Category: Radio & Music

Meg just threw me a list of songs with questionable lyrics that she found on the web. Songs – presumably – that people have decided not to play during the current events. Which possibly explains why everyone feels so suffocated. Part of me thinks that some of these songs should be being played. Why can’t John Lennon’s Imagine be heard? It’s message should be more true now than at any other time, surely? And “Walk Like An Egyptian”? What possible reason could there be for not playing that? [lyrics]. And while I understand why it’s not being played, I desperately need to hear REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” at the moment. There has to be some release for the anxiety that seems to be building again.

Paul Simon: Graceland It’s 1986. I’m fourteen years old. I’ve had a few albums bought for me before, but I’m basically illiterate when it comes to popular music. I’m living in a village of eighty people, ten miles away from my nearest friend. My brother is one year old. I spend most of my time in my room – reading and listening to the radio. The outside world seems a hundred thousand miles away.

One day I buy Graceland. Essentially it’s the first album I ever really bought myself. And I got it because I’d heard ‘You Can Call Me Al’ on the radio. And I’d liked it. In many ways it set the tone for the rest of my teenage years – thoughtful before my time, disconnected from deep disturbing bodily urges, unsettled and slightly jaded.

There are a hundred times I can remember involving the album. I played it until the tape died. Then I waited a couple of years and bought the CD. It was an album that my mother listened to with me in her Vauxhall Astra on the way into school on frosty winter mornings, my legs only recently out of grey short-trousers. It was the album that played when Glyn, Simon and I wandered around the south of England in my rusty yellow Polo, when I was eighteen. As I get older I get less up-tight, less nervous. And Graceland grows with me.

“Over the mountain, down in the valley, lives a former talk show host. Everybody knows his name. He says there’s no doubt about it, It was the myth of fingerprints. I’ve seen them all and man, they’re all the same.”

What’s the most important album of your life?

From London’s Time Out Magazine: Feb 14-21 2001 No.1591 (presented without comment).

“I’m writing this week’s column under my hip new pseudonym, Thin Cloudy. So when I say that I want to incite acts of violence against Eminem, I hope you’ll understand that I’m being ironic. And when I describe how I’d like to force him to suck my dick before slitting his throat open, watching him bleed to death and then dumping his body in a river, I hope you’ll appreciate how clever I’m being. And while I’m hiding behind this hip new persona of mine, I might as well tell you that it isn’t just blond white boy rappers I hate. I also hate the black ones. Niggers, I think they’re called.”

“Oops, sorry! Hope I haven’t offended anyone’s delicated liberal sensibilities. After all, it’s one thing to rap about sexual violence or joke about murdering homosexuals, quite another insult an already beleaguered minority. This, presumably, is why Eminem is so feted by the music establishment, and defended by clever music critics – at the end of the day, it’s only bitches and faggots he’s having a pop at.” [Paul Burston]

I’ve been reading this really interesting article at Hack the Planet: “Route around the labels”, which describes a form of voluntary payment scheme for MP3s. To be honest, I’ve read it a couple of times and some of the technical aspects escape me (I’m tired, OK?).

Anyway, I was thinking about it, and it occurred to me that I couldn’t see why this system couldn’t be adapted to preserve copyright integrity and get people to pay for music. I know a lot of people don’t like this idea, but in the whole Napster vs Metallica debate, I have to confess I think I’m somewhere in the middle.

Let me go into a little detail about my idea (which isn’t that different from the one at Hack the Planet, I fear). Imagine a company that sells/distributes decent, trusted encryption software – say for example PGP. If they wanted to, they could produce a PGP enabled MP3 player, which decrypted on the fly. The individual puts their public “PGMP3” key into a PGMP3 server. Then when they select an MP3 they want to download, it is encrypted according to their public key, sent to them and can only be listened to on the PGMP3 player which contains their private key.

FAQs

• What if you want to listen to them on more than one computer?
  As long as you have your own private key, you can put it on whatever piece of software/players you like. However since the MP3 is encoded using your public key, ONLY software/players with your private key in them will be able to play it.
• What’s to stop people disseminating private keys?
  You make the private key like the PIN number of a bank account – the private key is generated for you when you sign up to buy music from a record company. This is attached to your user name, which uses that 1-Click nonsense to allow you to buy the music you want. The crucial part is that you have to give a credit card number when you get the private key and you can only buy stuff using it as well. Thus if your private key is gone, anyone can buy music using your credit card. That’ll discourage people.

