Entry #5 Future: Mask Off

Phew, that last entry was a bit of a mess, wasn’t it? Barely mentioned the (excellent) song and just flew off into TMI land. It won’t be the last time that happens, I’ll often have something to get off my chest that I feel can’t wait until December, but I always feel that there has to be some overarching ‘point’ to each entry and this series is literally the only outlet I have for that. At least until I get around to starting ‘Sing of the Thrill’ [TITLE TO BE CONFIRMED], my long promised/threatened King of the Hill episode by episode retrospective that’s currently the second most eagerly anticipated literary operation behind George RRRRRR Martin’s ‘No, No, No, This is What Was Supposed to Happen!’. To make up for Entry #4, this time around I’m actually just going to talk about one of the greatest songs ever for a thousand words or so, all tangents and flights of fancy will be kept to an absolute minimum, and if anything I’ll be undersharing, yeah? We cool? We cool.

This post contains a lot of information cribbed from Simon Reynolds’s fantastic Pitchfork article from last year. I might call him a ‘contributor’, but the fact is that he’s very likely to sue me for royalties once the money starts rolling in.

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18 Zeal and Ardor: Stranger Fruit

Mmmmmmmmmmlet’s talk about cultural appropriation.

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Zeal and Ardor are one of my favourite bands. In fact, I’d go as far as calling them my favourite Swiss band. They combine black metal with ‘negro spirituals’, the bracing gospel music sung by the black slaves in the early 19th century. What’s your initial reaction to hearing that? Are you OK with it? Are you straight up against it? Do you think that merely the fact that the band are Swiss makes any use of music born from American cruelties automatically cultural appropriation? Do you want to fnd out a little more about the band before deciding your reaction? Are you immediately against it because you assume the band is white?

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40 Chris Al3x: Sonicwave

Ho-ho! Remember a while back when I joked about fake Vaporwave subgenres? Yeah, I know, it was fucking hilarious, wasn’t it? Absolute, first class satire, sending up the entire Vaporwave industry so mercilessly that it no doubt sent shivers throughout Ilidža*. The genre will likely never be the same again.

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(*yeah, I’ve decided that Ilidža, a small municipality near Sarajevo in Bosnia, is the cultural capital of Vaporwave. It probably isn’t, but I’ve not really got time to do much research. If you’re reading this, Chris Al3x, feel free to correct me. Ashton-under-Lyne hasn’t got much going for it, can we be the capital of Vaporwave?)

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Entry #1 Prince: Raspberry Beret

Only Feasible Starter

There is an extremely high chance that I’m going to die relatively soon. Like, probably tomorrow.

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OK, not probably tomorrow. Possibly tomorrow. OK, maybe not even ‘possibly’. Maybe tomorrow.

Alright, the chances of me dying tomorrow, or even in the upcoming days, are admittedly quite remote. But I could die any minute.

I mean, admittedly, we could all die at any minute of any day, such is the deliciously cruel randomness of life, but let’s face it- I’m far more likely to die a long time before you. I am a medical wreck; I take very few measures to protect my life; I have a dangerous curiosity when it comes to both legal and illegal substances and yet so blissfully unaware of my surroundings that the likelihood of me being hit by a bus or eaten by an escaped hyena* (that everyone else noticed was coming from miles away) are extremely high. This is all despite the fact that you so deserve to die before me! Come on, admit it- you’re a fucking waste of your disgustingly over extended skin!

(*Yeah, I know hyenas only generally feast on dead carcasses, but have you seen me lately? I’m sure they’ll take one look at my decrepit body and decide “Close enough”. Cheeky sods)

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22 Wild Beasts: Boy King

Next time you’re at an Aerosmith concert- which is the type of humanatarian atrocity you often commit because you have the same laughable sense of taste in music as Homer Simpson and literally every artist you like is music that you’ve forgotten that you initially got into ironically- look out at the back of the crowd for a paunchy man in leather trousers and a faded ‘Toys in the Attic’ tour t-shirt and the kind of haircut that men only grow when they’re either unwilling or unable to accept that they’re bald. He’ll be disgusted that the band aren’t playing cheap Rolling Stones pastiches- a band that, lest we forget, are fucking shit in the first place- about a teenage girl having electric vaginal spasms, or whatever

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they’ll be muttering to themselves

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26 A Tribe Called Quest: We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service

We love it when old people can still do stuff, don’t we?

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Roughly seven times every day local news recommends that we celebrate the fact that a 98 year old man still has his job as Tesco’s, inviting us to applaud open mouthed in marvel that an old person is still able to stack shelves for 8 hours a week without frequently shitting himself

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Not frequently

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My Gran is a real inspiration, as she’s 94 yet still walks up to two miles a day to post dog excrement through the letter box of immigrant families’ houses

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