Everything Is Happening
Written in June of 2008
The things the internet have done to music continue to fascinate me. In times past, people recorded for radio-that is, they recorded in a way that would sound good on medium-wave broadcasting, because BBC Radio 1, the nation's way of discovering music, broadcast on 275 and 285 on the medium wave. FM was, for a long time, reserved for the Chart Show on Sundays, where Radio 1 took Radio 2 s FM slot for two hours. (Or was it an hour and a half?) This is one reason why there wasn't any bass in British pop music for years and years. It didn't broadcast all that well. Pop music was incredibly toppy for a long time; you only got real bass in clubs and at gigs. Today, it's the middle stretch that goes missing. Mp3 preserves the top and the bottom, but the centre loses nuance in the compression. And now I'm hearing people record for mp3. People are starting to complain about it-click around and you'll find "audiophiles" wishing for FLAC and Ogg that preserves more of the music. It's just another cycle. Sooner or later, we'll have another moment as in '87/'88 when people discovered bass again, and everything else sounded kind of insipid in comparison.
Not that it'll happen in a big wave next time. The other interesting thing is the immediacy and fractioning of musical movements. In (say) 1988, you could feel it coming. (In actual fact, there were two things coming-in addition to acid, there was a reinvention of guitar music). Genesis P-Orridge has talked about this a little bit, the weird surge in the air that took him to Jack The Tab. In those days, big cultural shifts were a slow wave passing over the planet, moving at the speed of postage and club nights and the occasional phone call. And they came, at best, one or two at a time. And they caught up everybody.
What's changed is the speed of communication and the speed at which new music can be experienced. So today we no longer wait for the breakers to hit every 11 years (roughly: rock, '55. Psychedelia, '66. Punk, '77. Acid, 1988). Instead, micro-movements pop up every month. Some new eddy in the hardcore continuum, MySpacey chavpop, The Fonal Sound, British "dark folk," the spooktronics crowd being drawn to the Miasmah label (and too many more to mention)... far more plentiful than "scenes" in the past, geographically scattered and inspiring the sort of mad group inspiration and evolution that you used to only find at the top of big New Sound cultural events.
Everything is happening, all the time, very fast. I like that.
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June 3RD, 2008
Decades before people were hyping themselves in rap, Bo Diddley was doing nothing but singing songs about
Bo Diddley (while ripping the piss out of "Hush Little Baby") and inventing the Bo Diddley beat (while actually trying to teach himself some old Gene Autry saw).
The first time I remember hearing Bo Diddley was actually a clip played on some BBC TV music quiz show, probably in the early 80s. I said something like, "What the hell...?" and my dad said, "Ssh. Listen. Listen to his guitar." And THAT was it. Because it's the sound of your heart skipping a beat. boom-ba-boom-boom bam-boom. i don't think Bo Diddley met a second chord in his life, he made status quo look like Segovia for that. It's all about that beat. "I play the guitar as if I were playing drums," Diddley said. See, my dad had been a drummer, and that's what he picked up on. People thought he was weird because he had women in his band-musicians like Peggy Jones and the Duchess, who could crank out primal blues riffs that would've made John Lee Hooker stand to attention.
Bo Diddley died today, aged 79.
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