Teasers

I am sick to death of teaser trailers. I remember when trailers actually showed you something of the film, gave you some hint of plot or visuals to make you go "Ooooooh!" Sure, there are still trailers out there (and some of them are very good), but just lately I have come to hate teaser trailers, because at most they have one little thing which makes you go "Ooooooh!" and the rest of it is just a waste of time.

The teaser trailer for the new Star Trek film is my argument exactly (spoilers for the trailer, but not the film, ahead).

It's just... Well... Boring. Some shots of some guys working on the hull of the Enterprise. Well. Whoop-de-do. Nearly a minute of guys welding. Bear in mind, this is supposed to raise excitement levels in anticipation of the film.

The two good things about the teaser trailer are in the audio as well: Leonard Nimoy's incomparable voice giving those timeless words, "Space... The final frontier..." (which sends shivers down my spine just typing it; Nimoy's voiceover at the end of Wrath Of Khan is ten times better than either of William Shatner or Patrick Stewart's efforts); the sound of the original series transporters as the old Starfleet logo appears.

Empire's blog recently had a post about how there was no opening voiceover or narration to beat the one which accompanied Star Trek, and I'd pretty much have to go along with that (although the various different opening monologues which have accompanied the first season of Heroes have been pretty good on the whole).

Work has been going well over the last two days; finished the first draft of my chapter of background material yesterday, and did a solid three pages for another chapter today (which I'm hoping I will finish tomorrow) as well as tidy up the formatting on some tables of results for one of my appendices. Through it all today I have been listening to Daft Punk and The Benjamin Gate (as well as the soundtrack to the musical episode of Buffy). I find that listening to music which is generally faster in beat has an effect on how fast I type and keep concentration.

Got to go now; playing squash in fifteen minutes, immediately followed by five-a-side. More soon.

Desert Island Discs

My favourite radio show is without doubt desert island discs. (It's been on Radio 4 for about three hundred years, but it never gets old.) The premise is, of course, its genius: a 45 minute interview in which the interviewee has to choose eight songs or pieces of music to take with them to a desert island. It can't really fail, and having a sexy presenter right now is just the icing on the cake. Anyway, for no reason other than that I can, here are my current choices:

1. Promised Land by Bruce Springsteen. I love Bruce; I think he's one of the few genuinely honest performers around in that he's quite happy to go in and out of fashion and has no care for being thought of as 'cool'. This is him at his best - angsty, energetic, desperate, passionate, and optimistic, and it would be great to put on in the morning to get me up and ready to go.

2. Jupiter: The Bringer of Joy - Holst, from The Planets. Just because it does exactly that - brings joy. Even though the famous march has been reduced almost to cliche by endless reproduction, in its original context it's still enough to make the hairs stand up on my neck and make me want to stand up and say, "Yes! I'm glad I'm alive!"

3. Cherub Rock - The Smashing Pumpkins. Probably my favourite band, so it's hard to choose just one song by them. I think this is them at their best, and a sort of microcosm of their ouevre. Rocky, proggy, grungy, and you can hear all the elements of what made them the most musically accomplished outfit of their era - Billy Corgan's genius for composition, James Iha's crazy guitar, and Jimmy Chamberlain's brilliance on the drums: so brilliant he makes all other drummers seem like guys just hitting things with sticks.

4. The Rite of Spring - Stravinsky. I've written about this one before. I think it's at the absolute zenith of Western art - the very point at which beauty stopped being the ultimate purpose and it started to become fundamentally about navel-gazing, politics and grandstanding instead. This ballet was just on the right side of that divide.

5. The Hook - Steven Malkmus. Any song that begins with the line at age 19 I was kidnapped by Turkish pirates is a fair bet to be a success with me. I think Steven Malkmus is vastly under-rated. His music manages to be both funny and touching, and his lyrics would stand on their own just as poems. Ever since Pavement split up he's gone from strength to strength.

6. Superunknown - Soundgarden. This just reminds me of being a teenager. I used to listen to songs like this and think, yes, there is more to life than growing up, getting a job, living in suburban boredom, and growing old. Some people out there are trying to create something, and are passionate about it. Of course in this case partly they were being passionate about taking heroin. But mostly it was about good rock music.

7. Flamingo Sketches - Miles Davis. I couldn't overlook Miles Davis. What can you say about music like this? Nothing.

8. Slip Slidin' Away - Paul Simon. Just a great song about what it is to be alive, and I love the ambition of that aim. To try and say something with meaning, a sort of elegy for life.

Even looking back over the list I find myself thinking what an idiot I am. No Marvin Gaye? No Leonard Cohen? No Smiths? No Beatles? No Bob Dylan? No Supremes? No Temptations? No Ben Folds Five? Some of my absolute favourites are missing, dammit.

I could rewrite it all over again tomorrow, and every day for the rest of my life, probably.

