FEATURE: I Turn on My TV: Encouraging More Kate Bush Fan Videos

FEATURE:

 

 

I Turn on My TV

IMAGE CREDIT: Rainbow Pie 

Encouraging More Kate Bush Fan Videos

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AT the moment…

there are a good range of Kate Bush music videos. The quality is not too bad. However, there are very few that are HD/4K. You would think her iconic songs such as Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), Cloudbusting and Wuthering Heights would be upgraded. I think that Bush would approve. I am not sure why it has not happened already. In terms of expense, it is not going to cost that much to convert many of her videos to 4K. I think it would attract more people. Kate Bush has said in the past how she would love for her videos to be on a DVD. That has yet to happen. However, we are lucky that there are all of her music videos. I do wonder if there is a long-term plan from Kate Bush regarding the visual side. She has remastered her albums more than once and there has been this quest to get these vinyl albums out to people. However, in terms of the music videos, not as much archiving work and retrospection. However, as her big singles are played on radio, people will be able to find the videos easily enough and enjoy. I do hope that there are at least one or two HD/4K videos coming where we get to see this very clean and crisp – and almost cinematic – representation for an iconic song. I guess we have all had the same thought as me. It doesn’t happen much now but, in the past, artists recorded more than one video for a song. Radiohead did it for High and Dry (off The Bends): one video for the U.S. and the other for the U.K./elsewhere. Kate Bush did that. She filmed two videos for Wuthering Heights. The red dress version for the U.S. The white dress video followed. She also filmed two videos for Rubberband Girl. The second was for the U.S. Even though there are examples of Bush doing more than one take of a video, there is this whole other thread and phenomenon: the fan-made video. Many artists have fans who will do their own versions.

Rather than them filming a video and doing a whole production – as that is quite expensive -, there are videos or visuals where fans will put that over a Kate Bush track. One classic example is the video for The Infant Kiss. That song was from Never for Ever but was not released as a single. There have been other attempts. I see there is one out there for Hello Earth from Hounds of Love. I guess it would be a big undertaking that Kate Bush might see as unnecessary but, as classic artists including The Beatles and The Beach Boys have done it, they have allowed various songs of theirs to be given to filmmakers to create modern videos for older songs. They usually revolve around reissues or documentaries, but it does give new light to songs that might not have had a video the first time around. There are songs from Kate Bush’s catalogue that I feel could and should have this kind of consideration. I am thinking about Get Out of My House and Houdini from The Dreaming (1982). Even Jig of Life from Hounds of Love (1985). The Fog from The Sensual World (1989). Mrs. Bartolozzi from Aerial (2005). There are possibilities. I am not sure how fans approach videos when they tackle a Kate Bush song. In the case of The Infant Kiss, this was a video initially made in 1984 that was set to footage from The Innocents – a film that inspired Kate Bush to write The Infant Kiss. Getting the rights to a film or how complex it might be. However, at a time when there is greater access to so many different visual styles and possibilities, it would be nice to see more fan-made videos. There are plenty of tribute acts and cover versions. However, not many fans of filmmakers taking a Kate Bush song and doing something new with it. I don’t feel it would need Kate Bush’s permission to do that. People can cover her songs without permission, so I am not sure whether someone would need to wait for Bush to give her go-ahead.

Her music is arguably more popular now than it has ever been. There is a lack of HD and 4K Kate Bush videos (some fans have done their version but it doesn’t look that great and I don’t think it is genuine HD by the look of things). Maybe there will not be anything as big as what The Beatles did with songs such as I’m Only Sleeping or The Beach Boys’ Wouldn’t It Be Nice for instance. However, there are albums with big anniversaries coming up. Never for Ever is forty-five later in the year. Hounds of Love turns forty. Aerial will be twenty. Big albums that won’t get vinyl reissues or anything from Kate Bush. I would love if a filmmaker got permission to do videos for songs from that album. Whether they are animated or feature actors playing out scenes and scenarios. There is a role for the fan-made video. So many songs under-explored or unknown that could do with a video. I would be very tempted myself. My favourite Kate Bush song is Houdini. It would be great either to put some existing footage over that song or do something from scratch. There are actors I would have in mind to play the parts. Maybe Kate Bush would need to give her permission. Some might think it strange to do something like that where it is not tied to an anniversary. However, as many artists have plenty of fan-made videos and Bush has had a few in the past, I wonder why there is an absence now. Her music videos and the visual side of her work is something that fascinates me.

I use The Beatles and The Beach Boys as examples of bands who have had recent music videos made. Their well-known songs given a new filmed version, an animation or, for most of the songs, the first music video. I am thinking about those Kate Bush anniversaries. Most eyes will be on Hounds of Love in September. I am writing a run of features for that album. It would be wonderful for new filmed videos for Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God) or even Hounds of Love. Tracks from The Ninth Wave not released as singles. Visualisations of tracks such as Waking the Witch or The Morning Fog. Never for Ever has a big anniversary. I wonder if Kate Bush has considered this at all. She has no objection to reissuing albums and has done archiving for a few years now. Maybe she is past that stage. She has always had a love of music videos and loved doing it. Perhaps the financial constraints put fans off or there are legal requirements and express permission from Kate Bush. That would be a shame if true. However, given the beauty of the recent Little Shrew (Snowflake) video and how Bush brought that non-single to life in a way that reframed the song, it is only right that fans get their opportunity to approach her work like that. Gems from 50 Words for Snow – where Snowflake features – such as Among Angels. I know there were some animated videos for tracks on that album. Looking back at the classic catalogue and these iconic songs, a new generation would have their ideas of reworkings or new visuals. How Army Dreamers and Breathing – from Never for Ever – could get an animation or a powerful filmed video each.

It is a thought I have had for a while and I wonder if it is one other Kate Bush fans also share. I know there will be. It is likely we will see some activity from Bush later in the year. She has revealed that she is keen to work on a new album, though that might not come out until next year – though never say never! She has reissued albums and won’t do that again. However, there definitely will be something around Hounds of Love turning forty as that is not too important to pass up! Among the many Kate Bush dreams, being tasked with a music video and choosing a song to take on is tantalising. I love the limited fan videos there are out there. Vidding is a fan labour practice in media fandom of creating music videos from the footage of one or more visual media sources. I know Queen had a vidding/fan-made video in 2019. Maybe some would say TikTok sort of allows fans to make short videos anyway. It is a way of taking a Kate Bush song and doing something over it. It is not the same as an actual video and people do not usually create something and put it over an entire song. There is a role and demand for traditional filmmaking and this labour of love. I don’t know. Of all the artists in the world who deserve this tribute and run of fan videos – aside from The Beatles perhaps! – is Kate Bush. The Infant Kiss showed that it can be done and done well – and Kate Bush loved that video. Since then, really only the odd thing here and there. With a whole wave of new fans and a whole wave of creatives and incredible filmmakers out there who love Kate Bush’s music, I know that there is…

DEFINITE demand.

FEATURE: Beneath the Sleeve: Joni Mitchell - Hejira

FEATURE:

 

 

Beneath the Sleeve

 Joni Mitchell - Hejira

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IN a new feature…

IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell in 1976/PHOTO CREDIT: Joel Bernstein

I am going deep inside a classic album. In the coming months, I am going to cover a wide range of iconic albums from throughout the decades. Even if Hejira is not the most celebrated and talked-about Joni Mitchell albums, I think it is one of the best. Following the sublime The Hissing of Summer Lawns in 1975, Hejira was a bit of a departure. Hejira is the wonderful eighth studio from Mitchell. Released through Asylum Records, its songs were a result of Mitchell writing during a period of frequent travel in late-1975 and early-1976. I am going to start out with an article from Joni Mitchell’s official website. There is a great archive interview where Dave Blackburn spoke with A&M staff engineer Steve Katz about the making of Hejira, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and Mingus – a run of three wonderful albums that was a move away from the more Folk-based sound of her previous work:

“DB: "I read that the recording for Hejira was mostly complete when Joni was told about this bass player from Florida that she might really like. Joni apparently flew him out to L.A and he ended up putting down his parts on four songs. Is that how you remember that?"

SK: "Yeah, and I don't know if he replaced any of the other tracks but she pretty much gave him free rein because she had already listened to the Weather Report stuff, I guess. I remember, he came in, and we met him. He was so different, with the fretless bass and an Acoustic 360 amp. We mainly ran him direct but we still miked his amp and combined those sounds together. He was pretty adamant about using some of the amp sounds - he liked that."

DB: "And he liked to double and triple track himself, right?"

SK: "Sometimes we'd speed the tape up - go double speed." [Probably that low C "bomb" where he enters during Overture on Don Juan was achieved by playing his lowest normal C with the tape running at double speed. When returned to normal speed his note would be an octave lower, and below the range of a four string bass guitar.]

SK: "If we were going to double a riff, he knew exactly what he had played; he would play it perfectly. He was amazing, the guy was just brilliant! Karen Carpenter was like that - she could double and triple her voice, singing an inch off the mic. She was the most amazing singer I'd ever worked with." 

DB: "So working with Jaco was a pleasurable experience, then?"

SK: "Ha, oh yeah. He was new, he was different, he was completely out of the box. Other bass players were like vanilla compared to him. He was a rainbow - any color you want, he could do it. I'd never seen anybody like him, and he was just a kid!"

DB: "Well she was always looking for players who could paint with sound. That's why she liked Wayne Shorter too..."

SK: "It wasn't always what Wayne played; it was what he didn't play. That's how you have to listen to Wayne Shorter. He would play, but it was always the holes that he would leave. These guys were just phenomenal. She was starting to create with all these new sounds that she had now in her toolbox."

DB: "We haven't mentioned Larry Carlton yet, but he was another guy who could paint with sound and really interact with a track"

SK: "She used him, [and later Steve Lukather, on Wild Things Run Fast] Those guys were very creative when they played. The way her melodies were, Larry could paint a really nice picture with his guitar."

On Blue Motel Room

[There is a very good chance, though Steve doesn't remember for sure, that Joni's guitar on Blue Motel Room was recorded at her home and then transferred to the multi-track at A&M for the rhythm section and vocal overdubs. It has a 'home recording' room sound, and prominent tape hiss that would not have been there if it had been recorded there.]

DB: "Were you a fan of Joni's outside of being in the studio? Did you listen to her records?"

SK: "It's funny. I graduated high school in 1970, and then in '71 or '72 I went to Valley College, in the San Fernando valley, and I was taking a lot of general classes; I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. And in the library they had turntables. I remember, for the longest time, if I had an hour or two between classes, I used to bring in Joni's first three albums, 'cause I loved those three records. I'd put them on and people would come in and say 'do you mind if we listen to that with you?' She was widely popular."

DB: "So when you did get to work with her, that was pretty exciting then?"

SK: "Yeah, I loved these records growing up, and here I am all of a sudden working with her!"

DB: "Well, so what was she like to work with?"

SK: "Oh, she was amazing. Henry and I would never really know what we were going to do when she'd come in. We were ready, we always had a vocal mic up, but we just had to wait and see. She would go home at night and work out parts and then she'd show up and say 'I want to work on this.' One time she showed up with Glenn Frey and J.D. Souther to do backgrounds [for Off Night Backstreet]. Jaco would come in to the studio, and he'd be waiting with us, and she'd show up an hour or two hours late, and then we'd start, but nobody really knew what we were going to be doing."

DB: "So once Jaco was involved, he stuck around for the remainder of the project?

SK: "Yeah, he pretty much showed up almost every night." [especially for the DJRD and Mingus albums.]

On Hejira guitars and effects

SK: "She had a few guitars on Hejira, none of them solid body." [they were most likely Gibson hollowbody arch tops with flatwound strings - the Ibanez GB10s she later toured with in 1979 and 1983 were not available until 1978. The exact guitars she used will probably never be known as neither Steve nor Joni remembers what she played, and Henry is no longer with us to ask.]

SK: "She would go to Guitar Center and try out stuff" [she was also a regular customer at Westwood Music, owned by luthier Fred Walecki, who was her guitar tech/advisor.] "She'd come in and lay down things she'd been rehearsing at home; she never really did her rehearsing in the studio.

DB: "And the pedal effects she was using on the record?"

SK: "Yeah, all that was done either at Guitar Center or at home. A lot of time these guys would show up with stuff that hadn't even been released yet. They had deals with these companies who would give them stuff to try out."

[The Boss CE-1 chorus/vibrato pedal was released in 1976 and was the first chorus effect in a pedal format to be available; it is very likely a part of the guitar sound on Hejira, along with a phaser pedal giving a "liquid" swirling effect - likely the MXR Phase 90 which had been released in 1974 and was the first product sold by MXR. Then one or two more layers of guitars, including an acoustic, would be added and then be panned left, center and right, giving the album its lush panoramic texture full of modulated movement.]”.

Before getting to a review and some modern acclaim for Hejira, I want to keep inside its making of. Some insight form those involved. Back in 2006, Doug Fisher spoke with Joni Mitchell about Hejira. Many people do not know about the album or assume it is inaccessible or too out-there. Even though it is very different to 1971’s Blue or 1970’s Ladies of the Canyon, it is a remarkable album that everyone needs to listen to:

“Whenever Joni Mitchell had trouble sorting out her life, she took to the road. But in early 1976, with a turbulent love affair on the rocks and too many drugs in her body, she hit the highway almost with a vengeance.

"I was getting away from a romance, I was getting away from the craziness and I was searching for something to make sense of everything," she says. "The road became a metaphor for my life."

And it inspired the album many of her fans and music critics consider her masterpiece.

Released 30 years ago this week, the nine songs on Hejira form the remarkable personal journal of a nomadic, romantic dreamer whose aural notebook is filled with the stories of doomed love, late night roadhouse dance floors, wedding gown fantasies, lost chances and a deep yearning to escape and start over.

Mitchell is not convinced Hejira is the best of the 22 albums that made her among the most influential singer-songwriters, male or female, of the past 40 years. She won't attach that label to any of her albums.

'Hejira could only have come from me'

But she concedes Hejira is probably her one album that could not have been made by anyone else.

"I suppose a lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs, but I feel the songs on Hejira could only have come from me," she said an interview with the Citizen.

The stories they tell are so vivid, their observations so naked and the landscapes so haunting that Kris Kristofferson famously urged her in a letter to be "more self-protective ... to save something of yourself from public view."

But Mitchell says self-confession, no matter how risky and revealing, was essential to her writing during that era.

"My songs have always been more autobiographical than most people's," she says. "It pushes you toward honesty. I was just returning to normal from the extremities of a very abnormal mindset when I wrote most of the songs (on Hejira).

"When life gets interesting I get very alert, and life was very interesting. I think that took the writing to another level."

Mitchell talked about the album by phone from her home in Los Angeles, where she revealed she's recording her first collection of new songs in nearly a decade. More wary of public scrutiny these days, the Canadian singer agreed to a Citizen request to discuss Hejira because, she said, the album recalls an "interesting transitional" time in her life and her career.

Musically, Hejira certainly marked a departure from the two jazz-tinged but radio-friendly albums that preceded it. Gone were the hummable melodies, conventional formats and jaunty horn sections she used as Top 40 flirtations on 1974's Court and Spark and '75's The Hissing of Summer Lawns.

In their place, Mitchell offered seductively sparse rhythms, lush swirling guitars and the brilliant spark of Jaco Pastorius's fretless bass to create an unceasing musical motion that is as mesmerizing as the highways she travels in her songs.

The album is also a departure lyrically. Using the music's structural looseness to her advantage, Mitchell gives her words a simple directness and poetic polish seldom seen in her music before and rarely found again.

"To me, the whole Hejira album is really inspired," Mitchell says. "There is a rootlessness to it, for sure, but also discovery along the road."

Despite good reviews, Hejira did not sell as briskly as the more accessible albums Mitchell released during the first half of the 1970s. Although exact numbers are hard to get, there are indications sales of Hejira are stronger today than ever.

Voting on jonimitchell.com, an excellent fan-driven website, ranks Hejira as Mitchell's most popular album. A critics' poll done in the late 1990s placed the album in a first-place tie with the Blue, a moody collection of love songs she recorded in 1971.

Mitchell says Hejira's songs were written during or after three journeys she took in late 1975 and the first half of 1976.

The first was a concert tour cancelled amid turmoil after six weeks in February 1976 when Mitchell and her drummer boyfriend John Guerin ended their on-again, off-again relationship, this time seemingly for good.

Soon after, Mitchell signed on with Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review, a ragged, drug-soaked circus that also variously included Joan Baez, Mick Ronson, Roger McGuinn, Ronee Blakely, Allan Ginsburg and members of the Band. She soon became a frequent cocaine user.

"I realized you couldn't stay on that thing straight -- you'd be the only one," she explains. "It was just insane." Looking back, she says, the drugs had both "great and disastrous" effects: "I had terrible insomnia but I wrote a lot of epic poems," including Song for Sharon, for many the masterpiece around which Hejira orbits.

In danger of losing her equilibrium, Mitchell fled for home in Los Angeles. She was only back a few days when two friends, one of them a former lover from Australia, showed up at her door proposing they drive across the country to New England.

Mitchell eventually dropped them in Maine before heading alone down the coast to Florida, around the Gulf of Mexico and across the southwest back to California.

"I was driving without a driver's licence," she remembers. "I had to stay behind truckers because they signal you when cops are ahead. I had to drive in daylight hours only to stay out of harm's way."

In the South, where hard rock and country music dominated the airwaves, Mitchell was a virtual unknown. "It was a relief. I was able, like The Prince and the Pauper, to escape my fame under a false name and fall in with people and enjoy ordinary civilian status."

The cross-country sojourn resulted in six of the songs on Hejira, which Mitchell says was originally called Travelling -- "that wouldn't have been very memorable," she jokes.

While looking through a dictionary, Mitchell came across the word "hejira," an Islamic term for exodus or breaking with the past. It became a song title -- and against the will of her record company, which wanted something less cryptic -- the name of the album.

"I'd been struggling with a title for the song," she says. "The idea of departure with honour captured the feeling I was after very well”.

I will get to a great Pitchfork review soon. When Rolling Stone were ranking the best 500 albums of all time last year, they placed Hejira in 133. It is one of those albums that is undeniably a classic and work of brilliance but is often compared to other work less favourably. When we talk of Joni Mitchell, we discuss Blue but Hejira does not get the same sort of affection. I was keen to explore it more and spotlight one of her finest albums:

“No regrets Coyote/We just come from such different sets of circumstance,” what a perfect way to start an album. ‘Coyote’ was written about Sam Shepard, a member of Bob Dylan’s entourage from the Rolling Thunder Review with whom Mitchell had a brief relationship. Mitchell joined the tour for a few shows in 1975. She picked up a relationship and a cocaine habit. The song is all about sex, drugs and Folk Rock ‘n Roll. The album in itself is a road trip album. It was written mostly in the car while Mitchell was road tripping solo following ‘The Hissing Of Summer Lawns’ tour (#258). ‘Hejira’ is an Arabic word meaning “journey,” and that’s just what this record is. Mitchell later said “I suppose a lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs, but I feel the songs on ‘Hejira’ could only have come from me.”

At the height of her fame and success, Mitchell donned a red wig, sunglasses and told people along the way that her name was either Charlene Latimer or Joan Black. Mitchell had grown increasingly frustrated with session Rock musicians and started to look towards the Jazz world. It was on this record that she formed a musical connection with arguably the greatest bassist of all time, Jaco Pastorius and his fretless bass coupled with her guitar and vocals dominate the sound of this record. The songs are unique and different to her previous recordings in that there’s no real distinct chorus and verses. It’s mostly a flow of consciousness from Mitchell. Her lyrics are beautiful, as are the songs. Best enjoyed on the open road”.

I am going to end with a Pitchfork review from 2022. Awarding it a 10, there is a lot of great detail and background to the mesmeric Hejira. I think that it is an album that should be played and talked about more. An easy and obvious choice for this first Beneath the Sleeve:

“At the end of the ’70s, Mitchell told Rolling Stone it was never her goal to be the queen of her generation, or the best. Her goal was to remain interested in music. Her steady gravitation toward jazz was proof, from Blue’s approximations of its textures to the experimental yet accessible Hissing of Summer Lawns. She considered the electric jazz fusion of Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way to be the previous decade’s definitive record and absorbed its astral atmospheres. She was an avant-gardist among rock’n’roll people in an era when improvised music was creating rock stars of its own. Still, Mitchell inhabited that slippery space unique to those ahead of the times.

Rolling Thunder didn’t only fuel the luminous and literary “Coyote.” It also broke her down physically and left her addicted to cocaine. (She allegedly told the tour to pay her in coke and wrote ever-longer poems high late into the night: “Everybody took all of their vices to the nth degree and came out of it born again or into AA,” she said in 1988.) A month after, attempting to start her own tour for Hissing, her wrecked state and endless battles with her drummer John Guerin​​—the self-described “jazz snob” to whom she was engaged—resulted in its abrupt cancellation.

So the circus gave way to a spirit journey. Mitchell found herself sitting at Neil Young’s beach house wondering how to recuperate from such self-annihilation, longing to travel. Soon two acquaintances—one, an Australian former lover; the other, a lover-to-be​​—showed up together at her door in Los Angeles. The boys were going to drive cross country; their destination, for the Aussie ex with a 20-day visa and a grim custody battle, was Maine. “We were going to kidnap his daughter from the grandmother,” Mitchell said. “You could have made a whole movie about that trip.” (Paging Todd Haynes.)

Thirty-two years old with no license, Mitchell drove this band of outsiders east before looping back solo, down the coast of Florida and then along the Gulf of Mexico, “staying at old ’50s motels and eating at health food stores.” She adopted fake names like “Charlene Latimer.” She was often disguised in a red wig. She wrote most of Hejira on the guitar she kept in her white Mercedes. “I was getting away from romance, I was getting away from craziness,” Mitchell said, “and I was searching for something to make sense of everything.”

Hejira exalts the art of being a woman alone. It is restless music of road and sky, of interior and exterior weather suspended, epic and elemental. Her narratives unfurl with driving forward motion, telling stories of black crows and coyotes, of cafes and motel rooms; a bluesman and a pilot; psychics, hitchhikers, mothers, a guru. She contemplates eternity in a cemetery. She sees Michelangelo in the clouds. She hears jazz in the trees. Blue’s optimistic “traveling, traveling, traveling” gives way to an insatiable “travel fever,” each cartographic song extending the road further from Savannah to Staten Island to Canadian prairies, from Beale to Bleecker Streets. Her solitude distills the details into ascetic elegance.

The stark arrangements on Hejira, free of traditional structures, with only a few players on each song, are iridescent like glitter on icicles or sand. Mitchell stretches the unresolved tone of her “chords of inquiry” into a nine-song epiphany. The fretless bass, spare percussion, and unusual harmonics depict her wintry lucidity as well as the extremes of her existence, which she had accepted in service of her creativity. The protracted song lengths were allegedly a product of her drug addiction, while their clarity was inseparable from her process of getting clean.

She had started playing with the jazz fusionists of L.A. Express on Court and Spark—musicians who wouldn’t “put up a dark picket fence through my music,” as she once put it—and during a pit stop on her road trip, guitarist Robben Ford played her an advance copy of the debut album by Jaco Pastorius, an electric bass player who, like Mitchell, was really more of a painter. The 24-year-old had a tendency for introducing himself as “the greatest bass player in the world.” Mitchell (and most of the best bassists in his wake) wouldn’t have disagreed. She called the eccentric Floridian the bass player of her dreams. Pastorius used a knife to pry the frets off his instrument and transform it, playing more fluidly, flexibly, or as Mitchell called it, “figuratively” than anyone. Having only recently joined the intrepid Weather Report, Pastorius overdubbed parts atop four cracked-open Hejira songs, rhythms that liberated the music.

