My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
The longest cry in my life was to Runaway on repeat. It felt like my lungs were coming out of my mouth. A distorted electronic symphony clawing out the last bits of my broken heart. The song shouldn’t work but it does. The whole shebang that is My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a nervous breakdown in the wake of a massive bender wrapped up in clean 1 hour and 8 minutes. Even if you hate heavily produced music you have to admire Kanye’s willingness to crack open his sloppy noodle brain and let us dig in with chopsticks. Hell of a Life still gets me up in the morning when I’ve embarrassed myself the night before. Addiction, stupidity, fatalism, self pity and hooks, lines and plinkers of pop genius. It’s also a big fat sorry if you’re at home self harming because he only wanted you for sex. Last track Who Will Survive America samples Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken-word “Comment No. 1” says “America is now blood and tears instead of milk and honey” and this is 1970! I wonder what he’d think about Trump 50 years on. Music writer Ann Powers interprets the big theme on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy to be “the crisis of the jet-lagged cosmopolitan … the exhausted cry of one who’s always new in town, chasing whatever goal or girl is in the room, fueled by consumer culture’s relentless buzz, but finally left unsatisfied” Kinda makes it sound less sexy now ya say like that…still.
Nothings shocking
Jane’s Addiction very kindly came to Brixton in 2014 and did their album Nothing’s Shocking back to back. It was packed with 40 somethings who stood around and nodded into their beers. Even better live, Nothing’s Shocking has big guitar moments, sweeping soundscapes and a frankness. Electricity was crackling from Perry Farrell’s eyelids but all the old Jane fans could muster was a foot tap. Jane fans are tired but Perry Farrell known for his shamen wizardry on stage became an eagle then a giraffe then a mouse with all the playfulness of a 10 year old boy. He creeps about the stage and discovers all the nooks and crannies with his screeching beak. Jane’s Addiction are Led Zeppelin through a dirty kaleidoscopic. An uplifting and disturbing sound. I can’t sing you a single song. They are hard to emulate. But I love their sound. I asked my mum to send me my Jane’s Addiction CDs when I moved to the UK and she foolishly had a listen to Nothing’s Shocking before sending. “Ben that’s the worst music I’ve ever heard” she said. Nothing’s Shocking hated by mums. Check.
Reflector
I’m an Arcade Fire superfan, ready to do whatever they tell me. I buy the merch and Google search “where does Régine Chassagne live?” every few days, giving Kate Bush a rest. Founder Régine Chassagne plays accordion, drums, xylophone, hurdy-gurdy, keyboards and organ sometimes at the same time (as do the other band members). She dreams songs backwards in her head. I saw them live at Wembley Arena in 2017 with two other superfans and like most superfans I was a bit judgemental toward the disturbing display of unchecked superfannery going on. The floor was empty and suddenly the whole place was a turgid sea of superfans creating shapes with their writhing bodies seemingly for the band’s exclusive pleasure. Arcade Fire had successfully recruited my body and now they were coming for my soul. Superfan devotion I suspect has been cultivated using subliminal messaging and by the time they get to Everything Now they shamelessly flash slogans that find a permanent home in our subconscious. I need them. Frontman Win Butler played “It’s Never Over (Hey Orpheus)” to his unborn son during the making of Reflektor and he claims the song still quiets him. Arcade Fire hypnotise their children. I saw a comment below concert footage of Arcade Fire on YouTube. Stevens Smith. 1 year ago. “Once you’ve seen them live your just a full on crack head to their music fact”
Proof that music is in your DNA lvino Rey American jazz guitarist and bandleader is Win’s granddad and Arcade Fire have a big band feel, arrangements are written in strophic form with the same phrase and chord structure repeated several times. Sound familiar, superfans? I win.
Funeral, Neon Bible, The Suburbs were about looking back, fueled by nostalgia, loss and jocundity. Reflektor is colder and is about looking in and seeing what you want to see. Refektor explores the new digital mythology and its impact on our sense of self. Screens that became a mirror rather than a window, from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs. Fact. And yes I used the word ‘jocundity’.
