Author: Tony Wright

Discovering Bowie

I’ve enjoyed Bowie’s music for years and owned the double disc DVD of his Best Of collection for about five. From radio plays during long family drives to my Nan’s house to the occasional music video on TV, he’s always been there on the outskirts of my music radar. I recall my sister getting scared of his role in Labyrinth, a documentary on Linford Christie’s running outfits to a theme tune of Fashion, getting home stoned and tripping out to The Man Who Fell to Earth and reading about Marilyn Manson’s contact lenses tribute during my brief goth phase.

But the artist really catapulted towards the core of my radar this month after a chat with a colleague about how cool the man is. That night I downloaded the CD equivalent of the DVD I’d owned for years and have been immersing myself in the two solid and varied discs every day since, whilst I get dressed for work in the week, stroll over Tower Bridge on my lunch breaks or run the treadmill in the gym.

There are moods for all occasion:

Space Oddity – 101 Hollywood blockbusters and US dramas about extraterrestrials and space later, a strength of this track is it’s ability to challenge the boundaries of imagination, even in the age where everything seems possible, at least when it’s engraved with an Apple logo. A great one to open up the box around your brain in a morning, munching a bowl of corn flakes and bolting a door shut for the day ahead is rarely as inspired.

Modern Love – A happy and bouncy tune that’s ideal for walking out of your office at the end of the day. It’s one of many examples that show how unlike say, Stevie Wonder’s I Just Called To Say I Love You or Paul McCartney’s Give My Regards To Broad Street, Bowie’s 80s output remained current to it’s time without over cheesing it.

China Girl – Another 80s effort that avoids the pitfalls of the decade’s dry drum machines and cold synthesisers thanks to Bowie’s intriguing lyrics and their softly, almost spoken execution, muting the familiar hums of traffic and curry house touts for this number can put a fun, rhythmic, anticipatory and swaggering screen over your walk out to a night of drinks and chatter.

Heroes – When your head’s split in two, you wake up brewing over an argument the night before or have just had a long lay in on a lazy Sunday morning, the goose bumps one listen and welling up eyes of the next that this song can conjure up tells you you’re listening to a pretty special thing. The simplicity of the ostinato, escalating passion and strain of the vocal and statement of the lyric are elements that bread track review acclaims such as ‘life affirming’ and ‘all time classic’.

I’ve always been a little too proud or obsessive to begin exploring an artist’s back catalogue with a greatest hits collection though the Best Of Bowie is a useful tool for an artist of such material and direction. It’s helped me to start digging deeper, from the surprisingly folk collection of his Space Oddity album to the very considered electronic efforts of Low such as Always Crashing In The Same Car.

On watching Bright Star

I am trained to bite the tongue of affection’s announcing calls. Sense tells me they’d scare or spoil our smiles beneath these warm songs. Why throw hurdles of language into the foray of simmering chuckles? Surely taming expression to sustain the familiarity of looping comforts is of greater consequence than evoking words that may but fright. Yet as time slides on and our grasps tighten and conversation peals beyond what was thought to be at its most unguarded extent, shelves of sonnets crumble fiercer each time, the rule of favouring silence over what may terminally disrupt this most enjoyable of meetings that so brightly provide content across each dinner table, dance floor, car, sofa and pavement shared, all remarkable yet snagged on the fence of a word I do not climb.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0810784/

Digital dreams.

In the first house I lived in we had a video games console that we fed cassette tapes. An educational puzzle game would blink on to the big, bulky TV set’s screen. An Uncle twice my age would set up his childhood console when I visited him at my Nan’s house. It was even more basic. He sat with a pamphlet and inputted code for half an hour before I could play a black and white Ping Pong game that entertained me for hours.

A year or so later, friends were starting to talk about the Sega Megadrive. I’d have a play if I was at theirs for tea but I got more satisfaction out of my Dad’s Commodore Amiga. The way a little green character named Super Frog bounced through medieval, Egyptian, circus and space levels to an upbeat soundtrack was mesmerising, and very gay. The stern bitmap image of a floppy disc on the screen was an exciting event for my sister and I, signifying our success in completing another world of the game and having to enter a new disk.

