MUSIC: Spotify v Apple Music v Google Play Music

Just what the world doesn’t need - another blog comparing streaming services...

I’ve been streaming music as my main way of consuming music for about seven years now.  Like most people I started with Spotify, and that has been my go to music place since then.  

However a few things happened recently that made me decide to reevaluate this.  The first - EE gave 6 free months of Apple Music (data included).  The second - I started using a Chromebook as my main computer, and got 3 free months of Google Play Music with it.  As I was becoming a bit disillusioned with the Spotify Android app, it seemed like a good idea to check out the competition...

Apple Music

I’d tried Apple Music for a month when it first came to Android and remember not expecting much and having my expectations met.  What surprised me about my second try of Apple Music was how little has really changed since it launched.  Most obviously for me, the sound still sounds flatter than Spotify Premium and Google Play.  I’m by no means an audiophile and most of the time use the headphones that came with my phone and am happy with that.  So for me to notice it is quite a thing.  There are some quirks of the interface that are odd - it took a Google search for me to figure out where the repeat function is, and there’s no way of ‘liking’ a song from the lock screen - minor irritations that add up.

One of Apple Music’s selling points with its playlists is that they’re made ‘by hand’ (ie by music loving individuals) rather than by algorithms.  The curated playlists can be good, but for me there's no discernable difference between the ones on other services. The relatively short length of them is much more digestible than Spotify’s 4 hour plus ones. Despite all the bubble tapping when setting up (a gimmicky way to tell the app your tastes) and upvoting songs, after 2 weeks of daily use the playlists never seem particularly tailored to my tastes - the most recent have been Rock In The 00’s, Hits Of 1980, and Indie Hits 1987, and there aren’t really any surprises there. These are practically identical to lists on the other services, and not particularly personalised.  They just leave me thinking that I could make a better Rock In The 00’s playlist for example, which defeats the point of having curated playlists at all.

Probably I should accept that Apple Music is not designed for the likes of me. I don't use iTunes, I don't have an iPhone or any other Apple product - I’m sure you get a lot more out of it using it on iOS.

Spotify

Formerly a big fan of Spotify I found myself becoming more and more dissiosioned by it. The Android app is somewhat deficient in features - relatively basic features at that, such as being able to reorder songs within a playlist. That feature is something which can't be done on the web player either, meaning that using my current setup curating a playlist is not possible. It's method of uploading your own songs is also fiddly, requires access to a Windows or Mac desktop and only works if you download these songs to your device - meaning it won't work on your phone without premium.

There’s two things I still really like about Spotify that makes it stand out. The first is the ability to share playlists either via Facebook or embedding into a blog. The other is its music discovery algorithms, leading to the Discover Weekly playlist and decent (and very long) curated playlists recommended based on your tastes.

But guess what? You can get both these features for free on the free tier. So if you’re going to pay for a service you might as well pick another and get the best of both worlds...

Google Play Music

Perhaps it's inevitable that using Google systems exclusively, the clumsily named Google Play Music is the best one to suit my needs. It's chiefly web based - although there are apps for Windows and Mac the web player is good enough I don't miss having an app for the Chromebook. You can stream your own tracks by uploading them into the cloud via the website.

Finding all this out was something of a surprise.  I’d subconsciously written Google Music off as being a lame duck without ever really trying it out, and it’s only ever been recommeneded to me by one other person when talking about music.

It’s a little bit weak on recommendations and though it has excellent curated playlists, they’re styled as radio stations that you can’t see the actual tracks upfront or play from a particular song.  But the interface is nice and bright (I was getting a bit sick of Spotify’s perpetual black gloom, so something a bit more friendly on the eye is nice). Sharing music is available... But only to Google+, which, well... ahem.

Maybe it’s just because it’s refreshing to have a change, I don’t know, but I let the trial period finish on Google and start taking my money, and cancelled Spotify because I can still use that anyway. Google is ultimately nice to use, has a utilitarian but friendly feel to it, and does the job nicely.

Having tried all these streaming services, really the main observation is that you can’t really go wrong with any of them.  I mean, they all do what they set out to do pretty efficiently - the final choice you make as a consumer is going to be based on relatively minor or superficial details, a similar situation to smartphones - whether you’re an iOS/Android fanboy, these days the noticeable differences from a user’s perspective are almost entirely cosmetic.  The music catalogues differ slightly, apparently, but I’ve not had many situations where something is on one service and not the others.  I listen to mainstream and obscure stuff and haven’t had trouble finding anything at all really.

I chose Google Play Music because I’m becoming more and more rooted in the Google eco-system as time goes on, just as iOS users are going to find Apple Music a natural fit, and Spotify caters for anyone - because of its free tier it's probably the best option if you don't actually listen to music other than the radio that often.  And all of the above only goes to show how mainstream streaming is - it’s no longer some sort of niche thing; it’s no longer the future.  It’s now part of the humdrum, everyday present.

