The fact that Public Service Broadcast’s album The Race for Space almost cracked the UK Top Ten last month speaks volumes about Britain’s appetite for experimental alternative music.
A concept piece that channels the story of the American and Soviet space race from 1957-1972, each track relives a major cosmic event, utilising actual voice recordings of communications between astronauts, politicians and space centre personnel, embellishing it with the band’s own musical talents.
Classic British electronic music collective The Orb were doing stuff like this on their seminal 1991 album The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, and actually doing it in a way cooler and less earnest manner than PSB. However, The Orb’s music primarily appealed to those raving in bucolic fields while tripping on acid, whereas a tune like Go! will comfortably play to enthusiastic school kids visiting science museums.
With a song that’s got a pansy title like Daffodil Days, and armed with a poncy degree in Fine Arts from Central St. Martin's in London, there is every reason to roll one’s eyes at 23-year-old Oscar Scheller.
And then there’s this throwback music video that plays like some 1980s anti-Thatcherite polemic, in which young actors playing underclass British kids put guns to their heads, have epileptic seizures, watch their emaciated junkie mum shag, and then ineptly dance around like misfits. It’s all done with a stylish artistic sheen, which means that Scheller has called in a few favours from his elite art school alumni, who no doubt learnt all they know about UK privation from watching Ken Loach films they borrowed from the university’s well resourced media library.
Being signed to Wichita Recordings, it means that Scheller has a label backing him in ways that’ll get the kid noticed. (It probably also explains why this music video was shot using professional cameras and not on some mate’s mobile phone.) It also positions Scheller as an indie pop artist who may work for a more commercial audience seeking alternative music that remains accessibly melody-driven.
We need more white guys with guitars in Britain, but they’ve got to venture down un-treaded ground rather than plainly dishing up half-decent songs that sound too familiar. If Scheller was a black artist doing this song then that will at least prove different (black female will be even better), but as it is Daffodil Days is too routine to be anything more than middling.
The digital revolution has been fantastic at providing a platform for niche interests to snowball into global events.
Take for instance Brian Shimkovitz’s little known blog The Hiplife Complex. Hiplife began ten years ago as a forum for Shimkovitz to feature recordings he had accumulated while travelling in Africa. His most beguiling find was perhaps an old cassette called Obaa Sima by a Ghanaian rapper named Ata Kak. Ata Kak’s music registered with Shimkovitz because it was unlike anything he’d heard before, yet distinctly shared structural styles of US rap music of the ‘90s. Ata Kak’s music is a fusion of traditional Ghanaian highlife sounds meshed with North American go-go influences, in turn, becoming what is now referred to as hiplife.
Shimkovitz’s bedroom project took on a new life once he returned home to New York City and realised that The Hiplife Complex was ready to become something even greater. The blog had enough avid followers demanding high quality reissues of the low bitrate cassette recordings Shimkovitz was uploading. Thus Shimkovitz began Awesome Tapes From Africa, a label that has evolved from its blogging origins into a proper distributor of high quality world music.
After a global effort, Shimkovitz strangely enough tracked Ata Kak down in Toronto, his home for the last twenty-five years. His real name being Yaw Atta-Owusu, Ata Kak had been playing in highlife bands in Germany before relocating to Canada.
Shimkovitz’s labour of love paid off duly as Ata Kak, surprised by the cult following his record courted, agreed to provide the DAT mixes so that the newly appointed mastering engineer, Jessica Thompson, could upgrade battered old recordings without compromising Obaa Sima’s rough and raw edges that aficionados desperately wanted preserved.
Hiplife has, in a way, gone seriously global in 2015 as tracks from Obaa Sima are even being played on some commercial British radio stations. What started as an esoteric music culture has, for a moment, gone international. It seems fairly obvious why that is because so many of Ata Kak’s tracks could easily find their place in the DJ set of a warehouse club in Chicago or played at a hipster underground event in London. Ata Kak’s music is swinging worldwide because it’s enormously cool yet also atypical. In short, it’s just great music.
