06 January, 2015
Replacements: Bastards of Young
Possibly the only video on Bizarro MTV that Beavis ever actually recommended to Butthead. Truth is they mostly all rocked.
05 January, 2015
Turned over a new leaf, then tore right through it. Pet Shop Boys: It's a Sin
Update: Fuckers don't want you watching the video, because...well, because they're fuckers apparently.
Pet Shop Boys - It's a Sin (1987) by darkub
Of all the things to block...motherfuckers...
For every thing I long to do...has one thing in common to...At school they taught me how to be...so pure in thought, and word and deed; They didn't quite succeed.
Message read loud and clear, motherfuckers.
Siouxsie and the Banshees: Israel
The incredible thing is, Sue & Steve Severin, started out literally as groupies of the Sex Pistols, in the same company in the Bromley Contingent as the likes of Sid Vicious & Billy Idol, and in Susan's case, certainly best known for their role in the onscreen downfall of Bill Grundy. And within a few short years, they were producing the likes of this.
Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream (Animals, 1977)
If I had to pick one album by Pink Floyd as my favourite, Animals would probably be it. It's certainly in the top three with Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. This is Pink Floyd ten years
on from
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, a Pink Floyd that had stumbled a little with uneven albums such as Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother, only to find themselves ever more popular and famous with the release of The Dark Side of the Moon, and having subsequently to live in its shadow. This is also Floyd in the age of Punk, a band probably eager to prove their relevance with a new more electronic sound and lyrics that reflected the political and social realities of the time. This is the Pink Floyd that would crash out two years later with The Wall, a double disc epic that ended the Roger Waters era of Pink Floyd on a high much as The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway did for the Peter Gabriel era of Genesis.
Whilst much of Floyd's more ah-hippieish work hasn't dated all that well, the darker, more reflective, and the more politically incisive songs have stood the test of time quite well. Thinking Welcome to the Machine here, Time, Money, and the like. And this album has those same sort of attributes condensed into a perfect whole, one that really should be listened to in a single hearing. It slows and builds up again with the (most played by radio) track Pigs (Three Different Ones), only to reach a crescendo in the manic and lyrically cutting Sheep:
Harmlessly passing your time in the grassland away
Only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air
The metaphor in the album of people as Pigs, Dogs, or Sheep, loosely inspired by Animal Farm is a simple one, but one that resonates to this day, as a minority of us amass ever more obscene levels of wealth and power, the Dogs of the world fight viciously for what wealth and privilege they can, and the majorities live meekly in denial and willful ignorance of their increasingly vulnerable serf-like place in society. What do you get for pretending the danger's not real indeed ?
Whilst much of Floyd's more ah-hippieish work hasn't dated all that well, the darker, more reflective, and the more politically incisive songs have stood the test of time quite well. Thinking Welcome to the Machine here, Time, Money, and the like. And this album has those same sort of attributes condensed into a perfect whole, one that really should be listened to in a single hearing. It slows and builds up again with the (most played by radio) track Pigs (Three Different Ones), only to reach a crescendo in the manic and lyrically cutting Sheep:
Harmlessly passing your time in the grassland away
Only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air
You better watch out
There may be dogs about
I've looked over Jordan, and I have seen
Things are not what they seem
What do you get for pretending the danger's not real ?
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel
What a surprise !
A look of terminal shock in your eyes
Now things are really what they seem
No, this is no bad dream
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want
He makes me down to lie
Through pastures green He leadeth me the silent waters by
With bright knives He releaseth my soul
He maketh me to hang on hooks in high places
He converteth me to lamb cutlets
For lo, He hath great power, and great hunger
When cometh the day we lowly ones
Through quiet reflection, and great dedication
Master the art of karate
Lo, we shall rise up
And then we'll make the bugger's eyes water
Bleating and babbling we fell on his neck with a scream
Wave upon wave of demented avengers
March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream
Have you heard the news ?
The dogs are dead !
You better stay home and do as you're told
Get out of the road if you want to grow old
-- Roger Waters
The metaphor in the album of people as Pigs, Dogs, or Sheep, loosely inspired by Animal Farm is a simple one, but one that resonates to this day, as a minority of us amass ever more obscene levels of wealth and power, the Dogs of the world fight viciously for what wealth and privilege they can, and the majorities live meekly in denial and willful ignorance of their increasingly vulnerable serf-like place in society. What do you get for pretending the danger's not real indeed ?
