Dangerous & Lazy

And the mediocrity of Sexy/Back (like a disappointingly restrained knock-off of “Maneater”); FutureSex/LoveSounds really is heartbreakingly good. “My Love” is a great example of cold pop, a sort of wierd ghost-rave (but not at all hauntalogical; more hammer horror, or Scooby Doo).

k-punk is great on the Christina Aguillera album. He’s particularly right about the charm of the perfect anachronism of a number of tracks. The simulacra World War 2 of “Candyman” is the perfect soundtrack for the War on Terror, it’s actually painful to listen to. Which is also a useful reminder that the Iraq War is all fucking Spielberg’s fault. Or rather, of all that rather bloated WWII nostalgia. You want to shake Christopher Hitchens and tell him to get over his Oedipus complex (he’s not fooling anyone by sublimating it into an Orwell complex). This explains why Peter Hitchens is much more congenial than his brother: Peter is a nice healthy reactionary (with charming ruddy cheeks), he doesn’t bottle it all up like poor Christopher. I worry that that last sentence makes me sound like a character out of a Dorothy L Sayers story.

I loved the new Girls Aloud track when I first heard a terrible quality radio rip. I was actually a little disappointed when I heard a proper quality version; it turns out my imagination had inserted a storming gay bassline (not that the real version doesn’t have a moderately storming bassline, though). Luckily, the promo comes with a full complement of generic dance remixes; of which I particularly like the sort-of-almost dubstep Co-stars mix. There’s a fine trance version, too, which plays the old trick of transposing the bass chord progression into the minor, making the vocals seem to float in some kind of noumenal heaven above the melancholy of the day-to-day world.

Which reminds me of a number of interesting posts from &catherine, about a particular affective coldness in pop music. What interest me are those songs where apparent melancholy is somehow undercut precisely by the process of transforming emotion into music. The key example for me here is happy hardcore, which manages to preserve a sense of yearning like a specimen caught in amber, against a musical context that seems to expunge any possibility of emotion. I’m reminded of Spinoza’s claim that melancholy is always evil, but anguish can be good to the extent that it checks enthusiasm. Or, Nietzsche’s idea of a pessimism of strength: a cold pop music seems to begin from the essential painful nature of the world, but recognizes the worthlessness of raising this pain as a simple complaint. Instead (and I think happy hardcore is a particularly sharp example again here), there’s an odd combination of desperation and parody, an identification (over-identification?) with horror which works to create some kind of distance from it.

Take my credit card
The key to my house
Take my car

— “Suga Mama”

Anything you cop I’ll split the bill…
I can do for you what Martin did for the people
Ran by the men but the women keep the tempo

— “Upgrade U”

The new Beyoncé album is lyrically disappointing. “Suga Mama” is surely the anti-Bills Bills Bills. Interesting that it kind of sounds like Kanye West’s “Golddigger”; perhaps it’s intended as a kind of response, a disappointingly desperate insistence that Beyoncé, at least, isn’t a gold digger. The tunes, though, are pretty great. The beats aren’t especially surprising, but it says something pretty good about R&B that this level of quality is just business as usual. It’s probably a better album than Beyoncé’s first one; only a couple of ballads, one of which, “Irreplaceable,” is absolutely gorgeous.

Jay-Z has some interesting bars on “Upgrade U,” mind. I assume the reference to Saturn is some kind of 5% numerology, but I’m not exactly sure what it means:

‘Cause that rock on ya finger is like a tumor
You can’t put ya hand in ya new purse…
Mafioso, oh baby you ever seen Saturn
No, not the car but everywhere we are

The internet has managed to replace some of my misplaced happy hardcore, including a couple of tracks that were favorites of John Peel (or “Fat Jack” as he used, implausibly, to claim people called him). This reminds me that my sister gave me a copy of Peel’s autobiography a little while ago. It’s pretty good; or, rather, the first half, written by Peel himself, is good, particularly if you read it to yourself while doing a bad John Peel impersonation. His description of his time at school is interesting, and his account of living in America suggests, without being overly confessional or falsely modest, that he may have been a bit of a dick, sometimes. The second half, written by his wife, is not so good; while I was surprised to discover just how involved in the counter-culture Peel was, it’s hard to get enthusiastic about a book written in the style of one of those family newsletters that people send in to Simon Hoggart.

Except, in a baffling and depressing turn of events, I do appear to have lost my happy hardcore CDs. I was writing a post, and I thought I should upload a particular track to illustrate it. So, I start looking through my CDs, and there’s no DJ Sy, no Hixxy, no Unknown And The Evolution. I can’t really explain it. Did I leave them in England? Did I really prepare to move a couple of thousand miles by discarding these CDs, pausing only to rip a copy of Raver’s Choice No. 7? Or perhaps they were stolen? Did the people who pinched my laptop also rifle through my CDs looking for mid-90s dance music from the north of England? Neither explanation is very satisfying.

I’ve only now realized that Tatu’s Cosmos doesn’t just express a generalized desire for cosmonaut revolution, it’s a narrative of a utopian experiment. I think Tatu’s next course of action is clear.