It Took Seconds

Four minutes and seventeen seconds: “Fire Bomb” is my favourite thing on Rihanna’s last album and grew on me to become one of my favourite songs of last year: an unabashedly epic and sentimental R’n’B power ballad about suicide bombing your former lover. I enjoy so much about it - its central imagery (“The lovers need to clear the road” - what a great line!), bizarro lyrical flourishes like “microwaved in a metal tragedy”, Rihanna’s nothing-to-lose tenderness on “baby we were brilliant”, the sheer enormous GOTHINESS of it. I love how unrespectable it is - of course she knew that people would be scouring her album for songs that might be about Chris Brown but I sincerely doubt any of those rubberneckers were expecting something like this.

But most of all I love the guitars. There are guitars all over Rated R, mostly used in the way they are on “Fire Bomb”: deliberately ugly, vulgar, over-the-top, crass signifiers of “rock” you might say but also there to suggest sheer mess. I don’t think there’s any intention of actually ‘rocking’ - the motion in the songs comes from their choreographed R’n’B hardness. The rock elements are purely textural, scar tissue and scabs on a wounded, angry record.

What would your 4’17” track be?

Four minutes and eighteen seconds: I have very few film score albums - even when my favourite acts do soundtrack work I tend to end up listening to it a little grudgingly. There’s no particular reason for this beyond cinematic philistinism. I also have very little knowledge of classical music, of whatever period. And I have only ever seen one Peter Greenaway film, and didn’t enjoy it very much.

So the context for the Michael Nyman Band’s “An Eye For Optical Theory” - an elaboration on a baroque round by William Croft, originally from the soundtrack of Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s Contract though this arrangement is later and faster - completely eluded me. But I loved the music immediately I heard it, sometime in 1995, so I had to build my own frame for it as a kind of string-driven math pop. What appealed to me then and now is its berserk precision, the different bits of the tune overlapping like layers of clockwork but also with a sense that the whole contraption is somewhat out of control, careening rapidly and giddily towards a collapse just out of shot.

What would your 4’18” track be?

Four minutes and nineteen seconds: First of all, apologies for the wholly unintended break from blogging - I got completely overtaken by other stuff and hit pause on most of my projects for a few days. The truth is, also, that this is getting really hard - we’re now at the stage where my library has about ten tracks I’d like to put up for every length, so choices are getting very arbitrary indeed. Time to be ruthless!

Anyhow, here’s Dusty Springfield, singing a Tennant/Lowe composition, “In Private”. It was a single, though didn’t do very well, and comes from the soundtrack to the film Scandal, about the 1963 Profumo scandal in British politics. The personal is often political in songwriting, but Neil Tennant is interesting in that he’s occasionally dug into the erotics of politics - writing songs, like this one, about the literal affairs of the mighty. The split between private professions of love and public denials gives Springfield some rich, painful material to work with, playing the other woman: of course this doesn’t have to be a political situation (or a straight one), there’s a universality of hurt here and I wish this had been a bigger hit.

What would your 4’19” track have been?

Four minutes and twenty seconds: “I used to say dumb things / I guess I still do” - I like to give the impression that I spent 1994 listening to Disco Inferno and jungle and dance-pop but the truth is I also listened to the Go-Betweens, every single day. I listened to the Go-Betweens while I got back together with my girlfriend, I listened to them when we broke up again, I listened to them walking in Oxford in the Spring and Edinburgh in the Winter. I called them “the Smiths for grown-ups” even though they sounded not much like the Smiths and I acted not much like a grown-up. I wrote lyrics that were poor attempts at Robert Forster lyrics and tore them up at once. I crowbarred their songs into my situations, forced “Bachelor Kisses” and “Twin Layers Of Lightning” to be about people I knew and risked burning those songs out forever. At the time they weren’t far off a lot of the other stuff I liked, but now that tide’s come in and they’re an island to themselves in my collection. I’m almost scared to play them. On “Apology Accepted”, the last track on the brilliant Liberty Belle And The Black Diamond Express, Grant McLennan sings deliberately raw and thick, stumbling through a song about trying to be trusted and trust again. Do I still love the Go-Betweens? “Such a simple question / I pretended I was sleeping.”

