League Of Pop Week 1 REVEALS

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I'm in a huge rush today and won't be near a PC again until tomorrow but orgafun must prevail! So here are the five tracks (and what I thought of 'em, very briefly). My views are of course not intended to guide your votes, which you can cast here: http://community.livejournal.com/poptimists/387730.html

Track One: The Normal - "Warm Leatherette": Ballard-inspired track from 1978, the dawn of electropop. The key I think is the tiny shifts in inflection Daniel Miller gives the repetition of the title phrase. Not wholly unsexy.

Track Two: Marcy Playground - "Sex And Candy": I'd need a better knowledge of the minutiae of late-90s American alt-rock to work out how this was distinctive (or any good). About sex, but not to my mind sexy.

Track Three: Latryx - "Lady Don't Tek No": A little too porridgey and dour to be sexy, but I'm not sure "being sexy" is the intention here. My second placed song (discounting ones I knew).

Track Four: Sex Boots Dread - "Tickle Tune": Much-celebrated (though almost unknown outside blogosphere circles) gay rasta track, which unconfirmed but persistent rumours suggest was in fact made by Keith Allen (Lily Allen's Dad). Funny, filthy and -yes- sort of sexy.

Track Five: Candi Staton - "Sure As Sin": Sultry soul slides gently over my forebrain without making a huge impact but Staton has a tremendous voice and this would have topped my list of unknowns whether or not I was taking the theme into account.

But of course my votes MEAN NOTHING compared to yours, so vote away and I'll let you know who picked what and who ranked where on Monday.

Turning Points

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Everyone's music taste changes and evolves over time. Do you have an album or song that was a 'turning point' for you, musically? Perhaps you've had two or three turning points, or found that the combined power of a handful of songs made you think differently about a whole genre?

Are musical turning points always in the form of "OMG!" revelations? Were yours gradual or sudden?

"the clash in india"

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

= one of the coverlines on the latest NYRB and so addled am i post-pressday (as i "plan" my MONUMENTAL REBUTTAL TO EVERYONE ABOUT EVERYTHING HURRAH)* that i assumed it wz (as i just posted on worldofagwu's thread) about responses on the sub-continent to j.temple's nu-strummer doc (which i may be writing AT LENGTH abt in F!LM QU4RTERLY oo-er)

pah i wz meant to be meeting up for lunch w.someone over from america today that i wz on a panel with at emp but they DIDN'T TURN UP: i have called their hotel but no word, i can only assume they didn't get my emails abt when and where and are cross ..me for not replying EVEN THO I DID

(i waited for 51 mins but am now panicking oh noes they were 52 mins latez)

*(it really is one of those piece where nothing seems not germane, i realised while i wz swimmin at hackney lido this mornin that i wz idly developing a paragraph -- or 40 -- on swimming! TAKE THAT k SO-CALLED penk er er) (ph34r me i am very tired and sleeply today)

Some pop-flavoured questions

[mippy.livejournal.com]

I know there'll be someone here who can help - apols if this is off-topic.

* What was the socio-economic situation in small-town Scotland in the 1980s? Was it roughly like Liverpool? Manchester? Were there actually YTS schemes in place if you wanted them?

* What was the situation with sectarianism, outside of the bigger cities? Was it a constant prescence, rather like racial conflict is in small Northern towns, or something that flashed up occasionally cf. Notting Hill, Toxteth?

* I might be wrong here as I've been thinking about other things all day and am a bit fuzzy, but I would say the kind of music working-class kids listen to *outside big cities* tends to be, as a generalisation, happy hardcore or West Coast hip-hop from about 1993. (I'm thinking Bodycount or Cypress Hill here..) Or, if female, chart dance that gets played on TMF. In mainstream terms. You know, small towns that are so...insular that they seem to have a pop culture all of their own, like a version of the Eden Centre but with more graffiti. How different was this twenty years ago? Goths? Heavy metal? The post-punk/indie stuff that came back into fashion in the past few years (remember small towns catch on a couple of years after the big cities)? As a pointer, my sister was sixteen in 1986 and has never heard of The Smiths, but liked Depeche Mode. So I am slightly confused.

* How instilled with ambition were 'secondary modern' kids in the early 80s? I mean,  I could use my sister as an example as she went to one, but her dream was always to settle down and have kids so the idea of going on to career/higher education wouldn't have been there.

* Are there any novels which touch on pop culture (s as much as everyday life/plot, as in, the two are firmly intertwined and one could imagine what song the character might be humming at any given point, say? The only 80s Scottish novels I can recall right now are The Trick Is To Keep Breathing and Lanark - one being magical-realist, one being very much an interior monologue. There are a lot of sub-Coupland pop-lit writers who namedrop bands/artists to fit in with the zeitgeist, but I don't mean that. I vaguely remember a slacker-lit (!) novel with a green cover where the waiters sung REM songs, but that was about it. Amis probably hasn't been near a HMV outside of Christmas time. *Maybe* The Buddha of Suburbia, but I haven't actually read any Hanif Kureshi since I was about sixteen. The fact I am having to think hard about this suggests it doesn't happen very often, and that can't be right.

Tim McGraws Indian Outlaw using powow Imagery

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

Watch on YouTube

anyone want to parse the iamgery here?