FILM: The Wolf Of Wall Street

New York, New York...

Today's guest blog comes courtesy of Ms Sarah Scoonover, aka Asha Vose from Red Room.  Originally there was talk of a House Of Cards 2 preview, but apparently it's too good to talk about without giving anything away.  Instead, she gives her thoughts on Scorsese's latest...

In keeping with the blog, I will discuss The Wolf of Wall Street, the latest Martin Scorsese film. Scorsese is famous for dark films with a heavy masculine audience like Goodfellas, Gangs of New York, and Taxi Driver. He’s brilliant, beloved of actors and screenwriters alike. There are a number of recurrent themes in his films: corruption, the casual nature of criminal violence, and self-sabotage among others. This film covered all of them.

I went into the theater (that’s right, American spelling) on a weeknight. It’s a nice theater, but the bored police officer who has been there every night since the shootings last year, made it hard to feel completely safe. It was easy to feel watched.

After the previews, I heard the unmistakable narration of Leondardo DiCaprio as main character Jordan Belfort. He opens the film snorting coke from a stripper’s most un-sunlit place.

At that moment, my experience of the film changed in a fundamental way. I went in expecting a film about finance, crime, and possibly drugs. I in no way expected to laugh until I fell out of my chair. But I did, repeatedly during the film.

The film isn’t light-hearted, but there’s a special kind of dark humor that carries it through. There is heavy criticism directed at the perceived apathy of the American people toward financial regulation and white collar crime in general. There are few, if any, good people in the movie.

What I’m trying to say, is it isn’t the easiest film to watch. It’s rough on a viewer; the characters make increasingly amoral decisions, bad things happen to good people, drugs and prostitutes abound, finally an awful lot of money is won and lost under the worst of circumstances to the worst people.

If you can find humor in the lowest rungs of humanity, then you’ll enjoy this film as much as I did; however, I do feel compelled to add a few caveats. Warnings for the viewer: there are uses of bad language, sex, and drugs in the film that will put off even the most seasoned moviegoer. Also, you’ll leave the theater with a powerful urge to try Quaaludes.

You have been warned.

If you like my writing style, I mostly talk books over at Redroom under Asha Vose. Thanks again for letting me post.

Without further ado, I return you to your regular blogger.

So what are you waiting for?  Go check out Asha's other work at Redroom!

EPILEPSY: How To Be An Epileptic

Don't Say Brainstorm - An occasional chat about epilepsy...

Is it really true that everyone is allowed one fit without having epilepsy?

I don't resent my epilepsy.  Obviously I don’t enjoy it, but the condition came early enough in my life so that it didn’t impede on an existing lifestyle.  Some peoples’ condition causes them to have more than one seizure a day, whereas I only have them a few days of the year.  It doesn’t make my life feel too much different to how it would be if I didn’t have epilepsy, and for that I am grateful.

No matter how serious the condition though, being diagnosed with epilepsy obviously has a massive impact on someone’s life.  Being epileptic stops you from doing a lot of things – obviously piloting aircraft and extreme sports are right out.  But even more everyday activities have to be approached with more care than usual – having a bath for instance, or going to the pub.  Alcohol reduces the effect of the medication I take and nowadays I even try to be sensible enough to actually bear that in mind.  Driving is probably the biggest thing that I miss, or rather the opportunity of learning how to drive.  After living in a village for two years I realised it was the lack of freedom that came with a lack of transport that annoyed me the most.
How does it happen then – at what point do you go from not having epilepsy to having it?  It obviously depends on the patient’s first experience with the NHS, and how that is dealt with; and sometimes that can be surprisingly blasé.  

I was diagnosed in my early teens, but it wasn’t after my first fit.  The first seizure I had was during the summer holidays when I was 14.  One moment I had been playing a game on the computer and found myself on the sofa.  My younger sister was the only other person in the house, and she managed to get the neighbour over the road to help.  She was obviously very worried – I’ve always said that for me the fits aren’t as bad for me as they are for the people around me.  I just have to wake up a bit confused, it’s everyone else that panics.  

I was taken to see a doctor that afternoon, and heard for the first time the piece of advice: “Everyone is allowed one fit without being epileptic”.  Anyone who has had a seizure is likely to have heard something similar.  I was told to go home and rest and so I did.  Doctors know their stuff, so we follow their advice.

