House road trip to Portland for Thanksgiving 09!  Yes, it was awesome!  What’s that?  Oh no no no, contrary to popular belief, Maine is not home to the only Portland in the United States.  In fact, there is actually another Portland in Oregon!  How about that, little ol’ Oregon.  Home of this guy.

Now I’m not really going to regale you with tales of the things we did (super cool things) or places we went (super cool places) or of the friends we made (super cool people) or show any (super cool) pictures because you should check out Jacob’s blog for all that good stuff.  Although I will say there was some Four Loko involved.  It did not end well for some (one) people (person).

No, this is a “Thanksgiving Portland 09 Road Trip Jams” post!  The drive up to Portland from San Francisco was about 12 hours.  That’s 12 hours of music.  Naturally, some clear favorites emerged in the car.  Since you’re basically sitting on your ass for long periods of time, the best ones are the ones that make you move.  There were about 15-20 songs that we kept coming back to, but I will only post three.  In no order of particular importance, just the first three that came to mind.  And I will share them with your indifferent ass right now.

Surfer Blood – Swim (To Reach The End)

Weezer meets reverb heaven meets “whoa oh oh”s meets the Florida coast, and you can’t go wrong.  If you’re not into the first three seconds, then don’t even try listening to the rest.  Because you’re super lame.

Neon Indian – Deadbeat Summer

I don’t really know anything about Neon Indian besides the fact that they’re from New York and that they have put to tape probably the best drum machine sound I’ve ever heard.  It’s so simple but it just seems to penetrate the space in your head between your ears and punch its way down your spine.  That snare, my God.  Not to mention the brilliantly catchy synth lines that come in during the chorus and the breezy, laconic vocals.  A future road trip must for sure.

Billy Bragg – The Milkman of Human Kindness

Driving through Northern California and Oregon/Washington, the scenery will inevitably put you in a singer-songwriter mood.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the Pacific Northwest’s main export was English majors.  Who’d want to study business infrastructure with all those damn trees everywhere?  And though a lot of Elliott Smith and Bright Eyes and Bon Iver and the like were played in the car, no one can pull the lone-singer-with-just- a-guitar like Billy Bragg can.  And unlike other singer-songwriters, he doesn’t come off as a quivering, vulnerable, feeble pussy.  Besides, it’s fun listening to him sing “Oi am the milkman of yoomin koindness” during the chorus.

Goodbye for another 5 months probably.

“Take down the Union Jack, it clashes with the sunset
And ask our Scottish neighbours if independence looks any good?
‘Cos they just might understand how to take an abstract notion
Of personal identity and turn it into nationhood.”

From “Take Down The Union Jack” by Billy Bragg.

So, one of my friends has challenged fellow bloggers to do a post to celebrate St Andrew’s Day.  She asked those who are Scottish or have lived here for some time to reflect upon it.

The fact is I was born in Northern Ireland.  I lived there only for a few weeks and from the age of 4 I have lived in various parts of East Scotland.  Practically all of my defining memories are of times spent in Scotland and my identity feels Scottish, even though I write “British” on official forms. 

My first football kit was the Scottish strip for the Argentina 1978 World Cup.  My daughter turns 5 tomorrow, loves playing football and was born in Scotland and is about to receive her first Scottish kit as a present.  It feels like the passing of a baton in an attempt to discourage all the rubbish that goes with team colours at such a young age. 

I saw Billy Bragg play a gig in Glasgow last year.  He had recently written a book exploring the notion of patriotism, national identity, Britishness and multiculturalism in the light of the BNP securing presence in a by-election in his former home of Barking, Essex.  I wondered how the songs and stories of Englishness would be received by a Scottish audience where there can be such ugly hostility and dislike for the English in certain circles?

One of the thing that stuck with me was when he explained that if Scotland did vote for independence, then by default England would also be devolved.  Now, that opens up a whole other bunch of issues and politics.  He then went on to applaud some of the things that the Scottish Government has committed to and some of the potential we could offer as a nation.

I was chatting at length about these ideas with a couple of guys on a surfing road trip a few weekends ago.  So many of us are bored and disillusioned with politics and feel torn between voting with our conscience (politically and environmentally) and voting tactically in the next general election in 2010.  We discussed the prospects Scotland offers for a new social and ideological order.  A future of co-operatives, self sustainability, harnessing of renewable energy initiatives, an end to nuclear power stations beyond their current lifespan. We explored the frustration caused by us taxpayers having to bail out the disastrous state of Royal Bank of Scotland and the Lloyds Banking Group takeover of Bank of Scotland.  We talked about the difference between a sense of belonging and hope for the future contrasted with the often narrow dogma of Nationalism.  We talked about inclusion and exclusion in society, immigration and community.  We talked about the systems established in Scandinavia, the rate of tax and the quality of education, healthcare and work/life balance… It was one of those conversations where lots of views were opined and your mind was stretched to grasp new ideas and concepts…I love those discussions – especially as we looked out the minibus windows toward silhouetted glens with the stars coming out and the sky reflected perfectly in the lochs…

So what do I love about Scotland? – The manageable size of the cities; the fact you can get from one city to another or to the countryside quickly; the scenery; the accents; the proximity to the sea; the buzz; the seasons; decent tap water; the fact that Irn-Bru outsells Coca-Cola; the pride of wearing a kilt which has family history from my mother’s side; the sense of identity; the prospects of a renewables revolution…

What do I dislike? – the bigotry; the anti-English attitudes deeply held rather than a culture of respect; too much rain at times; the fact that global warming has all but destroyed the Scotish ski-season in the space of 25 years; cycling home from work on cold, windy and wet nights; the fact that we only ever top the league tables for things like heart disease, obesity and abortion rates…

What is our soundtrack? – please spare me the bagpipes or “Flower of Scotland” – give me some Belle & Sebastian, Teenage Fanclub, Aereogramme, Biffy Clyro, calamateur, The Delgados, Mogwai, Jesus & Mary Chain or Cocteau Twins any day…

Where is it best captured on film?  Save me “Braveheart” and watch “So I Married An Axe Murderer“, “Gregory’s Girl“, “Highlander” or “Restless Natives” instead.

As regards haggis, Douglas Coupland recently made me question my love of vegetarian haggis by asking why they try to make vegetables have the consistency or illusion of sheeps’ innards?

Oh and I wish I had a proper appreciation of whisky…

———

Billy Bragg. The name conjures up a lot of images to those who know him. If you were to brainstorm, you’d undoubtedly come up with the words ‘Essex’, ‘Socialist’, ‘New England’, ‘Left’ and probably ‘Hypocrite’. Certainly most of these are justified. Bragg’s distinctive Barking drawl has mellowed over the years (on his records, at any rate) but it saturates the early recordings, and it’s impossible to sing along to ‘The Man In The Iron Mask’ without putting the ‘oiay’ in ‘say’. Bragg’s early output can be divided into two camps: the wistful, bittersweet love songs for single mothers and local tramps on one side, and on the other his penchant for hard-line socialist leanings. Bill Bailey was perhaps the first to truly summarise his work within the context of a single song, with his satirical ‘Unisex Chip Shop’:

“I used to buy my chips from an oppressive chip shop regime.
The girl who worked there, she seemed happy,
But I knew it was not what it seemed.

I wanted to free her.
In my dreams I would see her.
Running naked through the woods round Rainham,
If I had some tigers I’d train them.
To protect her
From the sexual fascism that was lurking round the gherkins.”

And so on. Bill’s delivery is typically slurred, but buoyant – it’s an absolutely spot on impression, and official endorsement from the man himself has no doubt helped. It serves beautifully as a minute-long précis, but for those wishing to dig deeper, Bragg’s 2003 compilation Must I Paint You A Picture? gives perhaps the most complete introduction to his work – consisting as it does of two-minute post-punk masterpieces from Life’s A Riot with Spy Vs Spy (1983), through the questionable lyrics of the cuts from 1991’s Don’t Try This At Home, and finally to the overtly political songs of England, Half-English (2002), performed ironically with a distinctly American twang. (The box set is worth seeking out, as the additional third disc opens with his memorably British answer to ‘Route 66’, the beautifully titled and quite essential ‘A13, Trunk Road to the Sea’.)

Personally, I’ve always preferred the earlier albums. There is something almost ethereal about that lone guitar: it’s a man recording in his bedroom at eleven thirty on a Friday night with a bottle of cheap cider, singing songs about the jilted girlfriends who by rights he should have been seeing. Almost every one of those early songs is a winner, from the unusual metaphor that is ‘Milkman of Human Kindness’ to the aching sense of loss that permeates ‘St Swithin’s Day’, where Billy drops in a frank metaphor for masturbation and still walks away with his dignity intact. He describes his education with a permanently raised eyebrow (“Just because you’re better than me / Doesn’t mean I’m lazy / Just because I dress like this / Doesn’t mean I’m a communist”), and describes former lovers with tender affection that is nonetheless always firmly grounded, musing in ‘A Lover Sings’ about “Walking in the park, kissing on the carpet / And your tights around your ankles”.

Those accusations of hypocrisy, then. Garry Bushell – the same man who was successfully sued for libel after announcing that William Roache was as boring as his onscreen character, Ken Barlow – had harsh words for Bragg in 2006, when he accused him of “pontificating on a South London council estate when we all know he lives in a lovely big house in West Dorset”. Indeed, this appears to have been one of the biggest complaints about the man – remarks that his abhorrence of racism and xenophobia are unjustified, given that he lives in a predominantly white area that presumably – praise God! – has yet to be overrun by towel-heads, which thereby denies him the opportunity of seeing the Islamic, immigrant-filled cesspit that the BNP would believe us Britain has become. In other words, Billy’s singing for a lost world and has no frame of reference on the here and now. He’s outdated; needlessly nostalgic. He’s Stephen Green.

