I don’t usually read the Guardian‘s music coverage, so I’d forgotten how incompetent a music writer Alexis Petridis is. I was reminded more forcefully than I would have liked by today’s review of Lady GaGa’s album, a six paragraph review that contains, generously, four sentences that mention music. Even those don’t rise above the level of “the tune of Paparazzi takes up residence in your brain and refuses to budge.” OK, fine, but why? What is it about that track that’s catchy? It isn’t, anyway, the tune which sticks in your head so much as the way the little catch in her voice plays against the cocooning buzz of the bass, and how that ambiguously anaesthetized melancholy fits with the bizarre fantasy of glamor that Lady GaGa attaches to the word “fashion.” But to get in to that would require describing music in some other way than through vague references to other artists, which appears to be the limit of Petridis’s skill.
Seriously, who is Petridis and where did he come from? Back when I lived in the UK and read the Guardian‘s music coverage regularly, I remember him appearing out of nowhere as their music editor; but I don’t remember him ever writing anything even minimally interesting.
In other “terrible things in the graun” news, Simon Jenkins appears to have written the apotheoisis of broadsheet opinion journalism: a smug, anti-intellectual column about why people should be smug and anti-intellectual.
I like to imagine that Britney’s new video came about when Britney, in a room high up in Spears Towers, complained to her team: “Christina had an elephant in her video! I want an elephant. No, I want two elephants!” And so, they wheeled out the rather tired celebrity/circus analogy, in an attempt to justify the elephants (which, really, ought to be their own justification). The tired conceptual architecture is an example of the general blahness of the album identified by Steven Shaviro; Read more↴
It’s a good Fall for music: I like the Sugababes album (though it does seem a little mean of them to have stolen Mutya’s idea of making a northern soul record), and I’m obviously eagerly anticipating the new Britney and Girls Aloud records that are on their way. Meanwhile, the Russian version of the new t.A.T.u. album is out, and I fear I’m a little underwhelmed, although I have enjoyed transliterating the song titles. The previously released tracks, “Белый Плащик” is fairly good and “220” is extremely good. Other tracks show promise, such as “Снегопады,” which starts fairly well, and has what sounds like a rather good bridge, which unfortunately fails in one crucial aspect, because the song doesn’t have a chorus for it to lead in to. On the whole, though, I don’t find myself being grabbed by the album as much as I would have expected; perhaps it’s just the estrangement effect of it being in Russian. A friend of mine suggested I learn Russian, to test that theory.
There is, though, one significant exception to this indifference: “Fly on the Wall” is absolutely fantastic. All the elements of the song work together perfectly: the tense build-up of the verse spills over into the psycho-sexual bass rumblings of the chorus; better still, the industrial clanking of the drums suggests a social context for the whole thing.
The new Britney song’s not that great, but the video is really quite extraordinary. It appears to be some kind of schizo-masochistic delusion:
I’m impressed that Britney’s recovery from tabloid madness simply involves the universalization of madness to her entire career. I guess it’s not actually surprising, but it’s nice to see it done so well.
A while back, I was re-reading Isaac Asimov’s series of novels about robots. There’s something faintly uneasy about them, which I’d meant to blog about at the time. The underlying theme of the books is the effect of robot labor on society; and the key thing which distinguishes robots from other types mechanization is that they are sentient, which makes the situation uncomfortable like slavery, a similarity which is always present in the books, but is not dealt with explicitly. This does raise a question for cybernetic communism, though: the usual assumption is that mechanization will abolish, or at least minimize, necessary labor, but what if this depends on an unjustified humanism, an assumption that we can simply farm our work off onto dumb machines? But shouldn’t a sufficiently complex assemblage of machines have some kind of say in its own future? Read more↴