Although I will never drive one of these I get to ride in them often enough

Except this advice – everyone having one fit without it being a cause for alarm – is questionable.  Hearing it makes you feel better if you’ve just had a fit for the first time, because it makes you worry less that you might have epilepsy.  But when you analyse it a bit more it is a silly thing to say.  If someone had a heart attack they wouldn’t be told that ‘everyone is allowed one heart attack without needing to be checked out for a heart condition’.  So why should someone who has just had a seizure be told that they needn’t worry about epilepsy, and don’t need to have it checked out further?  In many ways, it is the medical profession’s own hand-me-down advice to match the other urban myths about putting spoons in mouths and so on.  It is rooted in imperfect studies carried out in hospitals in the 1960s-70s, but it is not advice that is taught to medical professionals at university.  It is received wisdom.  It’s not written down anywhere and it isn’t part of anyone’s training. But it’s advice that’s given often.  Why?

There is a 50/50 chance that someone who has an unprovoked seizure will have another.  So sending someone home without treating it as something that should be at least followed up at a later date is not a good thing.  It is not neglectful, because that implies that the professionals aren’t doing something they’ve been taught to do.  Rather, it comes round again to a hazy understanding of seizures and epilepsy as we discussed last time we were on this subject.  If an unprovoked seizure has a high chance of being an indicator that another one could happen it should certainly be investigated.  I strongly believe this.  To pass it off as something that doesn’t need to be worried about is something you might expect a hopeful relative to do.  But the NHS needs to come up with a better strategy than this.  It needs to have a strategy full stop for dealing with people having their first seizure, instead of well-meaningly fobbing them off with comforting words based on nothing.

The gap between my first and second fits was about 9 months, and I don’t remember much about that one apart from being in A&E for 8 hours on a Saturday night in Nottingham.  You really see some things in A&E, and especially on a Saturday night in Nottingham.  To be diagnosed with epilepsy, all you need is to have had two unprovoked seizures – it doesn’t matter how long a time it’s been between them.  After the incident that Saturday I was sorted out with an appointment with a consultant and some scans, eventually leading to being an official card-carrying epileptic.  (Literally card-carrying – got a medical exemption certificate in my wallet and everything!)  

My fits have always been irregular and relatively infrequent.  But because I had friends and family around me when I had my fits I always had witnesses to confirm I was, indeed having convulsions.  But what if there hadn’t been any witnesses?  It could have been an awful lot longer.  That’s one of the reasons a lot of people don’t get diagnosed with epilepsy for some time – if someone is on their own and has seizures they may find themselves losing consciousness but won’t immediately think that they’ve had a fit.  Why would they?  If there’s no one around to tell them otherwise, why wouldn’t they just think they’ve fainted?  Another reason that if a seizure happens to be picked up on it should be investigated straightaway; who knows when the next opportunity could be to investigate it?

With many thanks to Professor Ley Sander. For more information, check out The Epilepsy Society website.

TV: Babylon

Babylon is the latest programme written by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, set in the world of the London Metropolitan Police force.  It’s a comedy-drama (or ‘dramedy’ if you want to sound ridiculous) and it’s directed by Danny Boyle.  

High expectations then.  Armstrong and Bain have written at least two of the most popular comedies over the last 10 years or so with Peep Show and Fresh Meat, and were involved with The Thick Of It.  Danny Boyle was involved with some kind of show at the Olympics or something.  This is a show that has been made by people with impressive CVs - so is it any good?

James Nesbitt as the Chief Commissioner

Well, I liked Babylon a lot.  I thought it managed to show four different sides to the police force in its opening ten minutes and introduce its characters very quickly.  By the first ad break you’ve already seen the normal front-line constables, armed response units, the communication office and the top brass.  It’s a lot to take in but it doesn’t really leave you behind because it’s so funny.  And it really does start out with a bit of an all-out comedy offensive (a man’s reaction to armed police breaking his door down eventually leads to him being tasered in the balls.  It’s much funnier scripted and acted by professionals, but I still think ‘tasered in the balls’ is a pretty funny sentence in its own right).  It seems like it’s going to be funny all the way through its 75 minute runtime but that isn’t what happens.

