I love 'Moon River'. I may even prefer it to 'Over the Rainbow'. It may be all time favourite song from a film. It's just perfect.
And it's Audrey Hepbun, as Holly Golightly, singing it, that I love. Quiet, simple, thin, imperfect (her singing, I mean... jesus ...). There are loads of other versions going around, from Andy Williams and Frank Sinatra to Frank Ocean and Andrea Bocelli.
But, as so often, that's all a bit much.
Hepburn's singing was famously dubbed (almost entirely) by Marni Nixon in 'My Fair Lady' just as was Deborah Kerr in 'The King and I' and Natalie Wood in 'West Side Story'. Wood was apparently inconsolable, as she didn't know she was dubbed until she went to the screening.
And was it worth it? Nothing against Marni Nixon, but I think the singing of the leads is one of the worst things about the original 'West Side Story' and i'm really glad they're remaking it. Nixon's bizarre nose-block Hispanic on 'Somewhere' ruins one of the most perfect songs ever written.
Very glad they didn't dub 'Moon River' ... I bet they thought about it.
Of course, there are limits to this and practical decisions had to be made. But I'm very glad dubbing in film musicals seems mainly a thing of the past - turns out people love the imperfections of Brosnan and Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling. Well, some people do.
It still surprises me a little, with rock'n'roll music having been a thing for over 60 years, that some people still think a good singer is a "good singer" - that it's all about the pipes and the range and the control and the tone. In some ways, the tyranny of the TV singing contests brought that notion back for a while, where people were lauded if they could just blast out a power ballad without too many bum notes.
Anyway, I don't have much of a point really - I love 'Moon River', I don't like dubbing, that's about it.
Friday 21 February 2020
Thursday 20 February 2020
Song 69: Black
I haven't watched The Brits in years. They always seemed dreadful, literally nothing to do with what good music meant to me.
But on Tuesday, I'd done bedtime, was finding the Liverpool-Atletico game pretty boring, and switched over to take a quick look. As luck would have it, I was just in time for actor Micheal Ward to introduce his 'Top Boy' co-star Dave.
I first heard Dave via the Ivor Novello-winning 'Question Time' a couple of years ago. It was instantly apparent he was a bit special - there's not much not to love ... the name, of course. His twitter handle being Santan Dave because he used to hang out near the Santander on Streatham High Street, one of his best songs being named after that same Streatham.
My taste for hip-hop comes and goes, but Dave's precocity, married to clarity, musicality, ambition and daring, made for the the most striking and unignorable British talent i'd heard since Roots Manuva's 'Run Come Save Me.'
I first heard 'Black' at the start of 2019. His first single from the soon-to-be-Mercury (and now Brit) Award winning album 'Psychodrama'. It caused a bit of a stir on release, with a few white listeners saying its pro-black message was racist. As you're no doubt aware, the stunning version he performed (with a couple of extra verses) this week, has blown up that white outrage exponentially.
Now, 'Black' was, as you see here, my favourite song on 2019. I already loved it, and I guess I'd already given it a fair bit of thought. I can see that, to certain ears, it's "incendiary" and "provocative", but mainly it's just pretty poweful and beautifully expressed.
It's brought out the predictably dim "what if a white person said that" responses from dim people unembarrassed about letting their racism hang out.
Something that Dave shares with Stormzy is that all the angles people might use to attack them don't work. At the moment, they've got it all covered. Both smart beyond measure, smart like Dylan and Bowie, smart like they already know your next move. But, yeah, people always find new angles. I think the Dylan thing might be a decent comparison. People will expect Dave to be a blameless spokesperson now. Any wrong move they'll be looking to capitalise on.
We talk about racism in Britain more than we used to, but we're still nowhere near understanding it or acknowledging what we're dealing with. People like Dave may have to tell white Britain over and over and over again how racist it is before it hears. The good thing is, I think, that while some people will be appalled and become entrenched. Lots of people don't want to hear they're racist, but also lots of them actually don't want to be racist, and they will listen. They will think a bit more about it. That's the hope anyway.
Look, there have been lots of songs about racism before, but I haven't heard one which so perfectly articulated, and made me really think properly about, the experience of being black in Britain. It feels like he covers everything in three minutes - it's a guidebook for white people, should they wish to hear it.
