forgive horsemouth - he's grumpy - they've been making him work. he's been stitching sow's ears into silk purses - or at least things that look like they might be silk purses until they have been sold - but the next morning you wake up and it's a sow's ear you've got in your pocket. this is the nature of all alienated labour- the nature of every impulse purchase.
william and jane morris, all those pre-raphaelite crazies (and their folksongs) still they had more political sense than all these sweepy sweepy broom broom peope - horsemouth swears when he saw boris being danced up the street (broom in hand) there was somebody waltzing with him saying in his ear remember thou art mortal! remember thou art mortal! eyes fixed on the glorious all swept out future, when london would be free of its rioting mobs and a hundred village greens would bloom. he swears that person looked familiar.
the cuckoo and the turtle dove will get even rarer (as their african wintering grounds are eroded away). whereas in greece even the dogs are rioting.
horsemouth has been watching zombie biker movie psychomania - it begins with formation motorcycle ballet through the standing stones in the mist.
saturday british summer time ends, the friday after is halloween, the wednesday after bonfire night - the world frays a little at the edges, the gates are opened up, things begin to appear strangely transformed and yet still within the old world.
on hearing a modern singer (we work against)
great voice.
bjorkish.
cute accent
.... and not that interesting.
no the one for horsemouth - does she do any trad?
she does trad - it works better.
horsemouth is not in love with lovely voices - what horsemouth wants is something about the voice that is revealed as it does the work of opening up the song - words and music working against each other (barthes much misused and always worth a read essay "the grain of the voice'). he feels the same about most classical singing. horsemouth would be more interested in hearing an amateur singer sing and seeing where they breathed or put the emphasis - voices with flaws, voices with imperfections, average voices working with dramatic material having to recruit other resources to cope. too many people are in love with the sounds that come out of their mouths (and recording gives you access to these seconds again and again) to worry about what the song is saying.
the music too has this problem. it is too sparse and willfully 'adventurous' (in a boring tasteful way - hello wire). a lot of this stuff shares this problem - it is just too mannered and too overproduced for its own good - all texture loving recorded with expensive microphones but with no musical content for it to work against. horsemouth is not interested in acoustic textures themselves but in the portability of the instruments and in the restriction of options that not having an electric guitar, a rack of effects pedals and an amplifier brings.
they cover a song horsemouth knows
so they found that one did they - ouch - well the lyrics always were rubbish - 10 seconds and off- ok if you could sing like bjork, cerys mathews and liz fraser the I guess you would... could she not sing a song where it sounds like she thinks it's important? or could she not sing one where it sounds like she just thinks it's cheap throwaway commercial trash.
even when he sounds bored bob dylan at least sounds like he thinks the song should be sung (or if he doesn't that's interesting - often he sounds like he wants to kill everybody for making him sing the song) - even when he's singing god-bothering trash on a nationally syndicated tv show mid-evening johnny cash sounds like he means it.
No comments:
Post a Comment