Let Us Now Praise ILM! (Critical Insight Dept.)

People up-thread have veered towards the Thing, then just swerved past it [OK, OK, so remember this is a record that mattered so much to me that I probably didn’t play it ONCE from c.1979-92: oh yes, an impossible unfaceable disappointment on first arrival, but already by then I *wanted* to be disappointed; by then betrayal was already the best we had to look forward to anyway] and the Thing is this. The centre of the core of the essence of the Thing: that if Sex Pistols gave us (“us”) the territory in which to live out our so-called adult lives, if that was the word, it was because they alone seemed to know that contradiction was: All. That. Mattered. Their heart, their motor, their hook, their end.

[You know, I read England’s Dreaming seven times straight through when it first came out: the compulsion only broke when I realised I was trying to _make the ending come out another, a nicer way_]

And I’m tempted just to talk about ‘Bodies’: after all, there’s a thread over there somewhere which says (to me) that this song — of all their hits and misses, deep projects and silly-thing throwaways — is the one that *hasn’t* yet been hoovered up into mere CD- collectable classicness. The *really* difficult one. Not Holidays, not Belsen. The * really* ugly one. The *really* scary one. The one that tricks you (= me) into stepping back from what they are, into, like, questions about — oh — guitar layering and song sequencing. Into scholarship. Objectivity. Somewhere safe, where I needn’t listen *and* think *and* hear. Because the contradictions are written right through that song: through words, delivery, even there in the peculiar anti-pop intro, a surging hostile undecided pure-music [dunno].

The first four lines of ‘God Save the Queen’ could furnish a punk William Empson with a perfect new project: Four [hey, Forty!] Types of Sarcasm. Every one delivered at a different level and/or setting of “irony” (too weak a word, obviously). But you can read the claim and you can read JR’s attitude to it, each time. In ‘Bodies’, what’s he saying, who’s he being? Who the *hell*? Himself, her, the infant, the watching world? All? None? In the interviews on Ltd Edn 2-CD set, they all just blabber abt Pauline, some poor mad early stalker-fan, doomed self- mutilator attracted by the spooky punk dog- whistle that all the insane and the now-long- dead also heard. Answer given to: “What made you write the song” Answer NOT given to: “WHERE DID YOU GO WITH THE SONG...”

…“‘When that Indian spoke to us,’ went on Brown in a conversational undertone, ‘I had a sort of vision, a vision of him and all his universe. Yet he only said the same thing three times. When first he said, ‘I want nothing,’ it only meant that he was impenetrable, that Asia does not give itself away. Then he said, ‘I want nothing,’ and I knew he meant he was sufficient unto himself, like a cosmos, that he needed no God, nor admitted any sins. And when he said the third time, ‘I want nothing,’ he said it with blazing eyes. And I knew that he meant literally what he said; that nothing was his desire and his home; that he was weary for nothing as for wine; that annihilation, the mere destruction of everything or anything—’”…

So, just some of those contradictions: here’s a song — a hard song, a song that’s a vortex of irresponsible, irrecuperable nastiness — which sits with both sides. Yes with nasty- child gross-out facepulling , deliberate fake-thoughtless adolescent pigtail-pulling, and Yes with righteous rage at such jerky capering. A song which sits with both sides. Not mediating, though: EXACTLY not mediating. More like dragging each impossibly opposed side through the guts of the other. You say either/or, you imagine some nice you-choose consumer ambiguity: this is more like, whichever you wanted, you get the *other* one. Punk = feeling SO MUCH you have to pretend that nothing touches you, that the worst is a joke like all the rest. Punk = feeling SO LITTLE that you’ve no problem pretending you care about everything and anything. Both. The good * and* the horrible. The invaluable *and* the worthless. Begin there (which the stupid Clash stupid didn’t).

The guitars and rhythm section are fantastic YET the production is amateur and rubbish, murkily mastered, arbitrarily sequenced: a careless maybe-deliberate assault on the very idea of the LP as desirable item, repeatable proposition, nice-thing-to-grow- old-with. The package is amazing YET the sleeve was chucked together, designed to seem to be random rubbish non-design. The death of rock intended YET this was the sought-for apotheosis of all rock culture, to date, when the unspoken promise was called in. Malice, yes: venom, rage, yes yes, all that blah blah ho-hum. YET also Lydon’s incredible *wide-openness* as performer and songwriter, never so mobile, so unguarded, so daring. Manufactured boyband mindgames: of course — all the time. Lydon is the second most manipulative man in all pop culture; McLaren the third (or vice versa/ doesn’t matter). YET the people they fooled most of all — themselves and one another — they tricked into a zone from which even retreat was just another kind of weary advance, because it meant working through so many otherwise unspoken things, especially compared to [insert anything you like or hate here].

