evil of banality

 

Laura and I went record shopping on Saturday and got a lot of great stuff. Still sifting through it (well I am, I won't speak for her). 

This is a suitably banal observation but I'll make it anyway, while I drink coffee and eat chocolate in a short break from writing comments on a frustrating masters thesis draft: Crazy Horse were (are?) a great band, don't worry, they are great players with a really appealing rough, edgy skill that makes you always feel like they are just about to fail. When they are not playing Neil Young songs and writing/playing their own songs, they are every bit as great in the playing, and the music is rich and varied and dynamic and intense. But the lyrics fucking suck the proverbial big turd in the mud. They're not weird, they're not lazy exactly, they're just intensely generic. 

I often wonder whether people who write terrible lyrics like this think the lyrics aren't important, or arguably worse, they think their lyrics are fucking awesome and touch on a core truth by their very essentiality. 

I just imagine Crazy Horse, about whom I basically know nothing, in the studio sweating over these bullshit lyrics, looking at each other with sincere eyes (and then the rest of the time talking about balling chicks they hate, I bet). They have already by this stage spent an inordinate amount of time with NY and recorded one of the all-time great albums in Everyone Knows This is Nowhere, so for fuck's sake, why don't they get that you have to put a little bit of thought into what you're saying?! 

I could quote bits, but they're not worth it. 

I will say that other bands-with-amazing-singer-songwriters-at-the-helm-who-made-whatever-the-opposite-of-a-solo-album-is-that-is-a-band-album-without-the-main-person haven't had this problem necessarily - I really love the Sensational Alex Harvey Band album without Alex, for instance and groups like Buzzcocks and Depeche Mode have done masterfully following the departure of their 'main man'. So what the hell Crazy Horse. Lift your fuckin' game. 

Backpedal: I had a few more listens (so, apart from anything else, it can't have been that objectionable) and really there's only one song that totally winds me up. It's called 'Kind of Woman' and it should be shot. The rest is manageable. 

new buzzcocks songs

I don't have much to say about this but there is an article in today's Guardian about a new Buzzcocks album, the first since Pete Shelley died, and the first to be composed (I assume) entirely by Steve Diggle. Let's be real, Diggle has his moments but he wasn't the songwriting genius Shelley was at his peak. Let's also be real about the fact that the Buzzcocks' output since their reformation in um 1990? hasn't really produced anything of great value, certainly nothing as good as their original three and a half albums (well, four and a half, if you include Singles Going Steady and why wouldn't you since it's one of the greatest pop records of the 20th century). So I was intrigued by the idea of new post-Shelley Buzzcocks and I was kind of ready to be exposed to a load of shit when I searched for the new single on YouTube, 'Senses out of control'. Well. It's actually not as terrible as I thought it would be, I mean, if I was the producer I'd do a bunch of things differently but perhaps it's not quite time to write Steve Diggle off. Perhaps my low expectations have warped my sense of it. Not sure. I'm also just kind of really impressed by Steve Diggle at 66, the guy looks old, I mean he perhaps even looks older than he is really, but he doesn't give a fuck about that presumably and I have to respect it, by which I mean, whether I have to or not, I do. The image above is from another video for another song, called 'Gotta Get Better'. Which is also not appalling. So... props. 

pourdom

After my receipt of that Pete Shelley album yesterday and the realisation that I also owned another, I was reminded that some time ago I had purchased a book about/by him a few months ago that had never shown up. This happens. I figured oh well it hasn't come it probably never will and it's almost certainly no good anyway. So guess what turned up today. 

I have read a few bits and pieces of it (I'm mainly marking today so I'm not in the position to sit down and spend a lot of time on a book, but I do need palate cleansers of reading or listening to something or walking to the shop or I get confused between different essays). It's actually pretty good, he comes out as very personable and matter-of-fact. 

As I was walking around a little bit as well, I dialled up Pete Shelley on Spotifuck to discover of his four solo albums only the first (which I haven't listened to but which I believe is a weird little pre-punk experimental thing) and the last (which I listened to a bit of and which is horrible) are available i.e. the two I own on vinyl aren't spotifucked. When I went to the chemist this afternoon (helicopters everywhere - jesus christ people are stupid i.e. anti-lockdown protestor shits) I listened to the third Buzzcocks album on Spotifuck and, well, it's patchy I have to say. 

I guess that's OK, the secret to albums is that they have an ebb and flow, they can't be hit, hit, hit because then what do you get - well exactly, Singles Going Steady, the most perfect English male pop record of the late 1970s, we can't have that raising the bar for everyone, it's stressful.