What would your 4’20” track be?

Four minutes and twenty-one seconds: Mouse on Mars! Rarely has a band’s name been as exquisitely evocative of their sound! The airless backdrop of another world, and yet from it come tiny skritchings and skitterings, weaving micropatterns of music out of crumbs and straw. The super-tactile “Saturday Night Worldcup Fieber” is typical (perhaps more gorgeous than usual though): pop music made by Borrowers, a football soundtrack made up of the tiniest gestures, a flea circus with drawing pins for goalposts. Nanotech pop, so friendly but so strange.

What would your 4’21” track be?

Four minutes and twenty-two seconds: 4’22” is, taken historically, still above average for a pop song, but for a disco record it’s pretty compressed. “Touch And Go” by Ecstasy, Passion And Pain gets its point across without any loss of power, though. It’s soaked through from start to end with flamboyance, defiance and emotion - vocalist Barbara Roy laying into her faithless lover without let-up. Even on the breakdown near the end, where the man might expect some minor respite, there’s no escape: Roy delivering a damning verdict on his character in the song’s most intense moment.

What would your 4’22” track be?

Four minutes and twenty-three seconds: One of the few things I am sure of in pop is that 90s Eurobeat will have its moment of fashionable revival, along the lines of 80s Italo Disco. Most actual fans of 80s Italo I have mentioned this to have reacted with a degree of horror, I ought to say, but I’m convinced of it. It may even be happening RIGHT NOW. A track that took over my brain something fierce a couple of years ago was Ex-Otago’s cover of Corona’s “Rhythm Of The Night” - but no matter how I liked Ex-Otago’s take this original wins out. They improved its structure but couldn’t quite grab its strange combination of euphoria and fleeting melancholy.

What would your 4’23” track be?

Four minutes and twenty-four seconds: My MP3 doesn’t credit it as such but I’m pretty sure this is the Motiv8 Radio Edit of “Jellyhead” by Crush - those shameless handbag-house keyboard riffs are very them. Motiv8 were a remix team some or all of whom ended up in Xenomania, and “Jellyhead” from 1996 is very much a stepping stone towards self-conscious 00s pop: full-on clubland influences, knowingness, classicist nods back to girl-group fierceness… it flopped - ‘96-‘97 were sour times for pop unless your adopted surname was “Spice” - and became a cult favourite. You get the feeling if the Popjustice Forums did a Top 100 of the 90s it would get major backing.

Have I made it sound terrible? Sorry! It’s good! I could listen to this kind of clean, cheap dancepop production all day - Motiv8 (if it IS them) should’ve been the 90s Stock, Aitken and Waterman. Don’t pay too much attention to the lyrics though.

What would your 4’24” track be?

Four minutes and twenty five seconds: I went through the UK civil service fast track exam process twice. There’s an exam, and an interview, and then a two-day interview, and then you have to wrestle one of our lizard overlords or something, I’m not sure as I never got to the fourth part. The first time I reached the two-day interview and at one point they asked me about the House of Lords, and I said oh, a portion of it should be chosen by lot, like in Ancient Greece. Bad Tom! Civil servants love the House of Lords because a lot of them end up there. I probably said some other crap stuff too. Then two years later I got to the two-day interview again, but I had another job offer and I cancelled.

Anyway ALL THROUGH that initial two-day interview this song, “Government Administrator” by Eggs, was playing in my head. I was talking to my bouncy and enthusiastic fellow would-be civil servants and in my head Mr Eggs was going “WALK LIKE I WALK THINK LIKE I THINK YOU’RE CATCHING ON FAST LET ME BUY YOU A DRINK”. Yeah, Mr Eggs! Stick it to the man! In the job I did take I ended up drinking with my co-workers anyway and sometimes WEARING A SUIT and stuff too so who is the sell-out now, it is me.

