Neneh Cherry, Manchild

It isn’t possible to embed this clip, because, you know, “Raw Like Sushi” is a #1 album all over the world, and Neneh is promoting like crazy, and if I put this on my website I am going to earn billions and people will totally stop buying Neneh Cherry records. Or something. Anyway, here it is: Neneh Cherry, “Manchild”. (Click to open in a new window.)

Neneh Cherry worked on arrangements on Massive Attack’s “Blue Lines”, released the mega-amazing “Woman” and is married to Cameron “Booga Bear” McVey, which alone makes her the 7th coolest person in the universe. But those aren’t her only achievements, for — while her albums turned to be mixed bags — she is responsible for some of the best female hip-hop/trip-hop recordings ever released — from “Buffalo Stance” through aforementioned “Woman” to “Kootchi”. She is now working on her fourth album, slated for release this year. (Judging by the fact she has worked on it since 2003, I assume Massive Attack must be helping.)

“Manchild” is my favourite Neneh Cherry track, despite the fact I have no clue what it *is* about. I used to think a manchild must be a man who never grew up, a Peter Pan figure, but the lyrics don’t really point that way (or, for that matter, any way). Manchild’s life obviously isn’t a bed of roses (“manchild, will you ever win? manchild, look at the state you’re in”). If we’re judging by the video, a manchild is somewhat androgynous, shit hot if you like your boys white and capped, wearing very fashionable clothes and loads of jewellery.

“Manchild”, the song, was remixed by Massive Attack — probably the best of their remixes, despite the fact the harmonics of the backing track have nothing in common with the harmonics of the vocals, plus, vocals have been transposed which very clearly suggests they had a backing track lying around and slapped Neneh’s vocals on top.

“Manchild” is amazing, mostly, because of the extremely unusual string arrangement in the verses. It is one of the most complicated pop songs I have ever heard, melodically, and it is credited to a primarily hip-hop artist. In fact, I believe “Manchild” ranks along “Unfinished Sympathy” as one of those incredible hip-hop fused records that will be considered classical music 20-30 years from now. That is, if anybody bothers to listen to it in the world where Janet Jackson’s “Feedback” was largely ignored or, when it received any attention, it was along the lines of “oooh, Pussycat Dolls really sound good on this one”.

“Manchild” charted at #5 in the UK, didn’t chart at all in the US.

I have read about KLF before ever hearing them. I saw a picture of two men in leather jackets, wearing goggles and holding, erm, sheep under their arms. The caption was: “KLF: A PRACTICAL JOKE?”

They actually were. Their Doctor Who sampling single, “Doctorin’ The Tardis” was a somewhat cynical (and successful) attempt at scoring a number one single in the UK which was followed by “The Manual”, a book describing how to, well, score a number one single in the UK. (Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West”, which was number 2 for two weeks, “accidentally” uses most techniques described in “The Manual”.) They took their name and “philosophy” from a series of books called The Illuminatus! Trilogy, and then created electronic pop records, which makes them uber-geeks. (Have I mentioned sheep yet?) And they were so. So. Cool.

The second, 1991 release of “3AM Eternal”, with the machine gun fire intro, is one of their finest moments. Raps delivered by Ricardo Lyte and icy, almost computer-like vocals by Maxine Harvey firmly placed on top of a really, really amazing beat and completed with cheering crowd samples from U2’s live album totalled to a truly fantastic record that became a hit more or less everywhere, hitting #1 in the UK (and, shamefully, #5 on my own chart, where it remained for 14 weeks).

In 1992, after a shocking performance at Brit Awards (featuring Extreme Noise Terror, a machine gun firing blanks and dead sheep) KLF have retired from the music business and deleted the entire back catalogue (in the UK) claiming they will re-release the music if all the wars in the world finish. Next year, in 1993, they released a single called “K Cera Cera (The War Is Over If You Want It)” only in Israel and Palestine, “In acknowledgement of the recent brave steps taken by the Israeli Government and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)”. Their next release, 1997’s “Fuck The Millennium” was a brass-injected version of “What Time Is Love” with the chorus “fuck the millennium/we want it now”. Then the narrow stream dried out, with the exception of Jimmy Cauty’s (not very good) solo project Blacksmoke.

