Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

Short sharp shock is the primary philosophy Brooklyn’s Radio 4 unleash on their 2002 album Gotham. Appropriately titled, the post punk Noo Yoik angst transmits aesthetics as dour as a Monday bank holiday stuck in a bedsit with Stephen Gerrard and Damien Duff as company, with the mildly unfair Gang Of Four label sitting just below the waterline for back up. Track 4 Dance To The Underground is the type of inductee piece found midway through the year on Uncut or Mojo compilation CDs, grabbing astonished, and probably thankful throats, after far too much acoustic chic has left the palate in a veritably queasy mode.
 
Wirey is the suitable metaphor for an edgy rumble through post apocalyptic New York streets once occupied by Sol Yurick’s and Walter Hill’s Warriors, this time it’s Anthony Roman’s lip biting bolshy boys who come to play, while the dust still settles on year zero for their dismayed city. The battle cry for a new breed becomes clear in the antagonism towards the previously structuralist myopia
 
He let her fly a new regime
Become a lecturist and venture towards extreme
 
Radio 4 are coming out to play in the industrial drizzle, James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy send them into the nocturnal snakepit with enough shrapnel to tear eardrums to shreds
 
You want to try some different scene
Well count your blessings, don’t get caught between
 
How could anyone mistake this band for another bunch of whiney post adolescent mallrats? Just listening to them from 20 paces off is enough for sweat to seep through a faux street-gang hoody brought back from the big apple by some trying too hard to be hip relative. Allmusic’s Peter J. D’Angelo is is no way stingy at what he sees in the group’s document of a city’s youth refusing to become liminal political fodder  “Half dance party, half political rally, Gotham! is a rock record for a new era. Radio 4 may have their heads in the past, but the music is still decidedly forward-thinking and it puts the group at the top of their class in the rebirth of rock”. 
 
Dance To The Ungerground has enough verstility to shake off the albatross label despite being the group’s closest thing to a well known song. It sits on the album politely waiting its turn to bite and growl, as soon as the moment arrives, 4 minutes and 52 seconds of that wirey pyschosomatic floor filling, alley crawling, feral cat scratch manfesto for an angry New York hammers home their part of the deal; get with the gang or piss on someone else’s tree. Radio 4 don’t shift the tempo for nobody.

In Daniel Orozco’s brilliant short story Orientation, there’s a moment when - during an introduction to an office environment - the narrative slips into the startling:

“Anika Bloom sits in that cubicle. Last year, while reviewing quarterly reports in a meeting with Barry Hacker, Anika Bloom’s left palm began to bleed. She fell into a trance, stared into her hand,

and told Barry Hacker when and how his wife would die. We laughed it off. She was, after all, a new employee. But Barry Hacker’s wife is dead.”

I’ve kept the Killers at arms length until now, not entirely unimpressed by their wholesome keyboard flavoured rock, and annoyed at myself for endlessly humming the trite but mercilessly catchy ‘I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier’. Listening to When You Were Young, though, my ears picked up at the end of the first verse, as things went strange and the best line in recent pop history came out:

“He doesn’t look a thing like Jesus, but he talks like a gentleman”

That line is the pop equivalent of Orozco’s story, flowing out of the song naturally but completely
out of place at the same time, for all the world like a threshold - inviting you into a skewed and
interesting world. On hearing it I was captured, as effectively as when in countless films a van
screeches up with its side door already sliding open to devour the caught-off guard protagonist to be bundled off to an uncertain fate (most shockingly used recently in Brian De Palma’s redacted - if
you’ve got the stomach for it).

All of which is to say that I’m hooked, despite the modest beginings of the song where
the rhythm section pounds along, grounded in a simple, determined, heart-quickening rutting beat, for all the world as if they were not the world’s quietest (in terms of behaviour) pop band but AC/DC kicking off a Friday night bar-room brawl. The warm fuzzy guitars and keyboards take off some of the edge, but only some, keeping it the right side of salvation.

If they’re tight, singer Brandon Flowers is loose, loose, so loose on this song - leaving
grand-canyon sized gaps for listeners to read between the lines in a tale that’s certainly about
temptation, may well be about sex (of a number of kinds) and profanity, and is coloured in with the
big broad American brushstrokes of devils and redemption, highways and hurricanes.

Like Orozco’s story, you feel like you’ve been given information, that you’re following the plot, but when you stop for a minute, it’s all too apparent that nothing is clear and the waters are muddied. Who, for example is the song being sung to? To the simplest of questions - is it adressed to a man or a woman? - there is no discernible answer (of course, if you watch Mtv you’ll be supplied with ready-made answers - but they’re imposed upon the song, rather than being integral).

It’s booming and anthemic, but in the best tradition of ‘big’ music it provides no answers, just a brilliant tune, great lines and ambiguities that are stadium-sized.

As I write, September 25th seems like it’s going to be a long long day. Far too much of what makes the ”average” shrink tick occupies my own allotment of infinity, where laboured breathing buffs up a damp silvery fog incumbent of what should be Thursday. Not for the first time, and most certainly not for the last, I have fallen hook line and sinker into yet another emotional spider’s web. Earlier I had resorted to the numbing comfort of the Romantics, the verbal haemorrhaging of Wordsworth, then Keats tangled up in a mystifying shade of blue offering shallow worthless recompense to a 21st Century lovesick boy. Both icons stood static, like the crushed flies on dusty pages, congealed blood as tributaries between ice cold letters, black as coal on the comatose fetishised editions. Turning my back on the staid purity of it all, flashbacks of empty summers slogging in a wharehouse trickled towards me, with a banjaxed CD player in the loading area as the only escape from the vengeful din of cackling fishwives. Favoured amongst the groovy part time staff, Love Is Hell sealed up the chasm with an empathy that was entirely self satisfactory, not that it mattered, when one is in the horrors, fake bonhomie would only defeat the purpose of the bruised heart healing itself through song. Empathy was for losers, something Adams and The Cardinals let everyone know with no uncertainty, a chiming jangle of chords wedged between Chris Isaak and Link Wray sat at the end of verses where delerium brought a strange sympathetic twist to the creeping Autumal ceremonies

“There’s strange weather/In the back of the room/And she’s pretty/Jesse’s spinning the tunes”

Call it angelic, ethereal, Adams is the fractured choirboy, in peril of crumbling under Brad Pemberton’s thumping neandrethal rhythms. Call it an accidental empathy, someone opens up their woes through the evils of unrequited love, and The Cardinals wail their own blues with a punky rejection of gormless submission to nature’s most potent killer of souls, something that can only be spawned through such a merciless condition

I could be serious but I’m just kiddin’ around/I could be anything, nothing, whatever, oh well/Love is hell

Yeah, love is hell alright, it’s a beast of burden, an ironic egaliterianism that can bring winter to a June day. But now it’s September and the real chill is on the way. Stay with us Ryan, keep us sane, the motions are with us again and November is peering through the cracks in the wall of a decprepid wharehouse. Love is hell, and this time the fog is so thick words of hope stifle the melodies drifting across another desolate morning after.

Lynnrd Skynrd‘s Sweet Home Alabama had two things going for it (more than many songs): A riff to launch a thousand ships, and an authenticity that was carved into the song by both its lyrics and delivery. Its two-fingered salute to Neil Young was just part of it. This song stood on its own merits, and sneered that you could like it or leave it. And many have, in equal measure.

Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London is a different beast, albeit in the same key. His song, all tongue-in-cheek and barrelhouse boogie, had no pretensions to authenticity but was original as hell, and - like the Skynrd song -  it provided a simple but elusive framework for countless jams and cover versions sine.

Kid Rock has created, if that’s the word for it, a slice of aural fan-fiction with his All Summer Long - which has become his biggest selling single to-date. He manages, with all the precision and craft of an accountant, to strip the above two songs of all their jagged edges, merging them together wrapped under  a clingfilm wrap of studio-beats, and tired cliches  to batten down any interesting faultlines. 

He’ll claim, perhaps, to have introduced his own slant to the songs, but changing Alabama to Michigan in one line is hardly on a par with, say, moving Verona to Manhattan. He’s merely changed the names and dates of the story, missing the whole point on the way to the bank.

Kitsch is a difficult concept, and one rarely used in rock circles , but if you’re looking for an illustration of it, Kid Rock couldn’t be better. Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, defined Kitsch as ‘the absence of shit’, which is to say a piece of art that removes the vulgar trappings of life in favour of an idealised form.  Calling All Summer Long art is pushing it, but it’s certainly idealised and polished to the point of removing any trace of humanity - and the paradox is that in cleaning things up so, he’s created bullshit.

One perfect example - the chorus, where he sings ‘we were trying different things, and smoking funny things’. Now, apart fromt he fact that it’s an appalingly uninventive couplet (best pointed out by Gladstone  - “Kid, I know you’ve talked about mixing Hip-Hop, Rock and Country in your music, and you’ve succeeded, cause this rhyme sucks in any style of music”), it’s a clean, clear-cut example of going against the spirit of things.  He’s walking the track-suited walk of a red-neck rocker, but singing the fluffy lines of a radio-controller keen to have all the bases covered without offending anyone. 