BOOKS/MUSIC: Triptych - The Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible

“The album was written with an almost academic discipline... We sat down and gave ourselves headings and structures, so each song is like an essay." - James Dean Bradfield

“If the Holy Bible was meaningful to you then I wouldn’t recommend spending six months thinking and writing about it” - Daniel Lukes (co-author of ‘Triptych’)

Triptych is a book published earlier this year comprising 3 dissertations on the Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible.  If any album deserves a book like this it is The Holy Bible.  The Manics always invited analysis of their lyrics, but The Holy Bible is the only album that demands it.  Richey Edwards’ words are dense and just listening to the words isn’t enough because it’s too much to take in with the speed of delivery.  

It’s a powerful album, critically acclaimed and compelling. The album’s subject matter takes in prostitution, political extremities, anorexia, the Holocaust, nostalgia, self-mutilation, a yearning for innocence and the morality of the death penalty.  And it mainly manages to get it right - done badly, an album covering these subjects would have been immensely embarrassing (‘Revol’ doesn’t get it right and has always been embarrassing).

I came to the Manics long after Richey’s disappearance - I heard ‘Design For Life’ played alongside contemporary Britpop singles from Blur, Oasis, etc then immersed myself in its parent album.  We had a ritual in my family of going to the library every couple of weeks to rent CDs for 20p a pop and taping the ones we liked.  I saw the The Holy Bible and we played it in the car on the way home.  It was a little bit different - my Dad hated it.  My Mum, who always encouraged getting into different things like The Prodigy and Joy Division, probably wasn’t keen on the music but was reading the lyrics in the passenger seat and said they were very good.  I’ll always remember that first exposure to the confrontational nature of the album for everyone and the way it demanded an immediate response.  It wasn’t, and isn’t, background music.

‘Triptych’ is confirmation of the importance the album holds over people.  Rhian E Jones, in the first essay, compares listening to the Manics now to thinking of embarrassing exes, which I very much relate to.  That said, she goes on to say that in a world where our generation is the first to be poorer than the previous one adolescent angst shouldn’t be confined to adolescence.  Her essay is the most personal, using her own experiences to make sense of the album; it’s also the most straightforward, putting it in a post-Thatcher, pre-Blair context and examining the political obsessions of the day.

Daniel Luke’s chapter is extremely interesting, and in theory a good idea - to read all the books that inspired Richey and Nicky’s lyrics. This includes sections on The Waste Land, Sylvia Plath, Hubert Selby Jr - the Richey Edwards reading list.  The obvious downside to this from his point of view is that it takes a lot longer to read pages and pages of bleakly themed books than it does to listen to 50 minutes of an album. By the end of the chapter, understandably, he seems worn down by the task he has set himself and it peters out, finally beaten by trying to ‘get’ Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition in the incongruous setting of waiting to pick his daughter up from ballet.  

The third essay by Larissa Wodtke which deals with Derrida’s notion of ‘the archive’ I will have to re-read to understand, as I began to feel out of my depth.  That’s not a criticism - it’s rare that reading a book about a rock album makes you feel stupid. I liked the way that instead of cutting off after Richey’s disappearance and ignoring the Manics’ post-Bible work, she examines its effect on their later career.  It ends with her seeing their 20th Anniversary shows for the album, where the book returns to its opening approach of personal experience.

Most bands only get one album in their career where everything they stand for is coalesced into a whole if they’re lucky, and for the Manics’ The Holy Bible was undoubtedly their finest hour.  The first two authors admit to growing out of the Manics, which is something that happened to me - a band that meant a lot just stopped being crucial at some point.  I started by saying it’s a powerful album, and it is, but anyone not in their teens who really related to it I’d actually be vaguely concerned about.  Having said that, the point raised by Jones mentioned above bears repeating - given the current political climate, the insecurities and everyday emotional instability we experience as teenagers are not necessarily things most of us leave behind when we become adults these days.

BOOKS: Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of The Rock Stars by David Hepworth

It’s obvious from David Hepworth’s book that he is a big 70’s guy. His other recently published book, which i haven’t read, is about 1971.  He is definitely the kind of person (I can just picture it) who would say “music isn’t what it was.”  That’s effectively what this book is.

Therefore, this book on the rise and fall of Rock Gods is at its most enthusiastic in its first half.  Rock Gods of the 80s onwards are treated with less interest.  Kurt Cobain’s suicide is dealt with intelligently but briefly, almost dismissively compared with the longest chapter which is on the rise of Bob Dylan who Hepworth considers the ultimate Rock God.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with that although it gives more than a clue to what Hepworth considers the golden age of rock music.