So there we go. Dave sang 'Black' at the Brits and it was one of the best things I've ever seen. Read this in The Spectator. Fucking hell, "Dave" is just boring, apparently. Racism is so boring, isn't it. Fucking hell.
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2020/02/rap-stars-like-dave-should-stop-calling-boris-a-racist/
But on Tuesday, I'd done bedtime, was finding the Liverpool-Atletico game pretty boring, and switched over to take a quick look. As luck would have it, I was just in time for actor Micheal Ward to introduce his 'Top Boy' co-star Dave.
I first heard Dave via the Ivor Novello-winning 'Question Time' a couple of years ago. It was instantly apparent he was a bit special - there's not much not to love ... the name, of course. His twitter handle being Santan Dave because he used to hang out near the Santander on Streatham High Street, one of his best songs being named after that same Streatham.
My taste for hip-hop comes and goes, but Dave's precocity, married to clarity, musicality, ambition and daring, made for the the most striking and unignorable British talent i'd heard since Roots Manuva's 'Run Come Save Me.'
I first heard 'Black' at the start of 2019. His first single from the soon-to-be-Mercury (and now Brit) Award winning album 'Psychodrama'. It caused a bit of a stir on release, with a few white listeners saying its pro-black message was racist. As you're no doubt aware, the stunning version he performed (with a couple of extra verses) this week, has blown up that white outrage exponentially.
Now, 'Black' was, as you see here, my favourite song on 2019. I already loved it, and I guess I'd already given it a fair bit of thought. I can see that, to certain ears, it's "incendiary" and "provocative", but mainly it's just pretty poweful and beautifully expressed.
It's brought out the predictably dim "what if a white person said that" responses from dim people unembarrassed about letting their racism hang out.
Something that Dave shares with Stormzy is that all the angles people might use to attack them don't work. At the moment, they've got it all covered. Both smart beyond measure, smart like Dylan and Bowie, smart like they already know your next move. But, yeah, people always find new angles. I think the Dylan thing might be a decent comparison. People will expect Dave to be a blameless spokesperson now. Any wrong move they'll be looking to capitalise on.
We talk about racism in Britain more than we used to, but we're still nowhere near understanding it or acknowledging what we're dealing with. People like Dave may have to tell white Britain over and over and over again how racist it is before it hears. The good thing is, I think, that while some people will be appalled and become entrenched. Lots of people don't want to hear they're racist, but also lots of them actually don't want to be racist, and they will listen. They will think a bit more about it. That's the hope anyway.
Look, there have been lots of songs about racism before, but I haven't heard one which so perfectly articulated, and made me really think properly about, the experience of being black in Britain. It feels like he covers everything in three minutes - it's a guidebook for white people, should they wish to hear it.
So there we go. Dave sang 'Black' at the Brits and it was one of the best things I've ever seen. Read this in The Spectator. Fucking hell, "Dave" is just boring, apparently. Racism is so boring, isn't it. Fucking hell.
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2020/02/rap-stars-like-dave-should-stop-calling-boris-a-racist/
Tuesday 18 February 2020
Song 68: Under the Bridge
I hated Red Hot Chili Peppers. It feels ludicrous now to look back on how much we hated inconsequential and relatively harmless entities like Red Hot Chili Peppers and John Terry a decade or so ago, compared to the manifold monsters we have to endure every day now, but, for what it was worth, I hated them a lot.
The cruelly perfect Nick Cave quote - “I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the fuck is this garbage?’ And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.” - chimed exactly with me, and, yes, it was the fact they were on the radio so much around the turn of the century, when XFM was about the best you could hope for, and amidst the solid indie bangers you could guarantee that at least once an hour they'd be some of that all-too-imitable funky bassline and fucking gibberish lyrics.
I could put up perfectly well with the landfill indie of the era, but there was something really disturbing to me about the sound of rap-rock-gone-mature California.
So it was that I walked into my local Co-op last week and a song of theirs called, I think, 'Zephyr Song' was on the in-store radio, and what struck me was not how much I hated it, but that I hadn't, mercifully, heard this band for ages, and that once they didn't impose themselves on your every waking thought, they were a lot more tolerable.
The lyrics were still gibberish though.
And yet, through all the years of loathing, there remained a RHCP song I had a soft spot for- probably their most famous song, you know the one ...
I'm reminded of Regina Spektor's 'On the Radio', for some reason;
"On the radio, we heard November Rain, the solo's awful long, but it's a pretty song"
... "but it's a pretty song" is the truth that covers so many sins ...
"On the radio, I heard Under the Bridge, he sings just like a goon, but it's a pretty tune ..."
or something.
It was never not a pretty tune, and would, singularly in their cannon, escape my disgust when it appeared on the radio.
But it's more than that with me.
I'm going to take you back to, of all places and times and settings, a minibus in the Cotswolds in summer 1993.
Music mainly passed me by in the early 90s. Certainly music for young people. I watched 'Top of the Pops', listened to Capital Radio, and hoped something better would eventually come along, which it did a year or two later.
But I missed out on a lot. Kids at school would be talking about NWA, Public Enemy, Pearl Jam, Anthrax, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine, Cypress Hill, Nirvana obviously, and though I heard 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' and 'Insane in the Brain', I don't think I went much further than that if it wasn't on Capital or Top of the Pops.
And also, naturally, like most early teenagers, I didn't go out much, thought everyone else was always out getting drunk and having fun, and envied all of those that did, even though it actually turned out it was a small and mouthy minority.
I know the first three times I got drunk. It was the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of August 1993. Drunk-drunk, you know, not "aah right this is alcohol" slightly tipsy.
I remember because 1st August 1993 was my 15th birthday, and I was the youngest participant in a cricket tour to the Cotswolds.
It was, you can imagine, such a thrill. The tour's reputation for permitted underage drinking went ahead of it - though a school teacher was in charge, he relaxed his authority for these three days of the year ... with only-slightly-disastrous results.
How did the drinking go, you're wondering.... I think I travelled with the expectation I'd be throwing back 10 pints a night (based on the outlandish boasts of boys in my year), but, once that target had been reduced, the first two nights were a remarkable success. I think I managed 4 or 5 bottles or pints each time and managed to hold it together, no hangover, no disastrous behaviour, I think I even managed to play some late night football.
I mean, when I say "no disastrous behaviour" I believe I was being an enormously precocious pain-in-the-arse, so with the age range of the rest of the squad being 16 to 18, was no one's favourite companion.
Still, I was having fun and wasn't going to let a little gentle bullying dampen my spirits. I was hanging out. With the lads. Drunk and boisterous in the beautiful English summertime.
And what I remember is the drives back to the B'n'B after the cricket match and the evening drinking in the clubhouse, the singing in the minibus, and the sense of these boys, 17 or 18, trying to capture, or recapture something, and singing songs they'd clearly already sung together, as boys do, in a different setting. And the two songs I remember were, funnily enough, 'Summertime' by Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince, and 'Under the Bridge'.
The thing is, I didn't know it was 'Under the Bridge' ... someone would just start up with "Sometimes I feel like I don't have a partner ..." and everyone else would join in for a while, then it would peter out a bit, and then someone would go "I don't ever want to feel like I did that day ..." and I don't think I even realised they were two parts of the same song, but still, clearly, they both made an impression.
Nostalgia, I always think, is a funny thing. These older boys were operating with some sense of nostalgia in the singing, like the songs were already classics of their repertoire, and I was latching on to the nostalgia and the sense of time and place, the feeling of being, albeit grudgingly, part of something.
As I was saying, the drinking went well on the first two nights ...what's all the fuss about. I guess I'm just the kind of guy who can hold his liquor, I thought. After the 3rd match of the tour, we had our traditional dinner in the Berni Inn in Stratford-upon-Avon, and I only remember telling people how many doors one had to go through to get from the table to the toilet, where I went several times, indeed, I think, where I ended up for the night, disabused of the notion that I was a natural and bulletproof bon viveur.
There we go then, that's 'Under the Bridge'. Those first, tame, drunken nights, that vague sense of togetherness that singing pop songs can bring, even with people you're not really together with.
I know the song's about a lot, and, listening it today, it still stands up as a really pretty good song. I don't think the self-destructive behaviour I associate with it quite stands up to Anthony Kiedis's, but we've all got to start somewhere.
The cruelly perfect Nick Cave quote - “I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the fuck is this garbage?’ And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.” - chimed exactly with me, and, yes, it was the fact they were on the radio so much around the turn of the century, when XFM was about the best you could hope for, and amidst the solid indie bangers you could guarantee that at least once an hour they'd be some of that all-too-imitable funky bassline and fucking gibberish lyrics.
I could put up perfectly well with the landfill indie of the era, but there was something really disturbing to me about the sound of rap-rock-gone-mature California.
So it was that I walked into my local Co-op last week and a song of theirs called, I think, 'Zephyr Song' was on the in-store radio, and what struck me was not how much I hated it, but that I hadn't, mercifully, heard this band for ages, and that once they didn't impose themselves on your every waking thought, they were a lot more tolerable.
The lyrics were still gibberish though.
And yet, through all the years of loathing, there remained a RHCP song I had a soft spot for- probably their most famous song, you know the one ...
I'm reminded of Regina Spektor's 'On the Radio', for some reason;
"On the radio, we heard November Rain, the solo's awful long, but it's a pretty song"
... "but it's a pretty song" is the truth that covers so many sins ...
"On the radio, I heard Under the Bridge, he sings just like a goon, but it's a pretty tune ..."
or something.
It was never not a pretty tune, and would, singularly in their cannon, escape my disgust when it appeared on the radio.
But it's more than that with me.
I'm going to take you back to, of all places and times and settings, a minibus in the Cotswolds in summer 1993.
Music mainly passed me by in the early 90s. Certainly music for young people. I watched 'Top of the Pops', listened to Capital Radio, and hoped something better would eventually come along, which it did a year or two later.
But I missed out on a lot. Kids at school would be talking about NWA, Public Enemy, Pearl Jam, Anthrax, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine, Cypress Hill, Nirvana obviously, and though I heard 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' and 'Insane in the Brain', I don't think I went much further than that if it wasn't on Capital or Top of the Pops.
And also, naturally, like most early teenagers, I didn't go out much, thought everyone else was always out getting drunk and having fun, and envied all of those that did, even though it actually turned out it was a small and mouthy minority.
I know the first three times I got drunk. It was the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of August 1993. Drunk-drunk, you know, not "aah right this is alcohol" slightly tipsy.
I remember because 1st August 1993 was my 15th birthday, and I was the youngest participant in a cricket tour to the Cotswolds.
It was, you can imagine, such a thrill. The tour's reputation for permitted underage drinking went ahead of it - though a school teacher was in charge, he relaxed his authority for these three days of the year ... with only-slightly-disastrous results.
How did the drinking go, you're wondering.... I think I travelled with the expectation I'd be throwing back 10 pints a night (based on the outlandish boasts of boys in my year), but, once that target had been reduced, the first two nights were a remarkable success. I think I managed 4 or 5 bottles or pints each time and managed to hold it together, no hangover, no disastrous behaviour, I think I even managed to play some late night football.
I mean, when I say "no disastrous behaviour" I believe I was being an enormously precocious pain-in-the-arse, so with the age range of the rest of the squad being 16 to 18, was no one's favourite companion.
Still, I was having fun and wasn't going to let a little gentle bullying dampen my spirits. I was hanging out. With the lads. Drunk and boisterous in the beautiful English summertime.
And what I remember is the drives back to the B'n'B after the cricket match and the evening drinking in the clubhouse, the singing in the minibus, and the sense of these boys, 17 or 18, trying to capture, or recapture something, and singing songs they'd clearly already sung together, as boys do, in a different setting. And the two songs I remember were, funnily enough, 'Summertime' by Jazzy Jeff and Fresh Prince, and 'Under the Bridge'.
The thing is, I didn't know it was 'Under the Bridge' ... someone would just start up with "Sometimes I feel like I don't have a partner ..." and everyone else would join in for a while, then it would peter out a bit, and then someone would go "I don't ever want to feel like I did that day ..." and I don't think I even realised they were two parts of the same song, but still, clearly, they both made an impression.
Nostalgia, I always think, is a funny thing. These older boys were operating with some sense of nostalgia in the singing, like the songs were already classics of their repertoire, and I was latching on to the nostalgia and the sense of time and place, the feeling of being, albeit grudgingly, part of something.
As I was saying, the drinking went well on the first two nights ...what's all the fuss about. I guess I'm just the kind of guy who can hold his liquor, I thought. After the 3rd match of the tour, we had our traditional dinner in the Berni Inn in Stratford-upon-Avon, and I only remember telling people how many doors one had to go through to get from the table to the toilet, where I went several times, indeed, I think, where I ended up for the night, disabused of the notion that I was a natural and bulletproof bon viveur.
There we go then, that's 'Under the Bridge'. Those first, tame, drunken nights, that vague sense of togetherness that singing pop songs can bring, even with people you're not really together with.
I know the song's about a lot, and, listening it today, it still stands up as a really pretty good song. I don't think the self-destructive behaviour I associate with it quite stands up to Anthony Kiedis's, but we've all got to start somewhere.
Monday 17 February 2020
Song 67: Country House
I wrote several posts, a few years ago, wherein I took a single song and ruminated on it in a vaguely autobiographical way. That was pretty fun. It's the part of the blog I most enjoy looking back at.
So, I'll do the same again and start with Blur's 'Country House'. 25 years old, man. 25 years. Dan Abnormal's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Odd one to start with. I think I just want to refute the regularly-made claim that this is a terrible song and the nadir of an era quite near the gutter at the best of times.
Britpop was great. 'Country House' was fine. Cleared that one up.
I know the video's pretty grim, but, honestly, I'm not sure I've watched it in full and I'm not concerned with the video. There are lots of shitty videos. I mean, in other genres, they're pretty much all that shit.
The song is good. It's not Blur's best single but it's not their worst (that's 'Crazy Beat', obviously). Whereas 'Roll With It' is, even now, Oasis's worst single, worse than every mediocre single they released in the next 15 years. 'Roll With It' is worse.
"Don't ever stand aside
Don't ever be denied
You wanna be who you'd be
If you're coming with me"
I'm pretty certain the radio first played 'Country House' and 'Roll With It' on the same day, and as a Blur fan, it was pretty satisfying to hear the difference between the two. If you're going to try and have a Number 1, you may as well have a catchy tune... which doesn't have terrible words. People talked about the "Morning glory" bit and the "Balzac/Prozac" bit, which was fine and, you know, something to talk about, but I did, and still do, like Albarn's confident phrasing - the way he phrases "thought to himself whoops I've got a lot of money", for example, is just very nice ...
As a city dweller unsuccessful fella who has found himself living in a medium-sized house in the country (large town) but having spent many hours talking with Londony people about in-town vs out-of-town living, I think the subject is pretty valid and well-handled - overwhelmingly the song's about not being able to run from yourself, whatever measures you put in place, and that seems pretty universal.
Anyhow, pretty rapidly the indie music which had been mine, only mine, for all of ooh four months belonged to everybody and it's vast success led to Country House being a song people came to despise and use to describe what a dreadful time it all was.
But actually it was ok. And I've seen Blur play twice at Hyde Park in the 2000s and no one there was embarrassed or appalled by 'Country House' ... it sounded like what it was ... a pretty good song.
Just a little PS, because I still haven't got to the nub of what I wanted to say - the anti-rockism of the present day is fine, the dismantling of the pantheon, the 50/50 festival line-ups are great, the necessary eclecticism of good taste, but, look, if you're roughly my age and you got into music in the 90s, you don't have to apologise for your taste. Pop music in the early 90s was fucking dreadful - it was awful, it was Mr Vain by Culture Beat and Doop by Doop and countless hideous soulless songs on radio and TV to sit through. The mid-90s guitar music explosion felt like a great and revolutionary thing, maybe not to the journalist covering it, but to fans. Yes, I know it's all pretty male and white, but not to the extent that people say now - I remember in my first few months of reading it Tricky and the Prodigy and Mark Morrison and Portishead and Madonna and the Fugees and Echobelly and Skunk Anansie and even East 17, for what it's worth, being on the covers of NME and Melody Maker. As well as Oasis, Blur beat Michael Jackson's 'You Are Not Alone' to Number 1, which was co-written with R Kelly. That seems fine.
