| Author |
Message |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Sunday, June 28, 2009 - 10:23 am: | |
Hi, been away for a while but I thought I would drop in. I am listening to Iggy's new album at the moment. Preliminaires. I had to laugh the first time I heard the first song. Ha ha ha. A few listens however, and it comes across as a fine album, perhaps it is most like Avenue B but in a minor vein. Whatever his advertising adventures, he is still a superb writer/musician. The Stooges last album, The Weirdness, in a way succeeds by also being small scale in its ambitions. It is highly listenable, and Iggy's use of his voice, a kind of flexible, infinitely modulated instrument in itself, is expressive, artful, ingenious, as always - or it might be it gets even better with time. This past decade is a high point for him in his career (in my view).
Michael Jackon's death is a tragedy, that is what I feel. I have very mixed feelings about it, on the one hand I experienced a sort of relief (a sense of "It's over at last"; no more endlessly nauseating nonsense, with that creepy smile of his); but on the other I felt that given his talent it was tragic that he became the way he did; utterly unreal and disconnected, unknowable in a somehow lost form, in a repulsive artificiality. That's all really.
I recently went to a Holgar Czukay gig at the Round House. Reminded me of just how incandescently powerful Can were. (Put the Can in the word.)
Another thing, listening to Jon Hassell alot too. He has a new one out; but my absolute favourite of his is the first he did with Eno, Possible Musics. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, July 06, 2009 - 8:57 am: | |
Jackson went the same way as Presley: strange that; on painkillers. He couldn't contain himself and had nobody to say no to him. Or if they did, he just found someone else to say yes. The law said no to his child molesting, however, and that stopped him for a while. I think those kinds of blows created a real possibility for him becoming a mature artist. However, still there was no one to say no to the surgery or the painkillers.
He was or is a cultural phenomenon, something more than just a person in that sense: an obvious point but I think that as a mirror for what we are, being to some degree manipulated by us as well as he himself being culpable, his death has created a reaction of shame and guilt as well as pity - pity for the gentle individual underneath the aberrational strangeness. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, July 09, 2009 - 7:50 am: | |
Strange too the way they look like gangsters, Michael Jackson's brothers at his funeral. Hoodlum chic. The shades; the suits; the mementoes. The cult of self. But you can see that it is all very much a family based thing, all interconnected, with the same tendency that every family has (including my own; I can recognise my own family here) to be deluded about themselves in their own peculiar ways: or up to a point all equally to be subject to the same limitations as everyone else in the family. All stuck together as by some glue.
Something else that is perhaps of significant consideration is the intensity of Michael Jackson's passion in his singing and performing. I don't think that that has an equal in many other singers (I suppose you might compare Bowie or Robert Smith) which perhaps explains a great deal of his impact. This intensity gives his songs an 'absolute' quality. All or nothing. A sense that people respond to. In a way it is 'purifying'. Not actually, but, temporarily, emotionally. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, July 09, 2009 - 3:48 pm: | |
Hi, MJP - good to hear from you!
Sly Guy & the Family Glue - it could happen.
I don't know how long Jackson's preference for male pubescents is going to stay verboten: presumably, until the chart feeding frenzy has died down, money has been made, and numerous creditors thrown scraps. As Paul Gambacinni said, in one notably unctuous tribute, "I don't want to talk about the stories - I want to talk about the music." Which is fine: no doubt he's preparing a similar show on Gary Glitter as we speak.
Meanwhile, it's rather like paying tribute to Lennon without mentioning the word "Beatle." Oh, and Usher won the "First Artist to Touch the Casket" award on the night, too. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, July 27, 2009 - 3:08 pm: | |
Hi Martin, something attractive and yet repellent about him. I think his real music stopped with Beat It. Those three brilliant songs on Thriller. Thriller itself begining his downfall. What physically actually happened to Jackson seems to have been horrific. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, August 05, 2009 - 3:34 pm: | |
$5m to look like Action Man - oh yes.
Replaying the full "Thriller" video on youTube, I'd forgotten about his disclaimer that "this in no way endorses a belief in the occult." I'm still laughing! |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, August 07, 2009 - 8:29 am: | |
Jackson was an exceptionally talented musician, songwriter and singer - and dancer: possibly why he makes such a fascinating subject. In some of his online interviews he shows himself to be highly personable as an intelligent and 'simple' man. Complicated by talent. Ultimately I think it got the better of him - his talent - same with alot of artists in middle age - that in thinking of himself as a supreme artist even so he lacked the education for understanding its ambiguities and increasingly interpreted the music he made as just the superlative of Michael Jackson: the later stuff lacks balance (for the most part). The introduction of endless key changes and upping of the ante (e.g as in Man in the Mirror). Ever more 'superlative' emotional catharses. Increasingly unreal in its personality. Cage rattling 'White' music. Some of the later stuff is good; but even so not as good. |
|