Music in Berlin and Hamburg, March 2012

-- I considered going clubbing on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg last Friday (Ewan Pearson was the headlining DJ at Baalsaal) but I needed to check out of my hotel the next morning and didn't want to be dead on my feet for the entire day.  My "threshold" for hitting the clubs is a lot higher than it used to be.  This just in: you can get into a lot of trouble on the Reeperbahn.

-- Almost every time I wanted to hear a song and searched for it on Youtube, I got a "GEMA has blocked this content in your country" message, or something to that effect.  Unless a song is hosted through VEVO, it was blocked, so I had to search out a live version if I wanted to hear something (which isn't so hard, of course).  Streaming restrictions must be tough in Germany, I don't think I'd noticed this before. 

--We joked about going to Berghain on Saturday night.  This was a joke because nobody seriously wanted to head down to Berghain in the middle of the night only to be rejected at the door for the n'th time.  The lineup featured, among others, Fiedel, Luke Slater and DJ Pete. We were slightly more serious about going there on Sunday morning or afternoon instead, but didn't.  The Sunday lineup featured Boris and Joy Orbison.  Yes, we've basically reached the point where Berghain's Sunday lineup for the stragglers and supernarcs is better than any other club's Friday or Saturday night lineup.  Berghain completely dominates the Berlin club scene these days.

--  There are so many clubs and parties in Berlin that I didn't even find out about this one until I'd already missed it -- the Emptyset record release party at Horst Kreuzberg featuring Emptyset and possibly my favourite DJ's at the moment (based on their podcasts), Ancient Methods.  Even though I was dead on my feet on Saturday night and was in no shape for clubbing, I still felt that I blew it by not going.

-- I went a bit crazy with CD shopping, dropping money on stuff without bothering to listen to it, buying stuff unheard from artists I like, etc.  Most of the damage was done at Spacehall.  I checked out Real Deal (a really cool punk/metal/hardcore shop) although I didn't buy anything there, and went back to Hard Wax for the first time in almost nine years.  By the time I got to Neurotitian I was too exhausted to sample the anonymous local experimental/noise CD's that I usually buy when I'm there.

Charlatans, Ride, and the 20th anniversary editions that never happened

Sometimes you read an article that seems as though it was written especially for you.  John Bergstrom's recent review/reminiscence of long neglected Ride and Charlatans UK albums from 1992 is one of them.

There's a really, REALLY narrow generation of music fans who a) got swept up in the 2nd wave of shoegaze and Madchester bands, and b) kept listening to those bands when they weren't the hot new thing anymore.  I was one of those people.  I listened to the Charlatans' "Between 10th and 11th" constantly in 1992, either that or the Orb's "U.F Orb" were my most listened to albums of that year.  I knew it was an imperfect, somewhat streaky (perhaps even Verve-y) album, and probably* not as good as their debut.  I loved it anyway, it was my "go to" album of the year, appropriate for any mood, any occasion.   Most people thought it was just another band going through their sophomore slump on the way down to one hit wonder oblivion.  The fact that The Charlatans recovered their reputation and became the last band standing from their era, with the #1 UK albums to boot, was pretty remarkable.   

I didn't have a job and basically had to beg my parents to let me spend the money on going to their concert in April of that year, the only time I ever had to do that.

Of course I overplayed "Between 10th and 11th" and when I discovered about a million new bands the next year (and had more disposable income for buying music) I very rarely even glanced at it for the next couple of years, and until just now, I hadn't heard most of these songs for well over a decade.  Every song, every word, every note, sounded so instantly familiar.  "Between 10th and 11th" might be a bit of a troublesome album, arguably the only Charlatans album where they didn't seem to know what kind of band they wanted to be.  But it still sounds inspired, and I still can hear exactly why I loved it in 1992.