Rage and deeper rage: rage for, and rage against life. He hurls himself down into the dank well of his disgust — imagine singing this song, night after night after night after night — and finds, what? You looking back at him. Me looking back at him. I don’t know how to end this bit. (You know Sex Pistols briefly had a notion to tour with Henry Cow ...)

Lydon: “I regard myself as working class, but I know damn well working class doesn’t regard me that way” *YET* Lydon: “Why are the working class so angry, lazy and scared of education? Why are they so scared of learning and stepping outside their clearly defined class barriers?”

Jesus: imagine listening to the hideous churning fucker for casual pleasure! For DIVERSION!!

McLaren : “Of course, the *real* fans aren’t buying it”

-- mark s (mar...), June 6th, 2001 1:00 AM. (admin) (0.0.0.0)

that's a def. standout

Brief sketch of what I mean by Superword: A Superword is a word like "punk," which is, among other things, a battleground, a weapon, a red cape, a prize, a flag in a bloody game of Capture the Flag. To put this in the abstract, a Superword is a word or phrase that not only is used in fights but that is itself fought over. The fight is over who gets to wear the word proudly, who gets the word affixed to himself against his will, etc. So the use is fought over, and this - the fight over usage - is a big part of the word's use. That is, we use the term in order to engage in arguments over how to use the term.
Meta use is use!

A Superword is a controversy word, but not all controversy words are Superwords; for what makes a Superword really super is that some people use the word so that it will jettison adherents and go skipping on ahead of any possible embodiment. Like, no one and nothing is good enough to bear the word "punk," and I wouldn't join a band that would have someone like me as a member anyway. (Supposedly, in the late ’80s I once claimed that Michael Jackson and Axl Rose were the only two punks going at the time.) “Rock,” “pop,” “punk,” and many other genre names sometimes act as Superwords. So "punk" (for instance) can be an ideal, and every single song that aspires to be punk can fall short in someone's ears. But for the word to be super, not only must people disagree on the ideal, but some people must consciously or unconsciously keep changing what the word or ideal is supposed to designate so that the music is always inadequate to the ideal, even if the music would have been adequate to yesterday's version of the ideal. And the music then chases after this ever-changing ideal. Words bounce on ahead, and the music comes tumbling after.

Sterling's got a good handle on one way to work this mechanism. Another way is to put the ideal hopelessly and inaccessibly in the past: e.g., we realize that there's no way, even if we copy the notes and the look, that we could ever be what the Stooges were in '72 or Britney was in '99, so we try to be something that is different but equivalent.

I'm curious about the evolution of Tom Ewing's use of the word "pop"; I'm guessing - though I could be all wrong - that he'll sometimes, depending on the context, use "pop" to mean chart pop or something that sounds like it, whether it's good or not, while at other times he'll banish a song or band from "pop" for not being very good. And maybe Backstreet-Britney-*Nsync are initially pop simply for being teenybopper acts that charted, but by '01 they're no longer pop (again, depending on the conversation Tom's engaging in) because they're different from what they were in '99, and not as good. So pop is dead, and being dead, it's an idea without an embodiment, hence it's an ideal to be pursued, not just a form of music to be identified.

This thread has barely gotten warmed up (though, like all threads by the time I contribute to them, it's at death's door), because it has had very little discussion of social category. Come back, Nathalie, we need you. Chuck and Simon never lose sight of social category. And it's crucial to my idea of Superwords, since genre names would be neither controversy words nor Superwords if people didn't use them to differentiate themselves from each other. We differentiate from each other by using words differently (just as we differentiate by pronouncing words differently, by dressing differently, etc.), and we differentiate by categorizing each other as different. And we jigger the controversy words and the Superwords when we want to escape being identified with people who tend to be categorized as like us and when we want to be identified with people who tend to be categorized as unlike us.

(Slade, Dolls, Stooges, and Mott were all rejected by the metal fans [at least in the USA], maybe in part because the were all willing to play to get the glitter babes and the teenyboppers; these bands only became "metal" in retrospect, when the '80s glam-metal bands began looting their look and sound.)

