TheBrit and TheYank

Sometimes a good idea is only good whilst it remains an idea. I realised this once again a few weeks back when researching for this theme. TheYank and I spent a morning / afternoon respectively deciding which bands and singers could be classified as Mockney. During this time TheYank learned a little about the sociolinguistic and geographical makeup of London — it’s not all play, you know — and I ended up wondering how the hell the term could be applied to music given there’s only a handle of artists who can genuinely be classified as such.

So we copped out and picked one each. Rather than choose from the BRIT School sausage factory that has a propensity for producing Mockney starlets¹, I’ve gone for Mike Skinner’s The Streets, who despite living in Birmingham and Barnet sounds like no-one I’ve ever known from either of those two places.

The Streets - Don’t Mug Yourself

The Streets’ debut album Original Pirate Material was met with some derision by the UK garage community. It’s easy to tell why: while it was lumped in with that genre, it doesn’t even to this day resemble a typical garage album - it’s too minimal, chilled and wordy (not rappy). As such it was received warmly by all types of listener - critics included - and became extraordinarily successful. Mike Skinner’s tales of girls, booze and dope delighted many, even those outwith his lifestyle, because they were told with humour and truth. Pitchfork was later to call it the “chav Parklife,” which is a compliment.

Don’t Mug Yourself was the fourth single taken from the album, itself a measure of the album’s success and impact. Recorded after a night out drinking rum in a cinema, watching Monsoon Wedding with his mate Calvin Bailey, it’s “about bugging yourself with a girl .. just really liking a girl and acting like a complete twat.” Soft but crisp percussion and a relentless unwavering bassline serves two purposes: firstly it keeps pushing the story forward, making you want to hear more, and yet it’s sufficiently uninteresting to not distract from his lyrics. The ultimate charm of this song is however the way that it collapses in a heap at the end from Calvin’s impromptu counter-piece, ending with him and Mike giggling their way into another attempt to record his vocals.

The Streets - official website
Mike Skinner - official website
The Streets - Don’t Mug Yourself (Last.fm)
The Streets - Original Pirate Material (Amazon UK, Amazon US, iTunes)

The Streets - Blinded by the Lights

A Grand Don’t Come For Free eschewed the usual sophomore slump buy gambling on a concept album centering around the loss and eventual recovery of £1000. Second time around, the backing tracks are less melodic and harder, mirroring the darkness of the album, sometimes using rough cut classical samples and stabs to highlight the drama of Mike’s stories.

Few of its songs come with melodies, but Blinded by the Lights is one of them. Mike Skinner carries his paranoia into a nightclub, wrenched with confusion over his new girlfriend. Before he can reach any conclusion, the mix of alcohol and drugs in his body takes him away from those worries, and the loneliness he felt upon entering the club disappears. The backing, which begins with heavy snares, trancey gated pads and ravey soulful backing vocals, becomes gradually more serene. It’s a neat trick because it barely changes; rather it’s the interplay and feeling behind the lyrics that changes the perception of the music - helped by the arrival of hi-hats.

The Streets - Blinded by the Lights (Last.fm)
The Streets - A Grand Don’t Come For Free (Amazon UK, Amazon US, iTunes)

The Streets - Can’t Con An Honest John

Success and fame treats people differently. The Streets’ third album The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living doesn’t boast, nor does it claim life to be tranquil and happy, which one might expect. Instead it has songs of introspection and the sheer hard graft of being famous and dealing with its consequences. Curiously it bears the most interesting production techniques of all The Streets music to date. The melodies, when present, are more warped, atonal and psychotic, and Mike’s vocals are delivered with even less rhythmic precision. Perhaps this was too much for some critics who marked it down in comparison with the previous two.

The story of Can’t Con An Honest John is simply one of a straightforward pub hustle (albeit a good one), accompanied by a wobbly bassline, off-key padded chords and the occasional drop into a two-stage am-dram EastEnders chorus. Mike expresses through this song his realisation that the music industry is itself a scam: “running the beats is just getting people’s confidence and then taking their money.” It’s possible that the backing and that juvenile chorus is evidence to support that.