A thoroughly well written and detailed article on Brian Shimkovitz’s pursuit of Ata Kak can be found at FACT, as well a detailed account of Jessica Thompson’s meticulous re-mastering of Obaa Sima.
The late great British artist Derek Jarman’s last film was Blue; a conceptual piece released four months before his death in 1993 from complications caused by AIDS. He was pretty much blind by that stage and produced a feature constructed of an entirely blue coloured screen where the voices of his favourite performers narrated Jarman’s intimate thoughts and visions. It’s a powerful piece.
Jamie xx’s music video for Gosh reminds one of Jarman’s Blue for obvious reasons. In tact is Jamie xx’s signature sampled grime MC’ing and swooshing sawtooth basslines, but there’s ponderous momentum to the track that evolves into something unexpectedly beautiful, where synthesisers lift the piece to heavenly heights. Jamie xx’s adoration of early house music frames the structure of his output, building scant loops layered on top of each other because back then computers had massively limited processing and memory capabilities, thus making tracks like Gosh feel both a throwback and contemporary postmodern wonder. The intensely blue backdrop further focuses one’s attention to the many sonic flourishes on offer.
British rave culture, personally speaking, has always demanded thought and intelligence on the part of the listener. That means the truly great stuff requires multiple hearings to properly appreciate its dynamic brilliance. Gosh is no different.
Noel Gallagher and his former band Oasis were one of Britain’s most successful music properties; however, one has every right to think of them as the turning point in UK alternative culture becoming less sacrosanct.
You see, Oasis were an indie guitar band that became massive principally because they were in the right place at the right time, striking gold because alternative music had already become mainstream by that point. It had reached a moment where even those that didn’t like such music were buying into it because it was the soundtrack to a ‘90s backdrop of football, larger and glamour girls. When a particular music scene reaches such a watermark then it can only give way to cheap imitations and less credible acts.
Oasis’ music never really stood for anything. The songs were catchy and radio-friendly enough to entertain, but they didn’t exhaust brain matter on the part of the listener to deconstruct subversive meanings. That wasn’t the case with earlier alternative working-class British acts from the north like The Smiths or Stone Roses, whose lyrics were drenched in double entendres and psychotropic ennui. Oasis made music for the masses and generated a lot of money doing it.
Oasis disbanded in 2009 after much infighting. Yet Noel Gallagher’s current stint as the front man of High Flying Birds has seen the singer remain one of the last successful British guitar acts. As much as one celebrates Noel’s working-class credentials, and his rightful bemoaning that “there’s too many posh people in the arts,” it’s harder to take him seriously as a relatable individual knowing he has a cool £30 million in the bank and insists on sending his kids to private schools because he doesn’t want them, “speaking like Ali G.”
But let’s get back to how Gallagher ruined British alternative music culture by turning it into a pleasing fondue set. The benignity of early noughties pop music, coupled with the advent of reality television singing contests, has now given way to a chart where the vanilla sounds of Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith and Paloma Faith accounted for more than a third (34.5%) of UK music sales last year.
The British Phonographic Industry proudly declared this week that: "The UK has a rich and diverse cultural heritage and we can be proud of the cross-genre music royalty that we have produced down through the decades to this very day.”
That seems great but the current state of British mainstream music is horrendously homogenised and elitist, ruled by a cohort of privileged singers whose parents have bankrolled their careers, accompanied by lacklustre state educated X-Factor pop stars who’ll defer to industry overlords if it guarantees their record contract gets renewed.
Noel Gallagher, master contrarian that he is, is a bloke that wants―to use that famous English idiom―have his cake and eat it. He criticises the lack of meritocracy in modern music but has himself become part of the establishment.
Oasis can be argued to be the beginning of the end of what was a popular British alternative spirit, but that doesn’t mean Gallagher’s sentiments are entirely out of place. He told the NME last year that: “My bass player summed it up [best], we’re constantly saying, 'Where is the next band coming from?' and he rightly says, 'Never mind the band, where are the people?’”