Light and Sound Show

Dear World,

This is an open letter, and in some respects I don't expect a reply but if you have any comments I'm sure I'll find them interesting.

I'm sitting on the train home from Liverpool, just ran to catch it (and despite my declarations of going to the gym, the during and aftermath of me in fast motion is not a pretty sight); I'm on my way back from seeing KT Tunstall, who is a fabulous British singer-songwriter who's on tour to promote her second studio album. It was a fantastic show, really great folk-y pop-rock with a wonderfully witty commentary between songs.

It was an almost perfect gig - but one thing threatened to spoil it.

Camera flashes.

For ages now I've seen phone adverts and wondered: "Who needs a phone with a 5 megapixel camera built in?" Or, even worse, a phone with built in 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens and flash, and video call function?

Oh, well that would Mr Moron, who was stood just behind me. "Awright Gary," he bellowed into his phone as the music started up and KT came on stage, "Look Gary it's just started," and I swear his whole arm comes over my shoulder holding the phone to get it as close to the stage as humanly possible.

Ten minutes later I'm momentarily blinded as the whole arm and camera comes over again, this time to take a picture with the flash on.

Because, like, shucks, they turned the house lights down to create a mood - what were they thinking?

Sigh.

Rant over: it was a great gig, KT Tunstall is a phenomenal singer, and this is made even better by her considerable talents as a songwriter and musician. I'm not sure if she is well known outside of the UK, but her style has something for everyone. Like acoustic ballads? Hers are great. Like something that you can let your hair down and dance to? Listen to Black Horse & The Cherry Tree. She really does something for everyone.

She has a myspace (naturally, I mean, what musician doesn't?) and you can check it out here. You won't be sorry.

Top 5 of Good Japanese Music

I don't much care for J-pop. I know that it isn't very fair or reasonable to call an entire genre "largely rubbish", but believe me. After four years in Japan spent listening to sub-Celine Dion melodramatic codswallop, faux- Will Smith rap-pop, and The Bends-era Radiohead without the tunes, riffs or lyrics, I feel I'm qualified to make that call.

But then again, a lot of Western pop music these days is rubbish too. That doesn't stop us finding bands which we like. And the same is naturally also true of the Japanese music scene. So here (drum roll) is my list of the Top 5 Japanese Bands Wot I Reckon You Should Check Out:

1. Elephant Kashimashi. A group of 80s survivors who've changed their style considerably over the years (and improved a lot: in 1988, when their first album was released, they were pretty awful). The singer, Miyamoto Hiroji, has one of the Great Rock Voices; a sort of throaty, bluesy version of Bono, but infinitely more expressive and tuneful than that, and the band are tight and somewhat experimental at the same time. More importantly, Miyamoto is one of the few Japanese leads to actually sing about interesting things and put an individual 'take' on them. (Japanese bands' lyrics tend to swing from one extreme to another - mindless 'I love you baby' drivel on the one hand, bizarre dadaist gibberish on the other.) That might not mean anything if you don't speak Japanese, but even you will be able to appreciate the fact that Miyamoto doesn't liberally sprinkle his songs with snippets of crushingly inappropriate and jarring English.


2. Jazztronik. I don't know about you, but I think the world needs more Music That Makes You Happy. And Jazztronik consistently manage that, without ever seeming like meaning to. That's just what the way the music comes out - you can actually hear the joy in it, like an extra instrument. I don't know whether J-jazz-funk-pop is a genre, but if it is, it's definitely my favourite.


3. Thee Michelle Gun Elephant. Do you remember the early 2000s Garage Rock renaissance? The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Vines, The Hives, Von Bondies, The Dirtbombs...well, Thee Michelle Gun Elephant had already revived it five or six years before, and are probably the only example of a Japanese band actually setting a trend rather than following one. What's more, they were also brilliant: loud, choppy guitars, gravelly but tuneful vocals, and a nice recognition that nothing else matters if you've got a really good riff.


4. I hate sounding like a sell-out, but I do really like Spitz, a band who formed in 1987 and are absolutely massive in Japan. Sometimes they sound too poppy for their own good (you know how some pretentious idiot musicians talk about "retaining their pop sensibilities"? well Spitz wouldn't have had that conversation because all they are is a bundle of pop sensibilities) but hooks like theirs are impossible to resist. Secret weapon is Kusano Masamune, the vocalist, whose eerily beautiful voice really doesn't sound like anything of this earth.


5. It's a bit of a cheat to include Oki, because his music is that of the Ainu, the indigenous people of Hokkaido (Japan's northernmost island). But I'll do it anyway, because I'm evangelical about how good Ainu music is/was. Even if you don't like 'world' music (I don't), it's worth listening to, and it'll surprise you firstly by how much it reminds you of the Blues (in the way it revolves around cyclical segments of rhythm) and secondly by how much you can hear the sound of Hokkaido - frozen lakes, pine forests, seal-hunting - in it, even if you've never been there. It's like the gateway to a subarctic world, right there on your ipod.