Here’s hoping for world peace.

The world fell in love with Martika when she released “Toy Soldiers”, her debut single. It was a rather poignant song about addictions, but I never really cared about it. It was only the third single, the Carole King cover, “I feel the Earth move” that made me notice.

I immediately fell in love. With her hair — I wanted the same haircut. With the energy — I still think “I feel the Earth move” is incredibly energetic and sounds amazing at the gym. With the song itself and the video — I didn’t know (I still don’t) the original, but the Martika version blew me away and smeared me all over the wall. It. Was. Amazing. It was all that late Eighties were about. It reached #25 in the US, #7 in the UK and #1 on my chart way back then.

I Feel The Earth Move single

The second Martika album was co-produced/co-written by Prince and for some odd reason hasn’t sold anything. And then she fell in love with a Romanian poet and moved to a mountain with him to live the life of a goat shepherdess.

Seven years later she got back to her senses, but the world moved on and emitted a collective sigh at her further attempts. She tried a solo return with a rather disastrous song called “The Journey”. She tried a return with her husband as a band called Oppera. Then Eminem used a sample from “Toy Soldiers” in one of his singles and Martika… didn’t release anything. Sony repackaged her greatest hits (i.e. most of two albums put on one CD). That was it.

In retrospect I have no idea why exactly Martika hasn’t become a lasting success. Was it the poet? Not really, since “Martika’s Kitchen” was a flop already despite being very good. Was it Prince? Was it the fact that Martika epitomised the year 1988 and in 1991 was already a last decade’s starlet? I have no idea. But it doesn’t make “I Feel The Earth Move” any worse. So let’s enjoy it together via the YouTube clip, unless you are in the United Kingdom, you evil thief of copyrighted property who wants to illegally benefit off the blood and tears of poverty-stricken record labels.

Can you believe 11 years — ELEVEN!!! YEARS!!! — have passed since the release of Air’s “Moon Safari”? I was poor then. A student with no money whatsoever. And I only bought CDs very, very rarely — mostly settled for tapes, because they were much cheaper. There were two occasions when I bought a tape and after playing it a few times ran to exchange it to a CD: Air’s “Moon Safari” and Madonna’s “Ray of Light”. Because in both cases I knew I was going to wear that tape out completely, same as I did with Vanessa Daou’s “Zipless” before.

It is such a pleasure to discover a perfect record. It doesn’t happen so often nowadays, maybe because music isn’t as good (he said, looking for his dentures), maybe because there’s too much of it, maybe because it is too easily accessible. There are maybe 10 albums that I ever felt like this about; one of them Badly Drawn Boy’s “The Hour of Bewilderbeast”, which — just like Air’s “Moon Safari” — proved to be the absolute peak of his creative powers, never to be bettered. And the amazingness of “Moon Safari” was further underlined by the release of “All I Need”, with Beth Hirsch on vocals and that odd, odd video, where a couple talk about how much in love they are, being almost unbearably cute, with the beautiful, beautiful song relegated to the status of a backing track.

“All I Need” was released as a single in the UK, reaching number 29 on the sales chart. It reached only #8 on my personal chart, which should be attributed to me being a twat and puts it among my biggest chart mistakes, together with Massive Attack’s “Protection” only charting at #8 and staying on the chart for 8 weeks, and Lighthouse Family’s “High” (that one is unlikely to pop among the Sunday’s Lost Classics) charting at #1 and staying on the chart for 24 weeks. Ugh.

After the disastrously bland “Songs in Red and Gray” was released in 2001 to lukewarm critical reception and barely any sales, I wrote Suzanne Vega off. I thought, that’s it. She lost everything that made her exciting when “Blood Makes Noise” came out and I spent the night playing it on repeat until the tape I recorded it on worn out. She decided to be middle-aged, boring and go on about her divorce. That’s it. She’s never going to release anything better than “99.9F” and “Days of Open Hand”, just millions of compilations and this.

I was wrong.

