My favourite album: Introspective by Pet Shop Boys
by Tom Ewing
As Neil Tennant has helpfully pointed out, this album is called Introspective because all its songs are introspective. Truthfully, this isn't saying much – introspection is what Pet Shop Boys do. After all, their signature hit starts "When I look back upon my life …" and most of their great records involve a certain amount of self-reflection, which they frame with glorious disco-inspired pop. The resulting distance – the horribly familiar inability to stop questioning yourself, even in the middle of joy – used to be misread as irony. Then in 1990 the band made Behaviour, where Tennant sounded more honest and vulnerable than he ever had, and people called it their first great album. It is a great album – but for me the six long tracks of Introspective from 1988 are more rewarding.
You could hear the album as a journey away from distance. It starts with Left to My Own Devices, pop's greatest celebration of ambivalence. On the rest of side one we experience the downside of autonomy – a lonely Tennant conceding the need for companionship on I Want a Dog, then failing to connect to a lover on Domino Dancing. On side two he's redeemed – pledging himself on I'm Not Scared, admitting his faults on Always on My Mind, and finally opening out to the world on It's Alright. In the end, Introspective rejects its title.
That's why I still love it, but not why I fell for the album in the first place. I was 15, awkward, mistrustful of dance music, adrift from pop. Introspective changed that – it's a collection of extended mixes for songs that mostly weren't yet singles, and these longer versions are the definitive ones. I know now that a lot of this album draws inspiration from years of fabulous, opulent disco mixes. But at 15 it was a beautiful education in what you could do with pop given space and ideas. Left to My Own Devices inverts itself, scrambles its earlier verses and takes off to a private, string-soaked dream world. I Want a Dog turns from a squib into something profoundly sad. The Sterling Void cover It's Alright is a nine-minute love letter to house music.
Best of all is the longer Always on My Mind, where the band gradually skeletonise the song, lose touch with it entirely and then, after seven minutes, drop in the riff and flood the track with colour. It was my introduction to the breakdown – dance music's greatest gift to the world – and it set my music taste back on track. That's still my favourite moment in all pop – and the emotional crux of a rich, hopeful record.
Yes, I’m still alive. I had to come back to share some thoughts for Blackout’s 10th anniversary because nothing is more Tumblr than sharing tons of thoughts about Blackout on its 10th anniversary:
You have to understand. There aren't many things I've held onto, pondered, or cherished for ten full years. My Facebook account is one of them. The others are Britney Spears' album Blackout, and the essay "Britney in the Dark Lodge" by @tomewing. For a decade I have remembered them constantly, or maybe it's better to say they haven't let me go. They've stayed tangled in me; they've yielded to however my life has bent, folded, and stretched since then. And thank god—what's better suited to the pleasures of overreading?
Tom's essay wonders at Blackout's main problem. How do you praise an album made by, or on behalf of, an almost-debilitated pop star. To this day, Britney is under a conservatorship. How much more so in 2007 (or less so, which is maybe the problem), when I, having listened to nothing but Christian and classical music for a whole childhood, watched that year's VMAs in my high school dorm room only to find that mainstream pop music was actually as alien as I'd thought? Here was a woman at the degree-zero of performance presence. I couldn't look away. I was fascinated.
That's not even mentioning the suffocating sense that something needed to change. That's not even noting feeling trapped in ballet, classical music, church—all the things that were supposed to be who I was (that is, all the things that were failing me, were not made for me). That's not even mentioning my then-nascent gayness. From beginning to end, Blackout is one long lesson in mediation. What you see, what's supposed to be the case, cannot in fact be trusted; fakery is the truest thing of all. The music thrills because it keeps erupting past its own surface. Like Tom Ewing says, autotune and other effects make this an album that can't ever be reproduced live. It exists most fully as a manufactured thing. Think of all the songs we have now with choruses that can only be sung by samplers and software. I think Blackout was the first time I realized I was haunted by the meaning of medium: what the form and surface of a thing seem to say, what they conceal, and how much an artist allows themselves to revel in artificiality, or not. (This lure is, by the way, how I eventually realized my enjoyment of Bruno Mars' music in particular is incredibly fraught. Why is he protecting himself.)