Ride's "Going Blank Again" is a bit of a different story.  For me, this album never went away, and I still can't understand why anyone would prefer it to their debut.  "Nowhere" was a copycat album through and through, "Going Blank Again" was an original.  Witness "Leave Them All Behind" -- shoegaze meets the Who and the Beach Boys, rocking out for eight unstoppable minutes.  Which other bands were doing that?  But even though it had so many individually great tracks, "Going Black Again" always seemed like less than the sum of its parts.  I'd followed the Charlatans from their first single onward, but I hadn't heard much of Ride until this album (CFNY played the Charlatans all the time in those days, Ride only rarely) and didn't have an existing emotional attachment to them.

That's not the whole story though, because even though the album (and "Leave Them All Behind" to a greater extent) got a lot of praise at the time, nobody really talks about it anymore.  Bergstrom doesn't offer any ideas as to why that happened either, other than the obvious (i.e. the band broke up a couple of years later, shoegaze fell off most critics' radar, etc.), but none of those reasons have prevented songs and albums from attaining classic status before.

Modeselektor live at Block Club 15/03/2012

The first time I saw Modeselektor, it was at an event in Berlin and I did a lot more wandering than dancing -- wandering from room to room, to the outdoor patio next to the river, stopping occasionally to see who was performing.  Most of the people at the party were nomadic as me, and only a fraction were dancing at any one time.  And those that were dancing on the sparsely populated dance floor were pretty freaky by typical techno party standards, even for Berlin (although most of them made their appearances after Modeselektor's set).  I only had a passing familiarity with Modeselektor at the time, and wasn't paying very close attention to their set, although they definitely made an impression ...

[...which I remember as a good, but inconsistent impression.  Or at least that's how it plays out in my mind.  I was surprised to check what I wrote about them at the time, and it certainly wasn't positive.  And I had no recollection of anyone else who played that night.  Memory is a funny thing ...]

The second time I saw Modeselektor, they played in a proper concert venue, i.e. a venue not suited for dancing and/or club acts, although the show itself was quite good.

The third time I saw Modeselektor, I finally saw them as they are meant to be seen -- in a packed dance club.  Yarin Lidor played one of the best warm-up sets I've ever heard, something very close to Modeselektor's own DJ sets, where reggae, funky and bruising techno rub shoulders for hours on end.  By the time he wrapped up and Modeselektor were ready to hit the stage, it was 3:30 AM and the crowd was rabid.

It had been a while since I was at a show this packed, where you had a fight and claw to hold your place on the dancefloor.  Modeselektor, with their dazzling video screens and their champagne baths, certainly know how to throw a party.

Diary of Musical Thoughts Podcast Episode 8

"Gullible souls have noticed a correspondence in shape between certain mixes" - 52 minutes

Here's a useful link I discovered around the time I made the mix ... there's a bit of something for everyone in there, no matter what your level of professionalism and technical know-how.

For some reason I was listening to "Lemon Incest" and decided it would be a good song to start a mix with. From there, it developed into a semi-old school thing.  Every track, with the exception of Orphyx, is over fifteen years old.  The spirit of '90's electronica lives on ...

At the risk of revealing how the sausage was made (and therefore ruining the mix for you somewhat), I had to play a lot with tempos to make the mix work.  I had a preconceived idea in my head and wanted these particular tracks to fit together in this order, but in my head the tempos are always a lot more equal than in reality.  Still, I think things worked out fairly well in the end.

Gullible Souls have noticed a correspondence in shape between certain mixes by Bruiserfs on Mixcloud

Dance music at the Grammys

This performance at the Grammys is somewhat old news, as is Philip Sherburne's fairly well-circulated take down (which has seemingly vanished from Spin's website and the entire internet, but here is a sample of what Sherburne wrote).  In case it disappears from those tumblr and other linking sites, I'll excerpt it again here:

There was David Guetta, flopping about like a Muppet behind the mixer, jabbing away at the controls in a pantomime of performance. What was all that flicking of the faders and tweaking of the knobs about? Why was he wearing his headphones over one ear, as though he were cueing up the next record? During the French superstar’s time onstage, only one song (‘I Can Only Imagine,’ from his Nothing But The Beat, which features Chris Brown and Lil Wayne in its album version) was played. Simply put, there were absolutely no services required of him that a DJ would traditionally provide. He might have tweaked a filter here or there or cut out the bass a time or two, but that was the extent of his interventions. (No matter what he’s doing with his hands, you never hear an appreciable change in the music or note any kind of cause/effect relationship.)

