No Exit In Sight
Is there any strategy at all?
What We Think We Share In Music
We think we have agreement on some things when we discuss music, but lately I’ve been thinking the bits we assume are shared, might not be that well shared at all. Take Blondie. I’ve been listening to their albums since they came back after a 17 year absence and they have completely changed my perception of the band to what I had before. It is possible to come to Blondie and not listen to their early heyday albums and get engrossed in what they’ve been doing since 1999. If somebody who only knew them from the first 6 albums were to meet and talk to such a person, they might be talking about the same band but it would be a completely different musical experience they are bracketing under the Blondie band name.
Blondie is an extreme example but you can find most bands evolve, and change tack, and maybe get a turnover of personnel. The band name and the live repertoire might stay the same but the inner dynamics of the band might be completely different at both ends of their catalogue. This might seem bloody obvious but think about the number of times you might have been at a pub talking about The Rolling Stones, or Led Zeppelin, or Black Sabbath, and the other guy says they hate the band. It’s entirely possible they listened to one album out of a catalogue and decided they didn’t like the band and never listened to any of the other material.
Naturally, people are very loose about the subjects they discuss. It’s very difficult to sustain a conversation with somebody who claims to have listened to a band after hearing a couple of their albums. You can have pretty strange conversations about a band or their music. Imagine then what it’s like to talking about subjects like nuclear deterrent or global warming. Two people talking about a topic they barely share knowledge thereof. That’s pub conversations for you.
Equally, you could be totally wrong about an artist because of how you came to them. You might have come across the one anomalous item off their catalogue and spent the rest of your life being disappointed that they never got back to that point. I have that issue with Paul McCartney. My favourite album of his post-Beatles output is ‘Back to the Egg’ because that’s how I discovered him as a 13 year old. He’s never done anything like it since and he likely won’t. Everything else since has been a disappointment. I’ve since realised it’s wrong of me to have been disappointed - he just wasn’t who I thought he was as an artist. I had him wrong based on that one album.
All this is to say, we’re all drifting along with the notion that language allows for communication when in reality we’re all at sea with what anything means when the noun in question is a nebulous phenomenon.
Globalisation In Dire Straits
The business of bombing Iran has resulted in Iran playing the one card it can play to annoy everybody. Iran has closed the Straits of Hormuz. Yeah, that’s not a new band with a hit song Sultan of Swearwords. With the famed choke point of global oil shipping closed, the whole world is reduced to counting days in oil reserves. All this reminds us of the prescience of ‘Dune’. The whole global economy still runs on oil and the ability to control that commodity controls the world.
We’ve arrived at Oil Shock no.3. We had 2 in the 70s when Saudi Arabia asked the question “why are we selling the lifeblood of the world economy so cheaply?” With Oil Shock no.3, we are being asked by Iran “how do you like being Trump’s bitch now?”
Having lived through the two Oil Shocks as a kid, I can vaguely remember these things changing culture wholesale. The sense of austerity imposed on the world drove the initial impetus towards eco-friendly goods. The global success of Japanese auto-makers was a direct result of people actually paying attention to fuel consumption rates. Suddenly car ads on TV wanted to tell you how little fuel the vehicle used. Cars suddenly got designed with minimal ornamentation. Long before the word became part of popular parlance, austerity became part of car designs. In the long run it bled the US auto-makers and diminished the power and importance of Detroit.
If this Oil Shock goes for any duration, you know it is going to have a deep impact upon global trade as well as design, culture, and social cohesion. It might lead to a rapid electrification of all private vehicles. I know EV drivers are chortling about how the Oil Shock doesn’t impact their motor transport. If we get to rationing, there will be hell to pay at the ballot box. As uncontrollable events go, world governments are going to suffer from any prolonged fuel shortage. If people can’t fly in airplanes or ship goods across the seven seas, that’s going to knock Globalisation for a six. As the nation most dependent on globalisation to continue unaffected, you can understand why China is suddenly making big statements about peace and international law (yeah I laughed too).
At the climax of Herbert’s Dune, the various planetary governments and interstellar organisation leaders plead with the Emperor to take his mighty Sardaukar troops to Arrakis and put down Muad’Dib’s rebellion. They all go together and end up taking the Loss to Paul Muad’Dib and his Fremen. If you impose that picture on world events, that would make Donald Trump the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV. He might have to marry off Ivanka to an Iranian prince to save the world.
