Youth | The Grain

TUNES OF THE DECADE: #3 ‘I LUV U’ BY DIZZEE RASCAL

Dizzee Rascal

Youthful aggression and unjustified arrogance will get you a long in the world. Young people may be naïve, inexperienced idiots, but they don’t half do some fucking incredible things because of it. I Luv U smashes you over the head and grabs you by the balls. It sounded like nothing else then, and it sounds like nothing else now, and even though Wiley should take some credit as the pioneer, I still think it’s the greatest thing that grime produced, so kudos to Dizzee for killing it. Hell it might the greatest thing we (the UK) produced this decade. Its all of those good things about music that gets you excited, it original, its unique, and it catches you off guard, and of course Dizzee was only bloody 16 when it dropped.

Sonically it’s the sort of fierce fuck-off bass that makes me feel justified in using the word ‘sonically’ when talking about a four minute blast of popular music. Appropriately the lyrics are concerned with teenage relationships, sex, he said/she said back and forth, chatting shit to talk yourself up, and in the end pregnancy, delivered and handled with humour, realism and conviction. On record its bass blasts, processed hand claps, and previously unheard bleeps and processed sounds (sounding like the halfway house between futuristic and 8-bit), a surprisingly pop call and response chorus for new generation, and an MC with an English accent that had charisma and finally didn’t feel the need to ape them lot over the pond; as much a lyrical assault as a musical one. Once in a decade impact, a little bit of rare innovation in a stagnant cesspool of British music, something new that blew everything else away <insert your own comparison to punk, rave or bronx born hip hop here depending upon your age>, and despite some of his recent hip house shit, Dizzee is undoubtedly a talent who put together more than a few great pieces of popular music over the decade. (Side note – someone who won the mercury music prize and actually deserved it?) He’s become a bonafide star to boot, just shame it didn’t happen after he’d dropped this one rather than that Calvin Harris tosh. This TUNE(!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) still gives me hope. . .

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SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK AND YOUTH

Synechdoche, New York

Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut has met with some mixed responses. For every critic praising it, there is one whose reaction has been one of bafflement. Kaufman, who has the (possibly unique) position of being a script writer as famous as half of the directors in Hollywood, has followed up his collaborations with Spike Jonze on ‘Being John Malkovich’ and ‘Adaptation’, as well as the Oscar winning Michel Gondry collaboration ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, with a film that again embraces an unconventional narrative.

Synecdoche, New York[1] is the story of Caden Coutard[2] (played impeccably by Philip Seymour Hoffman) a regional theatre director struggling with his life and relationships (as well as the belief he is will die imminently). He receives a MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant and chooses to produce a work that will finally realize his desire to be brutally honest, and in which he can immerse himself in an attempt to provide authenticity. He gathers his cast in a hangar in New York, and starts his production as a recreation of the surrounding city, instructing his cast to re-enact the mundane, quotidian details of life as he has experienced it. As time goes on, the play is increasingly populated with actors playing their real life counter parts, including Caden himself, and his ‘life’ begins to slowly disintegrate. His relationships fall apart as his body gradually begins to shut down as a result of an unspecified disease, increasingly burdened by the weight of his attempt to present truth and his own life failings.

The experience of watching Synecdoche, New York reminded me, in a number of ways, of J.M. Coetzee’s semi-autobiographical novel Youth, and the comparison is an interesting, illuminating one. In S,NY Kaufman has made a creative leap forward: his quintessential concentration on neuroses, and his preoccupation with the creative process bizarrely and multifariously refracted in his narratives is still present, but here this tendency is combined with a pathos and a sense of the struggle to carry the weight of searching after purpose and accomplishment, with the constant prevailing threat of death and mortality, and ultimately Kaufman succeeds in attaining to a depth of personal emotion that many thought were lacking from his previous efforts.

Youth is far removed from S,NY in many respects, but what links the two works is the neo-existentialist focus on their protagonists’ quest for meaning in their lives, in their art, the evocation of that indescribable feeling that you are slowly wasting your life, never to be productive, or creative, or anything you ever believed you could be. They are both quests for identity, for truth, for purpose. The feeling of yearning for achievement, worn down by the weight of ambition, whilst the real world gradually recedes into the distance pervades both works, and they are both centred on one man’s perspective.

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