"What's your favourite album?"

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Drawing heavily on that discussion we had on Poptimists a week or two ago, here's my latest Pitchfork column. I wanted something straightforward after last month's reaction-free one (which I'm still quite pleased with) and I appear instead to have accessed my inner Nick Hornby.

Comments

[koganbot]

Back in '88 I wrote a piece for Jack Thompson's Swellsville that was called "Smoochfaces On The Vanguard" where I was basically saying that the girl twirl of Company B and Vivien Vee and and Exposé and Maribell and Sa-Fire and Chip Chip and Deborah Allen et al. could evolve within it raving critical Stoogesness and I was implying that the criticalness of the Stooges was being leached out of post-Stooges music, which wouldn't be able to find its way back to the throb of life and the roar of language that you could find in dime-a-dozen dance music. The way I put it was that there was The Dance Of Life and then there was The Life Is Fucked Celebration Dance (which was short for The Dance Of Cantankerous Recalcitrance And Resistance To And Proto (Or Pseudo) Rebellion Against The Conditions Of Life And Dating), and I was claiming that if you started with the first you would grow the second within you without having to abandon the first, but if you went for the second while forgoing the first you ended up with nothing. The piece wasn't written well enough to go in my book, I decided, and you could get a lot of the same ideas from the pieces I did reprint, but I regret not including it because it has wonderfully passionate polemics raised to an absurdity: "This IS the Dance Of Recalcitrance, the Dance Of The Party, the Dance Of The Anti-Dull. It isn't yet the Life Is Fucked Celebration Dance. But this is where the next Life Is Fucked Celebration Dance will originate.... The future of 'punk' is disco. By this I don't mean 'punk' bands that go 'rhythmic, like'; nor do I mean dance bands that wear British attire. I mean from within disco - The Disco Dance Of Life just naturally (without necessarily trying) dances itself fucked. Because 'fucked' is, like, there. Like the Matterhorn. You put on the record or go to the disco but bring your own dance with you - because after all the record is just your soundtrack. Go for it. - Frank Kogan"

(This is an example of the famed prognosticatory ability that has made me rich today.)

So the allegiance is to something, but to what? Which record?