Really, the nature of the book, although interesting, has less depth than the title promises.  The introduction starts promisingly but the book itself is really just a chronologically ordered list of potted biographies of famous musicians based on a year in their lives.  The book very quickly moves away from analysis of what a rock god is or was and becomes more concerned with anecdotes and trivia - interesting trivia, but still.  Example: the chapter about Jim Morrison focuses a lot on the year he got done for getting his cock out onstage but doesn’t really explain why I should care, or how it contributes to the rise or the fall of the Rock God. Likewise the fact that Little Richard's 'Tutti Frutti' was originally about anal sex is funny but essentially pub quiz level information.

The ‘event in the year in the life of’ approach rarely works for me.  Without context such a narrative relies either on the reader already knowing the context or not caring about it.  The death of John Lennon works better than most; but this could well be because The Beatles have several chapters devoted in this book.  Elvis gets two, everyone else just gets one year, usually the year they made it or the year they died.  

Likewise the list approach is always highly subjective.  My main query is the inclusion of Ian Dury, who was great but a relatively minor player looking back. Considering there’s no chapter on Sid Vicious from the same period seems an odd choice, Vicious being the ultimate anti-Rock God.  The conclusion I draw from this is that Hepworth isn’t interested in 70s punk and so chose someone he liked to write about.  Nothing necessarily wrong with that, it is his book after all - but this points once more to this being more like a list of favourite artists than historically influential ones.  Another quirk is the end of chapter lists of important singles and albums from the year in question, which sometimes omit songs from the artist you’ve just been reading about.

The overarching narrative is that the concept of the Rock God relied a lot on their mystique and ability to seem different to their audience in a special way.  According to Hepworth this went out the window with the arrival of us living, in his words, in a hip-hop world, which he seems to class as the opposite of rock somehow.  It’s true that In the 21st century, it’s not hard to find out what people in the charts have for breakfast or where they shop, which makes them less mysterious and more directly boastful. Instead of hiding away in a Gothic ruin pretending to be an occultist like Jimmy Page they will show off their bling on Instagram at will.  Considering there are chapters on Elvis and Michael Jackson, this doesn’t sit right with me.  They’d be straight on Instagram showing off their latest expensive diamond encrusted toilet roll holder or whatever.  The fall of the Rock God is more likely due to the fact that Rock Gods lost their novelty and that Rock as a genre ground to a natural halt.  

The mid-90s is a good place to stop - it was at this point that rock slowly became more derivative, with Oasis and Blur pinching bits of the 60s, Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party pinching bits of the Post-Punk era, and the original bands themselves reforming to do on the whole uninspiring Greatest Hits/grab the money and run nostalgia gigs.  The Rolling Stones are for instance are technically still going, but I’m sure people who see them now are either on a nostalgia trip or are curious to hear them play their old stuff live - and they give those people what they want.  Go on, name their last album without googling it - or in fact one of their albums from the last 20 years.

It is, however, premature to write off rock as a genre even if Rock Gods have in fact gone for good.  There’s always exciting indie stuff out there, as well as a lot of dreck admittedly - but that has always been the case, even in Hepworth’s day - for every Beatles there would have been a hundred Gerry and the Pacemakers.  Music is fashion, and fashion goes in cycles.  The 80s were on the whole a dry spell for guitar bands in the mainstream, but things turned around in the 90s through to the early 00s and then turned around again.  What Hepworth really means are that his Rock Gods are dead.  Music stardom still exists, and there’s nothing to say that guitar music won’t become culturally dominant again (although it’s true to say that there’s nothing to say it will either).

This is not a bad book, and is well written for what it is - if you enjoy music from the period covered (and I definitely do) you will find it very enjoyable.  But don’t expect more than some interesting facts from the past.  The future has no place in Hepworth’s obituary of the Rock God.

MUSIC: OKNOTOK - 20 Years of OK Computer

OK Computer is a landmark album - everyone says so,so it is. It was feted when it first came out 20 years ago and is still consistently on album of the 90’s/20th Century/All Time lists.

So what is it that makes it so iconic?

Yesterday...

To be honest I find it hard to tell listening to it again.  I’ve not listened to it this century until this re-release and it’s been very nostalgic but less good than I remembered. This isn’t a fault of the album (it’s not you, it’s me), it’s Seinfeld not being funny. ‘Seinfeld Is Unfunny’ is a definition (courtesy of TV Tropes) that refers to something that was groundbreaking at the time but since then it's innovations have become so integrated into the mainstream they’re now clichés. It's hard to listen to the album 20 years and hear certain things afresh - ‘No Surprises’ for instance no longer sounds as lovely and warped (read the lyrics) to me as it maybe once did and instead just puts me in mind of Coldplay’s ‘Yellow’.

...and today

As Radiohead themselves seemed to have realised at the time, when they moved on to electronic pastures new on their next album. I remember when Kid A came out it was probably my generation’s equivalent of Dylan going electric - something new and exciting (although to my shame at the time I was the guy in the audience shouting “Judas” - I came round a few years later). The band never really looked back, and the majority of the music they did since has generally had greater musical experimentation and emotional depth. OK Computer is good, but to my mind at least 3 of their later albums (Kid A, In Rainbows and last year’s A Moon Shaped Pool) are better.

