A New List From The NME, and some thoughts about pop-hackery.

If you want to feel awful homicidal awful quick click here, read this, and then read the comments.

It's not the actual list that's the problem. The list is the usual mix of shit, shinola and gold you'd expect. Terribly predictable no.1 but hey-ho. The problem is the writing & subbing of the text for each track. I mean, these are meant to be the greatest songs of their generation - does the writing communicate that sense of importance? Does the writing make you feel as excited, as bound up,  as 'Caught Out There', 'Around The World', 'Glory Box' or 'Unfinished Sympathy' do? In fact - good example, let's check out what's said about no.31, 'Unfinished Sympathy' a record that shudders like an iceberg through your heart, always swells like a fresh new bruise, the turning of personal torment, of the battle between freedom and love, fearlessness & loneliness into a whole new universal noir. It's a record you never forget for the rest of your life because so often in your life yr gonna need to hear it again. That need, that addiction, how does the NME in 2012 sum it up?

#31 "Trip hop progenitor ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ is really a slick piece of hip-hop soul blessed with Shara Nelson’s broken bawl and some muted beats and cowbells from 3-D, Mushroom and Daddy G. It came out under the more politically sensitive band name of Massive during the first Gulf War and ensured the collective remained the urban sophisticate’s artist of choice for the next decade."

So, this is what music writing should do now. Place, contextualise, describe, commercially delineate. All well and good (although wtf 'urban sophisticate' means I rilly don't know) and utterly pitifully inadequate to the record itself. And if music writing keeps doing this, keeps on - in terror of the poetic and fear of the 'pretentious' - simply comprehending music and never rhapsodizing, keeps on worrying about filing without ever losing its mind, it will continue to lag behind the form it seeks to circumscribe, will continue to be so much chip-wrapping for its readers and its writers to forget almost instantaneously. How could you ever remember such lumpen prose, such cliche-ridden mediocrity, let alone recall the names responsible? Where does this writing send you? Is there ANYTHING in each write up of each track that in any way has a reason to exist, a reason to be, a reason to take up those pixels? Would the piece have in any way suffered from just being the youtube links? Would any piece in the NME online suffer from just being made of youtube links? Faced with new technologies that enable everyone to be a critic what do you do? Make criticism look like everything else, or emphasise its unique posture, its antique desire not just to reflect but to CHANGE the way pop is thought about?

#72 "Tjinder Singh penned this track about the luminous cinematic power of Bollywood actress Asha Bhosle. As it stood, it was an absolutely pleasant slice of indie pop dreaminess. "

So, this is what music writing should do now. Be factually innaccurate (Asha Bhosle was a singer, never an actress), and have the ungainly ugliness of expression more suited to a college assignment, an exam, than music writing. It reads as if music writing is actually a painful, unpleasant process for those doing it, the annoying production of actual stuff that unfortunately is still attached to the real job of connecting, networking, partying and self-promoting. These are writers surely inspired by no-one, and consequently it's impossible to hear a human voice emerging, or see an effort involved in finding that voice. Just the mechanical regurgitation of acceptable cliches, the defeated tone of those pushed around and cowed by the biz, the absolute dead-end determination to 'appeal' as widely as possible, to never use a word someone might have to look up, to never say anything that could in any way lodge in anyone's mind any longer than it takes to read it. A downright FEAR of the new idea and the dwindling-readership it might alienate, a terrified scurrying cowardly retreat into the lukewarm arms of cliche and staleness and imprecision.

#10 " . . . rallying call against the rank hideousness of US society. It's a flame built on Tom Morello’s iconic, white-hot riff as Zack de la Rocha pours on the gasoline, taunting American forces with rhymes about racism and the Ku Klux Klan"

That language, that painfully half-witted mix of limp hyperbole and semi-erect bromide serves to render every writer for the modern mainstream music press anonymous, unidentifiable, monotone & monochrome. We're constantly told that readers don't want flouncy writers anymore, don't want imagination, purple prose, poetic license, just want THE FACTS. But what's shoved at readers are facts in the most withered, spineless fashion possible, to the point where it's only natural that those readers constantly wonder what earns the writers the right to pass judgement, what separates THEM from US? The fatal error the music press have been committing for nearly two decades now is in failing to realise it's actually commercially insane to reduce a body of staff to a unified, numb voice of one-ness, that what ANY reader wants from the music press is writing that reflects the music's variety AND excess AND concision. For pop writing to be as entertaining as pop it's got to be diverse but the writing being put out there, the writers that are paid, are almost indistinguishable from each other, much like the middling musical mulch those writers spend most of their time boosting. Hence the falling ABCs, the terror, the present/future role for the music press mapped out as mere capsule-review lubrication of commerce. All stemming from two things, a massive condescending underestimation of music fans, and the entirely fucked-up motivations behind those who want in on the music media.

#6: "Coming on like a twin of ‘Live Forever’, Noel Gallagher’s no-nonsense lyrics, a typically bolshy delivery from “our kid” and a guitar riff which sweetly echoed George Harrison’s ‘My Sweet Lord’ added up to the very first Oasis classic. ‘Supersonic’ was effortless in its spewing forth of Manc cool, all self-confident swagger and utterly accomplished musicianship"

If the writers seem indifferent as to whether their words mean anything or not, then why should the readers give a monkeys if their own comments rarely extend beyond 'wank list, not enuf Oasis why isn't wonderwall in there'. Idiots have always writ to the music press, it's the way I started, and when I used to edit the letters page in the half of the inkies I worked for yup there were plenty of numbnutted barely-literate cunts telling me to 'take my black hip-hop shit elsewhere' or complaining about writers going OTT on something they thought was just wank. Ever thus - trouble is now, no model's being provided by the writers of possible ways of thinking and writing about pop - just an endlessly banal slew of platitudes, dying metaphors, meaning approaching absolute zero. Comes from talking down to the readership, the seeping middle-class assumption that any group as wide as a 'readership' needs things dumbing down, simplifying to the point of irrelevance. Where is the writing that speaks across to the readership, across the table, across the room, across the tracks and divisions to illuminate new ideas? Spiked, knocked out, or worse - not even thought of anymore. Reason? Because the WRONG FKN PEOPLE want to be music journalists, beavering hustlers and networkers, passionate ambassadors for their own needy inclusion in da biz, people so damn obsessed with getting their foot in the door they haven't figured out if they have anything more than fuck-all to say, and couldn't care less how revoltingly commonplace is the way they express that fuck-all. Style-less automatons of triteness and humbug and horseshit that criminally WASTE your time, and don't even give you a laff in doing so.

E.G, read this interview , and then this interview with professional wanksnap, Hamish McBain, who works for the NME

Two quotes sing out here: "It makes it more challenging, to see how you can still make it exciting. It’s challenging for everyone – it’s a transitional period. It’s exciting in that nobody really knows what to do, and it’s exciting at the NME going to a meeting and instead of saying “right, who are we going to put on the cover?”, it’s “how are we going to put them on the cover?”. How do you make it interesting?"

And: "Tenacity is the key, really."

"How do you make it interesting"? For starters let's end the age of the pitch, the angle, the wacky juxtaposition, the let's take (insert band) to (insert incongruous location) lazyness of modern editorial. If your writers are interesting and freakish enough (not gonna happen if the people hiring are dull-as-fuck themselves or even worse yesmen to the marketeers) THEIR thoughts are the hook, the fact THEY love this band should be enough for an editor to TRUST there is a story beyond fkn celebrity endorsements or youtube hits. It's not really a writers job to give a fuck about ABCs or give two-shits about what some jumped-up little cunt wielding a piechart has to say about 'what the readership wants'. EVERY writer is ALSO A READER, what do YOU want from pop writing? Fkn get on with it then, and if you've no answer fuck off out of it until you get one, or even better, just fuck off for good. Let writers get on with writing about pop stars as if they're pop stars even if they're not pop stars because the things they make make them STARS to US. Let's unleash something entirely banned from pop writing these days - IMAGINATION - to give pop writing, and pop itself, its full magical and mysterious pull on our time again.

