Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

They tend to be a bit flaky and drippy for my tastes. Then again, I've never been a fan of whittling the whole world down into a nice, quotable soundbite. I guess hers are a slight step up from the "wot matters is dat you got a bird wot's there for you wheneva shit goes down" homespun bollocks which predominates over a lot of the rest of facebook.

I dug a track I heard recently, Bad Dancer. She's going for a Nu-Yoik Dance-Punk thang, and she gets it. Pretty amazing feat for an 80-year old, really. Haven't heard the recent releases, but if they're like that I can see why a fan of her avant-fluxus-primal scream stuff wouldn't go for it, but I worship at a pretty broad church so I can get behind it. You can't really tell an 80+ year old woman to try to make a tantric two-hour recreation of Mind Train without being held responsible for the potentially tragic results.

The dude Lawrence was talking about was one of the founders of a type of music that definitely doesn't make me smile, Powerviolence. It's an intense electronic onslaught mixed with things like old Nazi recordings and extracts from interviews with serial killers; it usually has provocative, bating themes (abortion, rape, incest, murdah!!!). It has its adherents, and supposedly there's often some kind of irony at play there, but mostly it's just enfeebled, emotionally and physically crippled men trying to get a rise out of people via their music which they could never hope to do in conversation. So, a bit shit and adolescent.

I dug a track I heard recently, Bad Dancer. She's going for a Nu-Yoik Dance-Punk thang, and she gets it. Pretty amazing feat for an 80-year old, really. Haven't heard the recent releases, but if they're like that I can see why a fan of her avant-fluxus-primal scream stuff wouldn't go for it, but I worship at a pretty broad church so I can get behind it. You can't really tell an 80+ year old woman to try to make a tantric two-hour recreation of Mind Train without being held responsible for the potentially tragic results.

Dunno about that. I've spoken with Dog on here at least a handful of times about Yoko. He's not a fan of anything she did post-Fly, which I guess is fair enough, but I thought she did a pretty good job subverting pop tropes with Elephant's Memory and the like.

Anyway, Yoko does a Q&A every Friday where she answers 15 FB and 15 Twitter questions. Sometimes there aren't too many more than 15 questions asked, so if you ever fancy interacting with her about anything it's worth a bash. Let me look up the question I asked (it was something sycophantic about Why).

Here we are:

"Wahoo! Yoko Ono just answered one of my [admittedly total brown-nosing] questions.

http://imaginepeace.com/archives/12671

Q: How did you encourage John to produce such striking, cosmically forward-thinking guitar playing on your wonderful song Why? So many genres are forever indebted to you for your work on that Plastic Ono album and Fly.

A: "I didn’t encourage John to do that. His incredible sense of music made him realize that he had to play that way for that kind of sound."

It's still in my Top 10 songs of all time...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCb0TsSIqI0"


I'm kind of more a Fly dude now. I do think Yoko's Plastic Ono Band record is easily superior to John's, at least for my tastes, but the fact that it's played by Lifelong Rockers does start to reveal itself after several listens. Just a certain drum flourish here that Jaki Love-Time would never be caught doing, or an out of place blues riff played by Clapton that breaks the spell. Why is still an adrenal shot to the scrotum and I'll love it right up until my dying days. That and Greenfield are the definite stand-outs. Fly is that sound's more organic conclusion, though.