But I love this record, it is pretty much the song which completely sums up early 90s indie rock for me in all its scuzzball naive hopefulness. I hear it and I think of John Peel, and of Peter Bagge comics, and of reading about the Internet and wondering what it was like, and of reading about K Records and Teen Beat and wondering what those were like, and of not wanting a job but not wanting to not have one and the general wide-open confusion of being 20. All that just in his opening dorky-ironic “Oh KAAY” really.

I got a job, not for the Government, I never really got into K Records stuff. The internet turned out alright though.

What would your 4’25” track be?

Four minutes and twenty-six seconds: “I had a dream of a backlot / I saw my life in a longshot”. New wave gawkiness, the British Broadcasting Corporation, Trevor Horn discovering his production style, a song that ends with a cut, a man coming to terms with change, a hymn to the studios where Top Of The Pops used to be filmed, the birth pangs of the New Pop. It’s Buggles, with “Elstree”.

What would your 4’26” track be?

Four minutes and twenty-seven seconds: “Laundromat”, by Nivea, is a bit of R’n’Bubblegum so playful in its sweetness, so oversaturated with sugar that you almost don’t realise it’s a kiss-off track: even then it’s letting the guy down as gently and prettily as it can. Pop beamed in from a world where pain is impossible - your archetypal ‘nice place to visit’ I’d say.

What would your 4’27” track be?

Four minutes and twenty-eight seconds: Inasmuch as I could name The Enemy when I was 14 or 15, it was Fleetwood Mac. Tango In The Night was everywhere (wannabewithyoueverywhere): it crossed over from radios to shops to my school, which didn’t usually listen to anything later than the mid-70s but which made an exception for the Mac’s supersaturated slickness. The newspapers loved them; Q magazine, which someone got at school, loved them even more. My own tastes were jumping like a rat in a box - taping pop off the radio, grabbing every Bowie tape I could off friends, borrowing older boys’ classic rock compilations, headphone sessions to Pink Floyd then a sudden turn when I heard The Smiths. But through all of it the constant distaste for Fleetwood Mac and their dead-eyed implacable emptiness.

And now I really like them: never, ever trust me, please. Here’s “Gypsy”, from 1982, Stevie Nicks with a nod back to the sad sunshine glide of imperial-phase Fleetwood Mac.

What would your 4’28” track be?

Four minutes and twenty-nine seconds: One of the things sampling has done to pop music is allow songs to be retconned, have their meaning and reception flipped long long after they were created - not just the original sample-source songs but (perhaps even more so) tracks which used a sample that was later used by a bigger hit. So when you listen to “Funky (12”)” by the Ultramagnetic MCs now, it’s very difficult not to frame it in terms of its difference to “California Love”, which uses the same Joe Cocker piano sample as its base. The two tracks - both terrific - are a good lesson in the artistry of sampling in 80s and 90s hip-hop: how the same source could be used to build entirely different moods. The Dre and 2pac tune uses the piano as a roll, a bottomless and ever-refreshing well of bountiful confidence. The Ultramagnetics track takes it as a judder, something more off-kilter that refuses ever quite to resolve and pulls the MCs into spatchcocked, pause-filled flows (which were the kind of things the UMCs did anyway).

What would your 4’29” track be?

Four minutes and thirty seconds: R&B, like much of pop before it, relies on a system of matching the best songs and songwriters with the best performers and the best producer/arrangers (rather than, say, expecting people to be good at them all, or even two out of three). This is not necessarily the best way of creating magnificent pop music - there is no best way - but it’s certainly created a lot. Of course it can misfire, and it’s particularly galling when an inferior version of a song ends up getting the commercial rewards.