Eventually there was the question of, Why white girls, and What do they mean to me (thanks Hilton Als). Which was not separate from, What does it even mean for me to be a (black gay) man who enjoys and sometimes even mocks, for fun, the efforts of a subjugated woman as such. Which is not separate from, How could I have been so drawn to Justin Timberlake and his music, if he committed the first of many public violences waged against Britney. But then there was a friend on a long car trip: something like, "Sorry, could we not listen to his music?" (I'd taken control of the aux cord.) "I can't stand what he did to Janet." Because of course, his slandering of Britney holds no candle to his eventual denigration of Janet Jackson, rendering (white) woman as refuse and black woman as even less than. (The country doesn't deserve any other Super Bowl halftime act.) All this, as Britney's whole schtick—feeling overprotected, using synths and sex as pop-starlet strength and accession to adulthood, making her voice heard (literally, by puncturing the surface of the album to speak to listeners as a person, and not a studio product)—issues straight from Janet's mouth. All this, as JT continues to seize and starch the legacy of one of the world's queerblackest artists: a man who also figures as achingly, distractingly bright surface. Because you can't talk about Britney without talking about Justin, and you can't talk about either without talking about Janet and Michael. Because if Tom Ewing is to be believed—if Blackout is, at its core, a "black hole" (so common a phrase, but so appropriate!), a wound—then the Jacksons are its depth.
I didn't plan to write a long spiel about Blackout until one of my roommates shared a link containing all the album's leaked demos. It contains one of several fan-blog posts about the mystery track "Rebellion," a fifty-second fragment which, among other things, "could reveal something crucial about the most difficult period in Spears' life; or, even better, inspire her to try her hand at songwriting in the future." So once again I'm reminded that Blackout continues to echo, loudly, far beyond itself. Its super-hi gloss still shimmers with deep loss and efforted concealment. What's happening in that play of light and shadow? What else is as silly and frightening and downright uncanny as Britney hissing, "I fall off the edge of my mind—"?
The Top 100 Songs Of All Time: 1. Pet Shop Boys – Always On My Mind/In My House
by Tom Ewing
The intro: 00’00 – 00’39
In December 1987 the Pet Shop Boys released “Always On My Mind”, a cover of the song made famous by Elvis Presley and Willie Nelson. It became the Christmas Number One that year. Almost a year later, they released Introspective, their third album, whose fifth track is a nine-minute version of “Always On My Mind”, including an acid house inspired breakdown that features Neil Tennant rapping. Introspective marks, in Tennant’s words, the end of the band’s “imperial phase”, where virtually anything they tried came off and was commercially successful. It charted at number two, behind U2’s Rattle And Hum.
Sixteen years later, at the end of a Freaky Trigger pub crawl, someone said that “Always On My Mind/In My House” was the best record of all time, and around a dozen of us agreed, or at least did not disagree, and that installed it at number one on our list, a list, we promised, that we would write up for the website over the course of 2005. And so we all went home the merrier for it.
And ten years after that, here we are.
The song: 00’39-02’53
When I wrote about “Always On My Mind” for Popular – giving it a 10 – I suggested the flash and bombast of the Pet Shop Boys’ synth arrangement preserved the song’s humility. I think I was mistaken about that. Neil Tennant isn’t gloating about his neglect of his lover, but he isn’t humble or regretful either. His reading of “Always On My Mind” preserves the admission at the expense of contrition: he is laying out the facts as he sees them, but even at this late stage he will not commit himself. Fortunately, the song has already done it for him: the crashing, swaggering synth riff that defines the Pet Shop Boys’ cover leaves you in no doubt which way Tennant is jumping.
But on this extended version, the riff is discarded, and Tennant’s wonderfully considered vocal holds the spotlight by itself. This time, he’s more thoughtful, more equivocal. And he has been across the whole album. Introspective is called that because that’s what the songs are like – “the Smiths you can dance to”, a winking Pet Shop Boy said to Record Mirror – but what the record is often about is autonomy: the will and fantasy and loneliness of living your life however you choose. As the opening song puts it, “I could leave you, say goodbye. I could love you if I try, and I could, and left to my own devices I probably would” – the desire here is for the fact of the choice, not its making. And on Introspective’s extended version of “Left To My Own Devices”, Tennant is faced with that choice, and smiles, and simply rejects the decision itself, stepping out of the song’s binary into a final-verse dreamscape where all his imagined possibilities mix into each other.
