Xmas Eve in Berlin was spent in the best way a Lonely Jew On Xmas knew how -- at the Tresor club. After nine weeks in the city over two separate visits, I finally made it. And it was more than worth it.

The top floor isn't too different than your typical club, with extended bar, video screen circling the dancefloor, and tech-house pumping along to keep the crowd moving. But it's the cellar which made me feel like I was in a legendary establishment. The walls were lined with thin, rusty, dingy shelves -- remnants of safety deposit boxes left over from the buildings' tenure as a bank. Further in this vein are the metal gates which divide the cellar into three section. Obviously they used to be for security purposes, now it gives the place a feel of a dark dungeon. The dancefloor is dark, and the flashing lights and regular dousings of dry ice smoke render it difficult to see eight feet in front of your face most of the time. And the music ... hard, pounding, minimal techno (I'd be proud to spin any of it) and a dense, sweaty crowd going 10 times more mental than in the upstairs room. In Toronto (and in most other cities) the situation would be the exact opposite. And somehow, these reactions transcended the sexes, as there were hotter girls downstairs than upstairs. All hail Berlin, the city where the cover for a mythical club on a holiday sets you back a mere three Euros (!) and techno stirs the emotions in such passionate fashion.

After all night at the Tresor, I woke up in the middle of the afternoon and set to the task of packing up and drinking the remainder of the beer in my fridge. And I watched MTV Germany's top videos of 2003. Somehow, I followed pop music more closely on this trip than I have in many years, including listening to pop radio regularly for the first time since 1988. In retrospect, it makes sense. MTV Germany was the only non-news station which broadcast shows in English. My increasing disenchantment with the Brit music papers gives me a craving for trash and gossip that I just don't get from the music I normally listen to. Plus, I'd become thoroughly bored of the 50 CD's I'd brought with me by the fourth week, hadn't had time to shop for anything new and therefore was desperately in need of something new to hear.

I watched the final 30 videos uninterrupted:
30. JT -- Cry Me a River. What more can be said? I was surprised it wasn't higher.
29. Blu Cantrell f. Sean Paul -- Breathe. Putting SP in
your video seems to guarantee a hit with an underwhelming song these days.
28. Nena -- Leicht Turm (Light Tower). Yes, it's THAT Nena. And she looks all right twenty years on, having apparently settled into a niche that Dido fills for the English-speaking world.
27. Snoop + Pharrell -- Beautiful. The song took months to hook me, but it did eventually. At the start of his career, I hated Snoop for his pompousness and arrogance. Now I love the guy to death. He's one of the ten coolest people in the world.
26. Linkin Park -- Somewhere I Belong. Whatever.
25. Xtina -- Fighter. Does this remind anyone else of an "Adore"-era Smashing Pumpkins video? That's not a compliment, by the way.
24. Busta f. Mariah Carey -- I Know What You Want. Busta was virtually unrecognizable the first time I heard this (with his singing). Mariah's career resurgence hasn't happened yet, but it's unevitable. Trust me.
23. Jay-Z f. Beyonce -- '03 Bonnie and Clyde. Beyonce's only purpose here is as the eye-candy sidekick, but that IS the subject of the song and I'm certainly not complaining.
22. Dido -- White Flag. Is Dido the new Jewel, except with better lyrics?
21. Ja Rule -- The Reign. It hasn't been a great year for JR, but he should have known better. Everybody knows that you can't have a hit by casting Patrick Swayze in a tough guy role, he has to play the sensitive tough guy role.

20. Puffy + B2K -- Bump Bump Bump. Yeah, we all know who the real star power is here. As if these little kids know anything about bumping.
19. Wolfsheim -- Kein Zuruck (~No Way Back). It was new to me, and it wasn't offensive or anything.
18. DJ Tomekk f. Kurupt, Tatwaffe, and G-Style -- Ganxtaville Part 3. This rates through the roof on the unintentional comedy scale. It's like they went out of their way to copy every rap cliche, but only from the years 1992-1994. The closing cry of "Fo Shizzle ma nizzle" had me rolling on the floor.
17. Seeed -- Music Monks, 16. Outlandish -- Aicha. These must have been German hits from the first half of the year. Respect for the way they respresent the homeland as well as the Brit/American megastars.
15. Xtina -- Beautiful. The song that made me regain some respect for her.
14. Black Eyed Peas -- Where is the Love. BEP are nothing more than the 21st Century Fugees. They make hip hop that it's OK for soccer moms to like. It takes such a simple-minded band
to distill a complicated issue of world politics down to such basic language.
13. Robbie Williams -- Come Undone. This must be the sickest video to ever accompany a pop song. The only competition
is the similarly styled "Owner of a Lonely Heart" by Yes, but that was far less of a "pop" song, and it certainly wasn't by a "pop idol". Lord knows what British ten-year olds thought of this.
12. Avril Lavigne -- I'm With You. It's the only Canadian entry in the Top 30. In case you were wondering, yes, Avril is indeed played on the radio in Germany every bit as much as she is over here. This song contains a truly amazing Great Pop Moment, it's the chorus that comes about 2:50 into the song, when the longing and admiration in her voice has risen to a boiling point and the song's title flows from her not-such-a-bad-girl mouth with one of pop's most emotional outbursts of the last few years. 11. Eminem -- Sing for the Moment. This is his weakest single to date. I'm just not moved by anything associated with Aerosmith.

10. The Rasmus -- In The Shadows. Decent to good Catchy Pop-Rock from a band I know absolutely nothing about. It's just not rock's year, but you already knew that.
9. Beyonce f. Jay-Z -- Crazy in Love. It's amazing to see how this track and Outkast's "Hey Ya" have united just about every writer in every genre in every major publication in picking the top singles of the year. Now THAT'S perfect pop music.
8. Sean Paul -- Get Busy. Again, not much to say about his amazing success, except that I was somehow unaware of his Toronto connections until recently (he partly grew up here and still has family living in T.O.) and I thought that last year's "Gimme the
Light" was a Neptunes-aided fluke, only to be proved wrong
in startling fashion.
7. Lumidee f. Busta + Fabolous -- Never Leave You (Uh-Oh). The most danceable song of the year that didn't have a backbeat. Not as if there was much competition. A song I rather like as long as I don't hear it three times a day. Therefore, flipping radio stations or listening to CD's once in a while was neccessary. 6. Robbie Williams -- Feel. The video isn't much cop, but the song is wonderful. I never get bored of it.

5. TATU -- All the Things She Said. You'd be forgiven for
thinking that everything had been tried in pop music, every gimmick
extended beyond it's worth, every good idea previously taken or explored by somebody else. But there's always that small subset of music intelligensia who find an opening and drive a Mack truck
of determination and ambition straight through it. This is but one way that great music gets made. In this case, somebody had the foresight to say "You know what we need in pop music? We need RUSSIAN LESBIANS. And they don't even have to be real lesbians, they just have to be really hot young girls who make out at every available oppurtunity so that people think that they're lesbians. Then we paste them to a dance-rock song about love and jealousy and we sell it to the world".

When the song came out, and every struggling music entrepreneur realized they'd been beaten to the punch, they must have simply hung their heads in despair. Russian lesbians? How could that NOT sell records? It makes you marvel at the simplicity of the concept and wonder why you didn't think of it yourself. And the reason you didn't is precisely the genius behind the concept, naturally. Add it all up and you've got the best pure pop single of the year. The
best pop choruses leave you wishing they'd go on and on, but then the song ends so you have no choice but to play it again. Just tremendous stuff.

4. 50 Cent -- In Da Club. Huge, although I could probably rap on a record with Dre and Eminem pulling the strings and it would be a hit.
Let's talk about something else. I was innocently
watching MTV Germany one night, and "P.I.M.P." comes on, a video I've seen many times. I'm not really paying attention, and then suddenly, all the girls aren't wearing any clothes! And 50's on the couch feeling them up! Whoa! Snoop and 50 spend the rest of the video cavorting and enjoying the booty of naked women. What's with this X-rated version? I'd never heard anything about it before. I guess you gotta love European non-censorship.

3. Evanescence f. Paul McCoy -- Bring Me To Life. This song was everywhere in Germany during my trip there in the summer. I certainly can't argue with its placing here, but when half-decent songs become megahits they eventually become suspended in some opinionless netherzone. Great songs (i.e. most of the rest of this top 10) can be heard over and over while losing little of their impact. Half-decent songs get boring after half a dozen listens but remain good enough to not be despised, but bad enough to not care if you never hear it again for as long as you live and breathe.

2. RZA f. Xavier Naidoo -- Ich kenne nichts (das
so schön ist wie du). I'd translate the title as "I Don't Know (What's as Beautiful as You). I suppose this song hasn't been pushed in North America due to the language thing, but I see no reason why it couldn't be as massive here as it was in Germany. It's got a summery hook, a laid back feel, and music is supposed to transcend language barriers.

1. Eminem -- Lose Yourself. The best and most
surprising Oscar-winning song ever, this track probably has done more to motivate young people than an entire year of after-school specials.

I was browsing in Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free yesterday (a primarily indie-rock store in downtown Berlin) and they had the top albums of the year lists from Mojo and NME posted on the wall. Number One according to Mojo, NME, and the two staff members' lists posted on the wall is Elephant by the White Stripes.

Am I missing something? When did the White Stripes become the best and/or most important band in the world? Sure, my tastes haven't been in sync with the NME since the fall of Britpop, but this years' list had me growling like an old curmudgeon, "rrrgghh, this rock and roll garbage, in my day we listened to real music, not this shouty crap". It's one thing to be out of sync, and quite another thing to hold very little respect for the NME's list in part because I don't like most of the stuff on it. The NME Xmas issue has been a holiday highlight for me for a decade, but this year, after seeing the list and the featured contents on their web site, I doubt I'll bother with it this year.

Jon Spencer must be hanging himself -- he released "Orange" a decade too early. I never heard "Plastic Fang", but it must have been really atrocious to have been panned and shunted aside so quickly in the Strokes & Stripes world which we live in, particularly after the large promotional push behind it.

This most recent breed of rock bands has been pushed down our collective musical throats. They've been championed far out of proportion with their bottom line. Enough time has passed for these bands to take their mantle at the forefront of music. But it hasn't happened. The White Stripes are not the Next Big Thing. They are barely even a big thing.

