Music – Page 2 – Wis[s]e Words

If only you had a friend like Andrew Ridgeley

Published on July 11, 2023Leave a comment

I watched the Netflix Wham! documentary on Sunday mainly because Mic Wright tweeted about it a few days ago:

The Wham! documentary on Netflix is one of the most beautiful things ever. And as we are having a discourse about men not talking about their feelings or being supportive: Andrew Ridgeley is a perfect example of someone who loved and supported their friend no matter what.

I was young enough in 1982-1986 to not be prejudiced against Wham!; they were just part of the pop landscape I grew up with. So I never had the disdain for their music that the eighties music press seemed to have. However, I did buy into the myths pushed by them: that George Michael was the one with all the talent in Wham and Andrew was just a hanger-on who got lucky. As the documentary makes crystal clear this was completely wrong. It was in fact Andrew who was the handsome one, the song writer, the stylist when Wham began. George lacked his confidence and wasn’t as skilled yet as he was. It was because Andrew was there as an example, as a friend, that George could grew into the superstar and artist he was when Wham ended.

Andrew was the booster rocket to George’s shuttle into star orbit. He lifted him up higher than he could’ve flown on his own, then dropped back to Earth once his job was done. It’s amazing how much he supported George, to the point of ending his own stardom for him. And not only that; he also shielded him from the gutter press. His fuckboi behaviour drew the attention of the tabloids which meant they never found out about George being gay. And being outed as gay in the eighties meant the end of your career. Not to mention continuous harassment from the press.

So cheers Andrew Ridgeley. If only we all had friends like you.

Ryuichi Sakamoto 1952 – 2023

Published on April 2, 2023Leave a comment

Anime News Network reports that musician and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto passed away on the 28th of March. He was a composer for several classic anime movies including Wings of Honneamise and Appleseed as well as one of the members of Yellow Magic Orchestra, a pioneering Japanese electronica music group. I only discovered the YMO last year, when feeling nostalgic for Hibike Euphonium I went to watch clips of the music performances in it and found this clip again:

Until then I’d always thought that it, like much of the other music in it, had been composed for the series, but the comments on it showed that it was actually a rather well known song. So I finally googled it and found out it was a Yellow Magical Orchestra song. Hibike Euphonium just turned it into a marching song. Having finally heard the original that turned out to be excellent as well.

This is of course just the tip of the iceberg with regards to Ryuichi Sakamoto’s work. But without this song having been used in Hibike Euphonium, I might’ve never heard of him or the Yellow Magic Orchestra and that would’ve been a pity.

“The Only Boss We Listen To”

Published on January 9, 2023Leave a comment

Tom Williams on Bruce Springsteen’s lasting appeal to the left:

Springsteen’s music seems to come from an intuitive understanding of oppression, exploitation and life at the margins. As a multi-millionaire, Springsteen is, by any Marxist definition, no longer working class, but he is from the working class, of the working class, and his understanding of the complexity and contradictions of working class life transcends his economic status. His work has a boundless empathy for those holding on for dear life, eking their way from one day to the next, from his father and his factory colleagues ‘outside the foreman’s gate, with death in their eyes and hearts filled with hate’ to the sad-eyed sex worker in ‘Candy’s Room’, which juxtaposes a typically muscular, whooshing E Street Band chorus with a delicate, twinkling first verse that treats the titular Candy with tenderness and sensitivity.

Darkness on the Edge of Town was the first Springsteen album I bought, sometime in ’84 or ’85, when he had became a superstar on par with a Michael Jackson or Madonna, purely because it was cheaper than Born in the USA, the album that had made him that famous. I’d inadvertently made the correct cheap out of sheer cheapness there. Darkness is the key album you need to understand Springsteen and understand why even decades later he can still related to where he came from. Springsteen’s first two albums had been very different from anything he would do later, Dylan being one influence, but also having a certain funkiness that would disappear with Born to Run, the one that made him a breakout star. From it you can sort of see the kind of career he could’ve had if that long, protacted legal battle with his ex-manager hadn’t interfered. For three years he couldn’t record, just tour and it drained out a lot of the optimism he had before. But it also meant that at this crucial period he had no choice but to keep in touch with his roots, a working class band for mostly working class audiences still. When he was finally free to record again, the end result is a bleak album, not quite as bleak as Nebraska or some of the darker parts of The River, but full of stories about losers and working stiffs trying to make it through life. It’s the album that made me a lifelong fan in a way Born in the USA couldn’t have done, an album that would forever ground Springsteen.

