Mint Deville

I should do a post on the 70's blog about Mink DeVille. They're the kind of band that interest me these days - the kind that fall awkwardly between the "official" and "alternative" histories of pop and rock. Willy DeVille was a Seventies rock'n'roll revivalist with a difference; his aim was to repopularise the oft-forgotten hispanic, cajun and gitano roots of popular music. Coming from the wrong (ethnic) side of the tracks, when he sang about his girlfriend's parents not allowing her to see him, there was always an uncomfortable truth to it.

Here's a late(ish) gem from his solo days. It's just a great song.....

Dust yourself off and try again

Beats, Rhymes and Cod-Psychology

 
The new Tribe Called Quest docu-film is a timely reminder of just how insanely remarkable and unique the whole Native Tongues project was. If ever there was a lost cause in need of defending and resuscitating, this is it. Unfortunately, the film as a whole succumbs to the vogue for tiresome human-interest biopics, and concludes with the unfortunate spectacle of two middle-aged men squabbling over nothing very much at all, a whimpering descent into farce with a timeliness of its own.

I'm going to dismiss accusations that Tribe were merely wussy, white-boy hip-hop out of hand (isn't it incredibly racist and sexist to imply that only white people would "get" this sophisticated, cerebral strand of the genre, that really authentic hip-hop has to be macho and martial?). The Tribe narrative, documented in the scintillating first half of Beats, Rhymes & Life, is quite literally one of the most inspiring and interesting in the history of popular music. Intelligent, funny, funky, and politically engaged, Tribe and their milieu were the most hopeful thing in early-nineties pop culture by far.

It's depressing then, that just as Tribe's trajectory was interrupted as apathy and careerism intervened in the later part of the decade, this film should follow an opening story of consciousness, collectivism, and scarcely plausible musical brilliance with a second-half narrative detailing a somewhat inexplicable extended argument between Q-Tip and Phife during the 2008 reunion tour. We all fall out with our friends and retreat into our families is the banal, boring ultimate message of this half-brilliant film. This may or may not be true, but it's certainly a hackneyed way of treating a radically, anomalously affirmative episode in the not-too-distant musical past.

But anyway, here's to the memory and continuing legacy of those abstract, literate, world-expanding choons ...

This Is What We Have Come To

Here's nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman proposing that the global economy can be revived via faking an alien invasion. It's proof that the system of economic thought known as Keynesianism has gone far beyond John Maynard Keynes' original proposal to maintain surpluses in times of prosperity in order to boost aggregate demand during recessions, and has simply become another form of Faustianism, our underlying yearning for expansion into infinity.

It's also proof that there is no hope. Our civilisation's delusions run too deep to be challenged and/or reformed. History's maw awaits us as we dream ever-wilder dreams of salvation.

Suburban Knights

Hard-Fi are the kind of "landfill indie" band that we're all apparently supposed to mock. Quite why this is so I've never really understood, as they seem to me to be clearly unrelated to any of their British peers of the noughties. For a start there isn't the slightest element of nostalgia in their sound, which seems to have been ruthlessly excised of any sentimental cues or knowing quotations. Only the heavy dub of Lee Perry (from whom they took their name) seems to linger recognisably at the edges of their music.



Originally from Staines in Middlesex, what the band documents is the minutiae of contemporary working class life found in the particular milieu of mid-sized, light-industrial southern English towns - a world of industrial estates, replica football shirts, Sky TV, modded Peugeots, vertical drinking and the kind of unsteady work that intersperses periods of scrimping with periods of low-rent decadence: the Saturday night millionaire syndrome.



The dinosaur-vampire super-ego coterie of exhausted rock-crits charged Hard-Fi with two contradictory crimes: the first being the age-old canard of them being somehow inauthentic (there were endless attempts to prove that singer Richard Archer wasn't really working class), and the second that they were simultaneously too wedded to a narrow provincialism to be of any wider cultural significance. In many ways the band inconveniently documented a lumpenised proletarian culture that many metropolitan liberals wished wasn't there, a world in which the likes of News Corporation and Chelsea Football Club and Max Power and Carling lager constituted the staples of cultural life - England as it really is (was?), not as how their denigrators wistfully believed it should be.



As someone who has spent most of their life in a middle-sized southern English city, I have to say that Hard-Fi's curiously inorganic music does ring awfully true - you can almost smell the stale fags and lager-sodden carpets in their sound. But ultimately any authenticity they may possess is superceded by the fact that they write great songs, and rock them hard. Alas, as has been pointed out before on these blogs, there's nothing the tastemakers hate more than something that is just too easy to "get".