If Shakespeare could compare his love to a summer's day then it makes total sense for The xx to use imagery of oil mixed in water to echo similar sentiments.
It's hard to know what to make of The xx. Even before their eponymously titled album won the prestigious Mercury Music Award in 2009, it seemed the band was making the kind of stuff designed to appeal to those too cool for comfort. Their music was everywhere, from political promotional ads to crappy American teen movies, making them look like a new Coldplay.
The xx are back with Angels, the first single taken for their sophomore effort, Coexist. It's a brave release to have made as the song is totally stripped to bare essentials, favouring minimalism and mood over fireworks. The no frills video and spartan production arrangements mean all attention is drawn to singer Romy Madley Croft's vocals, utterly convincing in its meditation on love and longing. As a song it doesn't really go anywhere or build up to anything big, it just dwells, lingering on cosmic thoughts and deep emotions. That's not something widely done in pop music anymore.
What on earth was the London 2012 Olympic committee thinking when they endorsed Muse's dreadful track Survivalas its official song? It's horrible to think that such corny number will signature all key moments of the event.
Had the London Olympic honchos had any sense of fun then they would have licensed Scuba's enormously banging tune NE1BUTU as its flagship song. The track pays homage to Britain's vibrant rave music heritage, featuring big beats and a classic soulful vocal element. Furthermore, the video is the happiest clip you're likely to see this year, with all the races that comprise modern British life dancing and having a top time together.
And the video also features Normski! Turns out the rumours he had died during a botched corrective laser eye treatment for his short sightedness were false.
One should always be cautious when the British latch on to an unknown American group and begin to venerate them like there's no tomorrow. On past occasions this type of overhyping has materialised in artists like Lana Del Rey and the Kings of Leon, big acts over here but rather less celebrated in their native country, with Americans viewing them more by way of suspicion than admiration. Of course, sometimes American groups that primarily court attention here in Europe can go on to have very successful homeland careers, a case example being the Backstreet Boys.
In keeping with the British tradition of overhyping American groups the Americans couldn't give a hoot about, Los Angeles band Haim are all over UK radio and music journals right now. The group is comprised of three sisters and a drummer called Dash Hutton. Although Haim's sound is redolent of '80s pop, the band's name is not a knowing homage to that period's tragic teen movie star Corey Haim and is in fact a clever moniker of sisters' Danielle Haim (vocals, lead guitar), Alana Haim (vocals, rhythm guitar, keyboards, percussion) and Este Haim's (vocals, bass) actual surname.
The Haim girls are getting a lot of UK loving right now and their debut single Forever is on commercial radio playlists nationwide. Their sound is old-school Americana, but the music takes liberal inspiration from '90s R&B, with the girls citing Aaliyah, En Vogue and Brandy/ Monica as key inspirations.
So are these Californian Jewish princesses rightly being praised as Christ's second coming, or are the British making a big deal out of nothing?
Lest we forget the plight of our white guys with guitars. The poor fellas are suffering, losing steady ground to a music culture that embraces manufactured pop over stringed instruments. Even a national institution like The Smashing Pumpkins could only shift 54,000 units of their new album Oceania this week, which in a country comprised of more that 300 million American consumers, is pretty poor in terms of sales numbers. Britain―a country that coined all modern perceptions of rock 'n' roll―has been the worst offender of neglecting alternative music. If ever we needed proof of that then just look at last week's massive Radio 1's Hackney Weekend, where famous generic urban pop stars (you know, the type that readily lend their voices to crappy animated kids films at the drop of a hat) dominated the event, while the few alternative acts on the bill looked massively out of place. Ten years ago such a thing would have been unthinkable. One indie white band playing at Hackney Weekend was south London's The Maccabees. Even though the biblical name of the band may indicate a Christian rock affiliation, The Maccabees are truly British in that they don't do God, and the band's title is an ironic feature as many of their songs have atheistic undertones, ridiculing the nature of organised religion. The irony is further heightened by the actuality that The Maccabees' sound feels very similar to Christian rock in some ways. Went Away is the latest single taken from the band's third album, Given to the Wild. Even though the album charted in the Top 5 on release, it's hard not to think that music of this nature would have made much greater impact in past years.
Will Icona Pop's new single, I Love It, be this summer's smash hit? Can this be the tune that drunken holidaying European kids will be partying to throughout the sunny season, only to look back on it in years to come as being little more than a embarrassing novelty track that marvellously typifies the characterless era it was conceived in?
Worryingly, it may do so, only because the Swedes are so good at producing universally adored pop music, and also because singers, Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo, seem energetic enough to get the attention of their core market.