Hats off Hamish, y've nailed the key to getting a job in music writing. 'Tenacity' as the sole modus operandi of the writer. Career career career career - if there's something I can say has been common amongst every great writer or editor I've ever worked for/alongside it's been none of this. They've all, basically, been music HEADS - seekers of new stuff on a constant basis, diggers of crates, record-shop ghosts, teenage-years wasted in libraries and racks with radios and players and books. They've also loved literature, loved writing almost as much as they love music. The impetus and motivation behind their writing was always clear, to say the unique thing they had to say in the unique way they had to say it. Tenacity? FUCK OFF - these loons were convinced that what they had to say DESERVED hearing by the planet, NEEDED expression or they'd explode. Tenacity, fkn tenacity FUCK TENACITY UNTIL you've actually figured out if your message is worth tenaciously trying to get out there. And if you have no message, fuck you and fuck off y'gap year cunt, get yr fkn backpack and go see the world. I hope you drown in a disused well before you fkn ever 'write' ever again. Because instead of writing what you think, you write what you think other people want to read. And as soon as you start doing that, you're fucked in the soul, heart and head.

#30 "It was no coincidence that this track was chosen to soundtrack a key moment inTrainspotting. Penned on a drunken night as Karl Hyde got bleary-eyed in Soho, the fragmentary lyrics are mirrored by the music, which hurtles between speeds and moods, perfectly echoing the state of inebriation one needs to get to before belting out “lager, lager, lager” to passersby."

Secretly, what modern mainstream pop-hackery confirms is that there's a fundamental sadness to the role of music writer, or at least there is if you let it take hold - you are employed to basically be a hanger-on, an eavesdropper, a spod, a geek, someone who won't shut up about something the rest of the world just get on enjoying. To a certain extent this is all true but the people taking on the role these days seem massively cowed, almost apologetic about being critics, fatally and stupidly too dim to realise that EVERYONE who listens to music THINKS about it deeply, has a whole barrage of prejudices and assumptions they call their 'taste', even if they don't necessarily write it all down all the time. Writers gotta realise - YOU ARE AN ARTIST TOO. Language is your medium, infinity is your potential, MATCH or even SURPASS the music you're writing about, you're just as good as those fkn musicians and writing about pop is a vital artform that actually contributes to the health, and the potential for surprise and intrigue, of a musical culture. You are not a fkn hanger-on (and spods and geeks and fans are important  in any culture - remember fans are not disciples, fans can be betrayed) you are part of an argument, a battle.Pick up yr arms and yr pens and yr paper and yr brains and fkn fight. FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT.

There is still, and always will be, a world to win. 

"A hoax perpetrated on the public"

THE STONE ROSES (REISSUE)
Neil Kulkarni , August 19th, 2009, The Quietus

80 quid? Fucking hell, I must've been wrong about this one — see, I had this down as a wet steaming fart of fuck-all when it came out but 80 quid? Jeezus, it must be good, no, it must be postively crammed forth with pan-roasted goodness n'est ce pas? Sure, your reflex is to run, but maybe it's like the Smiths and if you scratch the surface (hold your noses) and forget your prejudice you'll find some men making heaven. I mean, 80, eight-zero not one-eight quid. 80 quid. This crock's gotta have some fucking gold inside to warrant such elitist pricing.

Let's crunch the numbers. Two CDs (one of the album, one of bootlegs you'll already have if you're in any way fussed enough), one live DVD, innumerable bits of paper, a few bits of vinyl, 80-squids. Your funeral pal, and I hope it is soon y'rich cunt. But let's get to the really big numbers, the important ones.

1989 — Unbelievable sounds from Manchester, none of which were by the Stone Roses — 'Vini Reilly' by Durutti Column, 'Justice (Just Us)' by Ruthless Rap Assassins, King Of The Slums 'Barbarous English Fayre'. Mostly forgotten, all pointing ways unexplored rather than roads now potholed with overuse. See, if you were looking the other side of your eye when Year Zero for lad-rock got declared, if you were otherwise distracted, the Stone Roses didn't-mean-SHIT to you. And ever since then, you may have never actually listened to this album. Oh sure it's come at you. Put on in flats by folks that you love as you bite your knuckles and flick your brain into escape-route mode, mentally knocking 'em off the Christmas Card list. Dripping down from the mirrorball as you scowl at the early 90s dancefloor waiting for the 'Razzmatazz' request that never came. Demanded in the DJ booth when you're behind the decks, lads disgusted at your non-ownership of this totem, sideyed-up desert-booted monkey-strutting wankers who'd go into their own scowlpose whenever you'd spin a hip-hop tune say, lads never twigging the sartorial irony of their kangols and bucket-hats, lads never really understanding, it now transpires, what the fuck the Stone Roses might have been about.

The crux being that coming to the Stone Roses for the first time, as I am today as a 'listener' as opposed to a 'victim', I can't allow the adherents and the gruesome sap they've been squeezing out of this lemon for 20 years to affect me. There's a lot you can blame the Roses for, most of it not their fault: like Primal Scream (those other flabby false-gods) I can't think of a single good band to have emerged from their influence (bar maybe the Manics). But listening as fresh as you can right now, queerly, the record The Stone Roses reminds me most of from '89 is Straight Outta Compton. Three good tracks and a right barrel-load of shite afterwards. A similarly malign influence over a few goodies and a whole lotta baddies ever since.


But make no mistake, for those first three songs — 'Adored', 'Bangs The Drum' and 'Waterfall' — those bands that came at the wake seem minuscule. Undoubtedly the Roses were blessed with things they didn't, couldn't pass on. Blessed with a drummer on a lil' three-piece kit who just fkn KNEW, a bassist who'd listened, a guitarist just the right side of wanky who could write anthems and a singer who sounded like he cared and was smart, Sure you can hear the roots, you can hear a familiar lexicon of listening and learning in the years before they came together as four — it's listening that's well-obvious perhaps (Stones, Love, Beatles, Byrds, Zep, dub, northern-soul) but it's listening that's been absorbed, amplified, attempted at with a unique slant and spirit.

Reni's chops aren't showy, but they pump every moment with energy and hope, enabling and animating everything else as a drummer should. Mani is the kind of bassist you could follow and lose yourself in to the exclusion of the rest — then when you snap back and hear the whole he disappears into the melody, sits back for the hooks, does only what's right. Squire lashes together licks from his library and they're good licks and it's a good library. Let's think about the little numbers awhile, down to the fractions, the important ones. Nearly every band since '89 that's in any way attempted to equal these three tracks, the precise feel of them, has failed to remain as intact, fragile or as believable. And on those three, Ian Brown — who will never be better than The Late Show — Ian Brown pitches it just about right — he sounds like a nobody who hopes to be a star. Ever since, the likes of Liam Gallagher have got it just wrong (sounding like a somebody convinced they're a star already) but for these three songs, for all the ambition of the lyrics, Brown's voice has a grain of hopelessness amidst the hope, a glum forlornness his more macho forebears have seemingly never twigged or been able to recreate.

If the 'Roses had released these three tracks as an EP and then died in a van-crash, taken with the two singles that preceded the album, they'd be nudging the greats. And I'd have them up there with Nightmares On Wax, LFO, AC Temple and The Happy Mondays as the 'up North stuff' we gave a fuck about down here in the middle near the end of the 80s. Difference being — all of these bands had more than three good tracks and none of them have succeeded in the kind of posthumous godhead the 'Roses have. Again, not the 'Roses fault (though hugely beneficial to them). But grating when you consider just how much The Stone Roses tails off. Something sad and embarrassing happens after those first three tracks, something that should've stayed small and unheard but has been inflated into the hallowed realms of 'quality' ever since. Every Stone Roses fan I've ever spoke to has bandied the word 'quality' around — 'they're just quality', 'it's quality music' — but holdupa second, listen to this frigging record. This is quality control gone AWOL in a major, degenerative way.

