Eminem

Eminem – Not Afraid

Comparisons with Sex and the City probably don’t come thick and fast for Eminem. But think about it – both gained notoriety around the end of the ‘90s for the blunt manner in which they discussed boobs, bits, and the unspeakable things they wanted to do to their lovers (weeing on/killing them). However, these days it’s pretty difficult to locate the faintest whisper of their early brazilliantness amidst the mires of appalling clichés they both wallow in. Let’s list some of the hackneyed lyrical offences on Eminem’s comeback single, ‘Not Afraid’…

(1) “I’m doing this for me” – If a band ever says this in an interview (see also: “basically, we just love playing live”), THEY ARE TELLING YOU PORKIES. It’s code for, “I know my record’s total bobbins, so here’s a handy disclaimer that I can bandy about when all you mean ol’ critics poop on it from a great height”. Or, as in Slim’s case, it’s supposed to mean using the music to really work through your problems, maaaaan, which is a sure sign that the humble listener is in for an odyssey of self-indulgence.

(2) “Yeah, it’s been a ride / I guess I had to go to that place to get to this one / Now some of you might still be in that place…” – Urgh, life is a ride. Life is a fucking rollercoaster. Now, considering that this song is supposed to see Eminem back on the straight and narrow (the “path” of right that comes after the “ride” of wrong, if you will), talking in the kind of mumbo jumbo that only dribbles from your slack lips when you’re pupil-dilatingly high isn’t really going to help your case. All this vague piddle about places reminds me of that old stoned chestnut: “woah, but how do I know that the place I’m in is the same place as what you’re in and that what I see as blue is what you see is blue…”, passes out in front of South Park, end scene.

(3) “This fucking black cloud still follows me around” – Congrats, Eminem, you pass Pathetic Fallacy 101.

(4) “I shoot for the moon, but I’m still gazing at stars” – If this rapping lark doesn’t work out, there’s always inspirational slogan teacup manufacturing. ‘Mathers’ Motivational Mugs’, perhaps. It’s got a ring to it.

<<<And now, gird your loins, for the chorus is naught but pure platitude:>>>

(5) “I’m not afraid to take a stand / Everybody come take my hand / We’ll walk this road together, through the storm / Whatever weather, cold or warm / Just let you know that, you’re not alone / Holla if you feel that you’ve been down the same road.”

No matter how puerile and terrible, Eminem is always better when he comes back with a comedy single that riles everyone from the Pope to the glorious Kingdom of Pop, rather than srs business such as this. There was so much potential for a hamfisted lampooning of 2010s culture this time: Justin Bieber, autotune, Michael Jackson actually being dead, ferchrissakes. Instead we have this god-awful sub-guidance counselor hippy dippy shit over a beat so rudimentary that it’d sound cheap on Channel U. At least when the SATC ladies get old they can claim to be reprazentin’ hot flushes across the land. Clapped out rappers just sound embarrassing.

James Yuill – On Your Own (Summer Camp remix)

If you’re going to call a song ‘On Your Own’, it’s got to have a LOT of emotional chutzpah on its side. It either has to make you go, “FUCK YEAH I’m free and it’s AMAZING and I am an INDEPENDENT, STRONG PERSON!”  or on the flipside, it’s got to be so heart-wrenchingly miserable that you realise it’s the perfect reflection of your dejection and status as a pariah of romance, into which you will gaze wistfully before getting blinded by the sheer force of your own self-pity. Unfortunately, James Yuill’s original packs the punch of neither – it starts with a great thump and grind that suggests it might be a liberating dancefloor moment of the “FUCK YEAH!” variety, but then his voice comes in and the whole thing gets a bit tame and repetitive. Then there’s the outro, which really labours the point of how alone you are (“you’re on, you’re on your own” – yeah, cheers, James…), which is a lot like your best mate trying to comfort you after a break-up by saying that she never liked Derek anyway (when his name was Michael). It probably didn’t help that I listened to the Summer Camp remix before the original (and possibly a few too many times), but it is SO MUCH warmer and lovelier, and conjures a whole different kind of sadness. Elizabeth’s sweet tones somehow make it sound younger, injecting a bit of hope into the loneliness – you just know that this wily gal will be just fine. As SC are wont to do with remixes (see also: their remix of Active Child’s ‘Voice Of An Old Friend’), they’ve pretty much rewritten the whole song, this time as a paean to the delightful Charles Ryder of Brideshead Revisited. The sample of his plummy tones – “I felt so drunk that I’d almost begun to believe that the whole of yesterday evening was a dream” – seems like really quite an appropriate way to sum up the lovely impossibility of the fake nostalgia that Summer Camp sing about. Quite charming.