“Beauty and Crime”, her 2007 record, is my favourite Suzanne Vega album. It is produced by Jimmy Hogarth, who made it sound both very similar to Rupert Hine’s bland work on “Songs” and at the same time strikingly different — Rupert Hine’s production flows effortlessly from one elevator to another, and Jimmy Hogarth’s is rich, exciting and deep while still not really devolving from the MOR folk template Suzanne seems to be comfortable with. But this isn’t an album by a middle-aged woman without many ideas. This is an album by an accomplished artist with many things to say. And for the love of Morrissey, she does say it beautifully.

“Frank & Ava”, the album’s lead single, was an odd choice. It is probably the only track that sounds as if Rupert Hine was passing by the studio. It’s nice, uptempo, radio-friendly and very, very uneventful. But the other songs… “Ludlow Street” has provided me with a motto I’ve been using since hearing it for the first time; “Love is the only thing that matters, love is the only thing that’s real” and when Vega sings the line with that voice of hers, I have tears in my eyes. “Pornographer’s Dream” is Suzanne Vega doing bossanova and singing about naked flesh in a way that makes it obvious she is actually singing about the opposite — naked soul. And “Anniversary” is just breathtaking.

(Forgive me — there is no real video for the song, but this presentation has the original audio.)

(Live version.)

She sung about 9/11 quite a few times by now. “It Hit Home”, the first song she wrote about it, was a bit on the ugh-can’t-believe-she-did-that side of things. There are two on this record; “Angel’s Doorway” (which could have been better if she hasn’t rhymed “destruction” with “introduction” in a way that sort of  suggests rhyming dictionary has been used and many four-syllable words ending with -uction tried for size) and “Anniversary”.

“Anniversary” has a chord progression that coupled with Suzanne’s melancholic voice gives me shivers and, again, a lyric that brings me on the verge of tears. It is slightly understated yet monumental as an album closer; it is here that Hogarth shows his genius, having taken a track that started its life as a guitar-and-voice affair on one of the many editions of the “Retrospective” compilation and turned it into one of Suzanne Vega’s best songs. I would have loved for this to be a single complete with a beautiful high-budget video, remixes by Massive Attack and an a cappella for myself to play with.

The fate of “Beauty and Crime” was different. The video for “Frank & Ava” failed to capture the hearts of YouTube viewers. The follow-up promo singles “Ludlow Street” (great choice) and “Unbound” (less great choice) haven’t captured any attention whatsoever. The album reached #129 in the US, #127 in the UK and Blue Note have not renewed their contract with Vega for another record, quietly dropping her in June 2008.

It’s hard not to think most people are twats when this happens. So redeem yourselves at least slightly, play “Anniversary” and then buy the album. Your life will be better if you do so.

It is easy to forget, years and years after Michael Jackson released anything listenable for the last time, that he is responsible for some truly incredible music. I only bought Thriller a year ago and I couldn’t get over how perfect it was; then I started thinking about buying Dangerous and Off The Wall but never quite got there so far.

Popjustice forums tend to discuss the topic from time to time and the answer to the “can he ever make a comeback” question always seems to be “no, he’s a fucked-up weirdo beaver with a nose that sticks in place using chewing gum”. This is, of course, true. But while 2001’s Invincible was a pile of tosh, everything until and including HiStory was pretty much flawless — with the exception of ballads.

When Jarvis Cocker jumped on the stage and wiggled his bum at Jackson because he couldn’t stand the twattery of the aforementioned Jackson being pretentious and saving the world via a steaming pile of dung called Earth Song, I could only applaud. Earth Song was awful. It wasn’t as bad as Heal The World though (which was second only to We Are The World in its pure evil, and that one also featured Michael Jackson — more songs like those and I would have to start polluting the environment just because they told me not to). Or You Are Not Alone (for aaaah belieeeve in youuuuuuu, sang Jackson, and the world shuddered in horror). When Jackson danced, so did we. When Jackson got syrupy, we shuffled uncomfortably in our seats with visions of thirteen year olds being fed Jesus Juice appearing in our heads for no apparent reason.

