Spending such a short time in Georgia felt like disaster tourism, and now being back in London feels like disaster tourism as well. Every other person I meet seems to be leaving, or thinking about leaving, or dreaming of leaving. Don’t look at me – I left about 10 years ago, but listening to all these tales of woe I’m thinking of coming back. It’s the contrarian in me, I guess.
I posted the first (and distinctly clunky) draft of the poem Flying Dream Number Three for two reasons. The first reason is that Elbow won the Mercury Music Prize, which is the first time I’ve actually cheered the winners. I loves me some Elbow, but now they’re proper famous I’m not going to post any of their music here, despite the fact that they have their own flying dream. No, instead I’m going to post the last track by one of my musical heroes: Tim Simenon, aka Bomb the Bass.
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It’s 13 years since Tim Simenon released an album, the ridiculously dark Clear (note to self: post tracks from Clear), 21 years since Bomb the Bass first appeared. I bought the 12″ re-issue of Beat Dis in 1988 and couldn’t quite understand what I was listening to. It was of course The Future, and even though that track now sounds ridiculously late 80s, it sums up the DIY ethos, energy and optimism of the music scene at that time. It also lead to my DJing career, but you can’t blame him for that.
The second reason for posting an unfinished poem was that I’d spent the day at Litcamp, which turned out to be much more interesting than I’d originally thought. I didn’t learn anything much, but the opportunity to hear other writers talk about their experiences was enough to make it worthwhile. Enough people asked “So are you a writer?” that it forced me to think about whether I am in fact a writer. I write, but am I a writer? I’ll let you know as soon as I have an answer.
The most interesting part of the day for me was a panel discussion on Publishing in the Digital Age (which included Michael Bhaskar from Pan Macmillan, whose own blogging is interesting but infrequent). It was amusing simply because everybody realised that the internet had changed the game for writers, agents and publishers, but none of us had a clue what’s going to happen next. The one thing that everybody agreed on was that writers need to take more care of their online presence, in terms of creativity, marketing and social networking – all of which are increasingly interlinked thanks to the web.
Hence this blog post, which I guess signals a return to blogging. This may stop again when I get back home and find myself with a mobile connection that’s so thin only very small words (like “if” and “nice” and “ebb”) can get down it. While you’re waiting for the next post you may wish to read this post by Matt Shadetek about the use and abuse of found sound in modern music. Or more accurately, a mild rant against producers who use ethnically correct samples to spice up their sound.
In vocal music, especially rap, the vibe and energy of a tune is SO MUCH about the lyrical content that putting vocals on tunes that you, or perhaps more importantly a major chunk of your audience don’t understand is just weird to me. I feel that you are using these people and their words as an idea, or a reference or a signifier in a way that’s totally disconnected from their artistic intentions. If you, the producer can’t understand all the layers of what they’re saying and the audience can’t either then the words are just rhythmic or melodic noise, a kind of cultural texture.
I couldn’t agree more, which is one of the reasons why the recent passing fad for gypsy brass (go Guca!) is so puzzling to me. It’s fantastic music, and you’ve got to love Basement Jaxx for loving it too, but really – do listeners in the UK really understand where it’s coming from? I don’t, and I live there. So for my final contrarian moment, I’m posting a track by Saban Bajramovic, who died earlier this year from too much living. Raise your glasses and fire your guns in the air; it’s what he would have wanted.
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