Sweden is hot property right now with everything coming out of the country turning to gold. Sweden's crime books, gritty genre movies and, according to some music aficionados, its pop music, has the world's attention right now. It seems Icona Pop is giving us one more reason to pay close attention to Nordic pop culture.
Yet, yet, if Swedish pop music is so great then why on earth must it continuously play such derivative homage to ABBA, forever either overlapping one girl's profile with the other's full face, or just basically shoehorning a two girls and two guys formation? (Ace of Bass, anyone?)
And if Sweden is so good then why have the girls of Icona Pop relocated to London?
Poliça are a bunch of local musicians from Minneapolis who are, right now, struggling to maintain their low-key persona. This has a lot to do with the six-piece embracing the attention they are getting from celebrities like Jay-Z and renowned music bloggers like me.
Lead singer, Channy, has a voice that defies nature. Her ethereal tones overlap, warble and echo in beautiful ways. It's tempting to think much of Channy's vocal range is down to skilful producing, which it kind of is. Nonetheless, the production on Poliça's output really is technically epic, and Channy's ghostly voice is always at its core.
Amongster is the lead track from Poliça's debut album, Give you the Ghost. The video goes with the strange nature of the song, matching images of outdoors lovemaking and weird creature shots. It's odd, but then so is the band.
The USA has one of the most chequered histories when it comes to race relations.
Whereas Britain is a country divided by class, America seems a nation in which race will always be an issue. Perhaps the most uncomfortable aspect of American history is the abhorrent reality that slavery was a cornerstone of its nationalistic development.
The 1970s was a strange period in American politics. Tainted by the Vietnam War, ridiculed by the Watergate scandal and destabilised by an oil and energy crisis, the changing cultural landscape in America brought about new ways of thinking when it came to storytelling. Hollywood, which only a decade previously was making cute movies like The Sound of Music and West Side Story, was embracing darker projects. Rattled by diminishing audience figures and wanting to exploit a significant relaxation in the censorship code, Hollywood studios began developing edgier pictures that pushed the boundaries of acceptability. Never before had a major film industry taken the kind of chances that were practiced by Hollywood during this era.
Perhaps some of the most shocking films released in the 1970s were Mandingo and its unofficial sequel Drum. Both films are essentially slavery themed melodramas, but the brutal levels of racism, graphic sexual violence and disturbing distastefulness depicted in Mandingo and Drum convey that Hollywood was desperate to make adult material television could not compete with.
Prior to either Mandingo or Drum , Italian filmmakers Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi made Goodbye Uncle Tom, a brutal pseudo-documentary in which a production team inexplicably goes back in time to document the atrocities of American slavery. This film was the start of a subgenre labelled "slavesploitation." Goodbye Uncle Tom is rife in extreme images, showcasing, in intense graphic detail, scenes of male castration, paedophilic abuse and the atrocious raping of female slaves by white proprietors. Goodbye Uncle Tom features sequences that are so salacious one cannot help but feel ashamed for having ever viewed them. The film is explicitly designed to arouse audiences through its brutality rather than make them question what they're seeing.
Goodbye Uncle Tom dangerously signalled a new attitude in what audiences were willing to accept if filmmakers dared show them. However, unlike the former, Mandingo and Drum―both produced by the legendary Dino De Laurentiis―were not cheap slapdash efforts. These movies were big studio projects, put together by top line filmmakers and produced with sizable casts and budgets.
Mandingo was released by Paramount Pictures in 1975 and United Artists distributed Drum the following year, both huge Hollywood studios renowned for their financial power and marketing muscle. The films were very successful and still retain cult adoration, but neither studio is particularly proud of having such ostensibly racist titles in its archives. While Paramount will point us to its landmark movies like The Godfather, and United Artists will cite Raging Bull as films it'd like to be known for, the truth is that both studios were keen to tap into the slavesploitation canon to generate money.
Mandingo is arguably the more elevated slavesploitation film to have been made by a Hollywood studio. Like Drum, Mandingo was adapted from a Kyle Onstott novel and scripted by Norman Wexler, a screenwriter whose credits include Serpico and Saturday Night Fever. Mandingo was directed by Academy Award winner Richard Fleischer, an A-list filmmaker whose movies include 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and Tora! Tora! Tora!
Mandingo has been hailed a masterpiece by prolific critics like the esteemed Robin Wood who called it "the greatest film about race ever made in Hollywood." Even Quentin Tarantino stated that Mandingo is the only two instances in recent history that a "major [Hollywood] studio made a full-on, gigantic, big-budget exploitation movie." (The other being Showgirls.)
