Swamp | Mixtape | Vol XV, Narrative for Orchestra

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Music As Reading: Mixtape XV, Narrative for Orchestra

For a background to this mixtape, a rather hysterical and dreadfully organised set of paragraphs are available here. To summarise, it is intended to be a reflection on the way that we can’t help but read certain songs forever tied up with the television show/ film/ whatever narratives that we’ve seen them accompany/ introduce/ symbolise/ whatever enough times that this connection has become the point of the song, whether we like it or not. Such tracks, indeed, represent an act of Music As Reading that we’ve all engaged in, subconsciously or not, at one point or another, and deserve to be recognised as such. Lyrics and even mood are discarded and the connotation is king! Half of the mixtape will illustrate the various points made in those aforementioned paragraphs, the other will introduce a few other particularly compelling examples – for the potential scale of this mixtape is enormous, but citing examples such as the Star Wars theme and Singing in the Rain would be a waste of everybody’s time.

We’ll begin then, to pay lip-service to this week’s theme, with Jace Everett’s ‘Bad Things’ along with another of his recent tracks, ‘More to Life (C’Mon C’Mon)’ to demonstrate that ‘Bad Things’ probably isn’t as good as we think it is. Then we’ll draw out the strand of teenage association via Remy Zero’s ‘Save Me’, Mates of State’s decent attempt to make ‘California’ listenable and Simple Mind’s ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ to demonstrate that this has been going on for some time in a teen-sense – since 1985’s Breakfast Club, certainly. We’ll then explore four of the five versions of The Wire’s ‘Way Down in the Hole,’ two versions of Twin Peaks’ ‘Falling’ (the Wedding Present cover proving that even when a band with a significant, important, connotative identity take on one of these songs, the narrative prevails) and finish off with Nick Cave’s ‘Red Right Hand’ in order to state, in less explicit terms, I hope it was the fucking label what sold it to Hollyoaks. ‘Red Right Hand’ also offers a useful segue into Cave’s cinematic soundtrack work, an unsurprising example of music acting, beyond its original context, as a vessel for narrative – considering that Cave wrote a soundtrack for the audio version of his most recent novel and just generally has form here, as regular readers will have noticed. Then, by way of conclusion, three other examples of this phenomenon manifesting in film: Carly Simon’s ‘Nobody Does it Better’ from The Spy Who Loved Me, mainly because of Alan Partridge. Bernard Herrman’s Psycho work for straightforwardly evocative reasons as well as the fact that when he combined all the cinematic fragments into a single composition he called it ‘a Narrative for Orchestra’. And the Door’s ‘The End’ because, despite the fact it was the final song played at the band’s last ever gig i.e. represents a fabulously important musical-biographical punctuation mark (and a staggeringly appropriate one at that), one can’t hear that without first thinking of Kurtz/Brando. A fitting final testament to the power of the imposed filmic narrative. And one that comes full circle, in terms of its relation to this week’s theme. For Apocalypse Now = Martin Sheen, in blackface, in primeval swamp, as much as it = anything, right?

TRACKLIST, Y’SAY?

Bad Things – Jace Everett (True Blood)
More to Life (C’mon C’mon) – Jace Everett
Save Me – Remy Zero (Smallville)
California – Mates of State (The OC)
Don’t You (Forget About Me) – Simple Minds (The Breakfast Club)
Way Down in the Hole – The Blind Boys of Alabama (The Wire)
Way Down in the Hole – Tom Waits (The Wire)
Way Down in the Hole – The Neville Brothers (The Wire)
Way Down in the Hole – Domaje (The Wire)
Falling – Julee Cruise (Twin Peaks)
Falling – The Wedding Present
Red Right Hand – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (NOT Hollyoaks)
The Proposition #1 – Nick Cave & Warren Ellis (The Proposition)
Song for Jesse – Nick Cave & Warren Ellis (The Assassination of Jesse James...)
The Road – Nick Cave & Warren Ellis (The Road)
Nobody does it Better – Carly Simon (The Spy Who Loved Me)
Psycho: Narrative for Orchestra – Bernard Herrman (Psycho)
The End – The Doors (Apocalypse Now)

Type | Music | Celia, by Nicky Davidson

Something a bit different this week. One of the things we’re real interested in getting going over the next few weeks is some sort of platform for filmmaking, hitherto untouched by the hairy Silkworms hand. And as an early indication of the sort of thing we’ll be interested in receiving and advocating, welcome to Celia, a film by Nicky Davidson, a writer/filmmaker who various Silkworms editors and contributors alike have worked with in the past. It’s only been posted on Vimeo for five days like, and we have no doubt you’ll agree it deserves to reach as wide a virtual audience as possible…


Celia, by Nicky Davidson via Vimeo.

…And here, in order to at least vaguely tie proceedings in with this week’s theme (although I suspect that, whatever follows, my piece from a couple weeks ago about the letter ‘X’ represents a better fit) are fifteen wee reflections on Celia drawing together the twin headings, Type and Music. And listed, like any self-respecting list, in order of appearance:

