I Am Not The Beatles

 

Click above for big pictures, click below to play me…

” And this song is considered a perfect gem,
And as to the meaning, it’s what you please. “
 

C.S. Calverley - Ballad

If - like me - the prospect of a good Boing is the kind of thing likely to get you more than just a little excited, then you’re going to love this record. For here is a song with you for the long haul, one which realises that although an accomplished Boingking may be enough to gain your initial attention - only by following such a thing up with some seriously intelligent pillowtalk can any hope of a long term relationship be established.

Thus for every hardworking Boing which is expertly tossed off in your general direction, a roughly equal number of similarly industrious Pings, Booms and Tschaks quickly make themselves known to alchemise any embarrassingly premature overexcitement into the gold of an intellectualised discourse.

This is a brave tactic certainly but also very successful as although, just like any marriage, the Boings do eventually stop, this slowly turns a song which may appear to be an empty soulless void into something rather more interesting - a process not unlike when a new colleague starts work in the office who you find a bit vacant and bland… only to discover two years later that you now inexplicably fancy the pants off them.

For Kraftwerk’s Booms, unlike Will Smith’s much more blokey Boom!s, are not here to do anything as mundane as shake the room but instead exist to help you deconstruct the medium of pop music itself and thus create a veritable Love Tschak : a little old place where we can get together and make sweet Musique… Non Stop.

Brilliant.

Aren’t Kraftwerk More Than Just A Little Bit Famous ?

They certainly are and the story of this track is utterly fascinating - as a song called Technopop, which allegedly contained bits of this one, was originally recorded in 1981 for an album of the same name.

That album was never released however as one member of Kraftwerk had become rather oddly obsessed with the mechanics of bicycles at the time and, whilst riding one and presumably ruminating upon the exciting sound the gear change made rather than actually looking where he was bloody well going, he then rather sadly nearly killed himself upon it - putting the entire Technopop project on hold whilst he recovered from his injuries.

And it was during his recovery time that some exciting new digital technologies coincidentally came to the commercial fore and - not wanting their futuristic band to suddenly be consigned to a part of the past - Kraftwerk thus ditched the entire album they had just recorded and recreated it all again in the digital environment instead :

http://www.kraftwerkfaq.com/recordings.html#technopop

As such Musique Non Stop is a place where the band changed, and was therefore mildly controversial in Kraftwerk circles at the time, as it is a song that stands at the crossroads between two worlds - originally created in the analogue world like all their previous music had been, but now recreated and existing in the digital world like all of their (and just about everybody else’s) music from now on surely would.

In an irony some oh so futuristic Kraftwerk fans didn’t seem to spot however, alot of them were a bit scared of change - with them being downright suspicious of digitalness generally and therefore this record specifically - with the upshot being that not many people bought this pariah of a record even if it is now considered, for very good reason, to be a bit of a classic.

Want to hear the album which was renamed Electric Cafe ? The first three tracks are minimilistic magnificence personified… and terrifyingly prescient of the music that was about to occur :

http://tinyurl.com/cfjvgg

A Digital Universe In An Analogue World

” If I could write the beauty of your eyes
And in fresh numbers number all your graces
The age to come would say, This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.’ “
 

William Shakespeare - Sonnet 17

And the importance of the crossroads where this song stands cannot be underestimated.

After all, man’s ability to manipulate his own environment is what makes him inherently human and is one thing which separates us from being purely animal. In the past however our manipulation had always been within the analogue environment - ie on The Earth, constructing things like stone circles and cathedrals to make our mark upon the land and mould it to our cultural expectations.

The digital domain though is of course entirely different - as here Man has seemingly done the impossible and created what is essentially a totally new universe within the world itself which We are the God of.  This new digital universe, unlike our analogue one, can have no actual meaning as part of it’s make up however as it is constructed purely out of binary numbers (or, to put it another way, any human beauty of any human eyes when placed into it is digitally turned into fresh numbers) :

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=187488

“…a piece of music has meaning for us… but when we take these things across the boundary, they are stripped of their meaning. They just become numbers, their human associations lost. If their meaning is to be regained, they must be transported back from the digital to the human world.”

As such meaning must thus be plastered onto whatever objects we put in the digital domain and are now transporting back. But the problem with plastering meaning onto objects rather than just having feelings about them is that you end up objectifying them ie your feelings about them become exaggerated - something that Lara Croft can more than attest to.

