Work Hard, Play Hard… Bitch.

Avril Lavigne has been giving a few clues about her new album, due in November (found these stories via here and here). From this story:

"It's a lot different from anything I've done before. It's not a pop rock record. This is more about emotion and feeling."

Which I'm hoping doesn't mean a succession of ballads... This quote, from here, seems to imply that that might not be the case:

Deryck Whibley, who has used the couple’s home studio to produce eight of the nine tracks she’s recorded so far. “I think this is taking the spirit of what she’s done on previous records so much further,” he says. “It’s way more meaningful, has more of an impact, more emotional. It makes me feel something more than the other stuff. And I wanted to match that musically with the track.”

Which I like the sound of, especially combined with this from Avril:

“[Best Damn Thing] was intended to be fun, to be rockin’,” she explains. “All I had in my mind was my live show, running around on stage, getting the crowd involved. This record, I just really, really wanted to sing. We started recording each song, some of them, just with acoustic guitar and the vocal and building it from there. It’s stripped down. I love performing that way, so I really felt like it was time to make a record like that. To just make it all about the vocal and the performance, and the vibe, and the emotion.”

While I don't mind The Best Damn Thing, it definitely lacks the depth of the first two albums, so if the new record is going to build on the first two, it certainly sounds like a positive thing. The 3rd album, which it might have been thought would see the sound mature, seemed very much a regression, more teenage than what she was doing as an actual teenager, so hopefully the new album will rectify that and The Best Damn Thing will go down as an anomaly in her catalogue.
She is also using some old songs for the album:

a love song Lavigne wrote when she was 15: “I always really liked this song,” she says, “and I never recorded it.” There are other songs from her past on the record, too, including one she wrote at 17, and one she wrote at 20. “I always had material, but some people that I worked with didn’t really care, because they wanted to write the stuff,” she says, when asked why the tunes haven’t surfaced before. “Some people were just like, ‘Ah, whatever. You’re a little girl. What do you know?’ I know how this works. It’s my fourth record. It’s not rocket science. I think people doubted me before, and I’m finally just like, ‘I’m doing this.’”

Which on the one hand could be considered a regression, or even laziness, but on the other hand, given how much I liked the first two albums, and the lyrical content of the first two albums, I am at least willing to give the benefit of the doubt. It will certainly be interesting - a mature album that harks back to songs she wrote in her teens. And given what I have previously wrote about Avril Lavigne I find this quote revealing, especially as regards the third album:

“I was always really honest in my lyrics,” she says, “I think more so when I was younger, and now it’s kind of come back to that. Just like, you know what? I’m not trying to write a perfect pop song. I’m just trying to write a song that’s honest right now, even if something sounds weird or a lyric might not make sense to someone.

In summary - looking forward to the new album, which after The Best Damn Thing, I maybe didn't think I would be. Which isn't to say it's a bad album, but continuing down the road it created may well have resulted in one...

On Big Brother and Reason.

A couple of thoughts on Big Brother.

Firstly the whole seemingly unstoppable downer people seem to have on Big Brother. Big Brother 10 has been a good Big Brother. Not sure there can be much doubt about that. For drama and comedy and all the other things we've come to expect from Big Brother it has been up there with the best of them. I don't pay much attention to the viewing figures, they're down, I read, but I've been reading that every year since the dawn of time (or so it feels like). As far as I'm concerned everyone's been predicting the demise of Big Brother since day one, and so it seems as if everyone in the media will keep having a go at it until it does end when they'll be able to crow that they were right all along. The actual content of the show, whether it is any good or not, doesn't matter to these people. The simple fact of the show's continued existence is the offence in itself.
On the other hand there have certainly been missteps this season. The cancelling of the live feed being the most obvious. If the show is suffering from a drop in casual viewers the last thing Channel 4 should have done is alienate the hardcore fans, making them likelier to stop watching, or making them less loyal in their responses to the show. There's always been controversy over the difference between what happens in the house and the edited highlights, so the lack of live feed can only further criticism of this aspect, meaning that fans can be as critical of the show as the haters. The aspect of this that is most stupid is the way they said they were cancelling the live freed to concentrate on the website and yet the website is just the same as it has always been. Saturday night Tom left. The website wasn't reporting this until well into Sunday morning. And the Twitter feed also seems a wasted opportunity. While it could/should have been a real time look at what's going on the house instead it very often becomes nothing but a link to the main website, advertising when new content appears there, and the content on the website is not real time by any stretch of the imagination. It is a waste, pure and simple.