The first time I saw Billy was some three years before Bushell’s remark: August bank holiday in 2003, where he closed the Greenbelt festival. There are few artists who can follow The Polyphonic Spree, but Billy was one of them: a socially conscious, bittersweet and utterly grounded performance, a lament for love lost and the promise of new hope – a theme that rang particularly true with me after the year I’d had – and a timely reminder of what Greenbelt is all about, contrasting perfectly with the zany antics of DeLaughter’s merry band in the previous hour. Opening with the dreadful ‘Sexuality’ (a rare low spot in a canon of general excellence), he triumphantly declared “We can be what we want to be…well, unless you’re the Bishop of Reading”.

It was funny six years ago, but it more or less set the tone. I remember a friend of mine saying that she’d gone to see him back in 1997 – early 1997, when the political climate was just starting to hot up in time for the landslide at the beginning of May. I didn’t object to Jane’s attendance at one of Billy’s concerts, it’s just that she’s a rampant Conservative and I’m frankly a little curious as to why she went. “Yeah, he was good…but well, you know, he’s a socialist.”

That night at Greenbelt, Billy announced that “they’ve been trying to get me to come here for the last few years. Frankly, I haven’t felt like it before now, but I can see that for the first time in a long while the left’s starting to come together with – ”
“ – the right?” suggested a voice from the crowd.
“Nah, the church, actually, mate,” replied Billy. “Good heckle, though.”
Cheering.

“Seriously, though,” he went on. “I just came here from Reading and Leeds. Now, there’s two types of festival. There’s the sort that’s basically a hardcore rock gig that happens to be set in a field – that’s Reading. And then there’s this sort, where you want to come, and hang out with your mates all day, and be with people. It’s great.”

It was great, and it was a sentiment that Robert Fisher had echoed earlier when the Willard Grant Conspiracy were just starting their set: “I’ve got to say, we looked around a bit, and there’s lots of families, and people hanging out, and having fun, which is just what a festival should be”.

Back to Billy, who’s now reminiscing a bit more. “I was, y’know, at a hardcore folk festival a while back. One of the Morris dancers got hammered and carved something into his arm with the stick he was holding. Tripped over his bells in the end. I went to a couple of workshops. We were trying to splice the hyphen out of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and stick it so far up the arse of the BNP that they won’t feel like spouting any more of their racist shit.”

I think I agreed with most of what he said: the need for America to get back in touch with itself, and return to the barn-raising communal spirit for which it was once famous; the fact that we weren’t cross with the country but with the administration and the lunatic who ran it (and this was 2003, the year that Bush spilled blood over oil); the need for tolerance and fair trade. It was only when he sang “There is power in a union” that I started to get a little uncomfortable – unions serve their purpose but they also frighten me a little – and by the end of the set I’d realised that we weren’t at a concert, more a rally.

“Thing is,” Billy said, retuning his acoustic, “being part of the left brings with it all sorts of undertones. If you tell people you believe in a socialist society they assume you’re a Communist. Marxism served its purpose but I want to move away from the totalitarian ideology. Even that word, ‘ideology’, seems to have a lot of baggage. But if you tell people, as I do, that you want a compassionate society, they’ll understand what you’re saying almost immediately.”

You hear this, and then you think about that house, and you wonder. Is it hypocritical of an affluent, comfortable musician to sing about the angst of the common man, even if he’s been there himself? Is a failure to share everything you have a question of failing to practice what you preach? Is Billy in danger of becoming one of the hated lords that he sings about with such venom in his fantastic rendition of Leon Rosselson’s ‘The World Turned Upside Down’? Are the walls in danger of rising up at his command?

You could argue, indeed, that any sort of materialist gains become a barrier to preaching about socialist ideals. We’ve seen it happen in the church: Jesus’ message of love and charity seems to have been all but lost in the slurry of designer-suit wearing fifty-somethings who appear on cable TV, stating that if you give them your money, God will heal your cancer. (It’s not even as if the cash is going to the people who need it; they’re spending it on satellite dishes to go on the roofs of mud huts in Polynesian villages, so that the natives can pay them even more money to hear the gospel.) I don’t want to advocate living in poverty at the expense of looking after your health: I have to think of my family, and in my experience money is a useful thing to have that enables us to do stuff. But where do you draw the line? Where does living comfortably become affluence become greed?

There’s one parable that makes us Western Christians particularly uncomfortable, and that’s the one about the rich man who approaches Jesus, asking what he should do to get into heaven. When told that he needs to sell everything he has, the man becomes downhearted and leaves, whereupon Jesus remarks that “it is easier to thread a camel through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter heaven”. Some months ago, we examined this passage in a study group, and questioned whether we were showing sufficient compassion in our lives. The general consensus seemed to be that perhaps we weren’t doing enough, and that we didn’t even know what ‘enough’ was.

“I know what you mean,” said Anna – the pastor’s wife, a woman who in terms of giving her time is perhaps the most generous woman I know – who was leading the discussion. “But I think that in this case, Jesus’ message has to be looked at on an individual level. I think that in this instance the money had become a barrier. Jesus wasn’t saying it was wrong to have money. He was just saying that it was wrong to allow that money to intrude upon your relationship with God, and that’s what had happened to this man. So reading this parable doesn’t make me think that he wants us to sell everything we have. It just makes me think that we have to find our own particular barriers, whatever they are, and break them down.”

“I hope you’re right, Anna,” I said, “because that’s what I tell myself in the mirror every single morning. But the thing is, I know various atheists online who would argue that we’re diluting the message of the gospel to suit our own needs and lifestyles. And to be honest, I don’t have an answer for them.”

But Billy’s one to put his money – or at least his time – where his mouth is, as is evidenced for example by his work supplying guitars to prisons. (“People are saying ‘What about the victims?’, which is fair enough,” he has apparently said. “I believe in punishment and the punishment should fit the crime. Twenty-five per cent of people, in my experience, in the U.K. should never be released again, but 75 per cent are going to be out again and they are possibly going to live next to you, so shouldn’t they be rehabilitated?”). When we saw him again at Greenbelt some years later, he’d been doing songwriters’ workshops with victims of terminal cancer. There are things going on, and perhaps there’s only so much you can do.

I mentioned all this to Emily some weeks back, and asked if Billy Bragg’s affluence made him a hypocrite.

“Perhaps,” she said. “But then, he’s no worse than a lot of the others. Look at Bono, for example.”

I think I’ve trashed Bono enough on this blog, so we won’t go down that particular road today, but she’s right. There’s such a thing as giving quietly, and for all we know Bono does exactly that: it’s wrong to misinterpret radio silence as a sign of general aloofness when it could just as easily indicate a desire to keep your good deeds away from the limelight. Jeremy Beadle, a man I detested for years, redeemed himself in my eyes upon his death when news emerged of his tireless charity work in the latter period of his life – work that stayed out of the headlines. But for all the good work that Bono might be doing, he’s still a pompous twat, and a tax exile to boot.

Some months ago I got involved in a discussion about gay musicians. The originator of the thread questioned whether it was hypocritical of gay singers to perform heterosexual love songs. This was wrong on so many levels that it was difficult to know where to begin, but let’s try and unpack it a little: in the first instance, love songs are love songs, and relatively few are unambiguously male-female. Even the ones that referred specifically to a member of a certain sex (and which were, typically, performed by a member of the opposite sex) could quite easily have had their genders reversed if necessary – in fact the field is more less narrowed down to male-female duets, specifically of the ‘Hey Paula’ variety. For the most part, the rest of them are pretty ambiguous: when I was ten or eleven and first discovering the Pet Shop Boys, George Michael and Erasure, I had no idea that any of them drove their cars on the other side of the street. It’s hard to say whether such knowledge would have made me like them less; I fear that it may have done. It’s not a very nice thing to admit, but I was prepubescent and didn’t know any better.

So I’d play songs like ‘Careless Whisper’ and imagined that George was singing to a girl; I experienced the same feelings when I first heard the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Domino Dancing’ and ‘Heart’ (in my defence, the video for the latter sees Neil Tennant wed Danijela Colic, who then cops off with a vampiric Ian McKellen). I even let the obvious camp of Freddie Mercury’s ‘Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy’ pass me by, although God alone knows how this slipped under the radar. The same applied to anything by Erasure (although when we learned of Andy Bell’s sexuality, Ewan insisted that he’d known it all along, as Bell’s lament in the chorus of ‘Sometimes’ – “the truth is harder than the pain inside” – was “clearly”, in the eyes of my learned friend, “a metaphor for bumming”).

I suspect there are twenty-first century parallels, although I can’t imagine even the most innocent schoolboy watching Will Young prance his way through ‘Light My Fire’ and not know something was up. But does it matter? Readings of songs, you see, are two-fold: they’ll always mean something different to the singer than they will to the audience. When Paul McCartney sings that “in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me”, he’s talking about the spirit of the deceased Mary McCartney, who died when he was fourteen. Most other people, however, assume that he’s singing about Mary the Mother of Jesus. I daresay that there are a few people in Liverpool who can’t see any difference (although the Beatles were more popular) but in either case it doesn’t really matter that much, even though the pedant within me is screaming to correct them. Some people choose to interpret ‘Solsbury Hill’, a song so utterly perfect even Erasure couldn’t screw it up, as a metaphor for a man leaving a psychiatric hospital (an image that Peter Gabriel was to explore later, in 1980’s ‘Lead A Normal Life’). It’s actually about Gabriel’s decision to leave Genesis, but on some levels the misunderstanding actually works rather well.

The point is that once the song is out there you can only own it so far, and I can’t help thinking that when it comes to love songs, the sexuality of either composer or performer is completely immaterial. Everyone in the audience will hear the song in a different way – the builder, the paramedic, the artist, the accountant, the teacher, all with their own stories to tell. Some will feel as if it’s being sung directly to them. Some won’t be able to identify with it at all. Love songs are like that. But the singer doesn’t need to have experienced the events of the song in order to be able to perform it to a decent standard, although it helps – the fact that ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ was a career high point for Elton John was due, in no small part, to the fact that he was bleeding an artery dry on record.

