Friday 19 August 2011

We (Sort Of) Wish You Well In Your Retirement…

Of all the people in the world to age, get a bus pass and retire, I didn't think it'd be David Bowie.  Then again, maybe this ability to be properly popstar fabulous and completely human is why he’s so awesome. At the risk of sounding a bit ballsy, if you’re yet to take a voyage to planet Bowie, do not let this talk of retirement put you off. You’ll learn that it’s impossible for Ziggy Stardust to ever return to Mars without a trace, his music is as relevant as ever.

Though I purport to be an expert on this music sort of thing, I admit I was a little late to the Bowie party. Make that – a lot late.  This was no case of being held up by Tube signal failures, I was held up by 23 years of brain signal failures. Till last year (breathe), he was just the guy that sang “ch-ch-ch-changes”, often at one in the morning as I pranced about some indie club, the guy with chevrons for eyebrows that played the Goblin King in Labyrinth. Yep, last year, the legendary DAVID BOWIE meant nothing to me bar sticky dance floors and bricking it behind the couch, 6-year-old style.  If you see yourself in this at all, it’s time to do something about it. Turn and face that strain.

My Bowie-piphany happened one fateful, unsuspecting day. While dodging the office mice, I hear this tight, hot rhythm section on the Q stereo, followed by an arresting, frightening vocal. The hectic guitar riffs sound better than Foo Fighters’ latest, the title track grows more dystopian than Joy Division, the lyrics – something about a European canon – are more spacy and insane than even Muse. I’m finally hearing Bowie’s 10th album – Station To Station for the first time. 

While editing the reissue review, I’m discovering that, long before juggling crystal balls surrounded by Jim Henson puppets, David Bowie recorded this album under the influence of red peppers, milk and cocaine exclusively. He has no recollection of how this LP came to being. Given the circumstances, he was out of his intergalactic mind. So much so he wasn’t even him, he had appointed himself the Thin White Duke. I wash down some M&S carrot crudités with chocolate Yazoo thinking, This behaviour is absolutely more rock’n’roll than Kurt Cobain, Rihanna and Marilyn Manson put together.

Over the next 40 minutes, I hear gut-wrenching ballads, delicious pop, heavy rock, foot-stomping funk, disco – all in an album of six songs. I cast aside my double-CD version of Lady Gaga’s one-and-a-half-hour, 22-track debut album, shrieking THIS IS AMAZING! Soon enough I’m telling everyone “DAVID BOWIE’S AMAZING! Also, check out this film Star Wars. I’d say – cult classic.” Don’t even get me started on the art, the hair, the outfits. Up until this moment in time, I’ve been seriously visually impaired. What am I saying? I’ve been blind.

Now converted, I’m all about the Bowie – Aladdin Sane, Ziggy Stardust, Hunky Dory, Young Americans… I realise there’s nothing stopping me from being Elton John, Mick Jagger and Lou Reed at once. Everything makes sense where it didn’t before (Mika, at least). Station To Station is one of the most exciting records I hear in 2010, and it landed in 1976. I can’t frickin’ wait for all the Bowie I’m yet to discover. There’s so much in the Bowie Canon of Amazing, I never need to worry about running out…

Or so I think until David Bowie’s biographer – Paul Trynka – nukes me with an A-bomb: Bowie’s off to sit in his armchair, watch Countdown and eat baked beans on toast till the end of days. And deservedly so – God only knows the guy’s influenced nearly everyone who’s succeeded him in the charts. He’s even influenced the people who influenced him. Well impressive. But here’s hoping he’ll do a Jay-Z, following this announcement with several albums, a global hit a la Empire State Of Mind, a Glastonbury headline slot and the biggest musical collaboration since Madonna kissed Britney.