My rebuttal to that paragraph was written three months before the Grammys, in my review of the 2011 MTV EMA's:

David Guetta hits the stage to save the second hour of this show with Jessie J, Taio Cruz and Ludacris. I'm not sure exactly what Guetta is doing back there. He's sporting a pair of headphones (which probably aren't plugged in because he never uses them), pretends to tweak dials, and holds his hands in the air. But the laser light show is amazing, the songs are too, and the guest singers nailed their one minute each. Guys like Moby will be the first to tell you that DAT shows can rock too.  

I'm not exactly sure what Sherburne was expecting, especially since award show performances always favour spectacle and creative guest spots over musicianship.

I didn't mind that Grammys spot, sure, Deadmau5 and David Guetta weren't doing much of anything, but there were plenty of things going on (it certainly wasn't boring), and everybody was dancing (yes, they were on TV, but people do go out to dance to this type of music in real life).  There's a place for this kind of performance, and Sherburne certainly knows and respects that -- he wrote a feature on the most recent rise of dance music and DJ Culture in North America for Spin a few months ago.  

I hardly ever disagree with Sherburne, but I disagreed with him here.  Unfortunately, I have to try to recall his full argument from memory.  He wasn't objecting to the idea that people like listening to Skillrex rather than dancing at Berghain until 7AM on Monday morning.  It was not a "people prefer megastar X to semi-underground phenomenon Y" type of plea for authenticity.  No, IIRC, he was upset that far too many people will see the Grammys and think that "dance music" means this and only this, and it will never occur to them that it can also mean dancing to booming techno all night at Berghain.

To this, I still say "so what"?  Plenty of people believe that rock music means KISS -- makeup, fireworks, and sex parties.   Scenes blow up and it just creates more room for every kind of taste, and eventually those subgroups will themselves become so big that they'll never interact or even acknowledge the existence of the other.

Besides that -- and this is something that is woefully under-reported -- the scene inhabited by Skillrex, Guetta et al is far more inclusive and accessible.  One of the reasons they're so huge is because they're happy to slot themselves into the music industry's regular marketing model, where anyone can invest the time and money into buying their music, going to their shows, and watching their videos on the internet.  It's what every exec dreamed would happen when Prodigy and Chemical Brothers were hitting it big in 1997.  On the other hand, it is nearly impossible to gain admission to Berghain.  The number of people who try to get in every weekend is far higher than the number of people they can admit, but when all is said and done, most people don't get in and they can't go home and download the experience later on.  David Guetta's world is a world of hearing your favourite three minute song on the radio, the Berghain world is one where you need to invest six hours to get a taste of what it's about and you'll never find out the name of most of the songs you heard.

The Langley Schools Music Project, "Innocence and Despair"

On most weekday mornings I wake up with the radio.  The music plays, and the DJ tends to ramble on about the songs, but I'm usually not listening very carefully to either.  But music can really surprise you when you're not really paying attention and aren't expecting to hear anything special.

I was completely taken aback by the sound of a children's choir singing the Beach Boys "God Only Knows".  The voices were haunting and yet somehow uplifting.  Voice intonation would come and go, which would ordinarily ruin a song for me but in this case it didn't seem to matter. There's something so very affecting about hearing children struggling with fragile, untrained voices, singing words that you know they can't possibly fully understand.  It's exactly the same unusual quality that characterizes Daniel Johnston's best work.  Plus, the absurdly simple arrangement flies in the face of the Spectorian approach that Brian Wilson took with his mid-60's productions.  The DJ identified this otherworldly recording as something belonging to the Langley Schools Music Project.  The brainchild of Canadian schoolteacher Hans Fenger, these long lost 1976-77 recordings were rounded up and re-released on CD in 2001 with the title "Innocence and Despair".  The title is perfect -- no two words could summarize Brian Wilson's lyrics any better.   Somehow I'd never heard of this album before, even though it finished 29th in Pazz and Jop in 2003, and inspired.at least two prominent Hollywood movies (Richard Linklater's "School of Rock" and Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things Are".