Cable Tee-Vee
'I remember when MTV used to play music videos' has become a cliche of the same sort as 'when I was a kid we had to walk to school, uphill, both ways,' but at some point the generification of American cable networks becomes something of a sad joke as cable continues to die a slow death. Perhaps the internet would have inevitably killed cable TV anyway just as it seems to have killed off not just much of the print media, but most of the field of journalism outright. But could it have been different, if instead of giving their customers an ever more crowded field of hundreds and hundreds of mostly pointless stations, the cable companies had given in, and acceded to long standing demand and offered a la carte programming ? If stations got a cut of the profits based on subscription numbers rather than relying so much on maximising ad. revenue ?
Fuck, I remember a time when A&E (Arts and Entertainment originally of course) used to show opera and ballet instead of the endless marathons of Duck Dynasty and Storage Wars they have now. When at any time of the day, any day of the year, I could turn on CNN or Headline News and get actual news, turn on the Weather Channel, and see a weather forecast, watch documentaries on the History Channel pulled from the pages of history rather than those of the supermarket tabloids. And what the hell happened to what used to be The Learning Channel (TLC) ? At least when The Nashville Network gave up the fight for country music fans to their lesser competitor CMT they were honest enough to change their name (from TNN to Spike) at the same time. With their main competitor gone, you'd expect of course that CMT today would be all Country all the time. Well, no, of course it isn't. Even the networks that seem to vaguely adhere to their original remit during business hours, turn into a vast zombie wasteland after hours and on weekends. I know someone must watch the cold case programmes on HLN and the endless prison documentaries on MSNBC, but how many episodes of this shit are there, and how many times can you watch them ?
It would be some consolation to think that at the end of all this, in our Netflix and Hulu futures, we could at least be rid of wretched companies like Time Warner Cable and Comcast, but they retain their internet monopolies of course, and, since the asshats at the FCC apparently saw no possible conflict of interest in letting Comcast buy up one of the nation's biggest and most famous broadcasters, now they're a content provider. Comcast. That Comcast. The one who tried to rebrand their Internet service, as their name is so universally loathed. Fuckers.
/rant
Now, negative infinity points for originality: The Boss. Fifty-seven channels. I remember when it was that many channels. It was heaven.
Fuck, I remember a time when A&E (Arts and Entertainment originally of course) used to show opera and ballet instead of the endless marathons of Duck Dynasty and Storage Wars they have now. When at any time of the day, any day of the year, I could turn on CNN or Headline News and get actual news, turn on the Weather Channel, and see a weather forecast, watch documentaries on the History Channel pulled from the pages of history rather than those of the supermarket tabloids. And what the hell happened to what used to be The Learning Channel (TLC) ? At least when The Nashville Network gave up the fight for country music fans to their lesser competitor CMT they were honest enough to change their name (from TNN to Spike) at the same time. With their main competitor gone, you'd expect of course that CMT today would be all Country all the time. Well, no, of course it isn't. Even the networks that seem to vaguely adhere to their original remit during business hours, turn into a vast zombie wasteland after hours and on weekends. I know someone must watch the cold case programmes on HLN and the endless prison documentaries on MSNBC, but how many episodes of this shit are there, and how many times can you watch them ?
It would be some consolation to think that at the end of all this, in our Netflix and Hulu futures, we could at least be rid of wretched companies like Time Warner Cable and Comcast, but they retain their internet monopolies of course, and, since the asshats at the FCC apparently saw no possible conflict of interest in letting Comcast buy up one of the nation's biggest and most famous broadcasters, now they're a content provider. Comcast. That Comcast. The one who tried to rebrand their Internet service, as their name is so universally loathed. Fuckers.
/rant
Now, negative infinity points for originality: The Boss. Fifty-seven channels. I remember when it was that many channels. It was heaven.
04 January, 2015
Cabin Pressure, Bon Voyage
Finally listened to the long-awaited finale of 'Cabin Pressure', one of the greatest sitcoms of our age, and it certainly lives up to, although hardly exceeds Finnemore's earlier efforts. It's perfect timing really, to go out, with a show-count that just so happens to match that of the number of letters in the English alphabet. I'm less fond frankly of JF's other output than that of the characters of MJN Air, but the guy's evidently a genius. Check out his blog at http://johnfinnemore.blogspot.com if you're somehow still in any doubt in this regard.