There are exceptions. I actually believe some songs shouldn’t be touched. ‘Under The Bridge’ is one of them: the manifestation of Anthony Kiedis’ heroin addiction is so raw and unnerving and close to the knuckle that I don’t believe it’s right to do it. Another, coincidentally, is ‘Let It Be’, which occurred at a time of great turbulence for the Beatles, in the midst of a period of bickering and in-fighting from which they never truly recovered. But my list is entirely subjective and I am guilty of horrendous double standards. I haven’t forgiven All Saints for covering ‘Under the Bridge’, but I embraced with fervent vigour Johnny Cash’s take on ‘Hurt’, as well as his version of ‘In My Life’ – a song that Sean Connery ruined, but which Cash resurrected years later and which remains amongst my favourite Beatles songs. The been-there-done-that world-weary sentiment of his delivery has been done to death (do we really need any more comments that “Johnny Cash was the original gangster rapper?”), but when Cash sings ‘Some are dead and some are living / In my life, I’ve loved them all”, you know how much he means it.

Viewed from this perspective, the notion that a singer should only perform sexuality-appropriate material (music by gays, written for gays to sing about gays, with no gay left behind) is utterly ridiculous. Popular music doesn’t work that way: music is not unique to the performer, and the performance of your work by others ought to be seen as flattering rather than a burden, and if you don’t want your songs out there, don’t sing them to anyone. Taken to an extreme, you’d have to enforce the draconian principle that no one could sing any material that they hadn’t written themselves, which would mean we’d never have heard Jeff Buckley’s ‘Hallelujah’, The Byrds’ ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ or Roxy Music’s ‘Jealous Guy’. (We’d also have been spared The Carpenters’ ‘Ticket To Ride’ and Duran Duran’s ‘911 is a Joke’, so every cloud has its silver lining.)

If you’re going to apply this principle to love songs, would it not be appropriate to extend it to songs of social responsibility? And with that in mind, should I renege on my assertion the other week that ‘Imagine’ is inappropriate hypocrisy? Perhaps. Maybe the gravity of singing about the plight of the common man from the comfort of your Belgravia mansion is somehow more serious than singing about feelings you’ve never really experienced. Perhaps the gravity of songs about coal miners means it’s more important: perhaps Martyn Joseph’s ‘Please Sir’ is a more important song than ‘Have An Angel Walk With Her’. Perhaps.
I suppose that the question of my own hypocrisy, and the desire to sing from the viewpoint of the unfortunate when I myself have been very lucky, was with me that night at Greenbelt, as Billy led us in the last song of the night, an a cappella stomp through ‘Jerusalem.. Greenbelt’s not just about worship, it’s about awareness. The trade justice theme that ran through that weekend never seemed stronger than it did on the closing Monday, with constant references to the postcard petition that was due to be delivered to Tony Blair demanding fair trade laws, and a vibrant carnival on Monday afternoon.

I’ve long since been sceptical of the impact of such things – Live Aid was tremendous (the first. The second was shit) but, at the end of the day, barely scratched the famine’s surface – but as I said to a friend some time after the event, do you do nothing because you can’t do everything? Or do you do what you can? I’d have to add that this was pointed out to me during the carnival when I was having one of my more cynical moments. I probably don’t do enough; I try and avoid the bigger picture. But standing there, that night, part of the throng, I felt a curious mixture of elation and defiance, happiness and discontent, the determination to improve yourself and the world.

I slipped an arm round Emily’s waist and told her I loved her. And then the two of us joined the cry that appealed in one voice, however brief the sentiment, to change things for the better:

“I will not cease from mental fight
nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
‘til we have built Jerusalem
in England’s green and pleasant land.”

Whether you like Billy Bragg or hate him, it’s hard to disagree with that sentiment. Some contextual analysis is inevitable, but I can’t help thinking that we place too much emphasis on why a song is or is not appropriate to its performer, rather than listening to any message contained within it: it provides a convenient get-out clause, a way of easing our own consciences by maintaining that these would-be role models are no better than we are, all the time singing along to a rousing rendition of ‘We Shall Overcome’ before ignoring the retiring collection buckets on our way out. Perhaps we ought to be concentrating on the power of the songs themselves, rather than the baggage – or its notable absence – of the men who sing them.

The NME got in on the act early. This Sunday the Observer Music Monthly publishes its top 50. So I thought I might as well have a go. I wanted to get mine done first and see how much common ground I’ve got with the OMM seeing as its my favourite music mag. It’s harder than you’d think to select just 50 albums that span 2000-2009. I’ve had to leave out some records I really like. But here we go… Please comment as you feel necessary!

50 – Daft Punk: Discovery.

49 – Bob Dylan: Modern Times.

48 – Camille: Le Fil.

47 – Arctic Monkeys: Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not.

46 – The Blue Nile: High.

45 – New Order: Get Ready.

44 – Mercury Rev: All Is Dream.

43 – R.E.M.: Accelerate.

42 – Fionn Regan: The End Of History.

41 – The Beatles: Love.

40 – The Avalanches: Since I Met You.

39 – Badly Drawn Boy: The Hour Of Bewilderbeast.

38 – Roots Manuva: Awfully Deep.

37 – Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever ago.

36 – Mark B & Blade: The Unknown.

35 – Coldplay: Parachutes.

34 – Malcolm Middleton: Into The Woods.

33 – Seafood: When Do We Start Fighting…

32 – Doves: The Last Broadcast.

31 – Duke Special: Songs From The Deep Forest.

30 – Morrissey: You Are The Quarry.

29 – Guillemots: Through The Windowpane.

28 – Bruce Springsteen: The Rising.

27 – The Gaslight Anthem: The ‘59 Sound.

26 – Billy Bragg & Wilco: Mermaid Avenue Vol. II

25 – Richard Hawley: Coles Corner.

24 – Fleet Foxes:  Fleet Foxes.

23 – Athlete: Vehicles & Animals.

22 – Spin Doctors: Nice Talking To Me.

21 – Sigur Ros: Takk…

20 – Goldfrapp: Felt Mountain.

19 – Maxïmo Park: A Certain Trigger.

18 – Delirious?: Glo.

17 – The Shins: Wincing The night Away.

16 – Ben Folds: Rockin’ The Suburbs.

15 – Green Day: American Idiot.

14 – Neil Young: Living With War.

13 – Ray Lamontagne: Til The Sun Turns Black.

12 – Death Cab For Cutie: Narrow Stairs.

11 – Idlewild: The Remote Part.

10 – Johnny Cash: American IV: The Man Comes Around

An extraordinary achievement for a man in his final year. Johnny Cash’s last ‘proper’ album has the power to bring me to the edge of tears. I bought it the week he died in 2003 and played it a lot. A mixture of originals and covers, Rick Rubin’s brilliant production means there’s pathos dripping from every track. ‘Hurt’ is one of the songs of the decade which couldn’t even be ruined by that dire Nike advert. When I first heard ‘I Hung My Head’ it stopped me dead in my tracks. Just like most of the rest of this awesome album.

9 - Interpol: Turn On The Bright Lights.

I think there’s a good case to be made for Interpol as the band of the decade. To my shame I’m yet to see them live but their three dark, brooding and melodic albums demand that I get round to it soon. I think their debut is the pick of the bunch. Starting with ‘Untitled’ which takes its cues from the shoegazing bands of the early 90’s, the album goes onto channel the best of My Bloody Valentine, Joy Division and classic Krautrock. I suppose it can be said about all the records in the list but I can’t listen to this album too many times. It sends me to sleep, it wakes me up and generally soundtracks my life.

8 – Vampire Weekend: Vampire Weekend.

The drums alone deserve some kind of award. Chris Tomson is, for my money, the best drummer in a rock band at the moment. But this isn’t Keith Moon fury, or John Bonham theatrics. He sees the drum kit as a melodic and harmonic instrument. The kit is a lead instrument here and when allied to fantastic songwriting, it’s a winning combination. The African influence if overstated (this isn’t even the noughties’ Graceland, let alone Fela Kuti or Ali Farka Touré). However, the hints of afrobeat are enough to make this stand out from the crowd. Walcott is a great track – but there aren’t any duds here.

7 – Grandaddy: The Sophtware Slump.

This outstanding record is often compared favourably with ‘OK Computer’. Well, I’ll put my cards on the table. There’s only one winner; and it isn’t Radiohead. Grandaddy are impossible to categorise, but this record combines the best bits of alt-country, electronica and post-rock. The audacity of a 9 minute opening track has been matched by many bands. The difference is they’ve not made a song as arresting as ‘He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s The Pilot’. ‘The Crystal Lake’ is among the best songs of the decade while ‘Undreneath The Weeping Willow’ showcases a brilliant knack for melancholy. Released at the start of the decade, very few records have got anywhere near matching Grandaddy’s Magnum Opus.

6 – The Hold Steady: Boys And Girls in America.

‘Best bar band in the world blah… blah… blah’ said the music press. Talk about damning with faint praise. The Hold Steady are one of the greatest bands of the 21st Century, full stop. And though their earlier albums are packed with gems, this breakthrough album sees their manifesto fulfilled. How many bands could start a record quoting Jack Kerouac but never fail to be fun? The sound was compared to classic E Street Band and that’s probably as close as you can get to describing this joyous racket. Craig Finn’s lyrics are always interesting and frequently brilliant. So looking at our checklist we’ve got superb music, superb lyrics and some guys that seem delighted just to be playing rock and roll. It’ll do for me.

5 – Elbow: The Seldom Seen Kid.

