In which we find it difficult to escape the 1960s

[petronia]

A TRUE STORY: to make the mental jump from acoustic Pete Doherty bootlegs to Pretty.Odd.Punctuation.Strikes.Again. I had to go through Syd Barrett. In the process I discovered I find Ryan Ross's voice 1,000 times more tolerable than Brendon Urie's. What the hell, guys.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: so when are PATD going to cover "Waterloo Sunset"? Will someone get on this??? I hear they use the Internet and stuff.


Public Image Ltd. - Death Disco
Public Image Ltd. - Fodderstompf

At the time of my NYC trip I was going through a PiL period - even went and bought Second Edition at the Times Square Virgin megastore, where against typical Canadian practice back catalogue material was less pricey than new releases - so when Chrissie had the misfortune of asking me why I'd stopped reading Nana she got this loooong rant re: how Yazawa Ai's understanding of punk confined itself to Sid and Nancy and vintage Westwood, which ftr I was TOTALLY OKAY WITH right up to the point where she brought drugs into it, whereupon she lost me, and did I mention Sid Vicious was a crap bassist to begin with. Like legendarily crap. The funny thing is the second time around, when John Lydon went looking for a bassist, he hired a buddy from school who could not play bass at all... AGAIN. Who turned out to be Jah Wobble. Two six-sigma statistical outliers, on opposite tails of the normal curve; like being hit by inverted lightning.

W/r/t the Pistols my love has always been with Johnny but I guess that's not much of a surprise. He was so annoying yet oddly cute, like an insane ferret. XD One pictures him sitting on a throne like, "Now that the Sex Pistols are over, how do I piss off the MAXIMUM number of people today? ...I know! I'll make a disco track! And scream over it! To the tune of 'Swan Lake'! And tell everyone I'm selling out in the name of commerce!"

Remember I talked about that Buffy xover fic I read in which Lou Reed was a Watcher? Yeah. Any time, Lou; they say British people have "bad teeth" but we know the truth.


Duffy - Warwick Avenue
Duffy - Syrup and Honey

I think I like Duffy better than Amy Winehouse. ^^; Yeah, okay, I know - and Duffy's entire song persona is predicated around pleading with her man not to Do Her Wrong, so one sees the good girl vs. bad girl dichotomy coming a mile away. Plus ça change. I love Holly Golightly, though, and Dusty Springfield, and Bernard Butler left more negative space in Rockferry than Mark Ronson... well, than Mark Ronson ever leaves anywhere, but there's room for a number of approaches here. So really it comes down to sonics. And the album's not all stuck in the 60s! Some of it quite sounds like that album the Pet Shop Boys did with Dusty in the late 80s! Ahahaha.

When I was a teenager I had this photobook called A History of the Discotheque (ya rly), and the one chapter I found utterly alien to my North American life experience was the one on Northern Soul. Which I suppose is why they felt obliged to change the video for the US release. ^^; [up arrow] The UK version is considerably more dynamic, though.

Actually I probably need to revisit Back to Black; I'm sure when I acquired it that I wasn't in the right mental space. I don't like "Rehab" much but "You Know I'm No Good" is brill... I've had this great remix of "Fuck Me Pumps" for ages and recently was moved to look up the video on YTube, and it was just like, Amy, srsly, what the hell happened. Why. D:

EDIT -- forgot a song! Here's Duffy doing a live cover of errm Hot Chip: Duffy - Ready for the Floor

Comments

[dipping_sauce]

(... What did I tell you about the coffee? I can just picture in my head the arm-flailing and the fast-talking.)

I swear, the first time you played a Duffy song for me, I thought it was a Dusty Springfield tune I'd never heard of. I love Duffy, I can't stop listening to her stuff. (And I found a really great remix of mercy by someone called Dunproofin? Really awesome. Have you heard it?)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Honestly I haven't had any! I refine my rants verbally before committing them to the Internet is all. XD And yes, I have the remix, is indeed ace.

[kovaa.livejournal.com]

I had to go through Syd Barrett. In the process I discovered I find Ryan Ross's voice 1,000 times more tolerable than Brendon Urie's. What the hell, guys.
WHAT THE HELL, INDEED. explain please!