It should be obvious that the biggest trend in music is rap/R&B/urban/etc. It is the dominating style in pop music today, by far. Not only that, the quality is through the roof, as good or better than pop music has been at any time during the rock era. Nobody hyped the urban music takeover, because discussions of the Next Big Thing in music is limited only to the Next Big Rock Thing, because most music criticism is still rock based and the people who write about it are rock-centric to the point that rock is the Music That Truly Matters and everything else doesn't.

The White Stripes struggle to sell a million albums but textbooks of ink are spilled on them. In the meantime, the Neptunes and Timbaland productions dominate the pop charts. Like the Beatles and Motown before them (to name but two examples), they have styles that are indisputably groundbreaking because their music has raised the bar for anyone who plans on writing and producting a hit. Do they get their credit as hitmakers and pop music success stories? Absolutely. Do they get credit for making important, vital, relevant music? Almost never. Does Motown? Of course. Do the Beatles? Ha, what a stupid question.

In 1998, I wrote (in a notebook which preceed the construction of this web site) that a rather large amount of time had passed since the most recent Next Big Thing (grunge, or Britpop if you consider the UK). As a result, writers were subconsciously (or consciously, in some cases) desperate to find the next megatrend and gain lifetime bragging rights for being the first to hype it. They were so desperate that they resorted to hyping anything, such as swing. Like swing had a chance in hell. Or, in the case of electronica, they lumped a whole load of unrelated musics under one buzzword-friendly umbrella and expected it to shift product just based on the holy word alone, giving no thought to marketing strategy or intentions of the artists. Furthermore, I now believe (in 2003) that there will never be another Next Big Thing, no single style such as grunge or soft rock or synth pop that will take over the charts and the papers, no matter what the hype or the critical acclaim. It will never happen again. Let me repeat that. IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. Never. Again.

Why? Because people's tastes are too diverse. The pop charts mesh dance, rock, and rap without a second thought; music is proliferating at a rate far faster than before, and the internet has made everything readily readible and downloadable, so broadening one's horizons has never been easier. So, a fine website like Pitchfork can ruin a perfectly good year in review by saying that nothing summed up 2003 like the Rapture did. In ten years, people won't remember 2003 as the year of dancepunk any more than we remember 1994 as the year of the New Wave of New Wave (exactly: nobody does remember NWONW, that's the point). They will, however, remember it as the year the Rapture released a pretty decent debut album. Just like I'll remember 2003 as the year I got bigtime into Tindersticks again, and the year of one totally amazing MUTEK festival, and the year I bought the classic MBV albums on vinyl. I won't remember it in terms of some grandiose summary statement, i.e. the year that 90's angst and post-yuppie consumerism gave way to 00's global anti-war 9/11 backlash and public services over fiscal responsibility. Because such loftly summation statements are no longer relevant.

Thus, discussion of the NBT invariably leads down a dumbass path. The electronica hype is a great example of this, because to the average Joe all this music came out of nowhere, the industry didn't know how to sell it and most writers didn't know how to write about it. The only thing everyone could agree on was how to hype it, but of course without the proper context the whole thing came off as looking stupid. I recall a Depeche Mode interview circa "Ultra" (sorry, can't remember what publication), smack in the middle of the electronica uber-hype, and the interviewer asked Dave Gahan if the electronica buzz indicated that it was finally cool to like DM. Gahan lucidly and bluntly blew off the question, merely noting that DM's two biggest albums came at the height of grunge. That just about sums up the magic of early 90's DM.

Behind every electronica story was the endless repartees of "can this stuff sell?", invariably asked by people who had no clue how to sell it. How come nobody brought up the fact that nearly ten years previous, Depeche Mode had sold out the FUCKING ROSE BOWL for the finale of their "101" tour. Yes, I'd say that the music can sell, then. Before "alternative" became "mainstream", Nine Inch Nails had sold two million records and Jane's Addiction had sold out arenas throughout the summer for the inaugural Lollapalooza. In both cases, minimal radio play and MTV hype were involved. Magazines and TV weren't screaming at people about how cool these bands were. That fall, Lollapalooza lucked out when they signed up Soundgarden, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and a then-unknown Pearl Jam to play the festival the following summer, only to have all these bands break out simultaneously into the bigtime. Lollapalooza 1992 could have been the almighty grunge celebration extravaganza, but in fact, nobody remembers it for those three bands, they remember it for Ministry blowing everybody off the stage each night. Ministry, the band that had sold out 2000-3000 capacity venues at every stop on their previous national tour, unbenownst to nearly everybody who discovered "alternative" when Nirvana dethroned Michael Jackson.

The point of all these ramblings is that acts can frequently become a Very Very Big Thing without necessarily being hyped as the Next Big Thing. And just as such successes often defy hype and tidy labels, a year of music doesn't deserve to be summarized in one sentence as "The Year of ____". And there's my Year in Review.

I got home at seven AM yesterday, but I couldn't sleep. Why? I started flipping channels, scanned through all of the music video channels on Berlin TV (i.e., MTV, VIVA, etc.) and was entranced by quantity of CHEESY VIDEOS. Honestly, all this shlock came on within the span of twenty minutes.

Ace of Base -- The Sign. Not only is the video cheesy, but the song's production is too. The Neptunes have really spoiled us. Were fast panning, flash cutting, and flying colours considered edgy in early 90's pop video, or is this the exception? Ace of Base were completely harmless pop fluff, therefore, it's easy to recognize why they were so popular. Also, I believe they paved the way for the cute girls + utterly useless boys = pop group trend of the mid to late 90's. I think that trend died with the boy band resurgence. I think people got bored of the implication that pop was excessively manufactured and needed explicit reassurance that this was the case, hence, the boy bands. After all, we are living in the George W. Bush era, so things need to be dumbed down. It's also interesting to recall that those were the days when excessive T&A weren't neccessary for making a pop video. These days, the Ace of Base girls would have been 85% naked on the cover of Maxim within two weeks of the song hitting #1. We all lost out.

Haddaway -- What is Love. A Night at the Roxbury notwithstanding, this is one of those Songs That I Can't Respect Myself For Liking, But I Like Them Anyway. House of Pain's "Jump Around" and Backstreet Boys "As Long As You Love Me" fall into the same category. Let's all recall the early 1990's, a time when black performers sported hairstyles straight out of "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air". Haddaway must have loved the video for Meatloaf's "I Would Do Anything For Love", because the setting here is a virtual replica, albeit with 1/20th of the budget. And unlike the Meatloaf song, there's no storyline to either the video or the lyrics, it's just Haddaway singing the same nine words over and over while engaging in exagerrated hand foppery. Still, I love the tune. Really.

Wham! -- Last Christmas. The campest video of all time featuring horny young singers cavorting with innocent-looking girls-next-door. Except, of course, for Depeche Mode's "Just Can't Get Enough". At least Wham! had a half-decent excuse, with this being a Christmas song and all. Christmas songs are supposed to be feelgood campy drivel. DM have no excuse and no recourse except to blame the whole thing on Vince Clarke. The scene where they share the sodas in the diner with the girls may be the lowest moment in Depeche Mode's career. They all look about fourteen and the whole thing is so junior high double date, it's embarrassing.

For some reason, this song gets played on pop radio a lot here. I've heard it more times than I'd care to mention, although not nearly as often as Pink's "Trouble", Black Eyed Peas' "Shut Up" and Westlife's "Mandy" (and it pains me to report that "Mandy" has been added to the list of Songs That I Can't Respect Myself For Liking, But I Like Them Anyway). Back to the video, where Andrew Ridgeley comes across as 100 times cuter and more heartthrob-worthy than the ugly duckling he had the poor misfortune to make over. For the sake of his career, Wham! came along a decade too early. These days boy bands commonly splinter into separate successful solo careers. Ridgeley could have at least been Gary Barlow to George Michael's Robbie Williams.

TV Allstars -- Do They Know It's Christmas? There is no conceivable reason that this recording should exist. Who are these people? British TV stars? Do I really care who they are (no)? I have no desire to watch cheery-eyed kids singing any tune, under any circumstance (this falls under the under-16 rule I formulated during the summer). Seriously, this dancepop-lite rendition is so lightweight it makes Aaron Carter sound like Ritchie Hawtin.

Whitney Houston -- I Wanna Dance With Somebody. Daft colours, daft clothes, daft dancing, and even daft floors. Saturday Night Fever and Billie Jean were the last word in light-up dancefloors, any subsequent attempt to use one has come off looking silly.

I've had far too many late nights lately. Day and night have become indistinguishable and I have no clue what day of the week it is. However, I damn well know what time of year it is, it's time for the

TOP 10 ALBUMS OF 2003.

However, I'm far less certain of the choices on this year's list than I was in past years. I reserve the right to post something in the new year about how I got the whole thing wrong and left several deserving albums off of the list. This doesn't mean that I
churned it out in my sleep and didn't take the rankings seriously. Far from it. There are few things in life I take more seriously than compiling a Top 10 list. However, when you spend the last two months of the year working in another country and get dumped over the phone while you're there, you tend to have other things on your mind other than music. Not to mention that I've been cut off from the overwhelming bulk of my music collection -- including many of this year's releases -- therefore, this list deserved more thought and perspective than I was able to give it. But I did the best I could.

Some end-of-year thoughts regarding the list include the following:

-- The toughest decision was not the rankings themselves, but
deciding whether Broken Social Scene's "You Forgot it in People" belonged on the list. Even though it was released in October 2002, many publications didn't review it until this year, particularly those based outside of Canada. Heck, even Exclaim!, which is as Canadian as they come, ranked it on their Top 10 this year, which almost convinced me I would be justified in doing the same. But I just couldn't do it. 2002 is 2002, and 2003 is 2003. The record wasn't released this year, so it doesn't belong. If you just got the album this year, or didn't know about it last year, or didn't fully appreciate it twelve months ago, then too bad. I've always held fast to that rule. If I broke it for something from 2002, I might as well put "Loveless" and "Unknown Pleasures" in there too (at least that's always been my reasoning). I still make jokes
about CFNY ranking "Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness" as the #1 album of 1995 AND 1996. But the BSS record is a jewel -- Top Five and maybe even Top Three material -- so look for it in six years when I rank the best albums of the decade.

-- The last twenty minutes of Ekkehard Ehlers' "Politik Braucht Keinen Feind" are amazing, amazing, near Album of the
Year Material. The rest of it isn't even close to that level. Maybe I need to start a sub-category of Verve Releases to cover cases like this. The same could be said of Arab Strap's "Monday at the Hug and Pint".

