Just Another Social Profile Really

As the winter drags on, it seems like #occupy is falling out of the headlines; in the US it’s probably due to the coverage that’s being given to a bunch of millionaires fighting to prove who is the most Christian (camel? Needle?) In the UK a lot of it is probably being taken up by stories about millionaires wanting to give yachts to a woman who inherited her fortune.

But one of the recurrent features of much of the coverage I saw of the #occupy movement (if that’s not too strong a word for whatever happened) was that it was all a bit, well, vague. That these young hotheads didn’t have any solutions.

Read this book.

Or this one.

Maybe watch this film.

Haven’t got the time to read a whole book, or watch a whole movie?

Skim this article.

Sod it, a quick glance at any of these should do the trick.

Angry yet? I don’t know why anyone is criticising those involved in the #occupy movement for being unsure of the solution, when it’s apparent that the whole bloody shebang is the problem. Rather, we should be amazed that half the population of the developed world aren’t throwing molotov cocktails like confetti and stringing politicians and financiers up from every second lamp-post.

Seriously, why is no one in jail, and why are we still allowing these people to pay themselves whatever they want for inventing ways to gamble with other people’s money?

Cocktail by David Drexler on flickr

There must be something in the air tonight – Jane Copland posted on Facebook that Uptown Girl was the #1 record in New Zealand when she was born, and The Guardian has a short piece about a track of Joel’s from the 70s called Souvenir.

It was whilst watching a video of Souvenir, a track I’d not heard before, that I saw this version of the amazing Piano Man. It made me realise, again, just how underrated Billy Joel is. As far as I’m concerned his output in the 70s was as good, and as important, in terms of US music, as Bruce Springsteen’s. In many ways, he was Springsteen with a piano – from New York rather than New Jersey, but telling similar tales of the thousands of small stories that go to make the huge tale that is America.

It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday
The regular crowd shuffles in
There’s an old man sitting next to me
Makin’ love to his tonic and gin

He says, “Son, can you play me a memory
I’m not really sure how it goes
But it’s sad and it’s sweet and I knew it complete
When I wore a younger man’s clothes.”

I’m honestly not sure that I can think of a song with a better opening than Piano Man, and if it wasn’t for Up Town Girl, he’d probably be revered in a way similar to Springsteen or even Dylan.

Piano by Marc Falardeu on flickr

Well, music’s a funny old game, as Jimmy Grieves might have said.

Last year I wrote that Coldplay hadn’t done anything decent since their second album. I also wrote that I thought the Odd Gang Future Wolf Gang Kill Them Alll collective were a horrible shower of idiotic nihilists whom I had no intention of listening to again. Hmmm.

So, due to the fact that it featured in just about every single one of The Guardian’s 2011 Top 10 lists, I decided to give the free mixtape Nostalgia Ultra by Frank Ocean (of OFWGKTA) a try. And I’m glad I did – it’s a beautiful concept album, full of retor touches such as tape playters clicking on and off, and basically consists of Ocean singing wry, down-beat but not misogynistic lyrics over tracks such as Hotel California and Strawberry String by Coldplay.

He doesn’t even sample them, he just sings over the backing tracks. And it works. Wonderfully. So much so that I really should have put Nostalgia Ultra in my own best albums of 2011 list.

It also made me realise that Strawberry Swing by Coldplay is just a lovely song. They still shouldn’t have headlined Glastonbury though.

Strawberry by Marc Falardeau on flickr

Well, that’s 2011 more or less wrapped up.

Where the bloody hell it went, I have no idea, but, as I do most years, I thought I’d finish it by wrapping up my favourite albums of the year. Now, I should probably add at this point that, because I’m no longer a teenager who buys NME every week, or even a 20-something buying a monthly music magazine, I don’t hear as much new music as I’d like. So, whilst many of these albums were released in 2011, some are actually older but were new to me in 2011.

Anyway, here we go, in no particular order:

• Beastie Boys – Hot Sauce Committee Part Two: I’ve never actually been a massive Beastie Boys fan, and have always liked the idea of them, more than the reality. But Hot Sauce Committee Part Two was an absolute belter from first to last, was utterly life affirming, probably because one of the Beasties was recovering from cancer during its recording, highlighted how small-minded the OFWGKTA clique are, and it’s promo film was ****ing genius.
  
• The Streets – Computers And Blues: The Streets, or Mike Skinner as he’s known to his friends, is, I think, a perfectly English genius. This was his last album under The Streets moniker, and is, I think, a very fitting obituary. It mixes his trademark engagingly everyman raps with some lovely beats, and includes much of the (slightly cod) philosophy from his (amazingly under-rated) last album. I’ll be sorry to see The Streets go, but his new outfit The D.O.T. sound like they might be quite good, if their first track is anything to go by. It’s called Trouble and features a young man called Ghostpoet.
  
