Posts by Matthew Littlewood
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Hard News: Friday Music: Dancing Fool, in reply to Emma Hart,
I love dancing. If the choice is, "We could go home and have sex, or stay here and keep dancing,"... I'm going to trying really hard not to answer that question.
Assuming the person in question has some form of music-playing device at their abode, then surely the answer to that question is "we can go home, keep dancing and then have sex." Everyone wins!
Anyway, I know the tack below is painfully obvious, especially considering some of the cooler tracks on display on this thread, but Underworld's "Born Slippy", especially when they played it live, is one of those tracks that really captures the sense of a hedonistic, hazy and wracked state of mind released and exaggerated dancing. I love how Hyde's vocals sound almost terrified at being caught up in at all. And of course, it signed off one of the great films of the 1990s.
"Let you feelings slip, but never your mask, boy..."
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Hard News: Game Lorde, in reply to nzlemming,
Danielle wasn’t talking about artists, but critics.
As was I, in a roundabout way! :-) Good critics should not be hung up about "authenticity", because all art is play, in a way. And "inauthentic" artists are more fun to write about.
Indeed, Lorde is fun to write about precisely because of some of the disjunct.
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Hard News: Game Lorde, in reply to Danielle,
I have decided that music critics obsessed with “realness” and “authenticity” are going to be first against the fucking wall when the revolution comes.
I wouldn’t go that far, but a lot of my favourite pop music is more interesting because there is something “inauthentic” about it- whether it’s Joe Strummer, the son of a diplomat, and his reinvention as guttersnipe and rebel outsider, and the way his best music commented on those contradictions (e.g. “White Man in Hammersmith Palais”) or Bryan Ferry, son of a coalminer, reinventing himself as this weird, space-aged and slightly threatening European dandy for those astonishing early Roxy Music records.
(Sorry that the first examples that sprung to mind were from the early 1970s- I could have mentioned all manner of rap or other pop in the last decade that seems just as contradictory in different ways).
Where an artist comes from is often less important than what they evoke. It ain’t where you’re from, it’s where you’re at, as Rakim once rapped. Besides, contradictory performers are more fun to write about.
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Hard News: Game Lorde, in reply to Russell Brown,
But if you recall Lorde’s comments about LDR in interviews, … ‘Tennis Court’ refers to LDR stylistically, but completely rejects the I’m-in-love-with-a-bad-boy theme. I honestly see it as a bit of riposte.
Oh yeah, I can get with that. Lorde is also interesting in that her voice and lyrics sound like someone her age would write (if they were as switched-on as her, but still), whereas a lot of LDR's stuff sounds like someone in their mid-20s pretending to be in their late teens pretending to be older. It's a lot more distant and removed.
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Hard News: Game Lorde, in reply to Russell Brown,
Also: having watched the new Miley Cyrus video, I am even more strongly of the view that if Lorde can rescue pop music from that kind of hideous formulaic bombast, humanity wins.
Some stray observations about Lorde (forgive me for the fragmented nature of this post, I felt it would be better stringing a whole lot of separate ideas in one go, rather than clogging up the thread)
--It's fascinating how her lyrics can often be read as treatises on the pressures of fame or the pressures of "being yourself" as a teenager. "Buzzcut Season", "The Love Club", "Ribs" all seem really conflicted in that way- and there's this striking uncertainty to them. In fact, I wonder whether her songs will make more sense if she breaks really big
--It's also really interesting watching performance clips of her and comparing them to the Miley Cyrus ones. Whereas Lorde (as observed by others) occasionally seems exhausted or hesitant, but slowly works herself into a groove, Miley is flailing all over the place, all "energy" and "provocation" all the time. Yet ironically, she never looks as if she knows who the hell she is up on stage, or where the cameras really are, whereas Lorde is already quite aware of what sort of presence she has. I think that's crucial.--Nearly all of Lorde's best songs are surprising stripped back, "Royals" and "Tennis Court" are about as minimalist as anything out there at the moment. It puts a lot of pressure on both her to carry the conceit of the songs, and on the production to stick. Ironically, Joel Little's own stuff with Goodnight Nurse was the exact opposite of that- horrible, cramped, overly shiny and ultimately as dull as dishwater. He's clearly got talent behind the decks.
--Unlike some, I actually found Lorde's Kanye West cover really clumsy, it didn't fit with her persona at all. She is not bolshy. In contrast, her cover of the Replacements' "Swinging Party" definitely did- right down to the subject matter and the lowkey nature of the song.