-- You'd have scored big money in Vegas by betting on Blur, Kraftwerk, Spiritualized and Super Furry Animals releasing albums in the same year but having none of them appear on this Top 10. It didn't quite happen, but it almost did. The Blur album is simply shite, I downloaded it and could hardly bear to listen, I was so bored. But back in the day, Blur were The Band I Liked As Much As You Could Possibly Like a Band Without Loving Them, so "Think Tank" wasn't a catastrophic letdown or anything. The SFA album is good, better than "Rings Around the World", but I just haven't gotten around to hearing it much. It's on a hard drive back in Toronto right now. The Kraftwerk album is excellent in parts ("Vitamin", most notably), but also bland and formulaic in other parts
(there was certainly no need for a three part Tour de France suite). As for SPZ, they put out a record I wasn't expecting : a Verve Release.

Two words : O Canada. Total number of Canadian releases on my Top 10 charts, 1993-1997 : 0 .... 1998-2001 : 5 ... 2002-2003 : 9 (!)

So,

TOP 10 ALBUMS OF 2003.

10. V/A -- 45 SECONDS OF (A SIMBALLREC COMPILATION). Crazy, wild,
breakneck, pick your adjective. Unless someone puts out a "30
Seconds Of" compilation, this will remain the standard bearer on how to convey the most possible musical information on one disc.

9. DESORMAIS -- I AM BROKEN AND REMADE. Plucked strings buzz, groan and wail among an organic, yet unsettling sonic backdrop. And that's only the first track.

8. SPIRITUALIZED -- AMAZING GRACE. Intense, blazing rockers combined with glacial soul ballads -- that's been the SPZ way of life for over a decade now, so perhaps this album isn't such a departure after all. What else -- oh yeah, it's this year's Verve Release.

7. THE SILVER MT. ZION MEMORIAL ORCHESTRA & TRA-LA-LA BAND WITH CHOIR -- THIS IS OUR PUNK ROCK, THEE RUSTED SATELLITES GATHER + SING. They don't always make it too easy to love: the deliberately strained vocals, the epic track lengths, maudlin interval after maudlin interval -- but the beauty is down there once the layers are peeled off.

6. DO MAKE SAY THINK -- WINTER HYMN COUNTRY HYMN SECRET HYMN. DMST have shifted from proggy noodling and dubby grooves into far more complex, nearly symphonic song structures. The title implies this tri-movement approach, and the music makes good on the promise.

5. POLMO POLPO -- LIKE HEARTS SWELLING. White noise and backporch guitar licks were underrepresented on PP's debut, but never in his live shows. Finally, he's delivered an album that captures that pulsating, trance-y, head-caving spirit. That last sentence makes it sound like a 4/4 techno album -- but it's not that at all. Totally unique.

4. MOGWAI -- HAPPY SONGS FOR HAPPY PEOPLE. Sonically, it's "Rock Action II". But the songwriting took a great leap forward. They're barely hiding their melodies behind noise anymore, they're letting them hang bare instead. Their most tuneful and anthemic album by far.

3. BARDO POND -- ON THE ELLIPSE. Mind blowing jams, crashing noise, tender melodies, and eye-crossing drone-fests are Bardo Pond staples. But usually aren't done this well. And all on the same album. And often all on the same track. Their finest blast of raw power and subtlety.

2. TINDERSTICKS -- WAITING FOR THE MOON. In which a once-great band returns to their former greatness by doing exactly what made them great in the first place. So, it's more or less the same as what they'd been doing all along, but it happened to work out perfectly this time.

1. PLASTIKMAN -- CLOSER. Hey. This is the voice inside your head
telling you to get a pair of headphones and turn out the lights, or walk down a dark street, or stare at the floor, or think unsettling thoughts, and listen to this album. Dark dark pitch black DARK. You can even dance to it if you want, but you probably won't feel like it. Album of the Year.

Simballrec's "45 Seconds Of" compilation isn't just a great CD, it may be the most punk rock thing in my entire collection. The basics are these: it's an album featuring 99 tracks by 84 artists. Each track is exactly 45 seconds long, with no fade ins or outs. Other than that, Simballrec imposed no other submission rules. No rules! How punk is that?

And what could be more punk than a 45 second song? The Minutemen made a career out of it, and look how popular they are today, years after their demise! People crapped themselves over Elastica's supposed "authenticity" when they wrote the 50-second "Vaseline". As if that one song could silence the naysayers who claimed that Elastica were just ripping off melodies from their favourite bands. "See, they wrote a 50-second song -- so they DO mean it, man, they ARE 4Real"! I'm going to sit on the fence with this one. Elastica were shite, but "Vaseline" was the best song they ever wrote. I mean, how can you hate a song that short? It's too short to offend you that much! Before you have a chance to hate it, it's over and you're thinking about something else.

This is one of the secrets behind "45 Seconds Of". Anybody can sound good for 45 seconds. Creating 45 minutes of brilliance is hard, but 45 seconds is dead easy. You barely need even one good idea to fill up 45 seconds. And even then -- a lot of this stuff sounds like throwaway junk that was improvised on the spot without even trying. And that's the beauty of it! Anyone with a few ounces of musical smarts and creativity could have done at least one-third of these tracks themselves! How DIY is that?

The 45-second rule is essentially Step One of a paint-by-numbers punk kit. It ensures that no artist starts to indulge in gamelans or 100-piece choirs, because who's going to waste that stuff on a 45-second recording? Thus, everyone is forced to keep it basic. There's no time for solos, intros, outros, showing off your chops, telling a story, grandiose concepts, or taking the listener on a journey into sound. 45 seconds, no more no less, just get on with it!!

There are established names such as Blevin Blectum and Jan Jelinek slotted right in there among the nobodies (and there are plenty of them). There's no top billing for the stars, their names are written with the same size letters as everyone else's. Punk! Nobody is excluded, everybody can join in! Everyone gets a try! No prima donnas!!

The pace of the record is, as you'd expect, dizzying. So many things are happening so fast. There are no breaks and no pauses. There is no silence. Tune out for a few moments and you've missed three tracks. You say you don't like the track you're hearing now? Who cares! Something else will be along in a few seconds!

After thirty songs or so, you've completely lost track of what's what. You can't remember who did what, what you heard ten minutes ago, and you have no idea what to expect next. Surprise! Excitement! Unpredictability! That's rock and roll, baby!! That's what we love about it! And the damned record keeps going and going and going. After fifty tracks or so, you're desperately in need of a break to have some hope in hell or taking it all in. But the show must go on! And it's only halfway done at this point! You've now got the attention span of an eight year old child who just ate ten chocolate chip cookies and forgot to take his Ritalin in the morning. When it finally does end, your emotional state has run through a considerable psychiatric spectrum, spanning disorientation, frustration, several instances of boredom, and you can't wait to hear the CD again.

I found some time to do a bit of shopping during the past week, which has done well to break up the daily grind of working as well as the monotony of hearing the same damned CD's during the daily grind of working. Finally, some new sounds! Last weekend, I visited Boteca, a small shop specializing in avant-rock, bip-hop, and techno. The bright white walls and impeccable organization make the single room seem emptier than it really is. But there's quite a lot of stuff in there. I was surprised at the the number of Canadian (particularly Montreal) artists in attendence. I was suddenly overcome with the urge to support Canuck interests abroad, so I picked up a disc by Christof Migone, who opened this year's MUTEK festival with lots of crackling and a disturbing video featuring a frozen tomato. So last Wednesday, I returned home from work at noon and gave it a listen -- for about five minutes. I remember hearing a lot of crackling, and then I woke up about four hours later.

Take two, then. This was really for the best, since the darkness provided a better atmosphere for hearing the record. More crackling, scraping, and strange rumblings.

Thirty-three hours later, I left work. What's in my discman again? Oh yeah, Christof Migone. The final track began it's sixteen minute low volume hum as I was walking into my darkened apartment. The mood was ruined by the wierd farting noises which nearly poison the track, before it returns to the humming and fades gently away. Hmmm.

Twelve hours later, following the soundest sleep I can remember, I headed into work for a severely truncated day. It was so truncated that I was shopping only five hours later. I journeyed to Neurotitan in the heart of Mitte. I could find no trace of the store as I walked along the street, but I soon remembered which city I was in so I went to the spot where I'd expected to find the store (based on it's adress) and found the nearest alleyway. At the end of the dingy alley was an entranceway and on a nearby window, there was a nondescript white poster bearing the store's name. Oh yeah, I thought, now there's just no way this place can suck.

A few flights of stairs later, and I was in a place which felt more like a studio apartment than a store. The middle of the room was mainly open spaces, save for a square wooden table and chairs where people were chowing down on fast food. The walls were lined with tall bookshelves and bright colours splashed all over the room thanks to the art and comic books they displayed. The CD racks were small, which caused me some dismay, but that went away once I began flipping though them. Almost everything this store carries is experimental and noise music. Big names like Merzbow rubbed plastic with local artists and countless hard-to-find gems. For vinyl, they carry little more than wierd ambient and techno of the minimal variety (so said the words written with black marker on shards of cardboard above the boxes). Respect.

Behind the store, I discovered the reason for the unusual business hours (open until 10 M-F, until midnight on Saturday, and also open on Sundays, which is extremely rare in Berlin). The store doubles as an art gallery/lounge. It took a few weeks, but I finally had found something cool and different in Berlin.

I was going to bitch and moan about Pitchforkmedia's Top Albums of the 1990's Redux (specifically, about the switching of MBV and Radiohead at the top of the list) but then I mellowed out and decided to say something nice instead.

Both albums are worthy of their positions because no other band has even remotely duplicated them. Each band's previous work has been aped to no end, but once these two records came out, it was game over for their competition and the competition knew it. "Isn't Anything" has been xeroxed countless times, from Sianspheric's "There's Always Someplace You'd Rather Be" to Ash and BMRC's buzzsaw guitars and the increased density of most rock albums from grunge onwards. "The Bends has also been ripped off by scores of bands, most by notably Coldplay, who have made a career out of remaking that album.

But nobody tried to follow up "Loveless". Any attempt to do so was doomed to failure. "Loveless" was a singular achievement. The competition had been left so far behind, there was no use in even trying to catch up. Similarly, "The Bends" is far, far easier to remake than "OK Computer", which is why there's been so many clones of the former and no serious attempts to match the sentiment of the latter.