Just to make it clear, that’s not because it’s failed; it’s not funny all the way through is because that’s not what it’s aiming for.  There's the sense of wanting to do more than just get laughs.  In tone I found it very similar to the last series of The Thick Of It, which became more of a political drama with funny dialogue than a sitcom.  Some people thought that the fourth series of The Thick Of It was a bit of a failure too, and I guess that’s where you just have to draw a line and say it’s a matter of taste.

It's really, really lazy to say that comedy-drama (no, not 'dramedy') always falls short of being funny enough to be a good comedy and dramatic enough to be a good drama.  Most comment threads online about Babylon have at least one person making this smartarse observation without actually backing it up with anything from the show.  I think the truth is more that the show cracked it as a character-based comedy but that the drama was unfocused.

Babylon seems to be a natural progression for Armstrong and Bain’s writing, certainly if we take Fresh Meat as the example of their last TV series together.  Fresh Meat has 6 main characters divided into 3 general types –  the roughly realistic (Josie and Kingsley); mild exaggerations of stereotypes (Howard and Oregon); and extreme exaggerations of stereotypes (Vod and JP).  Basically, the normal ones, the social satire ones and the out and out clowns.  The last series of Fresh Meat started to focus more and more on characterisation, especially the more OTT characters like Vod and JP.  

What Babylon does is a more complex evololution of this; 4 different parts of the police force are represented with their own range of Fresh Meat-style character types, and it really works.  So you get Robbie being the Vod of the constables, all violent Id.  His funniest moment is possibly when he has to stop short of punching a protestor when he sees he’s being filmed, and settles instead for a threat of “I will verbally dominate you!”;  The sleazy Finn in Communications comes over like JP – an arrogant alpha-male wannabe; and so on.

The real evolution in the writing however is the move to not just to write a sitcom about the police.  It is a comedy-drama, but definitely weighted more in favour of drama.  The main characters are James Nesbitt’s Chief Commissioner and Brit Marling’s Chief of Communications and their characters have nothing of the sitcom about them at all.  The plot, about a lone gunman on the loose in London has nothing sitcom-y about it.  The laughs are there, but they’re ultimately more disposable than the drama...

The drama isn’t as good as the comedy though, and that’s where the structure falls down.  It’s not terrible, but the fact is the comic bits are more enjoyable than the dramatic bits.  And of course, the very fact that you can separate ‘comedy bits’ and ‘dramatic bits’ so easily shows that the joins are not seamless.  Some of the dramatic notes are hit well.  The scene where the gunman only starts being taken truly seriously by the police is when one of their own becomes a casualty is well played.  The subsequent scene where Nesbitt’s character goes to break the news to her widower is very powerful.  

Brit Murphy as Liz, new Head of Communications

But some of the internal politics stuff seems relatively tame (the ‘dirt’ that has been dug on Brit Marling’s character turns out to be that she was headhunted for a lot of money, which seems like it would be a surprise to no-one).  And the attempt at a bit of a romance thing with her character and Nesbitt’s is jarring because it seems to go against what we’ve seen of the characters.  What Babylon would benefit from (and could easily do) is some of the workplace scheming seen in shows like House Of Cards or Borgen.  What we see here is much less sophisticated or as involving.

What I really liked about the drama in Babylon however was that nobody was in complete control of any given situation, which seemed honest.  At the end there wasn’t a Malcolm Tucker character commanding everything, but just a room full of people shotuing “What’s happening?!?”  The point being made was that it doesn’t matter how far up the chain you are, no one can tame the million-headed Hydra of Twitter.  When the operations room cheers because the gunman has been shot, Liz doesn’t share their glee - she knows that the fact he tweeted ‘Please Don’t Kill Me’ shortly before his death is going to make everyone look like heartless bastards rightly or wrongly.  The comedy side of Babylon is all about the characters but the drama part is all about technology’s impact on society, right down peoples’ first instinct in any situation is to film it on their smartphone.  

While that is an interesting concept for a drama, Babylon's pilot is definitely best enjoyed as a character ensemble piece.  It had a point to make about social media and communication technology in the police, but ultimately it didn’t seem too clear what that point was.  Perhaps in the series it will be developed further; I really hope so, because this pilot made a series look very promising indeed…

MUSIC: Syd Barrett's Solo Work

"I tattoed my brain all the way"...  