-- Frank Kogan (edcasua...), November 10th, 2002 11:10 PM. (Frank Kogan) (link) (admin) (209.245.8.112)

Tori Amos:

Because "kooky" isnt necessarily a bad thing - Tori increasingly focuses on a strip of Kate Bush's career (circa 'The Dreaming') which went out of its way to conflate and confuse prettiness with ugliness, and analogy with arbitrariness. Kate herself seemed to be having a punk fetish at this point, which combined with her prog rock fetish to make music that sounds sarcastic and self-puncturing but at the same time earnest and over-ambitious. This is why it was so uncomfortable, and this is also why it was great.

What Tori learns from this, I think, is the value in a deliberate search for unneutered contradictions (we have to accept now that many "contradictions" within music are familiar enough as to no longer be surprising or unsettling, although they can still often be thrilling if executed well). A cursory inspection of the lyrics will show how Tori likes to mix up coherent narrative with a) indecipherable personal metaphors and in-jokes and b) a certain amount of random wordplay. Listeners can deal with any of these in isolation; it's the frustrating combination of meaning with non-meaning that people find off-putting/compelling; the conviction that Tori is (still) a "confessional" artist but the difficulty in piecing together a confession.

Likewise her musical choices: coupling the first album's piano-based MOR-pop with hopelessly inappropriate lyrics; getting even *prettier* (if on a grander scale) for her second album's dissection of/"transference" of women hating women; only then pulling out the latent Swans/Diamanda Galas/"Tilt"-era Scott Walker elements for what would otherwise have been her "love" album. Tori is nothing if not a defiant advocate for un-unified perspectives. That said, unlike "The Dreaming" - which remains uncomfortable listening to this day - Tori is too much the musician to cross out any chance of her music cohering, gelling; the contradictions are still present, but they seem to exhibit a desire to resolve themselves as you are listening. So what tends to happen, I think, is that once you do begin to accept Tori's approach, her music begins to sound oddly normal and instinctive. What then might otherwise be "difficult music" becomes "contextually difficult music"... or "idiosyncratic music" or more simply "Tori music". It's for this reason that Tori is much more the pop star than any of her peers

Because three million screaming teenage girls can't be wrong - the accepted argument for obsessive Tori fans is that they feel like Tori is speaking for them. I don't believe this is probably true, though - as Tori's lyrics are *so* elliptical, it's hard to know if she's even speaking for herself, let alone guess at who else she might be speaking for. Better to suggest that what three million screaming teenage girls can identify with is Tori's sense of unified disunity, which allows her to, as a pop icon, absorb anything you throw at her (whereas for reasons coming out of the distinction made above, I think there are a couple of pre-existing "rules" to Kate Bush which make her a less "absorbant" figure).

In that sense Tori is a bit like Britney, in that she only really exists in the mind of the individual who receives her. But whereas Britney communicates with "us" through the medium of the media, Tori communicates with "me" (me the average teenage listener not me myself) through the private rite of repetitive cd replaying, the relative privacy of live performance. Thus while even a ten year old will probably understand that Britney is a widespread and multi-faceted socio-cultural phenomenon, a more clued-in eighteen year old can still insist that there is, to all intents and purposes, only "one" Tori - the one they themselves pay homage to.

I'm not sure if this explains why you should like her though.

-- Tim Finney September 7th, 2002.

I'm sitting at my desk at work. I'm totally drained, feeling like I've run a marathon and close to tears. Why?
The reason is that I'm listening to The Lexicon of Love on headphones and I've just listened to All of My Heart as loud as I can stand. Isn't this song just the best fucking thing ever recorded? EVERYTHING about the track is perfect. Fry's vocals, the lyrics, the best intro ever - *that* opening chord, the piano arpeggios, David Palmer's thunderous snare thwack and skittering hi-hat, and the fretless bass prowling beneath. Fretless bass! - this track reclaims this godforsaken instrument from the clutches of the be-ponytailed session fop and turns it into a the sexiest sound imaginable.

The production - have keyboards ever sounded so epic and grand, yet without any trace of pomp? Anyone needs convincing that Horn is fucking god? Just play the 5 or so seconds after the first chorus which lead into the second verse about 5 different keyboard sounds collide and and burst into fragments. No, play ANY five seconds of this track.

Fry - a massive, massive voice, yet able to switch from despair to pleading to anger in a syllable. Listen the verse 2 "You'll be disappointed and I'll lose a friend" - oh God, overwhelming!

