Eighteen hours later, and I'm back again sitting at the same desk, having not left the building since returning from the Kraftwerk concert, which now seems like it happened several weeks ago, if at all. Strangely, I am less tired now than I was this morning, when I wrote the blurb above about the Kraftwerk show. I have little recollection of what I wrote, and in fact I am rather afraid to read it for fear of fainting from embarrassment at what must be some of the most incoherent and hazy sentences that have ever appeared on these pages.

I've got an eye on an experiment and two ears getting blasted to bit by various live mayhem courtesy of Spacemen 3 and Fennesz. When I feel the need to kill time even more blatantly, I head over to $0u1$33k to check on my newest acquisitions and to browse through other people's files. I never have to get out of my chair ever again. Half of the fun of going to other people's houses is to browse their CD collection. Now I can uncover countless musical identities from the comfort of my own home. No more must two people go through the trouble of talking to each other and making plans to meet in order for such a private viewing to take place ... I don't need permission (except from the firewall) and the person doesn't have to be home. It's the musical peeping tom! What could be better?

I think I need to sleep.

What a long, long, day and morning, he writes on zero sleep caught in the indecision between surrendering to sleep or slogging on at work.

The Kraftwerk gig was easy to find, I just got off the S-Bahn and starting following all the freaks with coloured hair and dressed in leather. The Tempodrom, from the outside, could be mistaken for the architectural love child between an oversized big top circus tent and the Sydney opera house. Inside, the spacious lobby greets me with a veritable social gathering, I feel more like I'm in the off-side lounge in a hotel than a few metres from a giant auditorium (where if you look toward the rooof, bares a strange ressemblance to the Sony Centre at Postdamer Platz).

It's my first concert away from the North American continent, and I barely had the time to get excited about it (see posting above). When I gave my name at the box office to pick up my ticket, the ticket girl asked "from Toronto?" in confirmation. It's like I'm the city delegate here.

Once the lights dim, everything gets massively noisy. But it's quiet during the songs, most of the patrons in the stadium seats are sitting, and there's very little dancing or movement of any kind. Is this the typical show of support from Berliners? Watch quiet, thank loud? The immense racket that's made during the breaks between encored does more than anything to convince me that this band is adored in this city. That, and the spirited reaction given to "Autobahn". I'd be proud of a tune written to celebrate my country's culture (at a time when few other bands were doing it).

Ralf Hutter is the most German-looking person I have ever seen. The slick hair, the dapper suit, there's something about him that just roars "Teuton". That said, he and Florian look great considering their ages. That said, the new songs from "Tour de France Soundtrack are quite welcome in a set list that hasn't changed much since 1981. That said, those Tron Suits may just be the coolest things ever. That said, the Metal on Metal portion of TEE blows my damn mind every time.

The last two days are starting to blend together, good thing I have pictures.

$0u1$33k has been working overtime for me yet again, with another gig of stuff coming in over the last few days. As predicted, I am getting bored with the thirty or so CD's I brought with me on this trip. No "Twinlights" this time ... I was all set to pack it, but decided it was time for a change and packed CD2 of the Cocteaus' "BBC Sessions" (which has "Half-Gifts" on it, so it wasn't a complete break with tradition). I also brought the Cure's "Disintegration" ... yes, I bought it, I own it, it's fifteen years of twisted history coming to an end yet AGAIN! But I haven't heard it yet, I'm still waiting for the right moment, i.e. an uninterrupted session where I can play it as loud as I want. Six in the morning on one of these long work nights should probably suffice.

I downloaded (finally!) the new Fennesz album, "Venice". My initial, cursory scan suggests a very noisy, abrasive effort, which is gold for those who love tha noize, but probably a bit too harsh for those who preferred the calmer, Beach Boys filtered campfire guitar strum moments of "Endless Summer".

I tried to make a visit to Dense this weekend ... and it's gone? I rode up and down Danziger Str. but couldn't find it anywhere. Stupidly, I'd forgotten to take the address with me but the good thing about all the streets turning into new streets every three blocks in Berlin is that address numbers are somewhat superfluous. You don't have to search very far once you're on the right street. So I made the trip further downtown to Neurotitan, spent about two hours there listening to about fifteen CD's and came away with some quality noise and messed up beats. I got a couple of crazy good deals on discs that will be hard to find anywhere else (including some local stuff), and now $0u1$33k will take care of the rest.

Most importantly, I had a moment of weakness last week and was rightfully reamed out for it. I was told about the gig that day by our research director Erik (he with the Speedy J background on his computer) and I totally sputtered. Shocked. Go to a concert? But I'm poor! I shouldn't spend that kind of money.

Screw the money ... thank you ILM.

Berlin Teyl Dray. We meet again. This time I came REALLY prepared, having gone bezerk on $0u1$33k for five days before this trip, and coming away with about three gigs of mp3's to keep me occupied. So, there's little chance of getting bored with all my music after two weeks. Nevertheless, the pop station has remained popular in the lab. Already, I've heard the dance remix of "Mad World" far more times than is necessary.