Syd Barrett is probably the most famous acid-casualty of the 1960s.  He is remembered for his early Pink Floyd work, but his (in my opinion lyrically stronger) solo albums are generally neglected.

Syd Barrett’s solo work is now available on Spotify, and this seems like a good subject with which to accidentally create and end a loose trilogy of posts; last week we looked at Forgotify and the unintended sadness of lost music, and after that we’ve looked at Lewis Carroll’s rejection of the adult world in favour of child-like fantasy.

Syd Barrett & Friend

Barrett’s solo lyrics, along with a lot of 1960s psychedelic lyrics, are steeped in images rooted in childhood, and quite often images rooted in the idea of Victorian childhood.  Not the chimney-sweep version of Victorian childhood, but the rocking-horse in the nursery version – most, though not all, of the 60s psychedelia movement of the time was middle-class  His solo music is not forgotten exactly (although some of it spent a significant amount of time out of print), but it is dwarfed by his previous band’s work – Pink Floyd.  

I don’t really want to talk much about pre or post-Barrett Pink Floyd, but the gist of the story so far is that Barrett was the leading creative force of Pink Floyd in the early days, always cutting an odd figure, showing some signs of what we would now associate with bipolar disorder.  He started to lose his mind (very possibly because of the vast amount of LSD floating around, although it’s thought be some that the hallucinogen was just a catalyst for a breakdown he was already heading towards).   He became extremely eccentric and erratic.  He was eventually dumped by the rest of the band; they courageously confronted the illness and difficulties of their friend head-on by just not picking him up for gigs anymore.

So he retreated even more into his own world, staring out as if marooned, eventually being persuaded to make some solo records at the tail-end of the 60s.  And they’re really good listening.  I haven’t listened to them in years but they really are quite startling.  This doesn’t always mean startlingly good.  But there’s something in the atmosphere of both albums that always sucks me in.  I think it’s not so much the songs themselves (although some haunt me for days), but the audible effort involved in just getting them out in the first place.  And they both share a mood of someone lost in time, yearning for a more innocent world.

The first album, ‘The Madcap Laughs’, is the most fragmented in style.  This is probably more to do with the fact it took 2 years to complete with several different musicians and producers than Barrett’s mental health.  

Barrett & Another Friend - The back of 'The Madcap Laughs' album.

There are songs with laid-back moods and some which are much more aggressively obscure.  The opening ‘Terrapin’ is a child-like lullaby.  ‘Octopus’ is a musically cheerful evocation of an octopus ride at a fairground, with a chorus where Barrett pleads to be left there.  The lyrics have flashes of darkness (“Isn’t it good to be lost in the wood/Isn’t it so bad, quiet there…”).  ‘No Man’s Land’ is where Barrett drawls “When I live I die/They even see me under call/We under all, we awful, awful, crawl” before breaking down into unintelligible murmurs.  

All the songs sound like they’re just about able to continue but are capable of derailing at any moment, as ‘No Man’s Land’ essentially does.  Even something relatively joyous (like ‘Love You’, a song which is grinning way too much to sound healthy) can end in a disconcerting and abrupt manner.  Sometimes a song seems to end and then starts again as if it’s just remembered something.  At the start of a song called ‘If It’s In You’ you hear him snap at someone (perhaps himself) for not being able to sing an ambitiously high note, and the song goes on to contain many false starts and missed notes.  And eventually you realise that this must have been the most useable take.   It feels voyeuristic, and changes the way you listen to the rest of the album.  All those moments where the songs break down away to nothing are just metaphors for their author’s state of mind, more so than the content of the songs themselves.

A drawing by Syd Barrett, the cover of his second and final album.

The second album ‘Barrett’, is more cohesive because it is played by more or less the same band all the way through and was made in a much shorter length of time.  It begins with the song that for me sums up the best of Barrett’s solo work completely; a deceptively sunny piece of post-psychedelia psychedelia with lyrics that are inexplicably disturbing (the opening lines are “In the sad town/Cold iron hands clap/The party of clowns outside/Rain falls in grey far away”).  It sounds like one of Barrett’s Pink Floyd singles, ‘See Emily Play’; but this time the imagery isn’t quaint Victorian whimsy but is instead either unintelligible or worrying.  And is vastly more interesting as a result.