This seems to be at the core of what is wrong with British culture right now. Our education system insists on propagating conformity through an uninspiring curriculum, while our government extols the need to invest in exportable art that makes money globally through giving people what they expect. Such policies all but guarantee crippling UK cultural progression, not enhancing it.
As much as our love-hate interpersonal relationship with Noel Gallagher sustains, the man shares much of the current woe many grumpy Britons have towards this country’s methods of prioritising music culture. In only the amusingly crass way a former working-class Brit like Gallagher can, he says it best by arguing: “I don't understand it […] when radio stations start focus groups. They literally go outside their building and ask people walking by, 'If I played you this song, what would you think?' and all that. Don't ask the man on the street! He's a cunt! That's why he's the man on the street, not the man in the expensive restaurant eating fucking mini sausages at four in the afternoon!"
Choice words. Noel Gallagher has become the unmistakable voice of UK class warfare as he looks down on those that got him there.
Vaski is a twenty-something kid from Minneapolis whose production skills, judging from this track, that is, are technically brilliant and creatively mind-bending. It’s all very much steeped in an airy sense of nonchalance, so relaxed that one loses themselves in its rhythmical trickery and soothing vocal chicanery. It feels like the music equivalent of a gorgeous night’s sleep.
There’s a superfluous prologue to the music video involving some father-son domestic drama, coupled with unnecessary mash potato themed food fighting that is best bypassed. (Skip to the 1:11 mark for best results.) One assumes that it’s meant to ground the video in a sense of suffocating conflict which leads to eventual escapism, but rather more wastes time in getting into what is a marvellous piece of bass-heavy dance music.
This kid is gonna produce a Madonna album someday … there, I said it first.
There’s a subgenre of cinema that has been pretty much dormant for twenty-years: The inner-city urban school drama. This brand of movie was launched around the time youth culture was becoming commoditised, but was also popular because it depicted life in big cities in which the poorest kids are sidelined into a constant state of vitriolic apathy and anger. This was fertile ground for fantastic drama and gave audiences a chance to see the toughness of ennui youth
A common trope was the drama of an inspirational male educator entering a hopeless situation and turning it around while discovering a lot about himself in the process. A key component of this brand of cinema was the danger invoked by this situation, the threat where doing the right thing gets you battered or even killed. It also enabled young ethnic minority actors to acquire gainful employment playing thugs and hoodlums.
Blackboard Jungle (1955)
This is one of the most important and pivotal movies in cinema history. Blackboard Jungle pioneered a youth film language that is now the established paradigm for how to meaningfully connect with young audiences.
This was the first movie to use a rock’n’roll song over its opening credits, instantly showcasing the glory of pop music when used in motion pictures aimed at teenagers. Ironically, Bill Haley & His Comets' Rock Around the Clock was merely a forgotten B-side released the year before, but when youngsters heard it blaring through movie theatre sound systems, it took on another life.
Suddenly kids were dancing in the cinema aisles. They got so carried away by the perfect marriage of cinema and rock music that fights broke out at screenings. The UK being the home of rock’n’rollculture caused the greatest headaches for exhibitors whereby Teddy Boy gangs were so overcome by what they saw and heard that they started tearing out seats and slashing everything to bits.
Blackboard Jungle was pulled from many cinemas over its corruptive influences, but it somehow played and played, scoring four Oscar nominations when all was said and done. It also broke out Sidney Poitier as a star to watch, who in this movie plays a leading juvenile delinquent.
To Sir, with Love (1967)
Hollywood had to make amends for the corruptive influences of Blackboard Jungle on British kids
and Sidney Poitier needed to redeem his delinquent boyhood portrayal in that movie. The compromise was To Sir, with Love, Columbia Pictures’ loose adaptation of British Guyanese E. R. Braithwaite’s memoir of the same title.
