Comments | me_ves_y_sufres: Where are the songs about booze and civilians, banning the bomb and abusing the children?

me_ves_y_sufres

Where are the songs about booze and civilians, banning the bomb and abusing the children?

Feb 09, 2010 19:52

I'm seriously considering starting a blog about Birmingham's alternative scene-- politically and musically speaking. (Randomly-- I've thought ever since I considered the plethora of weird place names-- seriously, the city centre has a Needless Alley tucked behind the Tescoes-- and bonkers, beautiful street-level geography that there should be a ( Read more... )

Comments 11

lollardy February 9 2010, 20:25:04 UTC

I really fucking hate a lot of music journalism (this is my own fault, almost certainly; I don't try hard enough to seek out the good stuff, story of my life), but I really like reading what you write about music.

lollardy February 9 2010, 20:31:21 UTC

And after watching that Smash Hits video, I REALLY REALLY WANT a pair of EMF shorts.

me_ves_y_sufres February 9 2010, 20:33:15 UTC

I know, right? They make me want to run around wearing baggy stripey shirts and combat boots OH WAIT.

loneraven February 9 2010, 20:25:16 UTC

Wait... the Manics covered Suicide is Painless? How did I not know that?

like_achilles February 10 2010, 01:25:34 UTC

Cheers for this, Carter were a good band to have around. Ah, Fruitbat punching Schofield at the Smash Hits Poll Winners' Party. Fuck me I'm old.

I'm not asking this purely because you're in the West Midlands, but do you like the Specials?

me_ves_y_sufres February 10 2010, 18:32:34 UTC

I do like the Specials! They're like Black Sabbath and Dexys Midnight Runners-- local boys made good, impossible not to listen to as you were growing up. The Specials are better than any other local band I can think of, though. (Led Zeppelin can fuck off.)

For an embarrassingly long period of time I used to honestly believe that Ghost Town was written about my shit Midlands hometown, not a different shit Midlands town. I was so sad when I learned it was about Coventry, not Dudley. (Ghost Town is for small post-industrial towns around Birmingham what London Calling is to London. It gets played in a club and people fall over themselves to get onto the dancefloor. And it's fucking hard to dance to, too, you can't even do the knees-up ska dancing thing.)

like_achilles February 10 2010, 21:45:57 UTC

I enjoy skanking to 'Ghost Town', that being one of the few dance steps I come close to competency at. It's one of my favourite songs ever, both on its own terms and for """zeitgeist""".

jacinthsong February 11 2010, 17:11:43 UTC

Seen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G1lbn5JdiU&feature=player_embedded ?

like_achilles February 10 2010, 10:25:59 UTC

Also, I saw the Indelicates support Jim-Bob in 2006*, and have just remembered them covering 'A Prince in a Pauper's Grave' (a song, displaying Carter's mix-and-match thematic approach, about watching your friends die of alcoholism). I was trying to find a recording of it but there doesn't seem to be one.

Do you think earnestly-political 90s music has dated, at all? I still get something from it but I find a lot of it too tied up with the contemporary struggle to which it responded (Criminal Justice Bill, Liverpool dockers, institutionalised racism, anti-bypass tree-hugging) to be more than uncomfortably nostalgic. Obviously Carter were eclectic enough not to fall into this category.

me_ves_y_sufres February 10 2010, 18:52:13 UTC

I would've killed to go to that gig. Do you know Carter's Born On The Fifth of November? (I LOVE MY FRIEND SO VERY MUCH-- HE DIED, OF COURSE.) If I were one of Jim-Bob's friends I'd be worried by now.

Do you think earnestly-political 90s music has dated, at all?I don't think it's dated for me, but I might feel different had I personal, political memories of the nineties. I don't remember any of the events they're singing about even if they did happen in my lifetime, so I don't have the uncomfortably nostalgic sense about them. Songs about, say, the Criminal Justice Bill, the Miners' Strike, Liddell Towers, Lewisham '77, the Birmingham Six, Margaret Thatcher, Red Clydeside-- they're all the same to me, because I never heard them the first time around, and don't remember the events they refer to. They move me in the sense I feel connected to the the historical struggle they're on about (god, that's wanky-- you know what I mean), but not in the "I was there, this was a meaningful part of my life" sense ( ... )

braisedbywolves July 24 2010, 22:54:26 UTC

After the Watershed was the first song I ever downloaded off the internet. The lawsuit, if I recall correctly, meant that it never appeared on the album that it was the lead single for, and when it turned up on the singles collection, it is in part (or possibly in full?) credited to Jagger/Richards.

Also yeah, they are a great great band - they probably wouldn't be as good if they were pure hate or pure love. They definitely wouldn't be as good without the dreadful puns (which have been very slow-burning for me EG finally hearing "24 hours from Tulsa" or "By the time I get to Phoenix" ten years after)