1.    1:21 – have you ever seen typography constructed out of hair before?
2.    Celia’s soundtrack is made up of three original compositions by a chap called Cotty, who used to be in a super-rad band called the Walk Off. The Walk Off’s singer, Blake, is now one half of BITCHES, who are putting together a Music As Reading mixtape for us as we speak. I daresay Cotty will be doing one soon enough as well.
3.    2.05 – This film comes with TITLE CARDS. This is important, both because they have to be read against a background of Cotty noise (Music As Reading) and because of the way the handsome typography contrasts with the scrawled ear-holes that frame it. This could very well be read as a visual reflection on the theme of clear language emerging out of noise, like little crystals of truth sprung in amongst all the delinquent fug. I daresay the ear-hole image will be explored in more detail later on, anyway.
4.    2.32 – The typography, or perhaps symbology (you know, the study of symbols, like Tom Hanks does in Dan Brown books) of facial hair is a book waiting to be written. Rafferty’s reminds me of the Beano’s various patriarchs – Dennis’ Dad, the Bash Street Kids’ Teacher… Clearly the typography of hair is one of Celia’s overarching themes: here, it forms the visual accompaniment to unheard words, becomes itself a hairy title card.
5.    3.10/3.39 – Here, a title card uses something like the formalised, archaic language of silent film in order to situate its ‘text’. The fact the film is ‘silent’ no longer jars: it proves itself coherent, rather than affected.
6.    3.45/4.07 – And then, just like that, all that's inverted: in short, we know that Celia will be a film reflecting on its own modes of construction.
7.    4.26 – See what I mean: the text is suddenly liberated from its title card and changes colour. That didn’t happen in Albert Capellani movies. (Also, ‘blue eye’ is a lovely turn of phrase.)
8.    The typewriter: probably the most important junction where ‘type’ meets ‘music’, with its evocative percussion. Cotty isn’t the first soundtrack-maker to take advantage of this phenomenon – it’s also utilised in the stunning first half of the 2007 Atonement adaptation (wasn’t the second half dreadful though?).
9.    5.10 – I’m delighted Nicky resisted using a hideous typewriter font for the title cards – in a gesture towards an unnecessary consistency. That would have been horrid.
10.    7.12 – What did I tell you: here (hear) comes an ear!
11.    This technique of suddenly situating a film’s soundtrack as representing what the protagonist is hearing, and not merely an adornment for the audience, is memorably utilised in Mary Harron’s American Psycho – Patrick Bateman takes off his headphones and Huey Lewis and the News’ Hip To Be Square suddenly fades into a tinny layer and we suddenly realise that everything, the whole film IS ALL IN HIS HEAD, WHAT A TWISTY TWIST!! – and confirms my suspicion that Cotty’s noise = the fuzz of Celia’s delinquency.
12.    7.39 – I’m sure Rafferty’s saying FOR FUCK’S SAKE here – but apparently not. Unless the title cards aren’t telling the truth, like modern fiction’s all-important UNRELIABLE NARRATOR. That would be a treat.
13.    8.12/8.30 – Font-size is suddenly defined as an indicator of emphasis. But whether this emphasis is a matter of mere exclamation or of something a little stranger is a question worth asking.
14.    9.06 – Pencil-line animations begin to dominate the screen. Word and image are finally reconciled.
15.    Look, 1/- 2/- 3/- 4/-: the film wanted me to make this list.

Compelling stuff. Perhaps we’ll do this to all the films we feature. Gotta work them into the weekly theme somehow, and talking about the symbology of facial hair seems like as good a way as any to do so.

Sam Kinchin-Smith,
Music Editor

Postcards from Italy - The Fifth

Postcards from Italy - the fourth

Sex | Mixtape | Mixtape VIII, Nick The Stripper

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Music As Reading: Mixtape VIII, Nick The Stripper As Reader

Karl Marx squeezed his carbuncles while writing Das Kapital;
And Gaugin, he buggered off, man, and went all tropical;
While Philip Larkin stuck it out in a library in Hull;
And Dylan Thomas died drunk in St. Vincent's hospital.

After the rather dense tardiness of last week, what follows is a more sprightly, on-time(ish) and probably under-intellectualised reflection upon the greatest of all the Music As Readers, already touched upon variously in previous mixtapes: Nicholas Edward Cave. The game is this: peruse the tracks, note their relationship with a (or indeed several) authors/texts, and come out on one side of the following fence… Is Nick Cave the most intelligent reader in (with) music songwriting today, utilising, manipulating, critiquing, juxtaposing literary allusions into a unique multi-disciplinary musical texture? Or is he an intellectual mountebank, piggybacking his way – via a labyrinth of arbitrary quotations – into a place a lot like that Peter Doherty was looking for when he was all like, ‘Well wouldn’t it be nice to be Dorian Gray, just for a day.’ Clever Peter. Real GCSE-incisive.
Oh, and what happens to that question now that the man’s actually learnt how to write with words (The Proposition and Bunny Munro: wonderful! And the Ass Saw the Angel: not so much.)
In roughly canonical order – as in, the literary canon, not the Cave canon.

1. Nick The Stripper – The Birthday Party (see mixtape title)
   
2. Narcissist – The Libertines (Wilde, Dorian Gray)
   
3. Hiding All Away – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (Sappho – and, indeed, Auden)
   
4. Brompton Oratory – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (Luke the Evangelist)
   
5. Wings Off Flies – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (Shakespeare, King Lear)
   
6. Song of Joy – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (Milton)
   
7.  There She Goes My Beautiful World – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (John Rochester – along with, amongst others, John the Apostle, Karl Marx, Nabokov, Dylan Thomas, Larkin und so weiter, as Blixa Bargeld would say)
   
8. Babe I’m On Fire – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (Walt Whitman – as well as Lorca)
   
9. No Pussy Blues – Grinderman (Yeats and Eliot)
   
10. Mack the Knife – Nick Cave (Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera)
    
11. Loom of the Land – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (Nabokov again)
    
12. We Call Upon the Author – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (John Berryman – and Bukowski and Hemingway)
    
13. 13. Jack’s Shadow – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (Jack Abbot)
    
14. 14. The Road (from the original score) – Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (Cormac McCarthy, The Road)
    
15. *Where the Wild Roses Grow – Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds feat. Kylie Minogue (Bunny Munro)
    
16. *Sk8er Boi – Avril Lavigne (Bunny Munro)
    

*These last two are a bit of a cheat – basically, Cave’s latest novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, refers constantly to both the music, and the vaginas, of Kylie and Avril. So there is a connection – just a slightly more, um, complicated one.

Wider Reading | Mixtape | Mixtape VII, Critical Listening

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At last, last week's mixtape. Pologies for the delay.

Music As Reading: Mixtape VII, Critical Listening, after Edward Said’s Music at the Limits

His unusual understanding of the human spirit and of the human being was perhaps a consequence of his revelatory construct that parallels between ideas, topics and cultures can be of a paradoxical nature, not contradicting but enriching one another. This is one of the ideas that I believe made Said an extremely important figure. His journey through this world took place precisely at a time when the value of music in society began to decline.

