ALBUM REVIEW: Kid Reflux's Summer Mix 2010.2

In other good news, heard some people calling the Yeah Yeah Yeahs a riot grrrl band.

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Side A: 'Prepare To Lose Your Dignity'

(envoi, 'Act 1: Clarksonomics')

1. Call Me Mr Demolition Man - Hot Club de Paris
[Radio 1 skit]
2. My Eyes Adored You - [eek. lowkey soul...Betty Everett?]
3. Movies Of Myself - Rufus W
4. I Love You Like A Madman - Wave Pictures
5. [cut to] Boss Hoss - Sonics
6. [cut to] Breaking Up - Ronettes
7. [Why Don't You Leave Me Alone? - some pop-grrl...Raincoats backed by Ian Dury?]
--> [20secs of some exemplar 60s popchorus]

Act 2: Dachshund

8. Beeper - The Count & Sinden
9. - [some really smart 8bitsy electrons]
10. Un bel di vedremo - Puccini & Callas
11. Do Your Thing - Basement Jaxx
12. Hellebore - Safetyword
13. A Clean Break - Talking Heads
[cut]



Act 1 plays very nicely into what's become my comfort zone of late [souly/guitary/lyrically reflective], dunno about yours.

Callas really is stranded here (even if the plot of Madame Butterfly hadn't already made her so); stuck between some electro niceness and the mighty JAXX.

"He will call "Butterfly" from the distance
I without answering
Stay hidden
A little to tease him,
A little so as to not die."

Side B: 'As I Ride To Victory'

Act 3: Spaceshuttle full o cum (set controls for the heart of the cum)

14. 22 Two's - Jay-Z
15. Ch-Ching - Lady Sovereign
16. [some boy/girl back-and-fore grime]
17. [cut] [some heavy busy club with Clangers melody. Instrumental but grunts]
18. We Are Prostitutes - Cool World
19. [cut] [some nice beatsy hang-drum stuff]
20. [cut] HEARTBEATS - The Knife (Hot Chip remix!?)
21. [some rounded mindtrap]


Act 4: Fragment (Consider Revising)

22. Wrestlers - Hot Chip
23. Something Good 08 - Utah Saints
24. Crips - Ratatat
25. We Share Our Mother's Health ([heavy] Remix) - Knife
26. [cut] [womp!]
--> [some weird Daft Punk-sampling]
27. [cut] What's It Gonna Be? (dubstepped) - HTwo0
28. [violent cut] You're Wonderin Now - Specials
[out]


Talk about hip-hop's theatricality; MCs make the world much more interesting than it is in the course of trying to be "real." Like here (17.); Mariah Davis reads off a line setting up Jay-Z as "freestylin" his following flawless, muscular flow. It's so blatantly bullshit that it's charming. As is her social exhortation to the fadeout... (Nerd note: she sounds a lot like AZ, who opened up Illmatic.)

A good, if obvious, point from the Guardian;

"The press stopped calling Dizzee a rapper after that [Glastonbury]; he was now a pop star. But what had really changed was not Dizzee but people's taste."

Which is just a reminder that "pop" is the most mutable and inclusive (though basically unexperimental) of the bullshit familienähnlichkeiten categories we call "genres". Purists can and do cry "co-option!" and "dilution!", but there's no stopping it, and nor should you aim to (unless, I dunno, you fundamentally hate most people.)

When "jazz-pop" or "punk-pop" or "grime-pop" gets on the go, you can scream about its aesthetic inferiority to the source musics as much as you like - and you might even be right - but a thing's being shit has rarely ever been reason enough to kill it. Unless you want to start thinking in terms of distracting from that which is really important in life as a crime, which is I think, a disease.


NB: This Glee thing is interesting in at least one way; it is pop-pop, the 'dilution', if you like, of something already a pure solvent.