It’s intoxicating – an old rock dream of total individual freedom seductively re-stated as a promise of pop music. A promise – or so I heard it at 15, very ready for such things – that pop contains doors. Doors which, if you bolt through them at the right time, on the right day, could simply upend the way you see the world, by rejecting false choices and connecting impossible things: “Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat” – whyever not? Great pop music is forever being confronted by sentences that start “Great pop music is…” and try and throw a rope around it. “Left To My Own Devices” tells me that pop (or love, or people) are defined instead by how they shrug off or wriggle out of definitions.
That was one song, and at the other end of the album, “Always On My Mind/In My House” picks up the same threads, more darkly. Without the riff to bring Tennant’s decision home, he can lose himself in equivocation again: “Maybe I didn’t love you quite as much as I could,” he’s singing, but his unruffled tone is saying… and maybe that doesn’t matter. But the difference between “Devices” and “Always” is that in the former I hardly notice the “you” it’s sung to, I’m as giddy as the song is about its celebration of possibilities. “Always On My Mind/In My House”, though, is haunted by its wounded “you”, who is paying the price for the singer’s indulgent indecision. We can be, to ourselves, as undefined as we like: sometimes other people need us to be fixed.
Tennant makes the opposing case. It’s not enough. The song collapses around him.
The rap: 02’53 – 03’49
The way we worked out the greatest songs of all time was simple. We sat round a table, drinking. Someone named a song. If someone seconded it, it was put to a veto. If enough vetoed, it was off the list. Otherwise, it was on. Once we had a hundred songs, the list was over, and the final named record was number one. It seemed as honest a method of making a list as the usual ways, one as likely to reward happy memories or well-timed jokes as acknowledged classics.
One of the things that is favoured when you make a list that way, in the pub, are moments that can be easily imitated, in the pub. Neil Tennant’s rap on “Always On My Mind/In My House” is such a moment. In the plan of the record and its emotional journey that I’m outlining, it has a place – a list of excuses for inattention that the production, speeding and slowing, turning Tennant’s speech into a calliope ride, seems to mock. In the Pet Shop Boys’ career it has a precedent too – it’s an extension of “The Sound Of The Atom Splitting”, their theatrically disturbing surrealist B-Side.
None of that matters next to the pleasure of putting on a funny deep voice and going “You were AWLWAYS” like a slowed-down record. It’s silly, as befits the greatest song of all time.
The breakdown: 03’49 – 05’22
It’s the end of 1988, the dying days of it, that odd slice after Christmas and before New Years. I’m in my room, listening to a cassette of Introspective that I copied off a friend. The album is a few minutes too long for half a C90, so the final track, “It’s Alright”, cuts off. I don’t mind that as much as I should, because in 1988 I don’t understand “It’s Alright”. A cover of a house music track by Sterling Void, the man with the greatest name of all time, it sounds corny and repetitive to me.
But for thousands of people Sterling Void, and musicians like him, are one of those doors that open up in pop and rewrite the shape of their world. A few miles outside my bedroom is the M25 London Orbital motorway, opened two years earlier. On it, British pop music is changing nightly. The looped road means that convoys of cars can move around it at speed, looking for illegal warehouse parties, getting instructions at service stations or on new mobile phones that keep them an hour or two ahead of the police. The house and techno music played at them (and in clubs, and in fields) has begun its irreversible transformation of British pop.
The Pet Shop Boys – born out of a shared love of clubbing, remixes, import 12”s – looked well placed to take advantage of this new world. Instead, they never really meshed with it. The roots of their work were in Hi-NRG, synthpop, Freestyle, italo – the melange of post-disco dance musics where smart, direct lyrics and strong pop songwriting could thrive. The blissful structural explorations of house and techno – its repetition, its long breakdowns, the different ways it used vocals – drew on other parts of clubbing history and culture. Like pub rockers when punk came along, the Pet Shop Boys almost fitted in, but that almost could suddenly seem glaring.
