Confessions of a Pop Fan

I'M NO FUCKING BUDDHIST, BUT THIS IS ENLIGHTENMENT

I’m bored with other people. I just thought I’d get that out there. Everyone else is jerks.

My Suede singles have arrived. “Attitude,” spread across three formats, with various b-sides and rarities, playing up the retrospective angle by mixing in unreleased old stuff with the new stuff. Both “Attitude” and “Golden Gun” are quite remarkable. The live versions I had heard did nothing to reveal the sonic fuckery the recorded versions sport. Great headphone songs, with the odd riffs snaking in and out of different ears. The track I keep returning to, though, is 1999’s “Heroin,” a b-side for the Head Music singles that never got released, likely because it’s a bare account of being hooked on the stuff, which Brett Anderson was trying to kick at the time. Old Suedeheads will remember “The Living Dead,” another of their B-sides on the same subject. One of their saddest moments, it was actually from the point-of-view of a lover of an addict and details the toll it is taking on her (Anderson’s protagonists often being female). It had some of my favorite lines: “If I was the wife of an acrobat, would I look like the living dead, boy? Out on your wire and you can’t get back, let’s talk about the living dead..” With a simple acoustic guitar backing, there was a warmth to it. Sad and desolate, yes, but the sense that this person, at least, was still alive.

“Heroin” isn’t clear on any such assurances. It begins with the electronic detachment that was the coda of Head Music, but with the sound of falling rain behind it. A piano starts to work its way in as Anderson begins to sing. At first, this could be to a lover, a melancholy lament of a relationship gone wrong, but the chorus takes away those pretensions. “Heroin, heroin, I’m out of it.” Brilliant ambiguity there. Is he out of the stuff itself? Or is he free of it? Or is he simply stoned? As the music builds—adding acoustic guitars, more texture—the vocals get more distant. Is the singer disappearing into the high? Coming through it? The song ends with no music, the final “I’m out of it” and the fading rain—and thus no answers, either. On alternate listens it can be full of hope or devastatingly brutal. It’s brilliant. (Audio samples here.)

It reaffirms why I love Suede. Suede ain’t jerks.

Very much looking foward to this book...click on the pic'.

I’ve seen Kill Bill twice now, and I’d like to advance a theory: Quentin Tarantino has made a hiphop movie. Consider all the references to other movies, both in story, visuals, sound effects, and music. In a way, Tarantino is sampling. He’s laying down his own beat, but constructing his movie around it with bits and pieces of other films. (I also see some Godardian influence in his use of sound, with random patches of music, abrupt endings to songs (think Uma going from wheelchair to Pussy Wagon).)

I still love Sofie Fatale, even with one arm...

On Vegas Jones’ suggestion, I pulled out my Jackie Brown DVD on Friday night, too, and rewatched it. It holds up splendidly. While being incredibly well-structured and tightly plotted, he lets his scenes breathe, let’s his characters live. The romance between Jackie and Max is one of the most believable in cinema—despite never really catching fire up until the very end, and only then a small flame before returning to smolder. It was the extras, though, that gave me another Tarantino revelation. The man, for all his abilities to express through cinema, is very limited when it comes to expressing himself. Watch the near-hour interview with him on disc 2, and you’ll see what I mean. His face and voice have an extremely limited range. He gets very excited and animated, but it’s his body that does all the work. He’s never at a loss for words, but his tongue only has a few tricks for unveiling them. The face is almost rubber mask-like, and his voice cowers behind a wall of nervousness. He does a bunch of impressions, but they all have a restraint to them that is almost like he’s in a crowded room and scared of being overheard. It’s very odd, and actually makes an otherwise interesting interview a little tedious.

Seriously, his action figure is more poseable...

The button-up sweater brigade should be happy. Trevor Horn didn’t turn Belle & Suckastian into leather boys with slogan T-shirts, playing mega-produced disco. He does get them to open up Dear Catastrophe Waitress’ lead single, “Step Into My Office, Baby,” with a fantastic Adam & the Ants drumbeat, and overall, for once, a B&S album sounds like…it has a producer! Holy moley! I mean, let’s be honest. Five albums in, the out-of-tune, recorded-in-a-shed affectation was getting to be a bit much. (Now we can all move to laughing at the Morrissey fans scared that his next producer has worked on AFI and Sum 41 records, that Moz will now record pop punk with poor adolescent puns. Okay, that last bit could happen.)

Trevor say, "Relax, boy of twee."

Unfortunately, I agree with Christopher McQuain that Dear Catastrophe Waitress is more akin to The Boy With the Arab Strap in being uneven than it is to their other three superb albums. I have listened to it once or twice a day since I bought it on Friday, and Dear Catastrophe Waitress wears out its welcome by the end nearly every time. In fact, I think half the time I don’t even finish the last track, “Stay Loose,” before I decide to do something else before it can finally end. The single and the title track start everything off quite fantastically, and “I’m A Cuckoo” is fun, and I like the mixed metaphors of “If You Find Yourself Caught in Love” and the twisted ‘60s pop of “You Don’t Send Me”—but overall, the album suffers from a sameness (ironic, since the aforementioned Arab Strap suffers from being all over the place—for a band that started off with an anything-goes communal attitude, they only work with the right balance of restraint and eclecticism).