The Amiga stuck around with us whilst we lived in another house. Friends at this point were bringing Gameboys into the playground, raving about Sonic The Hedgehog and role playing the Mario brothers in school assemblies. I remember one afternoon at school, being sent by the teacher to the classroom next door for the code to access a level of Lemmings that my friends and I couldn’t reach.

The pace, noise and colour overload of more progressive gaming options took a while for me to come around to. I remained content flicking through a chest of pirated floppies my Dad had copied from a friend at work. Lemmings was often in the mix, many a Sunday afternoon would be spent on Street Fighter 2 and once I received a midi compatible Yamaha keyboard for a birthday (the PSS 590 – it still sounds great), I had it wired up to sequence bits of music I could never develop for lack of not having a hard drive or understanding what it was to save. After hours or blocking out squares on a grid and looping sounds together, I powered off and watched my efforts get zapped to the middle of the screen before it went pitch black and fizzed with static that you never hear from modern monitor.

By the time I started secondary school, a weekly IT class was the norm. Windows 95 had changed the world and after some reluctance and no doubt saving, my parents bought the family its first home computer. The Compaq Presario ran on Windows 95 but welcomed users first, to a virtual shopping mall. One shop front would take you to a desktop and start button that confused us for a good couple of months and the other would launch a horrid Compaq impersonation of Microsoft Office. Whilst you ‘stood in the mall’ a horrific recording looped on the virtual Tannoy. ‘Welcome to Compaq Presario Plaza. We hope you enjoy your stay. Where do you want to go?’ would be considered an abstract joke if sold nowadays to a world addicted to smooth user journeys and simplicity.

On that first PC, before months of my life were consumed playing strategy games such as Theme Park and Command and Conquer, filling the entire 2D square of Sim City with buildings was my main focus. A friend came to visit one Saturday and we managed to not leave one pixel of the game’s map uncovered by road, commercial or residential blocks. My Mum wasn’t best pleased with two young kids spending their whole day in a dark, curtained room and we were put on our bikes and sent for a cycle around the block. All we talked about together was what area of the map we’d bulldoze to redevelop. We were obsessed. Just as we were coming back down my road, the friend imagined. ‘It’d be amazing if someone was playing the exact game at the exact time, somewhere else in the world. We could join our cities up!’

600 floppy discs, a Discman, several mini Alba bedroom HiFi systems, trips to central London with friends to play shoot ’em up games across LAN networks in gaming cafes and an old Nokia mobile phone just about able to handle a game of Snakes later, things are obviously rather different. And that’s the true beauty of technology.

It’s come along way and has a limitless way to go. When I took the hour long bus journey home from school I carried a rucksack filled with 5 separate CDs and spent most of the trip swapping them back and forth to hear one song from here and one there. I never dreamt of a wallet size piece of plastic whizzing my record collection of 10,000 tracks up to my ears whilst I sat on a train, booked on a website using a phone that could film, edit and distribute the journey to the entire world in minutes. Technology takes the unimaginable and destroys it with creation.

Aisle drifters.

The silent tangles of shrunken jeans
had her panting beside late night shifts
omitting microscopic details at high speed
as he moved to power off automatic doors.

It wasn’t good enough. It simply wasn’t on,
having bought it but two days prior.
No meat should fall off the bone like that,
refrigerated bargain bucket or not.

Running back and forth the static door,
serving and sliding out isle drifters,
the day’s final restrained sigh
squeezed his top button to chin.

Taps shut it up; that persistent stream
of meandering detail, so minuet, airless,
braised, sliced and bubble wrapped
from her gut to anyone who would hear.

A receipt penetrated the slit of her purse
documenting detail and date,
each shopping trolley’s wheel scratching
the little amiability a refund retained.

Reaching for volume controls she battled
the noise of an empty home,
photo frames of catalogue cut outs and
telephone books of call center care.

There, he stuffed the security safe,
beeping alarms, looking to the moon,
reversing through car park gates,
padlocking to some, a world.

Eminem’s Recovery

I’ll always be interested in a new Eminem album, ever since his early stuff appealed to my suburban teenage days in High Barnet around the time that I wrote awful raps in notebooks about the people at school I didn’t like.

I’m a huge fan, can roll off most of his lyrics to this day and am quick off the mark to download his latest leaked efforts (before purchasing on release day to keep the collection complete – something few artists have the ability to make me do these days).