Everything Everything – Schoolin’

Pop’s often talked about as a factory, making Stock, Aitken, Waterman, Cathy Dennis et al the clever clogs scientists in search of creating the perfect ditty. It’s not hard to figure out the algorithms behind their craft – catchy verse to the power of ball-bustingly good chorus over equal measures of sauce, charm and grace. ‘Schoolin’’ contains all of these whilst simultaneously defying and bettering all known pop formulae, and yet I still can’t quite put my finger on how – like the meaning of life or something (which I think shirley means that Everything Everything are the meaning of life, a belief system I am more than happy to subscribe to). Quite often it sounds as though it’s about to explode into something huge, but then someone presses the restart button just in time, making it start and splutter like a Peugeot 106 with a dodgy clutch and scattershot alarm system. As ever, it’s totally impossible to hear what Jonathan Everything is saying, but the fine SarahGolde0 of YouTube fame has made an excellent stab at deciphering the lyrics in this here video:

Curiously, it is the second single of the week to feature someone talking about dicking the earth – Eminem rapped, “He’s got the urge / To pull his dick from the dirt and fuck the universe,” whilst those Everything Everything chaps, fond of rudery as they are, sing, “I learn dick about earth.” I don’t think there’s anything to conclude about this, other than that I’d advise you never to hold hands with a boy who expresses a fondness for such filthbaggery. The impudence continues as he sings, “I’ve got myself a fire hydrant with more tyrant and watery blast than all of my past,” and if that ain’t a hint to the fact that he’d like to be the one to extinguish the fire in your loins, then I don’t know what is.

Tracey Thorn – Why Does The Wind?

And so to an ode to drafty old emotions by one Tracey Thorn, whose heart is chilled by wind when she looks into your eyes. Now this isn’t Tracey’s fault at all, but I’d read a lot of really very good things about her latest album before listening to it – that she sings about the grown up side of love in a really clever, sophisticated and funny way, kind of getting her ’69 Love Songs’ on by exploring the possibility and potential of the romantical ditty. Unlike Stephin Merritt, however, she fails to inject a great deal of charm or wit into ‘Why Does The Wind?’’s look at the comings and goings of fancy, which makes more like the tiresome tropes of a women’s magazine sung over the top of some appropriately breezy (and quite dull) synths and violins. Given that she’s dealing with supposedly “adult” themes and the tribulations of Serious Relationships, some might argue that as an unmarried dame, I just don’t understand what she’s going through. But that’s bunk – arguments about people not “getting” music because they’re too old or young, or born in the wrong period, are ridiculous and apologetic. And besides, Low, Arcade Fire, Cocteau Twins and more have proven that becoming a smug married is no barrier to writing excellent songs on the subject.

Veronica Falls – Beachy Head

It looks about as easy as 1, 2, 3 to form a lo/bro fi/surf/scuzz band, especially after watching the video to ‘Beachy Head’: take two chords, some oversized sunglasses, pudding bowl haircuts, film your whole video through Hipstamatic, and fake attitude by standing around looking scathing. Voila. My friend Leah and I were going to form such a band called Frolic Acid (if you steal our name, I kill you), and the fact that I can’t play guitar would have been no barrier to realizing that dream – we just don’t have cool enough haircuts. Anyway. After recently yawning through Spectrals slumping through the most uninspired surf rock pastiche I’ve ever seen, I swore I’d never listen to anything that didn’t possess pristine, crisp fretwork and tuneful singing ever again, but Veronica Falls might have made me change my mind. ‘Beachy Head’ might not exactly be a cat amongst the lo-fi fishes, but given Veronica Falls’ menacing prowl, you definitely wouldn’t say that to their face.

Joe Worricker – We Hug In Bed

Love them as we do, Rough Trade have made some serious balls ups with new signings this past year. Rox proved too dull to even grace my dad’s coffee table, Wilder sound like any old mildly insouciant electro band, and then there’s this chap, Joe Worricker. His voice has been likened to that of Arthur Russell, but in reality he sounds more like one of the blander members of The Feeling with a chronic head cold.

Johnny Borrell

July 9th 2009

The white drainpipes are gone. After nigh on three years of watching Johnny Borrell strut the stage in white perineum-hugging denim so tight it made Freddie Mercury’s ensemble from Live Aid look positively clandestine, Razorlight’s enviably cheekboned frontman has retired his trademark britches for a rather more sombre black pair.

Once indie’s resident rent-a-gob, declaring himself a genius and “better than Dylan” (an assertion he’s since blamed on the music press for coaxing such hyperbole from its subjects), the only words he mumbles to Eden’s extraordinarily white, middle class crowd are an unconvincing, “Thank you Eden Project, this is great. Can we play here every night?” Whilst Carl Dalemo leaps around and scissor kicks like a one man Busted tribute act, Borrell refrains from scaling stacks, taking a lady’s hand and singing into her eyes, or doing much other than yelping and trembling broodingly. Their set’s heavily laden with material from their first two records, which is typically electrifying and punchy (new drummer David Sullivan-Kaplan certainly pulls his weight) but the four new ones they do play amount to resemble an act in the a very bloated Razorlight: The Musical. Borrell affects an American drawl for ‘North London Trash’ (the London yin to Nickelback’s ‘Rockstar’ yang?), stalking the stage with a wearily nasal tone, ‘Wire To Wire’ drags on about five minutes too long and he overacts heartbreak tremendously during encore number ’60 Thompson’, whose lyrics sound rather more fitted to Meatloaf. The band seem to have realised that there’s no denying that the material from ‘Slipway Fires’ is listless dad-rock, and so play it with the air of an intentionally theatrical homage to the genre; an act or a tribute, rather than with the self-assured gusto that permeates their earlier material.