Stranger in Moscow, as embedded above (it was very difficult to find an embeddable version — I will never understand why labels believe if you can put a YouTube clip on your page it might decrease sales — I almost gave up on writing this post because I couldn’t find an embeddable version and I don’t see how NOT writing it would have promoted Jackson better) is more or less the only Jackson ballad post-1990 that I like. It isn’t about saving the world and it isn’t about Jackson making beautiful love to the ladies. It is about Kremlin’s shadow belittling him and Stalin’s tomb not going to let him be. (What exactly is Stalin’s tomb doing to Jackson remains a mystery we might perhaps not want to solve.) It is about Michael being lonely and isolated and going crazy because of the accusations of paedophilia. It’s got a KGB agent voiceover going on in Russian — trying to force someone to admit their guilt. It’s got an amazing production — it still sounds like nothing else ever produced. It’s got a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful video with raindrops in slow motion. And it had a 3 CD release with a grand total of 21 remixes, about 16 of them by Todd Terry and not a single one listenable.

When the video was released to MTV — back in the time they still played music — I didn’t have cable at home. I’ve had a few days off, though, and I spent those days at my aunt’s, flicking through four music channels — MTV, Viva, Viva II and VH1. They kept on playing three videos non-stop — Stranger in Moscow, Pet Shop Boys’ Before and George Michael’s Spinning The Wheel. I loved all of them –  they spent, in order, two, six and one week at number one of my chart — and they were played so often that sometimes the same video would be played on two of the four TV channels. That was one of the best weeks of my life — doing nothing but sitting in front of the TV and skipping between three videos on four TV channels and being thrilled that three absolutely incredible songs were being loved by what seemed to be all of humanity as much as by me. “Stranger in Moscow” eventually reached #4 in the UK and #91 in the US. That was a bit less love than Michael was used to.

13 years from those days Michael Jackson seems to have drifted into insignificance, plagued by paedophilia stories and lawsuits, bankruptcy warnings, indifference from record label execs and music fans alike, deluding himself that his new album — which he has been working on for the last eight years — will be any good. (Judging by the godawful remixes on Thriller 25 and the fact Will.I.Am has been enlisted as a producer… erm… no.) His constant health problems make it difficult to imagine a possibility of a tour. But whatever people say about him, his nose and his countless encounters with a surgical knife, this man has made some of the best music ever, and this song, while not his biggest hit, is just one of the many, many proofs of his — perhaps former — genius.

Chocolate Salty Balls

I am aware of the fact today is Tuesday, just treat this as a pre-New Year’s lost classic then.

Isaac Hayes’ discography is extensive, much sampled (there would be no Hoover[phonic] or Massive Attack without Isaac Hayes) and includes only one UK hit single — this one. Number one in the UK and Ireland, “Chocolate Salty Balls” was released 20 years after Hayes’ last single, “Zeke The Freak”. As the ever-so-reliable Wikipedia tells us, it has never been played on BBC’s Top Of The Pops, because it hit #1 in the Christmas chart, in the week when TOTP was not filmed; this spared the BBC some embarrassment that would have surely arisen from playing a song that goes “suck on my chocolate salty balls/put them in your mouth and suck ‘em/they’re all fine, baby”. The Southpark video on the other hand was played many, many times on MTV — I remember loving it big time, but strangely not being a fan of the song itself (it reached #10 on my chart and remained there for 10 weeks). Well, I was wrong. It’s brilliant.

Here it comes:

I Miss You UK CD1

The sixth single off Björk’s second album Post had an animated video — directed by John Kricfalusi/Spümc?, creator of Ren & Skimpy — which was colourful and appealed to children. It’s just that the content of the video wasn’t up to the parental visions of what cartoons should look like. Chicken torn into pieces, animated characters frantically searching for their genitals and moving condoms implanted as if by magic where Björk’s boobies should have been were considered too shocking — as a result the video was often aired in its censored, rubberboobie-less version — or not at all.

The song itself is probably my favourite Björk single. It is also one of her smallest chart successes (no doubt largely due to the fact it was the sixth single off a platinum selling #2 album) peaking at #34. Produced by Howie B, the single featured a plethora of shittylicious remixes (strangely enough Björk’s remixes were comparable in their shiteness only to Pet Shop Boys’ remixes — it’s quite amazing how both those artists managed to inspire the world’s best remixers’ worst achievements). The song’s vocals have been re-recorded for the remastered version of Post and the result was disastrous. It is quite sad how such a great track attracted such bad luck — but the amazingness of the video more than makes up for it.

Watch the video: