A kung fu fighter in a disco

Shabba Ranks.

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i spose the measure here is some artist/song you'd like to hear playing in a club even tho there might be an adverse moral reaction to it in some degree

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oops, that wasn't actually meant to be a response to you kat. esp as that's a good example. we all dance along to signor ranks right?

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Ah. You mean like when the mums and dads went mental in the 50s when they found out their kids were dancing to sechsy Elvis?

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Doubt our Shabba would go down well at G-A-Y.

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GPWM. now i'm trying to recall any similar material being played at the gay clubs i gone been in.

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carsmilesteve.livejournal.com

Jonathan King?

but yes, i think this mainly leads back to the "right-on white boys be liking dancehall" thing doesn't it?

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jeff-worrell.livejournal.com

Fear of a Black Planet is best PE album despite "Meet tha G that Killed Me" etc.

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blue-russian.livejournal.com

Black Planet really is the best PE album, but doesn't this kind of logic lead one back to the racial stuff again, where huge swathes of rap and hip-hop have to be written off b/c they glorify violence and/or denigrate women. If you want out of that cul-de-sac, aren't you forced to talk about 'authenticity' (ie., 'it's all just a pose' so it's okay to like it)?

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rap is overtly and self-consciously a music of clashing opinions (even just in the rapped words alone), before you even get to the (implicit?) ideologies of the samples -- and plenty of the very ferocious stuff is also an expression of conflictedness in any one mind-voice

think of it as a play w/o a moralistic last act yet("it's all acting so..."): authenticity needn't come into it (TS: mannerist acting vs method acting); and YOU'RE the one who'se being dragged on-stage to direct-act-cause the closure

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celentari.livejournal.com

Dre got some bitches from the city of Compton
To serve me, not with a cherry on top
Cause when I bust my nut, I'm raisin up off the cot
Don't get upset girl, that's just how it goes
I don't love you hoes, I'm out the do'

i.e. I will shag you and leave you and that's just how it is. Obnoxious, but I like the song.

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if you treat all "artworks" (however small) as a big old squabblecake of contradictory layers -- or a patch of conversation arguing with itself as well as its surround -- this issue becomes much easier to handle: ie can you separate out the [-x-] and the anti-[-x-] elements in [item under consideration]? can you hear how the [FORCE OF EVIL] is being wrestled with, or allowed to win? (cf also trotsky's useful phrase REACTIONARY UTOPIAS)

on ilm i used to call this the "anti-n4zi hihat argument" (a catchy meme which NEVER CAUGHT ON boo) -- by which i suppose i was implying that (let's say) the political argument of the RHYTHM in n4zi sk4 is at subtle subliminal war with the political argument of the WORDS

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with shabba (and a lot of ragga) the "ideology" of the words-as-lyrics is NOT in sync with the "physical ideology" of the mode of word-delivery or the ideology of collective dance itself -- hence simultaneous attraction and repulsion

and opting for one OR the other as the "pure truth" of the song sorta kinda misses the conflicted essence (i first wrote "point" there, which assumes shabba would see things my way here, but maybe he wouldn't at all -- however HIS justification of the song's politics isn't and shouldn't be definitive)

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i think this issue (at least in the simple place i've started from) is exactly the point where the songs are intentional creations, are "veridically authored", so the person(s) involved become tangled up in there and this drags in the moral. i.e. more so than if you treat the song as an isolated (internally in/coherent) entity.

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ok but where is this true? i haven't followed much of the ~~stepin fetchit~~ er er stephin merrit argt, but even he is a. a strong-version auteurist and b. operating at a cross-fluence of conversations, discourse and er "music tongue-types", some of which he has absorbed totally unconsciously, others he is tussling with guardedly and with ideological articulacy ect ect

there is no such thing as a private language -- this applies to all musics also outside a very lovelorn militant wing of ultra-modernism (which insisted on reinventing the language new with each work)

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it's true at the point you can feel guilty about liking a song. How can you feel guilty about liking a song? the song hasn't done anything. even bad words you can argue are not in themselves guilt inducing. tho obv a good ol-singalong song that calls for you to "throw the jew down the well" should, but that's already going that bit further into getting YOU to say something, well meant or not.

so where can the guilt be imported into a song? (another way of recasting my initial question) from the people involved in its creation was my initial answer, and was wondering about other ways.