Anyway, whether an album is iconic or not is irrelevant really.  I don’t imagine many bands set out to make an iconic album as their primary goal, and those who do probably fail.  The main thing is the songs, which I find still have the ability to entertain and frustrate me in equal measure.  The fact is that any album is a snapshot of a band’s work at a specific time and its iconic status is something we imbue on it after the fact.  

There’s an article on Pitchfork about OK Computer's lyrics predicting the future (either not an entirely serious one or an appallingly written one) and I think this is entirely the wrong way to interpret the album’s lyrics.  The Pitchfork article itself sets up its premise as “a song-by-song breakdown of the album’s most prescient lyrics” then fails to find any and settles for rubbish jokes. OK Computer is in no way prophetic - portentous maybe, but not prophetic. Its lyrics are instead opaque and (with the exception of ‘Electioneering’) uninterested in making a specific point.  

If anything the album is ‘about’ alienation and the sense of being out of joint with the rest of the world, which are pretty universal and timeless themes.  With this album Radiohead were being hailed as the ‘New Pink Floyd’ (NME journalists, bring unto us your lazy pigeonholes).  This was an almost entirely superficial comparison, but there are thematic similarities with Roger Waters’ misanthropy and Thom Yorke’s; Dark Side Of The Moon, which dealt with similar themes of alienation and mental instability, works as a comparison (its famous opening line “I'm mad, I've been mad for fucking years” would fit in as a lyric in just about any Radiohead song).

But musically the styles are different and varied compared to Pink Floyd’s; although there are some Gilmour-esque solos Radiohead’s music is very much their own.  The singles from the album are all great, but there is more filler than I remember (maybe that’s too harsh - possibly not filler but the Seinfeld trope kicking in again). Generally speaking ‘Paranoid Android’, ‘Karma Police’, ‘No Surprises’ are the highlights for me along with a few of the others (‘Climbing Up The Walls’ is creepy as hell and I love the crashalong ‘Electioneering’ if nothing else because it sounds like it’s just popped in to say hello from another album), with the rest of the album tracks feeling like a mixed bag to my jaded 21st century ears.  I hadn’t remembered songs like ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ and ‘Lucky’ despite having heard them many times in the past.  I’ve listened to the album 3 times in the last week - including whilst writing this - and can’t remember them now.  And ‘Exit Music (For A Film)’ just feels like a parody of Radiohead’s reputation for being a miserable band (perhaps because of the Father Ted episode?).  

The revelation for me was ‘Lift’, one of 3 unreleased tracks included on this set.  It’s about someone trapped in a lift.  Forever.  And it sounds great, a gentle start building up to a Britpop-but-not-Britpop guitar crescendo. ‘I Promise’ isn’t as special and ‘Man Of War’ is interestingly more like a Bond theme than their rejected one for Spectre.  The B-sides are generally strong and top quality.  They’ve also been released on previous re-releases and have been possible to stream and torrent for those interested for years.

The best thing about listening to OK Computer again was frankly the nostalgia factor.  The 90s were great, weren’t they?  I suspect people who have not heard this album before and listened to it on the basis of its reputation might enjoy it but also feel let down.  But then, those people aren’t going to be the target audience of a 20 year anniversary box set re-release, are they?

MUSIC: Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Nobel Prize Again

Bob Dylan? Nobel Prize? Literature? Dylan? Wuh?

This was the reaction of some to Dylan getting the Nobel Prize for Literature last week. There were also many people whose reaction went “about time too” (as if they'd been expecting this for years), stuffy “Dylan is a singer not a writer of novels or books and therefore incapable of writing literature”, and in the most self-parodic Guardian article I think I've read, “Bob Dylan is a white male and any white male winning an award is a step backwards for society” (no, seriously).

Although anyone who acts like they were expecting this is clearly full of shit, it is obviously an excellent choice. Bob Dylan is one of the most influential writers of the last century. Although mainly when people talk about his greatness they're referring to his Imperial Phase from the early 60's to (at a push) the late 70's, that's still an impressive body of work. The Guardian's suggestion that Margaret Atwood or Toni Morrison would have been better choices aren't really in the same league in terms of influence, popularity and ability to textually analyse in an English Literature degree kind of way. Also, Toni Morrison already has the Nobel Prize in 1993.

The textual analysis of Dylan happened early,mainly but not exclusively by music journalists. Music journalism developed its analytical side perhaps because of Dylan - his popular contemporaries didn't have anything to analyse (The Beatles, for all their talent, were still singing about diamond rings and holding hands until George Harrison buying Freewheelin’ on an American tour shocked them into trying harder. And by giving them drugs). Greil Marcus wrote one of the best music reviews ever on Dylan’s Self-Portrait (with my favorite opening line of any piece of critical analysis ever - “What is this shit?”). He was the most intelligent 60's icon, but transcended being reduced to only having iconic status - the Beatles can be reduced, if you want, to a lot of media clips with ‘She Loves You’ playing in the background - to 'get' Dylan you have to listen to the words.