• Ghostpoet – Peanut Butter Blues And Melancholy Jam: His taste for bad puns reminds me slightly of Carter USM, but don’t let that put you off. He’s signed to Gilles Peterson’s excellent Brownswood label, his album is a brilliantly captured time-capsule of Britain in 2011 and it’s a crime that he didn’t win the Mercury.
• Lee Fields & The Expressions – My World: Released in 2009, but to be honest it doesn’t matter as it sounds like it was released in 1969, this is an amazing piece of pure R&B soul delivered by a true soul survivor, and one that I discovered through the marvelous Hunch FM. Honeydove is possibly my favourite track of the year.
• DJ 2 Tone Jones – Shaolin Jazz: This is brilliant – a bunch of tracks by the Wu-Tang Clan, and is constituent members, with the backing tracks replaced with samples from classic jazz. Seriously. It’s what the wannabe hipsters would call amaze-balls. And his similar re-imagining of classic Gil Scott-Heron tracks is not to be missed either.
  
• Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues: Nothing particularly different from their first album, but when you have a début as beautiful as the Fleet Foxes did, why would you want to change that? Music to get lost in.
• The National – High Violet: I know, this was released in 2010. But I’m getting old, I’m not as up to date as I was, and this is simply too amazing not to put in a Best of list. Also, there might be people who are like I was – ignorant of the splendour of The National: possibly better than Arcade Fire.
• Elbow – Build A Rocket Boys: A couple of the tracks sounded like attempts to replicate One Day Like This, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is a truly beautiful record. Build a rocket boys indeed.
  
• SBTRKT – SBTRKT: Soulful house music made by a man wearing a massive African tribal mask – what’s not to love? Listening to this today it occurred to me that it bears a lot of similarities to the all-time classic All Systems Gone by Presence which, if you don’t own, you really should.
•  Gilles Peterson – Masterpiece: Part of  a series of mix albums released by Ministry of Sound, this 3 part epic shows why Radio 1 are fools to have let him go: like a 20th Century John Peel, he touches everything from techno to jazz and just about everything in between. Worth the price for just one of the three free extra mixes alone.
  

We all wish that our jobs were exciting. But sometimes, we have to create or promote things that are worthy but dull. Essential, but boring. So how do we make ourselves feel better when we have to do this sort of thing? Well, if you’re a lot of companies, you put utterly ridiculous stock-photos into your reports.

Have a look at the photos below and see if you can guess what the topic of the report was that I took them from.

You’d think it might be music, or young people, or travel or even sunglasses.

No.

Are you ready?

It’s about measuring audiences for digital display advertising.

Yep.

I know.

It’s actually quite an interesting report. I’m just not sure it’s the right fit for these pictures. Although maybe young people these days do jump around at the idea of solving the problem of cross-cookie attribution. Who knows.

All images courtesy Mediamind. I assume.

I spent last night at a comedy event at Dublin’s Vicar Street: Europe’s favourite black American comedian, Reginald D. Hunter supported by rent-a-shocker ‘Aussie c***’ Steve Hughes.

I’ve been a big fan of Hunter – how challenges accepted points of view, particularly those relating to the relationships between blacks & whites and I was looking forward to hearing what he had to say. I might have been more minded to give him a chance to win me over if I hadn’t had to spend an hour beforehand listening to Hughes first.

He started well; throwing out c-bombs and face-claspingly shocking jokes with abandon. And, like the comedians he obviously worships (Bill Hicks for example), his shock-tactics had a point – to make us think. From checking YouTube, they also appeared to be about 2 to 3 years old, but anyway. Things then took a turn for the worse.

Hughes thinks of himself as an intelligent man, misunderstood by the world and one of the few who can see the ‘self-evident’ truths that surround us. Most of these self-evident truths seem to involve a global conspiracy, or ‘Orwellian nightmare’ as he kept describing it; some of them involved meandering monologues on the injustice of making marijouana ilegal whilst prescribing things like Ritalin to children. And he has a point.

Unfortunately, he’s obviously such a pot-head himself that he’s started to think that his stoned ramblings mark him out as a philosopher, rather than someone who would be useful to have around the house if you wanted to make sure that there was a 24 hour supply of Rizlas.

He touched the bottom when he started spouting some conspiracy theory bullshit suggesting that Gaddafi was overthrown due to a plan to only sell his oil for gold (something that, as this post explains, he’d been suggesting for about 20 years, generally to a response composed of utter indifference by the rest of the world).