Simply put, four tracks in, half the band start showing their limitations badly. Jon Squire and Ian Brown have done all they have to do, the tunes become samey (as signposted by 'Don't Stop''s direct reverse-gurgitation of 'Waterfall'), Brown's vocals attaining the same monotune-irritant value as that twat outta Blink 182, that same unlovely unlovable monotune he's been jiggling round ever since. Squire's goldmine simply runs dry and starts hacking up gunk — his imagination can't quite stretch, he sounds like he's chasing originality when clearly UNASHAMED rawk-pilfering (see the much better I reckon Second Coming) is his true forte.

Oddly enough, it's only those songs you've heard too many fucking times that actually rise out of the gruel — 'Made Of Stone' and 'I Am The Resurrection' are both way too bloody long, but at least swing with hooks — the rest ('Bye Bye Badman', 'Sugar Spun Sister', 'This Is The One') are way too dullasfuck to allow any kind of flow, intrigue or wonder to this supposed great debut, let alone explain why so many dads and dad's lads routinely vote this 'classic', hold this up as the Greatest British Yadayada of BlahBlah. Again, gotta admit — that veneration ain't the 'Roses fault, and Mani and Reni remain intriguing throughout. But for two whole thirds of this album they're an awesome heartbeat ill-served by their frontmen — something that becomes clear and calamitous on 'Shoot You Down' and 'Fools Gold' (yeah, it's the US version you're getting, like it or not).

Both songs emerge from rhythm-section jams, free floating ideas (in 'Fools Gold''s case perhaps from the 'Something's Burning' demo). One's full of space and impact, the other's busy and directed at the feet — both great grooves waiting on a vision, big open Kingston/Dusseldorf tings much better suited to hip-hop, to some real verbals, some real loops. Then look what the twats from Timperley slop on top: Brown's vocals sound like a first-go you'd ditch, Squire's attempts at Free-style silkiness and liquidity coming across way more like Reef-style lumpeness and flash. That horrible wah-wah and all those funkless chops became the bedrock of the next decade's appalling attempts for lad-rock to get 'dancey' — you can hear a whole flotilla of Kula Shakers and Ocean Colour Scenes listening attentively.

On the cack second side of The Stone Roses, John Leckie's bigsound-cleanliness and echoey aftertaste really start to tickle the gullet, but in rendering Brown charmless and self-cornered, and Squire so monochrome and one-dimensional it's a production that's finally and damningly revealing, exposing tiny tired ideas in this big open hangar of sound. On such occasions, the demos are preferable, and you realise how this record hasn't so much been corrupted by its descendents as predestined that deterioration by its own sorry endings and fizzled-out fuses — this is a profoundly disatisfying clapped-out 'classic', a deeply disappointing 'essential' to anyone's collection.

Listening to The Stone Roses for the first, and gotta admit last time in my life (I just won't get as angry in the clubs when one of the hits comes on), the tragedy that emerges isn't that the Stone Roses 'won' their cursed-future as touchstone/bible (for all bibles are misunderstood); it's more that some people in bands can be bossier than others, can win out within the band-unit itself, can waste possibility in the dead-ends of a stunted imagination.

By the album's end even those first three bombs seem diffused, seem like the sound of a band rushing forth but also running out of ideas. And it's in that faffy, wooly second-side that I recall just why I hated the Stone Roses so much aged 17. It was because they were being hailed as gods but they sounded so earthbound, so (blame Leckie again) like the shit we thought we'd left behind by '89. There's a claggy clogged-up taste, a pristine feel to the sheen on this album that makes it oft-sound like some nightmare conflation of Del Amitri, the Lightning Seeds amd Steve Lilywhite. The Stone Roses might not have actually given us Oasis, Kasabian, The Libertines, every great shite hope since — but they gave us the template of fleeting brilliance and overwhelming mediocrity that's been more-than-enough for a whole generation of musicians now. And the fleeting brilliance, the sound they get on those first three songs has gone altogether — on the first three songs they don't sound smug about what they're doing, they sound like they're discovering it. The rest of this monolith, and much of what it's inspired, is lazy, coasting, kindling, contentment — nothing to make you part with your cash either then or now.

Because no, you weren't wrong the first time around. There was SO MUCH MORE than this going on in 1989. Doolittle. 3 Ft High & Rising. L'eau Rouge. Playing With Fire. Paul's Boutique, 33/45/78, The Great Adventures Of Slick Rick, Margin Walker, Done By The Forces Of Nature, A.R Kane's 'I', The Cactus Album, The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste, Walking With A Panther, Batman, Streetcleaner, Ghetto Music:The Blueprint, Altars Of Madness, Nice & Smooth, Road To The Riches, Unfinished Business, Youngest In Charge, Beneath The Remains. They were fearless and they went all the way and like The Stone Roses they spawned plenty of ugly offspring. But all of them really are 'classics' in the livable-with, imperishable and cherishable sense — they won't all get the 80-quid deluxe spunkathon-treatment but they're things you want to protect and keep because they still sound immortal. They don't fail, they don't fall-off and none of them now sound like a hoax perpetrated on the public. In comparison to the real highlights of '89, whether they bequeathed whole scenes or slipped into oblivion, The Stone Roses is some over-rated filler-heavy bullshit.

"I DON'T love music more than anything else"

I wrote about Cats On Fire for the Guardian here

And when I say 'European Album Of The Year' I mean it. Get. Now. 

 Here's what I thought of their last album, the beautiful 'Our Temperance Movement', as run by The Quietus  in 2009 . I love love love this band and I love the Quietus for letting me 'go long' on this stuff.  

Cats On Fire 

Our Temperance Movement 

Matinee Recordings

 Edith fucking Bowman, how shit is guitar music right now​? No wonder those off-the-peg indie-duds H&M and Topman are making such a killing with are in such infant-sizes – indie-fans must be fucking starving, malnourished, Biafran on these rations, these crumbs in the dust. 14 years ago I wrote this about indie-rock nearly-rans Sleeper- “Indie is four people getting together wanting to create something sublime and immortal having had their lives swallowed by pop and needing to do the same, surveying the infinite possibilities and deciding three guitars some drums and some good songs will just about do.” I wrote it whilst frowning and not getting any, but in 1995 it seemed like a fair response to the 2^nd gen tide of unpleasant big-sideburned britplop swilling around the stevelamacq-skidsmeared u-bend of our everyday, an era in which we were being earnestly told by all kinds of earnest movers & shakers in rugby shirts that Echobelly & Republica & Cast & The Verve were more deserving of our attention than Sepultura & Killah Priest & Tarnation & Pizzicato 5 ( i know! sheer madness!), an era in which the foundations & blueprints of that crucial RETREAT of nerve committed on our behalf by a shitscared media (the retreat that we can now blame for our current Britschoolumni hell) were being drawn up and decided by pusillanimous pie-chart wielding chuckleheads across the capital (now in higher-waged dotages across our airwaves thankyouverymuch) . Now, in 2009, in this permanent 85 we're in Jeez, 'some good songs' by a guitar band would be a godsent mannabomb from heaven, now that the 'craft' has been so thoroughly ambushed and owned by Xenomania & Gary Barlow (show me an indie-rock song from the past 3 years that's been better - let alone sounds better - than those Take That singles? ) & fucked up and fallen-short of by virtually everyone else (especially the kind of suppurating arseholes currently forming bands faster than Zane Lowe can empty the spitoon.) I'm not holding my breath for a big indie pop band to care about again, but I do try and keep my mouth shut - like you would in a festival toilet - whenever exposed to indierock in case some of the particles get in my mouth y'know? Kings Of Leon to the left of us and Kasabian to the right of us and all that Oasis in the middle and hippies twiddling everywhere else. Never mind giving it ten minutes, we need to leave indierawk the fuck alone for a year or five just to shift the stench.