And on an entirely different note, the second point I want to make is on the show itself. On the use of reason in the house. The biggest users of reason in the house are Bea and Halfwit. The point I would like to make is that reason is the most successful tactic that a Big Brother contestant can use. In the face of everything you go to the reasonable position which thus makes your opponent seem unreasonable, aggressive. The point is that reason should never be equated with honesty. In the same way that in politics reason is used as an ideological prop to capitalism - "You want a revolution? Be reasonable, look at what usually happens in revolutions, they never work. Capitalism may have its problems but it's the best system we have, yes there's inequality, but until you have a reasonable alternative let's just settle for this..." Reason becomes a way for the privileged to keep their position of privilege.
It is "cultural capital," something I remember from my Sociology lessons, the middle-class are better versed in the laws of middle-class culture so that in a society where "we're all middle-class now," they have a distinct advantage over those less well-versed in the unwritten rules. See how Halfwit by persisting in the reasonable position managed to become the favourite to win the show as everyone else turned to slagging him off, making themselves look bad - their anti-Halfwit sentiments became the opposite of reason.
And now Bea joins in the reasonable brigade. Note the way that with Kenny she started off by being sarcastic to him (the comment on his shoes) but as soon as she got the reaction she desired she returned to the position of reason, making Kenny hated.
And the whole thing demonstrates how hard this position is to criticise. Every time I criticise Bea or Halfwit I am berated for my views based on the fact that they are just so damn nice. Well, yes, maybe they are nice, but that niceness should be seen as the ideological construct it so blatantly is, and, in a show famed for disliking game-players, for the game it so obviously becomes in their hands.
To tie the two thoughts above into one, the people who criticise BB10 for falling ratings etc., may well be right empirically, reasonably, but that shouldn't cloud their agenda, that they have been wishing Big Brother to fail since day one.

Chessboxin'

Absolute killer video - Wu-Tang Clan "Mystery of Chessboxin'" video redone in Lego. Unmissable.

Wu-Tang Lego: Da Mystery of Chessboxin' from davo on Vimeo.

Compare it to the original

Raw Meat

New Hell Rell video - "OK Your Dead"



Nice video, just Hell Rell and meat (definitely no homo...)
On related Dipset business - the new JR Writer mixtape is hot, go get it from here, a coupla tasters





"We Like The Cars," and I can't even drive...

Outside of the comfort of hope

Catharsis: A release of emotional tension, as after an overwhelming experience, that restores or refreshes the spirit.

Envy. Been listening to Envy a lot in recent days. First time in a while. Trying to get at the core of their brilliance. 2 things emerge.

1) The hope of the soaring instrumentation vs the despair, frustration, anguish of the singing combining to create something beautiful. So many other bands do the cathartic thing but Envy rise above, which isn't to say it isn't cathartic, but it goes somewhere else, somewhere beyond. Where the beauty lies is in the dissonance between the two elements. The power of the singing means that the hope of the instruments never gets the better of it, never allows the emotional outpouring of the screams to point forward, to move beyond the present - the music gives us the illusion of a a future while all the time the singing tells us that there is nothing but the insistent present. Yet, at the same time, the hope of the instrumentation is never drowned out by the screaming. It's always there, soaring above. Neither element wins out, there is a violent tension at all times. Perhaps in the quiet moments we could imagine that the future wins, but the contemplation of the vocals implies a looking to the past, and again the tension comes about, a tension which is only heightened by the eruption of the vocals into violence, never dispelled.
The past is another illusion, the futility of the screams tells us that - what was will have been an illusion, what is still to come will only ever be an illusion, we only ever have the present. This is what the vocals tell us. The music on the other hand builds on the past to point to the possibility of the future.
I want to suggest here that what this dissonance between the two levels represents can be equated to something else: that what the vocals are insistent against is the music's vision of hope. I take this idea from Lee Edelman's No Future, and his idea of "the queer" as a figure against "reproductive futurism". I'll quote from the first chapter:

... politics, however radical the means by which specific constituencies attempt to produce a more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child. That child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention. ...
the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form.
Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to the queer, we might ... do better to consider accepting and even embracing it. Not in the hope of forging thereby some more perfect social order - such a hope, after all, would only reproduce the constraining mandate of futurism ... - but rather to refuse the insistence of hope itself as affirmation...

