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Im trying not to slip/ been trying not to lose footing/
Loose land keeps the pressure on my kicks/
and when I fall I tend to land like a ton of bricks/
stand like a man made of concrete and sediment like/ f
uck your skin nobody needs it theres/ Bones and muscles and blood/
Whats realer than fat and tendons?/
Its raw no soft tissue to draw your eyes to it so far flesh aint the truest at all lets rip into it/
Were all sick of them missed shots/
passed over like the last man picked no team so pissed off/
and/ thats not honesty/
thats just soft curves got your world flipped/
got you makin mixtapes for girls/
and thats the skin again/
lets blame the skin again/ stretching itself so fluidly over these awkward/ ligaments/
and I didnt shave today/
I prolly wont tomorrow and its safe to say Im never gonna shed this extra (yeah)/
Chorus:
So fuck it back to the wall/
crush it/ laugh at em all/
hush/ let em try to find the beauty in your face/
something more than a song/
they hatin? Aw come on/
dust/ let em try to find the beauty in the bassline/
aw but then them words dont change/
we wont sing with what will fade away/
yeah we do our own damn thing/
we dont blink at what tomorrow might bring (at all)/
Aw but then them words they dont change/
we wont sing with what will fade away/
yeah we do our own damn thing/
we dont blink at what tomorrow might bring (at all)/
Verse 2
Of how tomorrow might sting/ at all/
in us we trust/ no rush for bucks/
no sweat just enough/ them words from love/ no hits/
I let the track stand/ like how it was written is how it hit me/
or road cycle kids with the grip to skid a fixies/
a rouge wild kid with a stroll that let it roll/ like whatever/
they kick that gingivitis/ them rappers got the itis/
catch me bumpin Isis in a crisis/
instead of watchin yall count and lead sheep at the same time/
whats the science of that?/
I know the ( ) is sweet/ but where the movement at?
We in that coma capital/ spotless home team/
with hands steadily purelled/ germ-exed/
but never quite clean/ bloody as hell rarely will I ever care (for that)/
Chorus x2
So fuck it back to the wall/
crush it/ laugh at em all/
hush/ let em try to find the beauty in your face/
something more than a song/
they hatin? Aw come on/
dust/ let em try to find the beauty in the bassline/
aw but then them words they dont change/
we wont sing with what will fade away/
yeah we do our own damn thing/
we dont blink at what tomorrow might bring (at all)/
I wanna know how you dance, pretty baby, by the light of the moon.
If you carry your lovers around in a heart like a tomb, with a view,
I wanna know how you lose, pretty baby, does it show in your eyes?
Were you born to be a runner, or are you a casual sigh?
Did the boys at school break your precious heart in two?And in every sad, sad country song,
Is there a little bitty piece of ‘em still hanging on?
You tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine, my dear.
Then we’ll bury these old ghosts here.Where’d you get those eyes?
What do you see with those eyes, pretty darling, in the dead of the night?
Are you saying your prayers or are you glowing like the metal on the edge of the knife?
Baby whose name sounds right on the lips of my Queen?
Am I speaking in riddles, or do you feel what I mean?
Are you dying to move, or are you dying to be the one moved?And would you shake, shake, shake, shake, shake Senora.
If I could make you feel like he used to make you feel.
I’ll swing you a song and I’ll dance you a dance my dear, my dear
And would you shake, shake, shake, shake, shake Senora.
If I could make you feel like he used to make you feel.
I’ll swing you a song and I’ll dance you a dance my dear,
and we’ll bury these old ghosts here.
15 – Alabama 3 @ Glasto
I saw them 3 times but the saturday afternoon when they were on one of the main stages was far and away the most fun.