Just as the obvious entry-point for a mixtape about the relationship between music and poetry was a poet – Don Paterson, for example – who has written poetry about music, so it makes sense to discuss music’s interaction with literary criticism through a lens of a theorist obsessed with music. Edward Said was certainly that – he became, after all, music critic for The Nation in 1986, and the articles he wrote betray an easy familiarity with a number of composers’ entire lives’ work, not to mention the nuances which define the various recordings and legendary performances of key individual pieces and represent the subtler textures of the 20th century’s make-ups and break-ups with classical music. But the subject, Said and Western Classical Music, isn’t as simple as a mere he wrote about it. He also often made sense of his day job, that is, the study of literature and sociology, though it (and vice versa) and seems to have depended on the energies and releases of music for the currents of thought which produced his best writing. Daniel Barenboim has argued, in the foreword to a new-ish collection of Said’s musical musings, Music at the Limits, that at a time when ‘music has become isolated from other areas of life; it is no longer considered a necessary aspect of intellectual development,’ Said ‘used his musical experience and knowledge as a base for his convictions about politics, morality, and intellectual thought.’ For Said, music wasn’t simply a potential focus for criticism: it was criticism, its senses and its soul.

(*Music at the Limits: three decades of essays and articles on music by Edward Said is published by Bloomsbury*)


Part one, LITERARY INTERSECTIONS …It came naturally to Said, for example, to quote Keats when analyzing a performance of Bach… (Daniel Barenboim)

…Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder with its formidable economy of means, its understatement and calm, its almost total control of difficult material…The range of emotions offered in the cycle, as in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ late sonnets, is intense but not great… (‘Music and Feminism’)

Kindertotenlieder: Nun Will Die Sonn’ So Hell Aufgeh’n – Gustav Mahler
Kindertotenlieder: In Diesem Wetter – Gustav Mahler

Much of the great outburst of intellectual energy in recent literary criticism has focused on the difficulty, even the impossibility, of interpretation…Does the music mock the action? Is the music meant to accentuate the plot’s socially acceptable conventions, thus disguising Mozart’s subversiveness? Or is there some as yet undiscovered notion of counterpoint or accompaniment that yokes the two elements together so strangely? (‘The Barber of Seville, Don Giovanni’)

The Barber of Seville: Largo al Factotum – Gioachino Rossini
Don Giovanni: La ci darem la mano – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

…Most literature on opera doesn’t touch Handel, and when…books do, he is reduced to clichés that render him a boring imitation of Moliere… (‘Giulio Cesare’)

Giulio Cesare: Se Pietà – George Frideric Handel
Giulio Cesare: Da tempeste il legno infranto – George Frideric Handel

Towards the end of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, as the spiritually exhausted Fielding is sailing home, he comes through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, “the human norm”…Something like that experience of Fielding’s (minus the offensive aspects) occurs in anyone who tries to grasp the significance of Beethoven’s life and music. (‘The Vienna Philharmonic’)

Symphony No. 3 in E Flat Major, Op. 55 ‘Eroica’: I, Allegro Con Brio – Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67: IV, Allegro - Presto – Ludwig van Beethoven

Part two, MUSIC AS THOUGHT-CATALYST …Classical Western music was part of our daily life. Edward listened to music when he worked and played the piano when he took a break or needed to relax… (Miriam Said)

…I believe that it was Glenn Gould’s death in 1982 that impelled Edward to write seriously about music. The realization that Glenn Gould’s early demise ended an eccentric pianist’s brilliant career compelled Edward to probe deeply into Gould’s life and musical achievements… (Miriam Said)

Intermezzo No.2 in A Major, Op. 118: Andante teneramente – Johannes Brahms
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 5 in F Minor, BWV 1056: II, Largo - Instrumental – Johann Sebastian Bach

This is why I believe we must try to penetrate the Israeli consciousness with everything at our disposal. Speaking or writing to Israeli audiences breaks their taboo against us…it is why Barenboim’s performance of Wagner, although genuinely painful for many who still suffer the real traumas of anti-semitic genocide, has the salutary effect of allowing mourning to move on another stage. (‘Barenboim and the Wagner Taboo’)

Gotterdammerung: Act 3 Funeral March – Richard Wagner
Tristan und Isolde: Act 3 “Mild und leise wie er lachelt” – Richard Wagner

…Adorno writes as Strauss’ contemporary, who saw in Strauss an aesthetic practice opposed to that of the second Viennese school whose cause Adorno served as social champion and philosopher. Nevertheless Strauss’ career rests, I think, on altogether more interesting grounds than Adorno allows, and these are revealed almost as often as one of his works is performed today… (‘Richard Strauss’)

Vier Letzte Lieder, Op. posth.: 4, Im Abendrot (Eichendorff) – Richard Strauss
Der Rosenkavalier: Act III, Hab’ mir’s gelobt – Richard Strauss

…Edward was exploring the idea of “late style”. He determined that what composers wrote towards the end of their lives was characterized by “intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradictions,” thoughts that evolved into a book…The last essay in this collection, a review of Maynard Solomon’s book on late Beethoven, was published…two weeks before his death. It is ironically titled ‘Untimely Meditations’… (Miriam Said)

33 variations in C Major on a waltz by Diabelli, Op. 120, “Diabelli Variations”: Variation XIV, Grave e Maestoso – Ludwig van Beethoven
33 variations in C Major on a waltz by Diabelli, Op. 120, “Diabelli Variations”: Variation XXIV, Fughetta: Andante – Ludwig van Beethoven
33 variations in C Major on a waltz by Diabelli, Op. 120, “Diabelli Variations”: Variation XXVI, Piacevole – Ludwig van Beethoven
Sonata No. 10 in G Major, Op. 96: Alegro moderato – Ludwig van Beethoven

Postcards From Italy - the third

Youth | Mixtape | Mixtape VI, Italy

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Mixtape VI, Music As Reading Goes To Italy

Mai quest’onda mai mi affonderà, gli squali non mi avranno mai. Mai quest’onda mai mi affonderà …Sha la la la la Sha la la la la la, un’altra volta un’altra onda. Sha la la la la Sha la la la la la, quanto resisterai?

As you may have noticed on Wednesday, Music As Reading has gone to Italy!

Hence, this week’s mixtape comes to you from Italy! What follows is five Italian manifestations of something with a fair bit in common with the Music As Reading project. Part one, Opera, speaks for itself: opera is a musical reading of a historical or fictional narrative, a scattering of empty, useless words made sense of only by music, arguably the very concept of music as reading’s most sublime form. These two arias performed best of all the Italian arias in Radio 3’s slightly jingoistic Nation’s Favourite Arias. Part two contains two tracks by that rare thing, music- and culture-literate Italian bands. It is this kind of artist that has filled up a majority of the preceding mixtapes’ content, that’s why they’re here. Part three is two themes from Fellini movie soundtracks – these significant to the project because of the general question of soundtracking and the way they attempt, opera-like, to read a narrative with music. That they are evidence of a fruitful relationship between a filmmaking genius and a compositional genius is also important. Part four is a cheat, two songs written into a couple of Shakespeare’s Italian plays – ignore the fact that the Willow Song is a traditional English folk piece, not important, what is, is that Shakespeare used it, music, to define Desdemona’s final moments. Oh, and finally, two Italian fragments of that most explicit (in every sense of the word) and unavoidable form of lyricism in action, the hippity-hop. One good, one very, very bad.

