Three Monkeys Online - the free current affairs & arts magazine

There may be some artistic value hidden deep in the mix, but the prime concern with 99% of hip-hop collaborations is marketing ’synergy’.  Like fancy fashion houses developing perfumes, the important thing is establishing the logo, and then attaching it to as many different markets/products as possible. Naomi Klein’s ground-breaking  No Logo may have established its thesis examining big name brands like Nike and Tommy Hilfigger,  but the system it exposed is equally valid for the business empires of Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Beyonce etc.

The genesis of the Judgement Night soundtrack was presumably no different. Take a list of big name hip-hop artists and put them together with big name rock acts, and you’re bound to get a ‘crossover’ hit (the same principle behind the Jay-Z Linkin Park album Collision Course). 

The brand in this case, though, wasn’t sufficiently robust to do anyone any good. The movie sucked, and the soundtrack album while recieving decent reviews and a reasonable amount of airplay, hardly set the world on fire.

Marketing synergy is ironic when it comes to the collaboration between Teenage Fanclub and De La Soul, fallin, that features on the album and is without doubt the best of these thrown together products (neither of the bands had met before the recording). The two bands are forever dismissed - with some reason - as slackers. Groups that should have been huge, but though filled with talent lacked the fire in the belly required for any world-class brand. 

The song breaks all the rules for this type of thing, and is all the better for it:

1) Since the days of Run DMC and Aerosmith the rule is that hip-hop goes with rock (the harder the better).  Even De La Soul seem in agreement, when recently they talked of doing another similar collaboration but with someone like Linkin Park or Korn

2) When two brands meet you have to push the bravado all the way. These slackers base a song not around bling, or pheremones, but about falling flat on your face -  a washed up rapper (’and the teenage fans are heat’). Both groups need a serious lesson in self-promotion from a guru like P.Diddy ( How about a drive-by for starters? There’s seven of you involved, so we can afford to lose one - and it’ll create great publicity)

The song is glorious though, based around laid back guitars, a Tom Petty sample, and De La Soul’s characteristically sloping light-hearted rhymes. It wins the Monkey Tunes award for laidbackness, even though all involved sound like they’re firing on all cylinders, particularly at the end when the groove takes off. 

Aynsley Dunbar could’ve been a contender. Take the two overwhelming and contradictory pieces of evidence. One, his 1967 self-composed, acrid billowing account of romantic hindsight Warning, then place it alongside the other, his poodle rock sojourn of 1987, as a rather subdued skinthumper for a Whitesnake who went for the Rock N’ Roll Gok Wan treatment to make themselves more palatable for half-hearted Stateside audiences. To (mis)quote Hank Scorpio, “No-one ever says Whitesnake…” Let’s stick with 1967 then, shall we…

Other acts gauge into the zeitgeist of post Mod/Rocker binaries with greater zeal than The Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation, which is all very fine really, as Warning has no actual need to jostle for space with Black Magic Woman, Astronomy Domine, and Yer Blues who all scuffle like 14 year old schoolboys trying to impress a spoiled blonde caked in mascara for the first time. No, Warning, as Black Sabbath testified on their eponymous debut album a few years later, can tap into any source, blues for anyone in the mood for subtle vengeance after being screwed around once too often, garage rock for a Saturday afternoon in the suburbs, borderline Jazz, and obviously in the case of Sabbath, proto-metal.

Knob twiddler Mike Vernon must have spent a lot of time snooping around desolate cathedrals as his ‘catch ‘em by surprise’ job on Victor Brox’s petrified vocal shows, while Aynsley himself is in a zone that the pounding lifeless percussion of 1987 shouldn’t be allowed to sully. Listen to how the song literally walks its way into every nook and cranny, if a black cat strolls past, don’t be surprised is what I’m trying to get at. Everyone is off-guard here, band, listener, Vernon himself (and thankfully so too), so in effect the song becomes a cautionary tale that all the same reminds everyone that the protagonist would probably like to be fucked around again, just so he can sing something as badass as this in the future and pull a chick off the back of the one who shanghaied him in the first place.

Warning is predictably difficult to locate. Technology means that CD versions shouldn’t be to tricky to find, though to really get into the sultry cloudy moonlight groove of Dunbar’s finest hour, try and root out the original vinyl 45, even for that few quid extra it’s worth it, just to sit alongside these guys back in ‘67, knowing that one-way love won’t find an outlet as alluringly morose as this for its midnight ramblings until… Well, that’s the beauty of actually being there. Cheers Aynsley.

It may seem like heresy (and a rip-off of a Chuck D. line), but the Clash didn’t mean shit to me when I was growing up. I was six years old in the summer of ‘77, and by the mid eighties their punk revolution had already long-been mainstreamed , commercialised (some would argue also by the band themselves) and robbed of its political value.

The first Clash tune that I heard that really grabbed me was the Mick Jones’ sung should I stay or should I go, and I heard it not on the grapevine, but through a Levis commercial - oh the shame of it all.

Since then I’ve had a mild curiosity about the band, but never a fully fledged enthusiasm. To me,  there always seemed a little bit too much bluster and posturing about the Joe Strummer led band. A revolutionary zeal that, like Strummer’s voice, didn’t always sit well with the actual music. When it worked, like London Calling it was brilliant, but more often than not it didn’t. 