I'd recommend you go buy the episodes now, along with the rest of the series, if you hadn't already, but, the private organisation to which the BBC, in their infinite wisdom, gave the commercial rights to almost all of the historical radio/audio output of the BBC went bankrupt, and now almost all the radio licence-payer-funded content of what was the BBC is now in the hands of American entities like Audible, the likes of which I would scarcely recommend on my deathbed. AudioGo were hardly perfect, but compared to Audible... The latter's parent company were originally known for and still host a moderately functional search engine. Use it if you will. And bung a few dollars or quid in Finnemore's direction if you appreciate his work. I'll leave my ultimate opinion of Audible unsaid. And as for the cretin the politicos seem to end up choosing to head the BBC...
'The Lemon is in Play...'
I'd recommend you go buy the episodes now, along with the rest of the series, if you hadn't already, but, the private organisation to which the BBC, in their infinite wisdom, gave the commercial rights to almost all of the historical radio/audio output of the BBC went bankrupt, and now almost all the radio licence-payer-funded content of what was the BBC is now in the hands of American entities like Audible, the likes of which I would scarcely recommend on my deathbed. AudioGo were hardly perfect, but compared to Audible... The latter's parent company were originally known for and still host a moderately functional search engine. Use it if you will. And bung a few dollars or quid in Finnemore's direction if you appreciate his work. I'll leave my ultimate opinion of Audible unsaid. And as for the cretin the politicos seem to end up choosing to head the BBC...
'The Lemon is in Play...'
03 January, 2015
'T as D'
'T as D' in contemporary British English:
'What are you going to tell your daughter ?'
Say the above sentence, out loud, or silently. If you're an American, Canadian, Irish, Australian, New Zealander, or South African speaker of English, or basically a speaker from anywhere other than Britain, then you probably pronounced these letters basically the same way:
What are you going to tell your daughter ?
If British, then you likely, but by no means certainly may have pronounced, as one might logically expect, the following the same way:
What are you going to tell your daughter ?
Given that our systems of spelling are based, however loosely, on the pronunciation of the words at the time the spelling was codified (though how we came up with 'ch' I will never understand), presumably the latter is the earlier and more 'original' form. And yet one, that seems to be nearing extinction as the more 'American' pronunciation becomes more and more common throughout Britain with every passing year.
I never used to notice it much, but once I did, I couldn't stop hearing it, seemingly everywhere. When I heard David Cameron (descendant of royalty, and graduate of Eton and Oxford) talking in various speeches about 'the Briddish people', 'Briddish innovation', 'the Briddish economy', and the like, in a way that I could never imagine hearing from the lips of Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher, I suspected that perhaps this was on the advice of some media consultant to make him sound 'less posh.' But I could be wrong. Perhaps this is just the inevitable result of a universal linguistic shift in English pronunciation. The ubiquity of this pronunciation throughout the rest of the English speaking world suggests as much. And yet when did this shift start ? When in Britain, and when in the former colonies ? Was it people of a particular place or class in Britain who took this habit around the world, or a spontaneous shift that took place across the globe, and is only latterly now conquering Britain ?
'What are you going to tell your daughter ?'
Say the above sentence, out loud, or silently. If you're an American, Canadian, Irish, Australian, New Zealander, or South African speaker of English, or basically a speaker from anywhere other than Britain, then you probably pronounced these letters basically the same way:
What are you going to tell your daughter ?
If British, then you likely, but by no means certainly may have pronounced, as one might logically expect, the following the same way:
What are you going to tell your daughter ?
Given that our systems of spelling are based, however loosely, on the pronunciation of the words at the time the spelling was codified (though how we came up with 'ch' I will never understand), presumably the latter is the earlier and more 'original' form. And yet one, that seems to be nearing extinction as the more 'American' pronunciation becomes more and more common throughout Britain with every passing year.
I never used to notice it much, but once I did, I couldn't stop hearing it, seemingly everywhere. When I heard David Cameron (descendant of royalty, and graduate of Eton and Oxford) talking in various speeches about 'the Briddish people', 'Briddish innovation', 'the Briddish economy', and the like, in a way that I could never imagine hearing from the lips of Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher, I suspected that perhaps this was on the advice of some media consultant to make him sound 'less posh.' But I could be wrong. Perhaps this is just the inevitable result of a universal linguistic shift in English pronunciation. The ubiquity of this pronunciation throughout the rest of the English speaking world suggests as much. And yet when did this shift start ? When in Britain, and when in the former colonies ? Was it people of a particular place or class in Britain who took this habit around the world, or a spontaneous shift that took place across the globe, and is only latterly now conquering Britain ?
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