Despite an all-nighter that left me in dire need of sleep (finally admitting defeat after being awake for 32 hours and passing out at work), I arrived home at our quaint little riverside apartment (having gotten lost on the bike ride home -- it was actually the first time I'd gone home via bike since arriving) ready to crawl in bed, only to be greeted by my old buddy, that leading light of Deutschlander TV entertainment and one of the few beacons for the English language on our video airwaves. Yes, it was old reliable, MTV Germany, with a short look at the year 1990. This was not a Behind The Music :1990 "let's make everything look as important as possible and give ego-stroking interview time to has-beens". It was all about the vids, introduced and bookended with the occasional informative or goofy comment from VJ Markus (complete with new, greasier haircut). I forgot all about sleeping and enjoyed the following "classics":

NKOTB -- Step By Step. Of course, I'm using their latter-day, smoother-sounding name (at least that was the plan). Their 1993 comeback failed horribly, although unbeknownst to anyone, a certain Ron Perleman was sitting on a plane and wondering why it couldn't happen all over again. At the height of alternative/grunge's commercialism, he went back to Orlando and created New Kids Mk II and III. And it turned out that he was right -- it DID happen all over again. Life is funny sometimes. Anyhow, Donnie wears about three different PE shirts during this fiasco, but unlike the others, he is fortunately spared by not having to perform the horrid sub-MC Hammer jive dancing. Probably New Kids' best single, though. As is the case with just about every act on this retrospective, they became irrelevant post-grunge, although that may have come to pass regardless, since you always take the chance of becoming irrelevant overnight when your fan base mostly consists of preteen girls.

Enigma -- Sadeness, Part I. It was all downhill from here. "Mea Culpa" was pretty good, and the "MCMXC A.D." album was actually quite awesome, but the second and third albums descended into New Age floaty crud and are best never mentioned again. This first single, however, was perfect, more or less trumping The Orb at their own game by nailing ambient house on the head on the first try, and triggering a short-lived Gregorian Chant revival in the process (note: there was no Rickie Lee Jones revival). I had the cassette single and must have listened to it more times than any other single in 1990 save "Enjoy the Silence". Too bad the video is crap, though.

At this point, I flipped channels to VIVA, and there was a girl taking off her clothes to Massive Attack's "Be Thankful For What You've Got". As yes, I thought, it's more of those soothing Berlin late night girlie ads, but this time they're advertising the 976 numbers with Massive Attack tunes. What an impressive choice. But NO, it turned out to be the video! I had no idea that a) there were videos from "Blue Lines", b) this tune was a single (it's one of my least favourite on the album), and c) stripping!! nudity!! In a Massive Attack vid!!! Who knew?

Leila K -- Got to Get. Leila K has never been, and will never show up in a Behind The Music special. But remembering 1990 isn't always about the biggest and brightest names. I would have gone to my grave and not remembered this song at all. And despite not giving this tune the slightest thought for the last fourteen years, I instantly remembered it and enjoyed it. As Beyonce has shown, horn samples tend to work like a charm. 1990 -- the days when you could make a video with your friends and a shoestring budget and get it played on MTV.

Phil Collins -- I Wish it Would Rain Down. Clapton's in this video! How did I not notice this before? The guitar solos are so obviously him too. Was I paying attention at all back in 1990? This is a really really good song for Phil Collins, full of emotional hooks and wails that would have curled Joe Cocker into a pretzel had this song been written for him. In this way, it's not the least bit subtle, but I like it anyway.

And the video is the typical Phil Collins Lighthearted Humour For Young and Old, in which our hero dreams of a rags-to-riches life whose vault into stardom begins with a chance opportunity to perform this very song in a play. I *think* he's partly taking the piss out of himself -- the newspaper headlines declare a gigantic movie debut for "Bill" Collins, whereas "Phil" Collins' actual movie debut ("Buster") was a gigantic flop. But these same headlines carry a story about an Oscar win for Collins, which of course DID happen (Best Song, from "Tarzan"). So who knows. Collins is pompous enough to have dreamed up these things for himself for real.

KLF -- What Time is Love? What a great mix of stuff here. This is why MTV Germany rules it. The song may be familiar to many, but I'd wager that most of those people would have never remembered this video. It's basically three long shots of a car driving down a long road in the desert. Nothing about it has any relation to the song, and was likely thrown together haphazardly because the song became more popular than expected and they needed a video to send to the music stations. Either that, or it was a deliberate anti-video concocted by Bill and Jimi as a giant up-yours to the collective musical establishment. You never can tell with those guys.

A-Ha . Crying in the Rain. You might think that any A-Ha song that isn't titled "Take on Me" isn.t worth your time (as I did) but you'd be wrong -- this one is a pleasant surprise. The line "I'll do my crying in the rain" is a powerful visual image, the video isn't as cheesy as you'd expect from such a weepy little love song, and the band (and their hair) are in handsome form.

Technotronic -- Get Up. P. Diddy is going techno on his next album, or so say the reports. He could do worse than steal a few tricks from Technotronic's rap/dance template. They were so far ahead of their time, courtesy of a great techno producer/svengali (Jo Bogaert), not to mention putting the rap/techno hybrid high up in the charts years before anyone else.

