ROYALE WITH CHEESE

Sarko et Ségo








THE MELODIANS--I Could Be King
KING SPORTY--A Year Full Of Sundays
FRANCOISE HARDY--Je N'attends Plus Personne
JACQUES DUTRONC--Je Suis Content
JAMES MCMURTRY--God Bless America
WIRE--French Film Blurred
ALICE DONA--Mon Train De Banlieu
ELIZABETH HARPER--Let Me Take You Out
FRANCOIS--Tour De France
PSAPP--Year Of The Cat
LCD SOUNDSYSTEM--North American Scum
LIL' WAYNE (FEATURING JUELZ SANTANA)--Black Republicans
CUIZINIER (FEATURING TIDO BERMAN)--Seulement Toi
DJ MEHDI--Busy Being Born
FRANCE GALL--Musique
MC SOLAAR--Arkansas
A TRIBE CALLED QUEST--Luck of Lucien
BRAND NUBIAN--One For All
IAN DURY & THE BLOCKHEADS--Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick
THE BRUMMELS--Bof!
MR OIZO--Nazis
UTA--Baudelaire
JACQUELINE TAIEB--7 Heures Du Matin

FOOTBALL RIP

Secular prayer: May Chelsea fail to secure any awards this season. May the Special One leave the Premiership. May West Ham be relegated. May Leeds be relegated too. And may Spurs be rewarded with European football next season.

THE BURKINI IN BRITAIN

Muslim women in swimsuits

CAMPUS CRIMUS

When I moved to the University of Texas at Austin in August 1991 my roommate and I went into a pawn shop to look for a secondhand television, a toaster, and other appliances to help set up our student digs. A big shop assistant comes over to us and says, 'Hi fellas, are y'all lookin' for a gun or a TV?" That was our first experience of Texas retail. We didn't bother going to the firearms counter. In August 1966 a sniper at UT killed 15 people from the University Tower . The CNN, FOX, ABC, CBS, NBC axis is blaming the VT massacre on many factors, though the easy availability of guns is low on the list. Gun lobbyists are saying that if the kids had been allowed to carry weapons on campus they might have saved lives and taken the shooter out before he could have done so much harm. More guns make you more secure, apparently. A surge? I wonder how many more students will now go out and buy guns for their 'protection'. Guns R Us. The shooter was a South Korean with a Green Card. He's lived in the US since 1992 and is technically a Resident Alien. His alien status will doubtless become more emphasised as the networks squeeze every last bit of pus out of the story. The TV movie must be in the works. Producers are probably saying, 'We gotta get an Ashton Kutcher lookalike for the hero in the German class'.

A student gun club a couple of weeks ago
University of Terrorism
Is Rap Racist?

PRAIRIE RAMBLERS--Monkeys Is the Cwaziest People
ALABAMA 3 & GARY LUCAS--Woke Up This Morning (Live)
JOHNNY CASH--Flushed From The Bathroom Of Your Heart
DALE WATSON--I Wish I Was Crazy Again
TANYA TUCKER--Would You Lay With Me (In A Field Of Stone)
DON HO--I Love The Simple Folk
THE REVELS--Dead Man's Stroll (Midnight Stroll)
CLAUDINE LONGET--Lullaby From Rosemary's Baby (Sleep Safe And Warm)
THE FLEETWOODS--Mr. Blue (A Capella Version)
LESLEY GORE--You Don't Own Me
CAROLE KING--School Bells Are Ringing
SHOP ASSISTANTS--I Don't Wanna Be Friends With You
THE VASELINES--Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam
THE DYNAMICS--Murder In The First Degree
LAVICE & COMPANY--Thoughs Were The Days
GRAVEDIGGAZ--1-800 Suicide
CHESSE ROOTS--Rambo Salute
UNKNOWN ARTIST--Jeitili
M.I.A.--Bird Flu (Guns Up Buraka Remix)
SHELLSHOCK--Cheaptalk
BILL EVANS--Peace Piece
SMITH'S SACRED SINGERS--Where We'll Never Grow Old
FIDDLIN' POWERS FAMILY--Old Virginia Reel

SAFE AS HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT

So it goes

Regime change







MUTAMASSIK--Abdel Wahab's 'Zeina' (Occupation Mix)
NMS--Evacuate The White House
LIL WAYNE--Georgia... Bush
J DILLA--The $ (Instrumental)
J DILLA--The $
GHETTO GIRLZ--My Man's Playing Tricks On Me
KID CREOLE & THE COCONUTS--Annie I'm Not Your Daddy (Special Edit)
LUOMO--Wanna Tell
KARIZMA--All Teched Out
TIGA--Burning Down The House
COMMON--New Wave (Playgroup Remix)
DJ 3000--Merchants Of Identity (The Marketplace)
CRASS--Walls (Fun In The Oven)
GLAXO BABIES--Christine Keeler
MISTER FREEDOM--Balls!
BUSDRIVER--Lefty's Lament
KAM--Stereotype
DON CARLOS--Pass Me The Lazer Beam
SERGIO MENDES & BRASIL 66--For What's It's Worth
MERLE HAGGARD & THE STRANGERS--Sing Me Back Home
CIBELLE--London London (featuring Devendra Banhart)

