via Coudal. I can’t decide if this is brilliant or just peculiar. Is Pavarotti just singing the normal lyrics in Italian, or something else?
This one, on the other hand, is definitely just peculiar.
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Tag: music
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New stuff coming soon
I’m being an absolute dynamo of behind the scenes activity, wrestling with HTML, php and CSS for your reading pleasure. Sort of. Anyway, in the absence of any other new posts, have a video of Seu Jorge:
If you haven’t seen The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, you should. It’s a very good film.
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Pop Princess
I caught a bit of the build-up for the Concert for Diana earlier and it was a weird experience, seeing them try to present Diana’s taste for anodyne mainstream 80s pop music (Elton John, Queen, Duran Duran, Wham, ABBA, Chris de Burgh) as though it was a revealing personality trait.
I’m not knocking her taste (except for Chris de Burgh, obviously); as a child of the 80s I have a soft spot for Duran Duran and Wham myself. But it’s not actually very interesting, is it? I suppose a senior member of the Royal Family listening to Wham on her Walkman around the palace was symbolic of a culture clash of a kind, but that says more about the Royal Family than about Diana. And the fact that she enjoyed meeting pop stars doesn’t exactly represent a deep engagement with music.
I don’t know. It just seems odd to project such significance on to one of the least interesting things you could say about anyone: she listened to Radio 1, you know. I suppose having a charity concert in her memory with music she liked is reasonable enough; it’s the soft-focus halo of what, sanctity? reverence? earnestness? forelock-tugging? that weirds it. But then the whole idea of a ‘people’s princess’ was always kind of creepy and parasitic.
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Train songs
Larry has posted a whole compilation of train-themed soul music over at Funky16Corners, which seemed like as good a reason as any to post this video:
Trains are a big presence in American music, of course: blues, jazz, rock and roll all have their great train songs. I don’t think they’ve ever had quite the same associations in Europe, perhaps because our countries are just physically too small. There’s never been a great British road movie, either.
Still, there’s a different kind of romance to European train travel; the idea of buying a ticket in Paris and waking up the next morning in Vienna, or Milan, or Barcelona. Between school and university I went travelling around Europe by train with friends. That was before the Channel Tunnel, so it was a long first day: London-Dover, then the ferry, then a train to Paris, then walking across Paris from the Gare du Nord to the Gare de Lyon to get a train heading south. But the next morning, I took one look out of the window and could see we were in Italy; the buildings, the whole look of the landscape, had changed.
Going by easyJet just isn’t the same.
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that George Szirtes music thing
George Szirtes has invited examples of “those occasions when I had only to hear a bar of music to know that something had radically changed.”
This will do, for me:
I’m cheating, really, though, because it’s not just that piece of music, though I think it holds up pretty well and it does have a brilliant opening with that sample of Rickie Lee Jones talking about sunsets. It’s standing in for all that late 80s, early 90s bleepy stuff from the ambient to no-nonsense thumping rave music.
I’ve never actually been that keen on clubbing—too loud, too boring—and the rave scene happened without me, but I’ve always loved the aesthetic. Instead of electronic instruments being used as a simple replacement for physical intruments, the music starts embracing the ways in which they are different from physical instruments. The artificiality of the sound becomes part of the point. I still like that sound; I still like rather electronic-y pop music.
Looking back at the early stuff now, part of what appeals is the simplicity of it. Even though it’s obviously been made with electronics rather than bits of wood and catgut, it has a rough-hewn quality that’s sort of charming.
I do think it’s funny that the British, so temperamentally disinclined towards conspiracy theories that they even assume that referees are incompetent rather than corrupt, seem ready to believe in a shadowy international conspiracy to fix the result of the Eurovision Song Contest.
EDIT: and after posting that I read that Richard Younger-Ross, the Lib Dem MP for Teignbridge, has tabled an early day motion calling for the voting system to be changed, with the support of three other MPs. Thus proving there’s no subject so trivial that a pathetic, desperate MP won’t wrap it around himself if he thinks it’ll get him ten seconds of media attention.