How I intended to spend my evening: acquainting myself with Soviet cinema by watching Tarkovsky’s ‘Mirror’ for the first time.
How I’ve ended up spending it: offering a critical re-appraisal of Kylie Minogue on Twitter watching the ‘Confide In Me’ video over and over and over.
Patrick Cowley’s 16-minute mix of “I Feel Love”. Goodbye Donna Summer.
This is one of those songs that never feels familiar and is really, really exciting to listen to every time as a result.
Not sure why someone didn’t just edit the first 35 minutes out of this?
Aitken chose “I Only Have Eyes For You” because it was a song, he said, that “is almost embedded in our DNA.”
The slow-dance standard, penned in 1934 and most famously popularized by the Flamingos in the 1950s, is a song so enduring and omnipresent that it seems practically immortal.
“You’ve heard it in a bus stop; you’ve heard it on the radio,” said Aitken. “Somewhere, sometime, you’ve encountered it. I liked the idea that it was just out there, as this kind of sonic wallpaper.”
By continuously working and reworking the song, Aitken said, Song 1 can create a space “where you’re almost making a key to a door where the door opens and what you are seeing is wider and wider,” he said. “It becomes infinite.” (You can hear six versions from the Song 1 soundtrack on Pitchfork.)
The structure of the pop song itself figured into the structure of the piece. “I was interested in the idea of the architecture of a perfect pop song,” Aitken said. “Why is it reduced to three and a half minutes? Why does it have a hook that repeats?”
I’ve only just started reading up on Doug Aitken’s multimedia project that all these covers are coming from. I won’t be up to watch it live but I’m looking forward to catching whatever recordings make their way online when I get up tomorrow.
‘Sonic wallpaper’ sounds like a description you might use when reviewing an inoffensive piece of ambient music. But, talking about music and memory, it’s a decent way of defining music that’s big enough to feel communal and zeigeisty but small enough to feel private and intimate, which is something that the covers - particularly Beck’s - play around with.
It’s early days, but the 1934 pop standard ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ will probably be my song of 2012. I’m just not sure which version yet.
Right now there’s three versions to pick from in my iTunes: the 1959 Flamingos interpretation, the one everyone’s familiar with; the recent, cavernous Beck cover; and the even-more-recent Oneohtrix Point Never version which is less a cover and more a complete deconstruction. But then, if I’m counting the Oneohtrix Point Never song, it only seems fair to say that there’s actually a fourth version in my iTunes: The Field’s from ‘From here we go sublime’, which blows apart the song like the Oneohtrix Point Never version, but neglects to put it back together again.
All four have found their way onto my computer quite recently, which is strange for all sorts of reasons. As Mark Richardson touches on, The Flamingoes ‘original’ is a very ‘slippery song’. It could easy have been made a couple of decades earlier or later. It’s a song that’s familiar but not familiar enough to be rooted in history. If Mad Men started in 1959, a copy of it on vinyl wouldn’t end up in Don Draper’s lap in a piece of clunky cultural exposition. While the covers are all pretty different, but have the same slipperiness. Beck’s version feels like it’s come a long way forward in time; Oneohtrix’s has travelled back in time or at least fallen into our laps from a very distant universe; while The Field’s exists out of time, permanently jarred or frozen. In the most complimentary sense, none of them feel particularly current; none of them feel like they should be played on a computer, at least not my computer.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Been meaning to write something about Beck’s recent-ish cover of this (well, not this) for a while now, not sure whether I should get a move on or wait for another smart cover/deconstruction like this to come along in a few weeks.
I was 8 when Hello Nasty came out, so I can’t make many links between the Beastie Boys’ music and my life. But this was probably one of the first music videos I can remember thinking was really, really cool.
Usually I’ve decided whether I’ll listen to an album again halfway through its first listen. When I was finding my feet listening to Pink Floyd and other typically ‘canonical’ stuff that teenage boys listen to, I must have listened to something like Dark Side of the Moon a dozen times before I even began to feel like I was getting it. And when I fully got it, in the way you only ever really get the kind of books, films and albums you experience at that age, it was a kind of eureka moment that felt half spiritual, and half like learning a skill; Pink Floyd’s genius was revealing itself to me like God’s wisdom reveals itself in moments secular minded people would just regard as serendipitous, but there was also that flag-on-Everest feeling of elation that you get when you conquer a particularly steep learning curve, when your fingers seem to automatically be able to play a previously impossible guitar riff after hours of what seemed like fruitless labour.
