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.

TECH: Twitter Takes The 'Social' Out Of Social Media

Twitter seems to be repositioning itself as a rolling news operation.  That’s not a surprise exactly, but it’s a shame.

Its new ‘Moments’ feature, so far only available in the US, seems to be a digest of the most tweeted about stories of the day.  A bit like a Twitter version of Flipboard or Google’s Play Newsstand. (Being UK-based I’m sorry if that’s not a fair description of a feature I’ve not used.  But that’s definitely what it sounds like.)

 

Twitter's 'Moments' feature

As a new direction it seems like an admission of defeat from the company – they’re giving up on trying to persuade more people to interact with each other and want to be yet another online news source.

It’s not a surprise though.  Despite the large amount of accounts out there, there’s a significant proportion of people who have never really used it at all.  And daily use is on the wane with a lot of people who to check it every minute, let alone daily.  Meanwhile, Facebook continues to thrive.  As an experiment, post exactly the same thing on Twitter and Facebook – a random bit of silliness, a link to a news article, whatever you like.  I am willing to bet that in most cases the level of interaction and debate with other people will be much larger (and faster) on Facebook than on Twitter. 

For most casual users of Twitter, if just one person replies to your tweet these days, I’d say you’d be doing very well indeed.

That’s a shame.  It’s a company that used to thrive on millions of strangers interacting with each other, discussing common interests with people from all around the world.  It felt like a threat to Facebook at one point.  It was certainly cooler and trendier than Facebook, which was yesterday’s news.  (I’m aware that using words like cool and trendy makes me look like last week’s news.  I’m in my mid-30s with a baby on the way.  Sue me.) 

The Twitter experience has changed a lot since I joined.  It seems a lot less irreverent and amusing, for instance.  The balance between humour and silliness/current affairs and politics is a lot less balanced, on my timeline at any rate.  It’s news, famous people, journalists, more news, interspersed by the odd lonely and ignored tweet from a ‘normal’ user, sitting there forlornly unretweeted and unfavourited.  I suppose I could change my experience by unfollowing some people and finding some new followers.  But the novelty’s worn off now and that feels like it would be a chore I haven’t got the time for.

Twitter nowadays feels more corporate, more adult.  That’s because it is.  A lot of teenagers have moved on to things like Snapchat and other things that parents and politicians don’t use.  The journalist Grace Dent said that when your boss follows you on Twitter, Twitter is over for you.  Well if you’re a teenager and your parents sign up I expect this is even more accurate.

But leaving that to one side, the democratic feel of Twitter vanished when a Twitterstocracy emerged.  There was at some point a distinct drift to the dominance of power users (a mix of already famous journos, celebs, comedians and politicians with a handful of early adopters who gained prominence through heavy use and controversial/witty tweeting).  People stopped following new people as much and settled for the groups they already had.  (If you are a casual user, ie not using Twitter to promote your business, when was the last time you gained a load of followers who weren’t real life friends or spam?)

New users joining after this point would realise quickly they weren’t going to get followers very quickly without putting in a lot of effort. Their voices just weren’t going to be heard unless they turned into attention seeking controversy machines or were a company that could employ dedicated social media experts to create an online presence.

Even people who have been on Twitter for quite some time find that their tweets will be read by a relatively small amount of people if by anyone at all. More and more people have become passive users, reading but not interacting, not creating, sometimes only promoting.  And even at promotion, without a lot of followers it’s not actually that great.  For instance, I have always posted links to this blog on Twitter and I can tell from my stats that I don’t get any traffic from Twitter anymore.  I used to, but not anymore, nothing.  I get more from Google + for God’s sake!  Whether that’s because I don’t tweet enough on Twitter to have a presence on it I don’t know, but it’s not really encouraging me to continue to use it as a promotional tool.

It feels like the glory days of Twitter being a fun place to natter and chatter have gone, except perhaps when there’s a live television event.  As a company it is being steered  towards having a serious purpose, which isn’t as fun.

Loads of my freemium apps have started getting adverts telling me to use Twitter for all the latest news. This morning I had a Twitter alert about some “latest news” being retweeted.  I opened the link which went to a 2007 Guardian article about Martin Amis’ comments on Islam.  Hmm.  Might not be using Twitter for all the latest news just yet…

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.

