3 posts tagged “music”

(Don't worry, I'm not going to start with some terrible bastardization of Sgt. Peppers. There was enough of that when Sgt. Peppers itself was 40 years old a couple of weeks ago, and probably in everything written about any album anniversary since, ever.)

Anyway, it was ten years ago today that Radiohead released OK Computer, and ever since people have been going on about it being the Greatest Album Of All Time andwhathaveyou. While I hate to agree with those awful British music magazines, and think that the GAOAT concept is probably a logical fallacy anyway, today I feel obliged to doff my cap in OK Computer's direction.

Ten years ago (ten years ago!) I bought the album on CD. I know people say this type of thing about old music all the time, about wearing out records till the needle broke and about songs changing their life, but here I go anyway: I distinctly recall sitting in my bedroom that same day listening to the album intently for the very first time and being totally fucking blown away. I thought it sounded amazing.

I was seventeen, and I think there's something formative about the music you hear when you're seventeen. Most people that I know, by or around that age, have settled on their taste in music. I know that's probably a controversial thing to say, and I've got friends who would shout at me across our pints for accusing them of something like that, but I think it's largely true. It's not because your taste becomes immutable, it doesn't (some of the electronic music that I now love would have been heaped with scorn by my seventeen year old self). It's not because I haven't encountered music that has the potential to effect me as much as OK Computer since. It's that I haven't listened to an album the same way since: sitting in my bedroom, inlay card in hand, concentrating on the speaker while the music played.

That last sentence probably gave you an idea of the type of seventeen year old I was, and probably explains things a bit more. I was about to go to college to study humanities and politics, and here was this great new music from my favourite band, music about riot shields and mobile phone pylons crackling in the sky (and so on). It was great, and I invited it in. It's a zeitgeist album, and I was of that time and place.

I still love new music and seek it out at every opportunity. But I'd be lying if I said that I still listen to new music the way I did ten years ago; fanatically, ravenously. I guess I don't have the time any more (my world became a lot bigger in the following year), or maybe I just don't have the energy to wade through all the crap that's out there. To some seventeen year old, it's not crap at all though.

I suppose I should stop navel-gazing and say something about the album. I still think it's fantastic. There are only a couple of other albums that I can think of that run so well from start to finish as a single piece of music. To me, it is totally evocative of a time and place, and I can smile when I think about it. It's layered with vivid detail. But there I go again, I can't separate OK Computer from my own experience of it and just talk about the music. If you want that, go read the Guardian or something, I'm sure they've got some very clever deconstruction of the whole thing, no doubt starting off with the requisite Sgt. Yorke pun.

The Band, The Last Waltz
Jeff Buckley at Sin é
Nina Simone at the Village Gate

I was given the present of a mixtape once, "Kirsty's Jazz-Funk Fusion", cobbled together from it's curator's inherited 70s LP collection, complete with vinyl scratches bubbling away in the background. It was a grey Maxwell C-90. I had the tape for years, but I've long since lost it.

It was the first place I heard Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", and served as a reliable old workhorse for college house parties and later in the car during summer road trips. The main reason I remember it though, is "Expressway to Your Heart".

Until recently, I couldn't tell you who the song was by, the handwritten inlay card that came with the cassette long since misplaced and, despite my best efforts, entirely forgotten. It occurred to me to try searching online a couple of years back, and at one stage thought I'd found it, on a greatest hits compilation by someone named Karen Young. I previewed the song, and could tell straight away that it wasn't the version I was looking for. I didn't even bother ordering the CD. I forgot about it.

A couple of weeks ago I was pottering about on the iTunes music store. I've never bought music from it because I'd rather not be locked into the proprietary format that they sell their music in, but it's fun to browse. I've never caught onto buying single songs either, perhaps the music snob still hiding somewhere within me refusing to believe (or at least resisting the idea) that the album is dead. Or maybe I just hate the concept of listening to half an album. Anyway there I was, idly flicking through the racks, and... well, you know where this is going.

I don't know why I even thought of it (I had watched an interview with Gil Scott-Heron the week before on YouTube, could that be it?), but I found myself entering the song title into the search box. No preview necessary this time. I recognised the name straight away, that part of the cassette inlay suddenly unerased from my mind.

Margo Thunder. How could I forget a name like that?

99¢. "Buy Song".

I was somehow expecting an anticlimax. Last year I bought a cheap old NES on eBay, an attempt to reverse an ill-advised sale I made as a young man, but in the end it was kind of a letdown. Fun, but (of course) not quite as good as I had remembered. It was better in my memory.

Now, Expressway to Your Heart by Margo Thunder. Headphones on, press play. And as soon as I heard the intro, a flangy bassline and offkey horn stabs, then a sharp little drum fill, and... ah yes. The main hook, a simple, straight up ascending arpeggio for the horns with the matching bassline running little riffs around it. Classic funky drummer beat. And then Margo lets it rip. It's got a neat little low-tempo middle eight section and a cool descending refrain with a high chord piano throughout. Archetypal soul backing vocals. A key change! It was all just like I remembered it. I started giggling away to myself. It was great. It made me happy.

I'm not even recommending you go seek out this song; if you did, you'd almost surely be let down. It's just a standard soul song. It's not by any means the greatest ever written. But it is a cracking, funky little number.

And for some reason, I still love it, from it's very first line.

"I been tryin' to get to you for a long time..."