The Streets - The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living (Amazon UK, Amazon US, iTunes)

The Streets - I Love You More (Than You Like Me)

And then it all went wrong. Everything is Borrowed was the flipside follow-up: an album full of terribly obvious philosophising - probably now repeated on dozens of MySpace blog posts or Facebook memes - and almost equally bad music. A disparate set of styles employed as if they were just test tracks. Proof once again that happiness almost always leads to shocking songwriting².

Fortunately there are a couple of fabulous non-duds: I Love You More (Than You Like Me) is a story of internal, eternal apprehension, lifted by lounge piano swing, and On The Flip Of A Coin which binds risks with choices, subverts that attachment through randomness, all for a minor rite of passage: “And I got a bit scared of the fate of my baby son’s future / So I invented a reason to see if you could ever make do.”³

I’m especially cool with the former, just because of its chorus and one hilarious line. Unfortunately it never tries to reach a ravishing big band finale - restraint remains one of Mike Skinner’s musical traits - and instead the song peters out with a piano coda acting as a pause before its companion piece On The Edge Of A Cliff arrives.

The Streets - Everything is Borrowed (Amazon UK, Amazon US, iTunes)

The Streets - Stay Positive

Mike Skinner has stated that the forthcoming album Computer and Blues will be “the final Streets album,” which given the catastrophe of Everything Is Borrowed may be just as well. An opportunity to take a break and reinvent perhaps? For this fifth and final song, I’ve chosen one that reflects what makes The Streets interesting by going back to their debut.

Stay Positive is the lengthy song that closes out Original Pirate Material. This urban sermon is delivered in a way that’s far more direct and magnetic. Spot the difference in his lyrics: “I ain’t no preaching fucker and I ain’t no do-goody-goody either / This is about when shit goes pear-shaped.”

Built from string and piano samples, rough cut and looped, it reminds me of The Young Gods daring use of classical backdrops for their early albums. I drop it here because it’s a useful contrast to the previous song. Mike’s vocals are smoother, more rounded and less blokey, and it’s easier to spend time with the words which are blunt and truthful, yet carry with them an unexpected warmth.

The Streets - Original Pirate Material (Amazon UK, Amazon US, iTunes)

1. Well, okay, maybe just Kate Nash.
2. Ask Tori’s fans about American Doll Posse and her upcoming Abnormally Attracted To Sin.
3. I’m being ironic with respect to the latter song.

There are three types of album title: the first is the mundane, simply drawn from one of the songs on the album (such as Massive Attack’s Blue Lines); the second is slightly more interesting, being unrelated to song titles, eponymous or perhaps signifying the meaning behind the album (e.g. Tanya Donelly’s Lovesongs For Underdogs). That leaves us with album titles taken from lyrics, the best of the three, because until you’ve experienced the lyric, you may still be unsure as to why the album has been given its name.

Kristin Hersh’s acoustic album, Strange Angels is one such album. The way she deploys its title is effective because she rarely adheres to conventional song structures, which can make her work difficult to listen to. In particular the twisting of similar sounding words and phrases from one line to the next, but also due to the lack of obvious choruses. Listeners need to become familiar with the motion of each song to uncover its organisation, using repeating motifs, sounds or words as hooks on which to hang conclusions.

Shake is unexpectedly the centrepiece of Strange Angels because it concentrates ones attention on the use of those two words. Coming in the middle of the song, they arrive unheralded at the beginning of a line. Boom! What follows stretches through the remainder of the song and the rest of the album, lingering in the background of one’s thoughts. Furthermore, because Shake leads on seamlessly from its perky predecessor Stained, it’s eventual evolution into a separate entity makes it more remarkable. No wonder she uses the term Strange Angels for her musical benefactors.

Kristin Hersh - official website
Kristin Hersh - Strange Angels (Amazon UK, Amazon US, iTunes)

It was always going to be interesting to discover how Metric would sound after the quiet success of lead singer Emily Haine’s 2006 album Knives Don’t Have Your Back. This lead single from their fourth album Fantasies indicates that Metric can no longer be considered a distinct entity. Instead they’re now an extension; a sonic elaboration of Haine’s solo work, which is no bad thing. Perhaps I should listen to Live it Out once more to discover if this has always been the case?