Hejira’s tenor is one of personal reconstitution, but Mitchell populates the lyrics with characters she met along the way, some literal, some symbolic, each representing a fundamental component of her character. “Furry Sings the Blues” describes her actual visit with the bluesman Furry Lewis near Memphis’ crumbling Beale Street, one birthplace of the blues, and could be an allegory for the corruption of a music business that left its pioneers behind, another parking lot paved over paradise. (That’s Neil Young on harmonica.) “A Strange Boy” recounts her disappointing tryst with her travel companion and his confounding immaturity, standing in for the overall inadequacy of men that Mitchell had contended with so often. It’s attuned to mystery, representing this guy she couldn’t crack in amazing dialogue, like, “He asked me to be patient/Well I failed/‘Grow up!’ I cried/And as the smoke was clearing, he said/‘Give me one good reason why.’” On the discordant “Black Crow,” Mitchell likens herself to the bird overhead, brooding, searching, diving. But the most powerful of these itinerant encounters occurs solely in her imagination.

On “Amelia,” she becomes the sky. Her ode to Amelia Earhart is soaring and celestial. “Like me,” Mitchell sings of the disappeared aviator, “she had a dream to fly.” This austere six-minute ballad takes the form of a conversation “from one solo pilot to another,” Mitchell has said, “reflecting on the cost of being a woman and having something you must do.” Ambition must often go it alone, and Mitchell accordingly subtracts bass and drums entirely. What sounds like sweeping pedal steel is really Larry Carlton’s electric lead guitar and vibraphone. The song’s harmonic character is an arresting question mark, both unsettled and at ease, just like solo travel, knowing there might be something, someone missing yet savoring the space created by absence. Mitchell spoke of Hejira’s “sweet loneliness,” to which “Amelia”’s major chords and resilience attest. “Amelia, it was just a false alarm,” goes Mitchell’s refrain ending each verse, ending every romance, too. As she sings of “driving across the burning desert,” likening six vapor trails to “the hexagram of the heavens [...] the strings of my guitar,” and how Earhart was “swallowed by the sky,” the whole forlorn song seems to go that way. Stars glint in its upper edges.

Clouds and flight, metaphors for freedom and what tempers it, had long been two of Mitchell’s central obsessions. She called descendants of the Canadian prairies, like herself, “sky-oriented people,” and writing on a plane in 1967, she had looked down on clouds to contemplate life, arriving at her standard, the timeless “Both Sides, Now.” But nine years on, in “Amelia,” she equates her living in “clouds at icy altitudes” with her long-standing depression that left her admitting she’s “never really loved.” When she pulls into “the Cactus Tree Motel” to sleep on the “strange pillows of my wanderlust,” the inn’s name is an allusion to her 1968 song about a woman “so busy being free.” Her life’s motifs knock the door in Georgia, too, on the winking torch song “Blue Motel Room,” where rain turns the ground to “cellophane,” a word Mitchell famously used to describe her defenseless Blue era; “Will you still love me?” she yearns coolly, echoing a formative influence”.

An album that I was keen to dissect and go deep with, I hope those who do not know about Hejira are compelled to seek it out. Even if you are not a fan of Joni Mitchell or the blend of Folk and Jazz I would still advise you to listen. It is a wonderful album that is referred by many people but not as loved and spotlighted as much as it should be. A truly magical and spiritual album that you should…

IMMERSE yourself in.

FEATURE: My Goal Is Moving Near… Kate Bush’s Sat in Your Lap at Forty-Four

FEATURE:

 

 

My Goal Is Moving Near…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a single cover outtake for Sat In Your Lap/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

Kate Bush’s Sat in Your Lap at Forty-Four

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THE first single…

from Kate Bush’s 1982 album, The Dreaming, I wanted to look ahead to the forty-fourth anniversary of Sat in Your Lap. It is such an important song. In terms of when it arrived and how it changed perceptions around her music. Different from anything that was on 1980’s Never for Ever, Sat in Your Lap was this revelation. It hinted at the sounds of The Dreaming. Something with more percussion and a heavier beat. A denser album perhaps. Though Sat in Your Lap is one of the more accessible songs on Kate Bush’s fourth studio album, it is still a step on from Never for Ever in terms of scope and production. Released on 29th June, 1981, it arrived over a year before the album. EMI, perhaps keen not to leave a long gap after Never for Ever’s final single – Army Dreamers was released on 22nd September, 1980 -, and The Dreaming arriving, the first single was put out. In terms of the single releases, they spanned from June 1981 to November 1983. It was not an entirely successful album in terms of its singles. However, Sat in Your Lap did reach number eleven in the U.K. I am going to include some information and background to Sat in Your Lap. I will also include an interview from 1981. Before that, here are some words from Kate Bush regarding one of her all-time best songs:

“The idea of the demos was to try and put everything down as quickly as possible. Next came the brass. The CS80 is still my favourite synthesizer next to the Fairlight, and as it was all that was available at the time, I started to find a brass sound. In minutes I found a brass section starting to happen, and I worked out an arrangement. We put the brass down and we were ready to mix the demo.
I was never to get that CS80 brass to sound the same again – it’s always the way. At The Townhouse the same approach was taken to record the master of the track. We put down a track of the rhythm box to be replaced by drums, recording the piano at the same time. As I was producing, I would ask the engineer to put the piano sound on tape so I could refer to that for required changes. This was the quickest of all the tracks to be completed, and was also one of the few songs to remain contained on one twenty-four track tape instead of two!

Kate Bush Club newsletter, October 1982”.

I am going to move to a feature from Dreams of Orgonon from 2020. Such detail and passion, it is interesting reading what they had to say about Sat in Your Lap. After a period of burn-out and so much hard work, there was this moment when Kate Bush could not write or create. Sat in Your Lap was a revelation and moment when something changed:

“Yet Bush’s listlessness and struggle to write songs persisted for some time. It’s not hard to see why — the stress of Never for Ever’s production and the attention of the British public would be enough to put a damper on anyone’s creative output. It took seeing other musicians at work to get her motivated again. In September, Bush and her boyfriend Del Palmer attended a Stevie Wonder concert at Wembley Arena. Wonder was in a period of creative renewal himself. Having recently turned out a rare Motown flop in the distinctively titled Journey Through “the Secret Life of Plants”, he’d rebuilt confidence with his delightful Hotter than July LP. The concert broke Bush out of her writer’s block — “inspired by the feeling of his music,” as she later wrote, Bush got back to work on her songs, and forged a path towards her next album.

Bush’s work to date was largely harmonic, built around what notes went together interestingly on the piano. Rhythm was secondary for her: it’s hard to think of a rhythmically powerful song on Bush’s first three albums. Her preparations for Kate Bush IV had thus far consisted of little bits of melody, but without a focal center. After the Wonder concert, she realized she needed to start her songwriting from the rhythm track upwards. At home, she programmed a rhythm into her Roland drum machine (according to my friend Marlo, the Roland on her demo from the period sounds like a CR-78, and woe to anyone who disagrees with Marlo on drum machines), and “worked in [a] piano riff to the hi-hat and snare.” A demo resulted: “Sat In Your Lap,” Kate Bush’s first solo production, was in its nascency.

“Sat In Your Lap” wasn’t always Bush’s first self-produced song. For a time, she entertained bringing in experienced producers, including long-standing David Bowie collaborator Tony Visconti, going so far as to spend a day in the studio with him. The collaboration went nowhere, and Visconti has grossly remarked “all I can remember is the Bush bum.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bush decided to take on the producer role herself, with the intensive collaboration of a series of engineers. The first set of sessions for the album that would be The Dreaming were staged at Townhouse Studios in May 1981. Her collaborating engineer was Hugh Padgham, a producer for Phil Collins and XTC known for the “gated drum” sound that would define 80s pop (compress the drums, use a recording console’s “gate” to remove their reverb, resulting in a kind of sound vacuum. See Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight”). Bush and Padgham’s time in Townhouse was productive yet short-lived. Padgham is rare among Bush collaborators in having negative feelings about working with her, grumbling about her tendency to overpack a mix and experiment rather than having a concrete, straightforward vision. After laying backing tracks for three songs, Padgham moved on, dissatisfied with his latest gig but having indelibly marked the sound of The Dreaming.

Bush’s ad-libs, piano riffs, and rhythm track came together quickly in the studio, quicker than any other song on The Dreaming. Having a drum-centric engineer like Padgham was incredibly useful for her, as the early recording of Bush’s rhythm track showed. “Sat In Your Lap” is heavily percussive, built around its drum sound and brass section (initially synthesized on a Yamaha CS-80). The partially syncopated drumbeat (“dum-DUM-dum-DUM”) is Preston Heyman’s most memorable to date, a fine translation of the demo. The frantic, almost pharyngeal rhythm track has a kick drum so guttural and suppressed (though not apparently gated) that it can easily be mistaken for one of Bush’s vocal onomatopoeias. The track’s sonic menagerie (Bush’s recurring motif of musical instruments as bodily extensions lives to a maniacal extent), a veritable ensemble of screams, tinny horns on the Fairlight CMI, swishing bamboo sticks (thanks to Paddy Bush and Preston Heyman) childlike whispers, “HO-HO-HO’s,” and bellows of “JUST when I think I’m king!”.

I am going to end with John Shearlaw's interview from September 1981. Appearing in Record Mirror, there are some interesting exchanges. I don’t think I have included this interview before so I wanted to highlight it here. With the world unsure of what album would follow and what Sat in Your Lap would lead to, it was such an intriguing time:

“Kate Bush today sets up her own interviews, controls her own photographs, slavishly protects her fans through her club and, more so than ever, works on albums and tours at her own pace. And still we love her for it?

It's been two years now since what Kate calls her "Tour of Life", a massive circus of a tour that won't, repeat won't take place again until next year at the earliest. Again, it's been six months since the last single and Sat In Your Lap, as much as anything she's done, is the start of a new era, another "cosmic cycle" that will see the release of a new album later this year.

And now that all those ideas in the past--a theatrical tour that was a combination of the innovative and the unexpected, an album last year that surpassed all that went before it--have become reality, she's a powerful personality. SHe makes points where she used to make only comments, argues from experience now as much as from excitement, pushes herself as an artist ("one of us", she says, referring to the type) much more than a surprised, precocious talent.

Yet she's still infectious [huh?], vulnerable at times, as open to ideas as ever. Richness and fame don't embarass her; slowness in honing her creativity probably does, just a little.

Her favourite expression on this meeting wasn't one of wonderment, astonishment (ah, the cliche!); rather a dismissive pout of "Pah!" -- almost French, knowledgeable, and nearly coquettish.

"Pah! Let them think that! Pah! That's wrong!" she seems to imply, ready to underline her ideas. Call it a change, call it maturity, call it confidence in her art, for it almost certainly is. Take money:

"I've changed. I don't pretend it's not there any more, which I used to do," she says. "I'm not worried about being rich, I just didn't think of taking advantage of it. Now I buy things that I can use, things that will help me, like synthesisers and drum machines.

"My life has never been into money, more into emotional desires; like being an incredible singer or an incredible dancer; and if I can buy something that can help me, I will now. But I wouldn't buy something that I couldn't live with, like a country house which I don't need. [Actually, about two years after giving this interview, Kate bought--a country house.] I'd rather buy a huge synthesiser that I could live with all day."

She emphasises and explains, thinks out the question, returns to her theme. The easy answers have gone over the years. Take her career...

Kate maintains that there hasn't really been a gap, even though she admits that Sat In Your Lap only surfaced after her longest break to date.

"My slowness at doing things surprises me," she says, "but i have been doing things continuously. It's a battle to keep up with all the things I want to do, and obviously things like dancing are going to suffer. I couldn't spend twelve hours a day in a studio like I'm doing at the moment, and dance, as well."

Again the emphasis on her way of working--the only way. The ups and downs are of her own making, they don't follow rules. And Kate only bows to her own pressures.

"The last album was the first one that I would actually hand over to people with a smile," she says, almost seeming to imply that it was the first one she was actually pleased with, "and that was followed by a greater period of non-creativity, when I just couldn't write properly at all.

"It happened before, when the tour was over, and then I felt I'd just given so much out that I was like a drained battery, very physically and tired and also a bit depressed.

"This time it was worse; a sort of terrible introverted depression. The anti-climax after all the work really set in in a bad way, and that can be very damaging to an artist. I could sit down at the piano and want to write, and nothing would happen. It was like complete introspection time.

"I suppose I had about two months out earlier this year...and that was a break I really needed. It gave me time to see friends, do things I hadn't been able to do for three years.

"It wasn't really as if I was missing out on normality," she laughs. "I'd rather hang on to madness than normality anyway, so it was more like recharging."

But something more came out of it than just a rest?

"Oh yes!" The smile returns. "I felt as if my writing needed some kind of shock, and I think I've found one for myself. The single is the start, and I'm trying to be brave about the rest of it. It's almost as if I'm going for commercial-type "hits" for the whole album.

[I have always been struck by this statement. It seems to me to indicate that Kate really doesn't have a very sound notion of what is "commercial"--which is all to the good, of course. For if she felt that The Dreaming had a commercial sound, then some listeners's criticism that she seemed to have developed a calculatedly commercial sound for the next album, Hounds of Love, loses credence, since her mental image of "commercial" sound is so different from the sound of Hounds of Love.]

"I want it to be experimental and quite cinematic, if that doesn't sound too arrogant. Never For Ever was slightly cinematic, so I'll just have to go all the way."

The shock that Kate refers to, eyes almost ablaze as she uses the word, came months ago...after she started to work with a rhythm machine while she was writing.

"I'm sure lots of things that I'm trying to do won't work," she says, "but I found that the main problem was the rhythm section. The piano, which is what I was used to writing with, is so far removed from the drums. So I tried writing with the rhythm rather than the tune."

Sat In Your Lap, naturally, is the first fruit of the new approach--original (in that it could only be Kate Bush) marriage of pounding drum sounds and two layers of voice. There is a theme, but it's the rhythm that hits you first, blasting right through to the synthesised end--a step that she knows is likely to continue the critical division.

"I was really frightened about the single for a while," she admits. "I mixed the song and played it to people, and there was complete silence afterwards, or else people would say they liked it to me and perhaps go away and say what they really thought.

"Of course it's really worrying, because there's an assumption that if you're one of us, an artist, you don't need feedback at all, when in fact you need it as much as ever, if not more. I really appreciate feedback, and I'm lucky that the people closest to me, my friends and family, are used to me and realise that I've got my own 'bowl of feedback' to rely on."

And that's more important than the public reaction, or do you worry?

"There will always be some who are irritated by me. I seem to irritate a lot of people," she smiles, "and in a way that's quite a good thing."

Nor will the change stop there. Drums, Kate enthuses, are as wide a concept as music itself, and she's determined to go further than "a lazy acceptance of a drum kit." Add that to the news that she'll be working with other musicians on the new album--"the best around"--and it seems likely that "Kate Bush 4" will be one of the big surprises of the year.

As a preview she plays me one track that's currently being worked on: a wild soaring collusion with Irish group Planxty entitled Night of the Swallow, which also features one of the Chieftains. Again the sound is unmistakable, but this time it's Kate Bush married to the heartbeat of traditional Irish folk.

Discussing the project brings Kate Bush into larger-than-life focus once more. The burning enthusiasm returns, along with the string of "amazings", "incredibles" and "fantastics". She'd been up all night in the studio the previous night in Dublin, and her reactions are genuine, real and hard to resist.

"I'm still really up from the experience," she says. "In fact, I'm still reeling from it. I asked them if they'd be interested, and the whole thing was so relaxed, it was wonderful. I badly want to work with them again. I'm so excited about the fusion.

"And I think that there's so much of the Irish in my mother that it all suddenly came back to me--it was fate rearing its head at just the right time!"

So that's two surprises already, and although Kate has been making demo tracks since March, and Abbey Road is now her second home, the rest will have to wait until summer completion...if all goes according to plan.

What about the book you're planning to write, though? Again, she sighs (a marginal sigh) and repeats her line: "There's so many things I want to do, and it's so hard to fit them all in..."

But yes, a book is on the cards, hopefully before the end of the year, and she says: "I'd like to write it myself. Without saying anything about the other books, which I don't want to, I feel almost pressured to speak, otherwise there's this huge misrepresented area.

"In one way it's ridiculous--I feel it's much too early to write a book, I've hardly done anything yet. But I really want people to be aware of reality--subjective reality, obviously.

"It'd be about what it's like being me, my feelings, my friends, the people that I rely on. I need to be represented in a positive way, and I'll have to do it myself."

[This book, tentatively titled Leaving My Tracks, was shelved in 1984.]

Slowly Abbey Road is beginning to wake up for another Kate Bush day that is likely to last until the early hours of the next morning, and she announces candidly: "I'm beginning to feel like shit. Ireland's catching up on me. And all the things that have to be done. It's impossible to do it all in the time...perhaps if I could stop sleeping it would help."

But she doesn't really believe it, even if she does wonder if transcendental meditation does help you to relax enough to cut down on those "very wonderful"hours of sleep. No, she decides, it's work as usual.

Twenty-two years old, a Tour of Life and three albums behind her...and the rest can wait. Treading devastatingly and surely between the doubters and the devotees, Kate Bush may well continue to "amaze" us all”.

On 29th June, 1981, Sat in Your Lap was released. The first taste of The Dreaming, it is also one of Kate Bush’s best-loved singles. Forty-four years after its release, this song still stands out in her catalogue. So invigorating, propulsive and exciting, the video too really stands out. Filmed at Abbey Road Studios, it is one of my favourites of hers. Not only does Sat in Your Lap prove that Kate Bush was an exceptional songwriter. It is ample proof that she is also…

A wonderful producer.

FEATURE: The Modern Things: Björk’s Post at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Modern Things

Björk’s Post at Thirty

__________

ONE of my favourite albums…

of the 1990s turns thirty soon. On 13th June, 1995, Björk’s Post was released. Ahead of its anniversary, I want to explore the album in more detail. Even though many associate it with songs like Army of Me and Possibly Maybe, there is so much more to Post. A work with no filler. Many argue that it is Björk’s finest album. Though I would put it in the top three, I can see why people think it is her finest moment! Similar stylistically to 1993’s Debut, Björk wanted Post to be a more extroverted collection of songs, featuring a broader range of genres and sounds – including Electronic, Dance, Techno, Trip-Hop, IDM, and House. Björk produced Post herself with co-producers including Nellee Hooper, Graham Massey and Tricky. I am going to start with a feature from Albumism. They wrote about Post for its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2020:

“Debut is about expression. Intimate. Isolated. Looking out. It’s counterpoint, 1995’s follow-up Post is more focused on exploration.

Having moved from the natural landscapes of Iceland into the bustling and confronting big city appetite of London, Björk’s second LP is very much an album of “after.” It is the sound of discovery and journey. Less looking out as an astute anthropological observer, and more living out, getting in amongst it. Exposing oneself to the world and letting the world expose itself in return.

Initial sessions recorded in the Bahamas yielded a sense of freedom for Björk as she crafted her tones with a sense of joy. Here she and collaborators let sounds shape the songs and let access to their surroundings influence the feel of several efforts. Rumors abound the vocals were recorded on the edge of beaches, singing into the sea, and dug from the depths of caves. All very plausible and all very Björk, who was never going to be your average singer-songwriter.

Returning to London to flesh out the album, Björk pulled in more collaborators to help add warmth and greater musicality to the collection that was very stark and heavily beat-driven. The result is an album that is, as Björk herself puts it, “musically promiscuous” with songs not only cross-pollinating genres within the flow of the album, but within the very fiber of the songs themselves.

Opening with the plodding heaviness of “Army of Me” Björk sets to shatter any expectations the listener may have. Menacing and mechanical, “Army of Me” is strangely motivational with its “get your shit together” sensibilities. Melding trip-hop with industrial and bubbling techno with eerie horn flourishes and skittish synth runs, the track is a sonic feast that emboldens the listener with every bar. And Björk delivers a powerful, near raspy vocal that grabs you from the first line.

The spell cast by “Army of Me” doesn’t let up for the remaining forty plus minutes of the album. With “Hyperballad”—one of the most twistedly romantic songs ever dedicated to wax—Björk offers some self-care tips to surviving one’s need of self and sharing space with another. She describes how each morning before her lover wakes, she climbs to the top of a mountain and throws things off in a sense of cleansing and survival. It’s wild and lovely all at once. A sense of self and sacrifice. With a constantly propulsive beat that shutters along, little melodic blips and blops wind their way to the pounding energy of the chorus where Björk’s vocals take that leap off the mountain and soar around before coming back to earth. “Hyperballad” has to go down as one of Björk’s greatest moments on record and without a doubt, it’s one of the most exciting songs of the ‘90s.

All the bluster is stripped bare for the moving “The Modern Thing” that lets Björk’s vocals swirl and wind their way through expression as they soothe one moment and explode in the next. Lyrically, Björk ponders if all of life’s great inventions have always existed, just waiting to be (metaphorically) dug up and discovered.

Whilst the unexpected should be expected with Björk, few would have predicted a soft shoe shuffle into big band with a cover of a relative obscure B-side by Betty Hutton. But “It’s Oh So Quiet” not only works, but it does so with pure abandon. As the last track recorded for Post, it’s inclusion was meant to shake things up for the listener, but it would also do the same for the artist with its accompanying life-in-technicolor video catapulting Björk into the pop mainstream.

Balancing out the pop sensibilities of “Quiet,” the following track “Enjoy” delves into the darker side of things with a stalking beat and near threatening horn stabs as Björk gives into her most lust-filled desires. Its prickly and grating, and delightfully satisfying. It’s the kind of song you could see Trent Reznor aching to cover.

With “Isobel,” Björk retreats to the forest in a semi-autobiographical telling of a clash between modern living and nature. Backed with lush string arrangements, “Isobel” is an enchanting listen that is sensual and comforting set against a series of rolling tribal inspired percussion. As Björk’s vocal expressions are so idiosyncratic, it makes sense that they’re the main focus of your listening experience. But a song like “Isobel” also displays her ability to layer lush beds of backing vocals that wrap around you like a warm hug.

A sense of solace and haunting is present in “Possibly Maybe” with its hypnotic slow melody and trip-hop inspired back beat. It’s a slow unwinding of defenses and letting go of any hope. Although it is ultimately a song of heartache, the arrangement makes it comforting.

From heartache to hope, Björk takes us on a trippy mix of Zydeco and Afro-Cuban inspiration with “I Miss You” that unfolds on the listener in a joyous way akin to rolling down a long hill in sunshine. There’s an impatience in the music that reflects the lyrical turn as Björk sings, “I Miss You / But I Haven’t Met You Yet.”

“Cover Me” is a stripped back moment of revealing admiration that skews any sense of structure with a wicked smile.

The album closer “Headphones” is, as the title suggests, best experienced with said devices in place. Like a guided meditation, Björk is a sonic tour guide talking through a real time creation of sound. Aided (and inspired) by Tricky, the track is a perfect representation of Björk as avant-garde artist. And the perfect reminder of the many jewels to be uncovered in subsequent albums”

I am moving to a feature from Treblezine. I know there will be new inspection and investigation of Post ahead of its anniversary on 13th June. I remember the album when it came out in 1995. Although I was not a huge Björk fan at the time, in years since, I have really come to love all of her albums. Post is right up there with the best. A step on from her 1993 debut, new generations of fans have discovered this album. It still sounds like nothing else:

“An account I don’t quite remember, from an ostensibly less cretinous version of Twitter that no longer quite exists, once shared a long string of emojis: a woman, a mountain, a cloud, a wheel, a bottle, a knife, a fork, rocks, etc. The only explanation given: Björk.