I suppose too much has already been written about this album. It’d be easy to include ‘Asleep In The Back’ to prove I’ve liked Elbow since I used to play them on student radio in 2000. But that would miss the point: for once, the awards committees, journalists and hype-merchants got it right. This is an amazing album. There’s not an average track in sight in an hour’s running time. Picking highlights almost seems crazy, but ‘Grounds For Divorce’ and ‘On A Day Like This’ have deservedly grabbed the headlines and soundtracked a million daytime DIY programmes. But some of the less well know tracks contain stunning music and lyrics. When Guy Garvey croons ”We kiss like we invented it” on ‘Mirrorball’ it’s enough to melt your heart.  We await their next move with eager anticipation.

4 - Midlake: The Trials of Van Occupanther.

Take a moderately successful Texan indie band and give them a copy of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’. Stand well back and light the blue touch-paper. Doesn’t sound promising does it? How wrong could we be??? This was THE album of 2006. Inventive harmonies, layered synths and lyrics pining for the antebellum South came together to produce a stunning record. The guitar solo that comes halfway through ‘Head Home’ is one of my favourite musical moments of the decade, but this album contains several contenders for that title. The real genius of ‘…Van Occupanther’ is its ability to keep you on your toes. Just when you think it may slip into mid 70’s FM rock pastiche, the band pulls out a track like ‘Young Bride’ which forces you to admit this is a record which is far more than the sum of its considerable parts.

3 – Damien Rice: O.

David Gray is a perfectly decent singer songwriter. The same can’t be said for the likes of James Morrison and James Blunt. But how any of them came to be spoken of in the same breath as Damien Rice is beyond me. The irishman deserves to be in far better company (Jeff Buckley for example). This debut album was a slow-burning word-of-mouth behemoth that managed to retain artistic dignity while being offered on 2-for-1 deals in Tesco. Its strengths have been repeated endlessly, but any blogger who can’t find room for Lisa Hannigan’s beautiful vocals, the stunning string arrangements or the strange re-working of Silent Night is a fool. If this album has a flaw, I’m yet to find it. I can’t pick one track as a highlight because the others simply look at me reproachfully and say ‘actually we’re all rather lovely’. And they truly are.

2 – My Morning Jacket: It Still Moves.

This album sounds like the best party you’ve ever been to. If you want to label it I suppose it’s alt-country. But what on earth does that matter when the music is as much fun as this? Don’t get the idea this is some kind of comedy record though. Howling vocals, squealing guitars and pounding drums fuse together to create a brilliant racket. ‘One Big Holiday’ has a guitar hook to die for, but this isn’t an album of simple pleasures. The genius of the songs reveals itself slowly. The first time you hear it, it sounds like these are well crafted and edited jams. But like Led Zep at their peak, the tracks are more cunningly moulded than that. Crazy Horse are another reference point and when talking about a rock and roll band there are fewer bigger compliments than that. It’s a long record (71 minutes) but unusually for an album of that length, it doesn’t outstay its welcome. Superb.

1 – Stephen Fretwell: Magpie.

I’m annoyed I couldn’t find a decent picture of this album without the parental advisory sticker on it. Ok, maybe it doesn’t make an ideal present for a toddler, but any parent who’s doing their job properly should be investing in this if their child shows any kind of serious interest in music. It’s as close to a perfect record as its possible to get. At the start of the decade, Scunthorpe’s Stephen Fretwell found himself in Manchester as a promising singer-songwriter. A little while later, he was in a recording studio creating some of the most beautiful music that great city has ever produced. By 2004 it was ready for release. In reality, the Manchester thing is a bit of a red herring. Fretwell owes little to the genius of the Smiths and Joy Division or the more prosaic talents of Oasis. He’s just a good old-fashioned acoustic troubadour. So who are the key influences here? I’d guess Neil Young, Bob Dylan et al. But that doesn’t tell you much about this record’s greatest strength. Fretwell’s gift for melody is astounding. Songs like ‘Emily’, ‘New York’ and ‘Rose’ are beautifully crafted and sung. But there isn’t a track here which leaves you cold. You may know ’Run’ as the Theme of ‘Gavin and Stacey’ but don’t stop there. Investigate it immediately. Buy it and love it. There’s only one album of the decade after all; whatever the Observer says!

Billy Bragg is someone I grew up with. He was always on the periphery of my musical radar. I was aware of him but never really gave much time to the bard of Barking.

Until I rediscovered him a few years ago and suddenly with the addition of nolstagia and more of a realisation of the political landscape in which I was growing up I got him. I understood why he had seemed so angry and why he had felt the need to spread the word. I was simply too young at the time he was in his ascendancy to fully appreciate what he was actually singing about.

Since my ‘Damascus’ moment I have actively sought out every opportunity to repay my former indifference towards him and have been gifted the opportunity to see him play live on three continents.

It was already a done deal I would see him in my new (but temporary) home in Edmonton. And although he wasn’t stellar, it was the weakest of the four performances I have personally seen, he was a welcome visitor to this incredibly homesick Brit.

It was a strange crowd and atmosphere though in the Winspear. A mixture of young and old as I would have expected as Billy is a well established performer and although they all applauded warmly throughout and gave him a standing ovation at the climax they were on the whole rather subdued. The one time that Billy actively sought audience participation (during the closing number ‘New England’) there was an absence of noise rather than the cacophony of a thousand out of tune voices there should have been. As a result I shouted louder in an attempt to embarrass everyone else into joining in but also to give Billy something back after he had entertained us all for the previous hour and a half.

I got the feeling that mixed in with the younger generation seeking to find out for themselves what the fuss what was about and the hardened fans who lived and breathed the same ideals Billy stood for there was another element present there last night. The elitist Edmontonian arts crowd. Those that pride themselves on the cities reputation as ‘festival city’. For whom the Folk Festival is the pinnacle of their calendar year, where they get the opportunity to parade and preen themselves as the cultural masters of all they survey. It is just such a shame that they have to share it with the rest of us proles. They weren’t there because they believed in Billy’s political stance, they weren’t even there because they truly love music. They were there because they were aware that Billy Bragg is now rightly a folk icon, because CKUA (their guiding musical hand) had told them that was so and because if they hadn’t been there it might have been noticed and how could they have lived that down.

There were a few ‘flat’ moments when it was unfortunately obvious that his politics weren’t perhaps shared by all, at least not when they intruded on Canadian misdemeanors anyway. The Canadian Japanese resettlement during the Second World War being one example when the crowd rather than clap was stunned into polite embarrassment as if Billy had farted at the dinner table. It’s one thing to talk about global issues like capitalism, racism, homophobia etc but to point the finger at us? How dare he?

Perhaps it is partly due to the venue. It is a beautiful space but in my mind far too formal for this kind of event.

Music, from Beethoven to Billy, is visceral, at times violent, at times beautiful, and it should be enjoyed not admired like a fine wine. Not studied coldly from a distance.

I certainly hope Billy received more of an energetic response from audiences elsewhere in Canada.

[The First Part of this series was <<A: Open Source. The second installment of the Stop Usage Based Billing alphabet series was <<B: Packets and the Internet. The third installment was <a href="<<C: Deep Packet Inspection, and the final installment will be E: Open Source Deep Packet Inspection]

What is BitTorrent Anyway??

“BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used for distributing large amounts of data. BitTorrent is one of the most common protocols for transferring large files, and it has been estimated that it accounts for approximately 27-55% of all Internet traffic (depending on geographical location) as of February 2009.”

– Wikipedia on BitTorrent

BitTorrent is an extremely fast and efficient means of uploading and downloading. BitTorrent is an excellent way to distribute large materials to many people via the internet.

Radical Ideas

Like so many of the radical new ways to do things that technology and the internet have made possible, BitTorrent can only work through co-operation. BitTorrent requires a network of “peers”, or other people’s computers who are willing to share the file. This is referred to as “peer to peer” or “p2p.

If I have a large file I want to transfer, the first step is to “seed” the file, transferring portions of the file to multiple members of the p2p network.

Diagram 1: Seeding

It only takes a small fraction of the file to be passed along before the process speeds up enormously.

Diagram 2: Seeding and Sharing

Once I have a small portion, i pass it along at the same time as I’m receiving new bits of the same file, either from the original seed source of another peer.

Diagram 3: Upload + Download = Speed

With many participants (peers) uploading and downloading at the same time, large files can be distributed very quickly indeed.

Diagram 4: Finish Fast

Bell Canada “Throttles” BitTorrent

Bell Canada

When Bell Canada was first caught “throttling” internet traffic to the Independent ISP customers, Bell Canada’s justification to the CRTC was that the internet was too crowded, and that it was necessary to “manage” the traffic. Bell claimed that they needed to employ Deep Packet Inspection to identify BitTorrent Traffic so that they can “throttle” it.

Mandate:
“The CRTC’s mandate is to ensure that both the broadcasting and telecommunications systems serve the Canadian public. ”

—CRTC Role, CRTC Website

Amazingly, the CRTC had nothing to say about Bell Canada’s plans to discriminate against particular Canadian internet users.

The CRTC has accepted Bell’s unsubstantiated contention that this discrimination was necessary, and in approving it they have allowed Bell Canada to think that this discrimination is acceptable. In no way does this serve the Canadian public.

You might almost think that the CRTC mandate was to suppress Canadian creativity and the creation of Canadian movies and music. The availability of the technologies that exist to make it easy to create our own movies and music should be welcomed as an opportunity to add to and help grow our Canadian Culture.

Why single out BitTorrent traffic for throttling if it is an efficient use of the available bandwidth?

One of Bell Canada’s arguments for implementation of Usage Based Billing is that Canadian internet bandwidth is in short supply, making it necessary for them to “manage” bandwidth by penalizing heavy users.

So how could anything as efficient as BitTorrent possibly be seen as a bad thing if the Internet is so crowded?

It doesn’t make sense to discriminate against BitTorrent use. There is nothing inherently bad about BitTorrent use or BitTorrent internet traffic. But Bell Canada’s contention is that BitTorrent is bad because people use it to download movies and music.