Both the intro and the chorus are more approachable versions of the languid gloom that lives throughout Knives.. and then there’s the title: the first thought of each new-born. The overall result is downbeat new-rave, which makes its point through repetition. One for those recently impressed by Yeah Yeah Yeah’s It’s Blitz! or, at a push, Client.

Metric - official website
Metric - Fantasies (Amazon UK, Amazon US, iTunes)

While The Knife’s Silent Shout was praised for its music, Fever Ray’s debut is worth appreciating for its minimal, icy compositions, which are perhaps more beautiful. This enables Karin Dreijer Andersson’s lyrics and her voice(s) to be the centre of attention. When I Grow Up offers typically leftfield snapshots of thoughts and day-dreams, accompanied by a watery oriental soundtrack that borrows much from Silent Shout. It is, like the rest of the album, spectacular.

Best appreciated a little larger.

Fever Ray - official website
Fever Ray - Fever Ray (Amazon UK, Amazon US, iTunes)

So, after the hassles that YouTube have had with PRS Music in the UK, what comes along to make the music industry appear even more bewildering? Why, it’s a new music and video entertainment service from Universal Music and YouTube, with both parties sharing advertising revenue.

Apparently these two are going to join forces to form something called Vevo, which like all such dead-end ventures will launch “later this year.” Vevo is the only place where Universal (and possibly other record companies) will showcase their official videos.

Woah. How did that strategy get past the notepad-in-the-bedroom stage? Universal is relying on significant numbers of YouTube users to actively visit another site in order to watch their videos and hoping that everyone else looking online for them will end up at Vevo.

Hands up anyone who visits official major label websites? Yup. Exactly. This exclusivity could wreck major artists’ careers given that increasing numbers of people are watching videos online rather than on television. As I’ve said before, videos are promotional devices - the idea is to have them everywhere and easily accessible. Once again, Universal is trying to grab revenue where ever they can find it as compensation for their long term incompetence.

One of the first conversations TheBrit and I had was on accents (though I’m not sure he remember this, being old and all). For when I would say, “I so do love a Scottish accent,” TheBrit would state something along the lines that he was very fond of Mid-Lothian variations but not so much on Glaswegian. Okay, I could get that. As a native Yank, I could distinguish between someone from Texas and Alabama while a non-native Yank possibly could not. I can, however, distinguish between Irish, Scottish, English and Welsh accents but not necessarily the regional dialects. And that ability to pinpoint out various inflections has more to do with my Anglophile musical and television taste over outright study.

But what is it with the American fascination with accents? My own bland, non-descript voice is not remarkable in the slightest other than it’s husky and low. I don’t have cute diphthongs or cleverly slur vowels together. I don’t chop off consonants or adjust my pitch on specific words. I am known to make adjustments to certain word pronunciations randomly, but as far as accents go, mine is pretty boring and is also pretty fly-over-states American. But I think it is also because of my self-confessed blandness that heightens my fascination with non-American sounds.

And it was during the course of our conversation on accents that TheBrit and I discussed Mockney and the uproar surrounding it in music circles. We were interested in the phenomenon of singers (and bands) who would fake an accent (and to some degree, a life style) in order to become popular. What was is it about Cockney that is so appealing? While it predominates a small geographical area (eastern London), its influence is felt world wide. Even freakin’ Madonna has taken to speaking with a Cockney accent even though ‘ol girl is from Flint, MI. And then there is the case of certain bands, like Bloc Party, who are from East London but are definitely not defined as a Cockney band. But then you have someone like David Bowie who started his career singing in the tone of a perfect public school boy and would later change his singing style to sound more common and of the streets aka Cockney.

In recent years, acts such as Lily Allen, Kate Nash, The Streets, Adele and Damon Albarn (Blur/Gorillaz/The Good, the Bad and the Queen) have come under fire for affecting Mockney inflections in their singing to give themselves a thought of highly desired street cred. The believability that that any of these people are really from the lower working class London is like the U.S. taking Vanilla Ice seriously as someone who came from the ‘hood.

