Day 90 - A Sacred Cow is Shot At
I was thinking
of building the ultimate playlist with one simple rule. One artist. One song.
Each day will feature a song by an artist whose birthday is that day and then
nine other songs by nine different artists just because people like things to
be in tens.
The playlist
is here - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4exU9MUJMWaouOgnu7zmSl?si=I5fqk7VpQX6aDGec7xvqsQ&pi=e-IfIWXc5GT56R
So, the idea was
that you might want to follow and share and either have the playlist yourself
or do your own or chat about it with me, you could use the hashtag #EHGOGS.
I’m on Twitter X
thing as @fourfoot
SEXUAL HEALING –
Marvin Gaye Yes there’s Grapevine, yes there’s What’s Going On. I like this
one best. It reminds me of various pub jukeboxes in The Great Drinking Years and the
associated friends I had. Also, What’s Going On is fucking overrated. Honestly,
it’s tedious.
Every rock magazine
has printed a 100 Greatest Albums Ever Made list. And all of them will have,
somewhere usually around the number 9 mark, What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye.
In Sylvester
Stallone’s 1982 meditation on the sartorial choices of rock drummers, First
Blood, there is a scene where beleaguered Vietnam vet John Rambo – surrounded
by the National Guard – decides to hurl himself off a cliff rather than get his
ass kicked by part time psychopaths. It’s a million to one chance he’ll survive
the fall. Only a desperate man would make such a leap. Or one who had been
forced to listen to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On.
Over the last 30
years I have been lent, gifted, strongly advised to go out and buy this record.
The Guardian, in a nod to clichés about their readership, made it their most
important album of the 20th century. On paper, WGO is the forerunner
to albums by artists like Public Enemy, a righteous and angry album about the
state of black America and, by default, America itself – told in a 9 song cycle
from the perspective of a soldier returned home from Vietnam.
What it is,
however, is an extended Jazz Club sketch from The Fast Show. And that’s why I
no longer own a copy.
I love Marvin Gaye.
I realise that that might sound like “But some of my best friends are black”
but it’s true. The recently unearthed take of his unaccompanied vocal on “I
Heard It Through The Grapevine” displayed clearly this was someone with a rare,
precious talent. Even at the end, a song like “Sexual Healing”, which just
about any other artist would have rendered seedy and tacky, oozes the kind of
sophistication you wouldn’t find anywhere else in 1982. Not even in Rambo:
First Blood. The first dance at my wedding was a Marvin and Tammi duet. I have
no beef with the man.
Despite being a
prolific artist with an impressive legacy,
one still feels that his premature death, like that of Otis Redding and
Sam Cooke amongst others, robbed us of a genre we would never get to know – Old
Soul. Imagine any of those singers getting the reverential Rick Rubin
production treatment a la Johnny Cash in their dotage.
But What’s Going On
is b*llocks. These top 100 album lists only serve to reinforce the notion that
there is no more racist a club than the mainstream music press and its readers.
NME and Melody Maker editors often said that putting a hip hop or raga artist
on the cover of their magazine cost them a significant amount of their
readership that week.
This fear of a
black front page extends itself to the lists of rock journos, themselves mainly
white middle class dudes called Tristan and Aesop. They write a list. It’s got
100 albums in it. Then they scan it, oh my Christ. There are no black artists
in it. Sebastian rings Jeremy who rings Augustus to confirm. You’ve Got To Put Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin
On at Number 9. Otherwise we will look well racist.
The title track is
undoubtedly lovely, an impassioned cry of despair from perhaps Motown’s most
soulful voice. But Christ, everything else is a big mess. Bongos and strings
and background chatter collide all over the shop whilst old Marv gets to sing
some of the most inane lyrics this side of a Cranberries record (“When I look
at the world it fills me with sorrow. Little children today are really going to
suffer tomorrow.”) Songs merge into one another in some kind of attempt at
conveying the 24 hour hell of American life in 1971 – and despite the
cacophony, it’s worth admiring the risks taken by a singer desperate to prove
to his audience he is now an artist.
Admiration is one
thing, enjoyment is another. And this is a hard album to enjoy. You don’t come away from it educated,
bewildered and frightened like you did after hearing Nation of Millions. You
walk away wanting to watch Rambo: First Blood. (smears mud on face, stitches
imaginary arm wound up, throws grenade at stereo….)
SYLVESTER – You
Make Me Feel Along with I Feel Love, this is one of the twin towers of
Electronic Gay Disco. God knows what that makes the 9/11 of that genre.
GET YR FREAK ON –
Missy Elliot. If you’ve never cut some proverbial rug to this, you’ve never
heard it.
ORIGINAL NUTTAH
25 – UK Apache During lockdown our little block of flats would have a weird
socially distanced disco thing on our balconies and this song would always get
a big response. If in a very weird awkward, can’t come too close kinda way.
CAVERN – Liquid Liquid
AKA The one Grandmaster Flash sampled for White Lines.
FIRE UP THE
SHOESAW - Lionrock. One last banger before we exit the dancefloor. Was this
Big Beat? I can’t remember. So many genres back then.
YOU CANT PUT
YOUR ARMS AROUND A MEMORY – Johnny Thunders Pretty sure I heard this first
watching The Sopranos. A lot of good music in that show. Poor Mr Thunders.
MARY -
Supergrass I really liked Supergrass apart from THAT MASSIVE IRRITATING HIT.
Ridiculously talented, knew their way around a tune. And this late 90s (?) hit
was all the better for being a bit dark.
THOUSANDS ARE
SAILING - Pogues The first song I played when I heard Shane had passed.
What a lyricist.
UNFUCKTHEWORLD –
Angel Olsen. Fishguard Dave put this on a mix for me at the start of
lockdown and it’s stayed a favourite since.
As ever, your love/disgust/apathy is taken as read. Thanks
for putting up with this shite. Your disappointment is taken as read, also.
It’s that Richard Thompson’s birthday tomorrow.
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