Not a popular opinion perhaps. Watching Julien Temple’s recent documentary on Joe Strummer, you’ll hear how important both the band and Strummer were to various artists including Bono, Anthony Kiedis, Jim Jarmusch, and Johnny Depp. It’s an opinion, though, that if anything was strengthened by watching Temple’s film - Strummer was an important artist on lots of levels, but chief amongst his attributes was a charisma and enthusiasm, and it was one that I’ve never really clicked into.

Jump forward to last year, though, and a friday night in a small bustling bar I sometimes frequent. It’s the sort of place where the guys behind the bar use judgement rather than measures, and are liable to drink into the profits of a night, whilst turning the music up. The bar men are clash fans, and most people are chatting away, almost absent-mindedly interacting with the music. Heads are nodding gently, fingers are tapping along to tunes like Police and Thieves,  Rock the Casbah, Train in Vain, and Bankrobber.

Nothing extraordinary.

Then, the opening riff of Police on my back comes out, and we instantly move from finger tapping to jumping in the air. The bar men trampoline in time to the song, which goes at breakneck speed. Every song has a standard speed, and an ideal speed which is often just a fraction faster - not too much, which would sound careless and clumsy; if done properly, that increase in speed is like a graceful accelaration, like someone tripping out of a tackle.  This song’s original authors, The Equals (a fine London band, including Eddy Grant) played the song at its standard speed. Not too fast, and not too slow. When the Clash took it on for the Sandinista! extravaganza they brought it up a level, to that ideal speed. No-one will ever be able now to play Police on my back faster or slower than the Clash’s version, or at least play it at a different speed and sound credible or good.

And that, my friends, is a long-winded way of saying why this is very much a monkeys’ tune.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sq_HtgGOIfE

There’s an oldish interview with Glen Hansard (the frames / swell season) in TMO, where he talks about poetry, saying “Poetry stirs the blood. Poetry makes men go to war. If you listen to any of the speeches from Bush or the statements from Al-Qaeda, it’s all poetry, and that’s what makes men kill. ”

I heard the news today, oh  boy, and amidst security council vetoes, schools being bombed, and the inability to do anything, I’ve momentarily lost my appetite for singers singing songs. 

Offering a moment of peace and reflectionis the Italian pianist Giovanni Allevi, with his melancholy and beautiful track Back to Life. Allevi, a shy and akward composer who has touched a chord with a wide and diverse audience in his native Italy, plays music that would be classified by the short-sighted as ‘classical’ but it transcends boundaries and snobbish pigeonholes.

Just what’s needed in these dark days. (if you feel like doing something, how about signing the avaaz petition ‘stop the bloodshed in Gaza‘)

Why do we sing? Why do we force air out of our lungs, crafted by muscles along the way in to song? The prime evolutionary argument tells us that it’s something to do with getting it on -  most people’s vocal range diminishes with age, as they pass their sexual peak. But equally important is the fact that from our earliest moments we use our vocal capacity to draw people to us, to aid us, to communicate.

And during  the darkest moments, when we grieve, it seems natural to turn to song - the noise produced proving to us how alive we are.

That primal grieving defiant voice is, surprisingly, at the heart of this song by flavour-of-the-month band the Fleet Foxes. Surprising because their record is almost the antithesis of primal, based as it is on crafted melodies, thoughtful lyrics, and gentle sounds. And yet it’s perfectly in place on the album - which is as good as everybody is saying. 

The song opens with light guitar, before stripping back to the essentials of Robin Pecknold’s sweet and strangely anachronistic voice. As he sings the first verse, a hand taps a rythm on the guitar body, the only concession to accompaniement. This voice is called to testify, and all - including his fellow musicians - remain silent in respect, until he builds to the crux of the song:

“Oliver James washed in the rain no longer”

What worlds and mysteries are held in this simple song and statement. Is it a song about death? A trembling elegy to a drowned friend? A song about birth? About purification? All that’s clear is that water and washing are involved - the rest is for you to make your mind up.

What will remain with you, though, is how right that voice sounds singing that line.

The anniversary of Phil Lynott’s death is a strange one, in that it already has a clear and established mythology and ritual associated with it; one  set out by the singer himself. In the song King’s Call, the Irish songwriter ostensibly talking about the death of Elvis, prefigured how he would himself be remembered.

The first bands I remember seeing (and liking) on Top of the Pops as a kid were Abba and Thin Lizzy, but it would be a lie to say that I was a die-hard lizzy fan while Lynott was alive. In fact, like many of my contemporaries, the announcement of his death on January 4th 1986 was not something felt particularly deeply at the time. It was a footnote, a talking point, but little more. 

Later, though, discovering more and more of Lizzy’s records, with their melodies that seemed to resonate from somewhere deep in the Irish spirit (despite the fact that the majority of Lizzy’s guitarists were not Irish), and their romantic lyricism, I would do exactly as the song suggested and stay in with close friends drinking and listening to the albums over and over again.

It’s a habit I’ve grown out of - but let’s do it virtually today together with this brilliant track from the much over-looked early album Shades of a Blue Orphanage.  No need to explain why it’s so good - just listen to it, and enjoy.