The internet isn’t always so great at redressing the financial injustice in these situations (because most people going mad for ‘the original’ won’t have paid for either version). But it can give pyrrhic credit where due. After the Pussycat Dolls hit with “Don’t Cha” it didn’t take long before MP3s of Tori Alamaze’s first recording of it where flying around. The quality of this file isn’t great, and the record sounds cheaper - in a more intriguing way - than the Dolls’ hit, but Alamaze’s performance cuts through. The PCDs - who would go on to make much better records - strut and pout but stay fantasy figures, taking the path of least resistance through the record. Alamaze is different - against this thinner, more mechanical backing she sounds cold-blooded and cruel, stating her superiority as a fact not a promise. Her heat is in the song - the Dolls need visuals - but it’s a fatal heat, radioactive. Ironically, it’s testament to the quality of her take on “Don’t Cha” that she was able to make this song - which we know as an absolute lowest-common-denominator banker of a record - somehow too forbidding and clammy to be a hit.

Which would your 4’30” track be?

Four minutes and thirty-one seconds: You knew there’d be a New Order song eventually, right? Here’s how I tried to explain New Order when I reviewed the reissues for Pitchfork.

“Following the suicide of Ian Curtis and subsequent retirement of the Joy Division moniker, New Order began as a band without a frontman; the trick of them is that they stayed that way, even after Sumner had become the regular vocalist. Sumner’s often flat, affectless voice might be a familiar point of contact with New Order but it’s rarely their focus. Their notoriously careless lyrics— Sumner has generally made great play of how last-minute they are— are a further sign of the group’s discomfort with the way rock music tends to be lensed through its singer. So it’s no surprise the 12” format was so attractive for New Order— more lovely space for the vocals to wander out of entirely.

So if Sumner isn’t a frontman, what is he? “World in Motion” suggests an answer. It’s a song that uses soccer as a metaphor for raving and resistance— “Beat the man! Take him on!”— so why not use the sport as a metaphor for what the band who made it do? In those terms, Sumner isn’t a frontman, he’s a target man: The striker whose job isn’t just to score, it’s to hold the ball so his teammates can move forward and into play. New Order’s secret is their fluidity, their easy sharing of the spotlight. At any time in any song, any one of them might provide the hook— the bright drama of Gillian Gilbert’s keyboards, the giddy sequencing of Stephen Morris’ percussion, Peter Hook’s famously liquid basslines, or indeed Sumner’s own guitar lines, as gorgeously full and melodic as his vocals are blank.”

This isn’t “World In Motion” - my rule here is that I’m not allowed to feature tracks I’ll be covering in my other big web project. It’s “Run”, from the glorious Technique album, one of their most straightforward songs in fact. “Well, you don’t get a tan like this for nothing.”: actually Sumner’s singing is the focus here, or at least it is until one of those luscious bursts of guitar comes in, and after that he’s happy to step back and let Peter Hook wander generously all over the song. Beautiful stuff, might be my favourite thing by them.

What would your 4’31” track be?

Four minutes and thirty-two seconds: I’m not sure that British dance music has ever got as delicate as Y Tribe’s “Enough Is Enough” - a 2-step garage track built around a harpsichord synth motif and a singer’s train of thought about a suitor. I’m tired of love. And scared of no love. She sounds totally caught up in those thoughts, like their recording is a lucky accident, and the harpsichord and bass patterns are simply a ball of silver twine she’s playing cat’s cradle with while she wonders what to do.

What would your 4’32” track be?

Four minutes and thirty-three seconds: This is a recording of John Cage’s composition 4’33”, arranged for piano. The performer was Mark Sinker, the audience included myself and Eli Sessions, who also produced this recording. Mark also arranged the piece from memory, with the result that 4’33” is performed as a single movement rather than as 3 separate ones, as indicated in Cage’s original score.

The performance took place at about 8PM, on Monday 12th April 2010, at Mark’s flat in Hackney (chosen because it’s where a piano is). It was a fine Spring day, one of the best of the year so far in London: after the recital we headed to a pub. Birds were singing, though I don’t think you can hear any on the MP3: you can hear traffic passing and people walking through Clapton Square. In the fourth minute of the piece a conversation starts outside Mark’s window (which was open) and the rest of the performance is relatively full of incident.

The track is best listened to at high volume. Or possibly at very low volume.