--The Lana Del Rey comparisons don't quite work for me, either, because LDR's stuff is pretty much playing right into the "vulnerable girl who likes the bad men" vibe, and the arrangements on her tunes are (for good and ill) massive. Lorde doesn't strike me as vulnerable.
-- The "Tennis Court" video harks back to "Nothing Compares 2 U", but it also belongs to a recent trend of very "upfront" music videos featuring the artist looking straight at the screen (the Weeknd's videos are almost all variations of this). I wonder whether Youtube's smallscale nature has something to do with this.
(carry on!)
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For an example of how a newspaper takeover can go horribly wrong, look no further than David Carr's astonishing account of the goings-on at the Tribune Company. It's a remarkable piece of journalism, but his investigation reveals that the company's moral and fiscal bankruptcy under Zell- the workplace culture was utterly vile under his tenure. (Some of the anecdotes are jaw-dropping).
If you've got a spare hour or so, Jane Mayer's New Yorker profile is a great account of the undeniably shady and corrupt nature of the Koch Brothers operations.
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This seems short-sighted for a number of reasons. More than anything else, "U" could have served as an incubator of future talent for TVNZ's "grown-up" chanels (for want of a better term- and I concede 'grown-up' television on TV1 and TV2 is pretty thin on the ground), while also being its own "thing".
I didn't watch it very often, and some of it was clearly not for me, but it clearly had its own identity- and as Damian said, they "got" social media pretty well. Really, Freeview should be exactly the right venue for these sorts of niche chanels. I mean, they're that expensive to run, and should be seen as an investment by TVNZ- in people and talent, if nothing else.
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To say both novels were shocking, in the best sense of the word, to a teenage gay boy at a single-sex boarding school was a considerable understatement. So were Maurice Gee’s “children’s novels” – particularly the Halfmen of O trilogy, which also appeared in the mid-80’s to this SF/fantasy geek’s whole hearted approval – which worried away at the ambiguities and tensions of Godzone with all the spirited moral ferocity as his adult novels. And not without controversy either: “sordid” is an adjective that has hung around Gee his entire career, no matter who his intended audience is.
Maurice Gee is my favourite NZ novellist precisely because of those qualities- his best work doesn't spare anyone, and really gets something about how petty little squabbles between families that can affect subsequent generations (and even whole societies) if aggravated. I love how spare and controlled his prose- I'm a fan of writers who can be eloquent while also cutting right to the quick. He's also one of the nicest people I've ever interviewed, which only reiterates that you don't have to live like your own art.
I remember similar controversy over Maurice Gee's The Fat Man winning children's book of the year. Granted, it's gothic as hell and some of its material is decidedly grotesque (particularly Gee's lyrical descriptions of the titular character), but the complaints ignored what a human work it was.
As for the latest controversy over "Into the River"- I'd argue novels like that deal with those topics are absolutely necessary. Adolescents like being challenged- and they should be, too.
I want to read the book, tho.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Full-on First Person, in reply to Bart Janssen,
She's young, talented and I really hope she can build on her success. And if she can't that's cool too, I've really enjoyed her music thus far, as have many others, and that's enough.
What I really like about the single "Royals" is how much it's stripped back to the elements. One of the things that still makes me somewhat unsure about Lana Del Ray is the fact the arrangements often seem at cross-purposes to her deliberately blank vocals, and not in a way she intended.
In contrast, the backing to "Royals" is lithe, sharp and matches Lorde's somewhat offhand and playful delivery. I don't get the ingenue/Lolita thing from her at all. In fact, her work seems to reflect what she is- namely a rather precocious and arty teenager who's figuring out what kind of music and art she likes, and where she fits socially and otherwise.
(Interestingly, the US recut of her "Royals" video focuses a lot more on Lorde. I get why they did that, but it actually makes it less interesting. I like the somewhat detached vibe of the original)
Also, I don't think a pop star like her could've existed, say, 10 years ago- even then, having a young white girl croon ironically about hip-hop influenced materialism would seem too damn weird. Then again Hip-hop/RnB has been pop's primary colours for more than two decades now. So I guess it would be second-nature to her generation.
I enjoyed that NY Magazine interview (although someone should've copy-edited it- there were a few typos). She comes across as pretty level-headed and sharp.
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While I'm not suggesting anyone watch it in full, some peverse soul put up the entire three-hour rolling coverage of Thatcher's 1990 resignation on Youtube.
Just catching snippets of it, and I'm struggling to think how an event that momentus would be covered now. Visually, it seems so much less cluttered than it would be today- social media would be absolutely nuts.
But god, how fiery is the debate in Question Time? There are real, boiling emotions beneath the theatricality.