‘Dominoes’ has a sense of bleak ennui, with its repeating visions of numbness and endless falling.  ‘Rats’ is essentially a stream of consciousness, as if Barrett’s trying to express too many things at once.  These are the darkest moments.  ‘Gigolo Aunt’ shows the more uplifting side of his music at this point, ‘Baby Lemonade’ without the subversively gloomy lyrics.  And it ends with ‘Effervescing Elephant’, which has all the violent whimsy of a Victorian nursery rhyme and reminds me most of ‘How Doth The Little Crocodile’ by Lewis Carroll.

These albums are incredibly sophisticated in their efforts to reach back to childhood.  Rather than anything from Pink Floyd’s discography, Barrett’s solo work sounds most like a John Lennon song from ‘The White Album’, ‘Cry Baby Cry’.  It has the eerie feeling of nostalgia, and the stranger feeling of someone mistaking nostalgia and fantasy for reality.  This does not in any way make the music depressing or far too disturbing to listen to.  There’s true joy and, yes, madcap laughter on both albums.  The textures are much more complex.  

I think it’s important to remember that Syd Barrett wasn’t someone who, like Ian Curtis, was lost in misery.  He was just lost.  After ‘Barrett’ (and some claim during it) he lost interest and became a physical recluse, but psychologically he had cut himself out of society years before, long gone.  These songs are a snapshot of a rapidly dissolving, if not completely dissolved, sense of reality; but that does not mean that they are not filled with artistic and emotional truths.

BOOK: Alice In Wonderland and Lewis Carroll's Biopic.

Lewis Through The Camera Lens

They’re making a biopic of Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll).  But before we talk about him, let’s talk about Alice.  

‘Alice in Wonderland’ is one of those rare stories; not only do you not need to have read the book to know it, you also don’t need to have seen the films either.  It is a story that it just known, deeply rooted in popular culture worldwide. 

And it absolutely deserves that status – it is legendary in a literal sense; ‘Alice In Wonderland’ is a legend that can be interpreted and re-interpreted over and over again to different creative effects.  The famous Disney cartoon places the story firmly in fairy tale territory; Tim Burton takes the idea into darker territory.

The rampant dreamlike happenings of the story (and that of its superior sequel, ‘Through The Looking Glass’) lend themselves well to visuals both in film and illustration.  John Tenniel’s

Alice & Friend

original drawings are testament to that, and are perhaps still the best (although I think Anthony Browne’s Magritte inspired pictures give Tenniel a run for his money…)  Perhaps because the story started as part of the ‘oral tradition’ style of telling tales it allows it to be flexible and fluid; Carroll no doubt had to incorporate interruptions and questions into the story as it went along.

Of course, because the story was told before it was written the magic of the Alice books really lies in its use of language and absurd ideas. All of the wordplay, nonsense poetry and parodies of nursery rhymes, unanswerable riddles (“Why is a raven like a writing desk?”), anthropomorphic characters, playing cards painting flowers, murdering time, babies turning into pigs, disembodied smiles left hanging in the air…  Everything is possible, especially when it shouldn’t be.  It is anarchic in every sense – there are no rules to what happens.  This is why, I believe, the Alice books still have the capacity to terrify children; there are no genre tropes here where the heroine will be fine after defeating the villain/discovering the treasure/winning the game, etc.  The lack of rules or objectives is completely disorientating, and children can find this troubling (it terrified me – my Mum had to give up during the second chapter apparently). 

And where is Carroll actually going with all of this?  It goes nowhere of course; it ends with that most clichéd of dues ex machina endings – Alice woke up and it was all a dream.  It’s a complete admission on Carroll’s part that his anarchy doesn’t have a conclusion or a ‘point’ to make – it is there to be enjoyed, and then it isn’t.  It’s notable that this is exactly the same way the sequel ends, and was not seen as something from the first book that could be ‘fixed’ this time round.  It’s also notable that no one complains about either of the books having weak endings.