In Kraftwerk’s case the transporting back process is just a question of performing the songs they put there, and they thus gain whatever exaggerated meaning we perceive about them at the time. In other words, although “such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces” they do touch objectified unearthly ones.

And this is presumably why Kraftwerk inspire such huge devotion, and also why a total of seven spoken words put over a sparse electronic beat with no discernible bassline can feel curiously and oddly emotional - as the meaning of Musique Non Stop is quite literally… what you please :

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=1306

http://www.kraftwerk.com/

Money Update

Cost : 8 pence
Current Value : 3 pounds and 37 pence. Gosh, this wasn’t just not a hit in the UK but anywhere. Every single country it was released in… it totally stopped.
Current Profit : 332 pounds and 55 pence. You, like me, probably ignore this bit these days. But hey, it’s musique to my ears.

Want to hear some cover versions of this song? Make the most of them, this has never happened before. Click here.

Want to hear Karl Bartos’ (a Kraftwerk founder member but now ex-Kraftwerk) fantabulous version of Baby Come Back ? It is almost precisely like Musique Non Stop - but on much stronger drugs :

Supporting Cast Update : Smith, Will

 

Click above for big pictures, click below to play me…

Barrington Levy is having a bit of a struggle.

With what ?

His complaints are many and various, but he appears to be mostly struggling with being able to find enough relevant words to pad out 4 minutes and 42 seconds of music. Indeed, so much of a struggle is it that - despite his numerous claims that he’ll never give up - he soon does exactly this when he resorts to enunciating a series of Wop Diddle Dee Doo Bops within just 45 seconds of the song starting, and then repeating them with increasingly alarming regularity throughout.

This is an overcompensation from which Barrington sadly never quite recovers, as around the 3 minute mark he even starts struggling with his ability to be able to that successfully and starts to trip over his own Diddles - which is a messy experience at the best of times.

Maybe he is just a bit stressed ?

He is certainly that alright and for very good reason - as he woke up this morning to make the frankly disturbing discovery that he had run out of tea.

Bloody Hell.

And terrifying though this thought is for just about anybody to contemplate, Barrington has an added complication…

I get the feeling I am going to struggle to believe this…

… and this is that Barrington is capable of perceiving both the past and the future simultaneously - thus making his present moment a rather uncertain one.

Unbelevyable!

This is evidenced in the first verse where he claims that he is currently able to recall both waking up this morning and waking up tomorrow - and this confusion makes any presumptions about any perceived tea or lack thereof laughably difficult to pinpoint. After all he may not have any tea right now, but what if he has already bought some in the future thus making any quick trip to the shops wholly redundant?

Faced with such a chronological conundrum Barrington thus chooses the only sensible solution available to him… and very wisely struggles back to bed to moan about some other things instead.

What Else Does Barrington Moan About ?

Shitloads.

Everything from the fact that he is currently the owner of only one half of a pair of shoes, to the rather strange complaint that he considers himself morally incapable of being a thief. Odd though this latter moan is, the one I must take issue with is where he states that he finds it impossible to make love on a hungry belly.

This must surely be very much in doubt - as I can promise you that if there is one thing men are most definitely capable of if they are given even the merest hint of any action, it is attempting to have sex with just about anybody… hungry belly or not.

Any Major Levylations As A Result Of This Record ?

Yes.

This song is an example of the dancehall genre which originated in the 1970’s in Jamaica.

Now, dancehall is, by its very nature, in existence to make you dance - very possibly in a hall if you’re lucky enough to be in one at the time - but some people take it very seriously indeed and blame it for both social deterioration and increased violence in the place of its birth.

Despite the fact that just about every musical genre has been accused of this at some point in its life so the answer is already blindingly obvious - ie it’s probably a bit more complicated than that - why not read this essay called “So wha, mi nuh fi live to?”: Interpreting Violence in Jamaica through the Dancehall Culture. It essentially argues that, if you are Jamaican, then both you and dancehall are products of the same culture and therefore both you and it are going to exhibit many of the same characteristics of each other.

With this in mind if you dislike dancehall for the reasons stated above, it suggests this is only because you recognise secreted parts of yourself within it and it is thus probably a good idea if you swallow your pride, initiate some sort of group hug, chuck some on the stereo anyway and have a bloody good dance to forget about it all.