It takes a minute or so to see the link—it’s a deeper cut than a woman and a swan, for instance—but the imagery is drawn from “Hyperballad,” a standout song from Björk’s sophomore album Post. In its narrative, Björk imagines herself ascending a mountain while her partner is asleep, and undergoes a ritual of purging, walking up to the precipice and hurling objects off the edge, “Like car parts, bottles and cutlery.” It’s almost absurd to imagine, this person quietly rising in the stillness of dawn for the sake of throwing heaps of garbage into an abyss. But the resolution is one of security and well-being, confessing that she pushes herself to fling projectiles into the void, “So I can feel happier/To feel safe with you.”

It speaks volumes about Björk’s unconventional vision truly that such a peculiar piece of songwriting can be so recognizable even in nonverbal form. “Hyperballad” was only a minor hit, reaching number one on the Billboard Dance Club chart but coming nowhere near the Hot 100, yet it’s become a signature song for the singular Icelandic artist, a moment in which disparate, even contradictory instincts all come together in unlikely, rapturous harmony, an honest and vulnerable core wrapped in orchestral techno armor.

By age 29, when Post was released, Björk had already experienced something on the order of a half-dozen careers in music. In her early twenties she fronted The Sugarcubes, releasing her first all-time great song with 1988’s “Birthday” and subsequently opening for U2 a few years later. A visit to the Icelandic Punk Museum in Reykjavik, converted from a former public bathroom, further details her early post-punk years as a teenager in bands like Tappi Tíkarrass and KUKL. Even her debut album, Debut, was—technically speaking—her third, following a folk-pop album she made as a child and a seldom-heard jazz record she made in 1990 between Sugarcubes records.

It makes perfect sense that Björk recorded and released Post just before turning 30, an age when energy, fearlessness and confidence all seem to intersect.

Her actual but not literal debut, Debut, however, lived up to the importance of its title by delivering on the promise of Björk’s arrival as a solo artist. The 1993 album saw Björk immersing herself in the sounds of trip-hop and house music, collaborating with producer Nellee Hooper on a set of beat-driven songs heavily inspired by the music she’d been hearing in clubs, as well as records by Brian Eno, Kate Bush and artists on the Warp Records roster. Bearing little to no resemblance to any of Björk’s prior projects or releases, it offered up one of the most significant of many reinventions throughout her four-decade career.

Post, released two years later, presented a more extensive exploration of Björk’s artistic impulses and internal self. It’s an album that juxtaposes big sounds with contrastingly vulnerable emotions, a reflection of her new surroundings after relocating to London, looking beyond the club—either rock or discotheque—and probing a vast, chromatic and aural palette while somehow finding a way to unite its most contradictory sounds and distant points through a kind of sly introspection. Björk described the album as being her most “promiscuous,” in part because of how she brought so many different collaborators into her unique vision: Tricky, Howie B, 808 State’s Graham Massey, Brazilian composer and arranger Eumir Deodato and so on. Perhaps more accurately it’s a reflection of the many aspects of her own identity: defiant, complex, somehow both insular and extroverted. The entirety of Björk, both as an artist and as an individual, can be heard on Post.

As a 15-plus-year veteran of the music industry at just under 30 years old, Björk’s abilities were never in doubt. But perhaps more than anything, Post reinforced the uniqueness of her perspective. We perhaps take for granted that the aesthetic and stylistic hybrids on Post—merging trip-hop with orchestration, pop with industrial, avant garde electronic music with a more mainstream-friendly approach to songwriting—which came to be the norm in both alternative music and even well beyond that sphere in the years that followed. Still, there weren’t many songs prior to this album—by anyone—that sounded much like “Army of Me,” a buzzing industrial stomp backed by a John Bonham drum loop that saw the petite Icelander laying down the law with intimidating fury: “And if you complain once more/You’ll meet an army of me.”

Where “Army of Me” outfitted Björk in battle armor, the ambient twinkle of “Possibly Maybe” lays bare her vulnerability, her daydreams of unrequited love turning to bitterness: “After a while I wonder/Where’s that love you promised me?” And in the grimy, sweaty grind of “Enjoy,” she attempts to reconcile physical attraction with self-conciousness, an effort to be in the moment (“sex without touching” is the phrase she uses, but you get the sense that, yes, there will be some touching involved).

The broader musical palette that Björk draws from likewise allows her to explore a more complete range of emotions beyond big-time sensuality, though there’s no question that there’s plenty of that to go around. On the brief “Cover Me,” in which Björk recorded her vocals in a cave during recording sessions at Nassau’s Compass Point Studios (after what was then a recent renovation and reopening of the temporarily shuttered hideaway), she sings, “I’m going hunting for mysteries.” By and large, she finds them, frequently wrapped in idiosyncratic stylistic choices and haunting arrangements. Teeming with bright bursts of horns and hypnotic layers of percussion, “I Miss You” imagines an ideal partner that might not even exist, playfully accompanied by an animated video in which her head is bitten off by piranhas. Meanwhile, the left-field hit “It’s Oh So Quiet” is an update of a 1951 Betty Hutton vocal jazz song that hits reset at the halfway point, its brassy sound and punctuations of unfiltered screams a startling attempt to shock the audience, and the bane of karaoke DJs worldwide”.

Before finishing off with the influence and legacy of Post, there is a review that I want to get to. A five-star review from Slant Magazine, their praise and huge applause mirrored reviews from 1995 and those since. A huge chart success and an album that is seen as one of the best of all time by many sources, it still sounds fresh and exciting thirty years later. An album that has not dated at all. For anyone who has never heard the album, I would urge them to do so. It is a genius album from one of music’s true innovators:

“Though Björk had enjoyed minor cult fame as the lead singer of the prog-punk band the Sugarcubes, it only took one solo album to solidify the Icelandic artist as a viable pop iconoclast. The plainly titled Debut and its accompanying music videos showcased the endlessly fascinating sides to Björk’s offbeat persona: sweater-clad explorer (“Human Behaviour”), bejeweled sensualist-egg chef (“Venus as a Boy”), lovesick insane asylum inmate (“Violently Happy”), and, perhaps most intriguingly, trailer-hitch improvisational performance artist (“Big Time Sensuality”). All four of the album’s singles tickled the fancies of pop fans who secretly wished pop iconography would take more dangerous, sensual leaps of intuition: Björk, through sheer force of will, seemed as experimental and frightening as her pop ditties were cute and ingenuous.

Then, of course, there was her voice: She could rarely be bothered to sing in the 4/4 time signature dance music often requires, and her paradoxically husky and reedy, thickly accented vocal tone could sound at turns childlike and tremulous or like a shriek from the crypt of banshees. But Debut, for all its sense of independent self-actualization, is honestly as much an achievement by producer extraordinaire Nellee Hooper as it is a reflection of Björk’s titanic character. Her 1995 follow-up, Post, upped the ante by plugging listeners into the diverse pop mixtape playing inside her mind, and if she had to go suss out producers as sundry as Graham Massey and Tricky to achieve her goals, then so be it.

It’s telling that Post includes two tracks initially slated for Debut and then scrapped when they seemed too far out at the time: “The Modern Things,” reportedly a response to rockist fans of the Sugarcubes who cried “sellout” when Björk learned to love the computer sequencer, and the opening track “Army of Me.” Right from the word go, Post is several furloughs beyond any of Debut’s perceived weirdness, as “Army of Me” provocatively merges a Weather Report-esque jazz-fusion bass riff with a heavy-timbered rock drumbeat to match her contemptuous vocal delivery (“Self-sufficience, please!”). Without missing a beat, Björk puts herself into the role of fragile suicidist on “Hyper-Ballad,” as she throws tchotchkes over a cliff to approximate the nature of her own plunge. A phenomenal journey, the track begins with lightly shuffling drum n’ bass before expanding into an immense house groove.

“It’s Oh So Quiet,” an instrumentally faithful cover of a 1940s Betty Hutton big band number, was Björk’s biggest crossover moment ever, and if it’s usually rejected by most Björkheads, well, then that’s another testament to the extent she implores people to open up their musical horizons. Each track on Post reveals another emotional extreme: “Possibly Maybe,” an almost masturbatory ode to the wax and wane of love affairs; “Enjoy,” a dark and dubby dalliance with the seedier side of sexuality; and “I Miss You,” which should resonate with anyone familiar with the “Amor Omnia” speech in Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud. And in case some odd ducks still hadn’t caught on to Björk’s lost-in-a-costume-shop approach to public guises, Post came fully equipped with another barrage of music videos (six of the little buggers!), many of which have gone on to become classics, most notably Michel Gondry’s industrial wasteland “Army of Me” and Spike Jonze’s clodhopping tribute to Busby Berkeley and Jacques Demy, “It’s Oh So Quiet.”

Collaboration has always been an important aspect of Björk’s work ethic. Testifying to this is the fact that she has had romantic affairs with a great many of her colleagues (Tricky, Stephane Sednaoui…though probably not Lars von Trier). She also suggested that the Post remix album, Telegram, is, if anything, even more true to her personal vision than the prototype, despite having an even wider range of styles and producers (a shrieking, classical Brodsky Quartet “Hyper-Ballad” mingles with a distorted, NIN-like “Possibly Maybe” and a ghetto-blasting hip-hop “I Miss You”).

For many, the delicate balance of Post represented the ultimate Björkian pop experience, and one that has yet to be topped. In fact, Björk’s next album, her 1997 glass-dragon Homogenic, indicated with one fell swoop that Björk had moved beyond pop into what one might call her own cloistered “genre of me.” The shimmering Vespertine, from 2001, suggested a move on Björk’s part to translate her own unique musical style back into the world of pop (with some fantastically emotional moments like “Undo” and “It’s Not Up to You”), but Post will likely always remain the Björk album that most successfully sustains her winning balance of experimental whimsy and solid pop magic”.

I am going to end with some information from Wikipedia. In terms of the legacy and influence of Post, it has had such an impact through the years. Not just in terms of affecting other artists. How significant it was in Björk’s career. Rather than repeating her debut, Post took her music to new places. When she followed Post with 1997’s Homogenic, again, Björk evolved once more:

“The album's influence has been identified as being increasingly palpable on the contemporary music landscape, and later reviews of the album also make note of the timeless aspect of the music. Writing for The Daily Review, James Rose wrote in 2015: "Post is where mainstream music could have gone. While modern chart music hasn't gone there entirely[,] she undoubtedly helped broaden the playing field. [The album] stands today as a body of work that still informs the more marginal artistic fringes of modern music and reminds us how narrow and staid our world would be without outliers like Björk. Also in 2015, Andrew Shaw of Nerdist felt that Post "chose to ignore expectation, market restrictions, and contemporary trends", and that Björk "pushed her vocal performances into new places, where no other vocalists could dare to sing". He compared the album's impact on audiences to that of Jimi Hendrix's 1967 album, Are You Experienced, writing it "set the benchmark for what was possible when you take tradition and set it on fire". Raymond Ang of The Wall Street Journal considered Post to be "Björk's last stab at the pop game… she would dig deeper into her increasingly avant-garde interests and, in the years to come, thrill and challenge her audience".

David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors is an admirer of the record, stating he was influenced by Björk's deconstruction of classic melodies. American singer-songwriter Amy Lee has said Post is "one of the biggest records in [her] life". DJ Shadow sampled "Possibly Maybe" in "Mutual Slump", a track off his 1996 album, Endtroducing...... The Vitamin String Quartet—known for its series of tribute albums to rock and pop acts—covered "Army of Me" and "You've Been Flirting Again" in the 2001 album, Ice: The String Tribute to Björk. In 2008, Stereogum released a compilation of cover versions in homage to the album, titled Enjoyed: A Tribute to Björk's Post. It features: Dirty Projectors, Liars, Xiu Xiu, High Places and Atlas Sound, among other artists.

Much of Post's six music videos have gone on to become classics—most notably "It's Oh So Quiet" and "Army of Me". At the time of its release, music videos were beginning to be used as an art form, and Björk's visual output during this period—and her career in general—have become a clear example of the medium's artistic legitimation. Spanish writer Estíbaliz Pérez Asperilla has identified recurring motifs and themes through Björk's videography; these include nature and a magnified depiction of Björk. Surrealism and technology have also been identified as recurring features in Björk's visual output of this period. David Ehrlich of Time Out considered her "one of the first artists to meaningfully explore the aesthetic and semiotic value of CG and its relationship to the [videos]." Writing for Paste, Alexa Carrasco felt, "Björk has created some of the most beautiful and weird videos to ever play on MTV." The popularity of the music video for "It's Oh So Quiet" made the song one of Björk's most ubiquitous tracks, and was considered her first breakthrough on MTV. The music videos—and the pink boots Björk wears in "Hyperballad" (the work of Belgian designer Walter Van Beirendonck)—were displayed in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, as part of the 2015 Björk exhibition. They were also featured in the 2016 exhibition, Björk Digital, which premiered at Carriageworks as part of the Vivid Sydney festival”.

I am going to finish there. On 13th June, the incredible Post turns thirty. One of the defining albums of the 1990s, as I said, it still sounds so fresh. You can put it on now and find new layers and details. Testament to the incredible production and the phenomenal songwriting. Björk performances so electric and stunning. I am not sure if there is going to be a thirtieth anniversary reissue of Post. However, you can grab it on cassette, C.D. and vinyl, so I would suggest you go and get it. This album holds a very special place…

IN my heart.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Connection: Classic Albums Released on the Same Day

FEATURE:

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: Wellington Cunha/Pexels

Connection: Classic Albums Released on the Same Day

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FOR this Digital Mixtape…

PHOTO CREDIT: Anton H/Pexels

I wanted to look at an interesting phenomenon. That is when classic albums are released on the same day. It doesn’t happen often. However, if you look back through the years and all the times there have been incredible albums released the same day, it must have been great for music fans. These amazing albums coming out the same week and not knowing which one to spend your money on! That sort of excitement does not really happen these days. However, that is not to say we will never see a day when two massive albums come out the same day and there is this feverish anticipation. Although I cannot include dates in a playlist, I have found albums released the same day and included tracks from each. Putting them side by side. I am doing it in pairs, so the first two albums were released the same day; the third and fourth etc. Spotify has the wrong date for the release of Soundgarden’s Superuknown, and there is debate whether Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde was released the same day as The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, but I believe they were (though some might argue that). From A Tribe Called Quest and Nirvana in 1991, Björk and Alanis Morissette and Radiohead and Elastica in 1995, there have been these wonderful clashes. To see it happen is…

ALWAYS a joy.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: A Career-Spanning Pulp Celebration

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: Tom Jackson

A Career-Spanning Pulp Celebration

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FEW people…

expected the iconic Pulp to announce new music. Speaking with Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 6 Music, they talked about their new single, Spike Island, and their upcoming album, More. I have another Pulp feature coming soon as Common People turns thirty on 22nd May. That is a single from their fifth studio album, Different Class. Their eight studio album is coming out on 6th June. To celebrate this, I wanted to compiled a mixtape of the best Pulp tracks. The great singles and some deep cuts. Starting out with their latest single. NME reported on the wonderful news of new Pulp material:

“Pulp have announced a return with details of their first new album in 24 years ‘More’ and the festival-ready single ‘Spike Island’.

Jarvis Cocker and the Britpop icons have had fans waiting on new material having signed a new record deal with Rough Trade last year after reuniting again in 2023 for the first Pulp shows since 2012 – playing new songs while out on the road, such as ‘Farmer’s Market’, ‘Spike Island’, ‘My Sex’, ‘You’ve Got To Have Love’, ‘Background Noise’ and ‘A Sunset’.

Then, last summer, it was reported that the group were “back in the studio” after frontman Cocker was spotted in Walthamstow, London. The singer was pictured carrying an orange Rough Trade tote bag while waving at the camera.

Now the band have announced ‘More’ – their first album almost 24 years – will be released on Friday June 6. The album was recorded and mixed at Orbb Studio in Walthamstow E17 and produced by James Ford. The album is also their first since the passing of bassist Steve Mackay, who died in 2023. The record is dedicated to his memory.

Speaking on BBC 6 Music this morning, the band confirmed that “the record has been done for a while” and the wait between records felt like “a lifetime”, before completing it in three weeks.

“[Playing live] was a big influence on it – that we played and the songs came back to life,” said Cocker. “We did play one new song towards the end of the tour and no one threw stuff at us or left to go to the bar’

“We chose to do it quickly… it wanted to come out.”

The new single ‘Spike Island’ is a synth-led indie pop gem that sees Cocker reflect on life at a point of great change: “Dead in my tracks/ I was heading for disaster, then I turned back. The universe shrugged, shrugged and moved on”.

It is also a nod to the historic Spike Island gig that The Stone Roses, played in Cheshire in May 1990. The show saw The Stone Roses perform to 28,000 fans at the site of a disused chemical plant – becoming one of the most legendary gigs of all time and seen as the precursor to the Britpop era.

Pulp have made reference to the Spike Island show in the past – namely in their song ‘Sorted For E’s & Wizz’, which was shared as part of their 1995 album ‘Different Class’. Speaking on 6 Music, Cocker confirmed that he “never went to the concert, but I’d spoken to people who went and picked things up second hand from it” to piece together images and phrases that captured the show and the mood of the occasion.

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Lyrically the idea for ‘Spike Island’ came from Jason Buckle (of Relaxed Muscle) who co-wrote the song and went to Stone Roses’ infamous Spike Island gig where a DJ repeatedly shouted, “Spike Island, come alive!”

“I was told that someone was interested in investigating A.I. & did I have any ideas?,” he said in a press release about the accompanying video. “The first idea I had was to animate the photographs that Rankin & Donald took for ‘Different Class’: after all, back in 1995 they had been an ‘artificial’ way of dropping us into real-life situations & getting an album cover done whilst we were too busy recording the music for that album to pose for pictures. No brainer.”

He continued: “It was my initial idea to produce a kind of “making of” video that showed how the photos had come to be taken – but as soon as I fed the first shot into the AI app I realised that wasn’t going to happen. So I  decided to “go with the flow” & see where the computer led me.

“All the moving images featured in the video are the result of me feeding in a still image & then typing in a “prompt” such as: “The black & white figure remains still whilst the bus in the background drives off” which led to the sequence where the coach weirdly slides towards the cut-out of me.

“The weekend I began work on the video was a strange time: I went out of the house & kept expecting weird transformations of the surrounding environment due to the images the computer had been generating. The experience had marked me. I don’t know whether I’ve recovered yet…..”

He added: “I have to thank Julian House for some expert post-production work & Rankin & Donald Milne for allowing me to use their work in this way. As it says in text at the end of the video, I think what they did for Pulp back in 1995 was “Human Intelligence at its best”.

“My final thought? H.I. Forever!”

In a statement about the album, Cocker shared: “This is the first Pulp album since “We Love Life” in 2001. Yes: the first Pulp album for 24 years. How did that happen?

“Well: when we started touring again in 2023, we practiced a new song called “Hymn of the North” during soundchecks & eventually played it at the end of our second night at Sheffield Arena. This seemed to open the floodgates: we came up with the rest of the songs on this album during the first half of 2024. A couple are revivals of ideas from last century. The music for one song was written by Richard Hawley. The music for another was written by Jason Buckle. The Eno family sing backing vocals on a song. There are string arrangements written by Richard Jones & played by the Elysian Collective.

“The album was recorded over three weeks by James Ford in Walthamstow, London, starting on November 18th, 2024. This is the shortest amount of time a Pulp album has ever taken to record. It was obviously ready to happen”.

In honour of some great news from Pulp this week, I was keen to look through their back catalogue and assemble their biggest tracks and some deeper cuts that don’t get played much. Spike Island is a great taste of their new album. Keep an eye out on their social media channels for tour dates and news. You can pre-order More here. Even if you are quite new to Pulp then you will want to get this album. It will be interesting to hear what comes next from one of the best…

BANDS of all time.

FEATURE: Perfect: Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Perfect

Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill at Thirty

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I do love it…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Alanis Morissette in her hotel room in Cologne, Germany, in 1995/PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Cummins/Getty Images (via The New York Times Magzzine)

when two classic albums come out on the same day. There have been some famous examples through the years. However, 13th June, 1995 saw Björk’s Post released alongside Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill. This album ranks alongside the best of the 1990s. Jagged Little Pill was a departure from a more Dance-Pop sound of her first two albums – Alanis (1991) and Now Is the Time (1992). Jagged Little Pill is undoubtedly a work of genius, through it did have its detractors in 1995. Now, I think there has been enough retrospection and praise. Alanis Morissette worked with producer Glen Ballard after she moved from her home in Ottawa to Los Angeles. Jagged Little Pill sports classic singles like Ironic, You Learn, You Oughta Know and Hand in My Pocket. Because the album turns thirty on 13th June, I wanted to spend some time with it. An album that I experienced back in 1995 but have come to appreciate more in years since. The music industry in the mid-1990s not as supportive when it came to female artists and great works like Jagged Little Pill. I want to get to a few features of an album that I feel has inspired so many other artists. Before getting to some spotlighting of an album that went to number one in the U.S. and U.K. (and many other countries) and is seventeen-times platinum in the U.S., here is some detail about the legacy of Jagged Little Pill:

“Morissette's success with Jagged Little Pill was credited with leading to the introduction of female singers such as Fiona Apple, Shakira, Tracy Bonham, Meredith Brooks, and in the early 2000s, Pink, Michelle Branch, and fellow Canadian Avril Lavigne. American singer Katy Perry cites Jagged Little Pill as a significant musical inspiration, and opted to work with Morissette's frequent collaborator Ballard as a result. Perry stated, "Jagged Little Pill was the most perfect female record ever made. There's a song for anyone on that record; I relate to all those songs. They're still so timeless." Grammy Award winner Kelly Clarkson said of the album, "It made me a better writer. It made me a better singer." Avril Lavigne cited Jagged Little Pill as one of her all-time favorite albums, stating: "It is an album I can revisit over and over, belt every song, and never get sick of." In 2018, the album won the Polaris Heritage Prize Audience Award in the 1986–1995 category. Benny Anderson of ABBA listed the album as one of the 6 soundtracks of his life: "I listened to this a lot when it came out, at a time when I wasn't writing pop songs any more. It was a remembrance of solid golden pop, from a fantastically talented woman with great writing and a great voice, and a very nicely produced album by Glen Ballard. It's one of the top 10 albums in my life when it comes to pop records, alongside Rumours and Hotel California”.

I want to start with a feature from Albumism from 2020. They marked twenty-five years of an album that has been ranked alongside the greatest ever. Even though Alanis Morissette hoped Jagged Little Pill would gain her kudos among her late-Grunge peers, she found them aloof – and she herself was never that. However, the influence Jagged Little Pill has had and the life it has taken on cannot be denied. It is a sensational album. I don’t think it sounds too dated. You can hear artists today very much producing their own version of songs from the album:

“Just two years after Madonna co-founded the Maverick record label back in 1992, the company signed a then relatively unknown 20-year-old Morissette. Just over a year later and her debut album for the label had been released and proved to be the smash record the label had envisioned. With total sales now in excess of 33 million units globally, the album not only cemented Morissette’s star status, but went 16x platinum in the US, became the best-selling debut album of all time and garnered the singer five out of the nine GRAMMY Awards she was nominated for in 1996, not to mention taking out the number one spot in a staggering 14 charts around the world. But this album is about so much more than just groundbreaking statistics—it’s a powerful album about personal experiences.

Whilst the walk down memory lane in revisiting the album twenty-five years later is full of coming-of-age stories and in many ways, articulated everything that I was feeling then, aged nineteen, I am also reminded that Morissette was a mere year older than me at the time and wrote and produced music that not only belied her youth, but gave a voice to a generation.

Jagged Little Pill surfaced at a time when grunge was at its peak and although Morissette presented a strong, multifaceted woman, open and honest, she hadn’t ridden the same wave that her feminist peers like Courtney Love and Ani Di Franco had done. Instead, she had received success with her first two pop albums in her native Canada and even dated “Uncle Joey” (Dave Coulier) from Full House, all things that couldn’t have been further from the voice expressing torment, pain and vulnerability on Jagged Little Pill.

