About what I missed

Have been a bit distracted lately, so here are two things upon which I’ve alighted only recently. First, OK Computer all at once — all the tracks played simultaneously.

 

Somewhat inevitably, it sounds not unlike the orchestral freeform bits in A Day in the Life, but I suspect that would happen if you objected most albums to similar indignities. Oh, did I mention that I once wrote a book about OK Computer? (And yes, if you go to that site the first review is from someone who called it “a phenomenally dumb book” although I still get a perfect score for a book that neither I nor anybody else wrote, so there’s that.)

And then, a magazine that has got to issue 13 without me noticing it and I’m now tempted to hunt down back issues of The Fence, or maybe even to send in a contribution on spec, something I don’t think I’ve done for more than a decade. It clearly owes something to Private Eye in terms of aesthetic and attitude (two-colour, non-glossy, print-first, London-y without necessarily being about London) but its subject matter is wider-ranging (in this issue, TS Eliot, clip joints, five-a-side football results, Zimbabwean goblins). There are no ads, so I couldn’t work out how it’s survived so long, although this article suggests a wealthy, aristocratic benefactor has been handy. Which should annoy me, but for some reason adds to its ramshackle, flâneuristic charm. (If it were a hedge-fund manager behind it, I’d be annoyed.)

And now, I go back to being distracted.

About You're Dead To Me

On the face of it, the Radio 4 show/podcast You’re Dead To Me meets all those cosy Reithian criteria about informing, educating and entertaining. It’s essentially a history lesson for people who think they don’t like history, fronted by Greg Jenner, who has acted as a consultant for the Horrible Histories TV series. The format, however, is closer to the long-running In Our Time; a historical subject (the Mughal Empire, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Victorian Christmas, etc) is on the agenda, with Jenner taking the Melvyn Bragg role of an informed host, asking questions of an expert. (IOT usually offers more than one expert, which sometimes provokes a bit of friction, but the dynamic is similar.)

All good so far, but YDTM introduces a new worm into the apple, in the form of a comic voice. And this, as far as I can work out, illustrates the key difference between the two shows; its assumptions about the listener. With IOT, Bragg is the representative of the audience, someone who may know a bit about the subject matter, or has at least taken the time to glance at the relevant Wikipedia page to acquire a rudimentary foundation upon which the experts can build. In YDTM, although Jenner is fine as a host and the academics are all well-chosen, the voice of the listener is the comic, who may just as well have been pulled in from the street at random.

One egregious example of this is the show about the American emigré performer Josephine Baker; a wise don, Michell Chresfield from the University of Birmingham, is regularly interrupted by the comedian Desiree Burch, whose contribution is essentially half an hour of not knowing, and letting us know it. And she’s not even terribly funny while she’s doing it.

The closest analogy is those unaccountably popular YouTube clips of people listening to a classic song for the first time; we are encouraged to be consumers of their performative ignorance, pretty much the antithesis of Reith. And I’m increasingly worried that You’re Dead To Me is being set up not simply as a variation on In Our Time, but as its replacement.

Oh well, we’ll always have Josephine.

Harlem Shake, makankosappo and the death of the dream

Well, it was fun while it lasted. That brief, glorious window when web culture was all about happy, random accidents and people having fun for the hell of it is officially over; although people will need to be conned into thinking they’re still free agents or the whole edifice will fall over, probably taking what remains of consumer capitalism with it. This article identifying the people who really benefited from the Harlem Shake phenomenon is a sobering read, not because I ever gave much of a damn about the meme itself but because of the whole end-of-innocence vibe it represents; the Altamont of Web 2.0, maybe. Of course, people will still do daft, innovative things and bung them up on YouTube; but by the time most of us see them, the pimps will have got to work. “The world is divided into two categories,” said the Dadaist Francis Picabia, “failures and unknowns.” Yup.

So there’s just time to say that I rather like this most recent daft meme, makankosappo, which basically involves Japanese schoolgirls pretending to have superhuman powers. But since its arrival mysteriously coincides with the imminent release of a new movie, maybe I’m already going off it.

Maggie Mae, mother of rock

YouTube makes it very easy to take an isolated snippet of obscure video, preferably one taken from a cheap European variety show made in the 1970s and then make some sort of snap judgement about Czech or Finnish popular culture entirely based on the odd people dancing badly. Surely it’s more generous to use such oddities to create an alternative history of popular music, especially when one doesn’t actually know much about the performers in question; Maggie Mae, for example, doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page to call her own. So I can make up a history, recasting her as a punk pioneer, a precursor of such quirky, awkward, unclassifiable divas as Nina Hagen, Lene Lovich, Mary Margaret O’Hara and, um, her out of Daisy Chainsaw. And then suggest that with glasses like that she could also have been pretty high up in the Baader-Meinhof gang. Take it away, Mags!

Unborn chicken voices

To mark (roughly) the fifth anniversary of my book about OK Computer, here are some small children talking about one of the songs on the album. The funny thing is, I bet the various members of Radiohead were just like these middle-class wannabe rock hacks when they were smaller. Not such good dancers, though, obviously.