Of course, song selection is the most essential aspect of any covers albums.  In 2001 (and today), nearly every song here was an obvious, timeless classic.  But in 1976?  The Beach Boys had been rediscovered and rehabilitated only two years earlier, after the release of their greatest hits compilation "Endless Summer".  Fleetwood Mac were only one album into the Buckingham/Nicks era, their days as an inescapable FM radio juggernaut hadn't arrived yet.  Barry Manilow is much better regarded today than he was in the late 70's and early 80's.  Pulling off songs as weird as "Space Oddity" and "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" with such fluidity --and with children -- took a considerable amount of vision.  Fenger somehow knew what would work just as well as he knew what he needed to avoid. One Bay City Rollers song is fine, but most people in his position would have overloaded on goofy, happy songs like that.

Brit Awards 2012

Thoughts on some of the performances:

Coldplay's cold opening of the show with "Charlie Brown" was pretty fantastic.  When they drop the pretentious attempts at hugeness, keep things simple and just rock out (plus a few fireworks), they are one damned fine band.  Hell, even when they want to do "pretentious", they're less annoying and crank out better songs than most other bands trying to do the same.  I don't know if I've said it before, but I have no problem with Coldplay being the world's biggest rock and roll band.  Since it's the Brits, it's appropriate to compare them to another iconic British rock band of the past twenty years: Oasis.  Let's see, Oasis released two great albums and were then content to coast on their reputations.  Eventually, most people got fed up with their antics (brotherly infighting, slinging mud at other bands every time they wanted to draw attention to themselves), especially when the quality and consistency of the music took a nosedive.  Nobody was surprised when they finally broke up, and nobody really mourned them.  Coldplay honestly seem to try harder with every new album and aren't content to simply recycle what worked for them in the past.  I keep expecting them to fail, but they keep releasing number one albums, two or three classic singles per album, and when all is said and done, they might have assembled the strongest "greatest hits" (not songs, "hits", actual, radio-saturating hits) collection of their generation.  They might be the Pink Floyd of our time, wildly popular but reviled by many critics at the time for their exaggerated sense of self-importance (at least in the years when they were all but a Roger Waters solo project).

Rihanna, "We Found Love".  Speaking of adaptable artists who are putting together one of the best hits collections ever, here's Rihanna.

If you know anyone who believes that Adele's big win at the Grammys means that American and British tastes are converging, play them Olly Murs' performance of "Heart Skips a Beat".  Dance pop + fey clean cut young males + twenty five girls in red leotards dancing in front of a set of red hearts?  Good luck bringing that to America.

Florence and the Machine, "No Light, No Light".  I love it when goth storms the charts, no joke.

Adele sang "Rolling in the Deep" and flipped the bird, and it's fair to ask whether this is any different from what MIA did at the Superbowl.  Answer: it's a lot different.  Not to condone swearing on live TV, but ...

1) Adele is the world's biggest music star, and the Brit Awards are the top music awards show in her home country.  As expected, she won all the biggest awards.  The show was about HER.  Not getting more than 20 seconds to speak after winning Album of the Year is pathetic.

MIA was a sideshow at a halftime performance at a football game. The TV broadcast was about the game, the halftime show was about Madonna.  She rode the coattails of bigger stars to get there and tried to make the show about her, when it wasn't.

