The Correct Opinion

The Greatest Ever Pop Star - Scott Walker

Contrary, visionary, sophisticated, mercurial, prolific then reclusive: the career of Noel Scott Engel, from teen idol to avant garde experimentation, is the most magnificent in the history of popular music.

Ah, Scott... How do I love thee? Let me count the ways:

1) For being in a band called the Walker Brothers when none were called Walker and there were no brothers.

2) For “The Sun Ain’t Going to Shine Anymore” and “Make it Easy on Yourself” two of the greatest ballads of heartbreak ever recorded. “Loneliness… (bom bom) is the cloak I we-e-ear…”

3) For having the best hair ever.

4) For going to live in a monastery when the teen adulation got too much.

5) For the four mental sixties solo albums - your Trojan Horse baritone smuggling in songs about prostitutes, transvestites, opium dens, funerals and gonorrhea over enormous orchestral arrangements. And for them being commercial successes! Scott 2 was a number 1 chart topper. Scott 4, the best, was a relative failure. You can only trust the public so much.

6) For doing fuck all then getting back together with the Walker Brothers! Your songs being influenced by Eno-Bowie and in turn influencing them.

7) For Tilt, a record so impenetrable that I saw a review which gave it 0 and 5 stars – “we just don’t know.”

So, 7 ways then.

Oh! And for conning people that you were some crazy recluse when you were actually hanging around your London local playing darts. 8 ways. And mysteriously producing a Pulp album. 8 and a half ways.

Just realised that these aren't ways of loving Scott Walker at all. They're reasons. Oh well, you get the idea.

How CDs Killed Music

It’s obvious that CDs look worse than records. Cover artwork can be impressive when it takes up a square foot, but looks weak and fussy on a little piece of paper behind an increasingly scuffed and opaque piece of plastic. However, let’s not be luddites here, with some exceptions, the music does sound better… Here’s the problem with CDs: you can fit too much information on them. Pop music is disposable and brilliant, forty-odd minutes, the capacity of a record, leaves you wanting more. The time restriction allowed “artists” (some say “singers”) to choose their best material – they would *Leave Stuff Out*. Now people feel like the increased space needs to be filled, even if quality must be sacrificed. This is particularly true in hip hop. Coincidence that this genre, brilliant at making exciting bursts of music but guilty of long, filler and skit-crammed albums, came of age concurrent with the rise of the CD?

The way we listen has changed too. Take Exile on Main Street (Really. If you don’t have it then there’s probably something very wrong with you and nothing you say about pop music will be taken seriously by any right-thinking person). This ker-azzy, wandering, cavernous and fantastic double record has been put on one piddly CD. It has a power on vinyl, it looks big and exciting. Mainly though, you can explore it properly. Side 3 starts with “Happy” and ends with “Let it loose”, and that’s how it should be experienced, “I’ll stick Side 3 on again.” On CD with each track viciously biting the heels of the last, songs get “lost in the middle somewhere”. Now one can obviously skip to track 11 and turn off at track 14, but frankly life’s too short.

In conclusion then: if CDs were two times the size the size, half the length and double sided then music would be twice as good. In short, if the laser disc had caught on as a medium for albums not films, then we’d be laughing.

Eminem

Bit of a wanker. Very good at rapping though.

Crosby Stills Nash (& Young)

Better than you'd expect a group of egotistical millionaire cokeheads to be, although you probably wouldn't want a whole one. (If you would like a whole one then Deja Vu is the obvious [and correct] choice.)

The Decade that Invention Remembered

Lazy journalists and their ill thought out opinions… The Eighties contained the last flowering of inventive British pop music. Leaving aside all subjective considerations of “good taste”, how could one not warm to bands dressed up like this:

It started with post-punk and it ended with baggy. Along the way were Joy Division, New Order, Public Image Limited, Squeeze, The Specials, Big Audio Dynamite, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Smiths, The Jesus and Mary Chain and the Stone Roses (urgh). For every half decent nineties band (and is there even one British one who could unashamedly stand in that company?) there are two great ones from the previous decade. As for the pop, and of course there was dross, there were innovators making songs for the radio, the discos and the charts. Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Adam and the Ants, Madness, Dead or Alive, Culture Club, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Black Box, S’Express… they are not still listened to because people are clever and ironic, it’s because they made good songs. That’s enough.