----------

I was prepared to leave my comments like that: short, sweet and nice, but after I saw the Pitchfork writers' individual lists I got in a stew again. First, there is the absurdity of making a Top 100 list. Justifying a Top 10 is easy because each position is of obvious justifiable importance, a Top 30 is about the limit of one's self-assurance, a Top 50 is the limit of sensibility, but a Top 100 is absurd. I can't believe that anyone can state a cognisant, definite reason for having "Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld at #87 and "Dummy" at #88, rather than vice versa.

The tabulation system isn't stated, but I've got a feeling that assigning points 100-1 to albums 1-100 was the chosen method. This would mean that the difference between an album ranked at 1 compared to 8 would be just as much "better" as something ranked at 91 compared to 98. This is obviously inappropriate, partly due to the relative insignificance of the Top 50 compared to the bottom 50, but mainly because the Number One ranking, and probably the entire Top 10, must count for something extra. To use a simplified sports analogy, the team or player with the most first-place votes doesn't always win the award, but this is usually the case. The points systems are geared toward generating results in this way. Thus, I believe there's something of an injustice in "Loveless" ranking at #1 on FOUR writers charts (out of twenty) compared to just ONE for "OK Computer" (and two for Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea).

I've given some thought to making my own Top 30 Redux, but I'm just one person, and my tastes haven't changed enough to produce alterations as dramatic as Pitchfork's (due to large turnover of the staff since 1999, plus the effect of little changes from many people adding up to large changes by the whole). But in short, I'd bump "Loveless" up to #1 on my list, and find room for Slowdive's "Souvlaki", Vainqueur's "Elevations", maybe Bardo Pond's "Lapsed", maybe a Yo La Tengo album, maybe Spectrum's "Highs, Lows, and Heavenly Blows", maybe Slint's "Spiderland" (but unlikely), perhaps Gas' "Konigsforst" (but unlikely, but big ups to Mark Richardson for putting it on his list), and that's pretty much it (off the top of my head). Half of those records were in the running in 1999 (but just missed the cut), and the other half are new (to me) since then.

HOLIDAY MUSIC BUYERS GUIDE -- CANADIAN EDITION. Here's a quick and dirty rundown of notable music releases from 2003. Any of them would make for perfect stocking stuffer fodder for your fave music nut. And since I'm harbouring a bit of anti-American sentiment as of late, this petite buyers guide will feature CANADIAN!! releases only.

Polmo Polpo -- Like Hearts Swelling. Ignore the Alanis-esque heavy-handed title. This album is superior to last year's "The Science of Breath" not least because the slate of influences have been wiped nearly clean. This record sounds like Polmo Polpo more than it sounds like anyone else.

Aidan Baker -- I Fall Into You. It emerges gradually, like slowly opening a pop-up picture book. Not as engaging as last year's drone-tastic "Letters", but if you don't like this release, Aidan's recently put out another 582 for you to choose from instead.

Do Make Say Think -- Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn. Really jazzy, really loose, and really good. As overall statements go, DMST's albums keep getting better. Having said that, as time goes by it becomes more obvious to me that the mercurial twelve minutes of "Goodbye Enemy Airship" was the pinnacle of their career, and I doubt that they will ever top it.

The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band with Choir -- This is Our Punk Rock, Thee Rusted Satellites Gather + Sing. The band names and titles are getting ridiculous. Really, it's time to stop with it already. The overwrought, be-pompously-arty-at-all-costs lyrics are a drawback as well, but the long (and I do mean LONG) tracks will eventually reward the patient listener. SMZ albums always take extra time to sink in.

Sixtoo -- Antagonist Survival Kit. Nothing mind-blowing as far as (mainly) instrumental hip-hop goes, but a healthy source of phatness nonetheless.

Plastikman -- Closer. It must be hard being Ritchie Hawtin. Or more specifically, it must be hard being a legend. Even more specifically it must be hard being a legend for almost his entire adult life, and having to live up to the mountainous expectations that his formidable reputation demands. On one hand, there's continued adulation if you succeed, but if you fail, there's the spectre of being weighed down by your past and relegated to being over the hill at the ripe young age of 33.

But true genius finds a way to stare down those expectations and deliver the goods again and again. "Closer" is a fucking astounding album. Dare I say it is even darker than its Joy Division namesake. It's so good it puts much of Hawtin's already astounding back catalogue to shame. It's full of frightening and mysterious sounds whose existence you can't begin to fathom without hearing the album. It's essential like oxygen is essential.

Tim Hecker -- Radio Amor. I want to love this album more than I actually do, but I've been stuck in a rut with it for months now. I press play, it grabs me, I marvel at it, but about halfway through I forget that I'm listening to it. Toward the end I remember it's there again and it roughs me up a bit more before it finishes. Anyhow, when it does command my full attention, it's strikingly beautiful, like sitting next to a still lake, water glistening in the moonlight, while alternately shifting glances between a pretty girl and the starry sky. You can only count on Tim Hecker to provide that exact mood with absolute certainty.

Desormais - I Am Broken And Remade. Like Fennesz played with real instruments. Chaotic, organic, lo-fi chillout stuff. And a drastic change from their claustrophobic debut.

A SAD STORY INVOLVING THE COCTEAU TWINS AND FOUR PLANE RIDES.

On the flight from Paris to Berlin, I made a decision. No wait, let's back up.

On the flight from Toronto to Paris, I did some serious thinking. No wait, let's back up some more.

Between my trips to San Jose and Berlin, I listened to the Cocteau Twins "Twinlights" e.p. quite a bit. It's acoustic, it's gorgeous, I think I've written about it before. It's short, it's only thirteen minutes long. As with all the finest music releases, my favourite song kept changing, according to the day and my mood.

"Twinlights" was the first thing I packed for my trip to Berlin. The other musical themes of the trip were mainly German (and Austrian) artists, but make no mistake, "Twinlights" was the CD I wouldn't leave home without. I'd bought it at the revered San Francisco Amoeba, on a Bay Area trip I'd made to see her. No, not to see Amoeba, to see her. The fact that I was with her when I bought the CD was immaterial, I didn't associate it with her at the time. That came later, once I started listening carefully to the lyrics.

On the flight from Toronto to Paris, I did some serious thinking. It was a seven hour flight, but when I was in the mood for music, it was mainly "Twinlights". I think I snuck in Sigur Ros and the Round One to Round Five compilation too, but I can't remember for certain. I remember a young girl of about eight talking my ear off when I was trying to get some sleep and listen to "Twinlights". Anyhow, when I wasn't unexplainedly transifxed by the flight map playing on the video screen of the seat in from of me and the flight staff weren't catering to my every whim, I did manage to get some good listening done. And some thinking. This was an important trip. I missed her. And I was flying in the opposite direction from her.

On the flight from Paris to Berlin, I made a decision. I listened to "Twinlights" three times, and to the track "Half-Gifts" more times than that. Gently floating on air, I watched the sunny skies of France give way to the cloudier skies of Germany. Sitting in the very back row of the plane, I watched the endless clouds pass under the plane far below, and I felt very lonely. I was also nervous -- the Berlin trip was very important, and there was much to do in a limited time. Success would speed up the route to my degree significantly. Crucially, this meant I would have the chance to get out of Toronto and closer to her. Being away from her for this long was just too hard. It had been a month since I'd seen her. After Berlin, it would be perhaps another month, maybe more, until our schedules would allow us to get together again. This was unacceptable to me. The solemn beauty of "Half-Gifts" seemed to perfectly encompass this loneliness. Thus, my decision was to never allow us to be apart for this long ever again.

The fact that "Half-Gifts" is a breakup song left me uneasy, but determined to prove Liz Fraser wrong. "This relationship cannot sustain itself" was particularly unnerving. Bull -- I knew we could sustain it. The song was like a session with the ghost of Christmas Future. It showed me the horrors of what could happen, and made me more defiant that this would not happen.

On the flight from Toronto to Frankfurt, I did very little. The time passed quickly. I didn't listen to any music at all.

On the flight from Frankfurt to Berlin, I'd meant to listen to "Twinlights" to recapture the feeling from three months previous, but slept through almost the entire flight and never got around to it. I was more focused for this trip, even though the trip was twice as important, for I'd be staying for twice as long. After it was over, I'd have a reasonable chance at being Very Nearly Done. Thus, we'd be together soon. I was confident. I knew what needed to be done on this trip. Meanwhile, I'd brought the CD more as an afterthought, mainly as a reminder of the first trip.

A few days ago, I remembered to listen to "Twinlights" one night before bed. "Half-Gifts" moved me less than it had in July, through no fault of its own. I'd dealt with the song by this point. I wasn't scared of its negative message. I was a bit concerned that she'd been a little distant with me over the last month or so, as if things could get any more distant with the North American continent was between us. But hearing "Half Gifts" in my chilly Berlin apartment was uneasy relief. I could hear it, carefully consider it, and remain blissfully ignorant to it.

But perhaps I should have paid closer attention (to signs from her? to the signs in the song? who knows), because she called here about five hours ago and ended it. She'd had similar thoughts to the ones I'd had on that Paris-Berlin flight a few months ago. However, I'd resolved to try harder, whereas she appears to have resolved to stop trying.

I've still got this:

Half-Gifts

It's an old game, my love:
When you can't have me, you want me

Because you know that you're not risking anything

Intimacy is when we're in the same place
At the same time
Dealing honestly with how we feel
And who we really are
That's what grownups do
That is mature thinking

Well I'm still a junkie for it
It takes me out of my aloneness
But this relationship cannot sustain itself

Intimacy is when we're in the same place
At the same time
Dealing honestly with how we feel
And who we really are
That's what grownups do
That is mature thinking

I just have to know
How to be in the process
Of creating things in a better way

And it hurts, but it's a lie
That I can't handle it
I still have a world of me-ness to fulfill

I still have a life
And it's a rich one
Even with mourning
Even with grief and sadness

I still care about this planet
I am still connected to nature
And to my dreams for myself

I have my friends
My family
I have myself
I still have me

I have my friends
My family
I have myself
I still have me

Add No Doubt's "It's My Life" to the list of horrendous cover versions of our time. The first offense committed with this so-called "interpretation" by Gwen and her backing band is the note-for-note rip off. This, I feel, is the number one cover version sin. Why bother covering if you're just xeroxing the original? What purpose can this serve? You're not putting your own personal stamp on it or bringing something new to the song. As a major label recording artist, all you're doing is high budget karaoke.