I mean – there are probably considerable technical issues I’ve neglected here, but it seems like a pretty reasonable and basic idea to me. Opinions?

Having thought about it carefully, I have decided that lists like “the best albums of the 90s” are mildly pointless (if endlessly diverting). But that doesn’t matter surely? They are interesting exercises, and so without apology or explanation here is an extremely long list of names – which frankly is easier than a proper post about “World Hunger” or “Macs Versus PCs (Which One Will I Buy?)”. I call this phallogocentric/anal classification: “My 100 Favourite Albums Ever”:

1. Belle and Sebastian – Tigermilk
2. Tricky – Maxinquaye
3. David Bowie – Hunky Dory
4. Moby – Play
5. The Smiths – Strangeways Here We Come
6. PJ Harvey – To Bring You My Love
7. Morrissey – Bona Drag
8. Pixies – Surfer Rosa
9. Belly – Star
10. Pixies – Doolittle
11. Pixies – Bossanova
12. Portishead – Dummy
13. The Bangles – Different Light
14. Jeff Buckley – Grace
15. Kristin Hersh – Hips and Makers
16. Elastica – Elastica
17. The Beatles – Abbey Road
18. Pixies – Trompe Le Monde
19. Beck – Mutations
20. David Bowie – Heroes
21. Morcheeba – Big Calm
22. Madonna – Ray of Light
23. Julian Cope – Floored Genius (The Best Of)
24. Leonard Cohen – The Future
25. The Breeders – Pod
26. Hole – Live Through This
27. Nirvana – Unplugged in New York
28. Eg and Alice – 24 Years of Hunger
29. Air – Moon Safari
30. Eurythmics – Savage
31. Leonard Cohen – I’m Your Man
32. Tracy Chapman – Tracy Chapman
33. Suzanne Vega – 99.9F
34. Throwing Muses – The Real Ramona
35. The Smiths – Meat is Murder
36. Depeche Mode – Violator
37. Violent Femmes – Violent Femmes
38. Sean Lennon – Into the Sun
39. Beck – Midnite Vultures
40. The Cardigans – Gran Turismo
41. Jeff Buckley – Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk
42. Fight Club – Sound Track
43. Frank Black – Frank Black
44. Morrissey – Viva Hate
45. Morrissey – Vauxhall and I
46. Radiohead – The Bends
47. The Stone Roses – The Stone Roses
48. Paul Simon – Graceland
49. Rolling Stones – Hot Rocks
50. Nirvana – In Utero
51. Drugstore – White Magic For Lovers
52. Mazzy Star – She Hangs Brightly
53. Pixies – at the BBC
54. The Bangles – Everything
55. Curve – Doppelganger
56. Nirvana – Nevermind
57. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong – Ella and Louis Again
58. Sneaker Pimps – Becoming X
59. The Breeders – Last Splash
60. David Bowie – Ziggy Stardust
61. Leftfield – Leftism
62. Radiohead – OK Computer
63. David Bowie – Diamond Dogs
64. Juliana Hatfield – Hey Babe
65. Sly and the Family Stone – Best Of
66. Out of Sight – Soundtrack
67. The Smiths – The Queen is Dead
68. The Rebirth of Cool – Phive
69. The Smiths – Hatful of Hollow
70. David Arnold – The James Bond Project
71. The Smiths – The Smiths
72. Fat Boy Slim – You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
73. South Park – Bigger Longer Uncut – Soundtrack
74. Leonard Cohen – Various Positions
75. Reservoir Dogs – Soundtrack
76. The Smiths – The World Won’t Listen
77. Jeff Buckley – Mystery White Boy
78. Throwing Muses – University
79. Blur – Modern Life is Rubbish
80. Cocteau Twins – Heaven or Las Vegas
81. Afghan Whigs – Black Love
82. David Bowie – Station to Station
83. Blur – Parklife
84. Morcheeba – Who Can You Trust?
85. Suede – Coming Up
86. Eels – Beautiful Freak
87. Julian Cope – Peggy Suicide
88. Morrissey – Kill Uncle
89. Super Furry Animals – Guerrilla
90. Filth and the Fury – Soundtrack
91. Cowboy Junkies – The Caution Horses
92. Suede – Suede
93. Primal Scream – Exterminator
94. Placebo – Placebo
95. Blondie – The Best of Blondie
96. David Bowie – The Man Who Sold The World
97. Belle and Sebastian – Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant
98. Bjork – Homogenic
99. Belle and Sebastian – If You’re Feeling Sinister
100. Beck – Odelay