Which begs the question: how does that make BitTorrent bad?

The Copyright Red Herring

The “Copyright Lobby”, which consists of large media producers and distributors (like Disney), and corporations and organizations (like MPAA), who distribute commercial movies and music, want us to believe that this is a bad thing.

This corporate special interest group has spent a great deal of time, energy and cash trying to promote the “pravda” that any digital copying of copyright works is bad. Making no distinction between commercial bootleggers who distribute illegal copies for profit and legal purchasers who seek to make a back-up copy or digital format shift for personal use, the Copyright Lobby has been pressuring governments the world over to criminalize personal use copying.

The problem for ordinary citizens is that these corporate interests have vast quantities of money to spend and a great deal of media power. This makes it incredibly difficult for governments to stand up to their onslaught. In some parts of the world this persistent advocacy has paid off for the Copyright Lobby, as lawmakers knuckle under and legislate to the detriment of their own citizens by making it illegal even to copy or download movies or music for personal use.

Here in Canada the Copyright Lobby is seeking to influence our lawmakers to criminalize personal use copying. They are trying to make Canadians think that people who make copies for personal use are performing criminal acts, and should be penalized the same as a a bootlegger who films the latest theatrical release off a theatre screen and proceeds to sell hundreds of thousands of bootleg DVDs.

Once again, Channel Four’s hilarious I.T. Crowd puts this question in perspective with this send-up of a video piracy commercial I found on YouTube.

Strong and free?

Canadian Law says

RIGHT NOW, in Canada, personal use copying is simply not illegal.

RIGHT NOW, in Canada, use of the BitTorrent file transfer protocol is also perfectly legal.

RIGHT NOW, in Canada, peer to peer (p2p) file sharing is legal; Canadians break no laws simply by joining in a p2p network.

The Copyright Lobby’s smear tactics have gone a long way toward making the world believe that BitTorrent is inherently bad.

Bell Canada has convinced the CRTC that it is acceptable to “throttle” BitTorrent, because of BitTorrent’s reputed connection with possible copyright infringement. So although BitTorrent is perfectly legal, Canadian internet users are paying the price for the success of this Copyright Lobby propaganda.

Myth: All BitTorrent/p2p internet traffic consists of copyright movies and music

The Corporate world doesn’t understand radical ideas like Open Source software and p2p file sharing because these concepts are so different from anything appearing in the old business models. Even more incomprehensible to the outdated business models is the fact that it may or may not generate a direct monetary profit.

The classic example of corporate myopia is:

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. ”

—attributed to Thomas J. Watson, president of International Business Machines, circa 1943

For many years IBM has taken the rap for this quote whether or not Mr. Watson really did say it. (Most likely not.) Maybe proving it wrong is part of why IBM is such a going concern in the 21st Century. Having weathered the storms of fortune today’s IBM is a world leader by continuing to innovate and adapt alongside evolving attitudes and technologies. IBM has been steadily increasing their participation and involvement with Open Source software in this new century.

The reality is that IBM not only understands the importance of open source, the corporation has actively supported and promoted adoption of Linux and Open Office in the corporate world. And naturally BitTorrent is a part of the equation because it is such an efficient means to distribute large files (like for instance, Canonical’s Ubuntu.)

“Think.”

—Thomas J. Watson, president of International Business Machines

Seems IBM actually does heed their most enduring slogan (which definitely was coined by Mr. Watson). Sadly, this type of foresight is uncommon. Because BitTorrent is such a radical idea, most entrenched corporations simply aren’t capable of understanding it.

There are other uses for BitTorrent that are not only legal, but even perfectly acceptable in polite society.

Probably my favorite use of BitTorrent is the amazing Project Gutenberg. This organization has been digitizing books in the public domain and distributing them freely… via BitTorrent, since this is such an efficient method of digital distribution. After all, BitTorrent is used for transferring very large files like music and movies because it is very efficient.

BitTorrent file sharing is not all movies and music. Like IBM, many people actually use p2p to help distribute open source software like OpenOffice via p2p. There is a growing body of open source software available, for instance my favorite web browser is Mozilla’s Firefox.

In fact, there the awesome SourceForge website which provides a place to find all manner of open source software, or where you can release your own.

When a new distribution of Ubuntu is released, people around the world gather together and have Ubuntu Release Parties making more good use of BitTorrent

And of course the Pirate Party of Canada has established Captain: the Canadian Pirate Tracker, their own BitTorrent site where Recording Artists and Filmmakers (and I imagine novelists, and software creators as well would be welcome to utilize this) to freely distribute their work.

Every bit of music and every movie transferred is not a copyright infringement. If I get to the point where my home made movies may prove marketable, I would certainly be looking at BitTorrent Distribution. In fact it would probably be easier to distribute home movies to family via BitTorrent than it would be to try to burn DVDs. (DRM makes the two commercial movie making software packages I’ve purchased almost unusable. Of course it doesn’t slow down the bootleggers.) If YouTube is an indicator, I’m not the only person who wants to transfer music and movies freely … not as copyright infringements. I have paid levies to the music industry for home movies I have made and burrned to CD for distribution to friends and family. If I choose to transfer them via BitTorrent now I can avoid the levy but instead suffer the added expense of Bell Canada’s deliberate throttling inflation?

Another really good legal use of BitTorrents are the actual commercial websites where people can go to to purchase downloads of music. So far no one seems to have found anything wrong with this practice.

But that’s not all. Canada’s own CBC Television Network tried their own experiment by releasing an episode of their program Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister via BitTorrent. Unfortunately the BitTorrent didn’t work so well because of Bell Canada’s CRTC approved BitTorrent “throttling”.

Geist tweets about the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation

Which is not to say it wasn’t a good idea. Not too long ago Michael Geist tweeted about the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation’s foray into BitTorrent use. All accounts indicate that their experiment was very successful indeed, which is having a big impact in the way they do business.

Ink Poster

The sad tale of a pirated Independent film can be found in this TorrentFreak article Indie Movie Explodes on BitTorrent, Makers Bless Piracy.

I guess it isn’t such a sad story after all.  

Thanks to piracy this Indie film called INK was has been achieving a distribution level that the filmmakers had never dreamed of.  They are of course extraordinarily pleased.

I think what is being called piracy here is BitTorrent p2p personal use sharing. Friends sharing with friends is one of the most effective ways to achieve recognition. They used to call it a “grass roots” movement. This is one of the major issues for the large movie studios. This is the place where they complain of being ripped off. What they don’t seem to realize is that this is a good thing. Exposure garners fans, makes a “name”. Fans buy stuff.

BitTorrent Traffic is not the only thing Bell Canada is Throttling

Rumour has it that there are people who actually work from home.

Time was the government encouraged the idea of people working from home. There are all sorts of advantages to society, like reduced congestion on actual highways, less wear and tear on our roads, a decrease in commuting based pollutants in our environment, a reduction of human depletion of fossil fuels.

But if you work from home, you are probably going to have to transfer files back and forth between your home and workplace. Chances are good that you are going to encrypt this type of traffic for security reasons. Although Bell Canada says they are only “throttling” BitTorrent traffic, in fact there have been instances of Bell throttling encrypted internet traffic on the assumption that if it’s encrypted, it must be BitTorrent traffic.

Bell places the onus on the customer to prove their “innocence” before they will consider stopping throttling.

Since the CRTC gave Bell Canada permission to use Deep Packet Inspection to inspect our packets, the only way to ensure that our private information remains private is through encryption. And in Canada any encrypted internet traffic will most likely to be throttled.

Canadian Copyright Consultation

The Canadian Government is looking at updating Canadian copyright law. They held a copyright consultation process this year, traveling around Canada soliciting opinions of stakeholders. Even better, they set up a website where they accepted submissions from any Canadian who wished to contribute. This website was flooded with thousands of submissions. Some are simply a few lines, some are extensive essays covering all sorts of topics, but all I’ve read are heartfelt. Because of the overwhelming response it took a long time to get all the submissions posted. (My own submission finally made online.)

This process led a lot of Canadians, including me, to believe that the copycon process might actually mean that our elected representatives were listening to us.

Unfortunately there is currently a lot of pressure on our government to make copying movies, software and music for personal use illegal. The secret ACTA meetings have caused a feeling of dread to settle over most Canadians. There has been deprecating talk about weak Canadian copyright law.

Except it isn’t true.

If anything, Canadian copyright law is probably more robust than is good for us.

The essential problem that the copyright lobby is attempting to overcome the problem of suing their own customers for what they imagine are infringements. They have noticed that fighting personal use copying garners bad publicity. This problem can be neatly solved by passing the responsibility for finding and prosecuting copyright infringement to governments. And of course the only was to get government to take ob the responsibility is to convince them that the copyright infringement is a criminal offense.

Regardless, currently copyright law is imprecise as regards personal use copying. So we’ll just have to wait for an actual law to be passed before it becomes illegal. (This pressure is actually largely from foreign owned interests– like Disney. It will be interesting to see if our government caves to this outside pressure.)

mixed messages

The government mandated levy we pay every time we purchase a blank CD is a tacit governmental admission that it is legal to burn CDs of our own music.

In the pre-Tivo era, Canadian cable networks actively encouraged Canadians to videotape the movies that they showed so we could watch them when it was convenient. They called it “time shifting” in their massive advertising campaigns. But no media giants took our cable companies to court back then. For the same reason artists will lend or give away their work for free when they’re starting out (because they need to build and audience– exactly like the INK producers mentioned above), back then even Disney didn’t have a channel in Canada. So Disney didn’t kick up a fuss even though they had to have known this was happening. They let it go because it was in their best interests to allow time shifting (i.e personal use copying). Disney knew this was in their best interests because it would help the Canadian cable companies build their market.

Of course now Disney doesn’t want us to record their movies for personal use. Disney would be happy if our government decided personal use copying was illegal. They would be happier still if our government spent time and energy searching out and charging people who download Disney movies.