BOOKS: So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

Social Media doesn’t have to be a scary place – but it can wreck your life.

That is the main feeling I came away with after reading Jon Ronson’s ‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’, a book which illustrates the perils of (amongst other things) having an ‘online presence’.

Here he looks at public shamings, which since the advent of Twitter (and to a lesser extent Facebook) have become a massive part of society again.  One of the many cases explored in SYBPS is Jonah Lehrer, a writer who turned out to have used invented Bob Dylan quotes in his book.  After the initial controversy died down, he gave an apology speech, accompanied by a live Twitter feed.  That is the modern equivalent of being jeered at in the stocks, and serves as the perfect visual metaphor for what this book is about .  Social Media doesn’t accept apologies, partly because there are too many people out there who love sticking the boot in, and people find it hard to defend themselves against such overwhelming attack.  A judge from the American Deep South is interviewed for the book.  He’s known for using public shame in many of his sentences (drunk drivers have to hold signs by the highway proclaiming their crime - that sort of thing).  But he argues that the people he subjects to shame are at least found guilty first.  Who is in charge of finding people guilty on Twitter?  No one, obviously – or perhaps everyone.  We all just act as part of one big algorithm that surges wildly every now and then over specific incidents.

In the book, it is pointed out that, especially online, our reputation is everything.  And to lose it can be incredibly traumatic.  Justine Sacco is probably the most famous of the recent Twitterstorm victims, and Ronson gives a précis of the affair (and some others mentioned in the book) in this video made for The Guardian.

Justine Sacco probably naively thought the only people who would read her tweets were some of her 170 or so followers.  She thought she was making a point in a satirical way but as she says when interviewed in the book, she is not a comedienne or a character on South Park.  Her joke wasn’t funny, and because it wasn’t just an ill-judged text to a friend you could later apologise to but was a tweet it lingered in cyberspace as a potentially offensive statement waiting for people to take offence at it. 

Sacco lost her job (at a PR company of all places…).  I don’t know for a fact, but I imagine that she wouldn’t have immediately lost her job for saying the exact same sentence at work even in front of her manager.  She definitely would have had a disciplinary, possibly even been suspended, but she probably wouldn’t have been fired on the spot.  The guys at the tech conference who got fired for making a sexual innuendo about a dongle definitely wouldn’t have been fired if Twitter hadn’t been whipped up into a frenzy.  But Twitter was whipped up into such a frenzy on that occasion it meant that the person who originally complained lost her job.  I mean, no one is a winner here, are they?  As it happens I do think that Adria Richards overreacted regarding a conversation she overheard two strangers have at a conference.  I do think it was right to call her out on that.  But obviously before too long Twitter had in turn overreacted to her overreaction and there were calls for her to be raped and liberal uses of the C-word and all the other nonsense that shows Twitter at its worst.  So even Twitter loses in this case, as in similar cases (#GamerGate anyone?) where its users make it seem as if it is exclusively populated by swearing misogynists obsessed with rape.

Did these people really deserve to lose their jobs and effectively have post-traumatic stress syndrome just for making a bad call on Twitter?   I don’t think so.  I think employers will have to develop more sophisticated ways of dealing with internet indiscretions than simply firing people, because these incidents are going to keep on happening.  Ronson points out that we often like to think that when the Twitterstorm dies down, the person at the centre of it all will be fine really, but his book proves that it doesn’t really work like that.  The people he speaks to in his book all show similar signs of post-traumatic shock and depression for at least a few months after it ‘all dies down’.

Jon Ronson is an excellent journalist who is adept at taking a subject and making it accessible, without dumbing down.  He investigates a subject and lets you in on his investigations rather than just feeding back the results, which gives his books a novelistic and compulsive quality.  And at the very least, this book will definitely make you consider a few more seconds before pressing send on a tweet.

TV: Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall - Bewitching, brilliant - and that’s just what the continuity announcers said.