I assumed, perhaps, that Introspective was the Pet Shop Boys making house music. It’s not: it’s the Pet Shop Boys responding to house music, trying to fit some of its ideas to their template. The breakdown of “Always On My Mind / In My House” is the best example of this. An acid bassline underneath a mournful orchestral melody, leading into an angry thicket of programmed drums, and then the whole thing repeats. It’s unsteady, more a travelogue than a groove, and it sounds little like any contemporary club music. The template is still the extended pop 12” mixes of the mid 80s – by remixers like Francis Kevorkian or Jellybean Benitez. Even so it feels like a house-inspired version of those, because of the dark bassline, the pitched-up squeaks of “You were always!”, and because while it sounds eventful now, back then this middle stretch of the song seemed forbidding, alien even, in its minimalism.
All this is knowledge applied in hindsight. It’s 1988. The new world is propagating imperfectly, and has not reached my bedroom. The magazines I read are other schoolboys’ copies of Q and Record Collector, which have no interest in orbital raves. They lead me to Morrissey and REM at best, U2 and Pink Floyd at worst. I start the Second Summer Of Love exploring classic rock, sometimes with enthusiasm, increasingly with duty. Then I discover the Smiths – a door to bolt through, a name to call myself. I like indie music. By the end of the year I’m an evangelist, drunk on new rules and prejudices. But my friend has the new Pet Shop Boys album, and offers to tape it for me. We used to listen to Actually together, but that was long ago, all the way back in 1987, when I was 14 not 15, and I still liked pop, not indie. I’ve made my choice.
The drop: 5’22 – 5’30
I’m wrong.
The triumph: 5’30-6’46
The riff – and with that sudden shunt of synthesiser at 5’22 the whole of “Always On My Mind / In My House” is revealed as an extended exercise in delaying it – doesn’t just define this Pet Shop Boys cover version. It defines their entire, storied, “Imperial phase”. I once spent a whole Pitchfork column trying to throw a rope around the term “Imperial phase”: I suspect it wriggled free. But the point of them, it seems to me, isn’t just that the stuff you always do well becomes absurdly popular, it’s that the stuff you stretch for, and risk, comes off too. So while a relatively mediocre Pet Shop Boys single like “Heart” reaching Number One is the sign of an Imperial Phase, so too is the band invading the rock canon, at Christmas, with an Elvis cover and a video of clips from a surrealist film they’ve made, and it seeming like perfect, swashbuckling sense. And this also is a promise of pop music: it can make any decision you take seem the right one.
“Always On My Mind/In My House” is not part of the phase, by Neil Tennant’s own definition. “Domino Dancing”, the melancholy lead single from Introspective, was the Pet Shop Boys stretching once again – two uptight Brits making Latin synthpop – and it failed: it staggered into the Top 10. The game was up. So this uproarious minute of music, the riff rampaging through the song, synthesisers squealing and drum machines crashing around it, is a victory lap and farewell to the brief moment of British pop when the Pet Shop Boys were in charge of it. They will go their separate ways now, the Pet Shop Boys becoming a band that can release songs like “Left To My Own Devices”, “Being Boring”, “Can You Forgive Her?”, and “Se A Vida E”, an occasional, clever counterpoint to the rest of whatever pop is doing. But in this minute, this bubble of pop, they will always reign. Wasn’t it fun?
The Resolution: 6’46 – 8’11
Meanwhile there’s a song to finish – one last go-around for “Always On My Mind”, this time closer to its hit single version, with the riff appended, once again making Tennant’s choice obvious. The seductive refusal of decision in “Left To My Own Devices” finds its balance, the tune finds its breakdown, and the album can proceed to its happy ending. As can this list.
It’s 1988. The thing about pop music, when you’re 15, is that its doors open all the bloody time. Years later, month-long obsessions or beliefs seem like eras. Was there a time when I disapproved of pop music, on the say-so of Morrissey or Roger Waters or some spanner on the front of the NME? There was, but it didn’t last. I’d like to say the moment I heard “Always On My Mind/In My House” killed it, but things are rarely so neat. Still, it was a moment – I rewound it again and again, playing the whole album or just that track or just that minute or two. After it, I could not honestly stake a position where I disliked pop music. Within it, I could trace the outlines of other doors, into house and disco, and a world where the glorious return of the riff wasn’t a great pop trick, but a first principle of making and building music.