The strings - listen to the way they fade *slightly* 2/3 of the way through the chorus as Fry sings "Surrending, Remembering.." Also, the actual chords Ann Dudley uses for the string arrangement - simple, yet with a couple of twists which lift the vocals and let them fall.

I've lived with this album, this track for 20 years and it always has a similar effect. As well as the brilliance of the track itself it has, along with The Human League's 'Love Action', the ability to hit me with a feeling of nostalgia so tangible that I'm having to pinch myself to be sure that the last 20 years have really happened. I'm looking at my work colleagues, looking across at their desks and they're ghosts, strangers. From Martin Fry's opening line I'm back at University, walking across campus in the cold towards the lights of the Students Union. I'm with a group of friends - the girls look great, the boys are mucking about to impress, we've had a few drinks already and tonight we'll drink and dance and kiss and cry till we drop. That's the way I still feel. That's the way Martin Fry makes me feel. That's the way music makes me feel. I don't know what the question that I meant to ask is.
-- Dr. C (Daveatcrossdee...) (webmail), March 21st, 2002

-- fritz (fritzwollner5...), January 18th, 2002.

For a lot of us in our late twenties and early thirties, SR is a similar kind of problem - someone who articulated a rigourous and thorough way of thinking about music and the world, which is almost too seductive. Like Billy Blake always sez "I must create my own system or the be the slave of another's" (or words to that effect). Tom's solution to the problem of Reynolds was to reverse Reynolds Barthesian opposition between jouissance and plaisir - where plaisir is all that confirms our identity in a community, the everyday, the pleasures of sociability. Why not talk about the ordinariness (in a Raymond Williams sense)of how pop enters our lives, and leads to new conversations, communities. (If it weren't so obviously reactive to SR, Tom should publish an anthology called PEER TO PEER - THE PLEASURES OF POP, where peer-to-peer is less a technological fact than a social metaphor). This changes the focus of writing from how pop uses us - the awe, the rapture, the dismay or disappointment - to how we use music - as a way to make our social lives more fun. Pop is seen less as a "spell" or a drug or a dream - something that consumes us, that we become infatuated with, but as a ticket, the actual value of which is less important than the journies it allows you to make. In this sense ILM is TE's real achievement, a kind of emanation of a pop ideal and sensibility - pop as sensible conversation rather ecstatic sermon delivered from on high.

That said - I am still on the romantic end of the equation (Romanticism is like a very powerful drug, and can be hard to shake), but I'd like to try and think of a kind of way out of the binary. I think somebody like David Thomson is pretty good at this, conceiving of film in both romantic terms - as dreams, as ghosts, as fantasy - but also practical - how those ghosts stray into the everyday, sometimes in ambivalent and damaging ways...

-- Jerry the Nipper (jerrythenippe...), March 7th, 2003 3:21 PM. (link)

2) 'Almost famous' is a parodic representation of all this, the flame of rock criticism passed down the generations to young Cameron Crowe, and even Lester B becomes a kindly avuncular cheerleader, supporting the march of The Grand Tradition. You might say it's a huge misrepresentation, but can we imagine such a film being made about British pop journalist?! Compare this to '24hourpartypeople' where popthought is pompous, theoretical, buffoonlike, practical, inspirational, whimsical, impractical and finally embodied as absolutely central to the key moments of our popculture over the last twenty years.

3) I was thinking of that founding mythic image of ILx, the robot and the dinosaur. And it occurred to me that it represented a kind of deep structure of Ilx as it has turned out... I suspect that Mark S has a kind of Crusader Complex. He likes to identify a threat - the dragon, the 120 ft lizard - and then go riding off as champion with his band of feisty Markettes to vanquish it with his pitiless robot logic. Guilt is presumed, it's just a matter of forcing through the prosecution. His manifesto at the The Wire was 'have fun starting arguments', but I think, in practice, it's a more a neurosis about the need to win fights and play to an audience. There's a gracelessness and hostility and patronising polemic to a lot of these threads (mostly from the Markettes, it must be said); an ideal criticism should be infinitely attentive and thoughtful, I think, and a lot of the attacks here have all the subtlety of Steven Gerrard approaching Gary Naysmith in a Merseyside derby.

4) And why is the dragon always one of the usual suspects? I was thinking about Mark S and Momus, wondering why they generated such energy through their arguments. And I came to the conclusion that they are actually perfect opposites as writers [and their continual banging up against each other is really a desire to merge/achieve synthesis? :) ].