Is this not what we see in Envy? The vocals refusing "the insistence of hope itself as affirmation," as expressed by the music. And further, in the very anger, despair (whatever name you wish to give them) of the vocals, can we not see the impossibility of which Edelman speaks:

When I argue, then, that we might do well to attempt what is surely impossible - to withdraw our allegiance, however compulsory, from a reality based on the Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism - I do not intend to propose some "good" that will thereby be assured. To the contrary, I mean to insist that nothing, and certainly not what we call the "good" can ever have any assurance at all in the order of the Symbolic. ...
Such queerness proposes, in place of the good, something I want to call the "better," though it promises, in more than one sense of the phrase, absolutely nothing. I connect this something better with Lacan's characterization of what he calls "truth," where truth does not assure happiness, or even, as Lacan makes clear, the good. Instead, it names only the insistent particularity of the subject, impossible fully to articulate and "tend[ing]" towards the real."

Outside of the comfort of hope and railing against the illusory future, is this not an apt description of the vocal power of Envy? "the insistent particularity of the subject." And the "impossible fully to articulate," leads us nicely into...
2) The language barrier. This is of course not an issue for everyone. But not knowing Japanese, is an issue for me. I have never (till today for the purposes of writing this) checked out any translations of Envy's lyrics. I think the lack of understanding of the words actually enhances the pleasure of listening to the music, not in some mysterious, exotic way, quite the opposite. It is because the lack of meaning allows for the illusion of a full communication, of a non-alienating language. When listening one knows precisely what is being said at the same time as one knows nothing of what is being said. Words don't get in the way of the meaning. One is free to have them communicate whatever it is one wishes to have communicated - one appears to come closer to meaning here than one would come if one knew precisely what was being said. Having looked at the lyrics, they do seem to be quite good anyway, nothing too concrete, but I still prefer to not know... to stick with what I want them to say.

Crimes against Art

When I first saw this article about Lars von Trier's Antichrist in The Sunday Times I commented that it should have been in The Mail. And now The Mail speaks out on Antichrist. So, what's the difference between the 2? The Sunday Times bothered to watch the film before saying it should be banned...
Here's the Mail's reasoning for not having to watch it:

You do not need to see Lars von Trier's Antichrist (which is released later this week) to know how revolting it is.

I haven't seen it myself, nor shall I - and I speak as a broad-minded arts critic, strongly libertarian in tendency. But merely reading about Antichrist is stomach-turning, and enough to form a judgment.

The classic, "I'm not your usual call for everything to be banned type," excuse. But of course you do have to watch it to know how revolting it is. The point of the BBFC is surely that very thing - they watch it so we don't have to watch too revolting things, or that we know we are going to be watching revolting things, is Christopher Hart arguing that the BBFC shouldn't have needed to have watched it, they should have just known it should be banned by reading the plot synopsis? The Sunday Times at least makes a wider point about the BBFC:

The nastiness, meanwhile, is so nasty that it leaves one wondering what the British Board of Film Classi­fication (BBFC) thinks it is for. It may not be necessary — I’m agnostic about this — but, as it is there, how come Antichrist got an 18 certificate uncut?

But the board of classification has classified it. It is not the Board of Film Censorship.

Back to The Mail and even after admitting to not having seen it, he goes on as if he had:

Since sex and violence are both intrinsic parts of human experience, art and literature will necessarily contain both. There are few more horrific moments on the English stage than in King Lear, when the Duke of Cornwall gouges out the aged Gloucester's eyes.

I must have seen the scene 20 times and it never fails to appal. But although superficially similar to the atrocities of Lars von Trier's Antichrist, it differs in every significant respect.

Shakespeare is dramatising the tragic universe we inhabit, human evil at its worst, and the hidden moral process by which Cornwall will eventually be punished for his cruelty.

The world of Antichrist, by contrast, is blatantly amoral, without any sense of justice or retribution whatever. Its mingling of sex and violence, the cheapest and nastiest trick in the book, is usually one which the BBFC pounces on in a straight horror film. But here they are blinded by their own cultural snobbery, swallowing the lie that Antichrist is Art.

How does he know this about Antichrist if he hasn't seen it?