Part one, Opera

E Lucevan Le Stelle (from Tosca) – Giacomo Puccini
Casta Diva (from Norma) – Vincenzo Bellini

Part two, Literate bands

A New Start for Shoegazing Kids – Giardini di Mirò
It Was Bliss! – Settlefish

Part three, Film music

Toby Dammit Theme (from Fellini’s third of Tre Passi Nel Delirio) – Nino Rota
Aria Di Roma (from Fellini’s Roma) – Nina Rota

Part four, Shakespeare in Italy

Willow Song (from Othello) – arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams
Light o’ Love (from Two Gentlemen of Verona) – arranged by Tom Kines

Part five, Italian hip-hop

La Grande Onda – Piotta
Tranqi Funky – Articolo 31

Youth | Music | Postcards from Italy

Music As Reading has gone Italy! I lie: in fact, at the time of writing, Music As Reading is sitting on his bedroom floor half-writing, half-packing in preparation for his Tuscan holiday – it’s Friday 2nd July, soon to become Saturday 3rd July. Music As Reading is coming at you…from the past!

Anyway, long and short of it is Italy and t’internet are, despite sharing two letters (three if you count the T twice) not as happy friends as England and t’internet (by England, I mean all of England except Cumbria). Which means that for two weeks only, Music As Reading (mixtapes not included within that umbrella-sort-of-term incidentally – I prepared those earlier) will be relying upon more analogue methods of communication. Inspiration courtesy of the wonderful Beirut, whose ‘Postcards from Italy’ can be enjoyed in its Spotified entirety if you’re willing to click on the hyperlinked title above…

Whose ‘Postcards from Italy’ also has some maybe-profound things to say about this week’s theme, yoof, actually:

The times we had
Oh, when the wind would blow with rain and snow
Were not all bad
We put our feet just where they had, had to go
Never to go…

The shattered soul
Following close but nearly twice as slow
In my good times
There were always golden rocks to throw
At those who admit defeat too late
Those were our times, those were our times…

And I will love to see that day
That day is mine
When she will marry me outside with the willow trees
And play the songs we made
They made me so
And I would love to see that day
Her day was mine…

Hmmm. A link at best tenuous, at worst entirely non-existent. I’ll move on. Basically, throughout my Tuscan retreat (lol) I’ll be sending postcards from Italy to one of my fellow editors in lieu of contributing to the blog (for, let’s be honest, this is hardly a proper contribution) in the hope that, A, they don’t get lost or take a million years to get to England, it being not quite yet high season, and B, one of said editors can be arsed to scan them into the blog so Silkworms gets to see them. Both sides please chaps, scan both sides! Not yet being in Italy, I obviously have no idea what I’m going to write, but I will promise now that it will be vaguely linked to the weekly themes and SHORT. Such is the advantage of postcards. An advantage blogging lacks, as I daresay you’ve noticed.

They shall be our very own Postcards from Italy – without a ukulele in sight or sound. Actually, I lie, Mother’s bringing her ukulele with her, so goodness knows what kind of synthesis might happen. Useful fact: BA are cool with passengers bringing a musical instrument (guitar or smaller) in addition to their hand luggage onto their flights. A boon Mother intends to take full advantage of. I recommend you do the same. And there you were thinking BA were strike-breaking bastardbitches and nothing more. Shame on you. Shame on us all.

(To access a [very, very short] Spotify essay-soundtrack-playlist to accompany the above, click here)

Sam Kinchin-Smith
Music Editor

Hollywood | Music | Musical Hollywooding

J.K. Rowling's Minerva McGonagall - the Harry Potter books are full of po-mo references to other bad writing.

‘I love all films that start with rain,’ begins Rain, the final poem of Don Paterson’s most recent collection, Rain – that’s not a typo by the way, both poem and collection are in fact entitled Rain, and the first line of said poem also includes the word ‘rain’, so those three rains have to be there, I know, I’m as put out as you are… (What is the correct means of dealing with this problem of poems and collections sometimes sharing the same name – and the sometimes-necessity of putting both in the same sentence, thus creating a clunky, clunky sentence? Title-poem?)

‘I love all films that start with rain,’ begins Rain, the title- (and closing-) poem of Don Paterson’s most recent collection. It continues thus:

rain, braiding a windowpane

or darkening a hung-out dress

or streaming down her upturned face;

one long thundering downpour

right through the empty script and score

before the act, before the blame,

before the lens pulls through the frame

to where the woman sits alone

beside a silent telephone

or the dress lies ruined on the grass

or the girl walks off the overpass,

and all things flow out from that source

along their fatal watercourse.

However bad or overlong

such a film can do no wrong,

(For the whole thing, lookee here)

It’s a wonderful piece of writing, playing similar games with technique-expectation, art-about-art and the concept of simplicity as Song For Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze in the same collection, and The Rat and The Reading in Landing Light. And its point – at least, its point until the fabled Paterson italics kick in a couple stanzas down – is, I think, spot on also. Hell, I remember, eight years old, going to lie down and sky-face in my garden in my shorts whenever the summer rain came, because I’d seen somebody in some film I thought was awesome or something doing the same. It’s a bloody lovely feeling, incidentally. Makes you look like a prick though, so I stopped. Pity, really.

Rain: one of the most successful and common Hollywooding techniques there is. Hollywooding: the covering up of any number of individual crippling flaws in a film via evocative, heart-bursting shit – a method popularised, undoubtedly, by Hollwood. So, rain: one of the most successful Hollywooding techniques there is. Another one: music.

