Rockhunter, Issue 35, 10 March 2007
Violent inversions and gender role reinforcement
The videos for Lily Allen’s “Smile” and Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” fulfil similar functions in marketing the idea of gender-centered empowerment. On the face of it, with totally different agendas, these two women allow themselves to be used in a tedious reworking of The Battle of the Sexes. Allen’s on-screen persona hires some street-punks to beat up her ex-boyfriend and trash his flat. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the rockin’ multiverse, Lavigne’s goth-punk character does violence to a rather anodyne version of herself.
Allen’s video perpetuates the stereotype of the woman scorned, who feels she has a licence to commit violence. It’s a version of the evergreen “I cut his clothes to ribbons because he left me for another woman” narrative. There’s a similar ad running on telly at the moment, where women are portrayed committing criminal damage to their partners’ property for apparently disrespecting their own. Anyway, your woman, Allen, hangs around, with butter unmelted in her gob, sticking her tongue out coquettishly and rolling her rich eyeballs, paying a bunch of toughs in cool hard cash for duffing up the unfortunate fellow who messed wiv poor li’l Lily’s persona’s head.
Lavigne’s character is a more ironic take on the high school relationships scene. The goth-punk girl doesn’t really wanna be with the jerk-off jock she’s eyeballing, but she wouldn’t mind a go on him anyway. However, for some reason, Lavigne insists on coyly re-reunning the girlfriend/boyfriend concept for the 100000000000000th time - not being able to admit in song that she wants to have sex with the fellow. And for this reason, the other woman, also played by Lavigne, gets it in various high school-related ways.
How I hate inverted gender taxonomies.
Charlie Brooker Must Try To Become Less Ubiquitous
This week, as part of his increasing exposure in print and on telly, Brooker produced an article in The Guardian about why he hates his new mobile phone. I can’t be bothered to explain why I hate newspaper columnists who produce this sort of toss, so you’ll just have to imagine it.
New Comps News
I seem to have missed An Experiment With Tyme, Vol. I (Swozzle, 2006) when it was first out, but that’s not that unusual. I haven’t got the cash these days to spend on discs. Most of my spare coppers go on eatin’ treats from the deli over the road. I love a nice rye loaf, with a bit of quality serano and a tub of mixed olives. And as far as music goes, as I’m currently documenting in other posts, my listening needs on a daily basis, at least to and from work, are entirely satisfied by Christian’s Generic Psych cassette. Interestingly, I bumped into Simon this afternoon and Christian had done him a tape around the same time, which seems to contain exactly the same tracks! How many more are out there? And what can it all mean?
Anyway, back to the matter in hand. I was up in London yesterday and rounded a very nice afternoon off with some fine, competitively priced Pakistani cuisine at the Lahore Kebab House on Umberston Road, about 10 minutes from Aldgate East tube. The lamb chops for starters were fantastic, but were narrowly pipped to the post by the chicken and spinach main course. I was stuffed to the gunnels for under a tenner! You’ll have to take your own booze, though, as they don’t have a licence. The mango lassi looked good, though if you’re contemplating the benefits of temperance.
Where was I? Oh yeah, this wretched comp I stumped up just under a tenner for. Was it worth it? Are they ever? Band 4, Side 2 is my top tip on this waxing. Why, it’s “Footpath to Lavender St.” by Christopher Eager, the original 45 of which is, in my world, as rare as magic rocking horse shit. The bi-side of “Your Carriage Awaits”, comped a few years back, this intriguing Future-period Seeds-style number is a rather pleasant opener. From the other face of the disc I was expecting harpsichords, paeans to Morgantown and so forth. But there’s an almost Brechtian use here of what I term the Michigan Muffle - that is, recording an overamped guitar at full volume with minimal compression and damping it in the mix a bit. I’m thinking The Glass Sun’s “In the Silence of the Morning”, if you need a comparison. With this technique, there’s a distancing of the sound, thru its imperfect reproduction, that renders it a highly visible, almost tangible, presence. Who knows who produced this, but it’s certainly not the same engineer that did the radio side. Eager sounds a little uncomfortable with the result. It’s almost as if he’s written the words to fit a different version. This 1967 song appears to be about a young man’s faltering steps through a London of the imagination, from theatreland to drinking clubs, significantly via Picadilly. The couplet, “Music is my trade/I feel my vision fade/Singing’s not for free/I get it on HP”, is the key to the whole number. Given the name of the tune, it’s pretty fair to suggest that “trade” is actually the Palare slang for a person one has sex with, and “HP” in that case would stand not for “hire purchase”, but “homy palome”, or homosexual man. Whether he knows it or not - and I suspect that he did, because the songwriter’s name, C. Ede, has the same initials as its singer’s — Christopher Eager was singing about the road to self-realisation of a gay man in London’s entertainment business. I wonder what happened to him after this single went down the toilet? So to speak.
Despite this comp’s excellent title, the rest of the tunes on are much less intriguing than the Eager number. This whole comp business is like a nightmare in a salad factory. Of the other tracks, my faves so far are Poor Wight’s “Upside-Down Heart”, which is a great stomper straight outta 1968. And I actually enjoyed Still Water’s version of “Eight Miles High”. Get me? ENJOYED!!! Perhaps it’s because they do it cool, like 4tathafloor. Fuzz monsters are all very well, but baby I need a bit of light and shade - you understand me? - for colour and comfort. Dig?
In Future Issues * 45 Me: the best band for singles As and Bs? * Post-Punk: why? * A Brief History of the Black and White Panthers and the Great Might-Have-Been of British Rock ‘n’ Roll Radicalism * Jim Smith’s recipe page. Favourite food hints and tips from the winking uncle of Brighton rock ‘n’ roll. * Rain Effects in Rock ‘n’ Roll, Part II: Mickey Newbury, Neu, Quadrophenia, * Kontrived Kontrovasie: 1980s Stripped Down Sounds: Thee Mighty Caesars and Spacemen 3: two sides of the same coin? * The Medway Drummers: the unique, localised sound/style that changed the course of backstoried re-enactment rock ‘n’ roll.
And so much more….
Hey! This ain’t Pismo Beach!
That’s all folks!
Hugs
Ed.
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