His implied meaning was clear; that Gaddafi was some sort of people’s hero, martyred by the nasty west. You don’t have to be a fan of the West’s foreign policy over the last 10 years to be able to see that Gaddafi’s fall was because the West didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the majority opinion of a Middle East striving to achieve democracy.

Worryingly it seemed, chatting to people during the break, that people were buying this crap – one person even started to lecture me on how it had been the British who had created Israel because we’d owned Palestine at the time. I do hope that guy is spending today reading Wikipedia.

Hughes also had a go at his twin pet hates of political correctness and health & safety. He didn’t seem to have any idea that these two concepts had utterly pure motives behind them at the start and have, by and large, been ruined by the fact that the right wing press around the world, the sort of papers that Hughes would probably run from if they tried to adopt him as a spokesperson*, have taken these concepts and made things up about them. The recent Winterval farce is a perfect example.

Steve Hughes then, ends up sounding like a Daily Mail reader with a drug problem. Middle-England with a massive skunk addiction. Someone without the self-awareness to realise that political correctness was developed to stop people using words that do have a power to hurt, to misuse language and symbolism to hold entire groups of people down.

When someone shouted out “Aussie c***”, he suggested that because he didn’t mind being called this, no-one else should object to offensive language. I’d challenge him to ask a native Australian whether being turned down for a job only for the HR person to mumble ‘Abbo bastard’ under their breath as they walked out the room whether they’d be so understanding. Those who live in a position of power never feel that words and symobilsm can hurt, because it can’t hurt them.

I also wonder whether the families of those who lost their lives in mines which had no safety systems because it would cost profits, or those who lost fathers to asbestos, would find his jokes about health & safety so amusing. I’m guessing not.

Steve Hughes thinks he’s a revolutionary, pointing out the contradictions of the world, an intellectual with a gift for one-liners. He’s not. He’s a pot-head with a microphone and a filthy mouth: funny, but far from intelligent or even insightful. He’s obviously watched a lot of Bill Hicks, but I’m not sure he ever listened.

After an hour of Hughes, Hunter could have come out on stage and farted and it would have felt like Nobel winning stuff. In many ways, that’s exactly what he did.

His gags were tired, lazy and often obvious. The only thing that really made them strand out was the fact that they were being told by a black-man in front of an audience of white people, all of whom (myself included) got a little thrill of excitement every time he used the n word, all delivered with a beautifully courteous southern drawl.

There were jokes about the English, a painfully obvious thing to do to get cheap laughs in front of an Irish crowd. He made jokes about the difference between the sexes that would get Jim Davidson bottled out of the venue, but everyone chuckled away here. And he ended by victimising a member of the audience and calling her a retard because she dared to disagree with his lofty philospohical insight that we all need to have looked at our own arseholes.

Like a school bully made to look like an idiot, he lashed out, all with his lazy deep south drawl that allows him to get away with murder: I was amazed he would call someone a retard after all the fuss about Ricky Gervais, but am guessing that he’s been too stoned to have noticed that furore – he, in common with Hughes, appeared to be of the opinion that what the audince really wants is someone performing as if they’ve just been reenacting the Camberwell carrot scene from Withnail & I, though at least Withnail & I is funny.

As with Hughes, he appeared to have no problem telling us we shouldn’t have a problem with words (his assertion that his use of the word faggotry to describe things he didn’t like wasn’t homophobic would have been worthy of that well known equal-rights champion Tyler the Creator), but left me wondering whether he would have been so amused if the woman in the audience had responded to his hilarious description of her as a retard in the style of Luis Suarez. It would have been indefensible, but then so were Hunter & Hughes. Amazingly it seems that she didn’t mind, and that’s her look-out. It doesn’t change the fact that Hunter’s language is out of date, much like a lot of his material.

Sticks and stones by Al Muya on flickr

I can’t decide whether I love or hate Devlin’s cover version of The Jam’s classic track Town Called Malice. As anyone who knows me, or has ever seen my last.fm profile will know, I think Paul Weller is an absolute genius, and one of the best British musicians of the last 30 years. In fact just one of the best musicians of the last 30 years from anywhere. I’m therefore a bit nervous of cover versions of his work, and one by a young British rapper, such as Devlin, isn’t one that I would imagine liking.

