-Music Videos on my Mind- Metronomy's "I'm Aquarius"

Electronic music has strangely enough superseded rock ‘n’ roll as the youths’ sound of choice. Guys that were bullied at school for spending too much time indoors playing with technology have become aspirational, while those that revelled in sex and drugs have become un-cool. In a topsy-turvy turn of events, the former commands millions to spin records in hip clubs across the world and the latter struggles to land a record deal. How did that happen?

With a video echoing outer space B-movie kitsch and featuring creepy furless cats, Metronomy’s I’m Aquarius plays like an art student’s final year film presentation. It’s a serviceable piece but hardly launches the group in exciting new directions.

Then again, there is no direction to change because as the lead single from the group’s second album, I’m Aquarius signals that Metronomy aren’t willing to tinker too much with a successful formula which last time resulted in major acclaim and lucrative remix commissions from Lady Gaga and Lykke Li. This kind of monotony is paying off in spades.

British Music Ends the Year in Style

It is always a point of credulity when a music blogger puts their neck out at the beginning of the year and declares that the following 12 months will be festooned with white guys with guitars reclaiming their rightful place at the top of the music food chain.

Instead British music in 2013 was a more omnivorous affair with lots of different things happening. Below is a scant snapshot of the range on offer this month. It seems the future of British music (note to one’s self) will be protean and unpredictable, but also pretty exciting.

A Year of British Rap

Ghostpoet’s Season Change

Ghostpoet is equal parts chameleon, Corinthian and caricature. He is a rapper from Coventry, a post-industrial multicultural city that was the home of landmark British acts like The Specials and The Selecter. Like the latter two acts, Ghostpoet’s animated inventiveness is countered with despondent lyrics about life’s unremitting daily grind. There’s a jolting anxiety and uneasiness to his work that makes one realise he has very real things to say about the human condition. His work with African Express this year made for a Malian rhythm infused record that blends tribal drums with anachronistic arcade game sounds. The lyrics are desperate and needy, yearning for change and redemption – very much echoing the plights of both the disenfranchised underclassmen of Britain and the war torn peoples of central Africa where Season Change was recorded.

A Year of British Rock

Royal Blood’s Out of the Black

Even though British guitar music failed to deliver in big ways this year, there was some good stuff. One group that registered is Royal Blood, a two-piece rock act from Brighton that manages to create an epic sound despite only consisting of a bass guitar and drums. Locked somewhere between the anger of Rage Against the Machine and the sheen of Muse, Royal Blood isn’t just raucous noise, there is a great deal of skill at play here, much of it inspired by everyone from Led Zeppelin to The Pixies.

A Year of British Country

Ned Roberts’ Blues #6

Britain makes country music? No, not really, though there is a movement called Cowboys for Country Music that pickets major broadcasting headquarters and line-dances in front of them in an effort to make UK radio stations play more mainstream American country music. Country music is seen as far too removed from British culture, but Ned Roberts is a figure that sounds like the reincarnation of Tex Owens. To be fair, our Ned is American by birth but he has made his home here in England and draws as much inspiration from the bucolic wilderness of Wiltshire as he does the wild west of Wyoming.

A Year of British Electronic Dance

Jon Hopkins’ Collider

Dance music flows through the veins of Europeans. It belongs to us and has been a mainstay of our music culture for decades. Dance music is what brings Europe together, a unifying backdrop that enables us to engage in common equanimity. Before dance music came about we were constantly warring with each other, but now we get down in shared appreciation of binary rhythms and beats. While the Americans insist on cheapening the brand by proclaiming cheesy EDM as their saviour, we Europeans know real dance music when we hear it. Britain’s Jon Hopkins has produced the kind of record that does something familiar but adds melodic touches and flourishes you don’t see coming. This is a thinking person’s dance music and has one heck of a music video accompanying it.

Is Jennifer Lawrence a Movie Star?

Sandwiched between the phenomenal successes of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and this month’s awards’ baiting release of American Hustle, it seems an apt moment to ask ourselves if Jennifer Lawrence is the real deal?

The British cultural academic Richard Dyer wrote a seminal book in 1979 called Stars, in which he theorised the notion that audiences will engage with a film on the basis of our pre-existing perceptions of a celebrated movie star. Dyer’s book was the first proper intellectual exploration of how movie marketing and reviews hinge around the cultural sway of a movie star, focussing on the significance of stardom in American cinema.