All that changed when Morissette met legendary record producer and songwriter Glen Ballard (Michael Jackson, The Pointer Sisters, Paula Abdul). With Ballard now providing some guidance and a wealth of production knowledge, the two set about bunkering down in Ballard’s studio, supposedly recording a song a day. According to Morissette, she penned the track “Perfect” in a mere twenty minutes and requested that her original demo vocals be used to create a rawness on the album. Ballard in tow, it only seemed fitting to have session musicians lend their wares and there was no better fit than Dave Navarro and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers to provide some serious guitar work on the album’s lead single “You Oughta Know.”

A total of six singles were released from the album, with all of these songs (except "All I Really Want”) entering the top ten in various charts around the world and “Ironic” taking out the number four spot on the Billboard Hot 100, her highest charting single in the US. But it was “You Oughta Know” that set the tone for the album and gave license to a type of female sexuality and unabashed raw anger not seen on a commercial scale, showing that women get equally as irked as men, most definitely as horny and may even get a little perverse as captured in lines like, “Is she perverted like me / Would she go down on you in a theater?”

With hope in her heart, the album’s second single “Hand In My Pocket” showcases a self-assured Morissette who is able to have a little fun. The third single and album smash “Ironic”— the much-disputed irony-free song that Morissette stood by in the wake of criticism over its linguistic usage—became her trademark. Whether or not you deem the song situational irony, dramatic irony or even completely unironic, you can’t deny that Morissette’s indifference to the world and how it will eventually do you over in the end makes for a damn good song.

Apart from the officially released singles, there is even more beauty on this album. Whether it be the togetherness on “Mary Jane” as Morissette reassures a friend in the midst of grief or the religious hindsight on “Forgiven,” she adds even more layers to her self-exploration and that of others too.

Morissette delivered an opus of immeasurable beauty on Jagged Little Pill, a beauty entrenched in her psyche, her anger, her lovelorn heart and her hope. She created a fluidity and slickness within this album rare for a twenty-one-year-old novice artist. She kept her words raw and articulated emotions and feelings that many women had felt too ashamed to even acknowledge, let alone put out there for the whole world to hear”.

I want to drop in a feature from Rolling Stone from last year. In their list of the five-hundred best albums ever, they ranked Jagged Little Pill at sixty-nine. Proof that endures to this day. An album that will continue to influence and gain a whole new generation of fans. Jagged Little Pill has been nominated for a score of great awards. I hope it gets new inspection ahead of its thirtieth anniversary on 13th June:

“A very important record from my childhood, I clearly remember going halves with my sister to buy this CD. That would effectively make it the first CD I bought, or amongst the first few and I listened to it to death. While this is her third release, it was the first released internationally. A major shift in sound from her first two, many naively considered this her debut. Following her second album, Alanis Morissette moved from Toronto to L.A., where she met producer, Glen Ballard. Amongst many other releases, Ballard had contributed songwriting and production to Michael Jackson’s ‘Bad’ and ‘Dangerous,’ most notably ‘Man In The Mirror’ and ‘Keep The Faith.’ Influenced by Grunge and Alternative music of the time, Ballard would refine Morissette’s angst into well-crafted pop songs, resulting in 12 (13 really) incredible songs.

Why 13? Well, this might possibly be the first album on the list to include a secret track, the stalker song, ‘Your House.’ ‘All I Really Want’ kicks the proceedings off, setting the tone of songs to follow. The middle eight section in the song would be a recurring device used throughout. Track 2 is arguably Morissette’s signature song, ‘You Oughta Know.’ A revenge/break-up song allegedly about Full House’s Dave Coulier, Ballard assembles a super group of sorts to deliver the song; the soaring vocals of Alanis, the unmistakeable bass of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea, as well as their one-time guitarist, Jane’s Addiction’s Dave Navarro. The song was essentially re-arranged by the pair with the middle section heavily resembling their own band’s song, ‘Aeroplane.’ Rounding the supergroup off is Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ organist, Benmont Tench. Although often rumoured, Taylor Hawkins from Foo Fighters doesn’t play drums on the recording (he was her live drummer). The 10/10 album also includes ‘Hand In My Pocket,’ ‘You Learn,’ ‘Head Over Feet’ and ‘Ironic.’ It was nominated for 9 Grammys, winning 5; making the 21-year-old Alanis the youngest winner (at that time) of Album Of The Year. It went to the #1 spot in 13 countries and to date has sold a staggering 33 million copies, making it one of the biggest-selling albums of all time (just behind MJ’s ‘Bad,’ coincidentally). It has recently been turned into a musical. I always forget how incredible this album is, until I relisten to it and I’m reminded all over again. Loved relistening to this after so many years”.

I am going to end with an anniversary review from Billboard from 2015. Their twentieth anniversary piece made some interesting observations. I have taken select sections from the feature which also included a song-by-song review. I have highlighted my favourite three from Jagged Little Pill:

“In 1995, there were plenty of angsty lady rockers with more rage and credibility than Alanis Morissette. The 21-year-old singer-songwriter hadn’t grown up playing basement punk shows or firing off feminist manifestos. Back home in Canada, she was known for the pair of dance-pop albums she released before graduating high school. Her parents weren’t even divorced.

But Morissette was no fraud. Jagged Little Pill, the era-defining international debut album she thrust upon the world 20 years ago on June 13, 1995, wasn’t some act of calculated alt-rock reinvention. Rather, it was a product of growing up. Alanis had been around the block, sung a few bubblegum tunes, and even dated a dude from Full House. It all left her wanting, and with her third album — recorded in Los Angeles after she’d been dropped by her label — Morissette decided to follow her gut and make music she could feel good about.

For the first time, this meant writing songs about feeling bad. Though drawn from personal experiences (bad relationships, career woes, adventures in Catholicism), Jagged Little Pill resonated. By November 1995, it had sold more than 2 million copies, topping the Billboard 200 and finding a mainstream audience that edgier female artists like Courtney Love and Liz Phair weren’t able to reach. This was precisely because of — not despite — Alanis’ past life in pop.

Jagged Little Pill isn’t a rock record. It’s grungy discomfort set to the kinds of tpp 40 hooks and backing tracks one gets working a guy like Glen Ballard, who Morissette met in 1994 and quickly took a liking to.

Pre-Pill, Ballard had produced artists like Wilson Phillips, Paula Abdul and Michael Jackson. With him co-writing and playing most of the instruments, there was zero chance of Alanis relocating to Alternative Nation. In terms of earnestness and emotional directness, Morissette made those Pearl Jam guys look like the cast of MTV’s The State, but that was OK. The ticked-off adolescent girls who constituted much of her audience weren’t necessarily looking for irony, and they didn’t require a spokesperson who even knew the meaning of the word.

This became apparent when “Ironic,” the disc’s famously irony-free third single, reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, continuing a hot streak that had begun with the gutsy scorned-woman rager “You Oughta Know” (long rumored to be about Dave “Uncle Joey” Coulier) and the more subdued, hopeful “Hand in My Pocket.” Two more smashes — “You Learn” and “Head Over Feet” — followed, making Jagged Little Pill one of those albums like Joshua Tree or Born In the U.S.A., where practically every track is a single, and they’re all pretty distinct.

Like those Bruce and U2 benchmarks, Jagged Little Pill today seems a bit dated. Still, Ballard’s drum machines and grunge-lite guitars (many preserved from the original demos) aren’t what anyone thinks about when they wax rhapsodic about this album. It was never meant to be hip or edgy, and 20 years later, it’s more meaningful for what it represents — a smart young woman talking honestly about her feelings and finding herself as an artist — than for how it sounds.

Read on for our track-by-track take on this, a record that earned five Grammys, sold millions and millions of copies, and gave its creator something to really freak out about: success.

“You Oughta Know”: The second-best major-label debut single of the ‘90s, right after Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” this gnashing kiss-off shocked listeners with its raw anger and frank portrayal of female sexuality. Turns out women get pissed off and horny just like men. Some even get freaky in movie theatres. This was no surprise to Flea and Dave Navarro of Red Hot Chili Peppers, who flesh out the Ballard demo and put scraping funk-rock to Alanis’ taunting indignation.

“Head Over Feet”: Alanis knows she’s a handful, and that she’s not the type to get all gushy. “Don’t be surprised if I love you for all that you are,” she tells a guy who actually treats her right. He listens when she talks and asks her how her day was, and he’s probably fine with her calling in the middle of dinner. He’s the opposite of that “You Oughta Know” dude, and Morissette sings in a plainspoken manner suited to Ballard’s basic guitar-and-drum-box backing — and the feeling of relief that has her buzzing.

“Ironic”: Alanis might have been a little unclear on what irony means, but she knew how to choose her battles. Rather than argue that “rain on your wedding day” and “10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife” constitute “situational irony,” as some defenders have insisted, Morissette owned up to the gaff and stood by her song. And rightfully so, as her highest-charting Hot 100 hit is a funny shoulder shrug of a song about how life always screws you in the end”.

On 13th June, it will be thirty years since the mighty and iconic Jagged Little Pill was released. This is an album that will be discussed for decades more. I was twelve when the album came out, so it took me a few years after that to connect with it. I am not sure whether I was a massive fan of the album in 1995 but have become in years since. It arrived in one of the best years for music ever and stands up there with the very best. Thirty years on and Jagged Little Pill still sounds amazing. Alanis Morissette’s third studio album is an…

UNDENIABLE masterpiece.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Ms. Lauryn Hill at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

Ms. Lauryn Hill at Fifty

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ALTHOUGH there has not…

been any new music from Ms. Lauryn Hill, she has been keeping busy. Back in October, she performed reunion dates with Fugees. She was also at a star-studded memorial for Roberta Flack back in March. I do think that we are going to get more performances and activity from one of the icons of Hip-Hop. Someone whose sole studio album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, has been inspiring people since its release in 1998. Even if her career with Fugees was brief and she has not put out another album since 1998, she is very much in the world and influencing people still. She turns fifty on 26th May. Because of that, I have assembled a selection of songs from her time with Fugees, plus some of her incredible solo material. Before I get there, AllMusic provide some biography about the wonderful Ms. Lauryn Hill:

“Lauryn Hill broke through with multi-platinum-selling, Grammy-winning group the Fugees, but with her 1998 solo debut The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, the singer, songwriter, rapper, and producer established herself as a creative force on her own. She successfully integrated rap, soul, and reggae into a singular sound. Eclectic, uplifting, and empowering, the album was often cited by younger artists as a touchstone. Following its success, Hill was something of an enigma, her recorded output limited to a live set, scattered compilation appearances, and a handful of collaborations. Disenchantment with the entertainment industry, along with legal issues and erratic performances, did not lessen the impact of her '90s work.

Raised in South Orange, New Jersey, Hill spent her youth listening her parents' multi-genre, multi-generational record collection. She began singing at an early age and snagged minor roles on television (As the World Turns) and in film (Sister Act II: Back in the Habit). Her on-again/off-again membership in the Fugees began at the age of 13, but was often interrupted by both the acting gigs and her enrollment at Columbia University. After developing a following in the tri-state area, the group's first release -- the much-hyped but uneven 1994 album Blunted on Reality -- bombed, and almost caused a breakup. But with the multi-platinum 1996 release The Score, the Fugees became one of the most prominent rap acts on the strength of hit singles "Killing Me Softly," "Ready or Not," and "No Woman, No Cry."

Hill followed it in August 1998 with The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, her first solo release. Apart from a cover of "Can't Take My Eyes Off You," popularized by Frankie Valli, each song was either written or co-written by Hill. She was also credited with the arrangement and production of the whole album, which was steeped in her old-school background, both musically (the Motown-esque singalong of "Doo Wop [That Thing]") and lyrically (the nostalgic "Every Ghetto, Every City"). As Miseducation began a long reign on the charts through most of the fall and winter of 1998, Hill became a national media icon, as magazines ranging from Time to Esquire to Teen People vied to put her on the cover. By the end of the year, as the album topped best-of lists, she was being credited for her part in assimilating hip-hop into the mainstream. The momentum culminated at the February 1999 Grammy Awards, during which Hill took home five trophies from her 11 nominations, including Album of the Year, Best New Artist, Best Female R&B Vocal Performance, Best R&B Song, and Best R&B Album -- the most ever for a woman. Shortly after, she launched a highly praised national tour with Atlanta rappers OutKast.

Hill continued shaping her solo career, though it hit some significant snags. She faced a lawsuit from musicians who claimed they were denied full credit for their work on Miseducation -- a matter that was eventually settled out of court. After some film projects fell through, she retreated from the music scene as she raised her family and partially attributed her hiatus to feeling too compromised. The double-disc MTV Unplugged No. 2.0 appeared in May 2002 and documented a raw, deeply personal performance. It debuted at number three but quickly slid off the Billboard 200. During the next several years, her recordings and performances were infrequent and erratic, highlighted by a Fugees reunion for Dave Chappelle's Block Party. In 2013, she spent almost three months in prison for tax evasion but was more active after her release. The following year, the English-language version of the Swedish documentary Concerning Violence was released with Hill as its narrator. She executive produced and recorded six songs for the 2015 release Nina Revisited: A Tribute to Nina Simone, including interpretations of "Feeling Good" and "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair”.

I am celebrating the upcoming fiftieth birthday of Ms. Lauryn Hill with some incredible studio recordings and some great live cuts. Whether you are a diehard fan or are quite new to her music, I hope that the playlist here will interest you. One of music’s true greats, I do hope that we hear a lot more from her in the future. She has a talent that few others do, so it would be wonderful if she gifted us with new music. On 26th May, the world celebrates the fiftieth birthday of…

THE peerless Ms. Lauryn Hill.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: The Who’s Pete Townshend at Eighty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

IN THIS PHOTO: Pete Townshend in 2019/PHOTO CREDIT: Mamadi Doumbouya via The New York Times Magazine 

The Who’s Pete Townshend at Eighty

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ONE of the most influential…

IN THIS PHOTO: The Who in 1965/PHOTO CREDIT: David Magnus

and talented songwriters and guitarists turns eighty on 19th May. I am referring to Pete Townshend. Responsible for some of the greatest songs ever written, I am marking his upcoming birthday by collating some of the very best. As part of the legendary band The Who, generations have been enriched by his songwriting. Although I am not old enough to have heard them in the 1970s, I have listened to their classic albums since and recognise their brilliance. There are few songwriters in music history as accomplished as Pete Townshend. Before I get to a mixtape of cuts form The Who – with Roger Daltrey singing most of the songs; Townshend singing quite a few himself -, AllMusic’s biopgaphy of Pete Townshend gives us a glimpse into his genius:

“Pete Townshend was the guitarist and primary songwriter for the Who from 1964 to 1982, also participating in the group's occasional reunions after its formal breakup. Best-known for his conceptual works, he wrote Tommy and Quadrophenia for the band, as well as the bulk of its other material. He made his first tentative solo album, Who Came First, in 1972. Dedicated to his guru, Meher Baba, it continued themes pursued in Who's Next, and like that album, contained material originally intended for an abortive conceptual work, Lifehouse; it sold modestly. In 1976, he made a duo album, Rough Mix, with Ronnie Lane, formerly the bassist in the Small Faces.

Townshend's first full-fledged solo effort was Empty Glass (1980), which sold a million copies, reached the Top Five, and featured the Top Ten hit "Let My Love Open the Door," as well as the minor hits "A Little Is Enough" and "Rough Boys." He followed it in 1982 with All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes, which was less successful. Nevertheless, he felt he could no longer write for the Who, and at the end of the year, the group disbanded following a North American tour. Townshend released Scoop, a two-disc compilation of demos, in 1983 (a second volume appeared in 1987).

In 1985, he returned to thematic efforts with the album White City: A Novel, which included the Top 30 single "Face the Face." The same year, he published a book of short stories, Horse's Neck. As part of the White City project, he appeared in an accompanying film, for which he organized a band called Pete Townshend's Deep End. The unit played only a few gigs, but one was videotaped and recorded, resulting in the 1986 album Pete Townshend's Deep End Live! In 1989, he released an album based on poet Ted Hughes' children's story, The Iron Man. The record featured guest vocals by John Lee Hooker and Nina Simone, as well as two tracks featuring the three surviving members of the Who. Simultaneous with the album's release, Townshend embarked on a reunion tour with the Who, an event that overshadowed The Iron Man, which enjoyed only modest sales.

In 1993, Townshend delivered Psychoderelict, another conceptual work, to mixed reviews and poor sales. By that time, however, he had successfully reinvented himself as a Broadway tunesmith -- the theatrical production entitled The Who's Tommy had become a runaway hit, earning him a Tony Award and prompting him to pursue more stage musicals. None of these came to fruition during the rest of the '90s, though, and by the end of the decade, he was releasing live and archival recordings (notably the long-delayed Lifehouse) through his website and planning another reunion with the Who.

The Who became a regular concern following the group's 1996 reunion to play Quadrophenia at Hyde Park. After that, the band next hit the road in 1999 and performed often until John Entwistle's sudden death on the eve of a tour in summer 2002. Townshend and Roger Daltrey carried on as the Who and in 2006, they released Endless Wire, which was the band's first album in 24 years and Townshend's first collection of new songs in 13.

Over the next few years, the group performed regularly, culminating in a 50th anniversary tour in 2015. That same summer, Townshend released Classic Quadrophenia, the flagship album in a symphonic reworking of his 1973 rock opera. Featuring Townshend, Billy Idol, Alfie Boe, and Phil Daniels, Classic Quadrophenia also had orchestrations by Townshend's partner, Rachel Fuller”.

I know that there will be some features written about Pete Townshend ahead of 19th May. His eightieth birthday is reason to cheer. Formed in 1964, their most recent – and perhaps final – album was 2019’s Who. Their most recognisable and celebrated song, My Generation, turns sixty in October. I am not sure whether we will hear more music from The Who. You can check out Roger Daltrey and The Who tour dates. You can read more about Pete Townshend here. You can buy Pete Townshend and The Who’s albums here. Such an iconic and respected songwriter, ahead of his eightieth birthday on 19th May, I was keen to compile a mixtape featuring…

HIS brilliant songwriting.

FEATURE: My Tea's Gone Cold, I'm Wondering Why… Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP at Twenty-Five

FEATURE:

 

My Tea's Gone Cold, I'm Wondering Why…

Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP at Twenty-Five

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A number one album…

PHOTO CREDIT: Interscope Records (via The Independent)

in multiple countries around the world, Eminem’s third studio album, The Marshall Mathers LP, was released on 23rd May, 2000. Among the album’s producers were Dr. Dre, Mel-Man and F.B.T. The Marshall Mathers LP also featured guest spots from Dido, RBX, Sticky Fingaz, Dina Rae, Bizarre, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and others. Perhaps a more personal album than his previous two, Eminem’s lyrics tackled his rise to fame, criticism of his music, and estrangement from his family. Mixing different genes and sporting some of the sharpest and best lyrics on any Hip-Hop album, it is hard to hold it in high esteem without mentioning its faults. Whether playing a character or not, the album has not aged well in some respects. Its consistently misogynistic and homophobic lyrics would not be tolerated and supported in Hip-Hop today. Even though this happens still to this day, we have not really heard an album quite as vitriolic as this since 2000. In the way Eminem treats women and the violence evident through the album’s tracks. In addition to references of  the Columbine High School massacre, there are repeated threats of violence and murder. In fact, songs like Stan that actually do feature murder. In spite of this, there is emotional depth from Eminem. His poetic turns of phrase no doubt influencing scores of rapper since. Almost twenty-five years after its release you can see the legacy it has and how it is seen as one of the most important Hip-Hop albums ever. However, at a time when there is misogyny and violence against women, is it an album that we should celebrate and spotlight?

I want to bring in a couple of reviews of The Marshall Mathews LP before asking whether we remember the album for its innovation and moments of brilliance or its frequently unsettling and toxic lyrics. I will start with a review from Stereogum. They wrote about The Marshall Mathers LP on its twentieth anniversary in 2020:

“On The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem talks about himself as if he’s public enemy number one, as if he’s the most hated person in the history of mainstream America. This is an act. He wasn’t that — not yet, anyway. A little more than a year earlier, The Slim Shady LP had sold well and established Em as a shock-rap star. He’d been on arena tours — as opener, not headliner — and he’d rankled public-taste watchdogs like Billboard editor Timothy White. But his success wasn’t a public crisis yet. Still, Eminem spends The Marshall Mathers LP speaking about himself as an inescapable pariah — the despised colossus who stands astride the world. As soon as the album came out, that’s exactly what he became.

On The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem’s great superpower is an ability to magnify every perceived slight to absurd degrees. In an anodyne MTV segment, Christina Aguilera had mentioned that Em had married Kim Mathers, the woman who he’d rapped about murdering on “’97 Bonnie & Clyde.” This was a tiny on-air moment, not some grand campaign that Aguilera was waging. But at the time, it wasn’t public knowledge that Em had married Kim, so Em was furious. On “The Real Slim Shady,” the ridiculously catchy first single from The Marshall Mathers LP, Em goes nuclear against Aguilera, imagining himself at the VMAs, sitting “next to Carson Daly and Fred Durst, and hear them argue over who she gave head to first.” It’s a wild, dizzy, indefensible overreaction — one of many.

Eminem has so many enemies on The Marshall Mathers LP: Parents, teachers, gay people, journalists, boy bands, girl groups, Insane Clowns, his own fans, his mother, his wife, himself. A couple of years before he made the album, Em had been a white-trash no-hoper in Detroit, a grown kid with a failed rap career and a daughter he couldn’t afford to raise. Em had transcended his origins through sheer profane ingenuity and force of personality and a lucky connection to Dr. Dre, and he’d suddenly become a public figure. But he was still miserable. His wife was cheating on him, and he was getting into fights over it, getting arrested. His mother was suing him for rapping about her. He was going through it, and he was telling jokes about going through it: “Tell me, what the hell is a fella to do?/ For every million I make, another relative sues.”

Trolling didn’t exist as a verb in 2000, but that’s what Eminem does all through The Marshall Mathers LP. He’d noticed that his homophobia on The Real Slim Shady had made people uncomfortable, so he doubled down on it, admitting later that he’d done it just to piss people off. Pissing people off had become his religion. This was a cruder time in American public history, when you could become a free-speech crusader just by saying fucked-up shit and daring uptight old people to react. (Lynne Cheney, another Eminem adversary, took the bait, complaining about his lyrics on the floor of Congress.) Em caught the same wave that the South Park guys did, riding shock-value infamy to towering mainstream fame. On the album, Em plays the villain — “I was put here to annoy the world, and destroy your little four-year-old boy or girl” — because he knows that this will make him a hero.

As irresponsible as Em gets on The Marshall Mathers LP, though, he also vents a whole lot of anxiety about his own success and what that might mean. Sometimes, he’s outwardly offensive, as on all the moments where he raps about the Columbine massacre, “a whole school of bullies shot up all at one time.” Sometimes, he’s defensive, insisting that he’s not society’s problem: “What about the makeup that you allow your 12-year-old daughter to wear?” Sometimes, he’s self-conscious, fretting about being “in rotation on rock ‘n’ roll stations” just because of his race. And sometimes he’s piercingly, fearfully vulnerable. That’s the power of “Stan,” a nearly-seven-minute Hitchcockian horror story about the kid who takes all of Eminem’s jokes the worst possible way.

“Stan” is a fascinating relic now — a genuinely cutting and absorbing story-song that entered the lexicon, changed the dictionary, and gave toxic fandom a name. Producer Mark The 45 King sampled a ballad from the relatively unknown British trip-hop siren Dido and briefly turned her into a star on American adult contemporary radio. (This was less than two years after the 45 King had sampled Annie for Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem).” Has a not-that-famous producer ever had such a culturally impactful one-two punch?)