Torfrock -- Beinhart. And now for the show.s bonus German content, and it's a boisterous novelty tune with an animated movie tie-in (at least that's the jist I was getting). It's sung in German, so it's obviously unknown from a North American perspective. But it's an interesting example of the oft-ignored German sense of humour (it's not Rammstein all the time here, you know).

I'm a sucker for lists, as I've stated many times. I'm such a sucker that I always find myself stuck watching MMM's "Listed" even if it's a list that I've already seen (plus, I like staring at Karina Huber's chest). Today, it was the "10 Best and 10 Worst of the 80's", which they seem to replay every single week. And every week, their choices appear dumber.

The 10 worst includes luminaries such as MC Hammer, Jack Wagner, and Rick Astley. First of all, let us all be in agreement that one cannot create novel criticism against the 80's on the basis of bad hair, clothes, and dancing. Yes, Hammer's dancing looks ridiculous viewed through the lens of 2004, but so do the dance moves in any 80's video by a performer without the last name "Jackson". I can barely look at video footage of the Smiths in their early days without having to shield my eyes from their hair. Everything about the 80's looks cheesy now, take it as a given and move on. Hammer was crap for a million reasons other than his dancing and his clown pants.

Jack Wagner was a one-hit wonder, but there were zillions of those in the 80's so that's not why he's on here. It's because he was a crossover star and somehow MMM equates "crossover" with "embarrassing", which is ludicrous because they get plenty of airplay from J.Lo and Hilary Duff these days. A soap star showing up in the charts for six months on the back of a lone corny ballad mega-hit hardly characterizes him as a prominent embarrassment over an entire decade.

Rick Astley is crap, but tell that to the millions of teenagers who voted for John Stevens last week on American Idol.

Number 1, predictably, was Milli Vanilli. Have any artists in recent memory gotten more of a raw deal than MV? Of course, they are on this chart for exactly one reason : the lip-synching. Without it, they'd have been allowed to fade away in peace just like all the other musical acts that got turfed by grunge. They'd have their late 80's number ones, the millions of albums sold, the relatively disappointing 1991 follow-up, and a quiet post-grunge retirement until showing up as judges on "Deutschland Sucht den Superstar" (note that if you replace "Superstar" with "American Idol", you get Paula Abdul's career to a tee).

MV had good things going for them, namely, the songs were good and they were strong, charismatic performers. The former were provided for them, whereas Rob and Fab's sole task was to put 100% into becoming the latter and selling themselves as stars, a task which they handled extremely well. They were hardly the first artists to employ vocal "ringers", even though you'd because any discussion on lip-synching post-1991 begins and ends with MV. One of their only defenders at the time was no less than George Clinton, who pointed out that ringers were nothing new in black pop (I take him at his word, although I'm not certain precisely which artists he had in mind, the usage of ringers is in itself undisputable). Phil Spector frequently had Darlene Love sing on other artists records (most notably, the Crystals didn't sing a single note on some of their huge hits). On a related note, Spector's "Wrecking Crew" played nearly every note on hits by the Byrds, the Beach Boys and the Mamas and the Papas (among MANY others), while sometimes those bands themselves happily mimed along on their instruments during their "live" appearances on TV shows but no disrespect is aimed their way due to this.

Ah, but that's ages ago, that stuff just doesn't happen anymore, right? It's like with baseball post-1920, Pete Rose is pretty much the only prominent gambler in the game, so of course the attention is focused on him. How we forget that both Black Box and C&C Music Factory employed ringers at the same time as MV. Black Box had a skinny, attractive singer pose as the lead for "Ride on Time", and were later sued by the actual, fat, unnattractive singer once the song became a big hit. Both these acts were nominated for Grammys THE YEAR AFTER the lip-synching scandal, but the Best New Artist award went to the impressively bland Marc Cohn instead of one of the massively popular ringerified groups. But nobody remembers this stuff now, because the Grammys were never awarded (and therefore couldn't be revoked) and nobody from those bands died a pitiful death from a drug OD.

I listened to the highly-touted Feb. 20th "Smile" performance, and it is, as advertised, all that and a bag of chips. And I really had my doubts about this one, because after so many years of absorbing the "Smile" myth, the idea of it actually existing in the year 2004 didn't seem possible. And even if it could magically appear, would it honestly bear any ressemblance to its 1967 ancestry? That is, Brian Wilson 2004 couldn't hope to capture Brian Wilson 1967 anymore than Barry Bruner 2004 could capture, say Barry Bruner 1990 -- too much time has passed, people change, and musical tastes change (and all this stuff is virtually axiomatic, isn't it?).

Yet it has arrived, and it sounds like everything you've ever heard about it. It's "Good Vibrations" spread over 45 minutes. It's a roiling stew of wierd barnyard sounds, clucking and banging, and four part harmonies passing in and out like winds through an open window. The melody seems to do an about-face every minute or so, tunes appear and then return three minutes later. It's bonkers. It's unpredictable. It's a fascinating listen.