THE QUITTER

I used to read The Beano and 2000 AD and have dabbled in graphic novels off and on. Saw the movie American Splendor but haven't read the book of the comic. Pekar's work is mostly autobiographical but The Quitter is seriously close to the bone. No frills. Dean Haspiel's hard-edged drawings apply black humour to 50s B-movie noir figures and landscapes. This ain't no Sweet Smell of Success though, but a discomfiting memoir that brings you layers of self-loathing, and fesses up to the bad things one does as a youth (like beating up guys for peer cred). Pekar's persistent fear is that he might not make enough money to get by. The young Pekar tends to fuck up in minor ways and loses jobs. The Quitter lends some insight into the tedious casual labour that young people do and then moves on to the lives of working stiffs in offices. The older Pekar is still anxious about paying the bills, providing for partner and daughter, despite some success and cult fame as a comic book auteur. The Quitter's characterisations are sharp and unfussy. It would be easy to blame the parents. But there's no bitterness with the neurosis. Vivid sketches include his downbeat Mom (it's all going to turn to custard, always), lonely ex-Navy cousin who lodges upstairs, and his angry father who thinks everything America is shit compared to the European. No immigration clichés here. The Pekars came to Cleveland from the shtetls of Poland. At times you'll have your head in your hands in despair like Pekar, though you might also gnaw at your cuticles. Music is not quite a saving grace but the love of jazz records and writing about them helps to validate Pekar in a more respectable way than kicking the shit out of other tough nuts in school and the neighbourhood. The Quitter flipped some backpages to melancholia and the crack-ups of mundanity.

READING THESE DAYS

Wax Poetics
Total Chaos

NO REST FOR THE JIHADIS

"My beard's longer than your beard (na na na-na na)"

HELLO SAILOR

Polly Toynbee on Faye Turney
She works hard for the money







JULIE LONDON--Hot Toddy
MIKKI WILCOX--Alright, OK, You Win
KEELY SMITH--A Hard Day's Night
ESTHER PHILLIPS--I'm Getting 'Long Alright
MILLIE JACKSON--Loving Arms
BETTY HARRIS--What'd I Do Wrong
RENALDO DOMINO--Not Too Cool To Cry
SHARON TANDY--Stay With Me
BESSIE BANKS--Try To Leave Me If You Can (I Bet You Can't Do It)
SAM BAKER--Sunny
BOB & GENE--I Can Be Cool
ARETHA FRANKLIN--I Can't Wait To See My Baby's Face
JEAN GRAE--Not The One (DJ Raize & Ski Beatz Remix)
CASS ELLIOT--All For Me
AMY WINEHOUSE--Love Is A Losing Game (Acoustic)
TRACEY THORN--Goodbye Joe
KELLY HOGAN & THE PINE VALLEY COSMONAUTS--Papa Was A Rodeo
DEAN & BRITTA--Words You Used To Say
BRAD MEHLDAU--River Man
IRIS--Song For A Past
POLE--Sylvenstein
DON FRENCH--Lonely Saturday Night
KETTY LESTER--Love Letters

PANTOMIME TERROR

And I've been working like a dawg. Time for an Easter break. I can tell I'm physically and mentally tired when I start to use the word 'interesting' too much in a lecture every time I'm trying to introduce a 'significant' point. Found myself doing that today when talking about 'A Hard Day's Night' in the Popular Music on Screen course. I even attempted some defensive drolery about it with the students (about 90 of the 130+ roll), apologizing for using the word too much and then telling them that it was OK in a lecture but not in their essays.

That was today but yesterday I finished powerpointing the Beatletastic images with a few Warhols, then went to a talk by John Hutnyk who does anthropology and cultural studies at Goldsmiths College at the University of Londinium. John was one of the editors of Dis-orienting Rhythms (1997), a book about the new Asian dance music in the UK which I read religiously just after I finished my PhD in 1996 and was thinking about ways in which to rewrite it into a book. DR marked out a space to share knowledge and debate the British Asian peeps pop culture. That's when 'TranslAsia' was as hep as the Nu Asian Kool or the Asian Underground. Well, there's always a place for a nifty title. I agreed with many of the authors in Dis-orienting Rhythms though I disliked the way some of its politics seemed to ignore issues of musical pleasure and gender and suggested that the only 'worthwhile' British Asian music was the stuff that was clearly anti-colonial, anti-racist and on the barricades. It didn't have many light touches.