My colleague Chris DeVille just wrote a whole piece about the legacy of “Stan,” but the song also served a function in the moment. At the 2001 Grammys, the same night that he famously lost Album Of The Year to Steely Dan, Eminem performed “Stan” with Elton John, making a feeble attempt to defuse all the homophobia accusations. The song choice was auspicious. “Stan” is the moment where subtext becomes text, where Eminem makes his vulnerability plain. Em wasn’t just a spitball-shooting outrage magnet. He was also a smart and incisive storyteller. You couldn’t hear “Stan” and believe otherwise.

If you’re listening closely enough, that vulnerability is all over The Marshall Mathers LP. Em imagines himself in a nursing home at 30, or staying home with a 40 at 40, babysitting his daughter’s kids while she’s out getting plastered. He gives voice to his own worst impulses — to the worst impulses that anyone could have. The previous album’s “’97 Bonnie & Clyde,” where Em babbled lovingly to his daughter while disposing of her mother’s body, was bad enough. The Marshall Mathers LP gave us the harrowing prequel “Kim” — six minutes of crying and screaming and, finally, murdering: “You were supposed to love me! Now bleed, bitch, bleed!”

I hated “Kim.” It stressed me out, and made me sad, and exhausted me. So I avoided the song. I had the album on cassette, so I couldn’t just skip the song. Most of the time, I just fast-forwarded the tape to the end of the second side, sacrificing “Under The Influence” and “Criminal” so that I wouldn’t have to listen to “Kim” again. You couldn’t endure “Kim” and think that Eminem was cool, that he was someone worth emulating. He sounds pathetic, unhinged, his own worst-nightmare version of himself. But even on “Kim,” Em imagines himself as the victim, immune to whatever harm he may be inflicting on the rest of the world. It’s a perennial Eminem problem. As much as he fumes about bullies, he can’t process the idea that he might be one.

“Kim” plays out like a movie — dialog, sound effects, Em doing his own wife’s death-scream voice. “Stan” works the same way, with pencil scratches and car-in-river splashes giving physical dimension to the stories that he’s telling. The level of craft on The Marshall Mathers LP remains staggering. Where Dr. Dre only produced a few tracks on The Slim Shady LP, he and his proteges take over for much of Marshall Mathers, giving Em a tense, springy blockbuster-rap heft. And even when Em produces himself, as on the gothically pretty “The Way I Am,” the music has scope.

In terms of pure rapping technique, The Marshall Mathers LP is almost peerless. On his more recent records, Eminem has turned rap virtuosity into an empty technical display. But on Marshall Mathers, Em shows urgency and personality even when he’s speeding rings around his tracks. The album’s maddening catchiness is almost a problem. Em raps in absurdist, transgressive nursery rhymes that remain permanently lodged in my brain decades later: “Skippity bebop, Christopher Reeve!” I have spent most of the time since 2000 working in the music media, and yet I can’t see the word XXL without immediately hear Em’s clowning echoing in my skull: “Maybe now your magazine won’t have so much trouble to sell!”

The Eminem of 2000 was such a great rapper that he could make anything sound compelling — Tom Green catchphrases, UFO cockpit-radio chatter, intra-MTV gossip. A lot of it was terrible. The “Ken Kaniff” skit, wherein the two members of Insane Clown Posse give loud and slobbery blowjobs to Em’s menacing gay sketch-comedy character, is probably the most uncomfortable thing to have playing on your stereo when anyone else walks into your room. In decades of pornographic sex-noise rap-album skits, I don’t think anyone’s ever made anything worse. And yet I still kept listening. So many of us did. Apparently, there was a million of us just like Em, who cussed like Em, who just didn’t give a fuck like Em”.

I want to move onto a 2018 review from Pitchfork. Even though they celebrated its confidence and contradictions, there is this complex legacy. An album with very few radio-appropriate songs, one wonders whether spotlighting The Marshall Mathers LP is appropriate. Despite its clear problems and acidity, there is this legacy and reappraisal. How this album has changed Rap and influenced some of the best Hip-Hop artists of today:

“After the release of The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem would shatter sales records with 1.7 million copies sold in the first week alone, 6.5 million in the first month, and eventually, over 35 million sold worldwide. It’s still the best-selling rap record of all time. He would cross over from rap to pop and rock radio, sell out arenas, win Grammys, rankle Lynne Cheney in front of the U.S. Congress, add a word to the dictionary, and incite protests from no small number of social justice groups. By virtue of his whiteness and talent in almost equal measure, Eminem would come to rule pop culture in America by becoming this century’s prototypical troll.

Whatever he’s become since, there can be no question that Eminem was one of the greatest to ever do it. He blew a young Kendrick Lamar’s mind, teaching him things about narrative clarity that he wouldn’t learn elsewhere. He killed JAY-Z on his own track, thus spoke Nas. It was Dr. Dre—N.W.A., The Chronic, Aftermath Records, kingpin of West Coast rap-Dr. Dre—who got Eminem’s demo tape in the late ’90s and co-signed this twentysomething, lemon-faced, twiggy, vociferously self-proclaimed son of a bitch from the East side of Detroit born Marshall Bruce Mathers III.

He was also, and remains, a homophobe, a misogynist, a confessed domestic abuser. He wrote later that, because of his critics, he went into what he called the “‘faggot’ zone” for this album “on purpose. Like, fuck you.” He defended this ugliness using the modern troll’s boilerplate: double down on the thing they want you to change until they can’t tell what you believe and what you don’t. To be a long-suffering listener of Eminem is to contend with this petulant fake-radical impulse, but it remains an impulse that defined the scope and tenor of The Marshall Mathers LP and became part and parcel to its success.

Across his major label debut, The Slim Shady LP, Eminem established the framework of his mythology: He was born into poverty, raised without a father, shuttled between Missouri and the lower-middle-class black neighborhoods of Detroit, rootless, bullied to near-death. The album established his to-put-it-lightly Freudian relationship with his mother, his clear love for legends like Big Daddy Kane and Masta Ace and Nas, and his come-up battle-rapping at the Detroit hip-hop clubs. When the dust settled, his rapid ascent and sudden fame began to burrow into his writing, coloring his every want, thrumming behind the text.

“The Real Slim Shady” was one of the last songs written for the record. All through 1999, Eminem had been scribbling lyrics—not actual lines, just two or three words, little scraps of meter and verse unarrayed on a page—while on a world tour supporting his debut. Verses began to blacken notebooks after had found inspiration in the deregulated drug culture of Amsterdam, so much so that he almost named this album after the city. Meanwhile, over in the States, Dr. Dre and several other producers, including the Funky Bass Team and the 45 King, were assembling the beats for what would become the bulk of The Marshall Mathers LP. In early 2000, when Eminem submitted the project to Interscope label boss Jimmy Iovine, he was unsatisfied. It was macabre, morose, reflexive, and unflinchingly personal. It also didn’t have a hit.

The goal of rap, for Eminem, is to overwhelm. The Marshall Mathers LP floods the room with “South Park” and grisly kidnappings, Ricky Martin and ecstasy, the assassination of Gianni Versace and the impregnation of Jennifer Lopez. One minute you’re dealing with hypocritical gun legislation, the next you’re subject to an Insane Clown Posse diss track; as soon as you consider Bill Clinton’s abuse of power, Eminem is recasting the shooters of the Columbine High School massacre as the real victims. It is data overload, that sharp inhale and sigh of never getting a word in edgewise. For 70 minutes, you are tethered to a twirling Mathers, eye to eye, a dizzying and intimate manipulation by pathos and abuse by words. Sometimes it really is just a litany: “Blood, guts, guns, cuts, knives, lives, wives, nuns, sluts,” or, “Fuck, shit, ass, bitch, cunt, shooby-de-doo-wop, skibbedy-be-bop.” The album’s centrifugal force is thrilling and it is to Eminem’s great credit that he doesn’t once let go of his grasp.

American culture allowed Eminem to freely negate any kind of identity he wanted to, as was his inherent privilege. But, as the critic Hilton Als wrote in his 2003 essay “White Noise,” it didn’t matter to Eminem. “Mathers never claimed whiteness and its privileges as his birthright because he didn’t feel white and privileged,” Als wrote. It’s interesting, though, that Eminem never negated his masculinity or heterosexuality, two identities that were and, more or less, remain intrinsic to the success of male rappers. His privilege meant that he could shed his racial signifiers and become a ghost, a psychopath, a loving father, a bigot, a clown. So why do fans believe any of this? Why, when they listened to Eminem rip his vocal cords open and disconnect from reality and mimic slitting the throat of his wife while he screams at her to “bleed, bitch bleed” do they take him so seriously?

Part of it has to do with that virtuosity. If contemporaries like OutKast and Ghostface grew their albums from the soil, Eminem grew his from the salted earth. He’s grounded but acidic, you see the ink of his words, the indent they make on the page, the ridges formed around the letters by the force of his pen. The delight when he finds a little turn of phrase like “ducked the fuck way down,” or, “I guess I must just blew up quick” shoots out dopamine. It would be one thing if Eminem simply loved language, but more than that, he loves the tradition of rapping, this guy whose passion was donated to him by hip-hop at an early age, a vocation that rescued him from the status quo of poverty, that kept him from becoming among the millions just like someone else. At his best, he is like watching a gymnast spin on the parallel bars in slow motion:

Part of it, too, was the fantasy he offered. Along with his ’00 nu-metal tourmates Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach, Eminem’s music became synonymous with a kind of ball-chain necklace, mad-at-the-world angst, channeling the latent rage leftover from rap rock’s heyday. Here was a guy who put to carefully chosen words the feeling of being broke, at the end of your rope, jealous and backed up into a corner. Those who threw up their arms and screamed “You don’t want to fuck with me” along with him could feel a little bit of anger exiting their bodies, and the mental pressure dropping by a few millibars.

But the anger and trauma he conjured from his childhood of abuse and bullying felt uncomfortably real in all his performances. On The Marshall Mathers LP, he suits the action to the word and the word to the action. He picks the right tone for the right mood, the horrorcore of “Remember Me?,” the beleaguered artist on “The Way I Am,” the impish malevolence of “Criminal,” or the tortured, regretful, loving, deranged, murderous everything-all-at-once feeling of “Kim.” We don’t really believe it, but we believe Eminem really believes it.

Art bends the world in ways we can’t always see. This album is categorically music for kids, and it rests on the shelf as a time capsule from the last big cultural flashpoint of the 20th century. Heard now, the album is still a considerable piece of music, but it’s also full of this hate. And the targets of that hate—women, the LGBTQ community—are the same people that those in power seek to marginalize. To say otherwise is to rob great art of its power. To say that Eminem’s clearly homophobic lyrics should be read as satire is to argue in bad faith that the impact art has on the world, the way it shapes the life of those who experience it, can be controlled and mitigated. Because hate emerges under the guise of art, it doesn’t erase the profound hurt it brings to a population that may be out of your own purview”.

There is that debate about albums like The Marshall Mathews LP. Others will write about it closer to its twenty-fifth anniversary on 23rd May. So important in terms of its musical impact and how it revolutionised Hip-Hop, at a time when you could not conscientiously an album like it that came out today, will the 2000 release always have this complicated legacy? In spite of that, as Wikipedia write, there has been this reappraisal and modern-day relevance that at least shows what a powerful and important album The Marshall Mathers LP is:

“Since its initial release, The Marshall Mathers LP has been highly acclaimed in retrospective critic reviews. It has been regarded by critics as Eminem's best album and has been ranked in multiple lists of the greatest albums of all time. In The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), Christian Hoard said it "delved much deeper into personal pain [than The Slim Shady LP], and the result was a minor masterpiece that merged iller-than-ill flows with a brilliant sense of the macabre." According to Sputnikmusic's Nick Butler, The Marshall Mathers LP stands as a culturally significant record in American popular music, but also "remains a truly special album, unique in rap's canon, owing its spirit to rock and its heritage to rap, in a way I've rarely heard". Insanul Ahmed of Complex wrote, "At a time when the Billboard charts were dominated by squeaky-clean pop acts like NSYNC and Backstreet Boys, Eminem offered a rebuttal to the hypocritical American mainstream that criticizes rap music while celebrating—and, worse, commercializing—sex, violence, and bigotry in other arenas. This album turned Eminem into a global icon. There was a huge amount of hype and controversy around it [...] But none of that takes away from its musical achievement. This album definitively proved that the Detroit rapper was a gifted lyricist, a brilliant songwriter, and a visionary artist." Mike Elizondo, a former collaborator on Eminem's albums, said, "I felt like Marshall was part of this wave with Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction (1994) and Reservoir Dogs (1992) [...] This next level of art with incredible graphic imagery that Marshall had the ability to paint. Love it or hate it he was obviously very skilled at the stories he was telling."

Jeff Weiss of The Ringer wrote, "The Marshall Mathers LP certified Eminem as an alienated voice of a generation, a caustic wedge issue distilling the spirits of Elvis, Holden Caulfield, Johnny Rotten, Kurt Cobain, Cartman from South Park, and Tupac if he shopped at Kroger. In a postmodern abyss where everything's performative, it might have been the last album that possessed the capacity to genuinely shock.” Dan Ozzi of Vice highlighted that "Eminem was the one artist high school kids seemed to unanimously connect with. [...] he represented everything high school years are about: blind rage, misguided rebellion, adolescent frustration. He was like a human middle finger. An X-rated Dennis the Menace for a dial-up modem generation." Max Bell of Spin wrote that the album remains "one of the most critically-acclaimed, commercially-successful, and influential albums in rap history", citing rappers influenced by the album, such as Tyler, the Creator, Earl Sweatshirt, Kendrick Lamar, and Juice WRLD. Bonsu Thompson of Medium described the album as "a masterful confluence of punk, bluegrass, and subterranean hip-hop that gave life to a singular brand of Americana rap." Thompson further praised the album's impact on white rappers, saying, "For a snapshot of the album's seismic influence, compare the pre–Marshall Mathers LP decade of White rappers like Everlast and MC Serch with the post-2000 landscape of Action Bronson, G-Eazy, and the late Mac Miller [...] Eminem homogenized the White rapper”.

It is clear that The Marshall Mathers LP has changed Hip-Hop. Its place in music history is set. However, as we mark twenty-five years of a groundbreaking album, what impact will it have in years to come. Its moments of lyrical genius and genre-blending cannot be faulted. However, at a time when misogyny is rising and being weaponised; where domestic abuse, violence against women and sexual violence is high, there is this sense of guilt or discomfort listening to an album as visceral and unapologetically explicit and violent as The Marshall Mathers LP. One would wonder what the album would sound like if Eminem focused the proverbial gun on himself or cut away the homophobia and misogyny. It is difficult. Both timeless and a moment in Hip-Hop that we do not want to see repeated, how do you acknowledge the bigotry and misogyny in 2025? However, without an album like The Marshall Mathers LP, you do wonder whether certain artists of today would be here without it. It is clear that, when it comes to this album, there is…

NOTHING else like it.

FEATURE: Scented Letters Received with a Strange Delight: Kate Bush’s Babooshka at Forty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Scented Letters Received with a Strange Delight

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a photo from the Babooshka cover shoot/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush 

Kate Bush’s Babooshka at Forty-Five

_________

WHEN Breathing…

was released on 14th April, 1980, people got the first taste of this new direction for Kate Bush. Maybe heavier, more political and the introduction of a song where she was in the producer’s chair (with Jon Kelly), it must have been quite hard to decide which single would follow it. Released three months before Never for Ever came out, Babooshka might have felt an obvious choice. Another bold and brilliant song, it is typically one that could only come from Kate Bush! It was released on 27th June, 1980 and reached number five in the U.K. I have written about Babooshka a lot but, as its forty-fifth anniversary is soon, I needed to revisit it. With Garry Hurst and Paddy Bush provided some great background vocals and Bush sprinkling in some Fairlight CMI magic, Babooshka is this timeless and unique song that opens Never for Ever. Maybe one of the more commercial tracks on the album, it will still very different to what was being released in the summer of 1980! Before moving on, I want to highlight an interview, where Kate Bush discussed the background to one of her best-loved singles:

“Apparently it is grandmother, it’s also a headdress that people wear. But when I wrote the song it was just a name that literally came into my mind, I’ve presumed I’ve got it from a fairy story I’d read when I was a child. And after having written the song a series of incredible coincidences happened where I’d turned on the television and there was Donald Swan singing about Babooshka. So I thought, “Well, there’s got to be someone who’s actually called Babooshka.” So I was looking throughRadio Timesand there, another coincidence, there was an opera called Babooshka. Apparently she was the lady that the three kings went to see because the star stopped over her house and they thought “Jesus is in there”.’ So they went in and he wasn’t. And they wouldn’t let her come with them to find the baby and she spent the rest of her life looking for him and she never found him. And also a friend of mine had a cat called Babooshka. So these really extraordinary things that kept coming up when in fact it was just a name that came into my head at the time purely because it fitted. (Peter Powell interview, Radio 1 (UK), 11 October 1980)”

Recorded at Abbey Road’s Studio 2 and performed live on several occasions, Ran Tan Waltz was its quirky and bawdy B-side when it was released as a single. Many do not think about hidden depths and different interpretations of Babooshka. Its historical relevance and how it helped to change perceptions around Russians. I will move to a feature that argued that in 2014. Even though the country today is (rightly) being spotlighted for its atrocities, in 1980, there was this stereotypical and maybe regressive vision of anything Russian. Before getting to that, I want to come to an article from Dreams of Orgonon. They make some interesting observations and arguments when it comes to this Kate Bush classic:

“That Babooshka is something of a madwoman is expressed by the song, and particularly its video. Certainly Kate Bush considers Babooshka a pathetic (if pitiful and tragic) villain who hurts her husband. In an interview, she described Babooshka’s motivations as “paranoia [and] suspicions,” and ascribes the husband’s desire to meet his pen pal to her similarity to “his wife, the one that he loves.” Her perspective of the song is damning of Babooshka and de facto absolves her husband. The story is ultimately one of Babooshka’s downfall, where her preoccupation with retaining control of her life costs her the marriage.

Dreams of Orgonon often takes positions on Kate Bush’s songs contrary to Bush’s own. Later this year, I’m going to argue that “The Dreaming” is a hundred miles from the anti-imperialist parable Bush intends it to be. Similarly, “Babooshka” covers more than its titular character’s vanity. I think Bush writes the couple as equal offenders, and that “Babooshka” is two songs at once: it’s a covertly traditionalist song about how women’s preoccupation with their looks hurts their male partners, and it’s a subversive feminist tract about how gender norms destroy relationships.

Of course, the song’s moral ambiguity is its most interesting aspect. While there’s an almost reactionary slant to the way “Babooshka” perceives relationships, particularly in the way it treats gender along binary and determinist lines, Bush does push against the grain. She often demonstrates a willingness to interrogate the internal experiences of her characters, particularly women characters. Exploring the ramifications of jealousy is crucial to imbuing her characters with interiority. Bush has Babooshka’s husband failing similarly, even if she doesn’t realize it. Most texts are buzzing with suggestions their authors haven’t considered. In the case of “Babooshka,” Bush enacts a complex meditation on how gendered expectations can poison relationships. Babooshka lets her suspicions and preoccupation with re-becoming young and glamorous overcome her life, and her husband lets his treacherous predilections towards young beauty lead him astray. No party comes out morally in the clear, and yet neither is entirely unsympathetic. They’re trapped in an ugly binary where people are programmed to perform in ways incompatible with human psychology. If there’s a way to use the framework of folklore in a thoughtful and modern way, this is it.

As such, “Babooshka” makes the case that Kate Bush’s songwriting can be multiple things at once and create a conflicting hive of meaning, and that Bush’s love for the archaic is hardly blinded by a nostalgic haze. She demonstrates a consistent willingness to interrogate how stories like these work, how human beings act when plugged into myth and folklore, and the ways in which these situations are incompatible with humanity. Some of the most complex women in fiction are characters in Kate Bush songs. Never for Ever’s status as the first studio album by a female artist to reach #1 in the UK remains significant for a number of reasons. If Dreams of Orgonon has a thesis, it’s that Kate Bush is a traditionally-minded person who can’t stop herself from writing feminist songs. Break the glass. Howl “Babooshka, ya-ya!” The 1980s are here, and there’s a new swordmistress of chaos to herald them”.

I will round off this feature soon. As Babooshka turns forty-five on 27th June, I want to spend a bit more time with it. In 2014, Vanora Bennett argued that Babooshka humanised and reframed Russians at a time when the nation was under the rule of Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary of the Communist Party and Alexei Kosygin as Premier, with a highly centralised, communist system in place. It is an interesting take for sure:

“As a London schoolgirl studying Russian at the time, I didn’t care at all that Kate Bush pronounced the Russian name with the stress in the wrong place, and clearly had no idea that it meant “granny”. I just remember being gobsmacked to realise that any sort of Russian theme could come up in the charts at all – let alone one that didn’t fit either of the two prevailing Russian stereotypes. In those iron curtain days, to my mind Russians were either Ealing countesses, the children and grandchildren of the dispossessed, impoverished, desperately genteel White Russians who’d escaped from the 1917 revolution with nothing but their titles. Or they were solid, slab-faced politburo men from the newspapers, in solid suits, with hair lacquered into silvery central committee quiffs which always rather reminded me of menacing ice-cream cones.

Then suddenly this weird little fairytale about a love test gone wrong, full of the chirpy yet minor cadences of eastern folk and gypsy music, was on everyone’s lips all over the western world.

The song tells the story of a wife trying to check her husband’s loyalty by sending him notes purporting to come from a younger woman, which she signs “Babooshka”. Her fear that her husband no longer sees her as young and attractive are borne out by the barbed lines conveying his thoughts: “Just like his wife before she ‘freezed’ on him / Just like his wife when she was beautiful”. The trap is set when, in her bitterness and paranoia, Babooshka arranges to meet her husband, who is attracted to her alter-ego character because she reminds him of his wife in earlier times – and so she lets her fears ruin her marriage.

The video featured Bush beside a double bass symbolising the husband, wearing a black bodysuit and a veil in her role as the embittered wife, then changing into an extravagant, myth-like and rather sparse “Russian” costume as Babooshka. It was a kind of mass-culture rethink of some of the themes of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District, the Shostakovich opera which had so annoyed Stalin – the plotting, the secretiveness, the centrality of human relationships instead of politics, and that wily female desperation bringing tragedy in its wake.

But at the time the important thing was that Babooshka’s story, with its dancey, faintly eastern-sounding music and the emotional subtlety that toned down its cruelty, helped blow away the cobwebs from what most people then thought they knew about life on the communist side of Europe. It was proof that Russians weren’t all about Pravda and giant factories and dreary rolled-steel statistics, after all. There were real people out there, too: people who liked their wild love songs in a minor key; people with hearts, sometimes broken; people struggling to escape frustrating situations.

This made Babooshka a helpful soundtrack as the vast political changes began, very soon afterwards, on the eastern side of 1980s Europe – changes that would eventually bring the divided continent back together. The song opened millions of western hearts and minds to the possibility that the easterners they were reading about were no longer anonymous foot soldiers in a cold war that was ending, but rather flesh-and-blood folks like them.

Certainly by the time I started reporting on Russia in 1991, it had become standard for kindly mentors to advise young journalists heading for Moscow that the interesting thing there, these days, wasn’t the politicians. It was the human interest stories – the “babooshkas”. They always stressed it Bush’s way, too.

And so, when Kate Bush comes on stage this week to sing Babooshka, to a London which, a generation later, is teeming with people from all over post-cold war Europe, I hope they’ll forgive the nonsense meaning the song gives the word, and the wrong stress. Bush didn’t bring the Iron Curtain down single-handedly it’s true, but her song was certainly part of the evolution in thinking that eventually destroyed barriers and reunited the people of Europe – and could do in these strained times once again”.