Dyer in film academia is the man that brought forward the idea of star theory and provided the tools necessary for analysing how an actor’s constructed identity meshes with the performance given. By this definition, films live and breathe through what movie stars bring to them. Our idolisation of a movie star is what primarily attracts us to the picture, with us wanting to see the story play out through the living embodiment of the actor, making themes, morals, ideas and messages more effectively communicable due to the fact that we can relate better with the stars acting in it. For this very reason we will rush to see Tom Cruise acting in a movie in which he dramatises the harrowing experiences of a Vietnam vet paralysed by war injuries, and pay good money to see Tom Hanks star in a picture in which he plays a homosexual AIDS sufferer on the cusp of death but battling against his former employers for unfair dismissal. Movie stars enable instant communication and appeal of a given film. Without movie stars you have no film industry.

So how does Jennifer Lawrence fit into this? Most will argue that she is the epitome of Dyer’s star theory, but one is not instantly convinced. You see, Lawrence seems an icon of our times, but whether she has the pull of attracting audiences to see her in challenging roles is up for debate. Her break out role was in Winter’s Bone in which her performance as a troubled teenager in rural Ozarks attempting to prevent her family from eviction by trying to locate their missing father garnered much praise and an Oscar nomination. As a result, her ‘star’ power quickly intensified, with Lawrence winning coveted roles in X-Men and as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. Earlier this year she won Best Actress at the Academy Awards for her performance as the kooky young widow Tiffany Maxwell in Silver Linings Playbook. If anything, the last three years both prove and justify Jennifer Lawrence’s range, respect and reliability, warranting all claims of her being a movie star whom elevates the standing of any film she stars in.

But will Jennifer Lawrence’s name really guarantee box-office success? In truth, Silver Linings Playbook made more than $100 million at the American box-office in spite of its odd premise, but it was aided by a stellar ensemble cast that appealed to a mass demographic, a well-respected director at the helm, and the marketing muscle of the Weinstein Company. Ultimately, Silver Linings Playbook worked because underneath its awkward veneer it’s basically a feel good film with attractive leads.

On the other hand, Sandra Bullock is a true female movie star. She is someone audiences connect with. Never has an American actress made a succession of rotten movies and still managed to conjure billions in box-office revenues the way Bullock has. In a career consisting of crap like Demolition Man, The Net, Practical Magic and The Proposal (to name a few), Bullock has managed to spend the last twenty years bouncing from one unremarkable picture to the next, all watermarked with her persona of unquestionable beauty and affable quirkiness. Bullock has pretty much given the same performance in every film she’s made, retaining a lucrative and charming formula that has resulted in a career which has endured the usual pitfalls actresses of a certain age befall. Her turn in this autumn’s Gravity was basically Sandra Bullock lost in space, though her performance was technically satisfactory and serviced a truly cinematic event. Gravity has been a huge success because of the innovation on offer, but its saleability is essentially due to the fact that audiences identify and care about Sandra Bullock. Gravity initially played best to a 30+ audience, with word of mouth about its amazing artistry and technicalities filtering down to younger markets. Gravity is an event picture but it’s anchored by Bullock’s reliability as a movie star. Even if all else failed, older audiences that adore Bullock would have been there. As long as Bullock remains the movie star she is, her audience will remain loyal.

Many genuinely believe that Jennifer Lawrence is a once in a generation movie star, with young audiences loving her grounded personality and devil-may-care attitude. She’s adorable and talented, but can she open a movie? The Hunger Games franchise certainly benefits from Lawrence’s inclusion, but it was a publishing phenomenon even before she came on board. The X-Men franchise was massive prior to her taking on the latest incarnation of Mystique, and will be instantly recast if she ever relinquishes the role. American Hustle, much like Silver Linings Playbook, is an ensemble piece in which many constituent parts provide star wattage. The notion that audiences will flock to any old crap Lawrence puts her name to the way Bullock can remains untested, and for that reason her stardom is questionable.