Lovely, lovely film-music. What follows is not going to be a lengthy diatribe about the subtleties of good and bad film-scoring slash -soundtracking though because, one, such things have been done far too many times already (yah, the thing about Tarantino is that his approach to track-selection for his soundtracks mirrors exactly the way his films are, in fact, a bricolage of reference and little nods to, y’know, B movies and stuff) and two, because the relationship between Hollywooding and music is about something much more specific than whole soundtracks. It’s about moments, see. (All this said, I’ll be including the Twin Peaks theme on this week’s essay-soundtrack-playlist for reference’s sake, because it’s so completely magnificent. Oh, and if anyone is, in fact, at all interested in what people are still saying about scores etc., you could do worse than read this.)

Moments. Individual moments during which the empty script and score or bad or overlong sequences are, particularly, unambiguously, shamelessly glossed with the music-equivalent of Paterson’s rain. It is these that are the currency of musical Hollywooding, not soundtracks as a whole. Everybody can call to mind one such scene immediately, surely… Here’s mine. Ah yes, we’re all at a funeral but we’re all going walk out halfway through, because that’s totally cool, in order to get our hands on a photocopy of Ryan Pillipay’s journal that we’re all suddenly aware of the significance of and that incrimates Buffy totally (I’M A BITCH! Benedict Bitch!) without any of us actually having the time to read it – to the point that her 70s-pimp-style blow-crucifix gets nabbed, poor love. And then two of us are going to ruefully shake our heads in the most breathtaking display of accidentally-comic condemnation ever filmed. And all of this, all of this is redeemed via ‘mad’ Richard Ashcroft and a set of vaguely convenient lyrics.

‘One of the best endings to any movie I have ever seen,’ gushes Youtube user Worldskye. Worldskye, it sounds to me like you’re a fucking idiot. (What a car though, right?)

Anyway, for the purposes of Music As Reading, I’m interested in whether this technique is capable of glossing bad writing of another sort. Poetry, specifically. Can the right music make awful poetry sound like a specific genre of good poetry because of its own connotations? Can Hollywooding save bad poetry? Don Paterson having been my starting point, I will be utilising that unlikely influence of his, the utterly great William Topaz McGonagall as the focal-point of this experiment. And to celebrate Brief Encounter’s perfect use of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 – no Hollywooding there – I will be relying upon ‘classical’ (whatever that means) work only. The following three ideas will be expanded upon – and accompanied by several others – on this Saturday’s mixtape, A Musical McGonagall.

The Tay Bridge Disaster + Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 = Hitchcockian suspense…?

…It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay,
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

The Christmas Goose + Bartok’s Violin Concerto No. 2 = Arthouse enigma…?

…When Smiggs bought the goose
He suspected no harm,
But a naughty boy stole it
From under his arm.

Then Smiggs he cried, “Stop, thief!
Come back with my goose!”
But the naughty boy laugh'd at him,
And gave him much abuse…

An Autumn Reverie + Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings = Lush panorama…?

Alas! Beautiful Summer now hath fled,
And the face of Nature doth seem dead,
And the leaves are withered, and falling off the trees,
By the nipping and chilling autumnal breeze.

The pleasures of the little birds are all fled,
And with the cold many of them will be found dead,
Because the leaves of the trees are scattered in the blast,
And makes the feathered creatures feel downcast…

(To access a Spotify essay-soundtrack-playlist to accompany the above, click here)

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Music Editor

Tradition | Music | Goddam Motherfucking Hippies and the Bòrdan of Cnuimh-shìoda

Monday of this week having been the first sunny solstice in yonks, and having spent the weekend jawing organic falafel at Leamington Spa’s actually-quite-rowdy-this-year Peace Festival, I have been inspired (for truly, that is what happens to one at a Peace Festival) to write about something I know notalot about, about something that is less about tradition than it is about hyper-tradition, but about something that possesses its own consistently-active wee corners of both music and literature (particularly poetry – and often interacting with one another) and is therefore a more-than-valid discussion-focus, I think, for Music As Reading, whatever its more laughable qualities…

About goddam motherfucking hippies and, more specifically, what goddam motherfucking hippies listen to and read. And its supposed roots in, and interaction with, cultures ranging from the ancient to the archaic. And what those of us who have listened to New Age zen-drone or to a chap intoning a ‘contemporary epic’ about Camelot accompanying himself with bodhrán and come away thinking surely, SURELY that was a joke can learn from this most easy-to-parody manifestation of music and words.

(Incidentally, do ‘counter-culture’ men and women of other nationalities similarly evoke their locales’ respective ancient traditions in order to make sense of their fringe-position within modernity? Do affluent modern-day Egyptians adhere to the laws of Isis or Osiris at weekends? Has anybody come across a gathering of Bacchae in contemporary Greece? I suppose now is not really the time to start talking about organised religion…)

(Also, a disclaimer: people of any actual expertise, apologies in advance. I suspect that, due to this aforementioned ignorance, my understandings of such disparate adjectives as Celtic, Arthurian, Zen, Runic, World, Panpipe, Wicca, Earth, Druidic, Drum, Gaelic, Pagan, Pantheist, Chai etc. etc. etc. may bleed into one another below into a, yes, somewhat generalised conception of what goddam motherfucking hippies listen to and read. I am of course aware that, say, Gaelic culture is a subdivision of Celtic culture, and that both constitute richly significant facets to both historical and contemporary understandings of the geography of the British Isles, its traditions and so on – especially where both music and literature are concerned, indeed. I am allowing such a blurring to occur, however, because doing so reflects the nature of home counties, upper middle class, goddam motherfucking hippies – willing, in my experience, to toss together valid, interesting, important traditions, movements, ideologies and lifestyle-choices like so much transcendental salad – to the point that things’ proper meaning, significance gets swamped. Good things, like environmentalism, food activism, a genuine understanding of British tribal- and folk-history. Who needs all that when we’ve got our dreadlocks to worry about? and so on and so forth)

Without any more ado, then, five lessons Music As Reading can learn from goddam motherfucking hippy culture and its intersections with tradition. Which from henceforth shall be known as The Tablet of Silkworm. No, actually, The Bòrdan of Cnuimh-shìoda is a little more appropriate, it shall be known as that (I can’t be arsed to translate the grammar, as you may have guessed).

Lesson the First – Costume and Character.