A bit like the plot to Footloose then, but with longer words :

http://www.ragashanti.com/articles/Ideaz.pdf

Anyway Barrington himself, like Jean Beauvoir before him, was an early musical developer - releasing his first single under the pseudonym Mighty Multitide when he was just 13 years old. It would then take him just another 7 years or so to become the biggest star in the country at a stupidly young age, is still huge today and is seen as a massive influence to many :

http://www.barringtonlevy.com/

http://springlinejamaica.blogspot.com/2008/09/barrington-levy.html

Interestingly, the second link above tells us a tale about the way record companies view their relevant markets and how this naivety can directly impact upon what becomes popular - as at one point Barrington recorded an album where he collaborated with other people. In the UK this was released with the slightly edgy title of ‘Barrington Levy’s DJ Counteraction’ and it did reasonably well. In the US however they took one at at, didn’t really understand the title, then panicked a bit before finally deciding to tamely downgrade it to … ‘Duets’.

And how did it do there ?

Yep : It struggled.

Can Barrington Levy Really See Into The Future ?

Yes.

But only because, if Professor Mark Changizi is to be believed, then we all do this all the time - as we are all forever seeing about one tenth of a second into the future and predicting what will happen. This is, he claims, where hallucinations (such as ghosts) come from where our predicted future doesn’t match up with the reality of it :

http://www.impactlab.com/2008/05/18/humans-can-see-into-the-future/

Fascinating though that is, others believe they will soon be able to prove beyond all doubt that we all most definitely have a fully developed sixth sense that can do so so much more.

Important I Am Not The Beatles Warning

The following article contains the potentially deadly cocktail of words ‘paranormal researchers’ and ‘The Daily Mail’ :

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-452833/Is-REALLY-proof-man-future.html

Money Update

Cost : 8 pence
Current Value : Barrington may well be struggling with lots of stuff, but his second hand market is certainly buoyant - 5 pounds and 35 pence - which puts him in 9th place and sandwiches him between Sudden Sway and Luba value-wise.
Current Profit : 232 pounds and 26 pence. Want to hear a bit more Barrington ? Here is the very lovely You Have Caught Me :

And if you like that, why not pop off to Amazon to buy his Greatest Hits ?

http://www.amazon.com/Too-Experienced-Best-Barrington-Levy/dp/B00000E9KP

 

Click above for big pictures, click below to play me…

Band names are notoriously tricky things to get right.

If, for example, four people from Liverpool didn’t happen to chance upon a way to write what some people believe to be the best songs of all creation - thus making the name of their band an integral part of our cultural landscape - we wouldn’t be spending every 5 years sitting around yetafuckingain disecting the somewhat overstated merits of Sergeant Bloody Pepper, I can tell you.

Nope, instead the elephant in the room would become suddenly apparent as it became blindingly obvious what a dreadful band name The Beatles actually is. ie Merely the genre of the music the group chose to play - what was referred to at the time as beat music - with the letters l, e and s rather lazily crammed in after it.

So used are we to encountering the name The Beatles, and in an attempt to appreciate how awful it would have sounded in its historical context, let us take a look at what would happen if a few hitherto not yet formed bands of the modern era followed the same idea :

The Krunkles -  more breakfast cereal than street

The Raples - socially unacceptable

The Emoles -  a fey indie band that should have both formed and split in 1997.

Using the agreed standardised format for band names - the usage of the word The followed by whatever Something you like the sound of which hasn’t yet previously been taken - is also incredibly arrogant.

“I am not any old something,” it says to anyone who cares to listen, “I am The Something. The Definitive Something.”

Whilst The Smiths tried to vaguely subvert this by making their Something after the The something incredibly commonplace, if they were half as clever as they thought they were then they would have taken a leaf out of A House’s book… and called themselves A Smith instead.

For the usage of the prefix A is one which immediately bristles excitedly with the idea of equal community. “Come on! Why not form your own band and call it, oh I don’t know, Another House,” this bandname suggests in comparison to the The ones, “You could then move in next door, we could all strum our jangly guitars together in the communal garden in a vaguely angry way and then pop down the pub every now and again for a pint. It would make us all truly… Heart Happy.”

What Do They Mean By Heart Happy ?

Heart Happy is that incredible fluttery feeling which seems to emerge from your heart and uncontrollably spread around the rest of your body, your very world view and overall demeanor during those first moments where you sense the possibility of falling stupidly in love. It is your brain and body expressed as feeling - a recognition that an interaction with another individual of which you currently know very little, seems to offer the chance of taking the currently sad and broken you and transforming it into some sort of cohesive happy whole.