Then there's the video, which re-casts the defiance of the original as a War of the Roses drama queen overacting vehicle for glamour puss Gwen, who spends the entire four minutes dressing up in poor little rich girl revelry, pouting, complaining, flailing her body around like a rag doll, and generally over-magnifying her best impression of a crazy bitch post-breakup tantrum. Yuck. Watching her do this only draws attention to the whiny singing voice with mustard on top that she uses throughout the entire musical massacre.

It's been on the radio a lot and yet I can't really say I hate it, but that's because the original is so damned killer. There have been equally bad or worse cover versions lately. A good example of the "what's the point of doing a note-by-note autopilot treatment?" is Ride's "The Model", which appeared on an NME 40th anniversary collection about ten years ago. Shoegazers taking a run at Kraftwerk is an intruiging idea in principle, but their cheese-cake try at sounding precisely like the original comes off as perfunctory and soulless.

Then there's Sheryl Crow's attack on "Sweet Child O Mine", which turns the GnR rawk classic into a Sheryl Crow song. It rocks about as hard as Sting does these days, and her attempts to ape Axl's vocal inflections are pure unintentional comedy. Unlistenable.

X-tina, Pink, Mya, and L'il Kim deserve a special mention for covering "Lady Marmalade" about a year after All Saints did (and scored a hit). There should be a statute of limitations on these things, there should be a central register in pop music than regulates against a song being covered more than once in a seven year span. Two girl groups covering the same song one year apart is totally unnecessary. The sad thing is how the public fell for the same bait and turned the second version into a far bigger hit than the first.

A lot of people hate Lenny Kravitz's "American Woman", but I live in Canada so my sample groups are biased. Obviously a lot of people liked it in the US, where it was a hit and won a Grammy (if memory serves). It's not that bad a version, but anyone between the ages of 20 and 40 who grew up in Canada knows that it holds a pale candle to the Guess Who original, and therefore they react with the accordant disgust. The same is true of Madonna's "American Pie", it can't touch the original either, and anyone who truncates the lyrics to fashion a curt three minute song from a magnificent nine minute might as well be breaking the law.

But the worst, and I mean the worst absolutely horrible thing ever covered in our generation is "If You Could Read My Mind" by Stars on 54. The lyrics -- those tactfully poignant, stunningly gorgeous words -- run roughshod by chanting "never thought I could feel this way" as if it were an E-anthem (distorting the meaning of the lines in the most obtuse way possible), over a disco-by-numbers el-cheapo arrangement by a conglomeration of C-list musical stars, all as a tie-in to a truly horrible movie that nearly ruined my attraction to Salma Hayek and was little more than an excuse for Ryan Phillippe to run around for ninety minutes without a shirt. I can't find the proper words to describe how awful this version is. It must have come out during Lightfoot's recent downtime when he was sick and almost died. If he'd heard it playing on the radio every five minutes, he probably would have gotten sick and died that way, and thus his illness could be viewed as a silver lining.

MTV Europe Music Awards!!!!

21:01. Here we go! A warning label re: foul language?!? Bring it on!!

21:03. A huge choir, clad totally in white, sings a cappella "Dirty". X-tina's out dressed like a nun, and suddenly, everybody strips down and gets dirty. Trashy (leather panties and chaps?), and not in a good way. I bet X-tina's still fuming over getting left out of the Britney/Maddy kiss controversy/hype. Her kiss with Madonna wasn't as good anyway. As an aside, Pink said that she wouldn't have done it because she's nobody's bitch. OK. Pink is way more androgenous than the Post-Teen Whores, so there'd be no thrill in watching such a moment anyway.

21:07. This is a really glitzy show, there's laser light and sparkling all over the building. Far more pizzazz than the more basic stage/crowd setup of past years. Sean Paul and Beyonce do "Baby" boy with another cast of zillions. There have been two performances thus far and literally about 75 people on stage.

21:11. X-tina outfit count is at II (unless you count the nun and the leather cowgirl as two, then it's III). I love the method of presenting awards from the islands in the crowd. Much like the Brit Awards from earlier in year, it's very "of the people, for the people".

21:14. JTim wins for Best Album. What's with these testimonials before the nominees are announced? It's a cool idea in theory, but everything flashes by so quickly, I can't keep track.

21:15. "Local hero" Shirley Manson gets maybe one-eighth the pop that JTim got.

21:16. I am really lost with this testimonials thing.

21:17. Best Dance goes to Punjabi MC, which has to be considered an upset considering all the big heavy hitters in this category (Chem. Bros., Moby, Jr. Sr., Oakenfold). Moby keeps saying that he doesn't think he's dance. Well, only the dance community gave a crap about him from 1990-2000, so why he'd want to crap on the fans that stuck with him for years, made him into one of the few true megapersonalities in the genre, listened to him go on about animal rights and other social issues for years, and generally kept his career healthy until he could break through and star in his own videos wearing a spacesuit alongside c-list celebrities, is beyond me.

21:19. Michael Stipe gives a very Stipe-ish mini-speech about rock bands still meaning something and how vital music is still around these days, as he introduces the White Stripes. Note that it's only rock music that people get defensive about with the whole "losing it's significance" bit. You never hear anyone say "they talk about how there aren't any vital bands out there, that they aren't as important as bands in the old days, but this band proves them wrong, here are Massive Attack"! Or "they say that rap music has lost it's conscience since the glory days of PE and BDP, but this band proves that rap is still about more than bitches and hos, here are the Roots". The lingering assertion that 'only rock music = important music' will probably take another 20 years to peter out.

21:23, Vin Diesel sucks up to the Scottish crowd by singing an air while wearing a leather kilt. He annouced the start of voting for Best Song and then splits for another venue. Xtina and Beyonce's tunes crush the others in this category. Beyonce's "Crazy In Love" is the most original-sounding pop tune of the year, but "Beautiful" will be played on every station on the radio dial from now to forever.

21:32. III. X-tina comes out with another ridiculous outfit and rips the press for always criticising what she wears. Maybe if she didn't look like such a cheap whore skank then they wouldn't write those things. Oh, hang on, she doesn't give a f*** what they think. The problem with criticism is you have to take it both ways. In X-tina's case, she can't use the press to write nice things about her transition for pop tart teen to mature adult songwriter, but then piss on them when they don't like her outfits and claim that they don't know what they're talking about. Either make a concerted effort to listen or ignore them. Anyhow, Andre 3000 comes out wearing a striped shirt that no white person could possibly get away with after 1982. Beyonce wins for Best R&B, and X-tina should take notes on her outfit -- that's how to wear something revealing and sexy without looking skanky.

21:40. So much hype over Black Eyed Peas, but when your dopest beats are delivered by JTim's beatboxing, you ain't got much going for you. However, JTim's beatboxing was surprisingly good.

21:42. How is X-tina a fan of Jane's Addiction? What was she, seven when "Ritual" came out? Perry Farrell is nutty, but he falls under the Whiteboy Not Cool : Jewish Exception (from the MTV Awards in September). And the a great thing about European awards shows are the short acceptance speeches. No rambling!

21:47. The Tartan Army renditions are almost as entertaining that the original songs. More so, in the case of Evanescence.

21:52. V. I can't keep up with this show. There's so much happening so fast. X-tina's costume changes for instance. As soon as I write that, she's shown backstage diva-ing it up. She takes ANOTHER shot at the press, which is just dumb when you're in Great Britain. You're asking for it over there -- the tabloids are internationally infamous for a reason. They're smarter than you.

21:57. A wierd MJ clone (not the basketball player) introduces Dido, who provides the singalong ciggy lighter moment of the evening.

22:03. Best Hip Hop goes to Eminem. Europe has got their nomination process together and includes different artists in different categories, as opposed to MTV US which had seemingly had all the same people nominated in every category. It's not hard: decide if they're Pop, R&B, or Hip Hop, just make a decision so that more people get nominated. It makes for a far better show. Eminem accepts via tape, and shows yet again why he is the king of acceptance speeches. He feigns (?) not knowing what the award is for, then he jokes about being given the White Rapper award for the fifth year in a row, and calls everyone a cracker while he eats crackers.

22:04. VI. It's off to the 2nd venue with VinD, with a first-ever Flaming Lips + Chemical Bros collaboration, in which Wayne Coyne sings like a normal person! Did 10 000 people really flock out to the streets to see these guys? They love what they see, though.

22:10. VD refers to Sean Paul's music as reggae instead of dancehall, is this an understandable mistake or not? I don't know. The Tartan Army's "Get Busy" is one sad atempt, since all they can say is the "shake that thing" line.

22:16. VII. X-tina has the dumbest looking big blond wig ever. Oh, hang on it's OK, it's just a prop for introducing The Darkness. The singer looks like Peter Frampton on the cover of "Frampton Comes Alive", which makes sense since this stuff rocks like it's 1975. Whether that's a compliment or not depends on how one feels about 1975, which is therefore left as an exercise for the reader.

22:21. Chingy gets NO reaction, even less than Shirley Manson. Somehow, JTim and Sean Paul are considered "New Acts". SP wins, and although he isn't exactly new, he is the best of this nominated bunch. Wasn't "Gimme the Light" a hit in Europe last year?

22:27. VIII. The Best Video testimonials have almost no connection to the nominees. It's not even close, I had no idea who was getting nominated while watching them. But at least they're nominating the most interesting videos, rather than riveting the nominations onto the most popular artists. Missy, White Stripes, UNKLE, rub elbows with your token artsy nomination for the night, Sigur Ros' "Untitled 1". It obviously has no chance of actually winning. Hell, I didn't even know there were any videos made from the last SR album. Most people probably aren't aware that SR made another album. Most people in the audience probably don't know who SR even are.

22:28. Holy crap, Sigur Ros are the winners! Even Minnie Driver can't believe it. The crowd is stunned and has no idea what to do. This was like Anna Paquin winning Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars. Nobody expected an apparent "outsider" to win, and the reactions were those of confusion and bewilderment more than disappointment or envy. I remain so shocked that I can barely pay attention to Kylie's delicious performance.

22:42. IX. Easily her best outfit yet. A humanitarian award is given to the president of Burma, who is under house arrest by the Burmese army. She will be given her award once she is freed. This was a nice gesture. How come we never hear about this Burmese conflict in North America? I think the media there would rather make up stories about Arafat's perceived imprisonment rather than than report on the true innocents.

22:48. Missy's performance takes a back seat to the rapping and dancing happening around her. The new track features impeccable production, a hellaciously fat bass line, all the makings of another huge hit for her. Having said that, I still can't understand the big deal about Missy herself. I think she's a case of the Emperor's New Clothes -- as with Janet Jackson, her career would be gravely wounded if not for her producers making her sound so fantastic.