TheBrit and I loved the idea of doing a Mockney theme but the number of artists to truly make it worthwhile is limited and we would end up using the same artists over and over again. And there was another problem — these are legitimate artists and not necessairly one-hit wonders. Damon Albarn is so entrenched world wide in the music industry that you can’t pick up an album these days without his signature on it somewhere. Lily has just dropped a new album which is getting fairly decent radio play. Adele won two Grammy and Kate Nash is doing wonderfully with her solo effort in the U.K. and here in the States. So instead, we decided to choose just one Mockney performer to scrutinize and I chose Kate Nash.

Kate Nash, is it seems one of the more new promising artists these days, was found via her MySpace page and really blew up when Lilly Allen put Kate in her top 8 - so the story goes. And if you scope out Ms. Allen’s top 8 now, you’ll notice a certain young British chanteuse who recently won a Grammy is now encased firmly in Ms. Allen’s top 8. Interesting.

But I digress. Shortly after blowing up on the interwebs, Nash released a few singles on a local indie label before signing to Fiction Records. Her first album, Made of Bricks, was released in the U.K. in August of 2007 and in the U.S. in early 2008. Her second album, as yet untitled, is apparently still in production with release date tentatively set for 2010.

What makes Kate Nash mockney? There are conflicting reports of her birth as several reputable sources place her birth in Dublin and moving to London at a fairly young age while others make the claim she was born and raised in London proper. The only consistency is that Kate was raised in Harrow, a semi-affluent borough located north-west of London. Thus by affecting a cockney delivery in her singing, which is symbolic of the working/lower class of eastern London, is what makes her mockney. She’s been referred to as a third rate third rate Lily Allen (who, herself, was called a third rate Wendy Richard).

Nash is adorable. She’s doesn’t have, really, the sizzling sexy vocal range of Adele or the in your face of Lily Allen, yet she’s a combination of both. She’s playful and fun, much like Allen is but without being so in your face that you want to bitchslap her, something that I tend to want to do after listening to Allen’s albums because Allen’s so-called in-your-face after awhile seems less like using it as a storytelling device and more like a sulky, whiny drama queen. While I like Allen’s music, I can’t listen it to for too long before I want to stab her. True fact.

Nash has the emotional depth of Adele in terms of introspection and story telling while at the same time she comes off more as adorable, approachable girl next door and not the “oh woe is me, I hate you! Don’t leave me!” soulful moodiness of Adele. Nash writes perfect pop songs that are toe tapping, jangly good fun but are not so bubbly and fluffy that they are devoid of meaning nor are they so freakin’ depressing, which Adele’s soulful tunes tend to become after listening to them for an age, that you want to go off and kill yourself.

Take Foundations, which tells the story of a girl in a relationship with a boy who perhaps she shouldn’t be with and she questions the value of their relationship which is all set to a head bopping tune. It aims to provoke a seriousness (introspection in terms of relationship) but it’s difficult to believe the seriousness of said introspection when you’re spending your time bopping around your apartment. But having been in that particular position myself, I can understand Nash’s use of fun to make something that is difficult more palatable. Having grown up in the boom years of Depeche Mode and The Cure, I wonder if I would be quite so moody if there was a Nash equivalent at that time?

Yet, remarkably, Foundations climbed the charts in the U.K. It is not difficult to believe that it has staying power or pop-worthiness but since when did hearing a pop song about the demise of a relationship make one want to blare their radio and dance around their apartment? Apparently, it does.

In Mariella, Nash explores the idea of wanting to be in someone else’s shoes with the narrative swapping between the two persons but with the Mariella verses about the difficulties of being her. We can all agree, perhaps, that there is a time in our lives when we want to be in someone else or when being ourselves can be too burdensome. Children are cruel creatures and if you’re the slightest bit different, there is hell to pay. But what delights Mariella is that while she knows that people don’t necessairly understand her, she knows all the secrets in the world and sometimes that is enough.