So, I'll do the same again and start with Blur's 'Country House'. 25 years old, man. 25 years. Dan Abnormal's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Odd one to start with. I think I just want to refute the regularly-made claim that this is a terrible song and the nadir of an era quite near the gutter at the best of times.
Britpop was great. 'Country House' was fine. Cleared that one up.
I know the video's pretty grim, but, honestly, I'm not sure I've watched it in full and I'm not concerned with the video. There are lots of shitty videos. I mean, in other genres, they're pretty much all that shit.
The song is good. It's not Blur's best single but it's not their worst (that's 'Crazy Beat', obviously). Whereas 'Roll With It' is, even now, Oasis's worst single, worse than every mediocre single they released in the next 15 years. 'Roll With It' is worse.
"Don't ever stand aside
Don't ever be denied
You wanna be who you'd be
If you're coming with me"
Fuck's sake.
Though it's funny, isn't it, that both songs suddenly have this expression of deep woe;
"Blow, blow me out I am so sad, I don't know why" vs
"I think I've got a feeling I'm lost inside"
All right, Britpop heavyweights, lighten up.
Anyway, very briefly, as I've made this case before, Britpop was great. The only defining feature of a Britpop band is that they say they weren't Britpop. Everyone wants to call Britpop the shit stuff. But what's the point of it just being the shit stuff? They might all disown the tag, but as James Dean Bradfield so rightly said, it's the tag that made their careers.
Manics, Furries, Ash, Gene, Suede, B and S, all of them and all the other good ones ... they're all Britpop ... everyone needs to stop whining and saying "oh, we didn't feel part of that scene at all, we were doing really different ..."
But, yes, everyone accepts that 'Country House' is Britpop. And everyone hates 'Country House' now don't they?
I'm pretty certain the radio first played 'Country House' and 'Roll With It' on the same day, and as a Blur fan, it was pretty satisfying to hear the difference between the two. If you're going to try and have a Number 1, you may as well have a catchy tune... which doesn't have terrible words. People talked about the "Morning glory" bit and the "Balzac/Prozac" bit, which was fine and, you know, something to talk about, but I did, and still do, like Albarn's confident phrasing - the way he phrases "thought to himself whoops I've got a lot of money", for example, is just very nice ...
As a city dweller unsuccessful fella who has found himself living in a medium-sized house in the country (large town) but having spent many hours talking with Londony people about in-town vs out-of-town living, I think the subject is pretty valid and well-handled - overwhelmingly the song's about not being able to run from yourself, whatever measures you put in place, and that seems pretty universal.
Anyhow, pretty rapidly the indie music which had been mine, only mine, for all of ooh four months belonged to everybody and it's vast success led to Country House being a song people came to despise and use to describe what a dreadful time it all was.
But actually it was ok. And I've seen Blur play twice at Hyde Park in the 2000s and no one there was embarrassed or appalled by 'Country House' ... it sounded like what it was ... a pretty good song.
Just a little PS, because I still haven't got to the nub of what I wanted to say - the anti-rockism of the present day is fine, the dismantling of the pantheon, the 50/50 festival line-ups are great, the necessary eclecticism of good taste, but, look, if you're roughly my age and you got into music in the 90s, you don't have to apologise for your taste. Pop music in the early 90s was fucking dreadful - it was awful, it was Mr Vain by Culture Beat and Doop by Doop and countless hideous soulless songs on radio and TV to sit through. The mid-90s guitar music explosion felt like a great and revolutionary thing, maybe not to the journalist covering it, but to fans. Yes, I know it's all pretty male and white, but not to the extent that people say now - I remember in my first few months of reading it Tricky and the Prodigy and Mark Morrison and Portishead and Madonna and the Fugees and Echobelly and Skunk Anansie and even East 17, for what it's worth, being on the covers of NME and Melody Maker. As well as Oasis, Blur beat Michael Jackson's 'You Are Not Alone' to Number 1, which was co-written with R Kelly. That seems fine.
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