Dutch Cock rock group Diesel had a minor hit over here with “Goin’ Back to China”. One of those songs you know from hearing it on the radio occassionally. A decent enough rock song, with a little oriental(ist) flavour thrown over it, but nothing special.
Imagine my surprise when listening to an anthology of Japanese pop singers from the eighties and hearing a familiar melody, somewhat sped up and with a sax rather than a guitar solo:
No clue why a Dutch rock song would turn up a year later at the other side of the world in a disco version, but I’m glad it did. Yoko Katori’s version is rather nice as well.
Fleetwood Mac co-founder Peter Green has passed away age 73. To be honest, I was under the impression he was dead already.
This is him playing my absolute favourite song from his version of Fleetwood Mac, “The Green Manalish”, which I first heard in Judas Priest’s version on Unleashed in the East. The original turned out to be even better. Priest’s one is fun but this is so much heavier and sinister. It’s always a bit sad to imagine what he could’ve been, what Fleetwood Mac could’ve been had he not taken that acid hit on tour in the same year this was filmed, had he not left the band. Don’t get me wrong, I like the Fleetwood Mac as it actually existed as well and Rumours is still the best album recorded by people who really shouldn’t have been in the same room together, but there was so much promise in Green’s version of the band as well. Imagine if it had kept up that heavy blues sound and refined it further. As it is, it took Fleetwood Mac the better part of a decade to get over his loss.
From January 1987, the very first episode of Vara’s Vuurwerk, a seminal Dutch heavy metal radio show. Hosted by pop icon Henk Westbroek, always a bit tongue in cheek, outraging the real metalheads. Yet this show introduced me to so many metal acts: Metallica, Queensryche, Alice Cooper, Vengeance, Testament, Sodom, Annihilator nevertheless. A rarity in a time when there were only a dozen or so radio channels and metal was never played on them. It was either this, or the slightly elder metal fans at high school to introduce you to new bands. Especially influential were the annual listeners Top Fifty shows, one of which I turned into a Spotify playlist. It really gives an impression of what metal was like back then. Or at least what the listeners thought was great.
Which raises a difficult question: What exactly is so queer about Springsteen? Is it his extreme butchness, so practiced and so precise that he might as well have learned it from the oldest lesbian at a gay bar? Is it because his hard-earned, roughly hewn version of love is recognizable to those of us for whom desire has often meant sacrifice? Or is it something simpler? Do many queers love Springsteen because nearly every song he has produced in his 50-year career reflects a crushing, unabiding sense of alienation and longing—and what could be more queer than that?
The story of Bruce Springsteen is well known. Two albums that made him and the E-Street Band Jersey stars, a breakthrough album after the band got tweaked a bit with Born to Run, crowned the future of rock and roll, then fucked over by his first manager and forbidden from recording for a few years. The band spent the three years between Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town touring, honing their craft. Once they re-emerged, older and more cynical, most of Bruce’s original optimism had disappeared.
It’s that backstory that makes his music so much more grounded than many of his rock contemporaries. His songs don’t offer fantasies, though they can offer hope. His most famous hit sounds so much like a patriotic anthem Ronald Reagan wanted it as a campaign song, but is actually a seering indictment of the realities of his “Morning in America”. Even at his most insufferable, on Human Touch/Lucky Town he still can’t quite forget his working class roots. He walks the walk too: doing fund raisers for the Democrats, tours for Amnesty International and the like. He has spoken out against police violence and for Black Lives Matter and of course wrote the above song about the murder of Amadou Diallo. He isn’t perfect, but his heart is in the right place.
I became a fan when I was ten, eleven. One of the first albums of his I owned, was the live boxset he brought out in 1985, a compilation of ten years of touring. That was at the height of his popularity, deep in the dark heart of Reagan America and what’s on it? Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land”, Edwin Starr’s “War”, a warning that “because in 1985, blind faith in your leaders, or in anyone can get you killed”. He’s deeply subversive on a level I didn’t understand then, but unconsciously seeped into me.
Naomi Gordon-Loebl argues that the pain he puts in his songs is what makes him resonate with queer people like her. Not being queer myself I can’t judge, but to me he is the lightning example of how to be butch, how to be masculine without being macho. It’s a masculinity that is available to anybody who feels attracted to it, not reserved just for cis men. It’s part of what keeps me coming back to Bruce Springsteen again and again too.
What do we mean when we talk about listening to new music? I’m currently listening to the album the song below was taken off, ABC’s 1987 comeback attempt, Alphabet City. I do have the vinyl of that, but this is the first time I’ve listened to it in decades. Arguable this is new music to me, but is it?
Probably not, eh? But I have never listened to ABC’s sophomore album, Beauty Stab. When I play it today, does that mean I’m listening to new music, or is there more to it? The idea after all is that you stop listening to new music after a certain age (thirty, thirtyfive, in any case an age I passed a while ago). You no longer have the mental flexibility to appreciate new things, and are forever doomed to wallow in the nostalgia of the music of your youth. A horrible fate.
But what does count as listening to new music? Ont he one hand Beauty Stab is new music for me. On the other hand it’s more of the same music from a band I already know I like. Not very adventurous. But what if you discover an overlooked artist or group in the same genre of pop music? Is that new music? Or does that still fall under nostalgic wallowing? Surely discovering an entire new (sub)genre of music does count, right?
Alcest is a French band/project driven by metal prodigy Neige, which with its first EP created a new genre: blackgaze. A hideous mutant recombination of black metal and shoegaze and I’d be surprised if you can find two more unlikely musical genres to merge. Nevertheless it’s ultimately still heavy metal, a music genre I’m well familiar with. Alcest sounds a lot different from the Iron Maiden and Anthrax I grew up with, but ultimately it’s still metal. And to be honest, it is rare for me to start listening to any kind of music that is completely alien to me. Getting into Japanese pop and rock music by way of anime was the last major discovery for me, but even that is not that alien.
Ironically, the newest sort of music I may have listened to recently is actually the oldest piece of music we know how to play, a hymn to Nikkal, the goddes of orchards and fertility from Ugarit, an ancient port city in what is now Syria. Almost 3500 years old, it’s oldest discovered song with surviving musical notation. It’s older than anything we know, a product from an almost alien world, yet put a synth under it or use the right sort of guitar and it could just as well be a modern noise or gothic song.