And this is crucial to the understanding of why Dylan deserves a prize for literature - it is the words with Dylan, always the words - the music is great, but not as important. You just need to listen to covers of his songs to understand that. Jimi Hendrix covered All Along The Watchtower and effectively (in both senses of the word) jettisoned the music - he wanted that song for the words. Most covers of Dylan improve on the music but leave the words well alone - the lyrics are respected in the same way poetry is, an innate understanding that there is serious authorial intent behind every line, that this is not just something that goes well with some music. This is true of most Dylan songs at his peak - the music is great but it's the lyrics that are driving the car. Pitchfork, the ultimate hipster music website argues that to divorce the lyrics from the music lessens them; but this is comparable to saying divorcing an playwright's words from actors declaiming them renders them somehow un-literary - a line of argument that is weirdly pedantic in the name of being contrary. It is an unsurprisingly hipster argument, and has a perverse logic that would invalidate previous winners right to the prize, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Which would frankly be mad.

The idea of literature being something that can only be presented in static form in black and white is outmoded and redundant - is in fact very old-fashioned, and maybe the argument comes from the same hipster predilection for vinyl being superior to digital. When you're debating the medium rather than the message you are effectively judging a book by its cover. The vitality of literature lies in its communication of a message, of a feeling, of conveying a world - not in its form. Words are the lifeblood of literature, whether they are spoken, sung or read.

Bob Dylan's lyrics at their best are surreal, funny, angry - often simultaneously impenetrable and universal. Like Shakespeare his work is populist without sacrificing artistic merit - without being easy. Sure, not every line was shot through with genius, but enough were for him to be thoroughly deserving of a prize for literature. There's a line by Aaron Copeland - if you want to understand the 60’s play the music of the Beatles. Which I agree with. But equally I would say if you want to understand the the 60’s and more, listen to the words of Bob Dylan.

MUSIC: Joanna Newsom Attacks Spotify

I like Joanna Newsom a lot.  Joanna Newsom is cool.

Joanna Newsom is also the latest artist to complain about streaming eating into her bank account – she specifically mentions Spotify, but her music isn’t available on any streaming service.

 

The lovely Joanna Newsom

After some typically eccentric comparisons to bananas she said:

“Spotify is like a villainous cabal of major labels. The business is built from the ground up as a way to circumvent the idea of paying their artists. The major labels were not particularly happy with the fact that as the royalty money dwindled more and more, their portion of the percentage split agreed upon in their licensing agreement got smaller and smaller.”

Now she does have a point – but unfortunately, fairly or not, these complaints from artists are beginning to annoy music fans.

Essentially the problem for artists is that Spotify pay all the royalties, the labels take a massive cut, and the artist gets a fraction.  Spotify responded to Newsom’s complaint by tweeting that they pay 70% of their revenue in royalties to labels, $3 billion to date.  They make the point – and I believe it’s a fair one – that the problem lies with the artists’ contracts.

Who would’ve thought it, the music industry screwing over artists?

And that’s the point – it’s the industry screwing them over.  It’s not us.  I read a rant like that and my gut reaction is “well, what do you expect me to do about it?”  Or more succinctly, “boo hoo”.

Artists need to start getting their managers to renegotiate contracts with the labels instead of washing their dirty linen in public because it’s not a good look for them.  It’s like when bankers complain about not getting big enough bonuses – it pisses off the larger part of society that are struggling on minimum wages and hiking rent prices (soon to be exacerbated in the UK with the loss of tax credits but that’s another story altogether…)

Home Streaming Is Killing Music?

The fact is people who pay for music are going to go for the most cost-effective option.  If you have to live on a tight budget, music is going to come under the ‘luxury item’ category.  I used to spend a fortune on music, even though I was shopping in discount places like Fopp.  But I couldn’t really afford to do that, to the point where my love of music was getting me into financial trouble.  Spotify seemed like a good compromise – paying for music without pirating, and at the same time actually staying in the black (well, sometimes).

So when people I respect and admire – Thom Yorke is another – come out in force against streaming, it doesn’t make me think “right on, tell it like it is”.  It makes me think they don’t understand my situation, or that of a lot of their fans.  It especially seems like a U-turn from Yorke, who was willing to let people pay whatever they felt was fair for ‘In Rainbows’ in 2009.  Well Thom, a lot of people have decided that £9.99 a month is fair given their circumstances, and your response is to have a little moan and take all your music away from them.

As far as I’m concerned it’s not a good look.  People who are streaming are paying for music legally – it’s not realistic to tell customers they should pay more.  Because frankly, there’s a significant amount of those customers who will call your bluff and go back to torrents.  Look at this comic from The Oatmeal – it’s about television rather than music, but the principle’s the same.

