Quote of the Week.

"Much of that incredible vitality came from anger, aggression and hopeless energy, the amazing power they unleashed. But there was something else, something that wasn’t there, for me, with The Sex Pistols or The Clash. A note of longing, of yearning, of loss. A bittersweet tone, a beauty, that I think came from Joey’s singing, from his voice. I recognized it immediately in that song, in the choked off last word to the line “I just want to be with you…” and the haunting sweep of the repeated “tonight,” that opens up to take in the world of everything we love and can’t touch."

-- David Gordon has written a beautiful piece about Joey Ramone for Boogie Woogie Flu.

Never seen that neat surfing pic before either!

Labels: quotes, The Ramones

Quotes of the Week.

Actually quotes of last week, but current affairs got in the way.

“We were playing a festival in Dublin the other week. There was this other group like, warming up in the next sort of chalet, and they were terrible. I said 'shut them cunts up' and they were still warming up, so I threw a bottle at them. The bands said 'that's the Sons of Mumford' or something, 'they're number five in charts!' I just thought they were a load of retarded Irish folk singers.”

- Mark E. Smith, shining a light in these days of darkness (any offense caused to actual retarded Irish folk singers notwithstanding).



“Pure Joy! I can’t be unhappy while listening to this. Here’s every crazy smile, or hilarious dance -- the whole thing bucks and twitches with delight and energy! And as for the SOUNDS, the concept of modern high-fidelity has to be called into question when you hear these old 78s on a cheap, old, valve mono amp -- through a 4-inch speaker. Wooden instruments sound wooden and varnished, the vibration in the trombone brays like brass hammered by air, and there’s a UNITY OF EAR I find hard to describe. If a microphone is an ear-analogue, perhaps it’s a relief to only have a couple.”

- Alastair Galbraith on “Tiger Rag” by Kid Ory & His Creole Jazz Band.

I’ve always liked Galbraith’s approach to sound and recording (there’s a great bit in an interview with him in the Tape Op book, where they ask him what kind of reverb he was using on a particular track, and he’s like “huh, what? I was just singing down a drainpipe..”), but anyone who does a top ten for Dusted and picks a Major Bloodnok skit from The Goon Show has my eternal admiration.

Labels: Alastair Galbraith, Jeffrey Lewis, Kid Ory and his Creole Jazz Band, Mark E Smith, quotes, The Fall

Quote of the Week.

“One role of popular music in socializing the young may be to create … a picture of childhood and adolescence in America as a happy-go-lucky time of haphazard clothes and haphazard behavior… Thus the very real problems of being young are evaded. …A small minority is … not only aware in some fashion of the adult, manipulative pressure but is also resentful of it.

The rebelliousness of this minority group might be indicated in some of the following attitudes toward popular music: an insistence on rigorous standards of judgment and taste in a relativist culture; a preference for the uncommercialized, unadvertised small bands rather than name bands; the development of a private language and then a flight from it when the private language (the same is true of other aspects of private style) is taken over by the majority group; a profound resentment of the commercialization of radio and musicians…; an appreciation for idiosyncrasy of performance goes along with a dislike of “star” performers and an insistence that the improvisation be a group-generated phenomenon.”

- Sociologist David Reisman, writing in 1950 in an essay entitled “Listening to Popular Music”, certainly had an eerily concise line on “why we’re all here”, circa 2010 or at any point in between for that matter.

I’ve appropriated this quote straight from Kevan Harris’s piece on the new Touch & Go collected fanzine book over at Dusted - worthwhile reading for anyone with a passing interest in ‘80s punk/hardcore and the offensive chauvinism boiling-over-into closet conservatism it so frequently used as a crutch.

Labels: punk, quotes