Momus's fault is that he is too elegant, marshalling the facts to meet the pleasing contours of the form of his argument/idée fixée - and if this means form takes precedence over fact, well so be it. Whereas Mark S, is a kind of gonzoid journalist of ideas, suffers from a lack of form. I sometimes get the impression that he would be unable to leave a note for the milkman without first bringing the entire contents of his head to bear on essaying an history of pasteurisation, an overview of cows in ancient mythologies, a study of the symbolism of milk in the first few Captain Beefheart lps, then a critique of the tetrapak design, and so on. There's a lack of focus such that content overflows... even, ultimately, beyond the bounds of language (hence the evermorecompressed shorthand allowing the ease of expression but betraying the possibility of comprehension).

-- Jerry the Nipper (jerrythenippe...), February 8th, 2003 3:39 PM. (link)

I didn't think it was possible to prove yourselves more bereft of substance, of humanity, of worth, then you already have.

Fuelling tabloid lies about the alleged Estonian prediliction for masturbating in public - could you display your contemptible, noxious and dangerous characters a bit more blatantly, please? Cunts.

Because dangerous is what it is. Dangerous to those who are possessed of the TINIEST SPARK of conscience. The barest intimation of sensitivity. The smallest hope of a shadow of a possibility of a clue that anyone on the board has any knowledge of pain, of joy, of anything beyond their own stupid, vile, moronic attempts to destroy what little is left of the human soul. Cunts.

Fuck all of you. Go ahead and chuckle along with the filth spread by the Eurosceptic press, you blind, deaf, ignorant fascist sewage. Ridiculing an innocuous easy target like public masturbation probably makes you feel better about spreading hate, oppression, genocide. Of course, I no longer expect any better from this crushingly depressing and nausea-inducing forum. I'm off - for good. Fuck you.
-- denize llambert (voiceinthewildernes...), December 3rd, 2002.

Anyway, otherwise this is great stuff. I don't have time to read all of ILM, and I know I miss some posts I would love to read, and I greatly appreciate people bringing some of them here for me.

That statement is an insult to the intelligence of millions upon millions of people. To really get what's going on? Isn't it eye-bleedingly obvious? War is bad. Daddy left me, and I'm sad. Mommy didn't love me enough, so I have woman issues. I'm so famous that I hate myself. The whole album -- and, indeed, all of Roger Waters' big "theme" records -- is like Freud turned into a Dick and Jane book. See Roger build a wall. Oh, how deeply metaphorical! God, it took me years to understand that!

The word "wanker" applies to perhaps no one on the planet quite so manifestly as it does to Roger Waters.

Dud.

-- Kenan Hebert (mondria...), March 15th, 2003.

You've either gotta use this situation to your advantage or avoid the topic of music altogether...most people for whom music is an important thing are bargaining from the position of strength...me, I'd try and find out whether I could trust this person at all by asking something like "What's your favorite Guns and Roses song, mine's Rocket Queen?" In this case, the only wrong answer is obviously "I don't know". I'd try and avoid stuff like Sonic Youth or Belle and Sebastian or whatever because I'm not trying to start a club with the girl, I'm just trying to have fun. However, if someone tried to break the ice with me by talking about music, I'd probably consider them a bore straight off...so the whole thing is bogus. Talking about baseball (finding a girl into baseball is far more promising in my experience than finding one into Roscoe Mitchell) or cars or movies or politics or anything less solemn than music is the best way to go in this situation, in my opinion.

Kris.

-- Kris P. Cheezinator (branch_ricke...), October 11th, 2000.

-- Kris (branch_ricke...), July 9th, 2002.

-- Sean (saturns...), May 4th, 2002.

I'd like to nominate Aaron Grossman's explanation of house music from last week or whenever it was. That shit was dope, real dope, on the real.

SuzyQ has two great songs: Joan Jett has 222 (I didn't count) + the greatest croak in rock bar none. I kinda fancied Suzy somewhat when I was 13: she still has a nice smile. Since I saw the photo of JJ on the back of the Runaways first LP in 1978, I have been her, to the soul of my soul, a meaningless, stupid, enraptured identification with — what? Absolute lonely dissatisfaction: something like that. The other four Runaways pictured — four happy Cali-trash chancers — want fun-love-money, dancing, fame, boys: the usual, bah. JJ's pic is grainy, almost black and white, and she gazes west out of Foley's tacky rubbish-world, pensive and sour, towards the icy end of all division, and of everything else. Julie Burchill had a phrase, in a piece on Joan Jett now 24 years yellow and tattered: "beyond gender trivia..." I haven't the slightest idea at this distance what JB thought she mean by it: I know exactly — impossibly — what I took it to mean: the change in the world which would never be, and had to be. This is mad, but that doesn't mean I didn't feel it, or that I can quite escape the shape it made me.
It's just a picture. Maybe she had tummyache.
-- mark s ([email protected]

Can anyone find the thread where Anthony E. explains why he loves Leonard Cohen? It's the best thing I've ever read about him.