With the help of a costume, the Wiltshire air and, probably, a decent helping of psychotropic drugs, men and women like King Arthur Uther Pendragon (pictured above) quit pretending and actually become, legally and everything, the figures with whom they are obsessed, from whom their truth and ancient mysteries come. They share a relationship with the characters and history which dominates the content of their work of an intimacy that more mainstream poets and songwriters could only dream of – dressing, drinking, talking, dancing the same, together. For them, merely doing a Nick Cave, say, and resurrecting a traditional form (the murder ballad), or a Robert Browning and recreating the voice of a famous dead person isn’t enough. They are method-writers and -musicians a la Andy Serkis’ approach to method-acting – and for that we must respect and learn from them. Possibly.

Lesson the Second – Shamelessness.

If a writer of music or words is ever going to take the writing- or performance-risks that produce great avant-garde work, they require a certain shamelessness. They could do a lot worse than to learn some tricks from these guys. Be a fifty year old man. Have a beard longer than your hair. Wear something like a dress and, ideally, accessorise with a ‘wand’. Talk, at length, about being present at the third marriage of the ‘Earth Mother’ while a dwarf plays a flute. A relationship with tradition of this nature has the potential to be far more radical than a studied relationship with contemporaneousness. 

Lesson the Third – Reading with Drum/Singsong Intonation

One of the most striking aspects of the my limited, oh so limited experiences of witnessing goddam motherfucking hippies read, and play music, is their frequent use of an unflagging accompanying metronomic drum-pulse – which gives their work, particularly the poetry, an extraordinary strength-of-rhythm, a sense of metre that only music can teach words and, in turn, tradition teach the free-verse decadences of modern-day reading and writing. Let us read with drums. Let us write with drums. Like the oarsmen of Ancient Greece. And these guys' intonation – it's makes massive-crowd-drawing reader Dylan Thomas's rumble sound like a mumble. See, the thing about spells is that they're amazingly fun to say. Possibly that's why spells were conceived in the first place, y'know. Language as spellcasting catharsis: it's something every musician and-or writer should try.

Lesson the Fourth – Nudity.

We’ve all seen The Wicker Man – nudity is both a quintessential facet to the ancient culture of our Great isle, and, so long as Britt Ekland is involved anyway, fucking sexy. Goodmusic once made an effort to tap this, back in the glory days of Iggy Pop getting his knob out and Peaches doing – well, doing horrible things to herself. And will, surely, again. But literature? I’m not just talking nudity in performance by the by, why not also nudity in writing classes, while writing alone, why not life-writing alongside life-drawing. Heaven's sake, it's what our forefathers did to find their voice.

Lesson the Fifth – Meditation.
For a couple weeks some time in the future, something that I will be calling The New Meditation will become a principal focus of Music As Reading – because though all-too-frequently the site of dreadful music and idiotic sentiments, I'm pretty sure meditation constitutes one of the most common manifestations of people in this country already using music to read. Using music as the tone with which to find new meaning in words. Using the words to explain the music. It's a potentially very exciting exchange, just currently full of gimps. So: to be continued...

Sam Kinchin-Smith
Music Editor

Destruction | Mixtape | Mixtape IV, Thorn In His Side

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Music As Reading: Mixtape IV, The Poet With A Thorn In His Side (he only ever wanted to be a music-maker)

Armitage: “I really like your stuff.”
Mark E. Smith: “Got a light, cock?”

The poet who, really, would have liked to be in a band more than he enjoys being a really-quite-successful poet – an evocative, pathos-drenched, rather depressing image. And one of crucial import to the Music As Reader. For out of it buzz a swarm of questions at the heart of what the Music As Reading project is, really, all about: what is the relationship between the poet and the music he or she listens to – and what can one discover about both forms from that relationship? Does the poet who loves to music-listen read or write with, alongside music because of the benefits to be had out of this relationship? And is poetry (slash, the poet) not just ultimately, compared to goodmusic (slash, the musician) intolerably sad, po-faced, poontang-repelling, and does it (slash he slash she) therefore require an injection of rockandgoddamroll if it (slash he slash she) is to regain the reputation, readership and romanticism that once defined it (slash he slash she) as a mode? Because let’s face it, most people start writing poetry because they want to be Lord fucken Byron, not Sir Andrew Motion – ladies and gentlemen, we’re being cool-shortchanged… Why?

Armitage is so specifically important, though, because he did the unthinkable and actually started a bloody band – way late (perhaps middle would be the more appropriate word, actually) in life. Then wrote a book about it, Gig (published by Penguin) which contains the above two-line anecdote – and a full history of not-being-in-a-band-but-being-a-really-quite-successful-poet Northern miserabalia. In it, and generally, he is admirably open and generous about who he digs, who he adores, the kinds of artists he would have loved to be a part of. Unfortunately, his actual band, the Scaremongers (www.simonarmitage.co.uk for videos etc.) sound like nothing so much as Registered Trademark The Worst Band Of All Time, the Beautiful South. Only a bit less shit. Surely, Simon, there might have been another way? Surely, Simon, is not Music As Reading it?

Part one, Bands Armitage would like/have liked to be a part of.

Searching for Mr Right – Young Marble Giants
She’s Lost Control – Joy Division
Independence Day – Comsat Angels
Spoilt Victorian Child – The Fall
Wildcat Fights – Eyeless in Gaza
The Boy With A Thorn In His Side – The Smiths
Nocturnal Me – Echo and the Bunnymen
Diamonds are Forever – Arctic Monkeys
Ever Fallen in Love (with someone you shouldn’t’ve)? – The Buzzcocks
Blue Boy – Orange Juice

Part two, Bands Armitage’s writing/songwriting reveal would have, in actuality, been a slightly better fit (note, half the size of part one).

Lucky You – Lightning Seeds
Irish Blood, English Heart – Morrissey
Our Mutual Friend – The Divine Comedy
Perfect 10 – The Beautiful South
Put A Donk On It (original mix) – Blackout Crew*

* I suspect this one needs a wee explanatory note. Blackout Crew are, basically, the Beatles of the Donk scene, a relatively new species of drainpipe-techno defined by a quintessential northern-only-ness to compare with, say, Armitage’s rendering of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Simon would surely approve – somebody should put them in touch with one another, get the poet to ‘drop’ on the next record (if there is a next record…) See the VBS donk-umentary (http://www.vbs.tv/watch/music-world/donk) for more information.

Destruction | Music | Jared Leto Gets Twatted

I felt like destroying something beautiful. 