14 – Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip (and Kid Carpet) @ Warwick tempo
I assumed this was going to be quite fun but it was so much better than I thought it would be. The Students Union used to be a shit venue but as part of the big union rebuild they’ve knocked together a really cozy underground venue and I really hope they keep it given I never conceived the students union (which I’m now kind of shackled to for another six years) would have a place for music that I actually really liked. Kid Carpet was supporting and I’d never heard of him but he looked like such a fucking tool I thought I would hate it. It was really fun though: lovely, silly and entertaining music, in a similar way to a lot of ska-punk. Dan Le Sac was awesome. Again this was party down to the venue though and the bass in Thou Shalt Not was lovely. He did awesome slam poetry while Scroobius Pip went outside to smoke, flawlessly timing it to last exactly the length of one fag.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=6MKSCFufSeA
13 – Futureheads @ Warwick students union
I went to see this solely for Hounds of Love. From what little I’d heard, I’d never been interested enough to listen to anything else they’d done and I figured this song (which I adore) was a one-off. Even so I was stunned by quite how boring and, well, shit their other music is. I assumed they’d finish with Hounds of Love given it’s their only good song. I was in the toilet half-way through the gig when the initial vocal harmony bit started, cue excited jumping up and down as I tried to do my pants up, scaring the shit out of the guy who walked into the toilets at that moment. The song was fucking brilliant and kind of made it worth listening to 90 mins of shit music and paying a tenner for a single song. The night after was awesome as well, leading through the gig to a crappy but fun and very drunken rock/metal night to my living room and passing out at 7am in the morning. If I remember correctly – which I probably don’t – the following morning was the day of the riot. I got kicked out of bed by my ex to go buy milk and food, I left my flat at 11am on a saturday morning to find the high street filled with riot police, looking very nervous and with really old crap 1980s riot gear: the sort of small round shields you see police wielding uncertainly in photos of the miners strike, rather than the ultra-modern stormtrooper shit the TSG has. What must have been every available police body in Coventry on a saturday morning was out, as they had some football fans barricaded inside my local pub and they were periodically sending snatch squads in to bring people out and arrest them. Leicester were apparently playing Coventry and hoolies from each side decided to meet in my local area, which is nowhere the fucking stadium, to have a fight. I’m all for letting people who want to have huge fights do it, as long as it’s away from anyone who could get hurt (and I think the tendency of liberal thought to reduce this sort of phenomenon to ‘collective irrationality’ is a really interesting explanatory failure, given there’s blatantly a lots of quite complex emotional and social meanings tied into why people want to get together and kick the shit out of each other). However if you decide to this on a busy shopping street you’re simply a cunt. That was a weird morning and in the state I was in after the night before, it was deeply fucking confusing until I joined the large crowd of gawping onlookers (feeling deeply British as I did so) and asked them what on earth was going on.
12 – James Blunt @ Glasto
Everyone I’ve said this too has, perhaps justifiably, taken the piss out of mercilessly. I went to see it largely out of morbid curiosity and the fact there was nothing particularly interesting on at that time (it was also, I think, after the Editors so I was in fairly emo mood). It somehow seemed to fit the slightly confused and messed up state my head was in at the time, perhaps because watching Goodbye My Lover with my ex as we neared the end of a convoluted and depressingly protracted break up was a really sadly poignant yet strangely cathartic experience. He is such a cock though. He insisted on taking his shirt off for the crowd.
11 – Gogol Bordello @ Brum Academy
Great fun, though I wish I’d managed to see them at Glastonbury as well.
10 – A Golden Rule @ a pub in Leamington Spa
Far and away the best pub gig I’ve been to in my life. The other bands were quite fun but A Golden Rule were awesome, not least of all because of how much fun they were clearly having despite the dingy venue and tiny crowd. They’ve since split up which is a bit shit since I failed to make it to a gig they did in London which would have been really easy to get to. I listened to their CD so much that I killed the music for me a bit. They manage to take everything I like about skate punk and melodic hardcore and wrap it up in one lovely enthusiastic package. No youtube videos but their myspace is here and it has Trying So Hard which I enjoyed so much live.
9 – Reel Big Fish @ Brum Academy
I actually went to see Streetlight Manifesto who were supporting but I was having a shit night, found the mosh pot really claustrophobic and lost my friends because I can’t see for shit (very dark & crap eye sight) in the main Academy. So they were a bit shit. Reel Big Fish were so much fun though and completely cheered me up in the space of an hour. I’m seeing them again in early 2009 and I can’t wait particularly given that the above song has such amusing personal relevance to me now. I almost got the shit kicked out of me afterwards though when I intervened inside McDonalds as three rude boys started kicking off with this skinny 16 year old kid from the gig. I tried to do it in the most non-comfrontational way possible but it blatantly didn’t work as they were waiting for me when I left, cue me ducking back inside McDonalds and holding the door shit when I realised they were about 3 seconds away from punching me in the face. Such utter tools. It kind of took the gloss off the night a bit.
8 – Manu Chao @ Glasto
Skanking to this like uttery twats in sun glasses on a head full of mushrooms was wonderful. We were at the back of the crowd up a hill facing the sun as it set and it was truly beautiful. Even if the middle aged punks having a homoerotic orgy next to us was a bit weird. They all seemed very happy though.
7 – Bjork @ Wolverhampton Civic Hall
This was the third time I’ve seen Bjork and given that the first one, which the video is of, was – perhaps next to radiohead in 2003 – the greatest and most trippy set I’ve seen in my life, it’s always seems a bit of an anti-climax. God that was a convoluted sentence. Still an utter genius though.