There’s been a lot of praise for the BBC series of Wolf Hall based on Hilary Mantel’s novels, and it’s been extremely popular - according to a recent Guardian article it is the most popular drama since the modern ratings system began.  So why didn’t I get it?

"But did I leave the gas on or not?"

I tried reading the book of Wolf Hall a couple of years ago to see what the fuss was about, and found it really hard to get into - so hard that I didn’t in fact get into it and got distracted by something else.  I found it quite dry and boring, (which surprised me because I’m interested in the Tudor era in history and liked learning about the story at school).  Although technically it was still on my ‘things to finish’ list, it was way down. 

But I had the same thing with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - a bestseller that I’d found hard to get into but saw the film, and saw the light.  Seeing the film made me go back and reread the books and recognise that there was something I’d missed.  So I settled down to the dramatisation of Wolf Hall bearing that in mind, and you know what?

Well - it was a bit dry and boring… wasn’t it?

I was disappointed all over again.  I was being told this was ‘the new I, Clavdivs’ in the papers and most friends and colleagues seemed to really be enjoying it. too  The ratings seem to prove I’m wrong.  Everyone says that Mark Rylance was brilliant whereas I thought it looked like he sleepwalked through it with one expression (a man having a long and quizzical senior moment) before finally coming alive in the sixth episode.  Damian Lewis was admittedly brilliant as a charming and menacing Henry VIII.  Jonathan Pryce and Anton Lesser were well cast as Wolsey and Thomas More respectively.  And it all looked very authentic (whatever that actually means) in that Beeb Costume Drama way.  But the story seemed surprisingly divorced from emotion somehow - it showed other people’s emotions being enacted on screen but failed to inspire any in me.  I guess I was hoping to see something along the same lines as a Tudor House of Cards or The Thick Of It, a behind the scenes view of an arch-manipulator at work.  But we didn’t see that much of Thomas Cromwell’s Machiavellian skills until the end.  Instead of seeing ‘under-the-hood’ of Tudor politics, each episode seemed like walking in on a  series half-way through despite having been watching them all - you know, in order and everything.

So then I tried to enjoy it as a drama about Thomas Cromwell - The Man.  But with Rylance looking either mournful or like he’d forgotten to feed the cat I didn’t care enough about him.  And he doesn’t have that exciting a private life anyway - apart from a sequence in the first episode where his wife and daughter are killed by a fever, and a few other scenes here and there (he nearly gets off with Anne Boleyn’s sister, for instance) there’s not much to it.  Or rather, his private life and his political life were completely entwined.  

I, Clavdivs worked by taking a fairly marginal character (until his unexpected crowning as Emperor) and allow us to see events and characters through his eyes (although when it was dramatised Derek Jacobi managed to imbue the TV Claudius with liveliness and charm).  But the balance was all wrong in Wolf Hall - it felt to me we were seeing Cromwell’s life at the expense of seeing events build.  It felt like there were scenes missing that had been replaced with trivialities.  And the I, Clavdivs historical drama model doesn’t fit Wolf Hall in the end because Cromwell wasn’t by any means marginal - he was pivotal to the politics of Henry VIII’s court during this period.  

Wolf Hall also an intensely humourless production, bursting with a sense of the emotionally arid and dull.  A story that by rights should be very varied had exactly the same story arc for an entire three individual episodes (The Fall of Cardinal Wolsey; The Fall of Thomas More; The Fall of Anne Boleyn).  The sixth episode came alive (by comparison to the previous five at any rate); we saw Rylance absolutely take command and finally show the audience why his character has a fearsome reputation. 

Mark Gatiss wasn't very good either

Apart from a few forgettable one-off scenes in previous episodes, menacing relatively minor characters, we’d not seen evidence of him actually doing Henry’s dirty work.  Well ‘show don’t tell’ is a cliche, but like all cliches there’s some truth in it, and having people tell us that Cromwell has a fearsome reputation but not showing us why (until so late in the game) made for drama lacking in drama.  

I hated not liking Wolf Hall, because I was really looking forward to it.  Maybe I am missing out on what the biggest BBC2 audience of all time found in it, but I’m going to blame Wolf Hall and not myself for missing something this time round.

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.