On the upside we can't deteriorate further than the plateau of ordure we're surfing on at the moment. For the longest time the wrong people have been forming bands and are getting signed & hyped & played & supported by those same kinds of wrong people currently running tings across this industry-that-will-not-die. You've seen the next-decade's-stars the past 12-years of withered expectations and ambitions have bequeathed us: walking the streets with Peavey bags on their backs, our future captains of pop - not-really-posh-honest-off-the-peg-shabby fucks for whom music is everything maan cos they don't have anything else to fucking worry about, too many beanies, way too much facial hair and nowhere near enough care, poise or genuine ostracized commitment. Never in the past five years have I felt like I'm listening to a band who's music has to negotiate the cracks in their life (apart from the one in their arses obviously), or for whom music serves any purpose beyond itself. There are no cracks in their life, no bigger battles, nothing the campus indie-soc/Oasis doesn't know about music: crucially all this bad art they're making never lost these chumps any friends, it inevitably finds them entire circles of wankers to applaud their planet-sized smugness. The atrophy & pffft that's crept into schmindie songwriting, it's inability to stop either whining undeservedly (Radiohead, Elbow, Coldplay, U2) or whoop smartarsedly at it's own mistranslated-fortune-cookie profundity & pissweak satire (Los “Hipsters' Scouting For Girls” Campesinos, U2, Radiohead, Elbow, Coldplay)or simply be about utterly pointless shit (Kooks), it's crippled inability to step anywhere beyond relationship-advice, text-speak self-pity or wtf confusion – pop squeezed out in the gap year, pop who's vaunting ambition is to find itself scratching it's stubble whilst getting it's arse kissed on the T4 couch, pop in loathing of any language you couldn't read in the Heatmag advice pages. Pop which, time and time again, when confronted with the very real threat of Jools 'Someone Shoot Him He's The Piano Player' Holland throwing down some hoary ol'dogshite boogie-woogie piano over it never responds with the frenzied fists the viewing public crave, always only the nod, the smile, the shrug, that masonic-handshake made of laid-back gestures that ushers you into club Sunday Supplement-Pop. Such beige horizons and the immortal belonging they promise are wide enough to include everyone from the most globulous dinosaurs to the spikiest new straplings,

Fatally, this sick mainstream is fed by an equally spineless underground. So the grisly authenticity of most chartpop remains unchallenged by all the noodledoodling in the peripheries – all that proof that sonic confection is nothing without conviction. Aimless meandering muchly - I'm not remotely suggesting that wanting to form a band should be reason enough for imprisonment or detention (I'm thinking thumbscrews & waterboarding might be more effective as it goes) but can't somebody stop these gurgling giggling galoots gathering together after dark in their rehearsal rooms and recording studios, can't something be done once we've figured out bands have nothing to say to stop them saying it anymore? This whole decade of indie guitarring, when whittled down to only what is top pop quality extends as far as the first two Strokes albums, the first Franz Ferdinand and Arctic Monkeys singles, the Good Shoes & Vampire Weekend albums and what else? The decade of Oasis and Green Day if we're being real, the twin middle-aged millionaire perpetrators of GENERATIONS of damage to young hoaxed pop minds. That's a separate case to be brought to the European Court of Human Rights in due course but for now, for the next thirty minutes, don't worry about it is the message. The Finns have sorted it out for everyone. Don't they always?

See, I can't stop playing this Cats On Fire thing. It's not the greatest album of the year, probably – that'll be a toss up 'tween far hipper, more self-promoting outfits from nascent scenes across the planet. Cats On Fire are actually getting dissed on tinternet for their lack of self-promotion, and the first thing people seem surprised by is that this be Finnish and doesn't sound like Darkthrone. If this record slips on by 2009 it'd fit, accidentally, with the sound and the songs – for these are special and precious and perhaps not for these times. For starters, you can hear them (a lot of what I'm about to say sounds like the kind of thing your mum and dad said about pop when you were a kid for which I can't apologise). No fog, only the fireworks that can happen between clean, pure unpedal-affected guitars and drums. Strong rhythms. Killer tunes. No new production tricks, a 50s radiance and shimmer with a 70s warmth and an 80s pose - down to what's important, and all is important. Needed at this groggy stage for rock – some purity of purpose linked with a purity of sound, some fucking balls, some proper dignified campness shot through ennui and standing up for a vintage cynicism, an unrequited endless love, a heroic warmth that's the coolest response to this cold dry age. Right now who cares whether guitar music's being 'inventive' or 'innovative' enough? Cram all that doodaddery, guitar music needs to rediscover the art of songwriting again, wipe the slate clean, earn its right to piss about again cos we're drowning in the lukewarm yellow stuff down here. And only what's noble and dignified is gonna save us, something that sinks in rather than sinks us in that fathomless portabog that noughties indierock has become. At times like these the clear and good-hearted stops being a tradition to kick against with confusion and aggression, starts becoming the real alternative to all the faux-extremity and frowning.

So on one level the perfectly-monikered 'Our Temperance Movement' IS just 'some good songs'. And hallelujah, It will more than do. It's an album I love because it's so likable, possibly that likability wouldn't survive the perils of modern fame – but I hope Cats On Fire make it because they've made this and they deserve it. Tempted to toss it at first. The guys' voice was so Morrisey I felt furtive. But the band made it impossible to leave. Opener 'Tears In My Cup' throws down trump cards and silver with such controlled joy, the sound rich with a swing and punch that aren't pushy or perfect, just locked-on, confident, beautiful. In a flabby age where even the boiled down seems too loud Cats On Fire make the revolutionary leap of sounding just right, hit all the right balances. It's a sound that's close but not forced down your throat. In the room but not petulantly raw. A sound informed by all sorts but somehow unique to the characters in this room and thus able to fly where the words take it. The sheer chest rush of 'Tears' masks its conciseness, how the gorgeous melodic ease (or the illusion of ease which is the neatest trick of all) from Ville Hoppenen's Fender gets the tune cleaved to the heart within a minute's exposure. Most miraculously, for the next 30 minutes and 9 songs there was no fall-off, only new shapes of the same sweetness and fire, vocals that mattered, harmonies that mattered just as much. Even weirder, by the time I emerged dancing in the daze of a crush with guitar music again I was most in love with the man up front, the star who should be, dishy dreamboat Matthias Bjorkas.

He's gorgeous which helps. Cats On Fire all look amazing as it happens. Very pretty, very fuckable. As pure eye-candy and heart-quickener Bjorkas twangs the same straps as the young Edwyn Collins, but if you can't pick your heart out of the lines he sings and the way he sings them you have my full permission to continue running the planet.”Expel the Marxist ghost the cynical consumerist remains” he nails himself a minute in, thence come tales of misplaced arson ('Garden Lights') , the skewered precocity of “Letters From A Voyage To Sweden” (on deck amidst the meatheads and stag parties the teenage Bjorkas takes a fringe-hidden 'great pleasure in being right'), the wondrous 'Play With Fire'-feel of 'Never Sell The House', the Love-like 'A Steady Pace' (“you're not into art/The moment someone wants you to be/ And I could leave you here/Tie my shoes and prance away”) and the pre-Army Elvis stylings of 'Lay Down Your Arms' & 'Horoscope' (“We should have gone a long time ago/Now Sweden has drifted too far away/You come from a family who can afford to be eccentric/Go back and cry to them”). Throughout 'Temperance' the lyrics are male without being lairy, wonderfully & winningly fogyish as only the young can be and okay I'm naming soundalikes but Cats On Fire are a band smart enough to know nothing's original but the people putting it together. Bjorkas has a voice that you want to hear again and again because it can be more than one thing at a time: arch and witty without causing resentment, Lothario and feather lite,heartfelt & sentimental whilst still confident and convincing, because his voice has that thing, that real in-the-room/unreal beamed-in-from-Venus thing that makes your insides flip, that thing everyone in Cats On Fire plays to. And it's been a long fucking time man – you lot had the Smiths. I could never get over my prejudices with them. For me vis-a-vis boy-guitar-pop I've found something to listen to once 'Between The Buttons' has run out. Yeah, a long time. No filler because each of the ten songs here become killer at different times in your relationship with this record as it unfolds over the coming months. You want to spend time with it. You don't feel you ought to. And that's miraculous.