Disney would be happy they no longer had to expend time and energy chasing down copyright infringements. They would be ecstatic if our Mounties were to do it for them. Gratis.

But this precedent indicates copying movies for personal use is also legal in Canada

So even though p2p networks or copying movies and music are not actually illegal in Canada, our friends the CRTC gave Bell Canada permission to “throttle” anyone using BitTorrent transfers. Because the assumption is that even if you’re not technically performing criminal acts, per se, anyone who uses BitTorrent can’t be very nice.

The CRTC, the government body that is supposed to safeguard Canadian telecommunication consumers, gave Bell Canada legal permission to mess with BitTorrent traffic. Its discriminatory for one thing. If there are copyright infringements happening, there are laws to handle them. It isn’t any of Bell Canada’s business. Or the CRTC’s.

[More on copyright in my other blog-- in the wind: Personal Use Copying vs. Bootlegging]

Dudley Do-Right?

Eirik Solheim's metaphorical image of the internet is the best I've seen: The internet is a series of tubes

Even if it were true that Canadian consumers were downloading music or movies, and even if it had been made illegal under Canadian Law, it should not make a whit of difference.

Because Internet Service Providers or Internet Carriers are NOT branches of Canadian law enforcement. They have not been deputized to enforce the law by the RCMP. If Bell Canada was in fact a Law Enforcement entity they would not be allowed to peek in any citizen’s packets without first acquiring a search warrant. Corporations don’t exist to uphold laws, they exist to make money.

The internet has been called dumb pipes, or a series of tubes, or a highway. It doesn’t really matter what you call it, what is most important is access for all.  
The people who control the pipes should not be allowed to discriminate against particular users for ANY reason. Net Neutrality is so important: the internet should be accessible to all.

revolutionary ideas

In the United Kingdom The Times Online Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing? article looked at the benefits of personal use copying applied as peer to peer file sharing with some dramatic results.

Canada’s own ThisMagazine presented this thought provoking article Pay indie artists and break the music monopoly — Legalize Music Piracy which advocates making the law serve the artists and consumers rather than just the corporations.

Further rumblings about changing the way we look at this issue were reported recently by the The Globe and Mail blogs article NDP, Billy Bragg make case for free music

STOP Usage Based Billing

Ahahahahaha….this home made video looks like a karaoke video. In fact it may be…

Anyways, I discovered this weekend that cleaning the shower is very difficult to actually do, but brings a real sense of joy once you do it. Is this the same thought process that motivates suicide bombers?

Doug Chaplin has tagged me on this one. It’s a bloggers (though I’m still not so sure I am one) chain-letter. The meme asks us to share eight memorable musical moments, not favourite pieces, but the moments in which music combined to create memory. The rules are

Think of eight memorable musical moments, not necessarily all time favourites, but those when, for example, you felt compelled to wait in the car when listening to this amazing song on the radio because you just had to know who it was by. Or the piece you heard on the tv in a drama that drove you straight onto iTunes to download… (remember once we spent the princely sum of 6s 8d on a vinyl single?!). Optional details for each song give where, why and Spotify or youtube links …

At least I can say that I’m still too young to ever spent 6/8 (that’s 33⅓ p) on anything. Here are my eight, in no particular order

1. A Love Supreme by John Coltrane. When I was twenty, I bought a couple of editions of a jazz magazine. Each copy came with a cassette, and an excerpt from A Love Supreme was on one of them. I was rapt by its troubled passion, its prayer is total humanity communing with the divine. I love it, but jazz is musical marmite.

2. Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards by Billy Bragg. I remember buying a cassette of his album Workers Playtime as a teenager. This track is the last on the album, and I remember playing it over and over. The mixture of protest song, poetry and humour was an inspiring first to me, and turned me into a complete Bragg fan. Below is an updated version rather than the one I know. It’s still good, but I miss the lines “Doctor Robert Oppenheimer’s optimism fell at the first hurdle” and “The revolution is just a t-shirt away”.

3. Cantique de Jean Racine by Gabriel Fauré. This was sung by friends of the bride and groom at a wedding I took. The wedding was moving for pastoral reasons, and the gentle, thoughtful beauty of this song has remained with me. Last year, I sang this with the Wolfson(g)ians and loved singing its soaring, melodic tenor line.

4. Prelude, Adagio et Choral varie sur le theme du ‘Veni Creator’, Op. 4 by Maurice Duruflé. This magnificent organ piece came on the radio one dark and stormy evening. It’s a musical history of the Holy Spirit, and leads into the ancient hymn Veni Creator Spiritus.

5. I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For by U2. Just as U2 were getting big, before they got messianic, there was the Joshua Tree album. The live recording with New Voices of Freedom on Rattle & Hum is still my favourite.

6. Deus in adjutorium by Claudio Monteverdi. I sang this in a choir in Durham Cathedral as a young undergrad. It was my introduction to early music. Its monotonous opening is almost shocking, punctuated by outbursts of brass, before opening out like an estuary in the alleluia.

7. Nothing Compares 2 U by Sinéad O’Connor. I remember when this was all over the radio, and then I saw this video.

8. Goldberg Variations by JS Bach. I’ve got a Glenn Gould recording. This is perfect for sunny mornings at home.

I now tag cycads.

My old favourite Billy Bragg once sang “Scholarship is the enemy of romance”  ://www.billybragg.co.uk/releases/albums/reaching_converted/reach12.html

I’m starting to think that the opposite is true for me, or at least the end result of romance (our baby boy). Finding the space at home to think straight is becoming increasingly difficult, oh well, onwards and sideways. Now I am attempting to find time/space during work..shhh tell no-one!

[However..]

Latest headache is the fact that I cannot access Dreamweaver from anywhere on the Eastbourne campus,  and according to the IT guys, not since someone ran off with the disks to install it…so I will just have to make time tomorrow before class to hopefully do the homework..if the bloody thing is on the computers at Watts.

London-based singer-songwriter Frank Turner (pictured above in a Greg Nolan photo) has had a sizable indie rock hit across the pond with “Poetry Of The Deed,” which is the title track to his latest album. The song has received a considerable amount of airplay on UK music radio stations like XFM London and BBC 6 Music. It sounds like a brilliant combination of The Clash, The Alarm, and Billy Bragg. It’s a great song, one of those tunes that you never get tired of hearing.

To watch the video for “Poetry Of The Deed” by Frank Turner, click below:

Poetry Of The Deed is Turner’s third solo album in three years. He used to be the vocalist with the band Million Dead, which split up in 2005.

For additional information on Frank Turner, see:
http://www.frank-turner.com
http://www.myspace.com/frankturner
http://www.youtube.com/user/frankturner

Oh where the time does go…  Here’s a brief photo survey of what I’ve been doing while not blogging!

Quality time spent in CA in early October at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass - probably the greatest festival in the world, and the “Rooster Stage” that I managed was totally rockin; Billy Bragg, Mike Farris, Mavis Staples, The Knitters, Old Crow Medicine Show (Whom I also just saw in Des Moines this weekend!), Guy Clark, Boz Scaggs, Tom Morello, Dar Williams, Steve Earle, Richie Havens, and Robert Earl Keen were a few highlights…..

This was the ‘Banjo Stage’ opening Friday night of the Fest with who else but Lyle Lovett & the really really big band – holy soul shake down…

Marx Meadow in Golden Gate Park where the “Rooster Stage” was tucked into – also the home of many infamous 1960-70s Golden Gate Park shows with the Grateful Dead, etc. Good fun – and LOTS of people…

Billy Bragg knockin’em dead on the Rooster… I think this was just before ‘tea bagging’ the crowd, as he likes to say….

And what would a Robert Earl Keen set be without Todd Snyder stopping by to hang out – which was cool, because we got to talk about our buddy Dave Zollo while we were hanging out.

…and then there was my boss & Billy Bragg watching Mavis Staples… I’ll call it a pretty good afternoon at work.

You have to be slightly crazy to do this kind of work, but large scale Festivals are truly my favorite type of events to work on.

You take big piles of stuff off trucks and some heavy machinery…

…add some crazy fun people to work with and some aluminum trussing…

…bolt it all together into something(s) useful… (6 stages for Bluegrass 2009)

…and proceed to make it look kind of pretty…

…bring in killer sound & lights and a couple hundred thousand people… and, oh yeah, Mavis Staples….

….have a great time…. and then make it all go away….

…sort of zen in a sick and twisted kind of way…

And A LOT of fun!!!

]]> http://readerswives.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/readers-wives-31-loretto/ Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:57:55 +0000 readerswives http://readerswives.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/readers-wives-31-loretto/

September 7th, 2009

The dust has settled and this morning our adventurous jaunt to Ireland’s premier festival, Electric Picnic, is sinking in.

We were to play in the area known as the Mindfield . As a more intelluctual (some might say pretentious) side of the festival, it was peppered with a theatre tent offering abridged Shakespeare and comedy; a spoken word / poetry tent (which I had vacate almost immediately because I didn’t want to piss myself laughing at some ‘oul one reading some god awful verse with about as much enthusiasm as a corpse) and our own Leviathan tent – hosting “Political Cabaret”.

…..

Yeah, I know. That’s what I thought.

Anyway it was actually quite entertaining – economists battled politician battling socialist battling every fucking irate / drunken punter going.

Lots of swearing and accusations, but that’s pretty much how Irish people have been handling the recession anyway.

So business as usual except with microphones.

We had picked up Danny our manager (legend) from Dublin airport around 1ish and got to the festival site  around 3ish.

We discovered we were way too early-ish.

We were scheduled to go on at 6.15, so we gave ourselves a little bit of time to wander into a couple of the larger tents and caught a great set by Dublin band Jape and then Billy Bragg giving the crowd shit (quite rightly) over the Lisbon vote; to which, oddly, some people whooped and applauded to.