However one looks at it, Mandingo and Drum are both anomalies, freak filmic exercises that Hollywood knew it could not afford to sustain. The savagery and bigotry exhibited in such films veered abjectly in favour of sensationalism. Watching these movies in 2012 is a reminder of just how far we've come in terms of race relations. Although projects like Roots and Amistad have pensively dramatised the topic of slavery, neither exploited the subject matter for entertainment's sake the way Mandingo and Drum did.
This begs the question: Are we now living in a better or less exciting world because so-called slavesploitation films are no longer developed and released by major studios? How does a more prosperous and educated American audience of colour feel about such a horrid and racist subject matter like slavery being exploited by white filmmakers to entertain the masses? It could never happen in the 21st century, right?
But major studios may decide to invest in a slavesploitation movie if the right people bring it to them. As mentioned before, American auteur Quentin Tarantino remains an admirer of slavesploitation, hence why his next movie, Django Unchained, mines the spirit of Kyle Onstott's literary world (though it's not a direct adaptation), presenting the story of a runaway slave exacting revenge on the slave master imprisoning his wife.
Django Unchained has been financed and distributed by Columbia Pictures, meaning it is as much of a Hollywood studio movie as both Mandingo and Drum. The movie stars Jamie Foxx as an escaped slave known as Django who, with the help of a dentist turned bounty hunter called Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), wants to emancipate his still enslaved wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from the clutches of a sadistic plantation owner named Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) who, with the assistance of other villainous Deep South racists, groom slaves to battle each other to death for sadistic entertainment. In a nutshell, Django Unchained harkens back to the halcyon days of slavesploitation, an era where exploitation entertainment was an art form, not just a cash cow.
In all honesty, Django Unchained will bill itself as a homage to spaghetti westerns rather than a slavesploitation picture, but we know what it really is. Judging from the poster's inspired '70s exploitation artwork, Django Unchained will evoke the tone of Mandingo more than any generic Sergio Leone (or Sergio Corbucci for that matter) picture.
But shouldn't audiences, including African-American patrons, enjoy Django Unchained as an entertainment product without sensitivities over race and oppression getting in the way of their entertainment? Surely one should celebrate the actuality that a big budget exploitation movie like Django Unchained, with its top-tier credentials, can get made in this sanitised and risk-averse age of corporate filmmaking.
This is hard to tell. Only a decade ago there were members of the African-American community who had difficulty watching scenes depicting violent racist attacks on black people in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York. There is every reason to suspect that Tarantino's Django Unchained may provoke even harsher chastisement as it isn't necessarily a historical retelling and exists more as a pulp genre piece. Modern audiences may be perturbed by the racial pejoratives and hardcore white-on-black-on-black violence more than what they may have been back in the mid 1970s when race relations were not as refined as today.
Django Unchained is not the only slavesploitation movie coming out. British film director Steve McQueen is filming Twelve Years a Slave starring Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt and Chiwetel Ejiofor, telling the story of a black man in New York who is born free but was bound into slavery later in life and forced to work on a plantation in the Deep South. Unlike Tarantino's film, 12 Years a Slave will be a serious dramatisation of the hardships endured because of American slavery. In that sense it seems a more palatable approach, though not necessarily an easy watch.
There has always been arguments related to Hollywood's lack of opportunities for African-American actors but is slavesploitation a good way to enhance their presence in cinema? Should we accept entertainment as exactly that and not blight it with preconceived arguments related to exploitation?
The argument lies less with whether it is apposite to dramatise slavery and more with if it is appropriate to exploit the subject matter in order to thoughtlessly entertain audiences. Slavery in America was unarguably more atrocious than anything that can be depicted in cinema, but one can argue that the role of films should be to force viewers to contemplate the societal failure associated with slavery, not to be nonsensically entertained by the subject. The brutality of slavery should most definitely be explored in cinema but it must always provoke serious discussion and meaningful contemplation.
But Django Unchained is not strictly a slavery movie; it is a slavesploitation picture, a cinematic tradition that is still fondly remembered by some for its politically incorrect and transgressive approach. It is a hyperbolic representation of slavery, not an educational retelling. All will be revealed come Christmas but the very existence of a feature film like Django Unchained is bound to have many people questioning whether the merciless humiliation of an entire civilisation by white oppressors should be spun for entertainment value.
If Shakespeare could compare his love to a summer's day then it makes total sense for The xx to use imagery of oil mixed in water to echo similar sentiments.
