I was listening to the Happy Mondays the other day and was struck by the thought that WFL (which I’d believed to be a kind of hedonistic bragging - “I ordered a line / you formed a queue,” etc) might actually be a dialog between the crassly capitalist and their others (”Is there nothing else you can do?” / “Well not much, I’ve not been trained”). Possible material for the theory of proletarian resentment?

I’ve been listening to Kate Nash’s “Foundations” quite a bit recently. It’s another fine entry in the recent genre of housing-market related tracks (”Life For Rent,” “Everything’s Just Wonderful”). I’m slightly in awe of her accent, too; surely no-one’s Rs are naturally that non-rhotic?

Listening to MIA’s new album, I’ve been wondering what it is I find so creepy (and not in a good way) about her records. Possibly clarified for me slightly by the track “Grapes” which claims to feature Three 6 Mafia but appears to be a version of Nump’s Bay Area hit “I Got Grapes.” Hearing the area where I live incorporated in MIA’s third-world chic is definitely disconcerting. Not that there aren’t some enjoyable tracks; “20 Dollar” and “Paper Planes” are rapidly growing on me, and “Jimmy” is very nice indeed.

In other news, I’m wondering if “Jellyhead” by Crush (which could have been a 90s video war contender if I’d remembered it) is about the difficulties of going out with someone addicted to Temazepam?

Via Jessica, a marvelous French pop song. My French isn’t good enough to be entirely sure what it’s about, but I suspect the influence of Fourier:

Quand ça m’plaît plus j’efface tout et je recommence
Avec d’autres maisons et d’autres animaux

These “autres animaux” appear to include a bird, a goat, and a crocodile; un autre crocodile or, would it be too much to suggest, a counter-crocodile? Which, in a roundabout way, makes me think of Fourier’s exemplary materialism. Only an idealism that saw human beings as separate from nature would posit a social revolution that excluded the “natural.”

I’m probably not the right age or in the right place to really get New Rave; but still, it seems like a remarkably pointless movement. Hadouken range from alright to quite good, I guess, though “Liquid Lives” seems a bit like a poor man’s Audio Bullys.

More baffling are The Klaxons. “From Atlantis to Interzone” starts of like a pleasant enough rave revival, then turns into fucking Franz Ferdinand for no clear reason. Well, the reason becomes a bit clearer on listening to their awful cover of “Not Over Yet,” which appears to be an attempt to produce a dance record for people who don’t like, or perhaps have never heard, dance music. “We loved that song, and wanted to play it on guitars,” they said, apparently. Well, OK, I guess; but why on earth would anyone want to do that?

A day when the Spice Girls are rumored to be reforming seems like an appropriate time to mention my surprise that, according to Google, no-one has made the obvious “zig-a-zig objet petit a” joke. Or maybe ten years ago it didn’t occur to anyone to use a global computer network to disseminate such a mediocre gag.

In other Spice Girls news,  I was interested to find an article on Girl Power that says a lot of what I had vaguely imagined might go into a theory of Marxism-Britneyism.

Especially as it was preemptively won by Alistair’s definitive top 100 songs of the 90s.

I must admit, I found the short lived outbreak of 90s-pop hostilities a little depressing. Not because the songs were terrible, although some of them certainly were, indeed the opposite; the music of the early 90s was often so good, current pop music can’t really stand up. I realize there’s a danger of nostalgia, but this isn’t just a matter of subjective taste. The diffusion of acid house and hardcore into chart music that was such a big feature of the early 90s is, in hindsight, kind of amazing, and a positive development that I can’t see much to equal today. Marky Mark is a particularly good example. When I remembered his existence, I had no memory of what the song sounded like; certainly, it didn’t occur to me that a manufactured pop idol would was launched with a song that owes so much to an Italo-house classic. If you want to be depressed, just compare Marky Mark’s amazing track with the contemporary equivalents (James Blunt, maybe, or Daniel Powter).

Well, there are a couple of contemporary trends that give some hope. One would be Timbaland’s remarkable queering of R&B, particularly on the Justin Timberlake album. Pleasingly, this is being picked up by other R&B and hip-hop artists, particularly in the Bay Area, as I discovered from this great hyphy mixtape (mix-podcast?). Particular good is Berkeley group The Pack’s track, “At the Club,” which, unexpectedly, sounds like nothing so much as Belgian New Beat.

This is, unexpectedly, a really good song.

This may not fit infinite thought’s strict criteria, as it was never technically a hit, but it was, for a confusing couple of weeks, regularly played in the Coffee Shop in Neighbours…

antigram and infinite thought’s 90s pop war reminds me that I meant to post this video a while back, but I don’t think I ever did.

I forget why I was going to post it, but then, it’s not like it really needs any justification.

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There are some thing which, as far as I’m aware, never appear on bad records: hammond organs, trombones, handclaps.

And, a broader category, ska covers. Why is it, by the way, that two-tone, renowned as a political form of music, got so terrible whenever it explicitly turned to politics? Lots of great tunes about the general shitness of work, poverty, late capitalism; and then when political demands get raised, you get the mediocre “Free Nelson Mandela” and “Stand Down Margaret,” the worst ska record ever made?