Miraculous. That a record so thoroughly traditional in sound never sounds like it's copped-off or desperate or over-stretching itself. For something just to be beautiful inside and out. That you're hearing a band neither hiding in distortion's familiar cushions or stroppily minimalising what needs oomph . That you're hearing a band uninterested in guiltily making moves on electronica's perfection and ironing out all nuance, a band careless about the testosterone and permatan and ruffled machismo and mithering sanctimony modern rock production offers with the tug of a knob. A guitar band only interested in making the best pop music they can. A band simply & naturally existing in their own sound in their own room at their own imperfect pace armed with songs worthy of such a four-man marvel. Let's avoid (as some unfortunates already haven't) hysterically tagging Cats On Fire as 'the rebirth of indie' like what's going on here is defibrillation. The corpse is gone – put the tag on the toe & close the draw NO what's going on here is truly beautifully great pop, pure and simple and jeez people, keep your voices down. Nobody let the bastards tromp in and spoil this, don't let it be corrupted by anything so vile as being on today's pulse Cats On Fire are smaller & way more important than that, too cherishable to give up to modern-pop's spectacular irritations and infections. Amidst the blather and blare of all those bills and gongs elsewhere, 'Our Temperance Movement', a guitar record free of cacophony, feels like the moment an entire genre can get over it's inferiority & superiority complexes, and start genuinely competing with the best of pop again, start swimming in the same place as Britney & GA & Outkast & the important playaz who really own your days this decade. On the quiet like.

Of course I secretly hope it blows up like the godfather, to whit a quote for the ads: “Best Scandinavian pop album since Gran Turismo or Arrival” but let's make this youknowhat, and everyone else from Bowman to Wylie to Fearne and Vern and Conor and all those Marks and Alexes can just step the fuck OFF of something for a change. Not for you fuckers. For us starlets. So good it hurts your heart.

(Neil Kulkarni)

Wu-Tang Clan: Martial Law (Melody Maker, 1997)

"THE NEXT Wu-Tang Clan album will be in the year 2000, and we'll follow it up with a comet. A comet. Then an earthquake. Then Pestilence. We're gonna set off the New World", The RZA, 1997 

(First published in Melody Maker, 24 May 1997) 

Public Enemy's fall from grace left hip hop without a heroic focus. Enter WU-TANG CLAN, a crew from Staten Island whose ever-changing line-up has produced more solo albums than you can poke a stick at and rewritten rap's rule book

STRETCH LIMO. Ice white. In the front, a chauffeur – looking pissed off, chewing a toothpick for courage, dreaming of Sinatra. In the back, looking backwards, an MTV anchor woman – clutching a mic for grim life, dreaming of easier jobs, scanning with increasing anxiety the unknown New York streets the limo is now winding its way through. Facing her, a rap star – white suit, gold jewellery, the works. Cooing babe on each arm, kids playing at his feet, a bottle of Moet perpetually jammed in his slurring mouth, talking drunken nonsense, he leans forward and orders the driver to pull up outside an innocuous, low-slung building. Disentangling himself from the limo, he gets out of the car and enters. Minutes pass. The MTV VJ looks ever more desperate, wondering if he'll ever come back. Suddenly, the door opens and he's back in, champagne and wheels ordered to keep flowing. "What did you go in there for?" asks the VJ, timidly. "To pick up these," says the rap star, waving two welfare cheques at the camera. Eyes racing wildly off in different directions, as he jams the bottle back in his giggling mouth. He can do that. He's Ol' Dirty Bastard.

LIKE RAKIM said, "it's not where you're from, it's where you're at", but there's not doubt, the Wu-Tang Clan's history starts in and is defined by Staten Island. Out of the five New York boroughs, Staten – or Shaolin, as the Wu call it – remained fairly silent throughout hip hop's Nuyorcan birth and development. Whereas Queens, Manhattan, and especially Brooklyn and The Bronx had their own lost history of rap culture and local talent, little was heard from the Island until late '92, when a self-financed 12-inch called 'Protect Ya Neck' found it's way from the back of vans to the underground network of shops, clubs and radio stations that keep New York hip hop the most constantly changing and fascinating musical scene on the planet.

This was the first transmission from the Wu-Tang Clan, and even now it sounds as stunning as ever. It sounded as if the imposed isolation of living fenced out from the rest of the city and never even getting shout-outs on most hip hop records had twisted the minds of the music's creators, forcing them to build their own vision of hip hop straight from scratch to mic. Reducing the beat to a shuffling stumble, killing the soundscape with two huge, gothic bass-slabs, filling in what space was left with shards of Bernard Hermann soundtracks, it was the eeriest thing you'd heard in years because it was so impossible to predict. 'Protect Ya Neck' wasn't a refusal, or an affirmation of a hip hop world that had ignored them, it was a NEW hip hop world they had made for themselves. And nobody knew where the f*** it had come from.

What were these strange beats, these sudden bolts of noise mid-line, these vocal tics breaking out all over Method Man's monologue, the bizarre lyrics about "troops in Pakistan", "psycho flashback in the dark", "flowing like Christ"! As they started taking NYC by storm, people began to find out about The Clan: that they were nine, had known each other since childhood. That they comprised producer The RZA, DJ 4th Disciple, rappers Method Man, Ol' Dirty Bastard, U God, REbel Ins, Raekwon, Ghost Face Killer and Genius "The GZA". That they were all martial arts experts and were named after the most elegant of all martial arts sword-styles. That they recorded their madness in their own studio in Staten. That The Genius and RZA had released solo records in the early Nineties for Tommy Boy and Cold Chillin' that had sunk without a trace.

Fresh on the underground success of 'Protect Ya Neck', the Clan signed to BMG with a clause ensuring complete solo freedom enshrined in the contract. And then came the debut LP that changed the face of hip hop. Enter The Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers (the title referring to the 36 critical points of the body in Shaolin theology) is the most important rap LP of the Nineties – one of those LPs that changed the parameters of the future by obliterating the past, making you wonder where you were wasting your time before it came along.

Its arrival held three explosive changes for hip hop. Lyrically, it kick started the "reality" phenomenon – rap's bragadoccio and polemic ripped apart by a relativism and millennial anxiety that placed no limits on the rapper other than the life he leads, the fantasy and egotism of gangsta shot down and dragged through streets of doubt, fear and claustrophobia. Stylistically, it was the most complete concept since Public Enemy – a union of look, language and intent fused in ancient martial arts ideas (discipline, brotherhood, technique) and put in the Shaolin Staten present, the Clan appearing as faceless assassins on the sleeve, that perfect sublime logo everywhere and imprinted in your mind forever. Musically, and most importantly, 36 Chambers was like nothing you'd ever heard.