22:51. Best Female is X-tina, who accepts while wearing X. Fix! Fix!

22:56. Speaking of producers, JTim accepts the Best Male award from the guys who produced his record. Good for Chad and Pharrell, getting to share the stage with him for this one.

23:06. Travis play a decent mid-tempo rocker. These types of songs aren't their strong suit. The weepy songs are but those aren't really suited for this type of show (although Dido did manage to pull it off earlier). On the other hand, Fran Healy has thankfully given up with that dumb mohawk. They're playing the last few notes of the song and suddenly, there are naked people everywhere, cameras cutting all over the place and disorientation reigns. Wha?

23:11. Coldplay win for Best Group and accept via tape in an elevator whose door keeps trying to close on them. Unfortunately, it's one millionth as funny as it sounds.

23:14. Kelly Osborne sees it fit to rip on the "X-tina as diva" dart-throwing gag from earlier in the show, and the crowd turns on her in about 0.5 seconds and nearly boos her out of the building. Any segment that involves Kelly Osborne getting humiliated is a big thumbs up in my book. Particularly when she brings it on herself. JTim wins yet again, this time for Best Pop. He's cleaning up like he did at the MTV VMA's.

23:17. And now, it's the most surreal musical moment of the century thus far, as Kraftwerk make their first ever live TV appearance, and it's on MTV to boot in front of thousands of screaming kids. Kylie introduces them and gives them the major influence props. She can't help but state the case lightly, since this is just a three hour show. There's still four of them up there, which is obviously unneccessary in the laptop era, but Kraftwerk's live mystique is so tied up in the visual impact of having four performers that there isn't much of a choice, even if we all know that it's Ralf, Florian, and Two Guys That Don't Mean a Thing (athough in former robot Wolfgang Flur's engaging autobiography, he wrote it was like that all along, from Ralf and Florian's perspective of course). The video screens are simply stunning, with everything in black and green; streamlined, panning graphics sliding by in all directions; all of it perfect for the slick vibe of "Aerodynamik". And then it's over, just like that. MTV Germany immediately airs a pre-show presentation to Die Artze for Best German Group. Amd after all the reclusiveness, the refusals to collaborate with Bowie or with film projects, the seventeen years between albums, the parcity of interviews, and the decades of Mythic Man Machine uber-inflation, they finally relented and appeared on TV. And of course, it's underwhelming, because myths are always better heard and not seen. Like Ted Williams tipping his cap in Fenway Park after 50 years of steadfast refusal, or Inigo Montoya killing Count Rogan and being unsure about what to do with the rest of his life, there's the endless mountain of expectation, followed by the brier execution of the act, followed by ... nothing.

23:30. XII. And Vin Diesel's back? Just one song on the second stage. Apparently there was also more from the Lips, Chems, plus Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Jane's Addiction. Screw this show, broadcast that instead! And Best Song goes to ... I'm getting the feeling that JTim's got the momentum tonight and he's gonna steal it ... but mass voter sanity comes through in the end as Beyonce rightfully wins.

23:36. Pink La Rock Chick in a skintight devil's suit is infinitely more interesting than Pink the Cookie-Cutter R&B singer. I like the edgier direction she's taken, particularly on a song like "Just Like a Pill".

23:39. XIII (unless I lost count somewhere) !!! The last segment is nothing more than X-tina modeling her thirteenth and final outfit, and then it's goodbye. For the show overall, the short and choppy segments means that nobody's up there long enough to start sucking (except for Kelly Osborne, but her appearance was loads of fun for reasons already detailed). Literally NOTHING was bad, not one performance, presenter or speech. But while watching the credits roll and seeing the clips from earlier in the show, I notice I've already forgotten about a lot of the stuff and need to check my notes to jog my memory. There were no lows, but there were no truly supercool moments or perfomances, of which there were several on the US show. This show was uniformly pop, whereas the US show had pop, rap (which ruled) and rock (which sucked for the most part). Plus, watching the Good Charlottes and Linkin Parks blow chunks provided me with a sadistic pleasure of watching them get outclassed and outwitted by every rap and R&B artist. Thus, the MTV Europe Music Awards was certainly a very good show, but at no point was it a great one.

I am hyped for these MTVEMA's. So hyped that I watched a show that compiled notable performances from MTVEMA's of years past:

Madonna (2000). A simple and classy run through "Music", with just her plus a few dancers. A throwback to the basics of the "Holiday" video.

Britney (1999). This was just the opposite. Extravagant, featuring a cast of thousands, stop/start cuts between multiple songs, a precision-choreographed dance routines, and Britney's usual (false) reliance on jerky motions = intensity.

Robbie Williams (2002). Robbie is so cool, every motion his body makes while on stage declares "I am a pop star". Future aspiring pop stars need to study tape of Robbie to improve their craft. Fans are drawn to his arrogant strut (everyone loves a winner) but he also shows a sensitive, boyish charm that makes him loveable (unlike, say Liam Gallagher, who has the arrogance and the poses downpat, but is absent in the mama's boy likeability department. I wonder if Robbie was dissecting these sorts of thoughts in his mind when he was following Oasis around during 1994 and everyone thought he was embarrassing himself, career-wise. Seriously, good ol' boy band Robbie puppy dogging it around badass mercurial stars Oasis was, in 1994, a chalk and cheese mixture if there ever was one. Imagine a Backstreet Boy becoming a tour groupie for The Strokes, it was that kind of wierd. America, of course, has also found an affinity for embracing the badder side of their rosy-cheeked boy band heroes -- just look at how J. Timberlake's cred has improved since he went out on his own, grew some facial hair, kissed-and-told vis-a-vis Britney, and became linked with a procession of other hot women).

I don't care if he can't hit the high notes so well, "Feel" is a smashing song. One of his recent concerts was shown on a station called Pro7 a couple of nights ago, I think it was Knebworth because the crowd was soooo huge. I don't think I've ever seen a crowd have so much adulation for a performer, ever. It made "Dave Gahan circa early 1990's" look like "Any Non-Jewish White Presenter, MTV Video Awards 2003". He was nearly breaking down from it all and could barely get through set-closer "Feel". That's the kind of vulnerability that people can't help but cling to. He said all the right things, thanked all the right people, told the crowd how much the moments meant to him and told them how he was getting older (that vulnerability again, you don't hear guys on the wrong side of thirty talk about their age while on stage) and how he longed to grow old with all of them.

A couple of weeks later, he did a 180 and spoke seriously about abruptly ending his musical career, claiming his life was actually quite miserable. I guess it's really difficult coming down from a Knebworth-sized high.

George Michael (1994). I wasn't feeling it with the pandering orchestral ballad "Jesus to a Child".

Eminem (2002). But it was different with *this* solo performance. Eminem held Barcelona in a trance with "Cleaning out My Closet", and was then joined by the posse for the brand new "Lose Yourself". Not a single awards show goes by without an Eminem moment. This one featured a shot of Mr. Mathers' pants falling down past his ass, and his pimping of a then-unknown 50 Cent.

Kylie (2001). Excess done well. This is excess in the form of fun, not excess in the form of "look at me!!" like when Britney does it.

David Bowie(1995). A creepy, spooky, drum n bass tinged "Man Who Sold the World" (only one year after Nirvana's famous remake, and the two versions couldn't have been more different. This was practically Bowie covering himself), two years before Bowie went full-fledged DnB.

H-Blockx (1995). For those who like this sort of thing (cock hard rock rap metal), this still works very well today, in that all of the other crappy bands making this music still sound identical to this in 2003.

Guano Apes (2000). I think we're finishing the show on a German tip. The singer's DIVA shirt (in the VISA design) is the best part, otherwise, this is hard rock hell. Everyone in the band looks like a complete freak, which I gather is the point.

Rammstein (2001). A guilty pleasure with this one. It's like the German KISS, there's fire, costumes, makeup, and best of all, those gruff, caustic accents. It's like in the 80's, when you'd hear a bunch of industrial sung in English, but no matter how many effects were thrown onto it to make it sound sinister, it never sounded as nasty as Laibach just singing with straight German accents (except Laibach aren't German. Oh well. Still nasty, though). If don't have anything nice to say about somewhat, don't just say it, say it while grumbling in German. The mad-for-it Frankfurt crowd made for a fun visual also.

I love MTV Germany. My new favourite hobby is watching the MTVG shows with subtitles and seeing how they translate the English slang into German. The exception is the German "Dismissed", which alters the catchphrase to the inherently hilarious Denglish phrase "Du bist dismissed" (can't do it justice unless it's said with a German accent). But "Doggy Fizzle Televizzle" takes the cake -- you'd expect it to be nearly untranslateable, and indeed it is, since words ending in "izzle" never seem to show up in the translation (but I'll keep watching to see if any of them do). The fun is watching the subtitles helplessly try to keep up with Snoop.

I spent Saturday night in Kreuzberg, which is the "alternative" area of Berlin, or the approximate equivalent of Queen Street in Toronto. Among the stops was a bar called "Franke" (probably not the correct name or spelling but it's the best that I can remember), which was filled with cruddy hipster types and black leather with makeup types. The music played was exclusively punk, and 70% of that was the Ramones. We also hit up a bar called Madonna in which I was the youngest person there by a good ten years. The music was the Mighty Q's own classic rock. The small dancefloor was continuously packed with more mullets than a Maple Leafs game and women who were not so much cougars as they were the older sisters of cougars.

Sometimes, the further away you travel from home, the more things stay the same.

Berlin Part Deux: your Halloween scary moments of the year are the excerpts from a recent Suede concert that I watched on MTV Germany (which I mistakenly referred to as MTV Europe during the summer. The MTV Europe Music Awards are being pimped HARD on the station, and with the impressive list of guests and performers I'm grabbing the bait, big time. A performance by Kraftwerk? What universe is this?). Brett cannot, no way, no how, hit the high notes anymore. One can't be sure what did him in, but history has shown that a combination of age and drug use usually does the trick. Suddenly, I'm kind of happy that Suede haven't toured Canada in six years. This kind of disappointment would be a lot to bear.

And after one half of one episode, I'm totally sold on "Deutschland Sucht den Superstar", which is Germany's version of "Pop Idol". The format is vastly different from what we've seen in the US and Canada. Here, the contestants are in a lounge area backstage, along with the hosts and select friends and family. They converse in this room, and then go out one by one to face the judges alone. It comes off more like a job interview than a teen idol competition. No screaming junior high girls, no audacious ensemble numbers. Whatever format you prefer, it's nice to see the idea done differently. It makes the Canadian version look that much more pathetic by simply xeroxing the American show rather than adding a few twists of their own.