So, that’s my opinion of the Alice books.  Written by Lewis Carroll…

… but then Lewis Carroll didn’t exist in real life.  Charles Dodgson existed in real life but we don’t know very much about him.  Or rather, we don’t know very much about the part of him that wrote the Alice books, which are the only relevant bits for us.  It is worth little to us now to know that he was a good but very dull maths lecturer.  His biographical details are largely uninteresting apart from the aspects of Dodgson’s life that converged with Carroll’s – namely the nature of his relationships with children.  Nevertheless, they (‘they’ being Hollywood) are planning a biopic, called 'Queen Of Hearts'.  Hmm.  It's being talked about on industry sites, and the one sentence synopsis is as follows: "Oxford instructor Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) tells stories to the dean's daughter, Alice, and her sisters, while falling in love with the dean's wife."

Now, it may seem unfair to judge an unmade film on a tagline, but this already sounds a bit lame.  The emphasis sounds like it’s on completely the wrong thing.  The story of Carroll/Dodgson doesn’t have anything to do with falling in love with a Dean’s wife (something which maybe, possibly, might have happened but which is in the end pure speculation based on some missing diary pages).  No, the only story to tell about Dodgson’s life worth telling is about his love for Alice Liddell.

What form that love took is quite unknowable.  There are the posthumous accusations of paedophilia, but no direct evidence for them.  He shared a typical Victorian taste for over-sentimentalising children, and girls in particular (see also Little Nell and most of the rest of Dickens).  But I don’t think he wanted to sexualise children.  He comes across in biographies as a man who wasn’t particularly interested in sex, and was probably frightened of it, and I think it more likely that he enjoyed the company of children because they represented to him a retreat from the sexualised world of adults.  Which is undoubtedly still rather messed up; but then he lived in the Victorian era, which had a very messed up code of ethics and morals about most things.  There’s something of the ‘Old Peter Pan’ about his character, someone who shouldn’t have grown up but did.  Perhaps that explains the reoccurrence of time as a concept in all of his books.  And perhaps that’s why there’s also an air of sadness and of violence amongst all the comedy, expressing a sense of frustration with the tediousness/emotional responsibilities of the adult world.

Charles Dodgson

This aspect of his character is the only part worth examining, frankly, because that’s the only bit we know that links directly to the work we remember him for.  If the rumours (and I think even ‘rumours’ is too strong a word) that he was having a fling with the Dean’s wife were true then you’d still just have a dull melodrama set in Victorian Oxford.  You can say what you want about her importance in his life, but he didn’t write a book for her, he wrote one for her daughter.  The complex bit of his character, and therefore the interesting bit, is his attitude to childhood and his relationship with children; his relationship with adults just doesn’t sound very interesting. 

Even if the film is a good piece of drama about a love triangle – and it could be a very good piece of drama – that’ll probably put Alice in more in the background which is… well, fine I suppose – but it would seem a bit perverse to make a film about the relatively unremarkable life of Charles Dodgson instead of the more enigmatic Lewis Carroll.

MUSIC: Spotify and Forgotify - The Way We Listen Now

Everyone with a computer or smartphone will know about Spotify, even if they don’t really know what it is.  What it is is this – it gives the user the ability to make playlists of music from a massive online database and stream it. 

I groggily heard about a website on the Today programme last Thursday morning – Forgotify.com.  It plays songs which have never once been played on Spotify, which is a surprising 1/5ths of what is available.  Some of this is just boringly obscure (like some of the world music and mediocre renditions of classical pieces).  Some of it is batshit crazy. 

The amount of music available on Spotify is phenomenal – pretty much anything you can think of is there (apart from The Beatles, being as sticky as usual over the licensing of their music – remember how long it took them to come round to the idea of iTunes?  Perhaps after all the financial/legal complications they had during their messy divorce you can’t blame them.  I digress).  It’s been seen as controversial with some musicians – notably Thom Yorke – for the amount an artist receives from each play (not very much according to this BBC report.) 

I think of it as Napster in an age where music industry types are more accepting of the internet.  Napster came along in the 1990s and became essentially that decade’s version of the ‘Home Taping Kills Music’ hysteria of the 1980s.  In the 1960s the music industry worried that pirate radio would stop people buying records.  And so on – historically the music industry has always been suspicious at best of new technology.  But likewise, it always relatively adapts to it once the fuss dies down and they figure out how it can be used.  For instance, the establishment set up Radio One as an officially sanctioned popular radio whilst the pirates were edged out and shut down.