To be honest, movie stars don’t matter as much as they used to. Personalities count for less than brand recognition. Lawrence, timid of things like Twitter and celebrity, wants her performances to define her, but we live in a different era. Her hairstyles and fashion choices gain traction on the blogosphere, but she remains cagey about how much access she gives. Her greatest asset is that she doesn’t take herself seriously, which separates her from the annoyingness of Anne Hathaway and the blandness of say Lily Collins. Lawrence is doing everything better than anyone else in the game, but it still may not be enough because the concept of movie stardom isn’t what it was.

Richard Dyer’s mantra on movie stars is that without them you cannot really have a film industry. Nowadays it costs more money to sell a film than to actually make it. Furthermore, audiences are historically less discerning than they have ever been in the past. As Hollywood focuses on flogging branded concepts without nurturing the next generation of movie stars, it may mark the death of cinema as we know it, and Lawrence may be the last twinkling hope in an industry teetering on the brink of irrelevance.

-Music Videos on my Mind- Placebo’s “Loud Like Love”

Placebo is a lot like Muse. I mean, here are two bands that were actually considered kind of cool when they first released records, but then very quickly became naff and boring as their popularities burgeoned. It’s easy to forget how good Muse sounded when its debut album Showbiz came out in 1999; likewise one shouldn’t discount the quality of Placebo’s first eponymous studio album released in 1996. The problem was that both bands have pretty much coasted their entire careers, putting out records that sound near enough identical to everything else they’ve done. The unfamiliar has become all too familiar.

Placebo’s lead singer, Brian Molko, was such an androgynously pretty specimen of a young man when he started out, evoking the glam-rock splendour of Bowie during his 1970s heyday. Now a middle-aged recovering heroin addict, Molko ain’t what he used to be, and Placebo is just some band that puts out interchangeable records every few years or so. However, much like Muse, they’ll very occasionally release a single that makes one remember just why we all liked them at one time or another. Loud Like Love exemplifies what I’m on about.

-Music Videos on my Mind- Shreya Ghoshal’s “Nagada Sang Dhol”

Flicking through the cornucopia of digital television channels in Britain, I chanced upon a feature for an Indian song that was a part of a movie called Ram-leela that seemed to be a rustic Bollywood retelling of a Shakespearean tale. The feature deconstructed the painstaking development and rehearsals for a song number called Nagada Sang Dhol that involved teams of artists and craftsmen planning and structuring the music and choreography for a sequence. It was almost like watching the DVD extras for a Hollywood movie in which they illustrate the pre-vis compositing and subsequent digital rendering of a complex special-effects shot, only this was an organic dance number in which dancers’ ankles gave way and tendons got snapped in efforts to bring the song to life. The end result is breathtaking.

The sensory scale and sumptuous production design of this video is almost intoxicating. It’s such a passionate orgy of Indian folk madness that MIA must wish it was the music video for her new track. There are only a few cultures in the world that can do stuff like this.

-Music Videos on my Mind- Yuck’s “Lose my Breath”

There you are: this indie rock band straight out of north London, consisting of hip Jewish kids with crazy hair and tipped for big things; that is until your lead singer decides to evacuate his calling after just one album, thus rendering them a unit without a front man. This was the fate of Yuck after lead singer Daniel Blumberg called it a day. But this industrious bunch took it on the chin and sauntered guitarist Max Bloom into pole position and decided to carry on as if nothing had happened.

In a style of true Jewish resilience, Yuck has come back with new music that sounds as good as the old stuff - perhaps even better. Continuing on as if the slacker movement that came out of America in the early ‘90s never went away; Yuck sound as cool as they look. The video may be simple but the music is good.

The British Film Industry Continues to Undersell Black Talent

There’s a British period costume drama that has been doing the rounds at various international film festivals this autumn. Ordinarily such movies are an annoying cultural fixture in the British film industry: staid pictures that pander to the United Kingdom’s obsession with celebrating antiquated Victorian values.

And then this trailer came along and made things seem kind of different.

Belle is doing something that, to my knowledge, British cinema has hitherto never attempted: portrayed the experiences of a black woman during Victorian times, yet depicted it with all the stately production values the genre is known for. It has a solid cast and scored enough attention at festivals to attract the backing of a major Hollywood studio (Fox Searchlight) to come on board and distribute the movie in key international territories. But what is perhaps the most amazing aspect of Belle is that a British black woman directed it.