Lawyers, Guns and Money

One of my favourite songs is Lawyers, Guns and Money by Warren Zevon, and my favourite part in it is the part just after he's sung the line about "hiding in Honduras...a desperate man...I said lawyers, guns and money...the shit has hit the fan", whereupon he sings the title lyric again and then lets out this little whoop of what can only be described as glee. It's a great moment. He's singing about being in dire straits in foreign lands, but he clearly loves it.

The attitude in that song reminds me a little of Hunter S. Thompson, and the collection of his early letters I've just been reading called The Proud Highway. In it, Thompson bounces from country to country in Latin America, getting into scrapes, drinking too much, and writing articles for newspapers; he's permanently broke, often sick, always in trouble, but clearly loving it.

When I was younger that was just the kind of life I wanted to lead. Travelling the world, living off my wits and, ideally, having sex with an endless line of beautiful exotic women. I even drew up a plan towards this end, whereby I would go to Tokyo at the age of 21, then each year move to a new country and a new city until the age of 30. This morning I got a little depressed thinking about that plan and how I'd fallen at the first hurdle - getting to Tokyo and then stopping, like I'd hit a wall.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I have lived quite an exciting life, and done a whole load of things I can tell the grandkids about. I've seen hugely built Russian marines on leave in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan throwing vodka bottles at passing traffic and being told off by an old woman and shamed by her into stopping. I've bribed officials on two separate occasions, in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and felt absolute icy terror doing it. I've been in countries where civil wars are being fought. I've come within a hair of being arrested by Israeli soldiers for trespassing in an abandoned, bullet-hole ridden holiday camp on the Jordanian border with my sister. I've got lost in Hong Kong. I've been to the docks in Singapore. I've gone drinking with Mongolians in Yokohama. I've had a fight with Turks in Tokyo.

I might not be Hunter Thompson, but I reckon I've given a good account of myself. Thankfully, I think I've avoided becoming one of those "travellers" who spends their gap year on beaches in Thailand and Bali, visits Ankor Wat, gets a tattoo, and thinks they've "seen the world".

I didn't have sex with as many exotic and beautiful women as I'd have liked, though. That's more of a journey than a destination.

Stravinsky and Barthes

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Igor Stravinsky is one of my favourite composers. The Firebird and The Rite of Spring are, I think, two of the weirdest and most wonderful pieces of music ever written; by turns beautiful, wild, cold and unearthly. They're brilliant examples of the last flourish of Modernism; Stravinsky was to classical music what Wallace Stevens was to poetry - the zenith, the apex, before traditional Western art collapsed into naval-gazing, alienating postmodernism.

So I was interested to read the other day a quote by Stravinsky, who once remarked that "music is, by its very nature, powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc...If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion, and not a reality."

Which is odd, because it is reminiscent of the Arch Pontiff of postmodernism, Roland Barthes, and his famous assertion that the publishing of a work of literature constitutes the "Death of the Author". It was Barthes' belief that, when setting a novel loose upon the world, the author loses all control of it and it becomes a text wholly in the power of the reader to interpret and analyse. Stravinsky's comment seems to me to be hinting at the same thing (postmodern ideas being confirmed by one of the great figures of Modernism); once a work of music has been created, the composer's ideas and designs for it become meaningless because it now belongs to the listeners.

I'm not quite sure that I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment. Postmodern theories and tropes always seem to me to be either completely banal (racism and sexism are bad, truth is contextual), or completely absurd (everything, including the holocaust and your breakfast, is a text), and this is really a little bit of both. But it certainly made me think, and the more I think about it, the more I start to see Stravinsky's point. Music, much more than literature, is for the listener to interpret, and while it is overstating the case that "music is...powerless to express anything at all", it is certainly true that once the listener hears a piece of music, the composer is powerless to influence their reaction, however much they might wish it were otherwise.

Everyone knows the story of how Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA, for example, somehow morphed from a song about bitter veterans of the Vietnam War into a jingoistic anthem in the mind of Ronald Reagan during the 1980's. Every Breath You Take was originally intended to be a study in voyeurism and stalking by Sting, but it is now a common feature on "Great Romantic Love Songs" compilation albums in HMV. Somewhere Over the Rainbow's lyrics are deeply melancholic, penned by a deeply melancholy man, but it now seems the very embodiment of hope - thanks to Judy Garland. You Were Always on My Mind is a very different beast when sung by Willie Nelson when compared to Elvis.

By a neat little twist, it was Stravinksy himself who was one of the most unfortunate victims of this, which is perhaps why he made the statement in question: when Walt Disney decided to use The Rite of Spring for his film Fantasia, he not only completely altered Stravinsky's original vision (changing the piece from an elegaic celebration of pagan Russia to an account of how dinosaurs lived), he also cut out whole segments, changed the order of huge swathes, and even fiddled with the rhythms. The "Death of the Composer", indeed.