I saw Spiritualized for the eighth time last week. Makes me think about the first times I saw a band once, twice, three times ....

ONE. First concert : Depeche Mode 22/06/90, Exhibition Stadium, Toronto. Openers were Nitzer Ebb and Jesus and Mary Chain. Talk about a stacked bill. I HATED the Mary Chain. What a racket. I wish I could see their set again, knowing what I know now.

TWO. Sunscreem : 22/07/93, Kingswood Music Theatre, Toronto. Yes, the first band I ever saw twice is a band that nobody likely remembers. Both times they were openers, first for Inspiral Carpets and this time for New Order. Sunscreem weren't a great band by any means, but if they'd come along four years later than they did, they'd have been Republica in place of Republica. Not that it would have helped, because you don't see any of the electronica class of 1997 around these days. But they would have sold a lot more records.

THREE. Orbital : 04/07/96, Opera House, Toronto. This was Orbital at the peak of their powers, playing the most high profile gigs of their career in support of "In Sides", bringing indie kids and ravers together (back when both of those distinct groups existed and rarely came together for anything) to dance to protest songs about oil spills and the Bosnian conflict.

FOUR. Suede : 10/05/97, Barrymore Music Hall, Ottawa. This was the day after I saw them for the third time (in Toronto). For their first visit (June 1993), Suede played the now-defunct Palladium on Danforth and the scene was one of total madness. It was the closest I will ever come to experiencing a 90's version of those 60's Beatles concerts that our parents are always talking about (except, perhaps, Depeche Mode June 1994, which I've already written about on these pages). I have the bootleg, but all I can remember about the gig is lots of screaming and getting crushed. And asking my friend Ernie what he thought about the gig -- his answer, "I had to take a crap the whole time".

In two subsequent interviews during the next year (that I know of), Brett Anderson referred to that June 1993 concert as his favourite Suede concert ever, and Toronto as his favourite city to play in. Their next visit (Feb 1995) resulted in similar carnage and hysteria, so of course both band and city were jacked up good for visit number three. Except that 50 % of the formula didn't equate, the band came out, giving it everything they had, milking the opening bars of "She", and the crowd responded with ... nothing. No screaming, no pushing, no nothing. To this day, I have no idea how this happened. It seems implausible that every Suede fan in the city grew up all at once, but in any case, the band melted away right in front of my eyes, the disappointment on their faces was obvious. I was embarrassed for my city, too embarrassed to even sing along and single myself out. All around me, people stood politely and silently. The band played "Europe is Our Playground" and it was deathly boring. They just wanted to get all six of its swirling minutes over with.

In Ottawa the next night, they came out very blase, probably still let down from the night before and wondering why they had to stop in this nondescript city instead of heading straight to Montreal. But they were met by a crowd that went completely bonkers for them. It was the Palladium gig all over again. And their reactions were fascinating -- half-assing it initially because they expected nothing from Ottawa, but gradually becoming re-sold on themselves via the energy of the crowd. "Europe" was damned fine on this night. The strange thing is, many of the fans in attendance weren't even hardcore Suede fans. The fact is, so many (foreign) bands play only T.O. and Montreal without stopping in Ottawa, so that Ottawa music fans seldom see notable gigs in their own city. Thus, anytime a significant band does play there, everyone gets really excited and shows up ready to have a great time. This was my favourite of the four Suede gigs, not so much for the music as it was for the uniqueness of the experience.

Regardless, the band likely harboured bad feelings from the tour, because they haven't played North America since.

FIVE. Orbital: 15/10/01, Opera House, Toronto. This, on the other hand, was not the peak of the band's powers. They were more concerned with dancing and waving their hands like little kids (for both themselves and the audience). That pretty much sums up their post-"In Sides" recorded output as well. Good, but disappointing, considering the lofty standards they've set. I'll have no complaints if I never hear "Chime" played live again.

SIX. Spiritualized: 26/04/02, Opera House, Toronto. Not quite as good as their gig from the previous November that featured a 583-member horn section, but it was still the usual excellence. The "Let it Come Down" tours were the only SPZ gigs to regularly feature encores. Jason must have figured the rearranged and updated version of "Lord Can You Hear Me" was a natural fit as a nightly encore. I've never seen them encore before or since.

7*. I didn't think it was fair to include local bands on this list, because of the far greater oppurtunity to see them. Otherwise, 27/03/03 would mark the inclusion of Polmo Polpo. Furthermore, I have never seen a PP headlining gig (do any exist?), he was always opening for another band or sharing a bill with one or more bands. Plus, if you add up the total time of all seven performances I've seen, they wouldn't crack the three hour mark. So it goes with PP, 15 or 20 minutes of magnificence and then nothing.

SEVEN. Mogwai: 22/09/03, Fillmore, San Francisco. An astounding gig, my second favourite Mogwai show behind the May 2001 gig at the Phoenix with Bardo Pond. Fully recovered from the illnesses which plagued them during their swing through Toronto two weeks previous, the volume was cranked back up and the set times extended. Plus *dancing* in many areas of the crowd. I love SF.

EIGHT. Spiritualized: 20/10/03, Opera House, Toronto. It's strange how one venue appears four times on this list. This gig is notable for being about 10 X better than their concert in the same venue 24 hours earlier, played to about half as many people. My guess is the day off from travel gave the band a bit more energy. It's refreshing that they've gotten out of their "Shine a Light"/"Electric Mainline"/"Electricity" rut, and are promoting their new album by playing the new songs for a change. That said, I hope that Jason Pierce isn't believing the revisionist press and is convinced that "Let It Come Down" was a poor record. In the live sets, that album has been erased from history, and I really don't want to imagine a world where "Don't Just Do Something" is never played live again.

NINE. ????

More on Sonic : his contributions to the S3 swansong, "Recurring", are leaps and bounds better than those of Jason His Nemesis. The "minimalism is maximalism" mantle is picked up from "Playing With Fire", incorporating dance rhythms on the way. Plus some mighty fine lyrics on self-doubt and love's neccessary second-guessing ("Why Couldn't I See?", and even though it was only on the US release, it gets mentioned because it was the best thing on it), urban disillusionment ("Big City"), and plain old love ("I Love You"). After listening to "Recurring", it's Sonic's work that you're humming afterward.

Jason's songs barely have tunes, they're meandering, sloppy, mumbling blues-y, and dirge-like (not in a good way). I always forget how the songs go and have to listen to the album to remind myself, but sure enough, a couple of weeks later I can't remember them again. Save "Feel So Sad", none of these songs have any place on a Spiritualized record lest they be drawn and quartered by the infinitely better songs that Jason went on to write. They were fixtures in the sets at early Spiritualized gigs before they were all banished by the "Lazer Guided Melodies" gems, never to return again.

Based on "Recurring", Sonic is the ex-S3 member slated to have the far brighter future.

---------

Sonic has always been a A-list manufacturer of Proper Drug Music. This goes beyond the "Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To" catchphrase, although I'm certainly not questioning the truth of that phrase as it relates to Sonic's music. S3 in particular, do indeed deliver on that promise with nearly every recording. I'm making a point about the *kinds* of drugs involved. You see, any moron can smoke, sniff, or inject something and then go make music. Countless morons do it every day. My central thesis is that the best drug music is based on the hardest drugs. As it pertains to the artist in question, heroin music is almost always better than pot music.

Pot music is wimpy. It's a wimpy drug. It's so popular because it's so wimpy. It's a cheap, friendly, harmless drug, and thus, it churns out cheap, friendly, harmless music (with the occasional artist such as Tricky being the exception to this and all that follows). It takes no resolve or dedication to get involved with it, which is why it's so dead easy for so many people to use it liberally or occasionally.

Pot music is about jamming and chilling out. These are both fun and enjoyable activities. Thus, the drugs reflect positively on the music and vice versa. That is, jamming and chilling out are fun things, smoking pot while listening to them is a fun thing, ergo, smoking pot is a fun thing. In this way, pot music communicates the message that pot is a cheerful and desirable drug.

Heroin music is not for the weak of heart. It is a drug of steely-eyed determination. It's not a massively popular drug because it is viciously addictive and it tends to ruin lives. It churns out paranoid, hardened (and hardcore, in whatever sense of the word), uncomfortable and uninviting music. There is nothing fun about heroin music. The drugs do NOT reflect positively on the music, that is, heroin music does not implant you with the idea that drugs are fun. There is nothing enticing about S3's "OD Catastrophe", it is a vicious and scary song, with it's one chord being strummed literally thousands of times within its nine minutes, delivering it's sobering message with harrowing repetition. The obvious irony is how the music says "drugs are bad" while Sonic himself was saying "drugs are good". It's as if there's an advertised advance warning behind the task of responsible drug use, such as "drugs can be good, but this is the kind of stuff you're in for if you choose to take the plunge. It may eventually be rewarding, but we'll have to give you a trial by fire first, to prove that you really want it. We have to intimidate people this way because otherwise there'd be a lot of idiots jumping into this stuff without having thought it through".

Post Spacemen 3, Sonic gave up heroin and chilled out with his music (I'm not sure in what order), but this was no floaty fluffy cloud chillout music a la The Orb. His was drone music, and drone music is hardly joyous. The drug lifestyle of early droners such as Conrad, Cale, and the others in La Monte Young's stable is well documented. Drone music doesn't conjure images of relaxing on a porch, getting stoned while a gentle breeze ruffles your hair. A more likely image is passed out on a bed, limbs outstretched at awkward angles, spit dribbling from a chin into a pool on the pillow, and the poor victim too messed up to do anything about it (or anything at all, for that matter). That's the precise effect of the first EAR album, most appropriately titled "Mesmerised".

Hard drug music is riveting stuff. There are many prominent examples. Nirvana made a whole generation of kids and musicians get serious (the Kurt + heroin tales have been often told). On "This is Hardcore", Pulp got super serious and introspective, shirked fame and retreated from the spotlight, threw irony out the window, darkened up their videos, and made arguably their best album (they were heavily rumoured to have been into heroin at the time). The late Elliot Smith's finest work was his stripped down self-titled album, unadorned except for mainly guitar and voice, and some of the finest songs ("The White Lady Loves You", "Needle in the Hay") were about drugs -- most likely his heroin addiction. I hope I'm not trivializing his death my painting him as yet another drug casualty of our times, but it *was* his best work and I've felt that way for years. I didn't come to that conclusion just in the last few days as a way to make sense of his tragic death.