2) Like I said in my Superbowl post, there's a time and a place for protesting and trying to look badass, and the Superbowl halftime show isn't it.  The Brit Awards aren't the Superbowl.  Somebody gets drunk at the Brits and creates a "controversy" every year, it's practically expected to happen every year, and nobody gets too upset about it because awards shows aren't taken as seriously as they are in the US.  The Brit Awards are a big celebration, but it's generally understood that the Grammys are more like an annual meeting of industry insiders, and more decorum is expected.  It's impossible to imagine people being OK with swearing at the Grammys or the Oscars.

As a matter of fact, it would have never happened in the US because American awards shows run long all the time (less so than they used to), so Adele would have been allowed to talk for as long as she wanted. The Brits have to run in their allotted time slot, down to the minute.

Blur were great as usual, and it's amazing to see how "Tender" has been transformed from nearly forgotten single on their most "difficult" album to their biggest big happy singalong.

Two "new" releases, the Legends Edition (II): Drugstore, "Anatomy"; Woob, "Repurpose"

Last year, I wrote a post about new albums by PJ Harvey and Mogwai, two fairly well known acts who happened to release their best new music in years.  This pairing is a little different. Both acts vanished without a trace for a number of years, only to make fairly recent and unheralded comebacks.  So unheralded, in fact, that even I had no idea they'd released new albums until a few weeks ago.

A lot of people would consider it a stretch to call a couple of relative unknowns legends.  But they both made singular, other-worldly music in the mid-90's, including albums that I believe were two of the top ten albums of that decade.  At the same time, I don't think they can be considered "cult" acts either.  Drugstore recorded a single with Thom Yorke at the height of the "OK Computer" hype. Woob was the flagship act on Em:t, which was a very well regarded label in ambient music circles.  On just about any given day, you can find Woob and other Em:t CDs fetching impressive sums for resale on eBay.   Some bands make a couple of great albums, disappear for a while, and their legend only grows with time.  But most bands that disappear for ten years are simply forgotten.  Even some of their biggest fans, like me, forget all about them.  That is, although I still love the music they made, Woob and Drugstore ceased to exist as living, breathing things for me some time ago.  Even when I knew that Drugstore had reunited over two years ago for a series of comeback gigs, it didn't seem real.  They had been out of sight and out of mind for so long, and I simply forgot to check up on new developments.

Isobel Monteiro summarized her "lost" years on her blog and posted regular updates leading up to the release of "Anatomy" this past summer.  Woob's official website doesn't say a word about why Paul Frankland decided to resurface when he did, but the past two years have seen a number of new releases, as well as the re-release of the classic "Woob 1194" album.  It's like a dream I never thought I could be having -- it's 2012, and both Drugstore and Woob are active, working musicians again.  Did their talents come along for the ride too?

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"Anatomy" is a lot less immediate than the other three Drugstore albums.  There's nothing resembling the Velvet-y fuzz rock of the debut or the stadium-sized crunch of "White Magic For Lovers".  "Songs for the Jetset" caught me off guard because it was so tranquil and laid back.  Its mellow, understated melodicism only clicked for me after a number of repeat listens. But "Anatomy" is even quieter and slower moving.  Nothing "rocks" here, even compared to the more upbeat moments on "Songs for the Jetset".  Besides a few twangy splashes of guitar on the opener (and single) "Sweet Chili Girl", the opening trio of songs crawl along so slowly, with so much empty space on the recording, that you might mistake them for a set of iTunes-only acoustic outtakes rather than the songs on the actual album.  I came around on those songs however.  Besides, the essence of a Drugstore album is never within the first few songs.  You always have to wait a bit until they slice your heart open for real.

"Anatomy" is very much the sequel to "Songs for the Jetset", in that it has the same recorded in a log cabin, stripped down, whisky-soaked feel. It could have released at any point in the past ten years.  There are no production gimmicks, nothing that does or will date this album anytime in the near future (as opposed to the treble-heavy Owen Morris-style sound of "White Magic For Lovers", which was left behind in the 90's on the Oasis and Verve albums from which it came).  It's a Drugstore album through and through, filled with all of their usual trademark song types.  There's the motivational ode to alcohol ("Can't Stop Me Now"), the mid-tempo rocking duet with a male singer ("Aquamarine"), the silly song ("Blackholes and Brokenhearts"), and all the tear-stained ballads you could ever want, featuring Isabel Monteiro's still deliciously sultry voice.  And "Clouds" is the type of soul-crushing breakup song that separates good bands from essential ones.