6 – The Editors @ Glastonbury
Early Friday evening at Glastonbury, after a Thursday night that devolved into the most unpleasant kind of drug-fuelled melodramatic idiocy, and was the most fantastic pick-me-up. When this song started, I left the people I was with in a rather naive and overly enthusiastic attempt to get to the front of the crowd. This inevitably failed but I got right into the middle of a lot of very excited people and the atmosphere was fucking brilliant. It had never really occurred to me that the Editors were one of those bands who just sound exponentially better the louder they are. I’ve never seen them in a venue, though after Glasto I fully intend to and I suspect they’re one of those bands (much like Muse) who just sound far better on a main stage at a festival than they do anywhere else.
5 – Streetlight Manifesto @ Brum Asylum
So much fun. Even though my favorite trainers fell apart midway through the gig.
4 – Frank Turner @ Birmingham Bar Fly
Well I was utterly shit-faced and depressingly I remember this gig far less clearly than I wish. It was fucking fun though, though it occurred the next morning that the singing along probably wasn’t quite as fun for the more sober randoms around us. Frank Turner is a lovely hippy twat and particularly live he has a really affable humility about him and his music. He also wrote the four lines that have fascinated me more than that from any other music I can think of:
Yeah, well life is about love, lost minutes and lost evening
About fire in our bellies and about furtive little feelings
And the aching amplitudes that set our needles all a-flickering
And they help us with remembering that the only thing that’s left to do is live
As I go on about it here, I think it expresses an intriguingly ambiguous sort of late-modern romanticism. There’s a sense of the objectivity of moral sources expressed really poetically in it: ‘the aching amplitudes that set our needles all a-flickering’ and which push our gaze to the world outside our heads and beyond our evaluations. It’s like the classical romantic idea of turning inwards to move beyond rational introspection and (re)connect to transcendent nature. Of the late modern variety, the moral impulse is accommodated to a naturalist universe that preclude the metaphysics tied up in the classical conception. It’s the reemergence of a romantic moral realism: kind of like what Richard Rorty tries to do from a PoMo approach but utterly fails because of the theoretical knots he ties himself in. Yet music flows right over the antinomies that appear inherent in the ethos when you approach it theoretically. It’s a scrabble for moral meaning in a metaphysically degraded universe.
3 – A Wilhelm Scream @ Brum Barfly
They were playing to a near-empty Barfly on a freezing Tuesday evening in February. One of the most fun nights I’ve had all year, even if I almost died of drunken hypothermia on the way home.
2 – Gaslight Anthem (and the King Blues) @ London Astoria
At Glasto 2007, where the video is from, the King Blues were my favourite band in the country. Then they got shit. Then suddenly they seem to have got good again. Not quite sure what happened there. As a support act they were superb and Gaslight were just as amazing as I expected them to be. It’s a shame the video quality is shit because I’m in most of it. I love the fact that two days after a gig I can watch videos of it on youtube.
1 – Strung Out @ Brum Asylum
A near-empty and freezing Aslyum. Also my favourite gig of the year. 2008 was awesome.
Did you expect it all to stop
At the wave of your hand?
Like the sun’s just gonna drop,
If it’s night you demand.
Well, in the dark we’re just air,
So the house might dissolve.
Once we’re gone, who’s gonna care
If we were ever here at all?- Connor Oberst
Gaslight Anthem – 1930
Give me mercy and a minute now.
I’ma bleed a little poison out.
I’ma cry a little river down,
then I’m setting this whole thing on fire.
And I’m burning up the night she died.
I’m putting every last picture aside,
I’m gonna say what I need to say.
In my very last letter to you
‘Cause you always made it clear,
said you’d never be my pain.
So here’s to you and your bright baby blues,
just a pause to cool the refrain.
And you said were satisfied,
that this body just weighted the tide.
And that you missed him sometimes,
but you said it’s all right,
its just a whole lot harder alone.
But I wish you knew her now.
She’s the better side of me now.
I’m doing the best I can.
That’s what you’da wanted.
And I see like you were there.
I know just how you’d smile.
Mary, you looked just like, it was 1930 that night.
But hear the days will eat you alive,
but I won’t give in tonight.
You said its not worth my time,
and not to regard them.
And not to settle just for piece of mind,
I could wait it out all night,
If I just keep breathing
[sigh]
But Mary, I found the sound,
and if this heart keeps pouring it out,
The glory hasn’t come,
and it’s probably gonna fade,
like a tattoo that hides this shame.
But reasons always fade.
The pain gives out some day.
So I’m saying my goodbyes to your deep blue eyes,
cause I don’t know how say, to stay still in the pain.
“Stay still in the pain.”And if I recall the last thing you said to me,
before it broke up.
Before it took you from me.
