Make It 'So'!

By: Eeleen Lee on 10:39 pm

Title: So
Artist: Peter Gabriel
Release Year: 1986
Tracklisting


Red Rain
Sledgehammer
Don’t Give Up
That Voice Again
Mercy Street
Big Time
We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)
This Is The Picture (Excellent Birds)
In Your Eyes

# Why should this album soundtrack my writing process?

Bored? Has the creative font in your head dried up? Need fresh inspiration?  If dunking your head in a bucketful of cold water is too messy, try water in the sonic sense. The theme of water runs through this album: Samples of hi-hats that sound like drizzling rain, looped triangles that resemble trickling streams and Prophet keyboards emissions like breaking waves. Gabriel extends the water theme in 1992's 'Us' but 'So' is more accessible, danceable,and fun.


Which albums do you play/ blast through earphones when you write?

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Elvis and Ellis

By: Eeleen Lee on 10:17 am

Declan McManus aka Elvis Costello. At first glance, an unlikely musical colossus who started out as a knock-kneed punk rocker with Buddy Holly glasses, since long established and straddling all genres. With Elvis Costello, I experienced the unique instance of a book introducing me to the music of a singer-songwriter. Normally, it is vice versa.

'Less Than Zero' by Bret Easton Ellis, takes its title from an Elvis Costello song. Unlike Ellis' other novels, 'American Psycho' and 'Glamorama', Costello does not appear in the novel as a celebrity or a name-drop, he is represented as this poster image on the bedroom wall of the protagonist (above).

I wrote an essay on 'Less Than Zero' and bought the album 'Trust' as part of my research. However, most people on my MA programme did not share my enthusiasm and disregarded the book as nilhlistic and dated. Back then I viewed it as a period piece like 'The Catcher In The Rye'. But rereading it now, I realise that the youth culture explored in the book is not so removed from the present.  MTV back in the 1980s has exploded into the easy access of Youtube. 1980s amoralism and early 21st century paranoia induce the same political apathy and numbness. Answering machine messages are now text messages, tweets and status updates. Teenagers will always be the outsiders. Or perhaps we are all teenagers now, ensnared in a technological web of our own making.

I contributed three more flash fiction pieces for City of Shared Stories KL, both inspired by Ellis and Elvis:  'Clubland' is gathered from a series of late nights (not all experienced by me), 'Less Than Kosong' ('kosong' is Malay for zero) and 'Malaysian Psycho' were written as  parodies nine years ago. I was unaware at the time that the parodies were to become  observations of Malaysian society. The Patrick Bateman character in 'Malaysian Psycho' was originally called Patrick Budirman.

For the uninitiated, check out this online Bret Easton Ellis resource http://notanexit.net/

For Elvis Costello uninitiates, listen to,  'The Very Best Of'.

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"Memory Man"- Aqualung

By: Eeleen Lee on 11:53 am

For the uninitiated, 'Aqualung' is the stage name of English singer-songwriter, Matt Hales. He is usually lumped together with Coldplay. Comparisons that are rather puzzling, for the resemblance is only in passing; the frail but winning vocals, tinkling piano-playing and enigmatic, plaintive ballads.

Commercial sucess eludes Aqualung, even after scoring hits with 'Strange And Beautiful', soundtracking a Volkswagen Beetle advert in 2002, and 'Brighter Than Sunshine' in 2003. Perhaps a move to Columbia Records, USA will change Matt Hales' fortunes for the better. But for now, look to his 2007 album, 'Memory Man' for gorgeous,swirling, wistful music that could fill up a stadium as well as a concert-hall, in atmospherics, if not in audience. He also broke out the hard, rawkin' guitar, feedback, vocoders and breakbeats, so *take that* to all those knee-jerk Coldplay comparisions.

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Culture Vulture Speaks! #2: 80's Music Redemption

By: Eeleen Lee on 3:23 am

Culture Vulture is flapping his wings and asking me to lay down a few ground rules concerning 80's music, in today's post:

1. Don't hate music because of the era from which it came from. The 1980s gets reviled as the decade of sartorial disasters, such as shoulder-pads, mullets, day-glo pants, spandex and violet eyeshadow. If the image and fashion sense of 80's artistes bothers you, well, then close your eyes but open up your ears.

2. Don't hate music of a particular era because your parents listened to it. (The exception applies to Engelbert Humperdinck...). Before the Internet, Ipods and mp3s, I admit, there wasn't much going on. But it wasn't a complete Dark Ages: there were record shops, walkmans, vinyl garage sales and music charts. Listening to music was a more tactile experience- you had to get the disc out of the sleeve/ case and into the player and you had to read the sleeve/ CD booklet for lyrics. Fandom was abit troublesome- to find out more about your favourite artiste there was no Myspace page or Wikipedia, you had to go to the library or bookshop and refer to hefty tomes such as "The Virgin Encyclopedia Of Rock" or "The Faber Book Of Pop". (quelle shock! Horreur!). There was no Google image finder if you wanted images of your favourite artistes, you had to spend some of your pocket money to buy magazines.
This is why your parents get misty-eyed or excited when they hear a certain song on the radio.This is whhy they start exclaiming things like, "Ooohhh I remember this!", "Ohh I used to have posters of him/ her/them all over my bedroom wall!". Just wait in another ten years, you'll be saying the same about EMO or American Idol winners (maybe...)