I had heard John speak about Asian Dub Foundation and Fun-da-mental in a Calcutta (now Kolkata) 1998 conference about globalization and music and I've read a fair bit of his other work. His talk yesterday was called Pantomime Terror and took place in ALR5 in the Architecture Building which is one of the worst designed buildings on our fair campus. John is working toward a way of narrating the 'war of terror' and the paranoia in Londinium using the detritus of popular culture and the different inflections of radical chic. Walter Benjamin, Michael Taussig and James Clifford in Adorno dub stylee. Fundamental are in panto mode when they dress up with their keffiyahs and pose for photographs, though they are trying to do something different to Madonna when she dons Che's beret for a record cover. John suggested a difference but didn't elaborate how we judge that difference. Is it just a matter of political utility that distinguishes this type of semiotic play/warfare and its value from this or that po-mo articulation? We must choose certain truths and rights, as Johnny Osbourne would sing: "Render your arms and not your garments. The Truth is there for who have eyes to see". I'd like to believe it but cannot pray to this claim five times a day. It's true but not true.

John's powerpoint presentation included images of the July 7 bus after the top of it was blown off, a posed Fun-Da-Mental pic from The Guardian July 2006 that seemed to juggle all the signifiers of the London transport terror like backpacks, the St George's Cross, rightwing soccer clichés, and the ubiquitous double-decker bus. He screened a rollicking Fun-da-mental video for their Cookbook DIY song about making dirty bombs in an Islamist bedsit and bigger bombs in US military installations. Cher appeared in Che's beret, Kylie in her Che T-shirt. John's working on a related project about trinkets and lefty memorabilia like Chairman Maos and the mass reproduction of Che. Motorcycle diarists of the world unite.

John returned to the Arabian Nights and imagined Sheherezad telling her stories night after night because they might save her from torture at Gitmo. This clicked with my own feelings about the absurdities of the current political moment and a hunch that fabulist forms of expression such as surrealism, situationism, science fiction and reworks of populist modes might have some mileage for telling stories that a million documentaries, news and current affairs segments cannot. We are after all living in the age of John Stewart 's show, which is proud of its status as the best fake news. I think we can give magic realism a bit of a rest though. But you can't deny the power of exotica to get people fired up.

All the playlists are my way of working through the craziness of what it means to be 'Terrormade' using muzik. To my distant ears Sarf London dubstep captures paranoid Londonistan better than any other music. Donning a rabbit's head or becoming a comic book terrorist with a pirate eyepatch is a way to talk back to the nonsense. Hollow po-mo irony maybe but if you don't snigger at it you're gonna go crazy like Gnarls Barkley, probably. Nothing that new about these fictions and rhetorical tactics. Maybe it's just that combination of a sense of failure with my academese and the need to use a different voice. The 'Guantanamo, Here We Come' essay on the Smiths' album Strangeways Here We Come was a start for me. Still waiting to hear back on the first draft which still needs a lot of work but has some good bits. At this early stage of a critical-autobiographical Islamopoppy project, it was reassuring to find someone looking for other ways to represent. Ended up enjoying more than a few drinks, vittals and rapping with John and Tara and other post-seminarians at the Mezze Bar. Cheers John.

ADAM'S BIRTHDAY

Twas Adam's birthday shindig on Saturday night. Had a good time shooting the proverbial with a bunch of folks. It's rare for me to get time to talk about music with people apart from Nick who does The Basement radio show with me. So it was fun to chat with Jessie, Alan and David, in particular. Came home a little after midnight and watched DVDs of Friends With Money and Volver, both excellent. It's been a while since I had a satisfying double bill. Anyway, here's a swiftly made comp of things I've been listening to, mainly downloaded from audio blogs, that I put together a few minutes before Adam's do.

FRANCE GALL--Soyons Sages
RED GARLAND TRIO & RAY BARRETTO--Manteca
SERGE GAINSBOURG--The Horse
RX--My Generation
RUBY ANDREWS--Everybody Saw You
MODERN JAZZ QUARTET--Odds Against Tomorrow
LORD RHABURN--Disco Connection
LES 5 GENTLEMEN--LSD Ou Les Metamorphoses De Margaret Steinway
YELLOW POWER--Hai Samurai (Pilooski Edit)
STEINSKI--Feelin' Bitchy Monologue Medley

MELODICALLY!

I once saw Barney tentatively play some minimal melodica in an early New Order gig (soon after Ian Curtis hung himself). But nothing beats the melodica maestro Augustus Pablo AKA Horace Swaby. Soul Syndicate backing. Earl Chinna Smith on guitar. 1986.