Could you imagine Ronny Van Zandt singing ’smoking funny things’. I think not.

All of which is a shame, because the one small shining light in this bastard mess is Kid Rock’s voice itself, which in the hands of a less polished production would be soulful. The boy can sing, but he just ain’t got the songs.

And yet it’s a huge hit. The reason is almost entirely down to the music of Zevon and Skynrd revamped for a generation that’s probably never heard of them. It’s a special moment when you hear the opening bars of either Sweet Home Alabama or Werewolves of London - shame, then, that for lots of kids out there the first time will be with this treated trash.

In the same year that Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel topped the album charts with Bridge over troubled waters, Gil Scott Heron recorded his debut album A New Black Poet - Small Talk at 125th and Lenox.  The difference couldn’t be more stark, both in terms of outlook and reception.

Simon and Garfunkel were at the height of their career, recording their fifth studio album and tensions were rife. The duo argued during the sessions and, despite being vocal politically at various points of their career, as a result opted not to include the only overtly political song of the recordings Cuba si Nixon no. They were repaid with an album that spawned (though I balk at its use, it seems to me that ’spawned’ is more than appropriate here) a number of huge hit singles that meant everything and nothing to millions of people.

Gil Scott Heron, on the other hand was recording his first album - a live recording in a nightclub with the small group of David Barnes on percussion and vocals, Charlie Suanders and Eddie Knowles on percussion, and Scott Heron himself singing and playing guitar and piano. It’s as intimate as S&G’s album was polished and spacious. It’s also about as political as you’re ever going to get, while still staying on the side of art as opposed to preaching or propoganda.

The album’s most famous track is, justifiably,  The Revolution will not be televised - a template for Scott Heron’s socio-political raps that would influence so heavily african-american music later. I want, though, to recommend to you a different track. One that’s  more traditional in terms of its structure -which probably accounts for its relative obscurity - but one that packs no less powerful a punch.

The song opens with Scott Heron introduction “Who’ll pay reparations on my soul?”, his voice rich and questioning. Thereafter it’s as taut, angry, and beautifully melodic as any protest song can be. The guitar and percussion start off at breakneck speed (for an acoustic song, let’s be clear) and Scott Heron and Barnes singing push and pull each other  through America’s troubled history, chiming together repeatedly ‘but who’ll pay reparations on my soul?’.

Scott Heron has been criminally neglected, and criminally targeted in the intervening years, going in and out of jail on drug possesion charges (and apparently becoming H.I.V. positive in the process) most recently being paroled in 2007.  It would seem that there’s a clear answer to the song for him personally - the only person picking up the tab for Scott Heron has been himself. He is, according to sources on Wikipedia, back recording and writing now - something we should all be grateful for.

On a wider scale, the song remains as relevant, angry, and unanswered as ever - as we head in to an election campaign where Barak Obama’s race is something that needs to be discussed.

“What about the red man
Who met you at the coast?
You never dig sharing;
Always had to have the most.
And what about Mississippi,
The boundary of old? 
Tell me,
Who’ll pay reparations on my soul?”

Wearing your heart on your sleeve is a cagey endevour, something which New Zealand’s indie deities The Clean go for broke with on Stars. For this cat it’s the most remarkable musical success of 2001, a year when indie took an ice cold shower and cured the jaded malady of the scurrying Brit Pop hangover. On their Getaway album, the wiley kiwis give alt-rock back its dignity. The stand out interstellar ode is a shimmering elegy to the sweet little mysteries of the galaxy, a droning bass gives the minimalist lyrics suitable company in the enchanting vortex, sexy old school synths (think Old Grey Whistle Test) dart in and out of the hypnotic imagism, a Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night for post-modern seers fleeing 21st Century pop culture proliferation.

Masters of subtle guitar pop since the late 1970s, The Clean summon control of a genre, that despite its familliarity, laughs heartily at any one label. Sporadic as they wish to be, those lyrical patterns, singular images of close natural comforts, trampoline themselves in slow motion all around the thickened blankets of rhythm guitar, a process of recall connected to west African bonfires or New Orleans moonlight rituals, with every participant staring mesmirised at the same dazzling source of infinte attraction. Not content to thrive on fads, The Clean engage you to the point where you cannot switch off 10 minutes after the track has finished, thus you return time and again to the spinning vortex, the familiarity of a trance that brings unspoken enlightenment.

Like Dylan Thomas, The Clean’s 5 minutes of overcoming the darkness throws misery and defeat onto their arses. In a void of infinte black there are stars that never surrender. The Clean’s telescopic souls pulsate with vigour, raging against the dying of the light.