Paul Du Noyer of NME Babooshka as "More luxuriant weirdness from sultry songstress with high-pitched voice". That was the general attitude from a lot of critics. After delivering the epic and pulse-stopping Breathing, Kate Bush delivered a song that was both commercial but strange. Something that should have pleased everyone. Babooshka having this hypnotic charm. Lyrics that were unusual and clever. Even though Babooshka was a chart success and Never for Ever went to number one, you do wonder why many critics took against Kate Bush and had this impression of her. Babooshka is not a high-pitched vocal. She is a female artist, so it is going to be a high-pitched vocal compared to men. Babooshka is only weird compared to commercial and routine Pop. The sexism and misogyny Kate Bush faced even when she released music of this quality. However, in years since its release, Babooshka has been met with plenty of love and praise. Last year, when ranking her fifty best songs, MOJO put Babooshka at eighteen: “Russian folk traditionalism inspires modern studio mastery. Inseparable from the promo of double bass-love and warrior-princess-shape-throwing, Babooshka is a tale of paranoid relationship collapse wrapped in a buoyant pop waltz replete with glass-breaking sound effects. Compared to the rest of the often bleak and meditative Never For Ever, Babooshka’s minor-chord intrigue offers three-and-a-half minutes of relatively light relief. Not that it was an easy song to record – even Del Palmer’s bass was deemed an incorrect fit for what would become one of Bush’s biggest singles”. The Guardian, in 2018, ranked Kate Bush’s singles and placed Babooshka in fourteenth: “As straightforwardly pop as Bush ever got, famed for a video that looks like a dream a Dungeons & Dragons-playing pervert once had, Babooshka is still irresistible: its howled chorus unshakeable, the sound of smashing glass presaging 80s sample-mania”. Last year, Classic Pop decided Kate Bush’s best forty songs and put Babooshka twelfth. Turning forty-five on 27th June, the majestic and magnificent Babooshka deserved another write-up. One of my favourite Kate Bush songs, it is a clear example of…

HER distinct genius.

FEATURE: The Inessential World: Kate Bush in the Late-1980s and a Move from the Innovative to the Personal

FEATURE:

 

 

The Inessential World

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a shot from The Sensual World cover shoot/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

Kate Bush in the Late-1980s and a Move from the Innovative to the Personal

_________

THERE is debate as to…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1989/PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Cummins

whether there was a period where Kate Bush’s albums stopped evolving. What I mean is, one can see a clear leap and progression from 1980’s Never for Ever, 1982’s The Dreaming and 1985’s Hounds of Love. All very different albums, there was definitely this move towards the more cinematic and ambitious I feel. It can be argued that 1989’s The Sensual World saw Kate Bush move more to the personal. I am picking up from something Graeme Thomson notes in his book, Under the Ivy: The Life & Music of Kate Bush. I have picked up on this before. Through the 1980s – and the late-1970s – there was nobody quite like Kate Bush. She was in her own lane and, because of that, her music stood out. One of the things critics could get their head around is the lack of context and likeminded artists. As Kate Bush was distinct, they either didn’t get her or ridiculed her. Those who understood and bonded with her music were much kinder. You wonder whether the work and effort needed to create a masterpiece like Hounds of Love was a turning point. Maybe Bush did not want to release another album with that same scope and detail. I can imagine there were periods producing that album that were tough. Making these huge songs come together. She possibly could have written something like Hounds of Love for her next album, though one suspects that she was keen to do something entirely new. The fact it took four years to follow that 1985 album probably impacted critical perception and public lustre as much as anything. Such a commercial success, eyes would have been on Kate Bush to put out a sixth studio album maybe in 1987 at the latest. The longest wait between albums up until that point has been between The Dreaming and Hounds of Love (three years). Considering the brilliance of Hounds of Love, three years was not a huge wait. By 1989, the world around Kate Bush had changed.

There is a whole other feature when we think about the particular year and how Kate Bush fitted in. In 1985, the sound she was producing was definitely fitting in to what was around it. However, this being Kate Bush, there was something head and shoulders above her peers. By 1989, the music scene had shifted. She could not repeat herself. Nor did that hold any interest. There were a host of other artists emerging that were being compared to Kate Bush. Among them were Enya, Jane Siberry and Sinéad O'Connor. If Hounds of Love and its Fairlight-led brilliance was innovative and forward-thinking, maybe there was something out of step with a British music climate where Rave and Madchester were in vogue. Bush working with a Bulgarian vocal ensemble in the form of the Trio Bulgarka. I love The Sensual World and feel it is wildly underrated, under-played and pushed aside by some – maybe wanting something closer to Hounds of Love. Bush could have created her own Dance album or fit in to the Pop factory and mainstream scene of 1989 that saw the likes of Kylie Minogue ruling. However, she wanted to take her music in a new direction. I don’t think that there was a massive dip in quality or ambition. However, part of Kate Bush’s innovative and always-changing mindset meant she was never going to do what people expected. However, many note that The Sensual World and its lyrical themes and sounds clashed with the more uplifting, euphoric Rave and Dance; different to what was popular in the charts. If her previous few albums were pioneering and moving towards this apex, Graeme Thomson feels The Sensual World was a moment when there was not this notable move forward.

If some feel the production is over-compressed and her vocals are squeezed and do not fit right in the mix, I don’t think we can blame Kate Bush entirely. Maybe there are fewer genius songs than we hear on Hounds of Love. However, anyone who feels The Sensual World is a disappointment need to revisit the album. Something I have noted before is how personal and beautiful the album sounds. I think The Sensual World sounds like it does because maybe Bush felt that the latter years of 1989 were seeing music decline. The quality going down. In terms of what was popular and what music was saying. Because of that, rather than trying to fit in with a scene she deemed inferior, she took things back. You can say that the production is not perfect and a bit muddled. However, I think that what Bush does on the album and the sounds she mixes works incredibly well. I do hear something personal on The Sensual World. Bush was in her thirties when the album came out. Like The Kick Inside in 1978, this was a very female and feminine album. An older artist (Bush was a teen when recording The Kick Inside), songs like Between a Man and a Woman, Reaching Out and Love and Anger similar to songs such as Hounds of Love and Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God), in the sense that they came from a personal place but had universal relevance and meaning. This feeling that maybe The Sensual World was a deliberate attempt from Kate Bush to go against what was trendy and commercial when she was making the album. Songs that maybe didn’t have as much depth or substance as you’d hope. I will wrap things up soon. I want to bring in a part of this interview from The Guardian that was published on 12th October, 1989:

“Kate is only a little less reluctant to meet the press than she is to go on tour, and she is facing the hacks this time in order to shed some light on her latest album, The Sensual World.

To her surprise and delight, people have finally stopped asking her about her 1978 hit Wuthering Heights and about her sexuality, and instead have been asking "much deeper things". Perhaps, with the charts stuffed with House, Kylie or heavy metal, her real worth has become clear.

Pop's comings and goings don't interest her much.

"There's some really bad stuff happening in pop music, isn't there?" she murmurs, like somebody discussing a newspaper report of a small, distant war. "everyone's been wearing black for the last five or six years in the music business, and I see it as a real state of mourning for good music.."

She admires artists like Peter Gabriel and Pink Floyd, whom she sees as perfectionists who work at their own pace. She gets cross with people who dismiss middle-aged rockers as unsightly relics of a bygone era, pointing out that artists in any other medium rarely reach a peak before they're 40. 

The Sensual World isn't much like the stuff they play on daytime Radio 1, though the title track received bags of airplay as a single. The album contains 10 songs - 11 on the CD - and if it takes a while before you feel you know your way around it, it eventually dawns on you that it is magnificent.

Ms Bush has nimbly drawn a thread of continuity through music patched together from any number of sources.

Folk melodies rub shoulder with jolting funk rhythms. Simple chord progressions are transformed by audacious instrumental voicings and tone colours. Lyrics which look flat or oddly naive on paper get up and dance when Kate sings them.

Sometimes, maybe in Deeper Understanding or Rocket's Tail, you find yourself ambushed and overwhelmed by great rushes of emotion, about love or childhood or the way things keep changing even though you want them to stay the same forever.

"It's stupid really," she says, "the amount of time that's gone into writing 10 songs. They're just 10 songs, it's not like some cathedral or something.

Technology is all moving very fast, and I think that's very good if you can keep the balance between technology and compassion, which is the human element where really the work comes in. I think maybe what gets more difficult each time is writing material, finding something to say that feels worth saying - something new that hasn't beens aid on the last album”.

I have a lot of love for The Sensual World. However, the late-1980s was a very different landscape to the one five or ten years previous. I don’t think Kate Bush took too long to make the album or failed to advance her music and make something worthwhile. Instead, she was trying to create something that was different to what was in the mainstream. A move from what she had done before. I know that there was this unhappiness with the album. The reason for 2011’s Director’s Cut was to address production or mix issues (where she reworked songs from The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes). Take the songs apart and rework them. However, I am not alone in feeling there is more than meets the eye regarding The Sensual World. An album with sublime songs, phenomenal production moments, heart-stopping beauty and these incredible moments of passion – together with flights of fantasy and numbers that are historical and also futuristic. This article from 2022 argues the case for The Sensual World:

“During the creation of The Sensual World, Kate Bush turned 30, reaching a milestone that inspired an evolving approach to her work. In 1989, she told NME that the album represented a newfound understanding of her own music, a shift away from the concentrated expressions of power that she associated with the “male energy” she sought to display in releases like The Dreaming and Hounds of Love. The Sensual World is comparatively more subdued than its predecessors, although definitely not without its own sense of bombast, but one that is allowed to launch forth after indulging in its own grounded spectacles, rather than existing solely to build upon itself. Her lyricism is much more centered, too—instead of yearning for an opportunity to run up that hill that is just out of reach, her poetry embraces intimacy and renders it equally as stirring as her more exclamatory aspirations.

What encompasses all of these songs, no matter their specific subject, is the prominence of passion as a motivating force in their stories, the conflict that drives every single narrator. This idea is most literally introduced in the title track, of course, as the word “passion” already has a visceral connotation that is innately sexual in nature, again placing such a powerful force within the primal desires of the human body. “The Fog,” through its elegiac usage of a string symphony that’s almost cinematic, envisions its titular phenomenon as the periphery a love interest occupies when its narrator cannot form a tangible grasp on romance”.

I will write another feature where I chart the decades Kate Bush’s albums were released in and how it fitted with what was around it. At a moment in British music when other scenes were holding attention, some were disappointed by The Sensual World. Rather than Bush pushing technology and repeating herself, she was in a stage of her life where she wanted to be more personal or explore sensuality and womanhood. The Sensual World seeming more human and rooted compared to a lot of Hounds of Love and The Dreaming. In Pitchfork’s 2019 retrospective of The Sensual World, they ended with this: “She didn’t need to prove her own steeliness to anyone, especially the male journalists who patronized her and harped on her childishness as a way of cutting her down to size. Instead, The Sensual World is the sound of someone deciding for themselves what growing up and grown-up pop should be, without being beholden to anyone else’s tedious definitions. It gave her a new template for the next two decades, inspiring both the smooth, stylish art-rock of 1993’s The Red Shoes and the picturesque beauty of 2005’s Aerial. Like Molly Bloom, Bush had set herself free into a world that wasn’t mundane, but alive with new, fertile possibility”. An album that many people feel is inferior and not a career progression from Kate Bush really need to listen again and see The Sensual World…

IN a new light.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Amira Elfeky

FEATURE:

 

Spotlight

Amira Elfeky

_________

IN this Spotlight feature…

I am focusing on the brilliant Amira Elfeky. She is someone who you will want to follow. If you can see her on tour and she is playing near you, go and see her. This amazing singer/songwriter is based out of Los Angeles, California. Elfeky is a Connecticut native. Her Surrender E.P. came out at the end of March. It is a fantastic release. I want to get to a few interviews with Amira Elfeky. I am starting out with an interview from Revolver Mag:

“In February 2023, Amira Elfeky found the sound she’d been searching for all her life.

It had long been welling up inside of her, an unshakable feeling that the Los Angeles-based singer couldn’t articulate, nor even dared to. She often hesitated whenever her mouth came close to a microphone, lest she sing a note that strayed from the melody she felt but could not yet hear. For the first two decades of her life, she’d compiled a melting pot of sounds that came close to her inner melody: Deftones, Linkin Park, Evanescence. But it wasn’t until that winter night — when she haphazardly typed “Linkin Park Deftones type beat” into YouTube and clicked the first result — that she heard her soul-song sounded back to her. “I heard one second of it,” the 25-year-old says today, “and I was like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God!’”

Elfeky immediately called her producer, Tylor Bondar, and told him to meet her at the nearest recording studio. She jumped in the car, humming the melody she’d finally managed to externalize on the drive over. Bondar smoked a blunt and pressed record — and Elfeky instantly hit a register she’d never reached before. Bondar’s jaw was on the floor. The track flowed out of the singer like “a possession, like the song had always existed,” she recalls. “We just looked at each other and were like, ‘What the fuck?!’”

Then, lightning struck. Literally. As soon as they finished recording, a bolt took out all the power. When they turned the machines back on, they were relieved to find that the song had been saved just before the outage. They played it back and Elfeky immediately began to cry. “It was everything to me,” she says. “My soul finally felt like it was right; I made the song.” That song was called “Tonight” — a ghostly, sensuous track that is responsible for changing the course of Elfeky’s life.

After sitting on the demo for a few months, she eventually posted it, off-the-cuff, to TikTok in early July 2023. She turned her phone off, went to the movies with her boyfriend, and returned three hours later to 10,000 likes on her TikTok. Another three hours later it reached 80,000. She kept reposting the track, and soon gained one, two, three, four million likes. “Everything changed within a week,” she says. “Everything I’d ever wanted fell into place… and all just because I followed my intuition.”

Thanks to “Tonight,” Elfeky has become one of the fastest-rising stars of the nu-metal revival. She is one of the leaders of a new swathe of Gen Z kids who have turned to the Y2K genre and aesthetic to transmute their post-pandemic anguish. Elfeky’s take on it is gossamer, sensual, highly emotive; Deftones-esque. Earlier this year, she released her debut EP, Skin to Skin, on Anemoia — a subsidiary of Atlantic Records — and increased her rapidly growing fanbase on her first ever mini tour earlier this spring. With another EP, festival sets and a support slot on the Used’s upcoming tour in the works, Elfeky could well be on the way to becoming a generational voice.

Elfeky grew up in small-town Connecticut, with cows for neighbors and a strong, close-knit hardcore and emo scene just beyond the fields she called home. Her earliest daydreams of superstardom were stirred by one of the weirdest Y2K promotional gimmicks: a Britney Spears VHS tape sold exclusively at McDonald’s that included the “Oops!…I Did It Again” music video. She’d play it on repeat, throwing tantrums whenever her mom made her turn it off. As a toddler, Elfeky recalls watching live videos of Spears and fixating on the singer’s head-worn microphone. At six, she began begging her mom for a mic of her own. When she finally got one, she sang into it all day, pretending to be the popstar. Then, when she grew a little older, her focus shifted.

Her brothers, who were nearly a decade her senior, introduced her to the nu-metal of the 2000s that had soundtracked their adolescence. They began playing Guitar Hero together, and Elfeky replaced her plastic microphone with a plastic guitar. As a child, the music video for System of a Down’s “Chop Suey!” terrified her whenever it came on MTV. But when she played it alongside her brothers on the game, she finally got it. It invigorated her. (Earlier this year, she paid tribute to SOAD with a sultry cover of the Hypnotize classic “Lonely Day” for Spotify’s Singles series.)

She soon found herself gravitating towards Connecticut’s hardcore scene. Before Elfeky could even attend shows, she became enamored by the surrounding aesthetic. The first friend she made in high school was a dude who wore a Disturbed shirt; their clique soon expanded to include three more kids who had a penchant for Hot Topic merch. As teenagers, the five of them went to hardcore shows each weekend and Warped Tour every summer — and roasted s’mores in their backyards nearly every night while blasting Slipknot.

Elfeky felt desperate to form a band of her own, but she was still years away from capturing the elusive sounds in her head. She watched from the sidelines as others sang into their microphones, desperately wishing to project her own voice from the stage. “I always had this weird intention in my brain where it’s like, if I’m going to do it, I need to do it perfectly,” she says. So for a while, Elfeky didn’t sing at all.

During her late teens, Elfeky turned inwards. She sang — but only in isolation, and with a whisper. She began practicing in the bathroom, bringing in a guitar with her. She downloaded an app called BandLab and began recording simple vocals over a two-chord melody”.

Back in October, Amira Elfeky spoke with Sound of Saving. They spoke with someone who is providing something fresh and original to the Heavy Rock scene. An artist I am quite new to, I know that Elfeky’s fanbase is growing by the month. Someone who has this ardent and loyal following. No wonder when you hear her music. It instantly stands out and stays with you:

“SOS: Do you come from a musical background? How did you first get into music?

Amira: My mom and everyone else around me were into music, but no one really played an instrument or anything. It was kind of like, I'm gonna do this. No one really took it as seriously as I did. We grew up with lots of music, so my mom would always be buying a CD, vinyl or be playing something at all times.

I was always surrounded by music, like an abnormal amount, I would say. As soon as I could wear headphones, I would just listen to music all the time. And then in fourth grade, I picked up violin and I wasn't good at it, but I just did it in elementary school and later on, I started playing guitar and I did choruses and stuff. I had a hyper -fixation on microphones and my mom is right there, laughing because that’s what I wanted for Christmas. I begged for a microphone, because I used to have this little playset when I was three and it had one of those Britney Spears microphones. I was Britney Spears when I was three years old for Halloween and I was all about that diva life (laughs). My uncle's into rock and stuff. I was just always surrounded by rock and then I found my way into the genres that I listen to now through my older brother, who is nine years older than me. He was in that whole new metal era.

SOS: What artists and albums do you think inspired you?

Amira: In the beginning, I think what really sparked me wanting to make rock music was Nirvana. In utero was the album for me that I was just like…oh shit. I had everything related to Kurt Cobain, I read every book or magazine, I had every poster I could possibly have and then I got into Foo Fighters and I went this whole 90s rabbit hole and listened to Alice in Chains and Stone Temple Pilots.

That was when I realized that I wanted to be in a rock band. And then, I used to be in a rock band but I was just too controlling over my vision to share it with other people so I was like I gotta be a solo artist . I remember listening to “All Apologies’’ and it blew my mind, because it has the cello in it and they're like mixing all of these things together… from there I went to Evanescence and just moved it down, just like spirals.

SOS: How is your creative process on writing songs?

Amira:  It depends, a lot of my lyrics come from my notes. I'll write a phrase down that I really enjoy and when it's time to start writing, I'll go through all my note sections. If I like the idea,  I’ll build a whole story off that.  So I never sit down with the thought. I know a lot of artists sit down like oh, let's write a song like this, but It just gets very emotionless for me so I just allow it to form itself and sometimes, I don't even know what I'm writing.

SOS: Your EP Skin to Skin is out. How do the songs feel to you now they’re held together on one record?

Amira: I love it! I'm excited to start writing my album. I like the cohesiveness of everything. Putting out singles is fun but putting out an entire body of work that goes all together fluidly is insane and it feels good to have everything done and then shove it out, as opposed to having your singles here and there. Creating a story and having the rollout for it is the most fun part for me.

SOS: What headspace do you enter when you are performing?

Amira: It's like a curtain. I was just explaining this to someone from my label today. We were talking about a live performance. If you meet me in person, I'm bubbly or a little shyer, but on stage, I get this confidence,  because you have people screaming at you in the crowd. It's a unique experience. I think I just subconsciously snap into a place and it’s the same with the music. It's like everything that has to do with my music side of me, it just snaps into a certain place and it’s natural.

SOS: I really like that.. Let’s talk about your latest song Remains Of Us. There are a few lines that really stuck with me when I first listened to it:

“You said you hate who you are, but I hate what I'm not’’ and also “You are what you surrender to.’’

How was the process of writing this song?

Amira: So those were all lines that I had in my notes section that I kind of thought of randomly.

You said you hate who you are and hate who I'm not. For me, something that I deal with a lot is being a highly emotional person. Growing up, I was always highly emotional.

I kind of always struggled with daydreaming and wanting to be more than what I am. So I was in a relationship before and the other person was just really depressed and hated everything about themselves. I didn't hate myself, but I hated that I felt like I was wasting potential. It's this weird dichotomy of like, you're looking at someone who hates where they are right now and you don't hate where you're at right now, but you want more. And then it's just this discourse between the two of you. So yeah, so it's like it's just that's the only part on the song where I really like wail besides like the screaming part. And that needs a lot of energy because it's a loaded state.

SOS: What do you like about yourself these days?

Amira: Myself?

SOS: Yep. Just anything.

Amira: I feel like I'm starting to overcome a lot of anxiety, which I'm very proud of. I recently started going to therapy again. That's something that's really been a step for me. Also, my confidence as a woman, getting older and just letting go. As a woman, there is so much pressure and expectations. I spent a lot of time being obsessed with how we [women] look and what we do and how we sing and how we sound. I just feel that I was able to let go of so much of that, just by being on stage every night and being able to be a voice for a lot of people. That's the most beautiful thing, so nothing else matters to me. I'm so obsessed with wanting to just be my authentic self.

SOS: I love that you’re able to let go of so much of that weight. About perfectionism, that's such a good way to put it, especially because it’s so forgiving to be on stage. Is there anything that you'd like to do to take care of yourself and share with us?

Amira: I like to get my hair and my nails done, I like to get massages. I would say I'm very much of a homebody, so I like to take care of myself and do things that make me feel good about myself. Then I really enjoy just being at home and watching shitty reality TV shows and eating food.

SOS: What song found you at the right time?

Amira: I think something that I played a lot was “Drown’’ by Bring Me The Horizon. It was my number one one year on Spotify wrapped. Sonically, the lyrics, the emotions, everything, all the vocals, the entire production, is just ridiculous. So that was something that really resonated with me. I love the line “What doesn't kill you makes you wish you were dead.’’

Drown was a song that found me.

And again, music really does save lives. So I feel like when I'm really upset, I just listen to music.

SOS: I love this song, it's such a good pick.

Amira: What's yours?

SOS: It’s hard to think of one song right now but for me, Drown is definitely one of them. Some of the Radiohead songs also helped me to go through a lot too.

Amira: Karma Police is a good one.

SOS: True! Is there anything that you want to accomplish with or through your music?

Amira: I think for me it is reaching a broader audience. I will literally break down crying because the amount of people that really tell me that they have my lyrics tattooed on them or just the emotional inclination that people have towards some of the lyrics, is insane. Being able to be a voice for more people and allowing them to find the lyrics and find the music and just being there. Music's been for me, and is the only thing I could ever ask for. Music is one of the most powerful things we have on this planet”.

I am going to end with an interview from NME from earlier this month. Spotlighting Amira Elfeky in their Breakout section, they chatted with a rising artist who is sure to have a prosperous career. This year is particularly promising when it comes to new musical talent. Up there with the best of the moment is Amira Elfeky. Someone that you need to be acquainted with:

“Now, Elfeky’s brooding take on nu-metal is routinely compared to Deftones. She’s just released her second EP, ‘Surrender’, collaborated with Architects on their album released in February, and is soon to tour with Bring Me The Horizon. And, she adds, “I get to sit in a room with someone like Zakk Cervini [Spiritbox, Poppy], and I’m allowed to be authentically myself and just put out the music exactly how I want it to be.”

Elfeky’s music is buoyed by fiercely personal lyrics; after a brief attempt at being in a band at 18, she realised she had such a specific vision of what she wanted to make, she couldn’t share it with other people. She released her debut EP ‘Skin To Skin’ in 2024, honing a sound best interpreted as the shadow side of pop’s current Y2k renaissance – a call back to the heaviest offerings of the 2000s, exchanging mall goth stylings for more baroque gothic visuals. “I love romantic, Victorian things,” she agrees. “And then I love Twilight and just like, fucking dark, dismal shit. So I feel like it’s very much a culmination of [the] gothic, Victorian vampiric vibe.”