The best bit though is this:

If I were to see Antichrist, I don't believe for a moment that it would incite me into copycat violent behaviour or make me a danger to others. But it would poison my mind and imagination, with explicit, ferocious scenes of sexual violence that would stay with me for ever.

Isn't that good enough reason to ban it...

The fact that it will give Christopher Hart nightmares is enough to justify banning it in this bizarre world. He doesn't need it banned from cinemas to prevent him being scarred for life, he just has to not watch it, which it seems he has no plans to do anyway - or are The Mail going to force him to review it?

The Sunday Times takes a different take, although it is also wrong. Bryan Appleyard very much seems to be against it, not because of its explicit content, but because it is a bad movie:

Antichrist may be seen as just another movie shocker, concern about which will be seen, in time, as quaint. But I don’t think so. Its sheer badness and the undergraduate cynicism of its director raise this to a different level. Why did Trier shoot those scenes the way he did? Not in the name of art, but to compete, to do something, anything, to stir the jaded sensibilities of an age stunned by screen violence. And the suckers in the art-house crowd fell for it.

Which is one of those arguments that one often hears, that art films can get away with more than simple horror movies because of their pretensions and because the ordinary man in the street won't be watching them anyway. And it is this, that this is just another shocker dressed as art that seems to lead Bryan Appleyard to suggest it should be banned.

This pretension is one that at least leads to some humorous outrage in the article -

Then, just as you think it’s all over, the film contains one final obscenity, which left me insensate with rage. On my way home from the screening, this shot almost prompted me to throw two bottles of wine through the window of Oddbins. I’ll come back to that. ...

I said I would tell you about the final obscenity in that last shot. It was just a dedication of the film to the late Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky is the Shakespeare or Titian of cinema, an artist of the highest order. Trier, at his best, is the Jeffrey Archer. My rage was uncontrollable. But, just in time, I thought, “He’s not worth it,” and the Oddbins window survived another day.

A board that protects us from crimes against art, now there's an interesting idea...

Make Her Say

Kid Cudi - "Make Her Say" video -



Love the tune, great vibe - video, nice split screen, nothing too special...

The starry skys above...

Making of video for Avril's Black Star fragrance -



Seems to be the most pointless thing ever, Avril in front of a green screen, everything added later. Technology renders the "making of" pretty obsolete, people sat at computers? Very interesting.
Other than that, there's a certain ridiculousness to Avril stating that working on a green screen and having things added later was "funny, cos nothing was there and I had to be in my own world and had to make up images in my head. So it was a challenge." The advert features Avril grabbing a bottle of perfume and throwing it to the camera. Which doesn't sound too challenging to me. Trying to give weight to an advert is not very dignified.
The most interesting thing is that she wanted the message to be "reach for the stars." Ignoring the fact that the only message that is important for the advert is "buy my perfume, buy,buy BUY," what I suddenly realised is that the logic of the advert is the exact opposite of this. Instead of reaching for the stars, the perfume, as capturing the essence of the star no longer requires the reaching, it is provided on a plate, thrown at us from the advert. What was once beautiful and great and bright has been reduced to a crappy bottle of perfume. The perfume is not raised to the dignity of a star, but the star is reduced to a throwaway product.

Woman Doesn't Exist part 2

The last time I posted on Big Brother I wrote:

...Sara from last year's Big Brother. She was assigned the role of flirt/tease and it was by fully assuming the role that she succeeded in showing just how ridiculous the assignment was. She didn't deny it, or apologise for it, or claim she just couldn't help it, she just continued in the role, eventually forcing Rex and Darnell into such a preposterous misogyny that the constructed nature of the role was obvious for all to see - resulting in both of them being evicted before her. There is always a certain distance attached to such roles, hence the way to subvert them is not to deny or apologise for them, this is simply a way of passively accepting the roles, or to actively accept the roles (as Angel does), but to fully assume the role, to show it for what it is.