If you are coincidentally lucky/unlucky (delete according to personal preference) enough to currently be experiencing such a sensation as you are reading this then beware, as this song comes with a warning : when a person you don’t know very well speaks their language and the words they choose to impart to you are ones which drool endlessly on about what a truly incredible person / kisser / shag you are, it is all too easy to start believing their overdressed mouth and end up tripping on vanity’s floor.

I Didn’t Even Know Vanity Had A Floor.

Well it does, and I’ve been there - and if you ever find yourself lying prostrate in this position having just made a total tit of yourself and cocked pretty much everything up, then I would recommend doing what the lead singer of A House does in the outro and endlessly repeat

“I’m happy. I’m happy. I’m happy. I’m happy…”

in an attempt to try and convince yourself of this fact.

After all, he doesn’t sound like he remotely believes it - sounding for all the world like he is recording his vocal whilst simultaneously being forced by the record producer to walk bearfoot across the hot tin roof of the house next door - and nor will you but, hey, a sad heart wears many faces… so it certainly seems like a good place to start.

Are A House Still Standing ?

They have sadly been demolished.

Before the wrecker’s ball struck into the heart of the household however, the core residents appear to have been Dave Couse on shrieky vocals, Martin Healy on bouncy bass, and the - not remotely do I sound like a children’s TV character - Fergal Bunbury on scratchy guitar. Despite being called A House in the singular they actually had many houses, as they rather greedily got through an astounding four record labels during the twelve years of their construction before finally not really trusting their foundations anymore and classing themselves as uninhabitable.

http://www.zop.ca/discog.cfm

Alot of people really rate this band incidentally - and although Light A Big Fire may well feel that they have a decent claim also - many think they are The Great Lost Irish Band Of All Time.

They are arguably most famous for releasing a song called Endless Art which lists the names of lots of dead people. It caused a minor controversy in as much as some journalist or other noted that every single person on the list was male and, for reasons that I can’t currently fathom, this fact was apparently Very Important At The Time.

To counteract this A House then recorded another version called More Endless Art where the list of names were entirely female. This affirmative action didn’t appease the pedants however who argued that all women wanted was equal access to the original song in the first place, and not to be fobbed off with a completely different song which frankly didn’t scan quite so well. Oh well, you can’t please everyone - want to know which one you prefer ?

Male :

Female :

Want to see Dave perform an updated version with Neil Hannon ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmEvTa7Npk0

Oh, and here is someone with far too much time on their hands :

http://www.mrpayne.com/2005/08/19/endless-art/

Where Are They Now ?

The good news is that they are all still going and that they all seem tremendously nice. Dave and Fergal are currently playing in a band called The Impossible whose most recent album The World Should Know was released in 2006 :

http://www.davecouse.com/

http://www.myspace.com/davecouse

Whilst Martin is currently in a band called Pony Club, and - in an apparent fit of rage that it wasn’t him who was given the wonderful name of Fergal Bunbury - seems instead to have decided to dress like a children’s TV character in an attempt to regain the initiative :

http://www.ponyclub.tv/

http://www.myspace.com/ponyclub

I Feel Love…

If you do then it seems likely you are currently overdosing on Dopamine and Norepinephren - as these are the chemicals that apparently give us that initial Heart Happyish feeling. After they make an appearance, and you have discovered that you really rather like snogging them, Oxytocin raises its head to help create the idea that we have a connection with the individual concerned before Vassopressin finally kicks in to try and make us stay together :

http://www.essortment.com/lifestyle/relationshipadv_tukr.htm

Interestingly, some scientists claim that Dopamine is as addictive as cocaine (which some claim is completely non-addictive of course - although these people always seem to be particularly heavy users of the stuff in my experience so their judgement should not necessarily be trusted). Dodgy drug comparisons aside however, the effects of Dopamine can physiologically last up to seven years before disappearing - hence, presumably, the itch.

http://www.dimaggio.org/Eye-Openers/what_is_love.htm

So, the next time you find yourself tripping on vanity’s floor just remember: blame the Dopamine. Well, unless it is this Vanity’s floor :

http://www.clubvanity.co.uk/

In which case I would blame the cocktails.

Money Update

Cost : 8 pence
Current Value : 2 pounds and 90 pence. I’m happy.
Current Profit : 226 pounds and 99 pence.  Want to watch The Impossible performing a lovely old A House song called I Am Afraid in 2006 ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EsHWTW0qx8

Whilst we are on the subject of feeling love, why not take a listen to A House’s quite astounding version of I Feel Love ?

Supporting Cast Update : Beatles, The;  Smiths, The