I don’t get that anymore. Partly because I think I know myself better than I did then, mostly because I don’t have the time. There’s too much stuff to listen to. I have to keep up with new releases, and I might want to learn more about krautrock or, hey! maybe I should listen to the Cocteau Twins considering I listen to so much Bella Union stuff.
What’s more common - and I don’t really know what this says about my listening habits - is a kind of immediate fatigue with a song where it’ll go from unfathomably great (a faint echo of that DSotM experience) to simply ok in a way that’s really confusing and deflating.
I’ve noticed this’ll happen mostly with really dense, layered music. Usually dance-y stuff. Because I have a keen memory for disappointment, I can vividly remember feeling completely overwhelmed by all the undulating layers, burps, claps and whistles on LCD Soundsystem’s ‘One Touch’ listening to it on headphones late one night, minutes after it had leaked. Since then? It’s ok, but it’s not the same.
The latest culprit and inspiration for this post is the Traxman record, which I listened to today for the 3rd time and kind of confirmed to myself that whatever I really loved about it the first time around definitely isn’t there anymore. I’m not being glib or funny when I say that the record is repetitive. It’s about 33% too long, and the repetitive stabs and stutters that make up the body of the album soon go from being really visceral and exhilarating to feeling a little too smart and deconstructed for its own good. Listening to it now reminds me of reading bad postmodernist fiction where the entire point seems to be showcasing the author’s technical kicks rather than, you know, just telling a story. There’s a lot of love for music and its takes an encyclopaedic mind to slice together what’s being spliced together, but given MCA’s recent passing, I can’t help comparing it to Paul’s Boutique which is a lot more rag-tag and wobbly in a technical sense, but has a lot of heart at the centre of it. They’re both smart, postmodern-y albums, but Paul’s Boutique’s the Infinite Jest to Trakman’s any Paul Auster novel.
Rosin: Can we talk about the scene with Hannah and her gay ex-boyfriend? I thought that was line by line one of the funniest scenes I have ever seen. I’ve been repeating that very last line—”It was nice to see you. Your dad is gay”—all week.
O’Rourke: I love that scene. To me, one of the strongest things about the show is its offbeat, neurotic humor, embodied in Dunham’s characterization of Hannah here (and her great physical humor—eye-rolling, looking faint). In this scene, she really does render as a kind a female Woody Allen—with her own contemporary quirks. I think that this quality in the show is still finding its footing, and I hope that as the show gets some of its set-up out of the way, that voice—quixotic, selfish, sad, poignant—will get larger and larger.
Stevens: After watching the Elijah/Hannah bar scene three or four times straight through, there are still a few spots where I laugh every time: the sendoff Hanna mentions, and Dunham’s impeccable comic timing as she slips from tearful sentimentality (“What I’m having right now is an inappropriate physical reaction to my total joy for you and your self-discovery”) to wounded spite (“that fruity little voice of yours … that’s a new thing”).
Sadly/brilliantly, that scene had more laughs in it than the first two episodes of ‘Veep’.
I enjoyed ‘Veep’ but found it a bit underwhelming compared to Iannucci’s best. Obviously the show’s just getting started, but it felt like it lost something in translation which barthel’s great post on swearing in the show gets a sense of.
As well as the swearing, there’s a couple of other things - one to do with The Thick of It and UK politics, and another more broadly with Iannucci’s humour - that don’t really work or appear in ‘Veep’ that make it seem a little less sharp:
I like ‘Girls’ a lot more because it doesn’t make me feel like a piece of shit loser. Television about ‘you’ generally does. ‘Skins’ was a show over here in the UK that followed the super sexy and scadalous travails of a bunch of 16-18 year olds that aired while I was 16-18 and it didn’t resonate with my profoundly unsexy and unscandalous life at all. Most TV makes you feel that way, but when a show positions itself as representing your generation/age group/class that can be very alienating. Stewart Lee is good on this.
Of course a lot of ‘Girls’ success could lie in the fact that it’s:
Girls is still (mostly) about the cool kids who live in the cool part of a cool city, but I can relate to them. It’s better than ‘Skins’ at being ‘hyper-specific & broadly resonant’ - either that or I’ve gotten cooler in the past five years.
…
And then there’s this. #squaresoftcore
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
In other ‘The 90s!’ news, at about 9:45 in this Lunice mix is a remix of Waka’s ‘F Da Club Up’ that uses ‘Who Are You?’, a pretty deep cut from the Final Fantasy 7 soundtrack by leading luminary of Squaresoftcore, Nobuo Uematsu.
I named my first cat Cloud (he is ginger and mostly silent) so I think this is pretty cool.