So mutters Ed Norton at the close of what is probably late-teen-emo-osophy-fest Fight Club’s most infamous and intellectualised scene, Angel Face Gets Twatted (as one on-the-money Youtube user has christened it). Now, I haven’t sat down and watched Fight Club for quite some time – for reasons that I daresay the above five-part composite noun make pretty clear (goodness’ sake, Fightstar released a track called ‘Palahniuk’s Laughter’: I’m not just being contrary). But I can still appreciate why the glamourised fucking up of a beautiful, semi-feminised male face is kind of interesting, even when it’s accompanied by piss-poor pop-profoundness (“I felt like putting a bullet between the eyes of every panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species. I wanted to open the dump-valves on oil tankers and smother all the French beaches I’d never see.”) This recent piece by the mostly-excellent Penny Red, concerning itself with how often it is violence against women that is used as a shorthand shortcut to stylised edginess and iconoclasm, goes some way to pointing towards why that is. This isn’t bad either.

Not that I can be bothered to hover around questions of postmodernism and masculinity for the next couple hundred words. Rather, I’m much more interested in the following, and probably-no-less-scholarly conundrum that surely dominated director David Fincher’s mindset for at least a couple days: what would be the best/most somehow-gorgeous (gore-geous? Hahahahahahahahaha)/most shiny-stylish/most Fightstar-rad way to go about destroying Jared Leto’s excellent face? It’s a question (or a mild-variation on the question) that resulted in what is, very possibly, American Psycho’s best scene. And it’s a question that inspires today’s exercise in Music As Reading: think of some poems built out of an elegant symmetry, a versatile but unambiguous handsomeness to compare with that exhaled by the American Beauty of Jared Leto’s features. Then think of some music to destroy them. And juxtapose the two, as painfully as possible. Music As The Death Of Reading – I daresay it’s an idea that’s been floated before, probably in the Mail On Sunday or summat…

Oh, and I’m not just talking about Huey Lewis and the News… In 87, Huey released this, Fore, their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is ‘Hip to be Square’, a song so catchy most people probably don’t listen to the lyrics. But they should, because it’s not just about the pleasures of conformity, and the importance of trends, it’s also a personal statement about the band itself. Hey Paul! TRY GETTING A RESERVATION AS DORSIA NOW YOU FUCKING STUPID BASTARD! YOU! FUCKING! BASTARD!

Byron + Mayhem

Byron and Leto, or more specifically Byron’s verse and Leto’s face – it’s not too big a leap to make. Only, Leto’s face is, I think, a little simplistic, a little pretty-pretty, not enough sardonically lined with experience to group with George Gordon’s monster poems – we need a little briskly-metred lyric, I think. With just a bit of an edge, befitting Leto’s vaguely greebo credentials…

So, we’ll go no more a roving

So late into the night,

Though the heart be still as loving,

And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,

And the soul wears out the breast,

And the heart must pause to breathe,

And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,

And the day returns to soon,

Yet we’ll go no more a roving

By the light of the moon.

(1817)

HEY PAUL! Destroy with the help of Mayhem (the Norwegian black metal band what ate a stew brewed from their singer’s brain – that’s the singer who used to bury his clothes for weeks before wearing them, incidentally) and their masterpiece, ‘Rape Humanity With Pride.’ This one speaks for itself.

Hopkins + Burzum

Like Jared Leto’s features, Hopkins’ sonnets, particularly this one, combine extraordinarily perfect shape-symmetry with ‘outrides’ (Hopkins’ coinage), extra bits, distributed carefully to form uncannily beautiful patternings – just look at Leto’s fringe, his slightly too-round nose.

The Windhover, to Christ Our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
      dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
      Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
      As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
      Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing. 

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
      Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
      No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
      Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

(1877)

HEY PAUL! Gerard Manley Hopkins bloody loved God and churches and so on – Varg Vikernes, the man behind one-man-band Burzum, burnt down several historically important Norwegian churches before murdering the Mayhem guitarist what made the aforementioned brain stew, ‘Euronymous’. Destroy this most exquisite of poems (barring that horrible ‘Stirred for a bird’ line) then, with the help of the just-under-ten-minutes-long ‘Snu Mikrokosmos Tegn’, a track no doubt constructed to headphone-accompany acts of ecclesiastical arson.

Isaac Rosenberg + David Banner

Look at that horrible t-shirt Leto’s wearing. And that Rooney-like rosary. And yet, with that Leto-face, that gaze, both become oddly beautiful, hypnotic. Isaac Rosenberg, to my mind the greatest of all the WW1 poets, achieved the same effect with a conflict that killed over 16 million people.

Break of Day in the Trenches

The darkness crumbles away 
It is the same old druid Time as ever, 
Only a live thing leaps my hand, 
A queer sardonic rat, 
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear. 
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew 
Your cosmopolitan sympathies, 
Now you have touched this English hand 
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure 
To cross the sleeping green between. 
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass 
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes, 
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder, 
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth, 
The torn fields of France. 
What do you see in our eyes 
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens? 
What quaver -what heart aghast? 
Poppies whose roots are in men's veins 
Drop, and are ever dropping; 
But mine in my ear is safe,
Just a little white with the dust. 

(1922)

HEY PAUL! In David Banner’s ‘Play’, Isaac, lies a contemporary realisation of the freedoms you and young men the world over died for. All together now, Finger fuck your pussy like you want some, girl / Work it like a nigga straight licking on your pearl / I wanna see you cum in the middle of the dance floor / A nigga can't fuck, what you think your finger made for / I'ma beat that pussy up / You get it wet enough, I might lick it up / Lickey, lickey, lickey, like a peppermint swirl Lick that clit / Cum girl / Uh, I wanna see your legs shake. This may very well be the single most depressing and destructive juxtaposition of all time.

And now it’s your turn. Juxtapose the most perfect, beautiful fragment of writing you can find with some nasty tunez and see what happens. A spot of filthy, filthy dubstep (possibly Bratkilla…) or some Lightning Bolt or Oxes may very well do the trick (Lightning Bolt and Oxes are both mega incidentally – just not, I suspect, for poetry). For one week only, let’s incinerate some fucken churches.