Like all shifts in hip hop (the only music form to progress less through revolutions than alien invasions), this was beyond fusing familiar sounds to create a new whole. The Wu bought completely new sounds to the mixing desk, and then mashed them together in an order, shape and mood you couldn't reproduce with an infinite number of monkeys, unlimited turntables and an eternity to play with. From the brutal murk of 'Bring Da Ruckus', the smoky funk of 'Shame On A Nigga', through the lush insanity of 'Clan In Da Front', 'C.R.E.A.M.' and 'Tearz', to the staggering distorto-groove of '7th Chamber', Enter The Wu-Tang shocked hip hop back to life when it was in danger of falling off the bench. It changed the lexicon of word and sound that the form could investigate, and crucially, was the first LP in too long that you learned by heart, that you let infect your everyday walk and talk. Setting the scene alight, it hit gold status almost immediately. The Wu had arrived; now we had catching up to do on those big blocks of lyrics we still couldn't fathom. But we didn't have time. The Wu never give you time. They keep going. You'll never catch up. That's the first lesson.

"IT'S NOT samples. I hate samples. We use one note and change it to anything we want. It's all noise, my beats are noise, noises put together over heavy drums, but to a formula only I and the other producers understand. And we're the best producers in the world, the best lyricists in the world. No question. We've got the ultimate powers to impregnate people with ideas through sound. That's all I want to do; not show my face, give any set pictures, just infect people with pure sound they can put their own pictures to": The RZA, 1997

FIRST TO exercise his contractual freedom and step out the ranks was The RZA, who along with ex-Stetsasonic psychonauts Prince Paul and Fruitkwan, plus Grym Reaper from Too Poetic, formed The Gravediggaz and dropped the stunning Niggamortis LP in 1994. Simultaneously creating and perfecting horror-core, it is the only supergroup LP in history that really matters.

Next to break was Method Man's Tical solo set, a nasty, short, brutish half-hour of advanced hebephrenia that was less interesting for Meths' warped vocal style than for the mind blowing out-ness of the RZA's production. The success of 36 Chambers now afforded him unprecedented freedom to create whatever fresh hell he wanted, fearlessly taking that remit to extremes some say the Wu have never surpassed. Crushing choirboys against the sound of rotting corpses, opera against sexmuzik grind, free jazz atonality with electro-precision – it was a dauntingly bleak, dark mini-masterpiece that Tricky spent a whole year listening to and which sent the rest of us either running scared or running out of superlatives.

The Wu were fast turning into stars, name-checked everywhere, cropping up on hip hop's most forward-looking moments (Mobb Deep, Show and AG), consolidating power, gaining gradual pre-eminence with entrepreneurial foresight and exercising ruthless control. Playing live for the first time in London and Birmingham in 1994, they were hailed as underground heroes; kids turned out in masks in worship of Ol' Dirty Bastard's newly-moneyed leeriness as displayed on his solo LP The Dirty Version. Here you saw 20-year-old B-boys swapping their Guinness for bottles of Möet in cheap ice buckets, Ian Wright showing out and joining in the pit's ruckus.

Meanwhile, back in the States, 36 Chambers went platinum, the first few Wu copyists chanced their arm and ODB cut an increasingly wayward figure, gate-crashing other people's stages, evidently too far gone too often to come back again. Method Man got in mainstream faces with a gorgeous Mary J Blige duet, 'You're All I Need', ODB palled up with Mariah Carey and then, almost to reaffirm their underground intent, if not to reiterate the RZA's visionary control of the Wu-world, the best LP any of the Wu have been responsible for was released – Raekwon's Only Built For Cuban Linx. Recasting the Clan as an assortment of coked-out Goodfellas (Meth became Johnny Blaze, Ghostface became Tony Starks, the RZA was Bobby Steele, Master Killa was Noodles and even Nas got a cameo as Nas Escobar) and introducing the incredible new members of the Wu-Tang family (Sunz Of Man And Cappadonna) it was an immense record most of us haven't yet managed to fully grasp. Segued together with an impenetrable flow of John Woo samples and turgid streams of street dialogue, the whole album recreated the urban heat and cruel waste it so perfectly described lyrically. As a seamless continuum of beat and rhyme, it was the Wu's most flawless production yet; as one gigantic challenge to the rap world (and indeed, the entire pop universe) it still remains unanswered.

There are moments here when you're left frozen and stranded wondering what the hell is going on. It easing you in on the relatively straight-ahead 'Knuckleheadz' and 'Criminology', but by track five you were in unchartered territory and accelerating alarmingly; by track seven you were hitting the repeat in stunned confusion; come the insane acid rock and diseased psychedelia of 'Glaciers Of Ice' and 'Verbal Intercourse', you gave up the ghost and submitted.

With its immaculate rhyming, impossible richness of imagery and density of content, Cuban Linx was something you couldn't leave alone, couldn't stop exploring, something that still confers a pall of inferiority on much of the rest of pop every time you hear it. It was the album of '95; for the B-boy it's the greatest LP of the Nineties, full stop; vitally, its massive success gave the Wu and The RZA the vindication for their supremely untrammelled status as bona fide artists in the face of an ever more-interested and intrusive industry. To make the most innovative LP of a generation was one thing, to buck the old innovation/populism dichotomy so spectacularly was to set up the Wu as gods of their own art, give them a power and potential unheard of in rap history.

YOU COULD feel that freedom when the GZA released Liquid Swords late in '95. Here the RZA's psychedelic reach was given full scope; it ran wild on wide-open spaces and was possibly his most eclectic and eye-popping production yet.

Once again recasting the Clan (U God became Lucky Hands, Inspectah Deck became Roily Fingers) and introducing phenomenal new talents from the Wu stable (Life, Dreddy Kruger and the scarifyingly good Killah Priest) it immediately established itself as the most accessibly funky Wu album. GZA pulls some astonishing vocal tricks (the Maker unforgettably – and unforgivably – called it G-funk), with the hip hop world now falling at the feet of anything with a Wu-Tang logo anywhere near it. Even the notoriously slack style press admitted the RZA as musical genius of the Nineties and Ghostface Killer's Ironman LP simply forced it home, winning over what little resistance still lingered. What was so amazing, and so encouraging about the solo LPs was the unity and individuality they balanced so well, the feeling that there is so much more of this stuff to come, the fact that as yet the Clan have never repeated themselves and have potential in their protegees that will sustain them into the next century. As ever with the Wu, their future, what happens next, is the most inspirational and inconceivable possibility in pop. What does happen next? This does.

"MY destination was to seek life/I mean stars were so low they appeared as streetlights/I was shown the crucifixion/my true addiction/I mean war in heaven/I saw Christ with a Mac-11/so I joined his army/prepared for Armageddon/slowly taking me into the mental orgasm/ejaculating stimulating relating to life incubating/rotating around light-beams/from a light-beam I was formed in a white cream/and then redeemed like powder outta my maker/into nature/returned as vapor/Killah Priest/was born in the pillar of yeast/lost in the miscarried": Killah Priest 'Greyhound Remix'

TO CALL THE new Wu-Tang LP, Forever, highly anticipated isn't just an understatement, it also betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Wu really mean to their fans. You can't simply find a space for Wu-Tang in your schedule, make a lifestyle choice, file them away in a corner of your world. They're too total, their demands on you too huge to negotiate without obsession.

They seep into your body, affect the mind, burrow into your soul, colour your whole experience.

All the music the rest of this paper tells you about every week, every nuance, every emotion, every quality, every truth, is already there in the Wu's music, and brought to a more perfect exposition and elaboration. The deepest psychedelia, the richest soundscapes, the starkest minimalism, the furthest reaches of post rock, the maddest dub on earth. Hip hop. And if every Wu transmission thus far has cast a shadow over the rest of pop, Forever will dominate 1997's agenda like nothing else. Now that the rest of pop are finally dimly realising what the Wu have done, Forever will place a bomb in pop that the entire music scene will spend another era trying to get their heads around.