The Coda: 8’11 – 9’04
It’s the most liminal time of the year. The days between Christmas and New Year are, if left unfilled, an unsatisfying appendix, like the minute or so of unadorned beats you find sometimes at the end of dance tracks, a residual tail for the mixer to match the next record to. Christmas is the year’s natural climax, New Year its natural beginning. The space in between is an equivocal season, something left hanging like an unresolved decision, or an unfinished list.
So we – a very specific we, the list-makers – fill it up, coming together every December 29th to go to pubs, catch up, talk nonsense, and occasionally in former years make lists of things to write about. Why lists? Because we were sad old nerds, obviously. But also, we liked – or at least, I liked, and I’m the one stuck writing this – the conceit that this unfixed time of year, and the magic of the pub, was a good time to make arbitrary decisions, like naming the greatest records, and accept the challenge of one day writing as if those decisions were right.
And now the list is finished. Something else can be the greatest record of all time. Not everyone who started reading the list is still reading, not everyone who made the list is still with us. I’m going to post this, put on my coat, go to the hospital, and then eventually go to the pub, because it’s December 29th and that’s what I do. Perhaps I’ll see you there.
“The impulse behind this “10″ is probably the same as the impulse of the “10″ for “Atomic” – whether it’s a cover version or not, important or not, this does what I need a pop record to do, perfectly and reliably. When you start saying “it needs something extra to be a 10″, what you’re doing is saying that joy on its own can’t be enough. I object to this idea. That objection can get misinterpreted as a hedonistic philosophy – that joy is always enough, pleasure above everything in criticism – but it’s not: of course pop can act in ways beyond simply ‘being pop’, how boring if it couldn’t! But I wouldn’t be much of a pop fan if I didn’t think that sometimes simply being pop IS enough to get the highest praise I can give.”
“I think it’s going to be alright.”
My favourite album: Introspective by Pet Shop Boys
by Tom Ewing
As Neil Tennant has helpfully pointed out, this album is called Introspective because all its songs are introspective. Truthfully, this isn't saying much – introspection is what Pet Shop Boys do. After all, their signature hit starts "When I look back upon my life …" and most of their great records involve a certain amount of self-reflection, which they frame with glorious disco-inspired pop. The resulting distance – the horribly familiar inability to stop questioning yourself, even in the middle of joy – used to be misread as irony. Then in 1990 the band made Behaviour, where Tennant sounded more honest and vulnerable than he ever had, and people called it their first great album. It is a great album – but for me the six long tracks of Introspective from 1988 are more rewarding.
You could hear the album as a journey away from distance. It starts with Left to My Own Devices, pop's greatest celebration of ambivalence. On the rest of side one we experience the downside of autonomy – a lonely Tennant conceding the need for companionship on I Want a Dog, then failing to connect to a lover on Domino Dancing. On side two he's redeemed – pledging himself on I'm Not Scared, admitting his faults on Always on My Mind, and finally opening out to the world on It's Alright. In the end, Introspective rejects its title.
That's why I still love it, but not why I fell for the album in the first place. I was 15, awkward, mistrustful of dance music, adrift from pop. Introspective changed that – it's a collection of extended mixes for songs that mostly weren't yet singles, and these longer versions are the definitive ones. I know now that a lot of this album draws inspiration from years of fabulous, opulent disco mixes. But at 15 it was a beautiful education in what you could do with pop given space and ideas. Left to My Own Devices inverts itself, scrambles its earlier verses and takes off to a private, string-soaked dream world. I Want a Dog turns from a squib into something profoundly sad. The Sterling Void cover It's Alright is a nine-minute love letter to house music.
Best of all is the longer Always on My Mind, where the band gradually skeletonise the song, lose touch with it entirely and then, after seven minutes, drop in the riff and flood the track with colour. It was my introduction to the breakdown – dance music's greatest gift to the world – and it set my music taste back on track. That's still my favourite moment in all pop – and the emotional crux of a rich, hopeful record.