The years immediately following the second Oil Shock were musically fecund. Bands that became prominent in that era include Blondie, The Police, Van Halen, B-52s, and of course Dire Straits. If nothing economically good comes out of this Oil Shock, maybe we can still look forward to some bitchin’ new music.
RIP Guillermo Martin Sepulveda
I’ve spent this week trying to digest the reality that my old AFTRS colleague ‘Willy’ passed away in Chile. Apparently he took a bad fall, went home and never woke up. It does not quite seem real to me. I half-expect him to call me still and tell me about his next short film.
Born in Chile, his family fled the Dictator Pinochet to Australia when he was six years old. He fought like hell to claim a seat at the table of what he felt was ‘White Australia’ that sought to exclude him. He resented the status quo, he bucked society at every opportunity. Garrulous, argumentative, quarrelsome, and ornery, he was in some way the very picture of an immigrant renegade. And yet at the age of 21 he found himself at Film School where I met him.
He was a young tyro, kind of like an Orson Welles. Nobody questioned his immense talent, and everybody was quick to praise his artistic flair. After graduating he threw himself into work that helped the needy and the poor, the less fortunate and the disenfranchised. His work took him places most people only dream about.
He moved back to Chile a year ago, and now he is gone.
What’s Spinning This Week (in no particular order):
B’Boom: Live in Argentina - King Crimson
Bach: Partitas 1,2 & 3 - Glenn Gould
Technical Ecstasy - Black Sabbath
Come Away With Me - Norah Jones
Triple J’s Hottest 100 Vol.17
This week’s nostalgia listen is B’Boom. This is the 90s incarnation of the mighty Crimso, recorded in Buenos Aires in late 1994. Clocking at 111min 06 secs, it is a mighty live set. This is the music that allegedly made Adrian Belew lose his hair. I just love this stuff. True to the lineage of King Crimson live albums, this one was taken from a soundboard mix on to DAT. It’s really rough and raw - it has as much in-yer-face quality as ‘Earthbound’, but with much better clarity thanks to 1994 technology being much better than 1972. There’s something about really raw live recordings that get your blood pumping.
I’ve had this ‘Bach: Partitas 1,2, & 3’ album since the late 2000s. I got a bunch of Gould’s recordings after the GFC was in full swing. People the world over were selling brand new CDs for peanuts. Glenn Gould racing through more JS Bach material is surprisingly good driving music. There’s something about a guy who is a virtuoso’s virtuoso delivering a performance masterclass - it’s resplendent. Recorded between 1957 and 1963, this disc also captures the unique sound of Gould at his favourite Steinway CD318, years before it got dropped while on tour. I’m not much of a classical piano listener, but I’ll always be there for a Gould-playing-Bach recording.
‘Technical Ecstasy’ might be my fave Black Sabbath Album so far. Recorded in 1976, it has a way out Sci-Fi cover that predates Star Wars, and certainly has a beautiful clarity in the recording. Stepping out of the earlier doom-laden Metal, they were on to more sophisticated songs and arrangements just as Punk was breaking in the UK. It sounds a little like ‘Physical Graffiti’ in parts while also having prog rock moments too. Apparently Sabbath fans hate this record but I guess I’m wired differently. I seem to like records the regular fans dislike. I like ‘The Elder’ by Kiss and that is considered a right stinker by Kiss fans.
I picked up ‘Come Away With Me’ for 5 bucks on eBay a while back. Maybe I’ve already talked about this album, but I think it’s quite a good collection of songs. She sings it well and the whole album is evocative of romantic tension. That said, I don’t know that it’s jazz in the way I understand jazz. If this is jazz, then a McDonalds Big Mac is health food. This is easy-listening pop, re-badged for a new generation of people who want to like music but probably don’t. Pretty sure I got it cheap from somebody who was redecorating and decided having CDs on the shelf was passé.
‘Vol.17’ didn’t do much for me. What I did notice was a bunch of stylistic call-backs to earlier eras, as if there was nostalgia for the sound of the late 1990s. There wasn’t a flagship song I could really hang my hat on to say this was a great entry. It sort of crawled by draped in nostalgia for the uncool. There was also a comeback for grid-based electronica and there was even a recognisable Apple Loop off GarageBand. That sounds a bit sad today, a cipher from a bygone era of music production. This anthology is not as good as ‘Vol.16’, but not terrible. It painted a picture of change of guard in voters yet again. Powderfinger sounded old and venerable. Mumford and Sons was just awful to my sensibilities, but it was the no.1 song.