It's enormous, it's pure devastation, the skills developed over the last five years coming to full fruition, the energy, aura and potential of each solo artist fulfilled at even higher levels, RZA's protegees – Mathematics, True Master and 4th Disciple – weighing in with some truly jaw-dropping production. The struck-dumb truth that's so hard to imagine is that it's even better than the debut, even harder than anything that's come before; the impossible burden we as fans have to deal with is that perhaps we really will never catch up, perhaps the Wu are too luminescently blessed to be held down. Maybe the point is that with the next Clan LP set for the year 2000, and solo LPs forthcoming from Cappadonna, Killah Priest, Master Killer, 12 O'clock, Sunz Of Man and a new Gravediggaz LP, this awesome shit will not stop fascinating, engaging, changing and challenging us for a long time yet. Keep it com in'.

SIDEBAR: THE NEXT GENERATION
Introducing the nu Wu...

SUNZ Of MAN: With two stunning 12-inches last year and a forthcoming LP that should be all-conquering, 62nd Assassin's crew should tear up '97 a storm.

KILLAH PRIEST: Already heard on Liquid Swords and that incredible Jon Spencer remix (Spencer hated it, which shows how much he knows), the Wu's most complex talent drops his LP soon and the tracks we've heard signal a masterpiece.

12 O'CLOCK: Nasty Immigrant on the Nutty Professor soundtrack points towards great things for these Raekwon protegees.

KGB: 'Bless Your Life' was the great lost cine-funk classic of last year; RZA-produced, they can't go wrong.

CAPADONNA: As heard live at the recent shows and on that phenomenal split 12-inch with Real Live; Capa should blow up soon to become the latest addition to the Wu arsenal.

WU-WEAR: Not a band, but the Wu's own clothing brand. Ummm, can we have some please? Size? Fat.

© Neil Kulkarni, 1997, reprinted with thanks from Rocks Back Pages

"You'll never be this uncool again."

 THE METAL COLUMNS.

Back in FKN AGES AGO the greatest editor IPC were too damn stupid to hire, Everett True, told me he was starting a new music magazine called Careless Talk Costs Lives and that he wanted me to write a column about Metal. In a similar state of dazed penury I agreed and they became increasingly unrelated to metal and a bit whiney. Still, people seemed to dig 'em so I'll be putting them up here now and then, in order. This is the first one, from issue 11 (CTCL counted down from ish 12 to ish 1).

"This is why I now have automatic limbs"

KASHMERE

So I got in the Darpacoptor and hummed up to his eyeline. Eye as big as Enceladus. Step down, gingerly traverse his metal sockets hopping mile-high rivets in my jet boots , always the immortal strength of mortal weakness singing through the retinal lakes I swim through, flaws so deep in the iridium irises they shoot back supersized light beams concave. This is hard: when you interview a real superhero, for that is what Kashmere is, you’re aware of something buzzing under the words, some elemental filament of resistance you can’t get to,  glowing like kryptonite inside, the secret identity he can’t reveal. That planet-wide steel-trap swings open and an abyssal rumble issues forth: “I’m in my own world. I have unique views and approaches to making music and its hard to find common ground with people. Even though hip-hop is my heart,  I still don’t feel like I'm 'part' of it. I see myself as an observer. And that’s real.”

OK, to even be privy to this transmission you must mainline manganese light and heat straight to your synapses through the wonder that is Galaktus, Kashmere’s simply staggering latest LP on the awesome Boot Records (seek the catalogue, buy and hoard), let it trephinate freshly deformed Schwarzschild radii in yr skull, pull you into it’s universe just as Kash godself was forged in such light-year-wide, light speed derangement.

“BOOOOOOOM. I’d seriously get lost in albums. I was totally lost in the first tribe Called Quest lp and the first De La Soul lp. I was definitely drawn into their worlds deeply. It was wondrous. All the different types of sounds, the skits, the way they laid down vocals. It was almost like they were rapping in riddles! Shit was really dope from there it was on!! Too many groups to mention, LONS, EPMD (as a group and separately), London Posse  there's too much to mention. Rap radio like Kiss 100's Maz LX and Dave VJ, Choice FM's DJ 279 and of course Capital Radio & Westwood had a profound effect on me growing up I tell ya. Incredible times. So coming from there I have to get in a zone when making music. I cant do it any other way and I really want people to get in a zone when listening. That’s what its all about. Working with Boot, with Jazz T & Zygote  for Galactic I guess was just natural as we were working together anyway. Working with them is cool apart from the armoured sentinel in the lab. It basically lasers your brain (with safety parameters off!)  if you aint laying shit down properly. I was fucking up alot as I was nervous. This is why I now have automatic limbs.”

    Crucial tie between comic books & hip-hop:  both are art forms ideal for people who consider themselves outsiders, homes for people with too many thoughts to just join the 9-5. If either comic books or hip-hop were looking for twin art forms that  can host ideas & stories & people that wouldn’t fit anywhere else they should look no further than each other. What say you oh strider of the 28 Xiu?

  “Well all you have to do is look at Galactus to see where the allure is hahaha.. I mean, he’s omnipotent and he’s fucking massive!!!! His power is actually off the scale! So basically the Galaktus lp isn’t really a recreation as such,  I used the Galactus imagery to convey power. We wanted to do a sci-fi based project that wasn’t masturbation but at the same time was powerful sonically. I purposely didn’t fill it up to the brim with comic book jargon as I was experimenting,  using the Galaktus thing as a semi-loose theme floating around. I wanted to suggest things more than exactly describe scenes out of a comic book. This is an alternate Galactus thats more concerned with getting’ busy than anything else.”

"One thing that doesn’t switch off for me is thinking about music. I’m in a constant day dream thinking about beats, vibes, sometimes lyrics, sounds, rhythms. just dreaming about it while awake."

That mix of high-concept cosmology and street-level ruggedness runs throughout the sound and verbiage of ‘Galaktus’, Kash as likely to lace Tribe Called Quest lines in with the sci-fi imagery, just  as Zygote & Jazz T mix dungeonesque noise & mayhem in with Show & AG-style avant-funk and straight up fuzzy stompbeats. It’s fearsome music but always a pure rubbery phat pleasure to submit to.

 “I didn’t want complicated rhyme styles either” affirms Kash, and this he relates through the medium of a binary shockwave that takes me by surprise, I skitter downwards, bearing-jointed knuckles scratching ineffectively at his visage as I plummet into the yonder. “I wanted the music to be the main thing because a) I think that’s missing and b) the beats Boot crafted where immense. Thinking that if I ever revisit this I will go more hard on the god adventures! Strictly for the heads! This time around I just wanted to make some hard hittin’ shit with these ideas floating around, you know what I mean? Hip-hop and the comic book world lend well to each other. Both highly creative platforms and both at their best highly inspirational. Also there’s a nerd quality to both, you know? Diggers will know what I mean - the collecting aspect y’know? Like comics, hip-hop can be a place for people that think differently can chill and discover themselves reflected. It’s got dope written all over it! Plus its so versatile!”

Still plunging through the dust plumes, past the torso, escape impossible, hope absconding as quickly as I freefall, barely conscious enough to register that for Kash hip-hop starts the moment he wakes and doesn’t necessarily end when he sleeps either.

“I’m definitely in my own world. I couldn’t imagine not absorbing the world through a musical filter. Life to me sounds like a soundtrack in itself so much interesting sounds textures and rhythms. With Galaktus I sat with the beats for a while, came into the lab in the morning, chill for a while, chat breeze, smoke trees, watch TV and listening to tunes. Then I'd hear a nice break and be like 'ahh that one'. he'd then start flippin the beat and id write while they flips. Kinda like I’m a critic and he’s a pancake maker. The creative process is not 100% controllable for me though. it fires of at random a lot. I know a lot of people are very deliberate with their music they know what they want and they go in and do that whereas I  more vibe it out.”