The band members’ silhouettes are soft against Brooklyn Bazaar’s trademark stained-glass as Bodega starts their set. Madison of ONWE channels David Byrne’s hollow stare, set in concentration. Nikki Belfiglio plays a converted computer keyboard as percussion before bite-smooching frontman Ben Hozie’s cheek.
Live audio, Bodega at KEXP. Catch lyrics from Neil Young's “Harvest” and Can's “Vitamin C” from 5:30-6:15 (both of which appeared on PTA's Inherent Vice soundtrack).
Hozie’s reading from the biography of French film direct & critic Éric Rohmer: “A classicism among the ruins… The cinema is definitely invested with a redemptive mission… [empowered by] the impartiality of the movie camera and the limits it imposes on human intervention.” Consider this the band’s ethos, alongside a motto inscribed in the lyric book of 2018′s Endless Scroll: The best critique is self-critique. Bodega sees its mission as self-evaluation through documentary. When liberals got excited about self-critique post-Trump, it was usually just one more in a series of sly twists toward superiority. (The dinner party line de rigeur: It’s like, shouldn’t we have worked harder to communicate our politics in a way the masses could understand?) Bodega’s scathing inward turn is in better faith and to better results.
The irony of the Rohmer quote lies in its contrast to our present moment: no one could seriously claim the camera and the screen as “objective” or limiting “human intervention” in 2018, year of the DeepFake. Hozie knows better than to sell cinema’s impartiality with a straight face; the artificiality of naturalism-as-artistic style is a recurring theme in our pre-show conversation. Which is why, on Scroll’s closing track “Truth Is Not Punishment,” Hozie shouts out the TV as the fulfillment of writing’s “porcupine dream… / where a man and his dream, let loose on caffeine, see it only one way.” Like everyone else, Bodega’s stuck inside a perspective and ideology. The question Endless Scroll can’t stop asking is what happens when you’re aware of the stuckness? What are the limits and liberations of self-knowledge?
Bodega used to be Bodega Bay, back before they broke up, played a final show to a desperate sweaty crowd, then pulled an LCD and were born again. The new record got its release on What’s Yr Rapture, the same label that put out Bodega’s post-punk peers Parquet Courts. It’s a more traditional LP than Hozie’s previous effort, thirty-three-track Our Brand Could Be Your Life (2015). But the never-say-die mode of “can’t go on, I’ll go on,” of trying to slip serious engagement into knowing snark, is standard practice for Hozie and Belfiglio, the two holdovers from Bodega’s previous incarnation. On Endless Scroll, the band combats contemporary nihilism — not to mention rockism’s aesthete tendencies — with an ethical center. Hozie makes full-length films in his free time, most recently The Lion’s Den (whose production is referenced throughout Endless Scroll). In Lion’s Den, Hozie took time out to explain Peter Singer-style utilitarianism, to examine the nuanced ethical trade-offs involved when consumption is framed as a zero-sum game: spend it on yourself, or spend it on others. Hozie’s projects have always been expositions on the hypocrisy and self-oriented pragmatism that characterize political and moral life. The message veers left, but it’s no Rococo Marxism — Endless Scroll is action-oriented and urgent, at least in affect.
2.
BODEGA exist within the global media economy, but they’ve also kept it local in holistic, farm-to-table fashion. The band’s biggest influence is, as it has been from the start, New York (“an island of blue / a nipple in water”). Wilson Ave venue Alphaville is a homebase for the group, and Hozie and Belfiglio are regulars in Bushwick’s weeknight scene. Ginsberg’s Rockland leaks through on the album’s twelfth track “Charlie”: “On that Staten Island ferry I was with you my friend / I see your face in the river / I am with you my friend.” The constant set-up and erosion of class oppositions, and the self-aware disparagement of yuppies, is vintage Whit Stillman updated for the iPhone bourgeoise.
That’s always been the conflict, right? Yuppies vs. Yuckies (aka Young Creatives). They used to fight over Downtown real estate but the suits won so the bands packed up for Brooklyn. Now the Yupsters have landed on the waterfront, set up a beachhead at the Vice Media offices and are working their way inland. It’s no coincidence that Vice is the conflict’s ultimate go-between, an intermediary agent with a history of swapping sides as is convenient. La Malinche, the Nahua translator who betrayed the Aztecs to Cortés, was a go-between who spoke both languages, after all.