The singer has also given her fanbase a rarely heard voice. Elfeky has Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), and writes unflinchingly about her emotions, which hit with such volatility she compares them to an exposed nerve ending (“I write for the BPD girlies,” she’s assured listeners in TikTok comments). A fan has since come to Elfeky after a show with the lyrics of ‘Coming Down’ tattooed on her calf, while others have found solace in her agonising recent single ‘Will You Love Me When I’m Dead’.

Your confessional lyrics have clearly struck a chord with listeners. What is your process going into writing?

“Sometimes I’ll have a session, and they’ll go like, ‘What do you want to write about?’’ and I’ll go: ‘No clue.’ I’ll start with a melody, and then from there I’ll hear a phrase, or I have a notes section where I have lines that I’ll think of during my everyday life. And I feel like it subconsciously all comes out. I feel a lot of intense feelings, which are very much prevalent in my lyrics. So I feel like what I’m writing is truly who I am, and not like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna write about this today.’

“I’d say a lot of the shit is very romantic or very heartbreaking – which is funny, because I’m in a very healthy relationship. Sometimes I see comments of people being like: ‘Who the fuck is hurting her?’ And I’m like, oh shit, it’s just [my] subconscious!” [Laughs]

You’ve taken to joking about your sound being ‘girl metal’ off the back of a hate comment. How have you found navigating being a woman in alternative music?

“You’re obviously met with some adversity. I remember I had another account where I would post these anime slideshows when I was starting off with my song ‘Tonight’. I was posting it on there, and that’s where the video went viral. Someone commented, ‘This doesn’t even sound like metal, this is a disgrace. This is girly metal. Like, what the hell is this?’

“I posted on my main account. I was like: ‘POV: you make girl metal’ as a joke. The connotation of that was essentially a humorous double down; like alright, fuck it. Let’s just run with it. There’s definitely a lot of people who are like, ‘this isn’t metal’. And I’m like, it can be whatever you want it to be. I don’t need to be classified into something.”

That in mind, it must feel great to have a co-sign from some of the biggest names in metal.

“I’m going on tour with Bring Me [The Horizon], and I made a song [‘Judgment Day’] with Architects, and what an incredibly positive experience. The support that I’ve received from Sam [Carter], Jordan Fish and even like Oli Sykes, the support and the recognition is just really meaningful. And those are obviously huge forces in the scene. I would say, by peers I’ve been faced with nothing but support, which is really, really meaningful.

“You see [hate] under a lot of other female artists, and it’s gonna happen, but you just gotta tune it out. I think of having those incredible interactions with Sam and all these amazing musicians who are singing [my] praises. It’s an honour, and that’s what I try to focus on.”

“There’s definitely a lot of people who are like, ‘this isn’t metal’. I’m like, it can be whatever you want it to be – I don’t need to be classified into something”

Do you feel like a lot has changed from your debut ‘Skin to Skin’ to the new EP?

“I would say it’s a better interpretation of who I am as an artist. I’m still figuring out exactly what I like and what I don’t, and I feel like this is another step into the direction of what I love. The songs are heavier, they’re a little less droney. A lot of my songs on the last EP were very elongated and yearning. Lots of breakdowns, lots of heaviness. I explore some different types of dynamics [other] than love and relationships. I’m excited for this one, because these songs are really fucking fun to play with live”.

I will wrap up now. I know Amira Elfeky will briefly be in the U.K. in June. This amazing artist has a lot of ardent fans here. I do hope she has chance to spend more time here in the future. A brilliant young artist that has this extraordinary sound, I am keen to see how her career pans out. Surrender is a stunning E.P.  This is someone standing out and making her voice heard…

IN a busy and competitive industry.

_____________

Follow Amira Elfeky

 Official:

https://www.amiraelfeky.com/

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@notamiraelfeky

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/amiraelfeky/

Twitter:

https://x.com/amiraelfekyy

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/6Z4kwq0LOaYQW2CqudoOIk?si=1Dus7A1tTp205EHBfWE9Ig

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGjOQgt48gFsntnrI9t0Bdg

FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Chy Cartier

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight: Revisited

Chy Cartier

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FOR this latest…

edition of Spotlight: Revisited, I am talking about an artist I first covered at the start of last year. Even though I included her in my Spotlight feature just over a year ago, Chy Cartier has achieved so much since then. An artist capturing this new wave of appreciation and interest, I am going to end with a review for her debut album, NO BRING INS. One of the most accomplished and finest artists in Drill, this is someone who is blazing a trail and proving she is one of the best on the scene! In a genre that is still male-dominated, Chy Cartier is changing the conversation and the view. I want to come to some interviews first of all. Ones where we get to know more about this incredible artist. I want to start off with a 2024 interview with Wonderland Magazine. She talked about the success of BOSSED UP and the attention it brought her. This was, and is, an artist doing things her own way:

“I’ve just finished writing a freestyle that’s out soon,” 19-year-old Rap prodigy, CHY CARTIER – born Chyna – tells us. “It’s about how life’s been after “Bossed up”, and prior to the song blowing up.” Finding fame, going viral, or topping the charts – it’s all written in the stars for this North London rhymer. And with that, she’s witnessing her life change at a rocketing speed already: “Having people in my area coming up to me and asking for pictures, that’s when it felt real!”

Released in late 2023, the life-altering track is stamped with the heavy-handed lyrics – a ferociously quick-witted and open-armed comment on the disparities and injustice in austerity Britain – that Chy’s now become synonymous with. It turned the heads of chart- toppers like Central Cee, Little Simz, and Stormzy, who’ve gone on to champion her as one of the most promising newcomers in the UK Rap scene; and rightly so. “I’ve spent a lot of time on my craft and my sound – from word play and rhyming patterns to my tone. When it comes to my music I have my blinkers on.” Forget a fork in the road, Chy Cartier’s only ever known her own path. “Just focus on your art and let it do the talking, everything else is just noise.”

Unlike her lionhearted lyrics and stinging delivery, she keeps uncharacteristically tight-lipped on any possibilities of collaborating with her new found fans – or her upcoming debut EP at large. But Chyna, the Sierra Leonean-Jamaican teen, and Chy Cartier, the unapologetic wordsmith, are not the same person. “I would say Chy Cartier is definitely an alter ego. I’m really quiet and reserved normally. Chy Cartier gets on the mic and gets everything off her chest [laughs]”.

In February, End Clothing spoke with a North London-based rapper ahead of the launch of Nike’s experimental Air Max Dn8 sneaker in Hyper Pink. If you have not discovered Chy Cartier then make sure that you redress that. An artist I was compelled to seek out and spotlight last year has made big strides since then:

“Looking back on Chy Cartier’s musical career so far, what initially stands out is her dedication to delivering an inventive take on UK rap that is wholly her own. While still early in her career, Chy – real name Chyna – has forged her own path through the notoriously treacherous music industry independently, building a loyal fan base eager to hear more of her quick-witted lyricism and see more of her captivating personality.

Blowing up in late 2023 with her already iconic single BOSSED UP, the 20-year-old North London-based rapper has carved her own lane in the somewhat overcrowded UK rap scene. Capitalising on her distinctive sense of style, impeccable beat selection and her memorable adlib, “BAP”, Chy’s presence, lyricism and attitude has created the perfect foundation for a UK rap star to be born, even without support from the industry, guest features or placements. Organically building a dedicated fan base, Chy’s talents are speaking for themself, and the proof is in the impact she has made amongst the upper echelons of UK rap. For Chy, this initial positive reception has been paramount in propelling her forward and has kept her motivated in making more music: “seeing how people connect with my energy and my lyrics, you know, it just makes you want to continue what you do and be the best at it.”

With co-signs from the likes of Central Cee, Skepta, Corteiz’ Clint, Novelist and many more, Chy seems set on her course to music stardom. With a distinctive sense of originality, her flow, wordplay and lyricism has seen her craft a strikingly fresh and modern sound, filtered through a sense of nostalgia for the late ‘90s and ‘00s. As I ask Chy about what originally drew her to music in a moment of respite during the Air Max Dn8 shoot for Nike, it’s clear that her connection to music has been longstanding and familial in origin: “I've been rapping since the age of seven, so I feel like music's always been a part of me. Growing up, my mum used to play different music in and around the house. Garage, hip hop, rap, R&B, all different genres. Music was just always my way of expressing myself.”

Expanding on her first foray into making music, Chy reminisces about her formative experiences performing for her family: “I remember one time when I was little, I performed one of my first ever rap songs to my older cousin and my mum and just seeing their reactions, how they were amazed, it really made me realise that I had something special.” From this original performance, Chy graduated to rapping at school; “I always used to rap, like in the school playground, and all of my friends would gather around the older kids, and just hype it up.” To those that know Chy, it likely seemed as if destiny was being fulfilled when she first started dropping music. Following the release of her Show Me Love Freestyle back in 2022, where she first exhibited her unique style over a beat sampling the iconic 1993 house track by Robin S, Chy has gone from strength to strength, delivering hard hitting raps over beats with an experimental sonic palette that offer a truly novel approach to the genre. The tracks that Chy has dropped so far are always rooted in a darker sound with a “menacing bass”, as she puts it, but subtly pepper influences from a wide variety of different genres, exhibiting the breadth of her musical passions. On branching out further, Chy made her intentions clear: “I definitely want to tap into dancehall and I want to explore more rock sounds. I feel like that’ll be hard!” Perhaps it’s this openness to different sounds and influences that has been imbedded in Chy since her younger years that is propelling her forward at such an impressive rate – when one note rappers will be left in the dust after trends change, Chy will be there with a fresh sound and her trademark “BAP”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Samantha Taylor

Before getting to a review for the incredible NO BRING INS, I want to feature an interview from Hypebae. I think it is important to know as much about Chy Cartier as possible. This is an artist who is going to be massive. Someone already showing signs of greatness. The more music she puts out there, the more eyes that are on her! It is interesting to read which artist and song lit a fuse in her. A pivotal moment that changed the course of her life:

“Grime was the defiant spirit of the U.K.‘s music scene in the ’00s with legends like Dizzee Rascal and JME brining the genre to the global stage. Grime rose with artists like Stormzy and Skepta, and continues to resonate today with chart-topping Brighton boy ArrDee and genre-adaptions from Little Simz.

Amidst this ever-growing scene, Chy Cartier emerged. Brought up in a household where rap, R&B, and hip-hop were always playing, the artist was naturally drawn to the energy and lyricism of the genre. But it was hearing Nicki Minaj‘s “Beez in the Trap” on TV that truly sparked something in her. From that day, Cartier began writing her own lyrics and performing them for her family, quickly realizing she had a talent worth pursuing.

What sets the North London-based artist apart today is her use of what she describes as a “dark, mean bass,” which defines the tone of her music. For those familiar with Cartier, it’s clear she challenges labels with her unique lyricism.

At just 20 years old, she’s already released 16 singles over the past three years, including the breakout hit “Bossed Up,” which has been pivotal to her success. Despite the challenges women face in the rap scene, she’s managed to carve out her own space. “People tend to second-guess female artists a lot,” she explains. “It’s harder for women to break through because there’s always that question of, ‘Are you really writing your own lyrics?’”

We caught up with the rising star ahead of her highly anticipated mixtape, No Bring Ins, to hear about what’s next in this exciting chapter of her career.

On How Her Musicality Has Evolved

While my musicality has improved over time, my approach hasn’t changed much. I’ve always focused on studying rap, especially rhyme schemes, and breaking down how they work. Growing up, I analyzed my favorite artists and how they structured their bars, like using patterns such as A, A, B, A, B. Lately, my process has shifted — while I used to write alone at home, I’m now more open to collaborating with producers; something I learnt when working on this mixtape. We bounce ideas off each other, and once that dark, mean bass comes in, everything just falls into place naturally. Music is now a true extension of me, and when it’s right, it feels effortless.

On Inspirations Behind No Brin Ins

After “Bossed Up,” I’ve been working with different producers who really get my sound. The project has a mix of chilled tracks around 95 BPM and some high-energy ones closer to 145 BPM. I’ve been collaborating with BKay who’s also from North London, on a new sound we’re calling “The Bounce,” which started with my track “YO.” Making this mixtape has been pretty smooth — it’s all about sharing my journey since “Bossed Up.” Over 10 months, I recorded 70 songs, then chose the ones that felt right for the final cut.

On Her Dream Collaborations

I’d love to work with people like Nicki Minaj, Drake, Future and Skepta. There are so many others — it’s hard to name them all. I’d love to get to a point in my career where I can collaborate with the legends. I feel like that would be a real moment of knowing I’ve made it.

On Her Future Plans

I’d love to get into acting at some point. Once I’ve put my all into music, it’s definitely a path I want to explore — whether that’s as an actor, writer, or director. I’ve never done anything like it before, but as a natural entertainer, I feel like my skills could translate well”.

I am going to end with a review from NME. Saluting a fearless talent who is the future of British Drill, they commended an artist “fusing gritty lyricism and a unique vocal flow, the north London rapper is carving out her own lane and leaving a mark on the scene”. There have been so many positive reviews for NO BRING INS:

“Chy Cartier, north London’s newest rap princess, isn’t waiting for permission to make her mark. From the first seconds of her debut mixtape, ‘No Bring Ins’, she makes her position clear – she didn’t come to play. She came to conquer.

UK rap’s self-proclaimed “prettiest problem” has already made big moves before this release. She scored a spot on the NME 100 for 2025 with her raw energy and attention-grabbing way with words. The Tottenham native has earned co-signs from local heroes and British rap heavyweights Skepta and Headie One, and has absorbed the legacy of her area and made it her own by fusing grace and grit. She’s not just taking steps into the UK drill scene; she’s quickly making her way to the top.

‘No Brings Ins’ should only take Cartier higher. She laces every track with cutthroat lyricism and riot-starting energy, not just rapping but attacking the beat, slicing through bass-heavy production with a flow so slick it’s disrespectful. On viral singles ‘Yo’ and ‘Different Kettle’, she unleashes grimy, chest-thumping anthems that practically dare you to test her and maintains that attitude on the likes of ‘Real Boss Chick’ and ‘Weakest Link’. The latter shows the star at her most unshakeable. “Bitches know I’m big boss, rich forever, stuck up,” she proclaims. “Oh, you don’t like me, why not shut the fuck up!”

When the 20-year-old first broke through with her 2023 single ‘Bossed Up’, she was mocked online for her unorthodox flow. But ‘No Bring Ins’ doesn’t just embrace her idiosyncratic delivery; it takes centre stage alongside her poetic edge. On ‘Locked In’, her intentionally rambling flow becomes a skillful use of enjambment as she raps: “Statue of Liberty, gonna walk before me, the way I’m standing on this business / Before I beg for a seat, at your table, I’m able, I bought mine”. But it’s ‘SN’ where Cartier marries her poetic ways with pop-drill most expertly. Her hunger over the low-end, bass-driven pop-grime instrumental feels like a spoken word poem about her transition from the streets to a life of luxury.

Debut projects are all about establishing who you are and what your sound is. On this cohesive and fun mixtape, Cartier sets about proving that she can’t be boxed in – pop, grime, drill, and now R&B are all in her domain. The latter is evident on the sultry ‘Crazy’, on which she flexes her storytelling abilities with a romantic tale and shows off her singing chops with unexpectedly lush vocals that deliver an instantly infectious hook: “I know you’re the one, that’s not a maybe / Bitch, don’t make me sin and go crazy”.

‘No Bring Ins’ is raw, cocky, and unapologetic statement piece from an artist who’s already moving like she owns the place. And, if Chy Cartier continues in this form, soon, she just might”.

It has been good revisiting Chy Cartier. Following the release of NO BRING INS, there is going to be this incredible and exciting new phase of her career. I know she has a few gigs coming up but there will be more soon I am sure. If you do not know about Chy Cartier then do go and seek her out. She is someone worth…

KEEPING an eye out for.

_____________

Spotlight Chy Cartier

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/chycartier/

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@chycartier

Twitter:

https://x.com/chy_cartier

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/c/CHYCARTIER

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4qxFzMJxrNzlv11J7pCY5q?si=SMyaDO03SFmfuWU425dUDg

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Bono at Sixty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

PHOTO CREDIT: Linda Brownlee/The Guardian

Bono at Sixty-Five

_________

ONE of the titans…

of music, Bono (Paul Hewson) turns sixty-five on 10th May. Because of that, I wanted to honour him with a mixtape of the best U2 songs and some deeper cuts. Even if you are a fan of his or not, you cannot deny his influence and legacy. Someone who is this incredible figure who has changed culture for the better. I want to get to a biography of the wonderful Bono:

“Singer, poet, activist, believer: few icons in the history of rock & roll have created art with the consciousness and passion of Bono, and only a handful have done it as successfully. Whether preaching about "three chords and the truth" or donning ironic personas, the first and only frontman for seminal Irish rock band U2 has always stood unequivocally for hope, faith, and love -- and in so doing has touched millions of fans, as well as sold millions of records.

Bono was born Paul Hewson on May 10, 1960, in Dublin, Ireland. His father Bobby, a postal worker, was Catholic, while his mother Iris was Protestant. Young Paul was raised in a spiritual atmosphere, but because he came from a mixed marriage he was never fully welcomed in either the Catholic or Protestant churches. This personal understanding of the religious strife in Ireland -- along with the sudden death of his mother when he was 14 -- were to be major influences on his songwriting in U2's early years.

The band that would become U2 formed in October 1976, after drummer Larry Mullen Jr. placed a note on his high school bulletin board seeking musicians for a rock group. Hewson -- along with guitarist Dave Evans and bassist Adam Clayton -- made the cut at the first meeting in the drummer's kitchen. Although he couldn't sing, Hewson's commanding personality landed him the job as frontman. Bono allegedly picked up his nickname from the Latin phrase Bono Vox ("good voice"), but it was initially his charismatic stage presence that helped U2 gain a reputation for live performance. U2's relentless touring schedule quickly boosted his vocal prowess, however, and by the time of the band's groundbreaking 1983 War release, Bono had developed a soaring tenor. Within four years it would become one of the most recognizable voices in popular music.

In 1987, U2 rose to superstardom with The Joshua Tree and Bono was quickly placed in the center of international media attention. His righteously candid interviews -- combined with a tendency to preach on stage -- eventually made him the target for the press' more cynical circles. After touring for over the better part of three years at the end of the '80s, U2 temporarily stepped out of the public eye and disappeared to Berlin to record a new album. The band returned in 1991 with Achtung Baby, which represented a complete musical reinvention for U2. The industrial-influenced album was darker and sexier than previous U2 albums -- a change paralleled by Bono's adoption of new stage presences. During the supporting Zoo TV tour, he sarcastically assumed the shiny black leather persona of a prototypical rock star called the Fly and appeared during encores in America as Mirrorball Man (a corrupt televangelist). In the rest of the world, he also introduced the character of Mister Macphisto (the devil portrayed as an aging rock god).

With occasional help from guitarist the Edge, Bono has penned all of U2's lyrics, often favoring unconventional subject matter over typical rock & roll fare. His material has ranged from the turmoil of adolescence, to politics, to religion. Straight-up love songs are conspicuously absent from the group's first four albums, and Bono didn't fully embrace the love song until he incorporated it in the shadowy textures of Achtung Baby. Bono has cited numerous influences on his lyrics, particularly his role in social projects.

Bono's resume includes an exhaustive section on social activism. In 1984, he appeared on Band Aid's charity recording "Do They Know It's Christmas?" After U2's historic Live Aid performance in 1985, he traveled to Ethiopia with his wife Ali; there, they spent several weeks helping with an education and famine relief project. In 1986, U2 headlined Amnesty International's Conspiracy of Hope tour. Bono also performed at 1999's Net Aid, a concert broadcasted live over the Internet that raised money to relieve third world debts, and began involving himself with more poverty-related organizations during the following years. His next extensive social campaign was Jubilee 2000, another project orchestrated to cancel third world debts with the help of supports like Radiohead's Thom Yorke, Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof, and producer Quincy Jones. During the Jubilee 2000 campaign, Bono spoke before the United Nations and the United States Congress and met with key figures such as Pope John Paul II and Bill Clinton. He later formed the One campaign and continued meeting with world leaders, sidestepping partisan politics in order to reach as many people as possible.

Bono's personal life proved to be a good bit calmer than his public persona. He married longtime sweetheart Alison Stewart in 1982. They have two daughters, Jordan and Memphis Eve, and two sons, Elijah and John Abraham”.

I am going to end there. One of the great group leaders, it is only right to salute Bono ahead of his sixty-fifth birthday on 10th May. Listening to the music of U2 music has been a real pleasure. I hope that we hear and see plenty of Bono for…

MANY years to come.

FEATURE: A Time to React… Creating a Social Media Campaign to Raise Awareness and Funds for Women’s Organisations

FEATURE:

 

 

A Time to React…

PHOTO CREDIT: Nayara Dinato/Pexels

Creating a Social Media Campaign to Raise Awareness and Funds for Women’s Organisations

_________

THERE has not really been anything…

PHOTO CREDIT: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels

like this for many years. I mean the viral sensation. A campaign that is on social media where people can share a campaign and hashtag that raises money. I am not sure when the last time is something like that occurred. Maybe there have been some minor versions recently, though it was probably the Ice Bucket Challenge of 2014. This was an activity involving the pouring of a bucket of ice water over a person's head, either by another person or self-administered, to promote awareness of the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and encourage donations to research. It has been over a decade since that. Maybe some criticism was justified. In terms of the point of pouring cold water over you and what significant that had. Anyway, it did raise money. I am thinking about the urgency of raising awareness of and funds for women’s charities and causes. It is a time when there is a rise in domestic violence, sexual assault and misogyny. A terrific range of charities that could benefit. Organisations and causes that support women and women’s rights. Through music and culture there is inequality and discrimination. Rather than a viral campaign raising funds for one particular charity, it would be a case of the campaign being tied to a single page or website that would then distribute funds to a number of charities and organisations. They would all focus around women’s safety, rights and equality. There is a lot of activism and awareness being raised through social medias. People posting frequently. However, as important as it is to have this awareness and engagement, there does need to be this wider explosion and movement. Whereas the Ice Bucket Challenge was for a single cause and had that focus, this would be more general. Not only in terms of raising money for charities and causes that support women. Also, there would be this other strand of promoting incredible women through society. Highlighting incredible and influential women. Maybe it seems unwieldy to have one campaign that supports so many different causes. I think it could work and would be a success – and not too difficult to follow.

PHOTO CREDIT: Kelly/Pexels

In terms of what a campaign would involve, rather than it being a video of someone doing a stunt or anything like that, there would be a musical element. I know there have been viral campaigns in recent years such as Movember and Black Lives Matter. In terms of supporting women and helping to shine a light not only on misogyny, sexism and abuse. Also to shine a light on brilliant women across society. I know we have International Women’s Day, though that is not about fundraising. I think a campaign would have to be simple. It would involve the person posting a link to a song by a female artist that means something to them. It does not need to be their favourite song or the one they hold dearest. Able to fit into a tweet, there would be a hashtag, a link to the website where funds are raised, the link to that song, plus a short section of what the song is and why it means something. The hope is that people get retweeted/shared and another person can add to that. There is no minimum donation for the campaign. The idea would, I hope, be that major artists and figures engage and that would do a huge amount. Think about women’s rights in the U.S. and how they are being stripped away. Artists in the U.S. like Taylor Swift or Beyoncé posting about it could raise millions of dollars! I do think that the campaign could do a lot of good. Rather than it being a fad or something throwaway, there is this website with links to charities and organisations. Information, promotional campaigns and online videos. The hope is the raise millions of pounds by the end. I am not sure why something like this has not been done recently. Perhaps there are flaws or some might dismiss it. How much is this helping to improve lives for women or to make things better?! Well, the aim is that people donating and sharing their songs would engage with the causes, learn more and engage. When posting on social media, the link they share would be unique. It would be a section of the website where you can write why you are supporting the causes and you can also, if you are a woman, talk about your experiences. This would inspire others to donate.