(To access a Spotify essay-soundtrack-playlist to accompany the above, click here)

Sam Kinchin-Smith
Music Editor

Prizes | Music | Awards Awarded Awarded Awards Award

British literary prizes carry way more weight, respectability, credibility, career-buttressing significance than their musical alter-egos. In fact, said alter-egos carry a good deal of the exact opposite. Seems, in hindsight, a bit of an obvious point to make but it’s actually kind of fascinating and, I reckon, relatively unremarked upon. Hilary Mantel, Don Paterson, fucking McEwan, even that dear man China Mieville can be nominated for and win however many gongs they like and maintain – improve upon, indeed – a full dignity-quota, a generally resounding air of well done old boy. (Mantel’s eye-wateringly problematic face haunting the Guardian Review and Ian’s ever-increasing reputation for turning ‘litfic’ into bellend-ery – or is it the other way around – are obvious sticking-points that deserve to be acknowledged here, yes, but you get the idea.) Give a musician a Brit (lol), an Ivor Novello, a Mercury prize or, worst of all, an NME award (hello Muse! Still stealing the themes from staggeringly well-known orchestral works? You awful cunts) and it’s more than likely I’ll never listen to their shit again. That’s if we were ever listening to it in the first place.

Unless we’re talking PJ Harvey. PJ Harvey can do slash win whatever she goddam likes.

Oh yeah, and if you’re one of those people who were all like, yeah man, Elbow totally deserved that Mercury prize, they’re such a hard-working band and that Garvey guy had a beard way before beard were cool because Elbow aren’t cool, they’re just really hard-working and the Mercury was just a really great reward for how hard they’ve worked: just…no…

Now, there are loads and loads of reasons for this. As Phil discussed earlier on in the week, the financial facet to literary prizes, especially poetry ones, is inextricably tied up with the financial realities of the literary career. Quite simply, poetry awards very often provide the space in which the (yes, of course, arguably) most brilliant poets can continue writing, ideally-speaking full-time. Not so where music is concerned. Badly Drawn Boy going on about how much the 2000 Mercury was going to facilitate more and better Badly Drawn Boy music-making was somewhat undermined (both musically- and financially-speaking) by the appearance of the About A Boy soundtrack two years later. The over-discussed ‘curse of the Mercury’ is sort-of-proof, indeed, that Mercury prizes don’t clear space for brilliant second, third, fourth records – no, they destroy careers. See Miss Dynamite. See Hell’s Kitchen.

Literary prizes are often admirably specific – for poets under 30, for writers who might broadly be defined as flying the flag SF, for lady-novelists (as I daresay they’d still like to be known – am I right? Am I right?). They have serious, not-anonymous, invariably fairly diverse, bloody hardworking judging-panels – as opposed to a scattering of faceless ‘industry experts’. They are frequently open to (if rarely won by…) the unpublished, the not establishment-entrenched – to entries entered anonymously, onto a relatively level playing-field. They are sometimes conceived along lines far more creative than Best Album, Best Song – see, say, the Warwick Prize for Writing, last year centring upon ‘complexity’, next year on ‘colour’, and utilising a creative and democratic nomination process open to all employees (not just academic) and students working at the University of Warwick.

Literary prizes give, at the very least, the impression they’re supporting their mode, and constantly evolving in order to do so. Where music prizes cheapen, stunt, commercialise, ever-imply British musical breadth is at best, tokenistic, at worst non-existent. How many music awards awarded this year have been awarded as a result of a certain artist agreeing to attend the awards ceremony in order to pick up their award? Is Lily Allen really the best pop-songwriter in the land? Really? Reallyreally?

In a year Stephin Merritt released a new record?

I’m not saying the literary system is perfect, obviously. I mean, godsake, Portillo chaired the Booker panel in 2008! And one could very well argue there are far more entry-points into the ‘music-industry’ (vile phrase) than there are into, say, the published ‘poetry scene’ (just as bad) – and that prizes thus have far less of a role to play in the former coase, inevitably. And that bands are only to be half-judged on their albums – less than half perhaps. Where a novelist’s live performance is, let’s face it, a non-issue (much as I like the idea of contemporary Dickens-making-women-faint-by-reading-the-murder-of-Nancy-scene live reading jamborees). Hence the album-award and the novel-award will inevitably have very different respective statuses, in terms of achievement-representation. Then there’s the money thing: whole lot more money in music = less need for prizes. At least, there was, once upon a time… (And possibly that-there ellipses represents the best reason for a new culture of prizes to rebuild goodmusic achievement from the ground up. No monies anymores!)

But consider, for one moment, if an equivalent to the Eric Gregorys (three and a half grand for the best four unreleased unknown-authored full-length demos entered each year) or the Warwick Prize for Writing (fifty grand for the record that most impressively addressed an (arbitrary) intellectual concept, every two years – nominated by bunch of everyones) or even the Faber new poets scheme (creative – rather than sellability-centric – mentorship and EP releases courtesy of a label like, I don’t know, Matador) began to dominate serious music-making and listening. Don’t get me wrong, the best indie labels, producers and whatnot do some wonderful, selfless shit, which achieves similarly anti-consumerist, cerebral ends. But why not this too? Let’s look at last year’s records, crown some Music As Reading literary-musical prizewinners 2009:

The Man Booker

Awarded to: Yo La Tengo’s Popular Songs. 25-year career, balanced, music-literate, pop meets challenging, you get the idea.

The Orange Prize

Awarded to: St. Vincent’s Actor. For being such a talented lady-singer and stuff.

The Arthur C Clarke award

Awarded to: Sunn 0)))’s Monoliths & Dimensions. I wonder if China Mieville likes Sun 0)))…

The Warwick Prize for Writing (theme – ‘complexity’)

Awarded to: Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion. A record that, bewilderingly, found itself in the US Billboard Top 20. I mean, have you heard it?

The Forward Prize

Awarded to: The Antlers’ Hospice. A record possessed of a very Forward Prize-ish harrowingness.

The T.S. Eliot Prize

Awarded to: Themselves’ CrownsDown. Hiphop would dominate the poetry-style categories, I feel. Especially hiphop as rad as this.

An Eric Gregory

Awarded to: Talons’ for Rustic Bullshit. You won’t be able to find this one on Spotify but I’d really, really recommend buying it here.

If the above doesn’t get you more excited than Speech bloody Debelle winning last year’s Mercury Prize, we might as well not bother being friends anymore.

(To access a Spotify essay-soundtrack-playlist to accompany the above, click here)

Sam Kinchin-Smith
Music Editor