You said I love you more than the stars in the sky,
but your name just escapes me tonight.
(Nobody does it like you anymore)
Well it’s been a couple of weeks since I got round to listening to the Gaslight Anthem to see what I missed when I turned down their gig in London. I haven’t stopped listening to it since and I’m still kicking myself that I didn’t go given that they seem to be one of those incredibly rare punk bands who come across as much more artistically accomplished live. I also just read on wiki that they cite Tom Waites as a big influence and it’s now sinking in how a fair number of the songs sound like exactly the sort of music Tom Waites would make if he was a punk in his late 20s from New Jersey. Ditto, I guess, Bruce Springsteen.
Someone asks me if I want to go to a gig. I don’t know the band and, for whatever reason, don’t go. Curiosity prompts me to look up the band and I realise that the gig would actually have been absolutely fucking amazing. I hate it when this happens. Particularly so in this case, since it was a tiny free gig in a record shop. Witness the Gaslight Anthem (oh how I wish I had):
Yeah, well life is about love, lost minutes and lost evenings
About fire in our bellies and about furtive little feelings
And the aching amplitudes that set our needles all a-flickering
And they help us with remembering that the only thing that’s left to do is live
Since hearing this in Frank Turner’s song I knew Prufrock Before He Was Famous I can’t get it out of my head. It’s the most absurdly beautiful expression of everything I’ve been realising recently about the pathways through life that we did not recognise or aim for but are, nontheless, there and the reality of it all that extends so far beyond the myopic little narcissistic universe we so frequently place ourselves at the centre of. Common sense is dominated by an understanding of what people are and what life is that conflates the objectivity of the possibilities open to us with the subjectivity of the desires and fears through which we live out a trajectory through that field of possibility. This individualism drives our moral focus inwards, as all our terms of evaluation are made (tacitly or otherwise) in terms of our personal psychologies: creating a private enchanted world of expressive individualism to be counterposed to the public disenchanted cold world of scientific naturalism (with the latter being made, through the strict hierarchisation of human experience on the basis of usually tacit epistemological criteria*, prior to the former). This inwardness frames our understandings of the possibilities life leaves open to us in terms of inward categories e.g. fulfilment, self-actualisation, authenticity etc.
This constructs life as a rich field of emotional possibilities that radiate outwards from our own needs, fears and desires. It’s romanticism accomodated within the disenchanted universe. The objectivity of the moral sources is occluded in the process. Look at Turner’s line: the aching amplitudes that set our needles all a-flickering and they help us with remembering that the only thing that’s left to do is live. There’s something real ‘out there’ (the aching amplitudes – moral sources generally) which resonates within us in a way that forces to actively engage with our own life. I’m not advocating that the expressive individualist understanding of interiority be abandoned in any sort of moral sense, only that it be recognised ontologically to be framed by the realities of our being in the world. Though this recognition inevitably reshapes the understanding we have of the moral significance of our interiority. When the inner/enchanted/romantic world is no longer counterposed to the outer/disenchanted/natural world, our interiority is placed against a background of life possibilites that, in the ontological rather than moral sense, have absolutely nothing to do with it. It’s through our interiority that we approach and understand them but the conflation of the two is the philosophical substructure of modern narcissism, understood in the psychoanalytic sense of conflating self with world. In this light the subjectivising ethos described above comes to be seen as seeking to dominate something (life) which is irrevocably Other and with this comes a moral imperative to be open to it. Which takes me back to Frank Tuner’s song which fucking brilliantly expresses the existential consequences of trying to live up to this imperative. Including the desire to communicate it while also recognising the insignificance and partiality of the realisation and its communication (hence this blog post).
Yeah I am sick and tired of people who are living on the b-list
Yeah they’re waiting to be famous, and they’re wondering why they do this
And I know I’m not the one who it habitually optimistic
But I’m the one who’s got the microphone here so just remember this
Well life is about love, lost minutes and lost evening
About fire in our bellies and about furtive little feelings
And the aching amplitudes that set our needles all flickering
And they help us with remembering that the only thing left to do is live
*Objectivity is seen to reside in the world as it is in itself, as opposed to the fuzzy and less real world ’subjective’ world of human feeling and interpretation. This bifurcation of experience & reality is quite profoundly wrong. To use a cumbersome yet weirdly pleasing phrase I nicked off someone online, the subjectivity of subjectivity is objective. We are concrete embodied beings in a real world that we experience in a ways we don’t plan or control. The subjectivity of this experience is an objective state of affairs susceptible to investigation. It just requires that it be investigated differently. Nicholas Smith’s Strong Hermenutics, as well as rather a lot of what Charles Taylor has written covers this brilliantly.