This is all reminiscent of the ‘home taping is killing music’ scare of the 80s.  But this time it’s not the big bosses (‘The Man’), it’s the artists who we like to think of as being on our side.  Like I say, I’m not saying artists don’t have a point about being ripped off, but they need to take this up with their labels and managers instead of slagging off the streaming companies because when they do that the implication is that people shouldn’t be streaming.  Which means that they are blaming their own fans, that somehow it’s our fault.  It paints the user as the bad guy, forgetting how much we actually have to pay even for downloads, let alone CDs (and ticket prices, and all that shiny pricey merchandise…)

Not engaging with streaming is starting to make artists look out of touch.  Streaming as a medium is staying.  If Spotify closed down tomorrow (and they don’t make a profit, so who knows?) that wouldn’t change.  Apple Music has further legitimised it as the future, as downloads from iTunes slowly and softly vanish away.  Artists need to deal with it in a more positive way, at least in public, or risk alienating their audience.

PS Joanna Newsom's album, Divers, is out on Friday.  I've pre-ordered it because I like her.  But there are going to be an awful lot of people out there who will be torrenting it and perhaps her entire back catalogue.  I don't condone that in the slightest.  But it is a fact that that is what will happen.  Attack those people Joanna.

FILM... & MUSIC: Kurt Cobain - Montage of Heck

Kurt Cobain is the 90s rock idol.  If you want to make people think ‘The 1990’s’, a picture of Kurt Cobain will do nicely.  (The Gallagher brothers?  Are you serious?)

Montage Of Heck is a documentary that attempts to make the last of the great dead rock icons a human being.  As well as concert footage of Kurt Cobain being a live rock icon, we see home footage of him messing about with his wife and baby and hear him doing mundane things like answering the phone. 

It is definitely a documentary about Kurt Cobain, and Nirvana is covered as the most famous and successful way Kurt Cobain chose to express himself.  Equal importance is given to his journals and to a lesser extent his artwork.  Kris Novoselic is interviewed, but significantly as Kurt’s best friend, not the bass player of Nirvana.  Dave Grohl only appears in archive footage, and forget the previous drummers, personnel, etc.  If you want to learn about the history of the band this isn’t that story – a lot of it just happens to overlap.  It is expected of you as a viewer that you’ll know at least the famous hits already, as most of the songs in the film are represented either by demos, live footage or ‘reworkings’ (a nursery-mobile version of ‘All Apologies’ soundtracks baby films of Kurt, and a 'Carmina Burana'-style choir version of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ plays over the original video).  All of this is very obviously in danger of drifting into alienating, Just For The Fans territory, but is also a way of making the point that this is not a rock doc.  In fact, taking away the familiar music serves as a way of taking it back from the audience and making it about Kurt again.

Of course the film fails in demythologising Cobain (the trailer reiterates the icon, let alone the film).  It doesn't really bother trying, because let's face it - the man is a cultural icon and that's a fact, like it or not.  I mean, why would we want to watch home videos of someone who wasn’t famous?  The fact that someone has gone to the trouble of putting animation to a tape of him answering the phone is instead testament to the fact that he is still entirely culturally significant.  More than 20 years after his death, it’s not uncommon to see people wearing Nirvana t-shirts and hoodies… In Utero got the Super Duper The Money Will Roll Right In Deluxe Edition treatment just last year and I’m sure it did very well…  The fame that ruined him has stayed almost as strong, long after the man has died.  It’s unlikely he will fade into obscurity, even if the music does.

What Montage Of Heck does achieve is creating a celebration of the man and explain who Kurt Cobain was when the media wasn’t around.  It's about putting some flesh and soul on the cult cardboard cutout Dead Rock Star (registered trademark, patent applied for).  He was someone who thought being a rock star was ‘the answer’.  He then unexpectedly became the biggest rockstar in the world, and maybe hadn’t realised in advance how much privacy and freedom he would lose in return.  He looks much, much happier in his home videos, dicking around with the wife he obviously loved, than the footage of interviews where his face says ‘not another, another fucking interview’.  Quite often he’s hiding his face so you can’t even tell that much. The quotes from his journals have to be taken with a pinch of salt, because everyone self-dramatizes in their diaries.  But bearing that in mind, they are still bitter about the same themes – fame and its related problems, heroin addiction and the stomach pains he seems to have almost constantly felt.

The fact is, he was a funny, talented, troubled guy who and frankly didn’t need all the shit that fame brought him – his life becoming a story consumed by the media, who sold it to us (and we bought it willingly), the easily gotten heroin and all the rest of it.  The film ends with a caption saying that Kurt took his own life one month later.  At the time, my reaction was that it was abrupt, and disappointment that they weren’t going to analyse his suicide in more depth.  And then, the other day I realised why I was slightly disturbed by my reaction – almost disgusted.  In a film which shows a man’s personal home videos and recordings, including those of him as a child, I still wanted more…  I literally wanted blood.  The whole film is scattered with things never intended to be seen by anyone outside of the the Cobains’ circle of family and friends; Kurt’s journals were a highly personal stream of consciousness which for all we know he would have been embarrassed about anyone else reading.  And I’m there consuming his private life as entertainment, and wanting more even after so much has been given. 