I'm not sure there's ever been any album quite like "Anatomy", that is, I'm not sure time has ever stood still like this.  You might expect that Isabel has the type of voice that would slowly disintegrate over the years, for example, in the same way that Kristin Hersh's has.  But time and mountains of cigarettes be damned, she sounds absolutely the same as she did fifteen years ago.  The rest of the band is new, but they've been seamlessly, impressively plugged into the Drugstore formula without a single misstep.  How often does a band take a ten-year time out from recording music, pick up at the precise moment where they left off, and still manage to sound this contemporary?  Two years ago, Drugstore were nothing but a memory, now they've reappeared out of thin air and gone straight back to being one of the world's most interesting bands. How did it happen?

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Whereas Drugstore seemingly hopped in a time machine, reappeared ten years in the future, and continued where they'd left off in 2001, Woob's 2010 comeback album, "Repurpose", is less of a continuation than a do-over of past work.  Significant portions of  "Woob 4495" have been reedited and reassembled -- it's as if you're hearing a long lost alternate mix of the album.  One problem with "Woob 4495" was that nearly every track was too short (e.g. the brooding opener "Gate") or too long (the 24-minute "Depart", too long by at least ten minutes).  "Repurpose" strikes a good balance between those two extremes , keeping the best elements of the source material and embellishing or cutting back as appropriate.

All in all, Woob's ethno-music direction fit nicely into what Em:t was releasing at the time.  Most of "Repurpose" is reminiscent of his post-1995 music, when he was comfortably nestled into the Em:t pack.  But "Woob 1194" was superlative because it was completely unlike anything else on the label. It combined warm-blooded dub with bone chilling ambient, effortlessly and seamlessly switching between styles, blissful at one moment, frightening the next.  "Repurpose" doesn't break new ground until the final track, "85 Bit", which finally recalls the anything goes spirit of the debut.  It combines science fiction soundtrack melodies, speaker rattling bass, prog rock organ sounds, squelchy downtempo beats, and a million other things into a 17-minute catalog of ambient moods and textures.

Perhaps the most flattering thing one can say about listening to "Repurpose" is that not a minute goes by when the music isn't instantly recognizable as Woob.  As a fan, you can't really complain about that, especially when an artist returns after fifteen years in the wilderness.

Whitney Houston RIP

This one really shocked me.  She had had a number of well-publicized personal problems over the years, although more recently she had claimed to clean up her act. Or maybe once her star had fallen, her problems never went away, they just became less publicized.  No news is not necessarily good news. 

The shock I felt over Michael Jackson's death was dampened considerably because I'd become so accustomed to hearing stories of his eccentric living habits and various health scares.  But with Whitney Houston, there may be a sexist element involved here -- with Amy Winehouse as a recent exception, in the 21st century we don't expect female stars to be sad junkies who turn up dead in LA hotel rooms. 

Some people have noted that two of the four megastars of 80's pop music are now gone.  Twenty years ago, Whitney Houston was unquestionably the most down to earth of the bunch -- Michael was Michael, Prince was changing his name to a symbol, and Madonna was doing softcore pornography and trying to push every boundary she could.  Whitney's reputation was unblemished, she was at the peak of her powers and about to release one of the biggest hits of all time.  Who would have picked her out of that bunch as the 80's superstar most likely to fly off the rails? 