Robert Sapolsky, ape researcher out of Cambridge, will tell you what Hozie and Belfiglio have learned through experience: large, concentrated populations lead to parallel status hierarchies, different but co-existing ways of gaining cultural cache. Which puts finance bros and punk rockers in the same business: cultural and social capital are capital too, these days. By the time the syllogism rolls around, the coffin’s already shut — on “Warhol” Hozie sings, “Andy said the best artist is businessman / and the best businessman is a cold blood killer / so it follows that the best artists are killers too. / If you see a man dying, note the color of his blood / and snap a picture.”
In his essay “Joe Chip, What’s On Your iPod?” Tom Ewing compares the death of rock, and the New York DIY scene by extension, to the “suspended animation state” and “shrinking reality bubble” of half-life in Philip K. Dick’s Ubik:
Within the bubble we listen to what we always did, we talk to people who listen to that stuff too, we enjoy the unspoken shared experience. But outside the bubble that experience is irrelevant or forgotten... Radio stations change format away from your music to something else; mailing lists sputter out; fellow fans move away and are not replaced.
Ben Hozie is the rocker in the bubble who’s also read all the thinkpieces written about the bubble. The political analogy is quick to hand, Bodega’s point of departure: for the man in a bubble aware of the bubble, what options are left? If you’re implicated, and you know you’re implicated, are you redeemed?
Bodega's combating nihilism — “What do you believe in? I have no idea what you still believe in” Belfiglio sings on “Margot” — because ultimately, self-knowledge is not just limited, it’s limiting. Accepting your narrow sliver of access to the truth, digging into your own moral impurities and hypocrisies, can be as paralyzing as it is necessary. How to continue on after self-revelation’s incapacitation? Paraphrasing Rohmer, you return to the past to find a classicism among the ruins. Keith Johnstone, Impro: “[You’ve got] to look back when you get stuck, instead of searching forwards. You look for things you’ve shelved and then reinclude them.” Cue Montana Simone, drums, standing up behind a cymbal, tom, and snare à la Moe Tucker on an Easter Sunday. Bodega is cratedigging through the archives, reincorporating discoveries and walking backwards as a way to move forward. In the end, well, there is no end — but maybe it’ll work.
Tom Ewing's series Popular is a review of every UK #1 single, in order.
“One temptation might be to walk away, to give up on 00s pop as an enchantment that failed, the froth of a delusional culture ... But that’s never been how pop or history works, for me. If the 00s looks like a decadent era right now then its pop reflects that as much as it reflected the hope and greed people felt in its urgent present. The pop music that for me still seems most resonant from that time is pop where the artifice breaks through the skin, where no real attempt is made to maintain a facade of naturalism.”
“21 Seconds” keeps things very simple: a staccato keyboard figure and a tattoo of rapid snares that bounces the track along, ushering its MCs on and off. There are embellishments – a liquid sub-bass that wells enticingly up under some of the verses; some extra keyboards; samples of cars rushing past the ear; another bassline, which Romeo asks be turned up when he takes the mic. It’s not quite as raw as the brutalist splicing of hook and beat on “Bound 4 Da Reload”, but it’s possibly even more basic.
This end of garage is a cheap, quick music, made possible by low-cost music software. The delicacy of production and sophisticated rhythmic mesh of 2-step is miles away. You could master the basics of making a track in a week or two, using a pirated copy of Fruity Loops or a similar software package. If you didn’t have a PC to do that, your Playstation would do. Music 2000 – one of the last releases on the PS1 – gained notoriety and respect for how rapidly it let new producers step up. The core of So Solid’s MCs were men in their early 20s, who’d spent time hustling but now had responsibilities – most had one or two kids – and wanted better, safer ways to make their money and names. But alongside that, the shift between 2-Step and what ended up as Grime saw a rapid drop in the age of people making the music, from the DJs and producers raised on house music to kids drawing on the hard snap of drum’n’bass, the battle stances of hip-hop and videogames.