With Noirin in Big Brother 10 we have the opposite of this. Noirin basically accepted that the "blokes" were right, that somehow her behaviour had caused the "blokes" to misread into her actions more than was there. She didn't continue in the role, but accepted that the "blokes" were right and apologised for her behaviour. And where did this get her? Alienated from everyone. Her power utterly gone, she was left in the centre of an absolutely futile argument in which all her previous admirers were against her and those she had chosen to side with had no emotional investment in her with which to defend her adequately.
The scene at the end of the episode where she played a little "prank" on Rodrigo was very interesting. No longer in the role of temptress, she casts about looking for something else to do, but the role of the prankster is a role that is already overburdened in the house. It seemed a great turnaround from Noirin as passive centre of male attention (something that the camera shot emphasised - from the other night with Marcus in her bed, the same camera captures her alone, seeking out Rodrigo's bed) to active prankster - the prankster as attention seeker - whereas before the men came to her for attention, now, stripped of her power she must seek.
The point being that she should have continued in her original role - as Sara did last year - rather than allowing the "blokes" to decide her role for her. The sight of Marcus and Halfwit's smug, self-congratulatory little chats together in the armchairs was horrible, as was Marcus saying, "come over here" and Noirin meekly obeying.
And yet it was Kris, who been mildly offensive to Halfwit who got evicted...

Black Star

Here's the commercial for Avril Lavigne's new perfume:



Her comments on the video raise certain issues:

“I think the TV commercial captured the edginess and fun of Black Star and made the commercial something I am really proud to share with everyone,” the Canadian pop star told fans on her official site. “I wore pink and black with studded accessories. I think wearing my own stuff and staying true to my style is a huge part of what makes me who I am.”

On the one hand the advert tells us "Be your own star", by wearing Avril's perfume, the belief that one can buy individuality on the mass market; on the other hand Avril points out the ridiculousness of this idea - by wearing her own clothing range (I'm assuming this is what she meant), she gets to be who she is, not by wearing the mass-produced clothes of another star, but by wearing the mass-produced clothes under her own star.
Consequently, even Avril's being is mediated through capitalism, she captures an essence of herself through the belief that such an essence can be captured by capitalism. Which is to say that the simple point - that it is obviously impossible to capture one's own individuality through the mass-produced style of someone else - is made more complex. If even the originator of this style can only be herself through the mirror of the capturing of her essence in the market, what hope for the rest of us?
Of course the main point is that even Avril doesn't get to "be herself" through her own mass-produced clothes. To refer to the first 2 albums in which she played out the struggle of (the always impossible) "being oneself" vs "being for someone else", "selling out" - authenticity vs advert. What we see is the utter victory of the advert - her self is no longer something inside, but wholly alien to herself, it is in the clothing line, in the perfume. And this is what we see in the advert for "Black Star", Avril Lavigne wanders in, sees the black star that represents her, grabs it, holds it for a moment, before throwing it on to us - Now it is available to everyone, but from the first the essence was outside.

Beautiful Detroit

New Eminem video for Beautiful -



Wanders about a decaying (I'm assuming it's) Detroit. Nice way to link his personal struggle with the struggle of Detroit - "I can't admit or come to grips with the fact I may be done with rap, I need a new outlet."

Stillness is the Move

Here's the video to the Dirty Projectors "Stillness is The Move":



It's a great song, floats along on the vocals and funks along in the music, nice combination. And the video is pretty random, on a hillside, dancing, a llama, some "wolves" and running with the wolves and walking with the llama, some odd trouser decisions.
Bitte Orca is an album that I've seen talked about in similar terms to The Mars Volta's Octahedron. It is an "accessible" album after, the implication being, a series of esoteric nonsense. Not having spent much time on the Dirty Projectors new album, and not being much of a fan anyway, I wouldn't like to comment too much on them beyond saying that I really like the new album on the couple of spins I've given it, admittedly more than I liked the other albums. On The Mars Volta I would say (and I still haven't given the new album enough attention, I've been distracted "doing my homework", getting far too into Frances The Mute and Amputechture) that it's not so much about accessibility, but about restraint. The album still has its more "obscure moments" and the sound hasn't changed too much, just the longer freak outs have disappeared. The point about accessibility is misleading because it's not such a muddying of the sound to make it appeal to people who can't listen to their other albums. It is still very much a Mars Volta album, rather than being the Mars Volta "pop album".
I think a comparison can be made between this album and Amputechture, but whereas that album concentrated the rock element, even within the different instruments being employed, it didn't really go for the long noodlings, this album tightens the rock element, keeping it under wraps, there is always a tension of what is about to be unleashed, an album of musical violence under restraint. In a way exemplifying the title of the Dirty Projectors song. Stillness is the move.
Further comments on The Mars Volta album when I've managed a concentrated listen, hopefully in the next few days.