s one of the few Bowie compositions of the period sturdy enough to withstand being a cover, whether a trumpet solo or a busker’s guitar piece (solo electric guitar interpretation by Jake Reichbart here). Its verse melody, a dance of mild leaps and modest falls, suits a lyric crafted for common use. In the verses, an older man regrets the paths he’s taken; in the choruses, he dares to hope a new love can give his life meaning. It’s Bowie’s “September Song.”

But “Thursday’s Child” wasn’t hip; it didn’t offer any pretense that it was—it sat in a comfortable present tense and stewed on the past. It felt genteel and a bit shabby. After a few years of running across stages in his bottle imp incarnation, after his stabs at industrial and jungle, after all the interviews about Damien Hirst and body scarifications and Millennial doom and Internet-as-cultural-dynamite, Bowie suddenly turned up as the sad clown again. He’d dusted off his Buster Keaton suit and reclaimed the shadow bloodline of his “rock” one: the Bowie of “When I Live My Dream” and “As The World Falls Down,” the cabaret and mime Bowie, the “light entertainment” regional thespian, the bedsit saddo, the Mod who worshiped Judy Garland and Eartha Kitt (see below).

The singer of “Thursday’s Child” is another of the Pierrots he’d played since the Sixties: a perpetual loser at love, like the glum figure of his “Be My Wife” promo. Take the Mr. Pitiful tone of the opening verse—

All of my life I’ve tried so hard doing the best with what I had: nothing much happened all the same…

—with its most desperate emphases (“best,” “hope”) cued to gloomy B minor chords, while the verse’s circular structure strands the singer back where he started, on an augmented E major (“breaking my life in two”). You can take the song as a straight-faced lament, as a quietly over-the-top spoof of the same, or both (it is Bowie, after all).

And while the chorus offers a hope of release from the cycle, its alternation of F# majors (“falling”) and F# minors (“really got,” “my past”) suggest the hope’s rather thin. The repetitions of “throw me tomorrow” start to feel desperate; Bowie’s “everything’s falling into place!” is someone trying to hypnotize himself. It’s as if Bowie’s answering Joni Mitchell:

It’s got me hoping for the future And worrying about the past

Ours was the most exciting show that had hit London since the war…I was glad that I was born in a part of the world that had been so well protected, but I was also ashamed of my protection. I carried guilt inside for being a privileged character when the rest of the world was being destroyed.

Eartha Kitt, Thursday’s Child, 1956.

This song, I might point out, is not actually about Eartha Kitt.

Bowie, 1999.

He’d taken the song’s title from Eartha Kitt, Bowie said upon introducing “Thursday’s Child” on VH1 Storytellers. Writing the song, he’d recalled the paperback cover of her first autobiography (“it just kind of bubbled up the other month”). It had been an erotic memory of his youth (that and D.H. Lawrence, he said).* Using Kitt as a starting point suited Hours’ theme of a middle-aged assessment of lost youth, a 50-year-old flipping through a box of mold-speckled records shipped from his childhood home (Ray Charles’ “Lucky Old Sun” —a man stuck in the middle of life and envying death—also gets a nod).

The title also plays with an old prediction rhyme—“Thursday’s child has far to go” (another variant is “Thursday’s child is merry and glad”)—that had come out of the ground somewhere in medieval England. The rhyme was a popular corruption of court astrology: Thursday was considered a day of great fortune as it was under the sway of Jupiter, kingpin of gods. The Book of Knowledge, by one Erra Pater (1745), notes a “child born on Thursday shall arrive to Great Honour and Dignity” (By contrast, David Robert Jones was born on a Wednesday “full of woe”).**

So the refrain of “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday born, I was Thursday’s Child” was Bowie spading up his old occult interests, presenting them in anodyne forms: the little boxes tucked away on a newspaper’s comics page: horoscopes, birth stones, fortunes, lucky numbers (see “Seven”). It’s the “secret histories” of the Sixties reduced to syndicated copy; it’s another diminishing of unearthly power into ordinary life.

It’s also a clever way to cloud the lyric. What to make of the chorus kicker: “only for you I don’t regret/that I was Thursday’s child“? It’s at odds with the picture the singer’s painted so far: that he’s someone for whom little’s worked out, someone who’s estranged from everyday life yet firmly stuck within it (“He’s a teethgrinding, I’ll-get-this-job-done guy,” Bowie said of the narrator). (It’s also possible that, as Nicholas Pegg noted, Bowie’s referencing the VU’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties“: “For Thursday’s child is Sunday’s clown.“) But a Thursday’s child would be a lucky child: someone with pull, some who had far to go: a Kitt, or a Bowie.

Go back to Eartha Kitt for a moment. Born in South Carolina, she’d reinvented herself in the early Fifties as a nightclub goddess who’d seemingly flown in from the Continent; she played the seductress, the gold-digger with taste (“Santa Baby”) who captured men with her boxful of languages. She’d be cast in that role for the rest of her days: a life spent forever vamping. But what a role! As her biographer John L. Williams wrote of her performance of “Monotonous” in the film New Faces: Eartha is playing a character that’s almost unimaginable in reality [in 1954]: a black American woman who’s tasted all of the world’s delicacies and found them lacking…we wonder, who on earth is this woman? And how can she seem to be so indifferent to the laws and mores of her time? A question that could have been asked, with a gender change, about another performer in 1973.

So maybe the singer is someone like Kitt: not some teeth-grinding anonymous drone but a bright public figure, someone whose name everyone knows, someone to whom things seem have come easily. Doing the best with what I had becomes a modest boast; shuffling days and lonely nights are those of a stage life. Or maybe even the common life of an office drone is a stage life. Bowie had called himself “the Actor,” but in a way, we’re all actors.

Composed in Bermuda in late 1998, “Thursday’s Child” appears to have been mainly Bowie’s work, written on acoustic guitar. It was earmarked as a potential single, with a prominent role for backing singers. The question of who those should be became a bit contentious once Bowie and Gabrels were back in New York.

After toying with having Mark Plati’s six-year-old daughter sing the “Inchworm”-inspired “Monday, Tuesday..” line (she turned Bowie down! “she said she’d rather sing with her friends than with grown-ups,” Plati told David Buckley), Bowie thought of contacting the trio TLC. In 1999, they were arguably the premier female R&B vocal group of the decade. But they were tottering. Rife with personality and financial squabbles and having taken five years to cut their follow-up LP, they were about to be dethroned by Destiny’s Child.

Using TLC sat poorly with Gabrels, who thought it stunk of Bowie’s “New Jack Swing” moves in 1992: “Thursday’s Child” could be another potential Al B. Sure! fiasco. Gabrels had positioned himself as the house purist: some faint analogue in the Bowie camp to Steve Albini. He’d met Bowie during the nadir of Never Let Me Down and he saw it as his charge to keep Bowie honest and weird, to stop him from embarrassing himself by chasing trends after their sell-by date. During the making of ‘Hours’ Gabrels came to feel that his time with Bowie was over (we’ll get into this more in next week’s entry); his veto of TLC would be his last strategic win.

His alternative proposal had a touch of self-interest: he recommended a Boston friend, Holly Palmer, who Bowie auditioned via speakerphone (“let’s hear it with more vibrato now”). You could argue that Palmer’s vocals were just as time-stamped as any TLC vocals would have been: the Liz Fraser-inspired vocalese, the coffee-shop ambiance (a slightly edgier Dido). But Bowie liked what he heard and Palmer joined his touring band in 1999-2001.**

Another question was how far to take the production. David Buckley argued that the song was “crying out for strings,” and the various synthesizer fill-ins for woodwinds, strings and brass can make the song seem stuck in an embryonic state. Had Bowie held “Thursday’s Child” back for what he was calling the “Visconti album,” slated for 2000, it likely would’ve had a much grander production. Perhaps what kept “Thursday’s Child” from being a monstrous hit was that it hedged its bets too much.

The last piece was Walter Stern’s video. “Bowie,” with little makeup to mask his plus-fifty face, and his partner prepare for bed. They brush their teeth, she takes out her contacts (verrry slooowly). There’s a naturalist feel to counter the tasteful Wiliams Sonoma bedroom set: you hear Bowie cough, mumble and half-sing over the recorded track (taken from Elvis Costello’s “I Wanna Be Loved” video), and the plash of water in the sink. He looks in the mirror, transfixed by his aged but still beautiful face; he’s a veteran Narcissist. A twist of the glass and he sees younger versions of himself and his partner.

The mirror pair have the easy, arrogant confidence of youth; they stare at the older couple with the cold pity of what Bowie once called “the coming race.” They seem like beautiful wraiths. Bowie, seemingly infatuated with his younger self, does the Marx Brothers Duck Soup mirror game with him. The double plays along for a while, then stops, bored and disgusted with his older self. We passed upon the stair, Bowie had sung long ago, upon meeting another double. He’d been on his way up then, his life still mostly potential. This is the other end of the staircase: a man realizing that time has changed him, that the majority share of his life lies behind him now, that his younger self would’ve regarded the current him like some threadbare costume. Perhaps that was the right question to ask after all: What happened to that guy? He kisses his wife in his imagination, and so to bed....

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flyrtreynolds · 6 years ago

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Four minutes into “Bohemian Trapsody,” the hamfisted opener of Logic’s new album, Supermarket, and you find yourself inside a never-ending Pro Tools session. The track’s acoustic guitar and four-on-the-floor bass—which sound ripped from a karaoke instrumental of a Gorillaz song—have faded away to make room for a trip-hop drum break that then falls into a stuttering trap drop.

In all, “Bohemian Trapsody” contains three beat changes, no rapping, and a space-rock chorus. It is also nowhere near the most ridiculous thing recorded for a project that also features an acoustic A Tribe Called Quest cover, multiple Thom Yorke impressions, and two Mac DeMarco features. From clumsy stadium rock to reggae-tinged ska, Supermarket is a painful journey across guitar music of the past five decades and makes Lil Wayne’s Rebirth look well-thought-out in comparison.

The album stems from Logic’s novel of the same name, which quickly became the No. 1 bestseller on Amazon despite the rapper admitting that he’s not much of a reader. That sort of chutzpah has always been at the center of his artistry, which is based around regurgitating the styles of abstract, genre-pushing MCs into earnest, easier-to-digest forms. This dumbing-down process has allowed him to reach younger audiences who crave the wordplay of golden-age hip-hop but aren’t necessarily interested in its grittiness. It’s also given him free rein to be as nerdy and uncompromising as he’s wanted to be, from releasing an album that takes place in outer space 100 years in the future to a record narrated by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to a Wu-Tang Clan tribute featuring every living member of the group. But the vital difference between those projects and Supermarketis that his rubbery rapid-fire delivery, the one skill that earned him enough points as an MC to continuously reinvent himself, is almost entirely absent here.

In its place are long stretches of dull, dried-out singing by a guy who can’t sing. Logic’s frail hum mostly comes off lethargic, like on the monotonous “Best Friend,” a glossy Southern rock track without any drama, or the title track, a pre-fab alt-rock anthem that imagines a world where Thom Yorke was a literal creep: “I’m a weirdo, I’m a freak/I wish I could watch you in your sleep.” The Maryland MC is shameless in his desire to recreate the sounds of influential bands, at some points going so far as to clumsily call them out by name. Rather than coming off like his frontman idols, though, he resembles the lead singer of a cover band on a cruise ship, failing to capture any of the magic of the original material.

On “Lemon Drop,” for example, he hilariously tries out the funky scat of Blood Sugar Sex Magik-era Red Hot Chili Peppers, only to come off more like Weird Al’s 1993 impression of the band. And then there’s the two DeMarco-produced tracks, which could serve as parodies of the Canadian singer-songwriter’s sound in how formulaic and insular they sound; it’s like Logic is singing over looped versions of past releases rather than working with DeMarco to create something new.

But the most egregious moments on the album come when Logic tries to tack on hip-hop elements as afterthoughts, most painfully on “Can I Kick It,” a soulless A Tribe Called Quest cover. There’s also “Baby,” the millionth rework of Biz Markie’s 1989 classic “Just A Friend” and probably one of the worse versions yet, as well as a handful of trap drops slapped on the backends of songs, as if during the album’s mastering session Logic had some last-minute concerns about the viability of dropping a project without any hi-hats. In that moment, maybe he realized his unchecked ambition had finally gone too far.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/logic-supermarket/

#logic #pitchfork

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umusicians · 8 years ago

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UM Afrobeats Playlist: UK Afrobeats Artists

The United Kingdom has been regarded as the “it” place when it comes to it’s Afrobeats scene. With artists such as Fuse ODG, Mista Silva and Kwamz & Flava noted as pioneers of the scene, these individuals have laid out the foundation for the scene. Constantly releasing material not only influenced by their cultural backgrounds (Ghana and Nigeria), but from the UK itself. Thus, through this combination the UK has been able to hang onto something of it’s own.

Capital Xtra’s resident Afrobeats DJ Abrantee reckons 2016 is seeing a shift in homegrown talent. “With the UK, the artists are trying to create a whole scene by themselves now...you’ve got the UK Afrobeats artists who are sounding authentic, they’re saying, ‘yeah, we’re from Nigeria or Ghana or wherever, but we’re also from the UK and we’ve got our own scene”.

Amandah Opoku and Shade Alegbeleye have put together a playlist composed of some of their favorite UK Afrobeats artists at the moment. Check it out below!

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Don E -“You Alright Yh?” Have you heard of Don E? Well you are late because Beyoncé has jumped on that ship, featuring the UK Grime artist track “You Alright Yh?” on a March 18th Instagram Video post.  Reminiscent of the structure of Kwamz & Flava’s “All Types of Bread”, ‘You Alright Yeah” is both a supercharged afrobeat and rap inspired anthem. Don-E teams up once again with production powerhouse, Dr Vades for “You Alright Yeah?”. Taking inspiration from his peers, Don-E offers up this super charge, afro-rap monster that is destined to spawn the next dance craze on the streets, thanks to it’s sing-a-long hook and unforgettable ad-libs. Don-E sings, “You alright yeah? How’s your mum, she good yeah?” Check out Don-E now, as he’s sure to be hitting the mainstream after the all praise from Queen Bee. By: Amandah Opoku

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Eugy -“Don Corleone” UK's Eugy is a rapper you should keep your eye on. Ghana Music Awards UK definitely thinks so as he picked up the ‘Newcomer of the Year’ award. Eugy has successfully released hit after hit including 2016's "Dance For Me" featuring Mr Eazi which I dubbed the song of the Summer. With over 20 million views between the dance and official video for “Dance For Me”, the world is taking notes. Taking after Ghana’s rap king, Sarkodie, Eugy has been able to perfect the art of rapping in Twi and English, switching between the two languages with such ease. His latest effort, "Don Corleone" takes it’s name from Mario Puzo’s novel ‘The Godfather’. Within these novels, Don Corleone is the founder and boss of the Corleone crime family. He is the most powerful Mafia family in New York City. On the Mikespro produced track, Eugy is found spitting bars on his “throne” decked in traditional Ghanaian attire -showing the world how rich is heritage is. By: Amandah Opoku

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Jaij Hollands x Sona -“Coming Home” UK based Ghanaian Afrobeats artist, Jaij Hollands has cultivated a sound of his own. Jaij Hollands has been able to create a sound to unique to him -standing out amongst all the artists around him.   Released late 2016, Jaij Hollands recruits Afrobeats artist Sona for one of my favourite songs “Coming Home”. "Coming Home" is one of songs that really pulls at your heart. This is evident as Sona sings in the chorus “Love me today, oh…You'll be my personal person".   A song about love, a song where Jaij Hollands pleads with his significant other to not play with his heart and the feelings he's developed. Because, he'll be coming home soon and they can be together again.   For anyone who's missing someone, "Coming Home" is the song you need. By: Amandah Opoku

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Juls and L.A.X - “Give You Love” If you are getting engaged or married this year, then “Give You Love” needs to high up on your wedding playlist. A classic African love story from UK based Ghanaian DJ and producer Juls and Starboy signee L.A.X, “Give You Love” is a beautiful love song which perfectly captures and expresses the love that a man has for his special queen. The Kemist Gold directed visuals also does a fantastic job of bringing the song to life and creating a short African story. A special dedication to Juls other half, “Give You Love” is perfect for the upcoming wedding season. By: Shade Alegbeleye

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Kwamz & Flava -“Takeover” Released at the start of 2016, Kwamz & Flava hit song “Takeover” was one of the biggest songs to come out of the Afrobeats scene in the UK last year. With over 3 million views on Youtube before the official video was released and a viral dance success on social media, “Takeover” has gone from strength to strength. A feel good track, which makes you want to get up and dance, the visuals will also have you learning some new dance moves at it perfectly blends a mixture of African and Hip dance styles to create an Afro-fusion style. If you have not added it already then “Takeover” definitely needs to be on your playlist. Signed to Black Butter in August, Kwamz & Flava headlined their first ever sold out concert at the end of last year which received amazing reviews. Be sure to watch out for these guys this year. By: Shade Alegbeleye

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Maleek Berry (ft. Geko) - “Eko Miami” Following the success of summer anthem "Kontrolla”, Maleek Berry started 2017 by releasing the visuals to his single "Eko Miami" featuring UK artist Geko which is taken off his debut EP, Last Daze of Summer. My favourite track on the EP, "Eko Miami" has that cool vibe that makes you want to sing along and also shake a leg or two. As usual Maleek Berry doesn’t fail to disappoint with the colourful and artistic visuals that will keep you entertained and engaged and we expect nothing less from Mr Berry. Maleek Berry has just finished a successful Last Daze of Summer tour in the US and also performed at the annual SXSW music festival in Texas alongside Moelogo, Mr Eazi and more. By: Shade Alegbeleye

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Mista Silva -“Murda” British-Ghanaian singer Mista Silva has been making strides in London. Silva, is regarded as the pioneer and of one of the most important scenes in inner-city London right now in Afrobeats. From signing to Polydor in 2014 with the release of his EP ‘Let It Off’, the first unsigned artist to be music playlisted by BBC 1Xtra, to present day where Mista Silva is collaborating with other artists and releasing new music…Silva is constantly making waves. Following hits such as “Like It” ft. A.I.M, “Mafia” featuring Deborah Rose, he is back with “Murda”. The track contains a laid back relaxed vibe compared to earlier releases. Switching from twi and, broken and english Silva delivers on the track. In an email interview with FADER, Mista Silva stated that “‘Murda”’means proving the stereotypes wrong! Growing up as a Black African in London, we’ve always been painted with negativity, so this record is about good vibes and shining above the negative energy placed upon me and my people!” By: Amandah Opoku

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Moelogo ft Adekunle Gold - “Rora Se” One of my favourite UK based African artists; Moelogo has shown nothing but growth over the last couple of years. After being nominated for a MOBO (Music of Black Origin) for the 2nd year running last year October, Moelogo released a brand new single titled “Rora Se” featuring Adekunle Gold. An uplifting, beautiful and glorious collaboration between the two artists, “Rora Se” is backed by lush acoustic guitar arrangements and an infectious drum pattern. Another classic from Moelogo, “Rora Se” is a perfect song to end the successful year that Moelogo had last year and 2017 looks set to be no different as Moelogo was rewarded £250k in funding at the start of the year from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) which will be used to help to grow and expand Moelogo’s brand internationally. We look forward to what Moelogo is set to do this year. By: Shade Alegbeleye

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Silvastone (ft. Ike Chuks) -“Incredible” UK based Silvastone, is a fast-rising London-based African artist/producer.   Like his peer Maleek Berry, Silvastone began producing for other artists before taking a break to develop himself as an artist resulting in his debut single release in 2014. He is renowned for his signature blend of entertwining his West African heritage with his South-London upbringing. Silvastone’s sound is referred to as a creative hybrid of African beats, UK sounds and Global melodies.   His latest single, is the self-produced “Incredible” which is featured on his EP ‘Levels’ released earlier this month. Silvastone recruits Ike Chuks on his upbeat tempo song which is described as “packed with vibrant energy to the brim” By: Amandah Opoku

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Sona -“Story” Following a break from the music scene, British born Nigerian artist Sona made a comeback late last year ready to take over from where he left off. Ending 2016 with a massive track titled “Hurt Nobody” featuring UK rapper Sneakbo, Sona kicked off 2017, with a brand new single titled "Story". If you know Sona’s story, you will understand the passion and emotive that went into this Lexxy Flow produced song as Sona he narrates his journey thus far in both his local dialect Yoruba and English. Ready to take over the scene, Sona is definitely one to watch out for this year as he prepares to release a lot more material. If you have not heard of Sona before check out his previous hit singles such as; “Ijo Sona” and “No Wahala” you will not be disappointed. By: Shade Alegbeleye

What other UK Afrobeats artists are you listening to? Tweet us @UMusicians and let us know!

#Afrobeats #Afrobeats Playlist #Amandah Opoku #Shade Alegbeleye #Don-E #Eugy #Jaij Hollands #Sona #Kwamz & Flava #Kwamz and Flava #Maleek Berry #Mista Silva #Moelogo #Adekunle Gold #Silvastone

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