Dumb Riffs

More on Iraq
Mike Davis has an article on the recent spate of car bombings in Iraq in today’s Guardian, here. My interview with Davis is here.

I don’t mean to harp on, but…
Went to the Olympia on Saturday night to see Nevada City, California harpist and songstress Joanna Newsom, who played an extensive set based around her recent, and brilliant, album Ys. I was interested to see how she’d recreated the highly orchestrated songs from Ys, and was amazed to find out that she produced similar sounds from a three-piece band who accompanied her onstage.

Now, I’ve been brought up on a steady diet of indie rock, often involving guitars. This form of music often comes with the sort of mythologisation that can praise a skinny pale, moderately talented chancer with a handful of tunes as a ‘musical genius’ (I’m thinking of Richard Ashcroft here).

But as I sat, rapt, while listening to Joanna Newsom I did think that this just might have been a musical genius at work. I know stuff doesn’t have to be the work of a genius to be good, but I think when you see something like this you should call it as you see it. Newsom sat and played highly complex patterns on the harp, while her childlike tones (for want of a better description – as her last album revealed a depth to her voice that hadn’t been plumbed on the first collection.

The arrangements for her band often meant that Newsom was the only person moving onstage, as the others sat and patiently waited for their parts to occur.

And the audience’s reaction was unlike anything I’d ever witnessed before, with an ovation occuring just after the first song. Subsequent songs were greeted in much the same way. And yet, on reflection, it’s hard to say that this reaction wasn’t deserved. A landmark gig.

A quiet weekend, really. Spent a lot of Sunday cycling: up the mountains, back to my house in town to watch Monty Python. The equivalent of solitary strolling, but with a bike and access to digital TV. A bit of reading: Nelson George‘s Hip Hop America, which is a good overview of the influence of hip-hop in American and global terms. Continued reading Jonathan Raban‘s Hunting Mr Heartbreak last night, after putting it on ice for a while. Now on the chapter where he heads to Seattle – a place that he still makes his home, I believe.

A piece I wrote on Flann O’Brien is in the Irish Times today as the Irishman’s Diary here.

Interviewed Nick Kent, legendary NME journalist of the 1970s, on Friday evening. Will have more about this in the next few days.

Exhaustive listing is impossible
Stuff I’m listening to: LCD Soundsystem’s new album, Old Dirty Bastard’s Return to the 36 Chambers, Serge Gainsbourg’s early stuff, XTC.

Watching: Rocket from the Crypt videos on You Tube, Spike Jonze’s music videos.

Reading: Jonathan Raban’s Hunting Mr Heartbreak, Nick Kent’s The Dark Stuff, Private Eye, AA’s big USA Roadmap.

What the hell is that?
Where I live, in Dublin 8, you see the most peculiar things lying on the street, like abandoned buggies and shelving units and mattresses that sit there for weeks.

But what I saw on my way home today tells a most peculiar story: a wedding cake, perfectly iced, face down on the pavement, with its cardboard box askew next to it. It was a fruit-cake, and clearly those things are like concrete, because it had kept its shape and consistency even though it had been flipped to the pavement. No one was nearby, bemoaning the fact that they’d just dropped their cake. No one even paid that much attention to the wedding cake, sitting there completely out of context (I’m working under the assumption that it was a wedding cake).

Someone, please explain this one to me.

Harry Belafonte
A good interview with actor, singer and civil-rights activist Harry Belafonte here.

Everyting is musik
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been reacquainting myself with an old friend: the rock music book. Uniformly written by overexcitable young men with nascent drug habits, often not about music at all, the ‘music book’ (often a full narrative, but more often a collection of essays knocked together in order to pay for leather jackets and drugs).

The first one I dug up was by a journalist called Chuck Klosterman, whose ‘Killing Yourself to Live’ is intended as a travelogue about rock and roll death sites in the United States, but always returns to the baseline of ‘vaguely neurotic rock journalist talks about problems in lovelife.’ It’s a peculiar book, enlivened by some great, funny writing at times, but often well sloppy. A good read, though. This also fits into the ‘renting cars and driving across America’ genre that is becoming so dear to me. Having been to Aberdeen, WA, where Kurt Cobain lived as a child, I found Klosterman’s indifference to the terrain very disappointing.

Nick Kent: that rare beast, a journalist whose legend often outweighs the rock stars he interviews. Okay, it rarely outweighs them, but only because he interviews the best: Brian Wilson, Lou Reed, The Rolling Stones, Elvis Costello and so on ad infinitum. His collection ‘The Dark Stuff’ is a classic rock book, and has just been reissued by Faber and Faber. Kent began as a music journalist aged just 19, and was on tour with the Stones by the time he was 21. His pieces are unforgiving portraits of the music industry, and his profile of Lou Reed is particularly cutting.

The theme that holds The Dark Stuff together is that rock stars frequently haven’t got a clue what to do next: they’ve got everything they ever wanted, so now what? The answer, Kent discovers, is a spiralling addiction and increasingly desperate attempts to recapture their glory days. It’s strange to see the Rolling Stones go from Exile on Main Street to treading water in a sort of unacknowledged desperation, in the matter of a few months.

The Stones piece, which I read late last night, strikes me as a classic of the form. He’s composed a piece that spans the decades from the late sixties up to (as far as I can tell) the late eighties. All this is possible because of the degree of access he was granted to the band. (His account of trying to revive an overdosing and blue-faced Keith Richards in Richards’ house is pretty horrible, but undeniably arresting, stuff.)

Kent, as a young hotshot journalist, made a pilgrimage to the offices of Creem magazine, where Lester Bangs initiated him in the ways of rock criticism. (Wow – just read on Wikipedia that Bangs died listening to the Human League.)

Kent himself fell prey to the sort of addiction he documents in the musicians he profiles, and as a result of this he is less likely to indulge the myth of the artist as addict. In fact, he is writing against that myth. And yet, as the description of Richards shows, it’s a double-edged sword: you can’t write about the myth without adding to it, it seems.

Nick Kent now lives in Paris with his girlfriend and their son, and contributes to French newspapers and magazines. It seems that ‘The Dark Stuff’ is his only book, but what a book.

Other good rock books:

Simon Reynolds Rip it Up and Start Again
Reynolds’s peerless narrative of post-punk music. (Simon Reynolds’s Blog)

Jon Savage England’s Dreaming
The classic book on punk rock.

Brian Eno A Year with Swollen Appendices
A characteristically oddball confection, consisting of a diary, but with theoretical articles in the huge appendix. Very entertaining.

John Harris The Last Party
Ambitious and quite brilliant book about Britpop and the rise of New Labour. Extensive original interviews conducted with Britpop insiders such as Justine Frischmann of Elastica.

Observer’s top 50 music books here.