I was never much of a fan of her music, although her influence on every R&B diva that followed her cannot be overstated.  "I Will Always Love You" might have been the most inescapable song of my lifetime.  At the time, I hated it because I heard that song, along with anyone else with even a passing interest in music in the early 1990's, more than any human being could possibly tolerate.  Michael Jackson's superstar status fizzled around the same time as Whitney's, but his influence on contemporary music seemed to vanish for a number of years, until a generation of teenaged stars (boy bands, Britney Spears) brought him back in a big way.  Whitney's shadow, however, was constant.  She's been a presence in the charts for over 25 years, whether she was releasing music or not.

Madonna and friends at the Superbowl

I don't remember hearing "America the Beautiful" sung at the Superbowl before, is this a new tradition?  Is the NFL taking cues from the WWE again?  During the introductions they also played "Written in the Stars" by Tinie Tempah Ft. Eric Turner, which was the theme song for Wrestlemania last year (I'm not sure if it was played in the stadium or just for the TV broadcast, but I think I heard it in the stadium).

During Kelly Clarkson's very capable version of the national anthem, I wondered how exactly one gets chosen for this sort of gig.  Singing the national anthem at a high profile sports event, especially the Superbowl, is just about the highest profile appearance you can get.  I understand how it works If the singer is connected to the network somehow, e.g. a Glee cast member singing at a football game broadcast on Fox, but otherwise, do record companies pitch for this stuff?  I feel the answer is obvious to most people other than me, I mean, how many high profile sports events have I seen without giving this much thought ... ?

I really enjoyed Madonna's performance, it's up there with Prince's as possibly the best Superbowl halftime show in recent memory.  Although music-wise, I much prefer Madonna to Prince, her show had a number of flaws -- some dodgy sounding vocals (a mixture of live and lip synched singing), a video floor that was bright and busy to the point of distraction -- whereas Prince's didn't really have any.  This is exactly the sort of spectacle I expect to see in a Superbowl halftime show -- part concert, part circus, part light and video show -- that you can't get from a performer like, say, Tom Petty.  You have to have a deep and varied catalogue to pull off crowd pleasing singalongs, uptempo dance numbers, ballads, a bit of funk, a bit of epic, insane choreography, unanticipated drum/guitar/voice solos, and cool guest spots all within a brief but action packed twelve minute time window.  Prince and Madonna can pull off that kind of show without even trying, whereas acts that wrote the same song over and over for thirty years (e.g The Rolling Stones) cannot. 

Cee-Lo Green sounded amazing and very nearly stole the show, which he tends to do at spectacle and awards shows such as these, Nicki Minaj was terrific as usual, MIA is of course a load of crap. Watching live, I completely missed her flipping the bird because I was thinking about her complete lack of talent as a singer or rapper, especially in comparison to fellow cheerleader Nicki Minaj, whom she had to follow.  I know that giving someone the finger on TV isn't exactly shocking in 2012, and it's not like I'm worried that this might corrupt the youth of America or anything like that.  But if you're going to brush this off with "get over it, it's 2012", then you also have to recognize that in these technologically advanced, supposedly enlightened times, there are a million ways to make a statement and get your message out, and an equal number of times and places where it's advisable to do so.  Halftime at the Superbowl is not one of those times.

I didn't think MIA could possibly do anything that would make me respect her less, but once again she outdid herself.  First off, she crapped all over Madonna, whose coattails she was riding last night, ensuring that the post-show gossip would centre on her rather than on the megastar that people tuned in to see.  But most of all, MIA is completely clueless to the fact that she's a sellout.  It doesn't get more red state, Jesus worshipping, heart of corporate America than the Superbowl.  No matter how much of a rebel you think you are in your own mind, when you accept an offer to appear at the Superbowl, then you're getting into bed with all those things whether you like it or not.  Accept it and go along for the ride, or stick to your "principles" and find another publicity outlet.  It's pathetic to see a celebrity, who married into one of the world's richest families, trying to stick it to the Man with ridiculous stunts on one hand, while living the lifestyle of the Man on the other.  What's even more pathetic is that she truly believes that this makes her every bit the rebel that her infamous father was, like she's carrying on his legacy or something.