It’s not even really a cover version, as he changed the lyrics (which were originally about  Weller’s home-town Woking, which was also the nearest town to where I grew-up and is, as the song suggested, what one might politely describe as a bit of a shit-hole. Devlin keeps the spirit of those lyrics, but moves them to modern-day Dagenham, another place that is unlikely to win the award of the prettiest place in England. He raps these new verses in a typically English shouty style, but has quite a pleasant voice when he signs a few bars towards the end.

So, what’s the final verdict on Devlin’s cover of Town Called Malice? I think it’s a positive one – it’s nice to see it being given a fresh sound, and good to know that Weller is still inspiring new music over 30 years since he was a young musician himself. And the great man obviously likes it as he asked Devlin to remix his recent track Fast Car, Slow Traffic. Which is crap. So let’s finish with the original version of Town Called Malice, still an amazing track, even now.

Woking station by Mark Hilary on flickr

Facebook’ made a big push into music last night, but I still tend to head to YouTube when I’m looking for a bit of serendipitous discovery/reminiscing. And today it didn’t disappoint.

There are a lot of great things celebrating 20th anniversaries this year: Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, Nirvana’s Nevermind, my GCSE results. And Saint Etienne’s first ever single, a house-tinged cover of Neil Young’s beautiful Only Love Can Break Your Heart: I know this because of the nifty timeline that YouTube have introduced for bands & artists.

Saint Etienne’s take on Only Love Can Break Your Heart takes a downbeat, acoustic little ditty and turns it into a dirty, great skanking club monster. It might be twenty years old, but it still sounds fresh enough to take your nose off. Or something. It’s taken from their début album Foxbase Alpha, which was an interesting and eclectic take on post SUmmer of Love London, but is, ultimately slightly frustrating (like much of Saint Etienne’s work if you ask me). But this single is a stone cold classic.

Lego album cover by hazymemory on flickr

So, he didn’t win the Mercury, though I think he should have done.

But he is playing in Dublin next week (I’m going!) and he’s done this rather lovely accoustic version of the, excellent, Us Against Whatever Ever, from the equally excellent début Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam, for something called The Secret Sessions, which I’ve not heard of before, but which I like a lot.

At this point, writing a post about the ongoing fiasco at Techcrunch is a bit like pointing out that bears like doing their business outdoors or that the chap who lives in Rome with the big hat happens to be a Catholic. But, as a reader of Techcrunch, I think it’s worth getting a few quick thoughts off of my chest.

1. It’s all got rather embarrassing. Paul Carr’s addicted to attention and is a veritable masochist when it comes to self inflicted injuries, as anyone who has read either of his books will know. But his resignation note has the air of a jilted lover throwing nasty names at someone he’s deemed to offend the man who won’t respond to his affections. Reading it kept bringing to mind images of movies set in private schools, hormones & unexplained emotions exploding. It leaves me feeling that I like Carr’s writing, but wouldn’t like him – something that I’m sure will bother him for approximately 0 seconds as he works out how best to next kiss the arses of Michael Arrington & Sara Lacy.
2. You can enjoy Michael Arrington’s style, admire his accomplishments and still think that setting up an investment fund for the sort of companies that you’re website covers, isn’t a good idea, without the fact that you say this being because you work for the competition. I think (Paul Carr’s former colleague) Jemima Kiss at The Guardian summed this up best.
3. The wrong people keep getting blamed. Paul Carr blames nearly everyone. MG Siegler (very unsubtly) blames Arianna Huffington (I guess we should just be grateful he doesn’t blame Microsoft). But Arianna is absolutely not to blame. Despite the fact that she’s someone I’ve had almost no respect for up till now (the way that she built a business on investments from her rich friends and the work of unpaid bloggers desperate for a slice of fame and sold it, for several hundred million dollars, as the future of publishing, is both digital sharecropping on an industrial scale and an example of the Emperor’s new [media] clothes), I think she’s being unfairly blamed here – the fault lies with Arrington (for believing that it wasn’t going to end like this when he sold to AoL, and Tim Armstrong of AoL for ever allowing Arrington to set-up Crunchfund. From, the outside, it looks like everything that Huffington has done since that point has been aimed at clearing up the mess made by the children.
4. Techcrunch is bigger than Michael Arrington. I don’t doubt that his new blog will make for interesting and provocative reading. Or that it will be full of childishly snide asides like this. But it won’t mean everyone will stop reading Techcrunch. Nor will Carr’s departure. And, in fact, if they will now have less puff-pieces for Arrington’s investments, and will start to punish people for being unprofessional, it might even mean that the site improves.

I really hope that this is the end of all of this. And that we can get back to reading so-so articles about companies that will never make any money (and puff pieces for Apple). But, considering the personalities involved, somehow I doubt it.

Rubbish by McKay Savage on flickr