We should probably not underestimate the influence of the E-Street Band here either. If you listen to the Lost Masters, bootlegs of studio tapes from that period of 1977-1984 you get a glimpse in how much of the song writing was also a collaborative affair, how much the Band influenced the Boss and vice versa. Springsteen has always been capable of working solo or without the E-Street Band structure, as Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad have proven, but it’s no coincidence that his worst creative period was in the nineties, where he completely stopped using them.

For me personally, I don’t think that was Springsteen who made me a socialist, but discovering his music the way I did at the time I did, certainly helped made it easier.

Ten years ago today

Published on July 15, 2022Leave a comment

With 4.4 billion views literally more than half the planet has seen this:

Over five million comments. I’m sure there were people in the rest of the world who knew about Korean pop music even in 2012 but Gangnam Style was still very much a novelty hit wasn’t it, driven by the video and dance more than the song itself. Hard to not see the phenomonal success of it, the first video to break a billion views on Youtube as opening the way for Korean pop music and pop culture in general to be accepted in the west. Every so often I find myself watchhing the video again and every time it’s still as good as the first time I watched it.

Your Happening World (clean out your tabs! clean out your tabs!)

Published on May 29, 2022Leave a comment

Some of these tabs have been open for months.

We’ve Made a Rare Animation Artbook Free to All — The author of Cartoon Modern, Amid Amidi, owns the book’s copyright and digital rights — and has written that he wants to see it reborn. “Would be delighted if someone scanned in and made available a high-quality PDF of Cartoon Modern,” he tweeted in 2019. “Book has been out of print for a long time and should be readily available to all.”
Download Cartoon Modern: compressed .PDF — 319 MB or uncompressed .CBZ — 4.6 GB.
Out of Touch/Out of Time — We remember the ghost of Lucky Star, so representative of what it meant to be an anime fan at that time. What was contemporary fan service is now a time capsule. Before legal streaming and simulcasts, before anime was something Netflix would spend millions remaking into live-action, when anime was kind of, well, cringeworthy. Maybe that’s why more problematic elements stand out these days. At the time, you had to take the embarrassment as par for the course, even a badge of honour that you could take it, unlike the normies. Lucky Star is a bit cringe.
Iraq, The Last Pre-War Polls — The final polls to be published before the war in Iraq started, conducted last weekend, all found a shift in public opinion in favour of British involvement in the war but still found a majority disapproving, both of military action and of Tony Blair’s handling of the Iraq crisis. Still relevant twenty years on as evidence that no, not “everybody” was in favour of the War on Iraq.
Dub Influence Vol 3: Snoopy — Yes! For our third installment of ‘Dub Influence’ we are very lucky to have a chart from the legend that is Snoopy. What Snoopy doesn’t know about reggae, dub and music in general… ain’t worth knowing. This got me on a dub/reggea kick a few months ago when I read this.
Transformers UK — the comic that (nearly) cheated death — This is the story of the comic that never was. Or, more accurately, the comic that nearly was.
bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/lists/50-key-anime-films — From the breakthrough of Akira in 1988, through the exquisite films of Miyazaki Hayao and others, Japanese animation has captivated audiences around the world. But anime’s history runs deeper still. Here we select 50 titles that celebrate its full, fascinating riches.
We’ve Got A File On You: Insane Clown Posse — VIOLENT J: And the amount of gay Juggalos out there is really surprising. I think about them doing their research and getting the old records, getting excited about it, and getting their hearts broke or something, you know? I tell my daughter, “For the rest of your life, when your friends ask why your dad said that, say it’s because your dad was a fool. Don’t defend me. Say I was a fool then, but I’m not now.” There’s no excuse. I was going with the flow, and that’s the very thing we preach against — being a sheep. And that’s what I was doing.