4’33” is not designed for recording. The nature of the piece is such that if you play it back the recorded version will inevitably find itself overlaid by noise that occurs when you play it. Or rather, the recorded version will inevitably interfere with the noise that occurs when you play it. It would be possible - and fun in a way - to make an Alvin Lucier style thick recording of 4’33” by recording the recording over and over again, letting background noise accrete like dust until the track is caked with it. (Someone may already have done this.)

But in general, a recording of this piece is an unnecessary novelty, so my apologies for forcing it on you. I have seen a few ‘versions’ of 4’33” - there’s one on the 2-for-1 CD reissue of the first Magnetic Fields albums, as a bonus track between the two records. But these are simply blank stretches of CD, actual silence which in some ways mistreats the piece as badly as recording it does. Genuine live versions of it are quite unusual, though. Back in the early 00s I read a piece suggesting that there were several versions of 4’33” available on Napster: none of them were actually four minutes and thirty-three seconds long.

Why did Cage choose that particular length? I don’t know. (EDIT: This interesting page about the piece suggests he didn’t - the duration is arbitrary, and he wouldn’t have approved of the fast-and-loose way we’ve arranged the work or treated it either. Sorry JC!) But I do know that different durations would make for very different experiences. We’re used to shorter silences - we use 1 and 2 minute ones to mark tragedies or remembrance. These are solemn occasions: background noise is an irrelevance or an annoying and insulting distraction. I remember two 3-minute silences, for Princess Diana (ridiculous and poorly kept) and after 9/11 (chilling, but even then there was a sense of people twitching expectantly before the end).

4’33” is obviously longer than any of those - and of course there’s no specific instruction on the audience to be silent, or any more silent than they would be at any recital. Assuming you do keep quiet while the piece is being played, those 273 seconds may fall intriguingly on the cusp of your ability to guess duration - the ending of the piece snuck up on me shortly after I’d stopped anticipating it. It’s also in the nature of the thing that the sonic content of the piece remains unresolved - whatever is happening when the lid comes down is framed and really before you know it time and sound are moving on again, one second at a time. What happened after the end of this track? What happens after the end of any?

Thanks to Mark and Eli for making this entry possible. What would your 4’33” track have been?

Four minutes and thirty-four seconds: I remember following “Lay All Your Love On Me” as it crawled up the charts in the Summer of 1981, willing it to go higher. I was eight, it was my favourite song for a while, one of the first I can remember.

Why did I like it? Unrecoverable. I only know why I like it now, for the same reason I love almost all ABBA songs: it catches the awkward grown-up vulnerability of our square world. Everything about the song is stressed - its narrator, chafing at herself over a possible liason; its uptight, nervous not-quite disco groove; its suspended promise of release in the bridge; its pedantic, jabby rhythm guitar licks, dinka-dinka-dink-DINKdinkdinkdink. The song was released only on 12”, which suggests maybe the band thought it was a record for the dancefloor, but it sounds like a record for standing at the bar, fidgeting and sipping your drink too fast.

What would your 4’34” track be?

Four minutes and thirty-five seconds: Of all the manufactured pop icons I find Kylie Minogue the hardest to like. No, not to like, who couldn’t like her, she seems a lovely person, hardest to enjoy. Even her iconic hits - yes, even THAT one - don’t do a lot for me. And if I had to pick only one Kylie song and leave the rest to hang, it would very probably be this ridiculous, cynical, glorious thing, this bit of overcooked Village People tinsel, “Your Disco Needs You”. It was written by Robbie Williams’ chief songwriting dude Guy Chambers, and you can totally hear it as a Robbie song, but Kylie sounds like she’s having more fun with it, maybe even like she believes it for a few minutes.

I don’t feel it rewards too much thought to be honest with you. Hooks are never a problem with her: the reason I don’t go for Kylie is because her voice is so thin, and the reason I like this is because here she’s mostly drowned out by a line of marching beefcake shouting “DISCO! DISCO! DIS-DIS-DISCO!”. That’s all.

What would your 4’35” track be?