When The Marshall Mathers LP dropped and the red tops had a field day over his ecstasy pill (bits of old chewing gum) taking on stage, I was in the audience. When The Times ran a double page spread about his wordplay and his song’s lyrical techniques, I enthusiastically ripped out the page and showed my English Literature teacher. I got hold of and still listen to the pre-major label album Infinite. I can tell you in great detail and passion about how Eminem destroyed the careers of Benzino and Ja Rule and it’s fair to call me a bit of a Stan.

I love the way the words roll off his tongue like no other rapper (I’ve listened to quite a few – www.rapnews.co.uk), his unmatched range of styles in delivery, the sharpness of his one liners and the depths of subject matter he dives to. So enthralled by the thrill it can be to listen to him when he’s on form on album tracks and non released treats on the ‘digital underground’, I unashamedly tell people ‘I’m into Eminem’ regardless of whatever the inevitable sugar coated pop single he’s most recently released might be and how that’s influenced the Radio One listening average Joe’s perception.

The Slim Shady LP had an immensely fresh, cartoon quality. The Marshall Mathers LP is a text book example of creating and playing to a media circus. The Eminem Show showed that there’s more to the cake than an icing of jokes and filling of stunts. Then came Encore, the going through the motions, ‘I’ve got nothing to say right now’ release, an output of various well documented things going on in his life around that time.

With late last year’s Relapse CD, fans were treated to a showcase of what Eminem does best. It had refreshing, non synth soaked beats unlike what many were using (Bagpipes From Baghdad), concept songs (3 AM) and his freshest, hungriest penmanship in years (Underground). Received by his public well, sales and chart positions were good. Encore was forgotten and in twenty tracks, the hiphop world was reminded of who’s the best at it. That said, it was an album that people have referred to as having little playback value.

On Recovery and in its marketing, Eminem discredits Relapse as being good, but not all that, echoing those views that it wasn’t a body of work you can listen to time again, blaming its content. However, the issue wasn’t the content at all – it was the most imaginative, consistently entertaining and varied effort since The Eminem Show.

There were no desperate attempts at humour such as the bathroom sounds from Encore – those sounds were so far from what online communities of fans expected and wanted that upon initial internet leaks, conspiracies formed claiming them to be a record label trick to confuse and deter file sharing ahead of release date though they were no joke.

It was just that Relapse came 12 years after Eminem waked up the universe of MTV with My Name Is that the world domination of ‘The Way I Am‘ and ‘The Real Slim Shady‘ wasn’t repeated. People now know everything there is to know about the man, are accustomed to the horror raps and expect the jokes and jibes at pop stars. Whether Eminem’s going through the motions or doing his greatest work ever, people aren’t going to be as up on it as if it were a debut effort and it’s not going to provide as much impact.

So what of Recovery, besides the rather confusing title and marketing angle that’s all got a bit muddled and confused? Relapse‘s narrative is of a drugs fuelled Eminem though all the press was about how he was clean and was on the straight and narrow. Is Recovery then, a less autobiographical title and more an indication of quality, and does it provide the playback value that the twist of Stan, sickness of Kim and childishness of My Dad’s Gone Crazy provided years prior?

Well for starters, it’s very solid and more along the lines of The Eminem Show than Encore or Relapse with a focus on well rounded songs of chorus and structure, less plotted humour and more statement than story line. It’s a welcome change to hear an Eminem album not dominated by now predictable and dated Dr. Dre beats in favour of something more reflective of what’s happening in the charts (though he’ll do well not to develop Busta Rhymes syndrome and see out his career trying to hook on to whatever is hot). They sound bold and will provide a lot of club and radio coverage.

Then there’s the vocals. There’s a hunger and energy in Eminem’s voice, he’s rapping like he did on Till I Collapse, the faintly Arabic accent of Relapse is gone, there’s a ridiculous pound to the punch that transpires further with each listen and there’s a mix of straight to the point ‘I’m better than you’ rap tracks to those on romance, mind sets and relatives. References to his kids and ex wife immediately grab your attention as would a series premier of a soap opera you’ve been following for years might. For the first time ever, he doesn’t reference his Mother. Heart felt and honest references to his late friend and rap partner Proof are moving.