Trying to be as professionally punctual as possible (try saying that drunk), we trudged over to the Leviathan tent. Here we discovered the debate was still raging on.

And on.

And on.

And on.

Once the shouting had died down and the drunken, fist waving polemists had finally admitted that they were way too hammered to remember their original point (s) – it was game time.

And what a game.

Aided by a great sound (thanks Evin) and some enthused dancing, we pretty much played our best show ever.

Odd seeing that written down, but it’s true.

Crowd was fantastic – like a sea of Bez’s – and anyone who stuck a curious head in, not only stayed but joined in.

Yeah, that qualifies it, alright.

Pulling that off in a periphery tent whilst Bat For Lashes, Klaxons and fucking Brian Wilson were kicking off, is pretty damn impressive (editor’s note : Bat For Lashes never showed up, Klaxons are shit and Brian Wilson just smiled and drooled, apparently).

Smiles all round and we swiftly made our way back to Doug’s motor to get Danny back for his red eye flight on Sunday morning (the trip back was a little less swift than planned after a nearly fruitless attempt to find an open petrol station in the wilds of  County Laois. However, thanks, to Chris’ GPS on his Blackberry it was a lot swifter than it could have been).

The next day we were untethered from our manager and decided to travel a little later as to avoid the hanging around. We didn’t count on the All Ireland Hurling Final providing a 2 kilometer tail- back on the motorway, but as before, things were running late and we had loads of time to spare.

We arrived to catch the end of a lecture / presentation by legendary rock and roll photographer Bob Gruen. Bob’s been in the business 40 years and it was pretty amazing seeing his snaps of everyone from the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Dylan, Springsteen to Bon Jovi (!) and Green Day.

Showtime was upon us again but, due to my ever present genius, I had forgotten my bag of leads and pedals, as well as Niall and mine’s guitar straps. Leads were found and Niall myself looked quite punk rock as we improvised by using duct tape to fashion straps for ourselves.

We knew we probably couldn’t top the previous night and were a little nervous when we saw that the tent filled out and we only had about a dozen people in front of us. The main stage was in full final night swing and we had lost a lot of people due to our unintentional later stage time.

In a testament to the band’s attitude we played our asses off and, thanks in no small part to Niall’s talent at audience interaction, we managed to end up with the tent, at the very least, three quaters full.

We felt like winners again and after a barnstorming encore we ended up with the crowd on their feet and bopping away.

After loading the gear into our van, we then legged it back to Doug’s car once more to gleefully return to Dublin for some much deserved rest.

All in all a triumphant weekend.

Back to work in the studio this week - but not without the small matter of going to see Fleet Foxes tonight…!

See y’all soon!

Disko

X

Soundtrack : Smokestack Lightning – Howlin’ Wolf

Frank Turner ist ein ganz Großer! Das muss man niemanden erklären, der ihn schon kennt. Ihn als legitimen Nachfolger von Billy Bragg zu bezeichnen, ist wohl nicht übertrieben. Vor kurzem ist sein neues, großartiges Album “Poetry of the Deed” auf Epitaph erschienen, dass er auch in Deutschland vorstellen wird. Als kleines Schmankerl gibt es hier schon einmal sein neustes Video. Und in folgenden Städten könnt ihr den englischen Singer & Songwriter sehen:

01.12.2009: Hannover – Bei Chez Heinz

02.12.2009: Köln – Luxor

10.12.2009: Hamburg – Molotow

11.12.2009: Berlin – Magnet

12.12.2009: München – 59 to 1

Mehr Infos zu Frank Turner gibts hier.

What a great experience, and a very controversial one! I arrived at the and was given an ‘artistes’ badge for security by Adrian Collins, the Redskins manager. I was really, really nervous, and rehearsed my speech in the toilets to try and get it word perfect. I kept a low profile as the studio began to fill up with the audience. I was really surprised at how small it is because on the telly it looks huge. I watched the Alarm and Billy Bragg before joining the band for their bit. I had to satand at the back between the drums and the brass section, clutching a tambourine for the first song, ‘Hold On’, then came out for my bit after being introduced by Chris.

I was literally shaking with fear as the song closed and the lights went off briefly as Nick played the drum intro. Chris spoke into his mike and introduced me by saying,’On extra percussion, tambourine, and on strike for 35 weeks, a Durham miner’, at which point I stepped forward to the mike. I can’t honestly remember speaking, I only noticed the audience applauding loudly when I’d finished. Then I walked to the back of the stage as Chris sang the song, ‘Keep On Keepin’ On’.

As soon as the band finished we all headed backstage to the ‘green room’ to recover. It wasn’t green but Martin told me that’s what they called the place where you get free drinks and within seconds I’d downed a pint of lager. Billy bragg came over and said no one heard a word of my speech. I was really disappointed because all that worry and nerves had been for nothing. I got a triple Southern Comfort with ice but was called outside to see Jools Holland and he said if I’d told them what I was going to do they would’ve made sure I was heard. A load of bollocks! Loads of people spoke to me and expressed their support for the strike, including The Tube’s press officer, who wanted to know what I’d said so I told them.

‘There’s been six miners killed in this strike, five miners on life support machines, three miners with fractured skulls, over 2,500 serious injuries and more than 7,500 arrests. we’re told we’re out on a limb, we’re on our own, and that no one supports us, yet hundreds of thousands of pounds have been collected for us by ordinary working class people – miners support groups have sprung up all over the country, in towns, factories, offices and colleges. They’re supporting us – you should be supporting them!!’

Anyway, I got pissed on free booze, met the stars and enjoyed the rest of the show.

I travelled down to London in the van with the roadies and am now comfortably settled on Chris’s settee in his flat in Willesden Green. At Cortonwood there has been an invasion of over 1,000 pigs to get one scab into work. Anyone who can try to justify that needs their head looking at! Majority rules and the majority are still on strike, ballot or no fuckin’ ballot. That’s a fact.

01. I’m Not Calling You A Liar // Florence & The Machine
02. Never had No One Ever (The Smiths Cover) // Billy Bragg
03. City of Electric Light // Chad VanGaalen
04. Basement Fever // Experimental Dental School
05. Kiss With A Fist // Florence And The Machine
06. Blood On The Sand // Ganglians
07. Now + Again // It Hugs Back
08. Renegade // King Of Convenience
09. Pousette Dart Kountry Eastern
10. Camilo (The Magician) // Said The Whale

Pama International är en engelsk allstar-ensemble. På gruppens senaste platta Pama Outernational – den sjunde i ordningen – samlas kända namn som Lynval Golding och Horace Panter från The Specials, Fuzz Townshend från Pop Will Eat Itself och John Collins, producenten bakom The Specials klassiska Ghost Town.
 
Pama International är en ovanlig reggaegrupp. De tvekar inte att blanda sina baktakter med pop, funk och, kanske mest tydligt, amerikansk 60-tals soul. Musiken är levande, experimentell och, inte minst, förbaskat kul att lyssna på.

Deras patenterade musikrecept har visat sig framgångsrikt och 2006 fick de möjlighet att ge ut en platta på legendariska skivbolaget Trojan. Det var hela 30 år sedan Trojan senast signade någon ny, och det säger något om gruppens storhet.

I december förra året släppte gruppen hyllade Highrise Campaign, en platta där intäkterna gick till att stödja antivåldsorganisationer i Storbritannien. På plattan, som delvis byggde på Cherry Oh Baby-riddimen, medverkade ett gäng kändisar – Dennis Alcapone, Billy Bragg och Mungos Hifi för att nämna några.

När det nu är dags för nya plattan är förväntningarna höga och risken att bli besviken överhängande.

Men Pama International lyckas leva upp till förväntningarna. Plattan håller inte lika höga klass som Highrise Campaign eller Trojan Sessions, men sticker ändå ut i drösen av reggaeplattor som kommit ut i år.

På Pama Outernational samsas soul med dub med roots med disco med ska. Och det funkar utan att någonsin bli krystat. Lyssna bara på Dub A Disco, Question the Answer och I Still Love You More.

Pama Outernational är tillräckligt cross-over för att kunna attrahera den stora skara som tröttnat på Duffy och Amy Winehouse och söker något mer genuint.

Plattan finns exempelvis att köpa genom gruppens eget skivbolag Rockers Revolt eller genom iTunes.

I’ve been playing this game where I ask someone, “Have I told you that ‘I don’t want to change the world, I’m not looking for a new England, I’m just looking for another girl’ lately?” the past week, then saying it’s just a joke, maybe you heard the song in Half Nelson. Well, here it is… Billy Bragg’s “A New England” from his debut album Life’s A Riot With Spy vs. Spy.

Billy Bragg “A New England”

Billy Bragg “A New England (live at Glastonbury 6/28/92)”

Kirsty MacColl “A New England”

“A New England” lyrics:

I was twenty one years when I wrote this song
I’m twenty two now, but I won’t be for long
People ask when will you grow up to be a man
But all the girls I loved at school
are already pushing prams

I loved you then as I love you still
Tho I put you on a pedestal,
They put you on the pill
I don’t feel bad about letting you go
I just feel sad about letting you know

I don’t want to change the world
I’m not looking for a new England
I’m just looking for another girl
I don’t want to change the world
I’m not looking for a new England
I’m just looking for another girl

I loved the words you wrote to me
But that was bloody yesterday
I can’t survive on what you send
Every time you need a friend

I saw two shooting stars last night
I wished on them but they were only satellites
Is it wrong to wish on space hardware
I wish, I wish, I wish you’d care

I don’t want to change the world
I’m not looking for a new England
I’m just looking for another girl
(Looking for another girl)
(Looking for another girl)
(Looking for another gi-rl)

WORKING eight hours and making my way to Washington for another two or three hours a night; this has been a rough week so far.