I don’t know why

...so I first saw this clip of Korean kindergarteners singing a Ramones song when Everett posted it on Facebook, and he wrote a book about the Ramones, I thought, so he should know, and I thought it was pretty damn cool, especially the kid in green who decides to do air guitar instead of pogoing, so I reposted it and few people whose opinions I trust said they liked it, as in *Like*d it, so that’s OK, but then the Daily arseing Mail caught up with it and said how heartwarming it was, in a slightly patronising way, and so I started wondering whether it was actually that good (a bit like last month, when John arseing Lewis retrospectively destroyed my teenage years) and then I calmed down a bit and had a cup of tea and started thinking about context and connotation and came to the conclusion that the clip’s still quite fun actually, even if I don’t really like small children that much. And maybe not absolutely everything that appears in the Daily Mail is entirely vile and squalid.

I must be getting old.

Hey ho, let’s – in a very real sense – go:

Gore blimey

More YT fun: an old friend’s plug for his book, Way of the Barefoot Zombie. Reminds me of my favourite joke when I was about nine (“Mummy, I hate Granny’s guts...”) Wonder if I should do something similar for The Noughties. But what?

Happy Friday

Recent posts have been a bit dyspeptic. For the weekend, two things that made me smile:

Name that toon

This made me chuckle:


And Everett reminded me of this:

Deckchairmen of the board

Apparently upon my recommendation, the lovely Geoff has been rediscovering The Korgis; just to move the goalposts, here’s the band from which they evolved, Stackridge. I have decided to adopt the clarinet player as my sartorial role model:

Leonard Cohen’s greatest hit

Had completely forgotten this existed. Magnificent.

Nazi punks fox off

Something to cheer you up on what, for many of us, is a rather glum day. I think it’s a parable about the joys of a multi-racial, pan-cultural, mongrel society, and how silly it is to be scared of difference. Or maybe not. Whatever, it’s bloody *F*O*R*E*I*G*N*, which should be enough to annoy those people who deserve to be annoyed:

Whatever

I haven’t posted here since Saturday. I could get all meta and ponder the socially acceptable time limit between posts (and the point at which people start wondering whether you’re dead). Or I could just stick this up, on the basis that what’s good enough for Graham Linehan is OK for the rest of us:

La Chanson de Roland III (instrumental)

Sorry, all been a bit frantic this week, so I haven’t really had time to come up with a proper blog post. And you know what that means:

Crystal balls

I recently picked up a copy of Our Future: Dr Magnus Pyke Predicts, a paperback from 1980 in which the wildly gesticulating boffin has a guess at what life might be like 50 years hence:

News is what journalists put into newspapers and news bulletins. Because we get news from a number of different channels, it does not follow that we are any better informed.

Which should remind us that transmission of facts was hardly perfect even before the Babel of the blogosphere got in on the act. But then the good doctor goes and spoils it with his guess at how the news might be physically delivered:

...newspapers could be printed on washable nylon sheets, to avoid the necessity of cutting down so many trees.

Oh well. At least old Magnus had a few more strings to his bow:



Sad to note from Dr Pyke’s Wikipedia page that his later years were dogged by people yelling “SCIENCE!” at him in the street.

(For some reason, people used to say I looked like Thomas Dolby. Or the saxophonist from Haircut 100. Or even John Denver. When really, I knew I was Andy Partridge.)

Crash bang wallop

So there I am, standing at the junction of Rama IV and Sathorn and Witthayu, the point at which Bangkok’s drivers believe they’re Italian for five seconds and inevitably I think of JG Ballard and then I remember that in the early 80s you could get on Top of the Pops with a song inspired by Ballard and because I’m a lazy, busy, sloppy, half-arsed blogger, and can’t even keep to my own self-imposed rules, all I can offer is this:

Never mind the flintlocks

(I'm very busy this weekend, so I hope you'll forgive me if I resort to the last and lowest refuge of the lazy blogger, the YouTube post.)

Popular music, of all the art forms, seems the best able to craft precious jewels from dollops of rancid ordure. But I was still disturbed to discover, during one of those aimless, witless YouTube trawls, that one of the most scintillating slices of 80s Scouse anthemic pop:



may owe rather more than we might have guessed or wished (from 1:21) to a band that would probably be entirely forgotten were it not for the fact that their drummer was a Tomorrow Person:

So you have quenelle...

Last week I reviewed five restaurants of varying degrees of conceptual delusion and this week I'll almost certainly do the same, or more. As a result I believe am perfectly at liberty to say that this is the best scene of any film ever ever ever:



(And it may be the last video I post here, as YouTube interface appears to have gone utterly hatstand. Has anyone else found this?)

Brothers in rhythm

The next time some plausible bigot starts wielding The Bell Curve or a similarly specious tome to justify, ever so politely, the notion of white racial superiority, I'll just show them this:



followed by this:

Thank Crunchie

Ah, Friday. I was going to concoct a megapost about McLuhan, Brecht and Baudrillard in the final episode of The Wire but: a) I've been a bit busy with proper work; and b) apparently, only about four people watched the final episode of The Wire.

So, what can a time-poor boy do? Crack open a few YouTubes, of course.

The first has literary overtones, and comes courtesy of the lovely Garfer:



Then, an old joke, but nicely done:



And finally, this one has been kicking around for a few weeks, but you may have missed it (especially if you've been watching The Wire instead):



Closing concept: an internet phenomenon that revolves around links that claim to be taking people to a video of Rick Astley performing 'Never Gonna Give You Up', but don't. What would it be called?