Intentionally or not, this film reminds the audience of the part they played in his death.  He gave as much as he could, and his audience always wanted more.  And he felt he couldn’t give anything anymore.  So he stopped.

MUSIC: Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti Deluxe

Physical Graffiti was re-released last week on its 100^th birthday or something or other, and in a horrible cover (for all of these Led Zep releases they’ve seen fit to make the covers ‘negatives’ of the originals, which looks rubbish).  As someone who is a casual as opposed to rabid fan of Led Zeppelin, it is this album more than any of their others which I think is actually fantastic, and worth looking forward to a re-release of...

Physical Graffiti is a wired and weird album.  It’s a double album for a start, and all double albums are weird – they have enough room for quirks and diversions (and cock-ups) like ‘Revolution 9’ on The Beatles’ White Album or ‘Brand New Cadillac’ on London Calling.  But Physical Graffiti is also a compilation album of sorts – when Led Zeppelin realised that the new material they had wouldn’t fit all onto one disc they padded it out with songs held over from the previous three albums.  Which makes it a forerunner of our current ‘Bonus Disc’ culture as well…  Physical Graffiti is perhaps weird because it works when it shouldn’t. 

The 2 discs have different moods.  The first is the more rock with a capital Rawk.  It sounds like a fortress, or maybe like the massive tenement block on the artwork.  It seems like there’s an element of attack in some of the songs and its not unlikely that years of touring, alcohol, cocaine, etc, etc, led to a lot of paranoia when they recorded this – the twitchy, nervous energy of ‘Trampled Under Foot’, for instance, feels like it’s the soundtrack to the moment late into your party where everything goes wrong. 

The second disc is what you might tenuously call ‘pastoral’.  It’s where you find things like the acoustic instrumental ‘Bron-Yr-Aur’ and the playful ‘Black Country Woman’.  It’s less crotch-grabbing and therefore less immediately diverting but of the same high quality, and shows that as a band they really did have more tricks up their sleeves.

It’s my favourite Led Zeppelin album partly because of this variety; ‘Kashmir’ is a brilliant combination of their inclination towards experimenting with softer sounds and their gut instinct to rock.  This is the apex of the album and it is there exactly half-way through - a peak in every sense.  I also admire the album’s cheek in fulfilling Jimmy Page’s ambition to have a double album by bunging a load of cast-offs on, (not that you can tell a dip in quality).

Maybe explaining a love of Physical Graffiti as an album over their others comes down to the filler.  All of the Led Zep albums have filler, and this one at least twice as much because of its length.  The difference is that on Physical Graffiti the filler is brilliant. 

We mentioned Physical Graffiti pioneering bonus discs, and this is of course the latest of Jimmy Page’s remixed and ever-debatably improved versions of all of Led Zeppelin’s albums.  The literal bonus disc for Physical Graffiti is underwhelming, the tracks all falling into the ‘Only Slightly Different’ category for me.  This has been true of all of the bonus tracks on these Led Zeppelin re-releases – it was reported excitedly that Led Zeppelin IV would have an unheard version of ‘Stairway To Heaven’ on it which sounds identical to the original. (It’s an overrated song anyway, with only its solo redeeming an otherwise dull plod – like listening to a coke-baffled hippy explaining why he loves Lord Of The Rings to you slowly and at great length…).  To take an example at random, the bonus tracks on The Fall’s expanded edition albums are very often revelatory, but the ones here aren’t particularly and haven’t been on the other Zeppelin releases.  The remaster sounds good though, the drums and guitar especially sound striking and present.  Though perhaps because the remastering is overseen by Jimmy Page it isn’t surprising that it’s not Robert Plant’s voice at the forefront of the mix. 

 

This Is... Led Zeppelin. 

Led Zeppelin were never really critically rated in their era and still get kind of overlooked sometimes…  Amongst my generation The Beatles went from being really uncool to being cool all over again during Britpop.  Several other bands that were declared verboten by  Malcolm MacLaren and co have been more or less rehabilitated now – Pink Floyd is fine for instance.  I’m not sure if that transition’s completely happened with Led Zep – I’m not sure it will.  They still have something of Spinal Tap about them, that means they always seem slightly risible.  But they were always slightly aloof, declaring themselves answerable only to their fans (casual or rabid, I guess).  So, if you already own a version of Physical Graffiti that isn’t naff this re-release isn’t essential.  But if you are even the most casual of Led Zep fans and don’t own any version of Physical Graffiti then this is essential.  