Five seconds of life left oh quasar-devouring monstro-MC Kash are you worried about the future of rap or confident that innovative hip-hop will always cycle back and return?

“For me I try not to involve my mind in anything other than music and the city. London city looks dope to me man. So it's like all the brainwashing from the corporate music industry doesn’t effect me. at times I've been caught up in what they’re up to but really... fuck that shit... its poison. its different now because interesting music doesn’t seem to cross over like it used to but I guess we were in  analogue times. now were fully in the digital realm it cant be the same again! only different! which to me is exciting cos we don’t know what’s going to happen.” [here I die. Onwards transmission recorded by automatic spectrotranscriber] “I’m enjoying artists like Dim Lite, Dorian Concept, S.Marharba - I think that movement is really exciting. I just wish I was hearing these guys collab with cool rappers, not posing idiots. I think some cool music can come from that."

My coptor, my jetboots, my suit, all atomised, my flesh dispersed beyond Chandrasekar  oh Galaktus oh Galaktus . .

“Alot has happened in hip-hop and its never gonna be the same. I think if we have another golden era its going to be on some different shit. "

"Its then going to be all about who sees and appreciates it, I’ve noticed a trend with a lot of people that are into hip-hop. The trend is to worship ignorance. Like ignorance is cool somehow. Dumbing down. That’s why the afrocentric/concious era was dope cos it was about learning, experimenting AND  having fun on different levels. In those times U wanted to know stuff and hip-hop encouraged that.  Hip-hop seemingly encourages something else now but we must remember... that aint hip-hop bringing this madness its the corporations that have sold people this crap over and over till they actually believe its the only way to go.  people don’t even realise they are being brainwashed!  they (corporations) want people on an ignorant tip so they can continue to peddle their dodgy goods. ”

Only one thing to report. Galaktus IS GOD. Man down. End transmission.

You can hear ''Galaktus" right here.

FOR THE NEW EDITOR OF NME, WHOMEVER IT MAY BE.

The Neil Kulkarni guide to being a record-reviewer

(15:35 July 13th, 2009, Drowned In Sound as commissioned by Everett True, lashed down in a moody morning)

Ten bits of advice from someone without a clue – the Neil Kulkarni guide to being a record-reviewer...


Words: Neil Kulkarni

1. Love language. To the point where you wonder where it stops and you begin.

2. Realise where you stand. Not in relation to the record but in relation to the record business. You’re something less than the shit crapped out by the maggot that feasts on the shit crapped out by the rabid dog that is the music biz – if at any point you start thinking that what you are doing ‘matters’ in a bizness sense you’re fucked, if at any point you reckon you’re anything more than a piddling-peon in place to rubber-stamp or reject product, then think again. The biz will use you if you say what they want, if you don’t they won’t – be mentally clear about your own utter irrelevance before you even start or be ready for a steady diet of disappointment your whole working life. Might seem such pre-emptive knee-chopping action on your ambition might wither the writing down to meekness – quite the reverse: only by first accepting your inability to change pop, your lonely impotence amid the cogs and gears, do you realise that your words shouldn’t be measured, considered, or anything approaching reasonable. The self-abasing degrading shame of being a critic doesn’t paralyse, it frees you up to write what the fuck you want rather than what you feel the ‘job’ demands, disconnects you from anything approaching favours, but keeps your overarching pomposity (for if you don’t have this what the fuck are you doing being a writer anyhoo?) in check. You have no favours to grant, no friends to keep, no partner to find, absolutely nothing to lose except your own idea of yourself, your own relationship with your style, taste and ego. This has nothing to do with whatever PR has sent you the record, whatever ‘readership’ your publisher is aiming for or any ‘help’ you can give to a band or artist you deem worthy of your reverse-Midas messing. This is between you and the plastic and the mirror you have to look at yourself in and nothing else. There is no career ladder. Only a downward spiral from the first thrill of seeing your name in print.

3. Be honest about your own dishonesty. Don’t lie, or at least make damn sure your lies are real. Delusions of grandeur aren’t gonna fly unless they’re not delusions, unless you can make the words vibrate with enough energy to create yourself the illusion of godliness. Tricky thang to create – conviction, the feeling reading that no matter how purple the prose it is still ineluctably connected with the life and soul of the writer. But record reviews are not really places to ‘affect’ anything – make sure your affectations are life-sized and real before you start unpacking them across the page. If you’re going to be a primping self-obsessed prima donna in print then make damn sure that self-image is intact and whole and the drama you’re throwing out and around yourself is rock solid, is firmly based in the time and space you find yourself right fkn now. If you’re going to shame yourself do it shamelessly. If you don’t regret what you’ve written after you’ve written it, or find in revisiting past work an occasional INTENSE embarassment (and equally intense pride) you’re probably not doing your job properly. But if ALL you feel is a faint embarrassment (and equally faint pride) then you’ve been writing needily, you’ve been writing to get friends you’re never going to meet, and you’re the next editor of the NME. Congratulations.

4. Teenagers. Read. By which I mean devour. Listen. By which I mean hollow yourself out until you only exist in the spaces between the pop you love. Then, try and find yourself again, or at least create something tangible in the gaps. Find the unique thing you have to say, the unique way you have of saying it, and hone the fucker until you can hear yourself talking on the page, until you can recognise yourself a line in. Your voice is easier found with a chip on your shoulder and a pain in your heart. Think about those writers who you feel weren’t just writing for you but who come to live in your life, a constant over-the-shoulder presence yaying or naying the choices you make. If you don’t want to be that important to your readers get out the game.

5. Getting song titles and lyrics right can be less important than nailing your feelings, your real feelings that occur before your mind has a chance to process them, the feelings a record puts in your brain and body before you feel the need to justify or back-up those instant instincts. If you can’t think of anything to say about a record you’re in the wrong place. Ditch this bitch of a non-job and get yourself a plumbing degree, s’where the money and the happiness is.

6. Stop dithering. You should be able to lash down a 600 word record review in an hour. Read it, change it, read it again, change it again – keep going until it’s inarguable. Be the most brutal editor you know – knocking shit down from EVERYTHING YOU THINK to a HINT of what you think will give you only the choicest shit, the toughest sense, the most committed nonsense. When writing always think Ed Gein – cut out the fanny.

7. Listen only to those colleagues whose writing you respect. Ignore pips on shoulders or being overawed by another’s ‘position’. Be willing to write anything for anyone but always try and pleas(ur)e yourself. In this day and age you have less and less to lose.

8. Be poetic be prosaic but if you’re gonna crack wise, be funny – remember what Fitzgerald said about exclamation marks being ‘like laughing at your own joke’ – if you’re gonna wank-off be concise. Get to the heart of your dreams and delusions quickly and convincingly – don’t waste time apologising or stage-setting. And if at any point you look on a paragraph and think ‘Mark Beaumont could’ve written this’ stab yourself in the eyes cut off your hands and drown yourself in the bath for the sake of Our Lord Jesu Christus himself. For the children dammit.

9. A difficult one this but NEVER Google yourself. Ignore compliments, avoid slaps on the back. Suck up criticism, it’s probably half-right. Be unfailingly polite and well-mannered in all your communications with PRs and labels (nothing’s quite so repulsive as a rude-cunt hack), watch what bridges you’re burning and keep on keeping on.

10. Accept that everything you say will be forgotten and ignored but write as if you and your words are immortal. Don’t just describe but justify – make sure the reader knows WHY the record exists whether the reasons are righteous or rascally. And always remember you’re not here to give consumer advice or help with people’s filing. You’re here to set people’s heads on fire.