I heard Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" on the radio yesterday morning and it hit me. This is a blatant drug song, I thought. It blatantly tells, no, ENCOURAGES the kids to take drugs. What's more, this song (and many others of the time period with similar sentiments) is played at every oldies station on the continent. The same suits who fondly remember the 60's as a time of peace and love and experimentation balk wildly at the music of Marilyn Manson, Eminem, DMX because they claim that it promotes suicide, violence, misogyny and just about every other bad thing that a person could do. They claim that today's music is warping their kids' minds but are completely accepting of the glamourization of the late 1960's by oldies radio, passing it off as "fond remembrances" or some other confusing rhetoric.

At least the suspects I mentioned above bring an element of satire into their music. Marilyn Manson is eloquent and well aware of the absurdities of pop culture, most recently expressed in the single "Disposable Teens". Yes, the song is utter trite, but kudos to him for taking well-needed shots at such an easy target. Eminem's music is full of witticisms and caricatured celebrity satire. On the other hand, don't try and pretend that the Jefferson Airplane had ANYTHING deeper to say than "feed your head". And it doesn't stop there, because the 60's were full of songs containing this message and nothing more. Let's not get all fuzzy inside and pass these songs off as the good old days of pure and meaningful music when they are nothing more than drug glamourization relics written by hippies who were wasted most of the time which is why they couldn't think of anything more intelligent to write about.

New Musical Express has conducted a year-long poll to determine the 20 most influential acts on today's music scene. Who was polled, or how they defined "influence" will have to wait until the mini-site is posted tomorrow (Eminem was #8, seems a bit early to be labeling him as a major influence on anyone beside 15-old boys who have gotten bored of their Marilyn Manson records). Bowie is #1, which is a good choice, but there is no explanation on God's green earth that can convince me that Radiohead deserve to be #2. WHAT IN THE WORLD WERE THEY SMOKING? I'm actually at a loss of words and I'm angry as hell. The Velvet Underground and Kraftwerk invented everything, oh, yes, but Radiohead recycled 1974 Pink Floyd. And then they went electronic, which is groundbreaking if you went into a coma in 1973 and woke up last week. "The Bends" was a good album, and it would have been a lot better if Thom Yorke hadn't sung on any of it. "Pablo Honey" featured a passable rip-off of vintage Adorable, but the rest was filler. And as personalities, Radiohead make Belle and Sebastian look like Mogwai taking drugs with Happy Mondays in Leonardo di Caprio's flat. AAARRGGHHHH. Screw Radiohead ... no, it's not their fault ... screw everyone who picked Radiohead in this poll and screw their families too.

After the first few listens to PJ Harvey's "Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea", I was totally loving it (my initial reaction to each new PJ Harvey album is to declare that it is her best ever, with the exception of "To Bring You My Love", which took three years for me to fully appreciate. After a few months I always come to my senses and scold myself for ever doubting that "Rid of Me" wasn't her finest recording). My mate Paul, a far bigger fan of Polly Jean Harvey than I am, also thought it was a fine album, but remarked that the final two tracks, sweet ballads they may be, but "a bit too Sarah Mclachlan". And the more I've thought about it, the more I'm convinced that Paul may have summed up the entire album with that comment. One thing which has always separated PJ Harvey from the multitude of female wimp-rockers is the menace that she brings to her records. In the case of "Dry" and "Rid of Me" this needs no explanation, "To Bring You My Love" featured the fierce "Long Snake Moan", and femme fatales a plenty -- "To Bring You My Love" and "The Dancer" in particular. What's more, she dressed like a sexually repressed farmgirl dressing as a tomboy dressing in drag, and if that's not a person that you absolutely do NOT want to be alone with in the back seat of a parked car, then I don't know what is. Anyway, she started dressing normally for "Is This Desire?" which ranged from the near industrial "A Perfect Day Elise" to the plurality of "character" songs with their bleak tales of lonely, abused young women. Lighter on the menace but heavy on the eeriness. Fear abounded. Now comes "Stories" -- where is the fear? The music itself is very radio-friendly. It is far from the desolate electronic-tinged moods of "Is This Desire?". "Big Exit" and "The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore" turn up the guitars but the Sarah factor looms large over the less aggressive tunes like "One Line" and "A Place Called Home". The menace presumably because this is a "New York album". Many people have written this but not a single person has defined exactly what "New York album" means, as if it were supposed to be obvious. I think it means "Velvet Underground", since they (and subsequent Lou Reed albums) are the finest examples of music about urban decay, drugs, the freaks who inhabit a city's underbelly, and introspection about all of the above. Polly was already an expert at writing about most of these, so I'm not sure how moving to NYC and mentioning Manhattan by name in her lyrics makes her new record so distinctly different from her others. As for the music, it's sounds more "Loaded"-era than EPI-era VU. At that point in the Velvets career, the songs were far less intense and the subject matter greatly toned down. The same could be said for the progression of PJ Harvey's career.

Then again, maybe I'm just a crybaby who's been waiting seven years for Polly to write another "Rub Til It Bleeds".

(That's all I have to say about PJ Harvey, but I would feel remiss if I didn't mention that she gets prettier as she gets older. I don't care how shallow and sexist that sounds.)