10 Cleo Reed: Cuntry

Oh, wow, white collar crimes on the company dime
Couldn’t catch a break on company time
Life on the clock’s like, eating with your eyes
Might find God, and go for a hike
More brown liquor, I chase my pain
I’m bitter by the hour, I state my claims
I’m hanging by a nail, my body’s on a scale
And work is really jail

The grass ain’t greener and the fare ain’t cheap
Give me salt and lime in the land of the free
Hate is in the air, getting harder to breathe

Salt and Lime

Ah man, I’m gonna be talking about slavery again??

Here in the UK, we hear a lot about America’s role in the slave trade. We hear a lot the perhaps most brutal and masochistic period in human history. We hear how a total of 12.5 million human beings were stolen from Africa and shipped over the the ‘New World’ in conditions not suitable for factory farmed hens. We hear how around two million simply died on the journey on account of the horrendous conditions that they were forced to live in. They might have been the lucky ones, rather than the 10.7 fucking million shipped off to the New World as slaves and brutally forced to live out their lives as someone else’s property. We are sent films like ’12 Years a Slave’ and think “Gosh, wasn’t the USA just ghastly, as we sip on our tea, toss a fag and spell ‘moisturiser‘ correctly. We watch films and TV shows about the American Civil War and think “Hmmm, yes, I know what that is” as we shove aubergines into our fannies.

Treat me like cattle and you gotta quit

17 Sharon van Etten: Sharon van Etten & The Attachment Theory

Yeah, I know a bit of an ‘Alan Sparhawk With Trampled by Turles Situation’ – or ‘ASWTBTS; as we call it in the Journalism Business: I have also seen this record named as the self-titled debit album by Sharon van Etten & The Attachment Theory. At least in this case the album’s title is never just listed as ‘& The Attachment Theory’, so Ms Van Etten isn’t quite up there with Sparhawk when it comes to awkward album titles. However, ‘Sharon van Etten & The Attachment Theory’ is referred to by Wikipedia as “the seventh studio album by American singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten” and – even more importantly – listed as solely a Sharon van Etten album on Bandcamp, so that’s what we’re going with.

Oh, and you shouldn’t capitalise the ‘Van’ in a name when you’re writing the name in full, only when you’re only writing the surname. So I will continue to call one of the greatest music artists of recent times ‘Sharon van Etten’, and Ms. Van Etten when I’m perhaps being more formal. Yeah, I know that Ms. Van Etten (see?) is American, and those fuckers don’t know how to fucking spell (see entry #26), but the least I can do is try and teach them how to spell their own name, no??

Someone inside me saved me

26 Wet Leg: moisturizer (sic)

What the actual fuck? You’re from the fucking Isle of Wight! What’s this rogue ‘Z’ doing in the album title?? Moisturiser, please! What would King Arwald say, the last pagan king in England and last king of the Isle of Wight? You really think that’s going to break you in America??

Actually… top 50 album in the US…? That’s… not to be sniffed at at all…

OK, carry on, you obviously all know what you’re doing.

You wanna fuck me, I know, most people do