-- Kris P. Ozzfest Rainout (branch_ricke...)

-- fritz (fritzwollner5...), March 24th, 2002.
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I guess what I mean is I've always liked how her fandom esp. Keith & Dylan fixations were cool. It's so hard to be a cool rock fan. Maybe the only rock star who identified as a fan herself? She talked about the sexual imagination of a fan in a really really interesting way, fearlessly verging into the creepy and masturbatory without ever parodying or downplaying it. I also liked how her frenzied hornygirl fandom included intellectual heroes too - the whole Rimbaud and Baudelaire as Rolling Stones thing.

& how she took songs that were familiar/invisible (gloria, land of 1,000 dances) and made them personal mythology.

-- fritz (fritzwollner5...), March 24th, 2002.

******************************************************************

Theories on punk:

a) Punk never happened. Certainly most people I went to high school with couldn't name any punk bands; college classmates might come up with one or two. This is not a put-down; it's just that most people weren't looking that way and haven't looked back. Many people around my age would consider Sting a punk rocker. The closest punk has come to them is perhaps a little more leather than there used to be in the fall collection and a fear that their children might want that new Blink 182 album, whatever they are.

b) Punk is always happening. Every time I see a 13-year-old with a mohawk, I smile but also think, "Surely they can do better than that!" (But then people of my age imitated our hippie older siblings and grew quite easily into that wasted Allman or Doobie Brothers look.) Punk happens every time someone discovers a Germs album in the fifty-cent bin, takes it home, and contemplates if Kim Darby's suicide was more aesthetically fitting than Ian Curtis's or Kurt Cobain's. Punk is happening not so much in Britain as in Bhutan, where television is brand-new and kids are wearing World Wrestling Federation T-shirts under their saffron robes. Punk in its guise as anarchy may have happened in Nepal, where a government official described the recent combination regi-/fratri-/matri-/patri-/sorori- /dei-/sui- cide as "Like those mass killings that happen all the time in American high schools." ("Titus Andronicus" therefore being no more or less newsworthy than Columbine.)

c) Punk happened a long time ago. See Greil Marcus, "Lipstick Kisses." Hundreds of years before Joey Ramone was born. Tour the Paris riots of '68. Lunch with the Diggers. Go back in time and stop the Situationists before they invent Malcolm McLaren. Punk is history, therefore it doesn't matter, does it?

d) Punk happened the wrong way. I mean, yet more electric guitars? Wouldn't it have been easier to program a synthesizer and wear Star Trek unitards instead of designer bondage wear? Weren't the Silver Apples more truly punk than The Seeds? Isn't the sound of a Moog short-circuiting more exciting than a Fender crashing into an amp? Is rage better expressed through satire than simple sarcasm? Aren't we ever going to get to the future?

e) Punk is yet to happen. Some day something will come along to truly change us all. It wasn't electronica, but it will probably be electronic. It ain't hip-hop, but it won't deny that influence. Maybe Elvis will arise from the grave. Anything is possible...

-- X. Y. Zedd (xyzed...), June 12th, 2001.

tell me about it! I am a seraphim cherub now, i hover above and watch the kitten-slaughter below. apparntly i was way way off-base on the whole musick-writing = musick-death thing, as it turns out God (alias Hunter-D) is a bit of an amateur rock critick! you should read His blog, it's all 'ardkore this and d&b that. I keep telling Him He's ten yrs late, but you know God. He never listens. I let all the air out of lester bangs's clowde last nite but we get on grate. that astral weeks thing was a joke btw - he never even owned a copy! They play it incessently up here, it drives Lester up the wall. keep the faith, flowercrushers. gotta go, heaven's interweb connection sucks.
-- Yves (YvesMontan...), May 10th, 2002.

'fuck, people who want melodic idm should just stick to gbv or something, autechre are original hardcore niggaz who dont need winking indie organ riffs and shit in their songs. mom are the flaming lips, ae are james brown, ep7 is cold sweat, DEATH TO MELODY '

-- simon trife