Stop Making Those Eyes At Me, I’ll Stop Making Those Eyes At You
So much of my musical taste today is shaped by nostalgia of some form or another – Songs that remind me of experiences, people, places, or just what it was like to be a particular age when that song was playing on the radio. My love for the first Arctic Monkeys album, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not isn’t any different, in a sense, because it’s almost entirely based on nostalgia, but it’s a fake nostalgia, if that makes sense.
I was too old, too married and too living-in-America to be living the life the songs on the album so vividly describe when it came out, back in… 2006, I think? But it’s a life I can remember, a life that feels like the one I used to live when I was in art school and every Monday and Thursday (and, sometimes, Friday and Saturday) would be spent out with friends at clubs and dancing and trying to pull and the whole thing turning into a blur of mundanity and optimism and hormones and music. What I love about songs like “Red Lights Indicate Doors Are Secured” and “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor” isn’t just the spectacular spiky pop music – Seriously, these are songs that make you want to get up and dance with their singalongable melodies and bouncing basslines, even if that just means jumping up and down, pogo-style – but the lyrics, their focus on all the small details of those nights that you remember once someone mentions with a sense of “Of course, that’s what it was like, how could I have forgotten…?”
Whatever People Say I Am is a pretty perfect pop album, short and honest and filled with songs to stick in your head. I didn’t really pay that much attention to the follow-ups, and sometimes regret that, but that feeling is always countered in my head with the idea that what made me fall in love so deeply with the record is something that couldn’t really follow through on any follow-ups: The idea that this was reportage from the front lines, the way life really was. As the band became more and more successful, their lives changed, and any attempt to do the same thing over and over again would’ve seemed forced and fake, and defeated the very thing that I loved so much in the first place.
But this one album? It’s “Teenage Kicks” by the Undertones, but better, for an entire album.
I Seem To Spend My Whole Life Running From People Who Will Be
I know, of course, that Oasis were never the most critically-acceptable band, and that the fall-out of the divorce between the Gallagher brothers so far has been the almost-comically rough Beady Eye album (I really liked the first single, “Bring The Light,” and then the album was horrifically bad), but… I kind of love the debut single from Noel Gallagher’s new project, the hilariously named “Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds” (The song itself is called “The Death of You and Me,” a title you have to wonder whether or not was created to bait the journalists and fans looking for secret messages about the end of Oasis). I don’t know if it’s the pretty melody in the chorus, the brass band, or just the fact that I liked “The Importance Of Being Idle,” an Oasis song that bears a close resemblance to this. But, no matter what the reason, this feels like a nice way to come back: Gentle, melancholy, longing.
For You, I Was A Flame
It feels weird to say that there was something surprisingly upsetting about the news that Amy Winehouse was discovered dead in her apartment this weekend; the word “surprising” suggests that I should’ve have been upset, or that there’s some other kind of reaction I would have hoped to have, neither of which are true. But, nonetheless, it felt like more of a shock that I would’ve thought, perhaps, and I found myself feeling more upset than I normally do, reading about deaths of celebrities, as if it was the death of someone I’d actually met, if that makes sense.
I hadn’t met Amy Winehouse, of course. It’s not like we moved in the same social circles, or even liked on the same continent, so I have no idea why I read the news with such a sense of sadness and the dull ache in my head that felt like I was shutting down some bigger reaction pre-emptively. I was a fan, I’ll happily admit that, but I wasn’t such a fan that I’d done more than enjoy Back to Black and her rare cameo-appearances on songs since then (I love her covers of “Cupid” and “It’s My Party” that appeared on compilations over the last few years). I’d never seen her live, and I found her first album, Frank, pretty disappointing when I searched it out.
But there was something about her, and about her music. She was a mess, yes, but she was so fucking talented – Not just her singing (Although, God, that voice), but her songwriting, too. There was a humor and a sadness there that really stood out, something that demanded you pay attention. I hadn’t noticed them at first, hearing “You Know I’m No Good” for the first time and noticing Mark Ronson’s production and the Dap-Kings’ horns more than Amy herself, but the more I listened to Back to Black, the more obvious it became that these were really, really well-written songs, ones that had more depth than you might’ve suspected, and were the product of a smart writer who’d been around and lived this stuff, and who also knew pop music on some level that can’t be taught.