Being one of only seven men in the world to have graced the cover of British Vogue, it’s possible that Borrell’s been paying close attention to Scott Schumann’s influential style blog, The Sartorialist, and his predilection for elegantly tapered dark trousers. But given the critical panning of ‘Slipway Fires’, the failure of their latest single to scrape the Top 40 (it came out in January, way before such disasters could even be blamed on Michael Jackson’s posthumous chart insurgence), their playing only four new numbers in a seventeen song set, it seems that in the spirit of gold old recession thriftiness, the white trousers are off being fashioned into a surrender flag of sorts.

Kasabian - image by Gareth Lloyd

July 4, 2009

For thousands of years, the heated debate between creationists and those of us with bloody common sense has raged; is Darwin’s Theory of Evolution the reason we’re all here living and breathing, or was woman created from Adam’s rib and let loose in a garden of riches only to cause humankind’s eternal condemnation? (If you’re having trouble deciding, you might not want to read much more). However, tonight at Cornwall’s majestic Eden Project, a surreal and disturbing rewriting of the time/space/belief continuum is occurring as Neanderthals invade the verdant former clay pit to see Kasabian become the least fitting band to grace a stage since John Mayer at MJ’s funeral. Crowd highlights include a chap wearing a t-shirt wondering “Is it necrophilia if it’s still twitching?”, blokes comparing how many midgets they know (two apiece, apparently) over their respective six pint trays of cider, and hordes of delightful types dropping empty beer cups and fag ends in the sweet pea patches. If we’re searching hard for silver linings, at least they’re ignoring The Hours, whose dulling tones make it seem plausible that Kasabian might actually provide some sort of musical relief.

Please, someone pinch me. As Kasabian strut on stage seemingly in order of self-perceived importance, the only relief they could offer might be to an stratospherically obese person thinking about getting back into exercise, as they demand that we put our hands in the air for the first of more than 20 times in a 15 song set. The command constantly spills from Tom Meighan’s lips as if he has attention-seeking Tourettes, joining his messianic spread arms in an hubristic display that’s embarrassing to watch. They boom on with ‘Underdog’, the opener of West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum, which psyches up the crowd with pithy sentiments like “lost in a moment” and easy to grasp expansive concepts such as “sky” and “future”. Profound. The empty sentiment omnipresent in their songs forms a vicious circle live – they sing about “doing it for the people”, who in turn respond with unabated glee (throwing nine pint cups per minute due to the wanton abandon that Kasabian provoke), spurring Meighan’s foolhardy ego on. It makes pooping back and forth forever look appealing…

By second number, ‘Shoot The Runner’, it becomes pretty clear that this is The Tom Meighan Show – the lesser band members know their place, occasionally twitching like press puppets yet utterly unresponsive to the crowd, without a hint of interaction or intuition between them. Whenever it’s not Meighan’s turn to take the limelight – during an instrumental part or song led by Serge’s nasal tones – he disappears offstage. You can only hope it’s a sign of inner band strife that’ll cause them to split within a few years.

“This place is fucking like Tracy Island,” contributes Meighan by way of the obligatory wonderment bands must show at playing in front of the two space age biomes. “Like Thunderbirds.” Jolly glad you cleared that up for us, cheers. He misses his cue to come in on ‘Processed Beats’ yet struts on smug and self-satisfied, asking for hands in the air again, then tells us we’re “fucking empire!” (no prizes for guessing what comes next). A trumpeter appears for the mildly Baltic influenced ‘Where Did All The Love Go’, which has all the cultural nous of a football fan who’s been to Latvia once for a match, ‘Thick As Thieves’ is a note for note rip off of The Beatles’ ‘I’m Only Sleeping’, but the crowd’s swaying, men are topless and hugging and there’s a thousand mobile phones in the air. What’s wrong with people?! ‘Fire’ has the tuneless football terrace roar of 90% of their songs, a technique defended by a bloke next to us – “they don’t need words, their songs are so fucking brilliant that they can really tug your heartstrings without them y’know?” Mm. By ‘Club Foot’, Meighan’s caught on to exactly the same thing, so doesn’t even bother articulating the lyrics. To avoid the crush for the car parks, we escape the encore, but hear the notes of a cod ‘You Got The Love’ cover float up past the visitor centre (first line: “sometimes I feel like putting my hands up in the air”), the crowd roaring along euphorically. Debate over monkeys and clay figures aside, this is a cultural devolution that must be fought, defeated and crushed.