The real attraction of Napster was being able to hear something on demand.  Something the industry didn’t pick up on at the time (not just Execs either; Metallica famously lost a lot of credibility by seemingly siding with ‘The Man’).  It wasn’t a question of owning the music, especially because Napster was at its most popular before the proliferation of cheap MP3 players.  I remember how I used Napster as a teenager.  I would read about some song or band somewhere (normally the NME, for my sins) and want to check it out.  I would download a song or two, which would normally take an age, and if I wanted to hear more I would buy the CD.  It genuinely got me to buy things that I wouldn’t otherwise have – it was just a tool to direct my tastes and make sure my money was being given to the right bands.

Things change, and now the problem for the industry is definitely one of ownership.  The majority of people, enthusiastically or resignedly, have given up on CDs and have accepted digital media is just the way things are now.  It turns out we can live without pretty cover artwork and more shelf space.  So we download our music and pay for it through iTunes, Amazon etc if we're good law abiding citizens.  A lot of people see these sites as charging too much however, and download torrent files illegally for free from The Pirate Bay and the like.

Spotify and other sites like last.fm are largely successful attempts to thwart illegally downloaded files: people can stream music for free with adverts through their computers or upgrade for a tenner a month to get rid of the adverts and, more importantly, use it on the go on smartphones or other devices (like the app on my TV box).  This is actually a sensible and level-headed ‘damage limitation’ response by the industry to illegal downloading – the Spotify user gets their hands on music instantly and relatively cheaply without having to search for hours through dodgy torrent sites and the artist at least gets some money instead of none at all.

Spotify’s main selling point is the ability to find music you already know or may be curious about and make playlists.  Last.fm is designed to make surprisingly good suggestions based on tracks you tag as favourites, exposing the user to things they’ve never heard of (making it, as its name suggests, more like listening to a radio tailored to your tastes).  But both still require a certain amount of input on the user’s behalf to be truly effective.

Which is why I’ve loved messing around with Forgotify.  It feels completely anarchic although it isn’t, being based on a very strict rule – you will always be hearing something found on Spotify which no one else has listened to.  It feels anarchic though, because of the complete lack of logic in the playlist.  What you hear could be complete rubbish, but perhaps surprisingly, it isn't always.  The people who have set it up say it is “a musical tragedy” that some of this music has been ignored.  Speaking in terms of quality this is (understatement warning) not always true – I can live without the MOR stylings of Ray Lyell’s ‘Rollin’ Storm’ as part of my life, for instance.  It’s also not particularly tragic when the aforementioned mediocre classical pieces turn up, which I skip, ditto the religious stuff.

 

Forgetify - Bringing Obscurity Into Your Ears

However, it is tragic when you listen to the pop, and rock songs and remember they were recorded by real people who were in that studio, however long ago, wondering if they were making their first number one.  Putting their heart and soul into mediocre songs like ‘I Gotta Know’, by Boy from 1983 and not knowing that they won’t even be famous enough to turn up on a Google search – which, you know, not being on Google is even less than being a footnote to history.  That’s just being left out of the book altogether. It also gives some of the happier, soulful and music a melancholic and almost creepy feel.  I have decided that I really like The Esso Steelband Of Bermuda’s 1958 ‘Bermuda Honeymoon’ album, but listening to it and knowing that it is essentially unloved by millions of people creates, entirely in hindsight, an eerie atmosphere, despite its upbeat sunny vibe.

These are creative people who tried and failed.  The boys and girls at the party that, in the end, nobody wanted to talk to.  It is heartbreaking listening to songs from Forgotify bearing this in mind, listening to all this unrequited optimism and enthusiasm.  It makes you want to listen to some awful songs out of an irrational sense of guilt. 

It’s refreshing to have something like Spotify – which is designed to give the user complete control over their listening – and perversely using it to listen to things proved beyond doubt to be hugely unpopular, and it’s the kind of subversion that could only happen when we take having everything at our fingertips for granted.  It's undoubtedly pleasureable mainly for the novelty factor and I don't count on it being more than a fad (if it even gets as far as becoming a fad); but it's certainly an enjoyable experiment, and serves to remind us how much of a disposable commodity music is.