The seventies were the sixties turned up a bit, and the nineties were almost completely retrogressive. (Concentrating on rock and pop here, there was invention in dance and hip hop, of course.) In between there was glorious and adventurous music being made by mavericks and popsmiths of the first order. Ignore the haircuts if you need to - this is the high water mark of British popular music.

There are worse choices for "My First Country Album"

The Stone Roses - Part II

Two things I’m not going to talk about. The Second Coming and Ian Brown’s voice. Now we can begin.

I struggle to see what people like in the Stone Roses. If you were 17 at Spike Island then I’ll look the other way, we all bring some youthful enthusiasms with us, but looking at them objectively? Their music is ponderous, empty, pompous and tinny. There is some talent there amongst the musicians, but they don’t know how to use it. Everything goes on so long, and has such a sense of its own importance. (Oh, another cascading John Squire solo. Brilliant.) They come from a long line of cheeky Northern scamps, but did nothing that Ian McCulloch didn’t do, and he was hardly the first. As for their supposed innovation: not jangly or funky enough. (Listen to CTA 102 by the Byrds on Younger than Yesterday. More interesting than the Roses’ career.)

How then to explain the absurdly inflated reputation this band enjoys? They came along at exactly the right time. The 80s were (superficially) about unemployment, social fragmentation and Duran Duran (Brilliant). A generation coming of age during this period had lived with their parents’ stories of the ‘60s their whole lives, and they wanted something of their own. The “second summer of love”, acid house, the “dance-rock crossover” made it seem like something was happening, something inclusive and wonderful. (To that percentage of people who ever actually take part in these movements. A lot of people were still at home watching “Colin’s Sandwich.”) It couldn’t be allowed to stand on its own, it needed to be compared to something, measured against the parties of the previous generation. They needed a Beatles, and for a time the Stone Roses looked like they could take that role. (The Happy Mondays were delinquent enough to fill the Rolling Stones tag.) So they were treated like something special, because people needed them to be something different, something more – it just wouldn’t be fair otherwise. And those boys and girls grew up to write for the NME in the nineties, and kids read their words, and Brit Pop brought back an interest in guitars and lo! the Stone Roses became mythical deities of the recent past. And then they released the Second Coming and a lot of people were very disappointed indeed. (But as we have seen above, there was little reason to expect something wonderful, even if they had spent all their time writing songs and not messing about on tractors.) Of course, we don’t need “Our Beatles”. The Beatles are our Beatles too. We can enjoy their good stuff and concentrate on commercial dance, which during this period made more innovative and vital music than anything coming from boys with guitars.

Hmmm... there is another factor which could explain some of this band’s continued popularity, and you’ll have to bear with me on this one. They made proper songs-with-guitars-and-lyrics-and-everything which could (just about) be danced to. This allowed white indie boys to intellectualise the music enough to physically enjoy it – having a purely sensual response is the preserve of women, and of black and gay people. White men don’t dance. Unless they can find an excuse to.

So you can like them if you want, they had some talent, but let’s get a grip, eh? I really couldn’t care if I never heard them again. (See also: London Calling) Actually, “Begging You” is quite a tune. I could probably hear that another couple of times. But add it all together, and it’s still worth less than “Been Caught Stealing”.

Bom, Bom, Bom...

Anyone who attacks Paul McCartney through lazy criticism of the Frog Chorus should really try harder. It’s for children, and I loved it as a kid so it’s doing its job just fine. If you have to get at something then “Mull of Kintyre” will do, for ‘tis shite.

I can’t explain.

The Who are worth less than the sum of their parts. Once this is realised you can stop worrying about trying to like them.

The better your “Hi Fi”, the more likely you are to be a prick.

These are the things you should care about in music: passion; joy; wit; sorrow; emotion and life. They are not improved by having copper wiring and gold connectors. Spending a lot of money on a stereo will make you more interested in the production, and you may well find yourself putting “Slave to the Rhythm” (tune) on repeat, and listening intently to Sting and George Michael. If I was pure, I would have a stack of ‘45s and a Fisher Price record player. Unfortunately, I am a bit of a prick so I have separates. In my defence, it’s mainly so I can dance around my room with “My Sharona” or “Welcome to the Jungle” playing really loudly without them distorting. If I ever start talking about “crisp snare sounds” then stop listening to everything I say for I will have gone to the dark side.

NB: Yes, I know a lot of music sounds better, textures, soundscapes etc. It's just a rule of thumb.