Posts by Simon Grigg
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that's one of several reasons why I think the collective noun for iPad haters will be "dickheads" in a couple of years' time, if not sooner.
Damn, you sound like George W. : you're either with us or you're against us. Is there no acceptable middle ground?
I have a friend who's a bit a MacBoy and I've always had a bit of fun tossing out flippant lines like 'Ives ain't much of a visionary'. I decided to stop doing it when the time it was taking in the day to be corrected was exceeding the fun of it all.
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why did you think you'd get away with nicking that line?
I don't for a moment think he did
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Yeah. I'd forgotten how good that album actually is
This is the version you need to find though. Side one is a hip-hop suite which sounds monumental loud and just when you've had enough of the scratch, it segues into a very electro-fied live re-edit of Buffalo Gals.
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Dear old Karl. Royally missing the point.
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But hiphop as 'punk for the black kids' would have exploded into what it is today even if it weren't validated by some ingenious white guy near the outset.
No argument but I can't help feeling that the focus McLaren put on hip hop gave it a huge shove. And hip hop exploded out of the underground urban community outside the US far faster than it did in its homeland and Malcolm's releases were pretty crucial to that crossover.
Also, Buffalo Girls was a massive record in the US hip hop scene too, massively influential at the time.
Don Letts, again, was bang on when he complied this.
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I was talking about invention, you're talking about popularisation, which is something else.
I think it's a non argument both ways. Nobody invented anything. They all grabbed, assaulted and adopted.
If you look at the early (1974) Ramones vids they were nicking Beatles & Beach Boys riffs and aping the NY Dolls, who were aping the Rolling Stones & The Small Faces who were aping James Brown and so on.
The British punk scene threw a whole lot into the mix, not least the Jamaican influences that mutated it a little further, the Americans grabbed it back for No Wave and on we go...
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Punk for me, cos i couldn't stand the music, was more an attitude in much the same way hiphop will always be
Don'tcha think that McLaren recognised this when he (opportunisticly) pushed his own hip hop band wagon
For me the, it's a shitty phrase but I'll use it anyway, spirit of punk, passed from the indie scene in the UK to hip hop and the experimental post punk scene, to the Chicago / Detroit electronic scenes to the the vast raft of interesting acts and labels making music from the left and right of field, to the crazy haphazard flood of ideas that the net lets us express, find, and mutate.
That's the point that Karl misses when he tries to put punk in a box.
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Watch out -- you'll upset Karl du Fresne:
Karl could profitably spend time with Don Lett's brilliant Punk: Attitude and do well to veer away from some of the half baked stereotypes in that post.
Punk legitimised the mad flailings of the talentless.
is just plain vacuous
as is
But in essence punk was political
FFS
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At about the same time The Saints were inventing Punk Rock in Brisbane, they certainly weren't part of any movement.
But I'm Stranded was produced by an expat New Zealander.
I think Malc's overwhelming achievement was to encourage a whole generation out there to raise a single middle digit to a lot of things, but most especially the recording industry.
It doesn't matter if the Ramones or Televison or The Rolling Stones were the first punks (I'd argue for Robert Johnson or some of the Harlem jazz-punks from the 1920s myself), what McLaren did was allow us all to re-examine the way we made music and to attack the powers that controlled how it was presented and released.
The independent recording industry we know today, and the way artists deal with majors was a direct result of the punk revolution in the UK and McLaren's machinations. I could go into dreary detail but bands / artists / producers across genres have an artistic currency, or at least an option to exercise that currency, that they never had in the days before UK punk. The credit for running with this goes elsewhere but he forcefully opened the door in a way that it could never be closed again.
He did an awful lot more more besides of course, but it's pretty hard to overstate how revolutionary this wee change was.
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Nothing new in that. Anyone remember It became necessary to destroy the town to save it?
Yep and all these decades latter can anyone tell me exactly how the deaths of 2 million Vietnamese in the name of America's freedom / domino war actually advanced that nation?
This bullshit didn't start in 2003.