Poitier plays an unemployed engineer who applies to teach in a school located in the slums of east London that’s full of degenerate cockneys with bad teeth. Poitier takes names and kicks arse, reforming the cockney scum into citizens that might stand a chance in gentrified London life.
The confluence of semi-hardened inner-city youth matched with a Swinging London setting proved to be a licence to print money for all involved. This life-affirming school drama was one of the top grossing movies released that year. Poitier negotiated one of the most stunning payoffs in film history, agreeing to star for a modest fee in return for 10% of all revenue in perpetuity, which works out to about $25,000 every year to this day.
But it was Britain’s sweetheart Lulu who made the largest impact. Her title song for the movie stormed the US pop charts for five weeks and was the biggest song of the year. Lulu even plays one of the loser London kids, though her dodgy affected London accent is terrible.
The Principal (1987)
The Regan era got an inner-city school drama it deserved, though, like most things back then, it became a hyper-violent action thriller in which a motor-mouthed Jim Belushi motorcycles his way through the hellish corridors of a defunct school in south central LA, armed with a baseball bat.
The 1980s seem a mad time in which edgy comedians were cast in leading roles over credible actors. Also, school kids were suddenly played by actors that looked ten years too old to be in school. It was also a period in which everything became overblown, with dialogue being literally yelled rather than spoken, and everything eventually culminating in absolute carnage.
The Principal was a modest success on its release, and, unlike the films before, failed to harness the power of pop music to sell itself. Belushi’s film career ended with the ‘80s and the crass tone of that period eventually gave way to more earnest attitudes to storytelling.
Lean on Me (1989)
They don’t get more earnest than Morgan Freeman’s part-pedagogue but mostly god-like turn in this
inner-city urban school drama that takes great liberties with real life story of Joe Louis "Crazy Joe" Clark, a baseball-wielding high school principal that reformed what can only be described as hell on earth.
This was an attempt to reground and update the subgenre, utilising established tricks of old but infusing it with modern sensibilities. After a throwaway flashback depicting Crazy Joe’s thwarted idealism of yesteryears, the opening credits features a montage in which a female student is sexually assaulted and a teacher’s head is cracked open by some thuggish teens in a violent attack. All this plays over Guns‘n’Roses Welcome to the Jungle, proving the undeniable symbiosis of urban youth dramatics and relevant pop music.
In fact, the film takes its title from the Bill Withers’ song, but licensing issues led to a cover version being used instead. The film also skirts over claims that Crazy Joe was eventually suspended by his school board after scheduling an assembly in which dancers stripped down to their G-strings. Crazy Joe later said he hadn't known about the dancers in advance, but something tells us that with great power came even greater irresponsibility.
Dangerous Minds (1995)
And so it ends here. This is the last of the iconic inner-city school dramas in which a reluctant scholar reforms the ailing fortunes of school while also bettering their own wellbeing in the process.
Having exhausted the white male saviour and righteous black guy angles, the 1990s needed a woman’s touch, this time adapting former US Marine LouAnne Johnson’s autobiography My Posse Don't Do Homework and transforming it into a summer blockbuster.
Made at a time when movie stars still mattered, Michelle Pfeiffer took on the role of LouAnne and brought in a film that was so profitable it spawned a spinoff television series that got cancelled after just one season. (Pfeiffer wasn’t in it.)
Dangerous Minds is Hollywood trash of the highest order. Despite its adult film rating, the movie was like an infant’s fantasy of urban hardships, but like most films of its canon, Dangerous Minds connected because of its ghetto-fabulous soundtrack. It shifted over 3 million units in the US alone, with Coolio’s signature track from the film Gangster’s Paradise becoming the biggest single of 1995. The song was so huge that Pfeiffer even appeared in the video.
The inner-city urban school drama essentially ended with Dangerous Minds and was superseded by things like High School Musical and Glee.
The fact that Public Service Broadcast’s album The Race for Space almost cracked the UK Top Ten last month speaks volumes about Britain’s appetite for experimental alternative music.