IN THIS PHOTO: Taylor Swift/PHOTO CREDIT: Jamie McCarthy

Not to suggest there are no kinks or anything to be worked out. I do feel that something like this takes a long time to get off of the ground and work out. Also, as I have no cache or huge following, if I were to start this myself, then it would not go far at all. Die in the water. It would need somebody bigger and more prominent than me to get this going. One might feel that the lack of video element would mean platforms like TikTok and Instagram would be out of the running. I do think there could be a central image that can be shared on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. I am not sure about the TikTok element. The point is that everyone can engage. Many people won’t want to share a video. A link to a song or video is more accessible. Also, there would be a committee that could work everything out. Rather than me hastily throwing something out, it would be carefully considered and tested before being rolled out. However, I do feel there is this urgency that means something need to change shape soon. A single campaign that could unite so many wonderful charities. The campaign could have ambassadors. Those who are already ambassadors for charities such as Refuge and Women’s Aid. In terms of how long it would run for, I would say about six months. There will be a certain momentum.

IN THIS PHOTO: Zara McDermott is one of the Ambassadors of Refuge

The start might be slow and then it would pick up pace. Perhaps the engagement rate would die after a few months, so that might be something that needs to be researched and ironed out. I do feel like, at a time when social media is more influential and popular than ever – and there is so much hatred and misogyny out there that impacts billions of women and girls – that this could be something positive that could make a change. There could also be a benefit concert that could go alongside the campaign. Maybe in the U.S. or U.K., it could unite a whole range of artists. In the coming weeks, I am going to be writing a feature about Refuge. The U.K’s largest domestic abuse organisation for women (and girls), I am doing a charity fundraiser for them in June. One of the most important charities out there. They would very much be part of the campaign and conversation. I am not sure of the name yet. In terms of brevity, a hashtag should have no more than sixteen characters. I would say, including the hashtag, there would be a maximum of thirteen characters. I am not sure of the name yet. Maybe #AllForWomen – which is twelve characters. Perhaps it seems like a dream and something that would not work. However, there does seem like this moment in history where something simple like this could be very effective. In terms of me? What song would I select if I was the first one to start the campaign? The artist and song choice may be obvious, though this is a song that means…

SO much to me.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Betty Boo – Doin’ the Do

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Betty Boo – Doin’ the Do

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THIS is a timely feature…

as the incredible Betty Boo is on the road soon. This year marks thirty-five since Boomania was released. To mark that, she is embarking on some tour dates. On 25th April, Boomania and Grrr... Its Betty Boo are being released on vinyl, C.D. and cassette. I wanted to celebrate the approaching thirtieth anniversary of Boomania’s second single, Doin’ the Do. The song was co-written and co-produced by Boo. It was a top ten smash in Australia, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, and the United Kingdom. It was released on 8th May, 1990. I am going to get to some articles relating to Doin’ the Do. Before then, this BBC feature from 2022 gives us some background to this legendary artist. The interview with Betty Boo (Alison Clarkson) was in promotion of her third studio album, Boomerang:

“The Betty Boo story begins, as all good stories should, with a burger.

It was 1987, and Clarkson was walking home from a Public Enemy gig in Hammersmith, when she spotted band member Professor Griff in McDonald's, ordering a Filet-O-Fish.

Full of teenage bravado, she approached him with two schoolfriends and declared: "We're rappers too!"

The trio - known as the She Rockers - proceeded to freestyle for him while being ushered out of the restaurant by an unimpressed employee. (Amazingly, Griff had a documentary crew following him and the footage is on YouTube.)

That chance meeting prompted an invitation to the US, where Griff produced the She Rockers' debut single Give It A Rest, external.

"That trip was an apprenticeship," Clarkson recalls. "I left my A-Levels, went to New York and toured with Public Enemy.

"We were really young and completely fearless. My mum must have worried so much about me."

But by the time they returned to the UK, Clarkson had grown tired with the She Rockers' sound.

"I realised that, actually, I like pop music," she says. "I wanted to try and write pop-rap and they wanted to stay a little bit more underground."

School daze

Her breakthrough came when The Beatmasters asked her to rap on a clubbed-up cover of Martha And The Vandellas' I Can't Dance To That Music You're Playin', external.

"I went to their studio, spit a few lyrics, and the next thing I knew, I was on Top of the Pops," Clarkson recalls with a giggle.

When the song hit the top 10, she used her royalties to buy a keyboard and a sampler, and started writing songs in her bedroom.

Straight away, she came up with Doin' the Do - a catchy-but-withering put-down of a maths teacher who had advised her to become a secretary.

"Going to be comprehensive school during [Margaret] Thatcher's time in the 80s, the teachers weren't being paid properly. I had aspirations to do well in my studies, and they just weren't interested at all.

"So I thought, as I broke out of school, that the only way I could express myself was by putting it on a record."

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. YouTube content may contain adverts.

End of youtube video 3 by letsgr00ve

The video for Doin' The Do, external channelled her rebellious streak, with Boo strutting around a school corridor in a leather jacket and hotpants, leading the pupils in a mini-revolution.

Fizzing with attitude and humour, it stood out in a year where the UK's biggest-selling singles were depressing ballads like Unchained Melody and Nothing Compares 2U.

"I always wanted to be a bit larger than life because I'd done the hip-hop look, with the troop jackets and the Adidas high tops,"she says. "In a way, I just wanted to dress up and be different”.

I will finish off with a review of the song. Before that, The Guardian spoke with Alison Clarkson and co-producer Rex Brough. Thirty-five years after its release, Doin’ the Do still sounds like nothing else. This infectious Pop released near the start of a magnificent decade. If you have not heard Betty Boo’s music then I would suggest you explore it now:

“Alison Clarkson, AKA Betty Boo, singer-songwriter

When I was 17, I was in a female rap trio called the She Rockers. We saw LL Cool J and Public Enemy play Hammersmith Odeon when the 1987 Def Jam tour came to London. Afterwards, we saw Public Enemy in McDonald’s. We went “Oi!” and told them we were rappers, so they filmed us doing a freestyle rap, right there in McDonald’s.

The next thing we knew, we were flying to New York to work with Public Enemy’s Professor Griff. After that, I did the rap on the Beatmasters hit Hey DJ! / I Can’t Dance (To That Music You’re Playing), which did so well that I got signed as a solo artist by Rhythm King records. With the money, I bought myself a keyboard, a sampler and a four-track tape machine and started writing songs in my bedroom, one of which was Doin’ the Do.

We saw Public Enemy in a McDonald’s and they filmed us doing a freestyle rap

I looped a breakbeat and wrote a bassline, the clavinet/piano parts, then a verse and chorus. Betty Boo was my nickname, because people said I looked like the cartoon character Betty Boop – big eyes and short hair. There are a lot of lyrics. I was a bit of a blabbermouth and self-promoter, but that’s what rappers did then. So the lyrics mention Betty Boo throughout. Also, I’d been to a terrible school and the careers officer told me the best I could hope for was to be a secretary. There’s nothing wrong with that – my mum was a secretary – but I wanted something different, so I channelled my fury into a song of empowerment. “Doin’ the do” basically means I’m getting on and doing things. Much later, someone told me it was a slang expression for cunnilingus.

The song was a slow burner, then we got radio pluggers Ferret N Spanner on board and suddenly I was everywhere. I’d loved glam rock as a child so wanted to make an impact with colourful outfits, big silver boots and backing singers with purple hair. Apparently I was the first British female rapper to have a Top 10 hit. I still remember Capital Radio DJs Pat Sharp and Mick’s Brown review of Doin’ the Do in Smash Hits. They liked it but said: “This rap thing will never catch on.”

Rex Brough, co-producer

I met Alison when she was in a duo called Hit ’N’ Run. She didn’t have a demo: she just had the song in her head. So we worked on it in the box room of my house. Studios were like citadels then, with huge mixing desks and all that rubbish. They looked like something from Star Trek, so working at home was a nice change. Home-recording was new back then, but I had a sampler and a Commodore 64 computer. We took the first organ chord from the Monkees’ I’m a Believer for the intro. The drums were a mix of James Brown’s Funky Drummer, which was ubiquitous then, and our own stuff. We sampled Reperata and the Delrons’ Captain of Your Ship but sped it up. We also used the tambourine and drum break from Bobby Byrd’s Hot Pants (I’m Coming), which the Stone Roses used on Fool’s Gold.

As a young recording engineer, I’d seen producers and engineers make singers do take after take until they burst into tears, at which point they’d all high-five each other. I vowed that if I ever got to produce, I wouldn’t be like that. Alison was very involved in the process and we went with her instincts. We recorded the vocals with a cheap Tandy microphone attached to a broom handle which also recorded the sound of a motorbike going past the house, but we left it in. We redid the chorus in a studio – one of those citadels – but it sounded lifeless, so we brought back the broom handle recording.

Pop music at the time had been either really slick Stock, Aitken and Waterman, Jive Bunny or MOR stuff. There was a space for a big, colourful persona like Betty Boo’s and music that wasn’t made by grownups. I always remember a line she had that didn’t make it on the record: “I’ve got plenty and I’m not even 20”.

I am going to end with a review from 2012. The F-Word made Doin’ the Do their Song of the Day. On 10th September, it will be thirty-five years since Betty Boo’s debut album, Boomania, was released. I remember it vaguely when it came out. I was seven. I definitely recall listening to Doin’ the Do and Where Are You Baby? with friends. Music that has stayed with me since:

“It was 1990 and Betty Boo‘s brand of rap, pop and R&B was infused with 1960s superhero kitsch. Along with Deee-Lite‘s melange of house beats and psychedelic grooviness, she arguably set the tone for a decade that took the previous decades’ excesses beyond “cheese” and back into the mainstream. ‘Doin’ the Do‘ used colourful comic book imagery to build Betty Boo as an icon and ‘Where are You Baby‘, the following hit single from her debut solo album Boomania, was similarly nostalgic and this time played on the space-age theme that had been popular in the 1960s and ’70s.

This left a lasting impression. Indeed, the story goes that the Spice Girls recruitment ad’s request for “larger than life cartoon characters” said “We’re looking for five Betty Boos”. Obviously, their resulting “Girl Power!” brand of empowerment has divided feminist opinion and been criticised widely so it’s perhaps easy to dismiss Betty Boo’s work as a matter of style over substance: cheeky and loud, rather than meek and demure, but somehow not the work of a credible artist.

Such a conclusion would be wrong in my view. With roots firmly in rap rather than pop, Betty Boo (or Alison Clarkson, her widely known real name) was an original member of The She Rockers, who allegedly got their first big break after performing a spontaneous rap in front of Public Enemy in a fast food restaurant. Trained in sound engineering, Clarkson used the money from her single with the Beatmasters to buy equipment. This led to her being invoved in the production for Boomania as well as writing the tracks for it in her bedroom in just a few weeks. Talking to The Independent in 1992, she said it sometimes irked her how little credit she got for that side of things but added that she tackled her frustration with the thought that “The people who buy my records like the sound of my voice and the tune; they’re not interested in credits.”

After a break away from the music business, Clarkson found commercial success again as a songwriter when one of her compositions ‘Pure and Simple’ was recorded by Hear’Say and became one of the fastest selling singles in UK history. When writing and working behind the scenes in the emerging Popstars/Pop Idol/X-Factor age, she found the industry approach very different from the one she had been used to back in the early 1990s:

“As a pop artist, I had my own image. I had got to help the directors with the videos, I worked very closely with an art designer on the sleeves and stuff. It’s completely different now.”

(The Guardian, 23 November, 2001)

Part of the appeal of ‘Doin’ the Do’ lies in Boo’s bragging confidence in the video and lyrics. This itself arguably makes her a good feminist superhero figure. However, it also brings up a more problematic aspect to the persona, with Boo’s rap battling stance arguably glorifying the position of the bully (“You say I bully though I know I’m no goody goody”) and employing sizeism (“fat as a rolypoly”) to insult a rival.

Certainly, the Betty Boo character is not the stuff of revolutions but Clarkson’s profile as a performer, producer and writer firmly files her work under “feminist interest” as far as this feminist is concerned”.

I shall leave things there. It is exciting that there is a Betty Boo tour coming up. Fans get to celebrate Boomania. Of course, Doin’ the Do will feature! Perhaps her best-known and loved songs, it is one that I have a lot of affection for. For my money, nothing like it has come along…

SINCE its release.

FEATURE: Oasis’ Some Might Say at Thirty: The Best Britpop Songs

FEATURE:

 

 

Oasis’ Some Might Say at Thirty

The Best Britpop Songs

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THERE are some big Oasis…

PHOTO CREDIT: Beyzaa Yurtkuran/Pexels

anniversaries this year. On 14th August, Roll with It turns thirty. That was the single that went up against, and lost to, Blur’s Country House in the big Britpop battle of 1995. I wonder what would have happened if Some Might Say went up against Country House. I think it may have won. Also, the album the songs are from, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, turns thirty on 2nd October. It is going to be a big occasion. However, as the first single from the album, Some Might Say, was released on 24th April, 1995, that is the first big anniversary. I will mark that by compiling a mixtape of Britpop songs. 1995 was a really interesting and uplifting time for music. A year when we were getting groups like Supergrass, Oasis, Blur and Suede ruling. To mark that, below is an assortment of tracks that should take you back to…

A glorious moment in British culture.

FEATURE: In My Life: Debate Around the Casting of The Beatles Biopics and Walking a Fine Line

FEATURE:

 

 

In My Life

IN THIS PHOTO:  (Left to Right): Harris Dickinson, Paul Mescal, Barry Keoghan and Joseph Quinn have been cast respectively as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison in four upcoming biopics about The Beatles, set for release in 2028/PHOTO CREDIT: Sony Pictures Publicity UK

Debate Around the Casting of The Beatles Biopics and Walking a Fine Line

_________

YOU just knew that there…

IN THIS PHOTO: Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison in 1966/PHOTO CREDIT: Don Paulsen/Getty Images

would be division and debate when the cast was announced for Sam Mendes’ biopics about The Beatles. Each member – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison – has been cast. I guess supporting cast will be announced soon. At the moment, the Fab Four have been cast. The biopics are set for release in 2028. Pitchfork were among those who reporting news of casting that have split people on social media:

“Sam Mendes has officially confirmed the main cast and release date for his Beatles biopics at Sony’s CinemaCon in Las Vegas on March 31, as BBC News reports. All four films—each centering on a different member of the fab four—are set to come out in April 2028, and will star Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison, and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr.

While Peter Jackson recently directed the 2021 documentary The Beatles: Get Back, Mendes’ tetralogy will mark the first scripted films to be granted the band’s music and life rights. Last year, Keoghan appeared in the music video for Fontaines D.C.’s “Bug,” and Mescal in a video for his now-ex Phoebe Bridgers. Quinn plays the metalhead Eddie Munson on Stranger Things, which landed him a chance to jam with Metallica in 2022.

It’s uncertain if Mescal will meet with McCartney ahead of shooting, but he’s already got prominent lead acting roles under his belt with Gladiator II, Aftersun, All of Us Strangers, and The Lost Daughter. The same goes for Keoghan, who could reach out to Starr for suggestions on how to capture the drummer, though he’s already portrayed complex characters in Saltburn, The Batman, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Banshees of Inisherin. As for Dickinson, his starring roles in Babygirl, The Iron Claw, and Triangle of Sadness preface his take on John Lennon.

The Beatles themselves helmed a handful of theatrical films during their run: A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, Magical Mystery Tour, Yellow Submarine, and Let It Be. They recently won Best Rock Performance at the 2025 Grammy Awards for “Now and Then,” a salvaged and digitally restored Lennon demo dating back to the 1970s”.

Some of the biggest arguments have revolved around the cast and whether they look like the band. I must admit that Barry Keoghan does have the look of Ringo Starr and could adopt his voice easily enough. Paul Mescal has a element of Paul McCartney. The casting of Harris Dickinson and Joseph Quinn makes less sense. People were also saying how these are quite big names and it would have been good to have some unknown or rising actors take the parts. I also assume that the cast will have to learn to sing like The Beatles. I am not sure whether Sam Mendes will go down that route or there will be miming. In any case, the casting is not perfect. Think about recent biopics like 2024’s Back to Black (Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse), 2022’s Elvis (Austin Butler as Elvis Presley), Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody (with Naomi Ackie as Whitney Houston) A Complete Unknown (Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan) and the upcoming Deliver Me From Nowhere (Jeremy Allen White will play Bruce Springsteen). I think there has been chat for a long time about Kelly Rowland playing Donna Summer. Most of these actors are established and there are not many that feature unknown actors. Also, many do not see the actor singing the songs. It is about them portraying the artist and embodying them rather than it being about the singing. Also, there is always talk about resemblance. Most of those films I mentioned have actors who look very similar to the subjects. These Beatles biopics seem to have created more conversation than other biopics. Perhaps because of the legacy and stature of The Beatles. I am on the side of those who say that the actors as a whole are not spits of the band. Also, when it comes to casting people like Yoko Ono, Linda Eastman (McCartney) and George Martin, who will they choose? I think the choice of actors for the 2028 biopics are more about the pulling power of the actors. As I say, two of the four look like the Beatles they are playing. Is it the most important thing?

Some of the queries around the Beatles casting was the resemblance. Also, the age of the actors. How they are perhaps a little too old to be playing the band. Also, they are big names, so has that compromised hiring actors who would be more authentic and look like the band? Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr no doubt are thrilled they are being brought to the big screen. They will be around for the premiers in 2028. It would be interesting to hear what they reckon. There have been a few biopics featuring The Beatles. However, this is going to be the most ambitious and high-budget undertaking. It is a fine line between getting the actors right and the script being honest and balanced. So many times the actors look the part and do great but the story is whitewashed, redacted or does not go deep enough. I think that the script for these Sam Mendes films will be great. The music will be sensational. With all that considered, how vital is it that the four members who get their own film look precisely like the original members?! The quality of the actors will show. In terms of the dialogue and movement. They will do a brilliant job inhabiting the role. In music biopics from recent years, the lead actors have been wonderful. The main concern is going to be whether the script stands up and does not disappoint. How the music is going to be handled. What songs will be included and whether the actors learn to play or mime. If the script glosses over certain things and what angle it takes. I am sure the films will be great. Recent music biopics have had mixed reviews. Most of it has revolved around the script and story. However, I do think that a lot of focus is on the actors and whether they look enough like the artists. That might be the biggest issue with the biopics around The Beatles. We shall see how audiences take to the films…

WHEN they arrive in 2028.

FEATURE: Snapshots: Focusing on the Wide Range of Photographers Who Captured Kate Bush

FEATURE:

 

 

Snapshots

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1979 wearing Chinese-Dutch fashion designer Fong Leng/PHOTO CREDIT: Claude Vanheye

Focusing on the Wide Range of Photographers Who Captured Kate Bush

_________

IN previous features…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during the filming of 1993’s The Line, the Cross and the Curve/PHOTO CREDIT: Gudio Harari

I have talked about photographers who have shot Kate Bush. For the most part, I have focused on a select few. Her brother John Carder Bush has photographed her since she was a child. He took photos for most of her albums. The covers including The Dreaming (1982), Hounds of Love (1985) and The Sensual World (1989). Some terrific shots. Guido Harari responsible for some of her best photos of the 1980s and 1990s. My personal favourites are the ones he took on the set of The Line, the Cross and the Curve in 1993. I also love Gered Mankowitz and the photos he took in 1978 and 1979. Capturing Kate Bush at the start of her career. These three are perhaps the best-known photographers. However, there are so many that deserves to be celebrated and discussed. I am compelled to think about this as a recent Kate Bush Fan Podcast episode was an interview with Govert de Roos. We look at photos of Kate Bush and take them for granted. Maybe not discussing the photographers. However, this new podcast episode allows us to hear reflections from a wonderful Dutch photographer who shot Kate Bush early in her career:

“For this new episode of The Kate Bush Fan Podcast, Seán introduces an exclusive interview between our own Darrell Babidge and the Dutch photographer, Govert de Roos. Govert was Kate’s European photographer. Many of the photos that were taken of Kate in 1978 and were posted on many a bedroom wall were taken by Govert. In this interview we get a glimpse into his work with Kate Bush, as well as the rock and pop stars of the 70’s and 80’s. We also find out more about his work during the Efteling Special in Amsterdam and taking photos of Kate’s Tour of Life concert there. Other artists he worked with include Grace Jones, Queen, ABBA, Debbie Harry, Tina Turner, Prince and many more”.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Anton Corbijn

A lot of these photographers did not have as long and wide a collaboration with Kate Bush as the likes of Guido Harari. I like the fact that Anton Corbijn photographed Kate Bush. Another Dutch master. He shot her in 1982. There are the iconic shots from 1981 by Clive Arrowsmith. He took two shots. One of her decked in Ivy and another with this dark blue background. They are terrific shots. I also have a lot of respect for Claude Vanheye (“Vanheye was famous for the open, informal atmosphere in his studios. There was great music and lots of food. His 1979 photo session with Kate Bush was scheduled for 30 minutes, but she sent away her entourage and stayed for six hours, with props like a fake dolphin and dresses by Fong Leng. His photographs of Kate Bush were used on the Japanese 7″ single for Symphony In Blue and in the unofficial box set Never Forever”). There are websites that document the great and rare photos of Kate Bush. A lot fo the ones highlighted in various features are press photos. You never really know about the person who took them. Each has their own experiences of the fleeting moment with Kate Bush. I have said it many times before. How it would be great to have some greater discussion around the photographers associated with Kate Bush. Memories of this amazing artist and what it was like shooting Bush. We do need to speak more about all the great photographers and their own style. In most cases, Kate Bush being this very willing subject who would give her all. Among my favourite shots are the ones the late Brian Griffin took in 1983. In another feature, I mooted the idea of a Kate Bush exhibition. One where we get a range of photographs from throughout the year. One of the main reasons is to give a name to some of the photographers who took these iconic shots. I wonder whether people reading this will have their own favourite photographers. Not the major ones like Gered Mankowitz. Those who shots are not as used and discussed. The media often select a narrow few when publishing stuff about Kate Bush. There is this archive that is relatively untapped.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Govert de Roos

That Kate Bush Fan Podcast episode with Govert de Roos opened my mind. I had forgotten about his shots of Kate Bush. One where she performed during The Tour of Life in 1979. It made me think about wider about the wider discussion. This chronology that has many colours and shades. A lot of these lesser-discussed photographers worked with Kate Bush in the 1980s and '90s. Not that many with bush in the twenty-first century. However, Trevor Leighton’s work with Kate Bush around the release in Aerial (2005) catch my eye. I have used his photos quite a lot. I am not sure whether it would be practical to have all of these less-heralded photographers get together. Or a book with their work. I would be fascinated in a chronological book that charts her different looks and the people who took those shots. I think all of the photographers were male. I am not sure whether Kate Bush ever worked with any female photographers. Hearing the likes of Guido Harari discussing his working relationship with Kate Bush is wonderful. In fact, nearly every photographer who has worked with her has fond recollections. Even though I have talked multiple times about Kate Bush photography and the people she worked with, I have never really thought about how many photos of her were taken through the years. So many press shots. Loads of collaboration. Whether snapshots of a wider photo album, these photographers deserve credit where it is due. They each brought something different from Kate Bush. We are not done talking about that side of things. With new music coming in the future, will it be a case of a few promotional shots and nothing more? Hearing what Govert de Roos had to say about Kate Bush. Brian Griffin besotted with her it seems. Anton Corbijn wowed by her. Claude Vanheye talking some of the standout shots. All vastly interesting and vivid. Photographing Kate Bush must have been…

A life-changing experience.