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"if you like this song you are one of us"
vs
"to be one of us you must agree with us"

music is NOT belief-sticky, which words (even songwords) are: so the second -- however much assumed or hoped for by some -- fails (personally i am inclined to argue that its NECESSARY failure is one of the reasons music is socially useful: its ability to create gatherings that aren't POSITION-based...)

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freakytigger.livejournal.com

So what is at subliminal war in the work of Gary Gl1tter?

I can actually see this more - staying with the same area of crime - with W1ll1am M4yne, the way in his work there's a sense of children as individuals, moral agents and still very 'allowed to be' children. (But then on the other hand the horror of his case is the way that - before it all came out - he struck me as a writer who really understood children. Which then led me to think - really understanding children is a v v useful skill for a p34d0 to have, it's something both - ugh - 'aspects' of WM's life would have tried to foster.)

Somewhat grim thoughts for a Friday afternoon eh!

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well i have never LIKED gg's work (in the face of MUCH POPTIMIST HIVEMIND STUBBORNNESS back in the day) so i am inclined to argue that attractions and replusions really ARE present, like, empirically

but actually identifying the strands is the work-not-done that i am invoking (rather than, say, DOING it)

(the kind of work i'm talking abt = like when kogan sez a GREAT musicologist wd be able to link up doors basslines with meltzer's vomit-pill)

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the good side of GG

Green Gartside
Gina G
Gloria Gaynor
GoGo's

the bad side of GG

G*ry Gl*tter
Gus Gus
Goo Goo Dolls

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blue-russian.livejournal.com

I'm with Tigger on this. GG is a very different case from latter day Jacko (cited below), where you can see the 'crimes' he ascribed to him seeping into his work. There was -- drawing on very vague remembrances now -- certainly something lascivious to his songs, but lots of rock n pop is. At the time, no more likely to be a pedophile than, say, David Essex.

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well the point i am arguing is one which (for example) sets the ideology of the BASSLINE against the the ideology of the brass section, and in this case it's pretty hard not to find yrself reading bad stuff back into not-at-the-time obnoxious material (tho as i say i ALWAYS found him obnoxious so i have a teenytiny get-out here)

what i once wrote about j.king (http://www.freakytrigger.co.uk/jking.html)

one of the reasons i haven't finished my "teach mark s a lesson" about m.bolan's unicorn is that i find the formerly innocent topic of HOT GOBLINISM is these days a bit toxic

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Hmm. Late era Michael Jackson?

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does being found guilty in the court of popular opinion tip poptimism into vigilantism?

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Jarvis thort so...

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"i am the damned/i am the dead/i am the agony inside a dying head"

i think there is lots in wacko's work -- from the late 80s on -- which clues you in to trouble in mind (cf stuff kogan and i both wrote about him back then)

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Also wot abt dude from the Darkness who has turned out to be bigoted Xenophobic Bosch-bashing Barsteward?

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HEIN?

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He's done a racialist world cup song.

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carsmilesteve.livejournal.com

xenophobic perhaps...

he is so full of coke he doesn't know where he is...

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blue-russian.livejournal.com

If you go down this path - taking Justin seriously - then don't you have to take Ozzy et al's Satanism as well? It seems pushing the envelope, although perhaps it's not fair to compare such a short career with longer (and more successful) ones.

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True. He was the most recent one I can think of though - the interviews he's done re: his world cup song have seen him make an Utter T0ssp1ece of himself.

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carsmilesteve.livejournal.com

i'm more reminded of the GOSH AREN'T WE CONTROV antics that surrounded the manics about the third single into the "gold against the soul" campaign, when they appeared to be pretty much down and out.

i can't see justin coming back with a holy bible though somehow...

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Xenophobic, yes (stand corrected).

A mild case perhaps but still quite morally queasy for me. I don't usually have trouble listening to records by ppl who are Utter Cvnts but if the record is bad as well it magnifies the cvntiness of the artist...

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miss-newham.livejournal.com

'Rock and roll' by Gary Glitter is VERY good, but I prefer the Human League's version.

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giddyoldgoat.livejournal.com

WHITEHOUSE

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freakytigger.livejournal.com

We're giving the concept of pleasure a good fisting here, no?

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