As he once profoundly stated: “Time may change me/But I can’t trace time.” Check out these five tracks below and prepare to have your mind abducted by an artist who transcends time, space and cosmic universes…

1.    Ashes To Ashes. Unfortunately once sampled by Samantha Mumba, this electro gem is felt all over Duran Duran, Hurts and La Roux’s In For The Kill. Bowie scored a Number 1 here with a single he described to NME as, “a popular nursery rhyme about space men becoming junkies.” How quaint.
2.    Drive-In Saturday. A doo-wop, Christmas-y number about watching porn. Morrissey loves a bit of it, he even did his own version despite the fact Bowie’s no longer a vegetarian.  I know – Morrissey actually liking something, it must be better than… well anything really.
3.    Moonage Daydream. From Ziggy Stardust, this rock behemoth of a song really is quite mental. It’s merely one track on a concept album where the messiah is an alien who does a lot of drugs. One-hit-wonders Babylon Zoo may as well have called Spaceman – We Love You Bowie. This is four minutes and 35 seconds that form the blueprint for Lady Gaga’s career.
4.    Oh You Pretty Things. One listen of the Beatles-y piano pop melody and Bowie’s falsetto and there you have it: the invention of Britpop. Indeed Blur, Pulp and, in turn, Franz Ferdinand, Scissor Sisters, Wild Beasts and Muse owe their life to this classic from 1971’s Hunky Dory. Brett Anderson? You’ve got some explaining to do…
5.    “Heroes”. Written by Bowie and Brian Eno, the title track from his so-called “Berlin era” was influenced heavily by Neu! Dark, brooding, experimental electronica, The Killers, LCD Soundsystem and New Order live between the synths.

Wednesday 10 August 2011

Earth To Madonna – A Telecommunication


…Hello Madonna … It's me... Downward dog once if you can hear me… You came to me in ’98 via MTV’s plays of Frozen… you had henna squiggles on your hands, crows bursting out your chest, and a winter coat that transformed you into a dog… You were on a beach playing some sort of contorted version of Twister by yourself… You never cracked a smile… Must’ve been all those puy lentils for breakfast…

I was mesmerised. I was scared shitless. You the Maleficent to my Sleeping Beauty, I pricked my finger on my plastic CD cover of Ray Of Light and fell into an eternal slumber, entrapped by your pop genius; your own brand of holistic mumbo jumbo communicated via Eastern hums and foreign tongues, which I have never mastered but attempted to with religious obsession… You led me to the discovery of hummus. In Sainsbury’s. It was amazing…

Ever since the Queen of Pop turned World of Witchdoctor, Madonna and I have had telepathic communicative ability. I knew it all along. Now I have proof. Just weeks ago I was reminiscing about how much I love Ray Of Light’s producer William Orbit. It started with the new Washed Out album, the opening ocean-skimming beats of which recalled in my erudite mind the work of, erm, All Saints. It may be a genre-defining, paradigm of the latest hipster movement, yes. But it’s so almost a carbon copy of 2000’s second biggest hit single Pure Shores, which Orbit produced for the Appleton sisters, Melanie Blatt and whatsherface. Had Danny Boyle yet to direct The Beach, this Washed Out song would be a soundtrack contender.

One trigger leads to another. I’m compiling playlists, lining up Blur’s 13 on repeat, whiling away office hours revisiting Ray Of Light and Orbit’s remix of Barber’s Adagio For Strings. Yes! Here I am! Going into William Orbit! All this replenished capacity for beach-friendly electronica and Karmic pop chanting has me feeling guilty about missing three weeks of Ashtanga yoga, fearful I no longer own a red Kabbalah ribbon (my piece of string got lost in the fell-down-a-loo incident of 2008). I go hunting in my stash of travel sewing kits for red thread but find maroon.

Regardless of my misplaced spirituality, Madonna must have intercepted my Orbital-y signals. Obviously, as the internet on Sunday claims that Madonna and Orbit may reunite on a new record. I know what you’re thinking – 2011’s Most Influential In Music list has got my name all over it. Yet, I’m not sure whether my telepathic tips were such a good idea. Madonna’s misinterpreted what the (Buddhist version of) hell I was doing.