Not Afraid offers a similar stadium anthem mood to Lose Yourself. No Love features a strong guest spot by Lil Wayne that Eminem feeds off to drop one of his strongest vocals on the CD (similar to how appearing alongside Jay Z saw Eminem record his greatest ever verse) and Rihanna provides a well sequenced reflective vibe over piano and guitar rolls. With each listen, rhymes within rhymes within rhymes become more easily picked up on and the statement that nobody else of Eminem’s stature is doing anything remotely as close to this in terms of skill rings truer.

Several tips of the hat references to Kanye West wet the appetite for what that collaboration could one day offer and will perhaps remind and leave fans wondering as to what became of DJ Premier and Just Blaze link ups spoken vaguely of by involved parties throughout interviews in the past few years. TV and radio show performances with producer Alchemist on DJ duties also raises questions as to why few collaborations have been attempted or surfaced between those two.

So where next for Eminem? With a more stable, settled home life there will be decreasing opportunities to capture listeners imaginations with confessionals such as Cleaning Out My Closet and if there is to be another big personal period of upheaval, would listeners have any thirst left to follow it?

Shuns of engagement with battle tracks by Canibus and Pace Won would suggest competitive tracks aren’t high on Eminem’s agenda and now that Relapse and Recovery have exhausted the ‘I was poorly, now I’m well’ story line, what’s left to be said? Has the glass ceiling of what can be done within hiphop in terms of scale been met?

It’s been a long time since Bob Dylan’s 34 studio albums long career has had a u-turn in creative direction though with each release he gains critical acclaim and pleases fans as he sticks to formulas that he and they both know work best, though that route’s rather contrary to hiphop’s culture of artists aiming to rule charts and strive to maintain mass exposure.

With all things said and done, after their initial catapult to greatness, coked up dips in the middle and re-considered last efforts, Oasis’ own recovery was an apt moment to push out a singles box set and call it a day but again, that model’s not appropriate in hiphop which sooner sees careers halted by gunshot or scandal amongst younger generations of listeners. (It says a lot of Eminem’s career to look beyond hiphop for predictions of his next move).

To elder statesmen of hiphop for another ‘what next?’ possibility, there is of course Jay Z who’s remained current with efforts such as full length studio albums sound tracking movies and albums produced by a who’s who of big beat makers. Another option could be a reincarnation of yester-year’s Bad Meets Evil project with reunited friend Royce Da 5’9. The pair sound good together and the shared alias opens up a new area of concepts and characters to explore.

Regardless of what happens, I’ll be there listening and discussing as that’s the real nugget of Eminem’s act. People connect with what he puts out, for better or worse, and find with him a point of debate and analysis that no other hiphop artist musters and that after over 12 years, shows little sign of quieting down anytime soon.

Headphones, snapped.

‘It’s peculiar and unnerving in a way to see so many young people walking around with cell phones and iPods in their ears and so wrapped up in media and video games. It robs them of their self-identity. It’s a shame to see them so tuned out to real life.’ – Robert Zimmerman.

Cavell Road Way

A short back and sides for loose change.
Simple enough, square turfs for games.
An unfurnished corner shop selling simple meals.
Vintage pub rooms turned apartments, the run of the mill.
Gelled heads swagger anger around the blocks.
Discount stores up the price of their stock.
A dog’s droppings keep the commuters on guard.
The local road death Mafia skid cars.
Safely away, media and city types play.
Moulding cash to six packs and pint glasses like clay.
Baggy jeans and bikes switch to suits and foot
when the weekend’s gone and freedom gets the boot.
Flyers pasted over scribbles and stains
name club nights the council will close with blame.
Across the market sits riverside retreats.
Waves crash into the heated garden’s beat.

Technological Penmanship; faster, harder, better.

A Twitter feed and blog is a writer’s friend as it promotes opinion over perspective. It allows an author the liberation from weekly newspaper columns where they’d have to stick to one specialist subject or the categorised fanzine focused on a particular theme.

The Twitter and blogging sphere allows writers with variety, to drift from a poem about their goldfish to a warzone commentary or curry house reviews, enabling the masses not to tune in to topic but subscribe to tone of tongue.

Operating loosely throughout this publishing landscape, a writer’s mandate is to produce gripping sequences of a consistent standard, challenging themselves, evolving their craft to greater heights and providing a stronger service to their audiences.