At long last it’s happened. The clock finally struck 12 on December the 31st, 2009 (rung in, for me, by a rather abrasive antipodean woman in a pub in Oxford) to herald the dawn of a much sought new decade. The noughties seem to have taken a bit of a kicking from all quarters recently (even mild mannered Rowan Williams was having a pop). It has been painted as a decade of ‘annus horribilis’ – a ‘decade horribilis’ – and for good reason. September the 11th, George W. Bush, ‘War on Terrorism’, phoned weapons of mass destruction and illegal wars. July the 7th bombings in London, the rise and rise of reality television (to the extent that now even the news asks ‘how do you feel’ as its opening question, rather than ‘what is going on’), New labour turning really fucking sour, the financial crisis, the ‘credit crunch’ (perhaps the most odiously named ‘thing’ of all time) and, worst of all – the glacé cherry atop this steaming pile of woe – Newcastle United were relegated. Happy New Year.
But it wasn’t all bad, was it? Was it? I don’t know, was it? Surely we can’t have just endured ten years of unmitigated disaster; there must have been some sporadic rays of light? Surely!
Well, in an attempt at blind optimism, an innate desire to balance the argument and to stop from going mad with despair, I’ve tried to think of some good things that happened in the last decade (and I’ve had to think hard, dig deep and scrape the bottom of the barrel, believe me). Here are a few things, in absolutely no order of importance, which made the noughties nice. Read the rest of this entry »
Dear Grant,
Such a funny thing for me to try to explain …
I can remember coming back from our half-year in Russia and hearing ‘Crazy in Love’ on Radio 1 for the first time. I couldn’t believe it. This tune felt like the one we’d all been waiting for, a tune that sounded totally of the moment, yet suggestive of the future: danceable, yearning, innovative. It seemed like a song that had stepped straight out of pop mythology, a vindication of the belief that magic can be unearthed in the unlikeliest of musical places. I listened to it over and over again throughout the summer, and for the next couple of years. At terrible, terrible club nights during my university years, just one play of this tune would be enough to salvage the entire evening. In poetic terms, I thought (and still think) that if ‘Crazy in Love’ were a physical substance, it would be liquid gold. It was the last CD single I ever bought.
I know our Tunes of the Decade list isn’t in any particular order, so ‘Crazy in Love’ isn’t technically our number one tune of the decade. I know you think Amerie’s ‘One Thing’ is the better tune, and you might have a point.
But for me, this has got to be the last tune on the countdown, the final word on our cack-handed, seven-month-long attempt at micro-macrocosmic cultural summary.
A conclusion then, of sorts.
The Tunes of the Decade countdown, and the website as a whole, has been terrifically important for me, and I really hope it has been for you too. This year hasn’t been a walk in the park for either of us, but when all is said and done (and at the risk of sounding like a sentimental gobshite), Read the rest of this entry »
For all their obvious limitations, Radiohead were one of the very few big-league guitar (!) bands this decade to combine creative envelope-pushing with a sustained political engagement. As such it’s hardly surprising that probably the most eloquent poetic-musical response to the Iraq nightmare and its wider symbolic implications came from the ‘Head camp, in the form of Thom Yorke’s staggeringly resonant ‘Harrowdown Hill’, the lead track on his solo debut The Eraser. At the decade’s absolute Stygian nadir, we were frankly pretty damn lucky to have a mainstream lyricist of Yorke’s calibre with the guts and intelligence to summarise a horrific (and horrifically confusing) set of international political events.
In time-honoured British romantic-radical tradition (Shelley, Blake, Morris), Yorke uses landscape as a starting point, specifically Harrowdown hill in Oxfordshire - ‘near where [Yorke] went to school’. On this spot in 2003, government weapons expert David Kelly committed suicide, caught up in an unsavoury scandal involving propaganda, spin, hyperbole, war, lies, weapons of mass destruction, the death of thousands; basically all the most appalling aspects of the last ten years (I shudder writing this to think how gothically awful things actually got. Despite the many reasons to be fearful heading into the 2010s, at least we know there’ll be no Guantanamos on Obama’s watch).
Yorke marries the wider apocalyptic theme with a bathos and attention to detail which bears out this juxtaposition of local minutiae with global politics. A scratchy and uncharacteristically funky (sexy?!) bass riff opens proceedings, but it soon gives way to the sort of grand narrative choral-orchestral soundscape that has become Yorke’s locus classicus. It’s this marriage of large and small that is the track’s greatest strength. The jittery home-programmed drum track and nagging rhythmic insistency sits perfectly beside the widescreen melodic sweep of the chorus. And, as an on In Rainbows highlight ‘Reckoner’, the harmony is quite ingeniously simple, based on a two-chord pedal that changes with a slaying subtlety as the verse slides into the chorus hook. Kraftwerk had such high-pop tricks down to a tee, and this seems to be one of many lessons Yorke has picked up from those automobilephilic German lads, though nowhere so obviously and brilliantly as on ‘Harrowdown Hill’. Read the rest of this entry »
Sorry to have to plunge headlong into pretentiousness, BUT …
Has the postmodern era come to an end? Commentators have been queuing-up to offer this conclusion for decades. However, in the last few years this argument has seemed more and more justified. One of the encroaching cultural impulses throughout the noughties has been a sense of weariness with hyper-reality, irony and relativism, a hankering after simplicity and back-to-basics essentialism that, for a change, didn’t seem conservative and reactionary, but rather rational and progressive – an antidote to the convoluted postmodernist ethos that has increasingly underwritten globalised consumer capitalism. At the end of the decade Obama is talking in rather essentialist (even paternalistic) terms about maturity, hope, responsibility. We’ve come a long way from the 1960s and Derridean ‘free play’.
For me, the song that most encapsulates this mood, this subtle yet marked shift away from the postmodernist worldview is Midlake’s near-perfect 2006 single ‘Roscoe’, a tune to which you might (if you happen to be a pseudo-intellectual twat like I am) want to attach labels such as new primitivist, new serious, new traditionalist (or how about invoking Phillip Blond’s interesting notion of a radical communitarian ‘Red Toryism’?).
Sure, backward-looking pastoralism is as old as music/art itself. The Band, Neil Young et al were treading over very similar ground in a pop musical context over 40 years ago, while postmodernism’s own version of this tendency, of course, was framed in terms of pastiche and nostalgia. But ‘Roscoe’ seems to me to be coming at retrogressiveness from a very different, distinctively late-’00s angle.
Take a look at the lyrics. The refrain is an almost hyperbolically subdued call to insurrection: thought we were due for a change or two around this place. But at the apex of an era of Bush and high capitalism, what will this ‘change’ involve? A soixante-huitard, MC5-style youthful rebellion? Emphatically not. For lyricist Tim Smith, the quiet revolutionary impulse comes from another place entirely: Read the rest of this entry »
FARMER OF THE YEAR. GLASTO DRUDGERY.
OMM managed to get its decade review out on the weekend with the usual album and singles of the decade lists, as well an article from Morley outlining the infantile nature of such exercises. But that wasn’t what caught my eye. Instead it was an interview with one of the ‘people of the decade’, Michael Eavis. When asked a question about Jay-Z’s ‘controversial’ headline slot giving Glastonbury a shot in the arm (alright, it wasn’t a question, but a sports journalist-esque statement with “didn’t it?” added at the end, thus allowing the interviewee to realise all he is required to do is agree), he said this . . .
“Oh yeah, and the whole culture of Glastonbury had a facelift. And it was the year before Obama was elected in America. God, it was so nicely timed, that.”
First things first, and those comments on Obama strike me as more than a little unsettling. Is he name dropping Obama on the basis that both he and Jay-Z are African-Amercian and therefore automatically linked? Is he comparing the now established conservatism at Glastonbury to America’s own neo-con vein and inability to integrate following years of de facto and de jure segregation? Is he deluded to the point of thinking that Glastonbury is influential enough to impress ideas upon the American people? It’s nicely timed that an artist who is black and American headlined Glastonbury because a black American became President as well?
Read the rest of this entry »