Sitting in a vegan hippy joint in Camden, I consider my reaction. There are shots of wheatgrass for sale; invigorating, earthy, weird. Hemp and incense surrounds the dreadlocked, multi-coloured, knit-wearing community. They look a bit 1998. The days when Rabbi Madge was trying to repopularise the Star of David are behind us. Richard Dawkins is the new religion, the recession is anti-bottled water/pro-meat casseroles, and yoga’s something you do on a Wii Fit… in front of a telly. William Orbit-era Madonna, while once ahead of the game, now redolent of time and place. It’s not even “vintage”; it’s moth-eaten.

See, Madonna’s not like other women. She doesn’t need to do a spring revisit to the wardrobe and inspect yesteryear’s garments for potential trend comebacks. Madonna didn’t go sifting for shoulder-padded jackets when, in 2008, La Roux took a ride on the Tardis to the year 1987. Madonna isn’t today looking at Nirvana t-shirts in Urban Outfitters exclaiming, “Thank Goa, grunge is back in – I’ll dig out my Doc Martens and see if Shirley Manson wants to come round for tea.” No.

Madonna is about reinvention. She takes the great morsels of bygone eras (Marlene Dietrich, Andy Warhol, Abba…) and mutates them into something state-of-the-art, contemporary. What is Madonna if not the avant-garde pioneer of popular culture; the commercially viable Yoko Ono? What’s to say this re-partnering isn’t an instance of a revival we only have room for in our wildest dreams? Vanilla Ice, the Wispa, EastEnders’ Dirty Den, The (New) Cars… Next in line of awkward comebacks is Madonna, spinning Cream Ibiza Classics in the kitchen, scouring for RyanAir deals to Balearic seas. Just as coffee tables don’t need a second helping of the Sex book, the world can’t require more Madonna above a highway, braless and dancing convulsively, shaking her beaded Herbal Essences curls to trance beats. Not now. Not ever.

Madonna! Telekinesis me now. Stop gatecrashing my iTunes trips down memory lane. Time to get ahead of the curve again. “Madonna secures guest vocalists The XX and Warpaint. Inside the Haus of Gaga. Relocated to the set of The Dark Knight Rises.” This is the sort of Biblical headline I want to read. You have many reincarnations yet to explore. Here are some humble suggestions…
  1. Madonna surfs “Chillwave”: If Washed Out also screamed William Orbit at you, bite the bullet and bag the new genre’s posterboy himself – Ernest Greene. Also dubbed Glo-Fi, the Chillwave movement offers the Donnie Darko superpower of time travel. Exist in 1980 and 2011 simultaneously and defy time and space. It’s like Polaroid gone digital. (New merchandise alert!).
  2. Madonnicana: Bon Iver would like to invite you to a log cabin to toast some marshmallows and reminisce about your past loves. Herein lies potential for fashioning accessories out of wood, popularising bearskin caps (strictly faux) and becoming the first ever female popstar with a full beard. Beautiful Razor… coming to a future Twilight soundtrack.
  3. M-androgyny: See if Prince wants a revolution, call Jack White, grab your Gibson Les Paul and Slash hat and start shredding Led Zeppelin IV. Alison Mosshart was Best Man at Kate Moss’s wedding and Lady Gaga looks like Al Pacino on her new single sleeve. You know what it feels like for a girl, time to know what it feels like for a rock God. Bender that gender.
  4. Freakfolk Madonna: Join Animal Collective, MGMT, Twin Shadow and Ariel Pink and get your twee on. Fuse any sort of sound together (the more household objects/old Nintendo effects the better) in a psychedelic jam of newer age hippy proportions. Hunker down in Brooklyn, NY with the Hasids and wackos who gaze at their moccasins through non-prescription glasses.
  5. Dubstep-onna: Burial, Four Tet, Magnetic Man and James Blake provide the urban sounds of nocturnal London, deserted tube stations and abandoned donner kebabs. It’s difficult to dance to, but who needs a leotard when you can seduce the masses at 138 beats per minute? Human nature, innit.