It's not always about heroin. You could also add the Feelies (the sound of speed), The Stooges (the sound of being fucked up all the time), Joy Division (the sound of sensitive souls not taking their epilepsy meds), and a whole lot more.

One last point: it doesn't have to be about heroin, but it should NOT be about cocaine. Cocaine + arrogance + music is a bad combination. The artist gets an inflated opinion of themselves, tries to put it on the record, and it comes across as conceited and indulgent. It's the musical equivalent of fawning over Bennifer's "we don't want the press at our wedding but we want it to be all over the press anyway just to rub it in their faces" wedding. Oasis' "Be Here Now" is the most notable recent example of this. Note that the entire trifecta is a neccessary condition for the crappy music. Cocaine + music is not a recipe for disaster by itself, which has been shown through brilliant records like "Rumours". A great record can be made with cocaine, as long as it doesn't *sound like* cocaine.

This interview excerpt (from 1988) is from a Spacemen 3 web site:

------------------------ Gerard: OK, I'm sorry. Tell me about drugs.

Sonic Boom: Ahhh, I find drugs to be very inspiring. All of our songs are about drugs our about experiences while on drugs. Seriously, without drugs I don't think I would be here today.

Gerard: Oh come on, I would've still come down here with you.

Sonic Boom: (visibly annoyed) No, that's not what I mean! Without drugs, I think I would've committed suicide! At one point, without drugs I had nothing left to live for. I can.t imagine going thru a single day without getting high. All of us in the band smoke every day. The bass player sells dope. I don.t ever drink but the rest of the group do. I'm very into hypnotic drugs, not just acid. Opiums are very nice, and there's lots of magic mushrooms out where we live. .Sound Of Confusion. was written about taking speed. I've stayed away from it for 2 or 3 years now, but that doesn't mean I've stopped anything else. I've probably tried every drug that's ever been available in this country at one time or another. I've got a very good friend who's a professional chemist, so I've access to virtually any prescription drug I want, which is very nice. It's for relaxation and recreation, really. I can't see how you could possibly be against it.

Gerard: I think you are going to burn in hell.

-------------------------

Yeah, the interviewer was being a prick throughout the entire interview, but the patterns were generally the same: Sonic would say "legalise everything, drugs are great, but use them responsibly" and journos thought he was a terrible person for saying those things. This was before the E-generation hit (pardon the pun) in England. Sonic turned out to be ahead of his time, because post-E, speaking for the responsible use of drugs became far more common. Sonic's bragging probably took the message a bit too far. He used to be way overboard with the glamourization, which is particularly disturbing considering the types of dangerous substances he was using. In this respect, Sonic eventually grew up -- in a 1994 interview, he claimed he regretted his heroin use, but stood behind his main theme of responsible drug use.

This is one example of how Pete "Sonic Boom" Kember was (and is) an unheralded pioneer. Sonic gets a bad rap these days -- he's considered to be the Marty Jannetty of Spacemen 3 -- but he's made some fantastic music in his own right. His opinions on drugs were way ahead of their time. He beat Jason Pierce to the punch by combining his trademark minimal drones with soul music on 1994's "Highs, Lows and Heavenly Blows". That album has more soul than just about anything Spiritualized recorded in the 1990's. It drips emotion, bleeds heartache, and didn't require an orchestra to do so. HL&HB and Inspiral Carpets "The Beast Inside" are, in my opinion, the foremost "lost classic" albums of the last decade. They have been criminally ignored.

While most guitar bands turned to heavy-handed grunge in the early 90's, Sonic got more and more chilled out. He used heavily treated guitar tones to create blissful ambience long before anyone spoke of "post-rock". With his EAR collective, he collaborated with techno giant Thomas Koner (one of his many forays into electronic music long before it ordained fashionable by every Tom, Dick, and Radiohead to do so), and also with Kevin Shields, dragging him out of mothballs for his first post-MBV recordings.

Can you tell I've been listening to a lot of Spacemen 3 this week?

Tindersticks have done several duets with female singers, but "Sometimes It Hurts", featuring Lhasa de Sela, finally hit the home run they've been looking for over the last decade. "Travelling Light" didn't really stick out among an album of maudlin uniformity. "Marriage Made in Heaven", with Isabella Rossellini, came really close to a round-tripper, but was a bit too playful and thus leaned away from 'Sticks greatest strength -- really really sad music. The "Simple Pleasure" album was full of female backing vocals, no duets per se, and no standout vocal contributions, but the focus on 60's soul was a fascinating departure from a band that had very nearly pigeonholed itself. So we can let them off the hook there.

Nonetheless, Tindersticks peaked with their debut, and hadn't made a truly great album since "Curtains" in 1997. The last thing I'd expected from them in 2003 was an Album of the Year Candidate and their best duet to date (good, because I'd hate to be the band who'd foretold their own irrelevance by naming their last great album "Curtains", wouldn't you?). "Sometimes It Hurts" is funny, wistful, introspective, and far and away the most charming thing they've ever done. It's a fun listen, with it's jaunty tune and the gentle interplay between the voices, and thus it makes you want to hear it again as soon as it's over. But it's also dripping with sadness, which makes you think twice about hearing it again.

Each song on "Waiting for the Moon", taken separately, sounds like the finale of an album. It's just that epic, just that moving. My faith in Tindersticks has been roundly restored over the past year.

Ah, now where to start with this one ?

I think the whole article comes off as ultra-conservative, near-censorious Tipper Gore-worthy paranoia.

The author appears to wish the musical world were impervious to change, in that it should remain rooted in sounds and images that she deems likeable. Indeed, no credibility is placed on those who listen to or perform rap and R&B, despite the clearly stated fact that millions of people do indeed manage to find some enjoyment in said listening and performing. After reading this, I'd feel obligated to disinfect myself every time I watched a music video -- as opposed to when the boy bands rules the air and video waves, since we all know that no boy band EVER used sex in a song or video with the intent of pushing more product. As if the cougars were fans only because they got a kick out of innocently reminiscing about their pre-pubescent school days.

A world where popular artistic tastes were not in constant flux would be a boring world.

But I really shouldn't say anything bad about this piece. After all, the author is my sister.

[update 31/12/04, link to the Star is now broken]

Last night I caught the second half of "Behind the Music : 1987" and felt somewhere between annoyed and appalled at the musical revisionism it contained. All of VH1's similarly structured mini-docs have this flaw. They have been made recently (2001 in this case), and therefore are made with many years of perspective. The interviewees are all too often aware of this, and try to retell the tale with the benefit of the obvious 20/20 hindsight, often with the intention of making themselves look more important. Poison's C.C. Deville claiming that "Talk Dirty to Me" is "one of the greatest garage punk songs ever written" was the most ludicrous example from last night's program.

In the VH1 era, with music being regurgitated on such a regular basis, the time is perfect for a book on 21st century musical revisionism. If anyone is reading this and wishes to take up the gauntlet, please do and make sure to put my name in the acknowledgements. Otherwise, I just may do it myself someday (right after my book on vinyl culture, I suppose). Hint: the TV special commemorating Elvis and his #1's collection would make a fine introductory chapter.

If you were to believe BTM:1987, you would accept the following arguments:

1. The successes of REM and U2 were cases of the underground finally peeking overground. 2. Hair metal was on the decline. 3. Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson followed up their mid-decade uber-successes with disappointing albums.

Let's start with #3. If not for "Thriller", "Bad" may well have been considered the biggest album ever to that point. It sold about 25 million copies worldwide, spawned six hit singles, was nominated for loads of Grammys, the videos were talked about everywhere and were in equally heavy rotation as the "Thriller" ones, and entrenched Michael as the most successful popstar in the world for another three years. That's hardly a disappointment, nor is it fair to characterize these successes as an artist treading water. Compared to "Thriller", almost anything would be viewed a monumental failure. That comparison just isn't fair.

Bruce's "Tunnel of Love" was never meant to be "Born in the USA II". It was a conscious attempt to shift gears in his career, symbolized by the abscence of the E Street Band from his records for the first time. This latter point was completely ignored by BTM. It sold less than "BitUSA", but again, that's not really a fair comparison. How many artists make more than one epoch-defining record? It still sold millions, and the follow-ups, 1992's "Lucky Town" and "Human Touch", debuted at numbers 1 and 2. I don't think Bruce disappointed anybody.

Now for the major malfeasances. It's all well and good to put fourteen years of hindsight to good use, but let's not use it to make patently false statements. First, let's get the following things straight.

1. Kurt was the single biggest force behind bringing the underground into the overground.

2. Kurt was the single biggest force behind the death of hair metal.

With all due respect to Dave and Krist, I said "Kurt" rather than "Nirvana" because Kurt, like it or not (and he certainly didn't during his lifetime), was the icon of the band and the times. Similarly, we now speak of Hendrix as the icon and forget about The Experience. Anyhow, neither of these points, IMO, can be intelligently disputed.

It's arguable whether U2 were underground in any way come 1987. "The Unforgettable Fire" and "War" had already been big hits. Not superstar sized hits, but hits nonetheless. Hell, if Samantha Micelli went to a U2 concert on a 1984 episode of "Who's the Boss?" then they couldn't have been too unknown. REM were certainly a cult phenomenon in 1987, but the main point is that the breakthroughs of both bands were singular and isolated. They did almost nothing to spur an upward movement of the underground. Stated differently, I can't think of a single band that made it on the backs of either U2 or REM's success. On the other hand, Nirvana dragged countless bands into the charts with them, so much so that the Billboard 200 before and after "Nevermind" were notedly different.

Furthermore, it's stupid to suggest that people were tiring of hair metal in 1987 because they'd realised how shallow it was and that you couldn't tell the bands apart with a magnifying glass. Or that consumers were bored of the string of dumbass songs about chicks and cars and girls and parties and babes. Hair metal stayed huge through the end of the decade. Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Motley Crue, Poison, Tesla, and Extreme's biggest successes were still to come. The pop charts of 1988-9 were stuffed full of hair metal bands and their indistinguishable power ballads, the same way the charts of the early and mid 90's were stuffed full of R&B vocal groups and their indistinguishable soul ballads. The truth is that post-Kurt, serious music was in and hedonist music was not. Bands who cut their hair and modified their message were able to continue their career. Those that didn't, mercifully vanished and are now appearing on a reunion tour triple bill at an amphitheatre near you.