I intend to follow this blog entry up with an essay for Harpers on the deconstruction of the song, I've Got A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts.

War...huh!

A good edition of BBC Radio 4's Start the Week this morning; argumentative and heavyweight, which is as it should be. I was interested most of all to hear that James Kent has made, in conjunction with five musicians in various "war zones" around the world, a War Oratorio of five pieces of music which are going to tell us, basically, all about how terrible war is.

I find it odd that people are still making things like this, when it seems that everything that can possibly be said on the subject of "the horror of war" has been said: We get it already, war is a bad thing, and despite his apparently novel means - telling us war is bad through music - I don't really see what Kent is adding to the contributions of Wilfred Owen, Joseph Heller, or, more pertinently maybe, Edwin Starr. In fact, the more that anti-war "art" is created, the more I feel that it becomes less about genuine pacifism and more about being hand-wringingly sensitive and compassionate and, dare I say it, holier-than-thou. There's little more satisfying than showing just how morally superior a person you are than pointing out how much you like to see wrongs righted and pain eased - and look, I've even written a piece of music to prove it!

Moreover, it has to be said that the apparent purpose of such art - making people think (really think) on some new, deeper level about how terrible the whole thing is, and thereby bringing about peace - is self-evidently false. We are awash with anti-war sentiment - barely a day goes by without some form of sanctimonious demonstration against Tony Blair or George Bush, or a new film/play/book/oratorio coming out and reinforcing our understanding of how War Is Hell - and yet wars go on being fought with depressing regularity, just as they have since time immemorial. In fact, one of the most, if not the most, important themes of world history is the very obvious truth that human beings really do rather relish the opportunity of killing each other in organized ways. This is not only evident from a cursory glance at a history book, but also from the studies of anthropologists, who have estimated that at any given time 68% of hunter-gatherer groups are actually at war, 20% have been at war between five and twenty five years in the past, and all others have been at war at some time before that (Divale, W. T., 1972); and that "conflict, rape, revenge, jealousy, dominance, and male coalitional violence are human universals" (Keeley, L. H., 1996).

The question, to my mind, should not then be "how can we reinforce how terrible war is?" but rather "why is it that we seem to enjoy warfare so much?" That is the one that needs to be answered if we are serious about eradicating warfare; and yet it is one that artists seem keen to avoid.

Noisms

So. Introductions.

Nah. Let's talk about Everything But The Girl instead, for no other reason than they're playing on my ipod as I write this, and that listening to them is a weirdly evocative experience for me; press a button and there I am, back in 1996, fifteen years old, spotty, greasy and walking to school in the rain with Walking Wounded on my personal stereo, thinking how poignant and melancholy and wonderful it was.

And the thing is, unlike most of the Britrock music I liked back then and thought was good (Geneva, anyone? Mansun? Spaced?), EBTG really were. They really were poignant and melancholy and wonderful. They were trip-hop but with better tunes, pop but with better lyrics, electronic but with impeccable taste. Everything they did exuded emotion and grace.

Better still, half of them was Tracey Thorn, a woman with a voice all at once smoky, sweet and soothing, capable of lifting the most mediocre song or lyric to something pure and beautiful and yearning: in her hands, Rod Stewart's hoary old I Don't Want to Talk About it becomes the dreamy, heartbroken plea that it should be; the one softly sung word "mirrorball" becomes a metaphor for nostalgia and regret.

The oddest thing to me at fifteen (and which is still rather odd to me now to, although I should know better) is that despite the utter sexiness of her voice, she is in fact one of the least sexy women in pop. The sound that I found, and find, so sultry and alluring, comes from a woman who, if I passed in the street, I wouldn't give a second glance. That isn't so unusual in itself - I know that looks have nothing to do with talent - but it tells me something interesting about myself, in a kind of roundabout way; I love EBTG for their music and lyrics and the way they seem to really mean something, and I suspect that it's precisely because I don't find Tracey Thorn at all attractive. Whereas with most other female artists I usually think about how much I'd like to get them into bed when I listen to them, and probably don't take them very seriously as a consequence, with her I think about what really matters - the music. It's the same with all the other female musicians who I've ever genuinely liked - Beth Orton, Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell - and I suspect that if they were better looking I never would really have gotten to like their music very much in the first place. I just would have put them in the box of 'women who are quite fit', and missed out on some of my favourite songs.

Which makes me think. Almost all of the female musical artists who have really been critical successes - asides from the ones I've mentioned, Chrissy Hynde and Billie Holliday spring to mind - have been so in spite of the way they look. I'm sure the success is due only to talent as much as it is to the fact that men will take a woman more seriously if they don't want to sleep with her.