[petronia.livejournal.com]

There's not much to explain! Syd Barrett and The Kinks split the difference there, but as for why that is someone'd have to ask the PATD guys. XD; I have to say I was kind of... not expecting Ray Davies to be the Great Emo Sound Killer 2008.

I'm kind of weird about male rock vocals. ^^; Like, most of the time I think they're at the very least too high in the mix.

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Wait, I thought you were saying in rockism, tho (of which punk is an extreme), it didn't matter whether you were a great bassist, but that you played the guitar yourself? Or am I getting things mixed up again?

Anyway, am curious about Nana and drugs and why it made you stop reading it?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Yes, but it matters to the characters in Nana whether someone is a good bassist or not. XD; Or should.

Because if you're going to annoy me by sending a character I quite like on an angsty drug-fueled death spiral, at least make it realistic and not some kind of retarded after-school special! Or maybe, being Canadian, I'm not as impressed as a Japanese audience would be. Basically it just started taxing my suspension of disbelief. I'll go back to it at some point, though, but I feel like much less has happened in the last few volumes than in the first few, apart from ominous foreshadowing (a la CLAMP?).

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

Huh, but don't actual punk people admire Sid? Or is that just a stereotype? [No idea on how Japanese rockers would process rockism/popism here]

Eh, I took a break from Nana because the suspense was just too frustrating. But as for Ren, I was expecting it to happen anyway, and it's par for the course for manga, I find, I guess. I'd expect the editorial, since Nana is technically shoujo-ish, probably affects that; now a treatment of drugs a la Murakami Ryuu would be pretty interesting in manga.

[jokersama.livejournal.com]

Hahahaha! Weirdly, I guess my introduction to that whole band of freaks WAS PIL. My sister got "The Greatest Hits...So Far" (which I still have, like, 20 years later), and told me that this was a spinoff of the Sex Pistols.

"Okay?" I said; at that time, my knowledge of the Sex Pistols was basically limited to wondering what "Bollocks" meant and that our cockatiel was named Sid Vicious. Oh, and that the Slits' "So Tough" was about Sid Vicious, too. (My sister told me a lot of things that I had absolutely no way of processing in grade school. XD)

You've listened to Happy?, right?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Ha, I remember you mentioning Sid the cockatiel, that's totes awesome. XD

You've listened to Happy?, right?

Actually I haven't!

[flamebyrd]

I really like Brendon Urie's voice in the lower registers (ie. verses) but not so much in the higher register (ie. choruses). *scuffs foot* Ryan's voice is nice but not very... emotive. Which is funny, when you think about it.

*downloads offered music*

[supplanter.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty oblivious to this sort of thing and reading nana never compelled me to want to listen to sex pistols (I just kind of assumed the sound of the bands in nana were like green day, somehow, in spite of the female vocalists >.>) but I wound up wiki-ing adam and the ants which led around to malcolm mclaren and the sex pistols and basically what I got out of the whole thing is that malcolm mclaren is a complete asshole who destroys everything he touches while somehow coming out as a legit and successful businessman/musician? ^^;;;;

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Malcolm McLaren: well... yes. XD; The thing is the music industry is basically full of assholes anyway, and McLaren was so integral to how things happened at the time that it's hard to say what UK punk would've ended up as without him, although I suspect it would still have happened in some shape or form. And the dude really does have astonishingly good instincts.

I had my own ideas re: what the bands in Nana ought to sound like (not particularly like the Pistols), but there wasn't much hope that they would correspond to Yazawa Ai's internal vision tbh. XD;

[supplanter.livejournal.com]

It got worse when I actually heard Seventeen by the sex pistols (which I think BLAST played when they were auditioning Shin?) and I was like "...?!?!?!?"

And then they were like "are we really punk?  I think we're more visual kei now" and I'm like "... IS VISUAL KEI SUPPOSED TO SOUND LIKE ANYTHING IN PARTICULAR?"

I can try to imagine what they might sound like, but I pattern them on bands that have not achieved massive massive success the way I think they're trying to make us believe Trapnest and BLAST can... but the industry in japan is different, so who knows. ^^;;