MUSIC: Analogue Hipsters - Vinyl vs Digital

There was a really interesting and thoughtful article in The Guardian recently about the return of vinyl as a…  Well, what?  As a medium?  As a fetishistic object?  As another way of detecting hipster wankers and or hi-fi snobs?

One of the article’s most cringe-worthy sections is a description of vinyl groups where about 70 people get together and sit in silence whilst ‘appreciating’ the albums such as Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ in total silence whilst the record is turned over reverentially by some hipster record priest, like a parody of a Nathan Barley character.  

Call me judgemental but my immediate reaction to that on reading about it could be summed up as: ‘Twats’.  For all I know those events could be great fun and not at all like the pretentious snob fests described in the article.  But all it reminded me of was John Lydon’s ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ t-shirt, which was aimed not so much at the band themselves but at the type of smug and complacent audiophile listener they attracted. 

Anyway all of that is a matter of personal preference.  A more general observation made by the article specifically (and by a hell of a lot more generally) is that vinyl is back.  In some quarters it is claimed that this is the death of the digital format, something which is clearly nonsense.  New vinyl albums are ridiculously expensive, for a start.  A plus point often raised by vinyl-converts is that the artwork is so much better (ie, bigger); well this is true to a degree, but the artwork is only so big and detailed to disguise the cumbersome object within the packaging.

The thing is that yes, yes, vinyl is ‘coming back’ but hardly to the mainstream.  I mean it never went away for people such as DJs, or bona fide record collectors. It’s ‘coming back’ in the same way that clothes in fashion magazines come back to kind of people that care about that kind of thing.  It is perhaps not so much ‘coming back’ as it is ‘in’.  A comparison can be made with artisan bread and craft beers.  It is an obsolete format that holds a certain allure for people who like to feel superior.

Our family household when I was growing up were late to the advent of CDs, for the most part sticking with cassettes and my parents’ record player and reel-to-reel tapes.  When I first learned how to use the record player I can remember coming home from school and having the house to myself for a bit, and so would play records.  I did enjoy the process of putting a record on, swapping the side half-way through, watching the record spin whilst listening to the music.  I enjoyed that kind of ritual.  For about a month.  Then I found it irritating.  It was an obsolete format for the mainstream then, and it still is.  Looking at comment sections on that Guardian article and other Vinyl v Digital ones around the net, here’s some of the things people like about vinyl:

Having to swap the record halfway through.  People claim to enjoy having to swap the record over halfway through, but god knows why.  The claim that it forces you to listen to the album “as a whole, as the artist intended”, is nonsense because believe it or not it is possible to listen to an album as a whole on a CD too.  In fact, it’s possible to listen to an album as a whole on Spotify believe it or not, you just have to not skip forward a track and Bob’s your uncle.  I believe a lot of artists in the 70s would have loved it if you didn’t have to have a break through the album (indeed, I’m willing to bet Pink Floyd would have jumped at the chance of having ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ played as a continuous 40 minute suite the way we can listen to it now with our fancy binary codes).

Snap, Crackle and Pop Vinyl inevitably begin to have background pops and crackles when you play it back.  There’s even the faint swooshing noise of the needle against the record whilst it’s spinning.  Personally, I prefer listening to music without this – I can’t imagine this sound improving (using the first example to hand) the clean atmopspherics of Martin Hannet’s work on the Joy Division albumns.  The fact is that LPs degenerate at a far faster rate than CDs (or even cassette tapes) even when cared for really well.

Lack Of Versatility Personally I like listening to albums all the way through.  But it’s nice to have the option to skip on forward, or selecting one individual track to listen to.  On digital formats this is literally done at the touch of a button, and even cassettes found a way of fast forwarding to the next track without too much hassle.  Trying to do it with a record  is a faff.  Being no DJ, and quite cack-handed, standing over a record trying to drop the needle into the ‘blank’ groove inbetween tracks is more trouble than it’s worth.

Warmth One claim that is made for vinyl is that it has a ‘warmer’ sound (which is a crap description but the most common).  This is all in the ears of the beholder, and probably only in the ears of a beholder with expensive equipment.  And what does that supposed ‘warmth’ add?  Authenticity?  Does it make a bad song and make it better?  Is it the ‘warmth’ a nu-Luddite needs to keep warm from being way cooler than me?  This warmth is technically the “introduction of distortion” anyway, as this Pitchfork article makes clear and so makes the music a less authentic reproduction of the artist’s music. 

I think a lot of the hipster fad of vinyl has less to do with appreciation of sound and more to do with playing with expensive toys.  You could argue it’s a reverse-snobbery backlash against iPods and MP3 Players which used to be terribly chic but unfortunately everyone’s got one nowadays (except presumably the people in the factories that produce them – that’s another rant).  I don’t think there’s any question that digital mediums can capture sound quality at least as well if not much better than analogue sources and that claiming otherwise is posing of the smuggest order.  And you certainly won’t find me having to stand up halfway through an album simply to carry on listening to it.  I don’t own a record player for a start…