On my commute home today, I could feel how cold it really was. The forecasts stated as much but fifty-four degrees is not really experienced until your elbow is rolling through it at sixty plus. After five minutes at home its back on the road to Washington. On my way through the door, I noticed Strangeways, Here We Come and I grabbed it, sticking it in my pocket. I leave as proud as a parent can be, my son olleing off of two planks of wood positioned between the curb and the driveway.

A rush and a push as my momentum backward stops and first gear drags me forward.

Fall and winter music. I have discussed seasonal music with other people that I would classify as having reached the point where they have forgotten more about music than you ever knew. They share the same concept. Some rap can be fall and winter music (Getto Boys) but there is not much hiphop that can fall into that classification. The Pixies and Billy Bragg – everything prior to The Great Leap Forward – The Housemartins; Tom Waits and Don Caballero specifically What Burns and Don Cab 2.

DC is great in the spring too. Cold cobalt days that never get above 50 and sting from rain. Early spring in Pittsburgh.

MAKING my way to the huge hill between the Canonsburg and Medowlands exits on 19N, I reached for a CD in the passenger door pocket. Inserting I load This Is Our Music into the cd player, I begin the decent past Meadow Brook(?)*and I travel back, to a feeling in a moment.. where I was ten years ago.

And I remember what I was thinking about and almost every detail of memorable moments of that day. I have been through so many life changes in the interval between this current moment and ten whole years. I can barley remember that person. What I do remember plays like a movie that I am watching. I don’t remember that guy personally, but I can describe what he did. Went to school part-time and worked in a local Pittsburgh Plant and Flower store chain that went belly up because of the lack of book keeping; from shelve stacker to greenhouse keeper. Even having done the worst flower arrangement ever because the flower arranger had a customer that she didn’t like so she wanted to ensure a shitty bouquet for the woman.

The best part of that job was the final Christmas season that I was there. The manager of the store completely hated me so she would get these calls for wreath deliveries to places like Gibsonia and Robinson Washington County and ask me, “Do you feel like driving to [insert locality] ?

She was a complete and total cunt. She would treat me like the biggest piece of shit ever, always nasty and pretentious. Her husband had died a few years before I started working there and I think thisis what made her so bitter. I used to tell my co-workers that she killed him for insurance money. This is the first good example of me then and now, I would never do something like that today… well I still might but I would definitely limit my audience.

One Sunday really sticks out in my mind. I drove about 300 miles that day in a 10 hour shift; about 24 local deliveries alone. This Is Our Music was the soundtrack for the entire day. I was so high that day that I left twice without the deliveries. I remember the smell of the snow in the air – the taste of the cold on my tongue and the store with Christmas trees fully lit, lining the walls. I remember the putrid stench of the Poinsettias gassing off because they were bagged to long.

I quit that job soon after, I walked out and never went back on Christmas Eve. Karen the Plant and Flower Warehouse manager proved to be a maniacal bitch. She hired a highschool kid who started on Christmas Eve and gave him all of the deliveries, religating me to sweeping. I worked about half of my shift and told her, “Give me some of those deliveries…please?”
She smiled and told me, in front of people to shut up and sweep the floor. I dropped the broom and left. I never went back. The only person that I worked with that I considered a friend, the assistant manager, called to let me know that I was “no longer needed.” She wanted to know if I wanted to come back because she could talk to Karen and smooth everything out. I told her thanks but not to bother. I had a job two weeks later at UPMC in the Center for Continuing Education in the Health Sciences; what would eventually become my first I.T. job.

IN that aforementioned moment, I somehow took that whole day in and felt it in the span of a minute, two, five, I’m not too sure how long it lasted. Looking to my right, I realized that I had reached my destination.

Karen was fired for stealing and customer complaints a year later.

(Originally published October, 2006)

Last night, at the Prince Charles Cinema in London, there was the first central London screening of a new documentary, Breaking Rocks, directed by Alan Miles.

The documentary explains how the Jail Guitar Doors project, created by Billy Bragg in 2007, started and what they have achieved with the programme since it launched.

Jail Guitar Doors is an independent initiative which aims to provide instruments to those who are using music as a means of achieving the rehabilitation of prison inmates. JGD takes its name from the b-side of the 1978 Clash single Clash City Rockers.

Giving musical instruments to prisoners serving time is a controversial initiative. It’s not something the right-wing media will be too happy about, but the statistics on reoffending speak for themselves. Of course, the stats vary for different types of offence and prison regime, but in general if a criminal has been imprisoned, they are more than 50% likely to come back once released. This figure is significantly reduced if the prisoner has been involved in a music education programme.

The idea of giving them a guitar and showing them how to use it is not aimed at creating an army of ex-con James Blunts… what an awful thought. It’s because the guys who start learning guitar while in jail show a demonstrable increase in self-esteem and self-awareness. Just by learning something new they suddenly get the power to resist a lot of the peer pressure culture associated with drugs, and it makes them realise they can play a role in a normal society.

The challenge to the guys who are given the guitars is to show that they can come out and stay out. The guitar unlocks the realisation that they can learn and they can do something useful.

One of the main criticisms of prison education programmes like this is that prison is supposed to be about retribution and punishment. Locking these guys up and letting them rot. The issue with that attitude is that they will come out at some point. Guys doing a 3-year stretch for drugs will be back out on the streets soon, and with no idea what to do, of course they will turn back to the same life they had before coming inside.

The simple act of teaching someone to play the guitar can (and has) shown people that there is another life out there that doesn’t involve drugs, nicking from people, violence, and ultimately returning to jail.

The film is very well shot. It’s an exciting and interesting documentary, explaining the issues as well as the history of JGD. After the film screening in London, the film director Alan Miles and Billy Bragg himself did a Q&A session in person. And after the talk, there was some music. Not only Billy doing a few songs, but two ex-cons who learned to play guitar and write songs because of Jail Guitar Doors.

Take a look at some of their stuff here:

Billy Bragg does Redemption Song

Billy Bragg does April Fool’s Day – song written in a workshop with prisoners

Leon Walker, JGD graduate

Jonny Neesom, JGD graduate

For more information about the Jail Guitar Doors initiative, take a look at the website here…

(Since I started this a mostly as music blog – though I do occasionally write on other subjects – I thought it might be fun to include a series of posts devoted to albums that I love but have kind of disappeared under the radar for some reason or another.)  

Billy Bragg & Wilco – Mermaid Avenue

   The story goes that before his death, Woody Guthrie left a bunch of unpublished lyrics offering them to Dylan.  Dylan seems to confirm this in his memoir Chronicles Vol 1 (and just where the hell is Volume 2, Bob?).  I say “seems to” because it’s always hard to figure out the truth with Dylan.  In the memoir, Dylan shows up at Guthrie’s house only to be told off by the babysitter.  

  As much as I love Bob Dylan, I’m hesitant to think of the actual result.  For the first few years of his career, Dylan was intent on copying Guthrie while creating his own sound, so it would have been superfluous for him to record an entire album of Guthrie originals.  

  Which brings us to Mermaid Avenue.  Decades later, Guthrie’s daughter offers some of the unfinished songs to Billy Bragg, who then recruits Wilco to also contribute to the album.  Really, you couldn’t ask for a better combination of musicians to create an album like this.  Bragg whose leftist politics picks up Guthrie’s revolutionary spirit, and Wilco one of the few American bands in the past decade who constantly pushed the limits of what rock can achieve in the 21st century.  

   I’ve always been attached to this album for a number of reasons.  Unlike a lot of other modern folk leaning records, the album manages to sound contemporary and timeless at the same time.  It also contains perhaps three of the best opening tracks on record (Walt Whitman’s Niece, California Stars, Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key).  Walt Whitman’s Niece lyrically is really an absurd song, yet with its call and response would in a perfect world, be the ultimate bar anthem.   California Stars has kind of become the anthem from the album, with both Bragg and Wilco still performing in their set-lists.  

   I suppose what really makes this album a success is that it actually works.  Usually side projects like these fall flat on their faces. The musicians try to sound too much like their heroes. Or take the extreme route and create something that is unlistenable, and does not capture the spirit of the original musician.  But trying to modernize yet still have Guthrie’s folk spirit is a testament to both Wilco and Bragg.  Hoodoo Voodoo’s carnival sound perfectly fits the fun and childish lyrics. She Came Along to Me’s defiant attitude is expressed in the way Bragg sings “and maybe we’ll have all the fascists out of the way by then.” It doesn’t seem like a lament but rather hopeful.  

The second volume of Mermaid Avenue (which I like) is not nearly as good.  Perhaps this kind of combination could only occur once.  And as much as I like Billy Bragg, Wilco and Woody Guthrie, I think it’s the best thing to come from all three.  

“Fellow artists, the aim of this site is to encourage dialogue between people who love music and people who love making music. Our aim is to explore, through constructive debate, how our two communities can work together to shape the music industry to reflect our needs, rather than those of the multi-national corporations that control the recording industry.” – Billy Bragg on A2f2a

I listen to songs while driving from here to there and over there sometimes. I usually change them up semi-non-regularly and I realized today that … “Hey! I wonder if some of my now favorite songs actually have videos to them“.

So here are the official videos/live performances/someone’s video with the song put together for a  few songs that I think have clever lyrics … or just because I like them.

WARNING: one is sexually suggestive, one is faded, one has a showboating kid in it, one has a showboating guy in a red/green shirt (my guess is he’s the drummer), and one is someone’s version of what the video should be.

note: Bloodhound Gang, John Hiatt, Billy Bragg, Brendon Benson, and Jack Johnson are all welcome to play charity concerts on Planetross for … ever … or for charity … or some other good cause anytime. 

double note: I’ve put on 2 entries tonight … the other one is more original, but less musical. Sometimes it goes like that: sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes seems irregular sometimes … or always.

triple note: I would have included David Franj’s video for Oxygen, but there isn’t anything. Here is “God Only Knows” as a runner up:

notes to myself #35

All the songs you love between 1977 and 1984 … you will love forever.