Even though I love the retro-60s-soul sound of Mark Ronson, my favorite Amy Winehouse song isn’t something that he’s behind; it’s not even a finished version of a song. The original demo of Back to Black‘s “Love Is A Losing Game” lacks the swagger and the sound of the version on the album, but it makes up for it with simplicity and a heartbreaking performance, vocally. Winehouse was only, what, 21, 22 when this was recorded? Imagine what she could’ve been capable of in the future.
But Where Does She Go
Since buying the reissued version of Suede’s 1994 album Dog Man Star last week – and then getting over the realization that said album is almost twenty years old and oh God I am so old – I’ve become weirdly obsessed with the question of why the album wasn’t more influential amongst the musicianati of the world. Don’t get me wrong; I know that the vocals (and the lyrics, most definitely) are things to be left to the drug-fueled ambition of the ’90s, but the music of that version of Suede – the mix of 1970s prog and glam, with pretentious classical steals and guitars permanently turned to “epic” – had a hunger and depth that was never really followed up on in the wash of Britpop that soon overtook the world after DMS came out. Even bands like Rialto and Gene and all those Britfop bands, they wanted to be the Smiths, not Suede, and it took Bernard Butler himself to follow up on some of the threads on the Sound of McAlmont and Butler album, and some of his solo work.
It’s sad; I listen to the music – again, not so much the vocals – of something like “The Asphalt World” and there’s something there that I wish there was more of, even if I can’t properly explain what it is. An echo of some Earth-3 version of the 1970s, played through a scuzzy speaker, trying to escape to happier places.
Song Of A Baker #3: Grow It! Show It!
Look at me: I can bake loaves of bread, thereby proving that I’m a baker.
This is a deceptive photo – it looks, perhaps, as if I’ve made a ridiculously wide, long slab of bread, but that’s nowhere near the case; instead, I’ve made my almond flour bread, which really just barely rises for some reason; it’s the length and width of your average loaf, but not very tall in the slightest (We end up slicing it sideways, to make the most out of it; cutting slabs and then slicing them in half, lengthwise).
Nonetheless, it tastes wonderful, and the texture is odd – spongelike, perhaps? – but really enjoyably dense, especially toasted. When the whole writing gig gets a little too much and I fantasize about giving it all up to become a baker (Forgetting, of course, that real bakers have to be able to do more than bake the occasional thing very slowly, and checking the recipe every two seconds, nervously), this is the kind of thing I can imagine myself making: Something enjoyable, relatively healthy and weird enough to have an appeal for a specific clientele who’d keep coming back for more.
Of course, if I became a real baker, I’d have to be able to make this kind of thing without eating it all myself because it looks so good and it’s right there.
“The Opponents Of The System Are As Much A Function of The System As Its Defenders”
More Grant Morrison quoting:
Before you set out to destroy “the System”, however, first remember that we made it and in our own interests. We sustain it constantly, either in agreement, with our support, or in opposition with our dissent. The opponents of the System are as much a function of the System as its defenders. TheSystem is a ghost assembled in the minds of human beings operating within “the System.” It is avirtual parent we made to look after us. We made it very big and difficult to see in its entirety and we serve it and nourish it every day. Are there ever any years when no doctors or policemen are born? Why do artists rarely want to become policemen?
For every McDonald’s you blow up, “they” will build two. Instead of slapping a wad of Semtex between the Happy Meals and the plastic tray, work your way up through the ranks, take over the board of Directors and turn the company into an international laughing stock… What if “The System” isn’t our enemy after all? What if instead it’s our playground?
From here. I have always liked the “make friends with them until they beg for mercy” school of thought in terms of dealing with conflict, I have to admit. I am the enemy, etc.
In Reality, Last Night
July, 1997.
And thus ends a week of really old comics that I made. Now all I have to do is wonder why I put them up.