Kate Nash may not be the world’s greatest pop star nor will she perhaps light the world on fire with her songwriting but what he does have over most singer/songwriters is the rare mix of honesty and playfulness that makes her songwriting special. Her career will be one to watch in the future and I’m eagerly awaiting her second album.

Kate Nash - official site
Kate Nash - Wikipedia
Kate Nash - Last.fm
Kate Nash - MySpace

Nearly a year ago (!) when TheBrit and I came upon this idea doing a he-said/she-said music type of blog, it seemed like a really good idea™. But as it tends to be, while not all great ideas make it beyond the planning stages, here we not only got beyond the planning stages we also produced a website that was starting to get some notice. Then we stopped updating with any frequency.

Life™, as it were, got in the way and we’ve kind of fallen to the wayside on discussing, writing and producing content on a subject we both are passionate about: music. And we know this.

Neither of us could have foreseen that I would start to make a name for myself in my education and possibly future career, get engaged and have my man shack up with me nor could we have foreseen that not only did TheBrit and I got a chance to meet and hang out this past summer¹, but that he too would fall in love and shack up with woman himself². Couple with our own work schedules and other committments, TheBrit and I would lament that we needed to get back writing here as soon as time allowed but that time never really came into play.

Now that things have started to settle down and time is more of our own again, individually and with our partners, updating this blog has been pushed back to high priority, beginning in January 2010.

For the rest of the month of December, we will be publishing content that was started and never made live on the blog to get it out of our queue, with also a special Christmas edition of TBaTY to be done sometime within the next week or two. In January, we’ll start publishing on our regular schedule of the he/she said themes bi-weekly, with additional content as reviews, opinions, rants and other goodies coming in at regular intervals.

We’ve missed you guys and hope that you’ve missed us too.
Happy Holidays,
Hugs and Kisses,
TheBrit and TheYank.

1. Our mutual goal was to hang out, drink lots of beer and talk music. This, sadly, did not happen when we met up in June but we did enjoy our time together. We have plans to do this however when TheFiance and I go to visit TheBrit and his woman in Scotland next summer.
2. It sounds suspicious that my engagement and his shacking up with his woman sounds like I’m discussing us in a third-person context, but, I’m not. TheBrit’s girlfriend is a lovely girl, considering they blame me for setting them up, so I’ll take the blame happily.

Edit: Oops, I’m an idiot. Coldplay is apparently having various people front for them across the US and I read Elbow to be at the beginning of the journey not the end, so it actually be Snow Patrol opening for Coldplay in Detroit, not Elbow. Either way, Snow Patrol is terrible in concert and still does not justify the ticket prices.

Recently heard that my future husband Guy Garvey and his band are fronting U2 in the UK and also will be fronting perennial wankfest, Coldplay, on part of their US tour this summer. Coldplay/Elbow are going to be in Detroit one week before my birthday. I thought to myself, “Self! Let’s see how much tickets are so you can go stalk see Elbow play!” I meander over to Ticketbastard and this is what churns out:

Type
2 Full price ticket
Ticket Price
US $97.50 x 2
Convenience Charge
US $14.15 x 2
Building Facility Charge < --- THE VENUE IS OUTSIDE!!!
US $7.50 x 2

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!? I don't know what pisses me off more, the nearly $100 PER ticket for crappy seats or the nearly additional $25 dollars in "fees" that Ticketbastard is adding on (because in addition to the convenience and building charges, there is also an additional traffic fee of $3.00!)!!

We're in a recession.
Michigan has the highest unemployment rate in the U.S.
The cost of two tickets and "fees" equals to my monthly car payment.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!? SRSLY?!
Not fucking happening. Even if I had the cash in hand and that this was chump change -- not happening. I could not morally spend that kind of dosh on tickets to see my favorite band even if they are opening up for a third rate knockoff wanker group. I wouldn't pay that if Elbow was playing solo gigs! Just fucking ridiculous.

I'm all fired up about this, so I'll leave a video of Elbow's song "Newborn," because any song that starts out with, "I'll be a corpse in your bathtub..." is okay by me and will sooth the savage beast inside.