Strangeways, Here We Come
It’s a brave man who has The Smiths in his top ten albums of all time. People get precious about the authenticity of one’s Smith’s love. “Sniveling pomposity” is my usual response to any accusation of class tourism. You don’t have to be born in a shithole like Hulme to love the Smiths. David Browne reviewed “Strangeways, Here We Come” in Rolling Stone magazine in 1987 and he says the album “stands as one of their (The Smiths) best and most varied records….despite the problematic artsiness of its lead singer” Artsiness is a new word for me in 2020 and there it was in 1987 describing Morrissey’s self-obsession and explaining why Johnny Marr had left the band soon after the album was made. Problematic artsiness, no less. Browne then says “If you’ve ever considered Morrissey a self-obsessed jerk, Strangeways, Here We Come isn’t likely to change your mind”. Morrissey was and still is a self-obsessed jerk but I’d still give him my big toe if he ran out of vegetables.
The Smiths gave hope to kids who grew up in buttfuck nowhere and had a choice between writing poetry and certain death and certain death for writing poetry and writing poetry about certain death.
In his review, David Browne fails to mention “Death of a Disco Dancer” the soaring gem of the album. This is dextrous song-smithing. Johnny Marr commented to Q Magazine that one of the best things about the song “is that keyboard drone. It’s like Goldfinger on bad acid. Which is kind of The Smiths in a nutshell.”
“Girlfriend in a Coma” is a tidy pop song and remains the entry level tune for new Smith fans. The Smiths gave us a sensibility not just a sound. Manchester is full of it. Kids of poor parents get an education and create art with a wink, to maintain ironic detachment so they don’t betray their working class roots.
David Browne is clearly fed up with Morrissey in his review and is out to champion Marr the overlooked genius because straight men don’t have enough of a voice in indie music.
The Smiths helped us laugh at the moronic human condition and gave us all permission to fail. We must always wear their iconic album covers on our t-shirts and pretend we like them at music festivals.
Strangeways has less of an intersection between Morrissey and Marr found on “Meat Is Murder” or “Hatful of Hollow”, still slightly at odds but creating a bitter sweet purity. In Strangeways they are definitely car pooling. More production helps.
Most days I’m in the mood for The Smiths but some days they make my ears bleed. Like when you’re stroking a cat because you love it so much and you notice you’re actually slapping it. I’m the cat in this scenario by the way. Top Ten!
Cheese
If you try and make more cheese from less cheese the holes in your plan will soon become obvious, Emmental even. Like everything cheese is a finite resource. Cheese the play by Nikki Schreiber makes this very clear in the maddest possible way. The piece is set in a disused office on Oxford Street and the humble staff welcome you in as one of their colleagues. You sense the foam ceiling is heavy with asbestos as you sit down on the ink-stained swivel chairs.
2008 and London Mortgage Co has gone into receivership along with Lehman Bros and Northern Rock. Before the staff (us) break into wild drinking and karaoke, 3 managerial types decide to perform a play written by one the managers Freya, played with great comic aplomb by Rachel Donovan. Joe, Rube and Freya fall in and out of character, fumble with the props and deliver lines as if their reading from a script scribbled on the back of a beer coaster. They make fantastic use of old office furniture and stationery as they bumble through trying to make sense of their sectors collapse and sudden redundancies. I can’t help but think of children using toys to convey repressed trauma.
The child play that follows leaves us plenty of space to revel in the ridiculousness of it all and to reflect on our own experiences of the great cheese shortage. Cheese, I realise is actually a 5-year retrospective, told the only way a painful story like this can be told; metaphorically.
A Delia Smith type in a bad wig with the price tag still dangling tosses culinary delights (bulldog clips) to distract Joe and Rube from the cheese shortage and a crazy scientist with a machine clones cheese; spin doctoring the financial crisis making it palatable and selling it back to us as ‘everyone’s responsibility’. A faceless nameless antipodean is electrocuted for not toeing the line in a very familiar pecking order experiment. Freya and Joe find an alternative world farming turnips and finally all seems sustainable until Rube resurfaces and tries to convince Joe to invest his turnips. The deal stinks of cheese and Joe declines.
Throughout this consistently hilarious but dark hearted 90 minute play we peel through several set layers; office dividers, a wall of boxes, and finally the office windows revealing the empty offices across the road and two cleaners moving through like tumbleweed. Capitalism out of steam.
CHEESE (a play) by Nikki Schreiber
10 – 28 September 2013