3.Don't close your mind to music of a certain era because of the instruments used on the tracks or the production. Would you hold production against Vivaldi, if recording equipment was available during the 17th century? 80's musicians didn't have 'Garage Band' software or digital recording techniques but they made the best out of what was available. So what, if the slap-bass makes you giggle, the synths sound cheesy, and the drums sound like wasps fighting in a biscuit-tin? That was all part of musical history. You'll never hear the likes of them again.

Redemption of 80's Artistes


1. Madonna- She wasn't always about Kabbalah and motherhood. She was a veryy naughty girl when she started out in 1982: ripped hemlines and conical bras, fruity song titles, such as "Like A Virgin",and "Into The Groove.". She was controversial but at least the songs measured up to the hype.

2. Rick Astley- . Before he became the infamous 'rickroll'd' internet phenomenon. Perhaps if he had been less cute and his videos less focused on his awkward dancing and tailored suits, he wouldn't be the easy choice for 80's music whipping boy. But this boy had a set of soul-singer pipes that could whip Michael Buble anyday.

3. Nik Kershaw- Another obvious choice for 80's artiste whipping boy, because of his Macgyver-mullet and Brooke Shield eyebrows. If you get past his anaemic vocals you will discover his formidable songwriting talent for putting weighty highbrow (no pun intended) subjects into smart pop tunes. He is the only artiste who has written a pop song about "Don Quixote".

4. Sting- (as above for Nik Kershaw, except for "Don Quixote"). In addition: He wasn't always this crappily safe, MOR and boring! He managed to sneak a song about stalking, "Every Breath You Take" into the Top Ten.

5. A-ha- There's more to them than "Take On Me'. They have been making beautiful if somewhat austere Scandinavian rock/pop since 1985.

6. Simple Minds- Listen to their output before 1985, before the activism and charity concerts. And ("Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Oohhhhhhhh..." ) Don't youuuuu complain about the lyrics. I know they do not make sense, but in a smart enigmatic way. Simple Minds never churned out radio-friendly love songs. They did have a hit with 'Love Song' in 1982, which isn't a love song at all but a sort of polemic against americanization.

7. Duran Duran- I'm sorry, there is no redeeming Duran Duran. The lead singer sounds like an elk going into labour, the other band members look like they failed the auditions for Japan, and "The Reflex" has not one but *two* godawful choruses

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4.5 Songs

By: Eeleen Lee on 5:10 pm

Hello everybody, today I am feeling adventurous- I shall start the first in a series of the ubiqitious 'song analysis' blog. . Hats off to Nick Hornby, who highlighted in his seminal book, 'High Fidelity', the predominantly male preoccupation with lists, song analysis and compilations. Nick Hornby also published '9 Songs' in 2002, which was a collection of nine musings on nine songs of his choice, thus here I present my '4.5 Songs':

1. "Somewhere In My Heart" Aztec Camera (1988)
In a 1990 radio interview, Roddy Frame the writer of this song, called it, 'a scuzzy little pop song'. This is a slight injustice, but when you hear the 5 note horn intro segue into a chirpy late 80s' drum pattern and some rather omnious lyrics about it being, 'Summer in the city, where the air is still/ A baby being born to the overkill': the tone is not so much scuzzy as muddled and elliptical. But all is redeemed when the anthemic chorus kicks in ( bizarrely accented with what sounds like Christmas chimes...?), Frame's impassioned declaration that, 'the closest thing to heaven is to rock n' roll..' at the middle eight, all topped with a guitar solo that soars, seemingly to heaven.

2. "Mack the Knife" Bobby Darin (1955)
I first heard this on the soundtrack to Quiz Show (dir. Robert Redford, 1994) ,obviously selected as a quintessential '50s song but it still sounds fresh and contemporary, as proved by the insipid covers of Michael Buble, Jamie Cullum and even Lyle Lovett . Bobby Darin's definitive interpretation is simultaneously tongue-in-cheek and all-knowing, in recounting the unsavoury exploits of Mack the Knife, a character from The ThreePenny Orchestra by Bertolt Brecht. Kudos to Darin for revamping a Pre-war German showtune into a hit with bobbysoxers, and sneaking it in under the pop cultural radar of '50s post-war America.

3. "Boredom" Buzzcocks (1979)
Ever the bunch of self-contradictions, the Buzzcocks came up with this gem that eschewed punk's three chord thrash and anti-establishment sentiments. "Boredom" rails against, well, boredom and sounds hilariously incensed. The two-note guitar solo that tails off (most likely out of ennui) is a classic but the caustic lyrics still cause this writer much thigh-slapping mirth, for example: "So tell me who are you trying to arouse?/ Get your hand out of my trousers!!"

4. "Respect" Aretha Franklin
A big song sung by a large lady. Do not trowel any proto-feminist readings onto this tune and just revel in the sturm und drang of Aretha's vocal.

5. "Born To Run" Bruce Springsteen (1974)
Here's the .5 song as promised in the title of this post. It may sound sacrilegious but 'Born To Run' should be played from around the halfway mark (2:37): then you'll avoid the overwrought lyrics about youths on the beach stuck in a deadend town in the midst of the American Dream gone sour. After the halfway mark, its Springsteen at his most life-affirming and evocative, "Baby we were born to ruuuuuuuuuuuun!!!!!", even on the way to work in the morning. And on the way back.

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