Amma Asante is a former child actor that left acting to peruse a career in scriptwriting. Her writing was so compelling that producers encouraged Asante to try her hand at directing. Her debut feature, A Way of Life, was one of the most ferocious and powerful British films to have been released in the last ten years. Whereas many black filmmakers would’ve made their first film something that focuses on black experiences of British life, Asante instead told the story of an underclass white teenage mother called Leigh-Anne who engages in callous and unforgivable acts. She terrorises her Turkish neighbours, prostitutes a teenage virgin in order to pay for heating, orchestrates chaos, and, ultimately, takes things so far that it culminates in the brutal murder of an immigrant living in her Welsh community. It is an incendiary picture, though, a million miles from the world depicted in Belle. Despite that, A Way of Life is rich in complexity and pathos: all the ingredients that make for excellent drama.

It’s been almost nine years since A Way of Life was released. In that time Asante had a project fall apart due to financial issues, but it seems shameful that the British film industry has not capitalised on an exciting young talent who ought to have better backing and support.

This begs the question of whether the British film industry is capable of nurturing and developing the careers of black filmmakers? Belle loosely tells the true story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, an illegitimate mixed race daughter of a Royal Navy Admiral in late 18th Century England that grew up in a society where she had the benefits of wealth but lacked the civil opportunities afforded to her white counterparts. (Because so little is known about the real Dido, Asante very cleverly embellishes the story by inventing plotlines where the protagonist is involved with dealings relating to the Zong massacre, abolitionism, horrors of the Middle Passage; therefore, generating greater understanding about the politics that shaped Britain’s attitude to black people.)

The story seems a very apt comparator to how things are for black actors and filmmakers in Britain currently. There are initiatives and schemes established to support creative ethnic talent, but the results are patchy. The most exciting creative minority voices in British cinema are not necessarily those from South Asian or oriental backgrounds, they are often those coming from the black communities, yet because of Britain’s myopic mindset, such individuals are either emigrating to America or will do so if we don’t change our ways.

The character of Belle is played by the beautiful and gifted actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw who is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. In the theatre world she has played the roles of Shakespeare’s Juliet and Cleopatra to great acclaim, yet television and cinema has not figured out the best way to utilise her evident skills. What is most disheartening is her admission to Screen International that “As a mixed race actress from the UK it is difficult when all your friends are cast in period adaptations of Dickens and Jane Austen, for example. I wasn’t sure how I would get cast in those wonderful stories”. It is this very statement that makes me wonder just how meritocratic Britain is.

We’re at a juncture in Britain where foresight is in short supply and that means as a nation we are really missing a trick. The filmmaker Steve McQueen, he of 12 Years a Slave acclaim, has made his last two films American based stories. Actors like Idris Elba and Chiwetel Ejiofor made their mark in American productions before Britain decided to develop things for them to star in. If this trend continues then Asante and Mbatha-Raw will likely go stateside and embrace opportunities over there rather than stay here.

Although Belle may be courting the right sort of attention, it still may not prove fortuitous. It’s difficult to imagine that the dependable middle-English audiences for costume dramas will flock to something that is an unknown property. Whether British ethnic audiences will be drawn to it is difficult to gage. American audiences, however, may actually be the most dependable market for Belle as the film caters to lovers of Anglo-heritage and characterises the experiences of a woman of colour existing in circumstances previously unrepresented.

Asante stated recently that although Belle’s prospects seem prosperous, the film’s atypical nature may work against it.  She said: “The pressure I feel is to be able to prove that a black character can carry a period movie like this so that we don’t have financiers saying in future ‘oh well we tried that, and it didn’t work.’”

It seems important that we as British audiences greet change. If we actually prove that showcasing stories about unique experiences, even within the tried and tested paradigms of elegant costume dramas proves appealing to us, then that may make British cinema a more interesting place.

Belle may be the portrayal of a mixed race woman’s stoicism and strength, but that hopefully will not make for mixed fortunes. It’s important that British cinema comes of age, even if that means it has to look back to its past for clarity. After all, the only existing image of Dido Elizabeth Belle is a pioneering portrait by Johann Zoffany―a painting that portrays a black female subject on an equal eye-line with a white aristocrat. If that isn’t an inspirational signifier then we are truly lost as a nation.