Take Off Both Your Shoes

Woke up so hungover this morning that the only plane of consciousness I could handle was watching CBeebies until 4Music started, at which point I watched a documentary on Shakira and several hours of ‘Top Number 1’s of the 90s!’, narrated by Mel C. Takeaways are thus:

1. There’s a new series of Babar, but… it’s CGI. And awful
2. Teletubby land is basically a police state
3. Aqua did that song from Sliding Doors that’s actually pretty good
4. All Saints are amazing. Wait, I already knew that

Now to *finally* watch Mad Men. I am t3h excite, but I watched the new Game of Thrones yesterday and it’ll take a lot to top that. Speaking of GoT, I’m sure Danaerys is talking differently now (much more colloquial, I think). I like her character a lot more now because of that. I don’t know if it’s intentional or not but it’s a very clear shift from the very deliberative way she spoke in the first season.

So. I wrote a few days ago that, for all of Lana Del Rey’s affectation, her songs were still plenty enjoyable. Well, I’m watching her on SNL right now, and I feel like a retraction is in order. She comes across almost as if she’s miming to someone else’s song. In fairness, it’s got a lot to do with her delivery — she’s going for the half-whisper, and she’s not pulling it off.

Also, Hulu has so many goddamn ads. I guess I don’t really have a right to complain, since I am pretending to be in the U.S. to use it. (In case you’re wondering, all the ads are for Chevy cars and Verizon phones.)

youresoneedy asked: Hey, nice blog! I need to start posting stuff too but dunno where to start! What about you though?love finding about other bloggers!

Hi! I think the trick is to just pick something that’s preoccupying you for whatever reason and get something down. That’s how I’m going to handle mine for the time being, at least. So probably music/films/TV to start with, and maybe then branch out a bit to writing about literature (novels/plays/etc) once I’m confident I have something substantive to say.

I’m looking forward to reading your first post, in any case. Good luck! :D

It occurs to me that I’ve been doing a lot of lurking on Tumblr but haven’t really gotten into the swing of posting. With a bit of luck, that’ll now be a thing of the past. Not a new year’s resolution, though, so hopefully it’ll actually stick.

So, without further ado: music! I finally decided to figure out what all the Lana Del Rey-related blather was in aid of. Video Games was certainly quite good, but Blue Jeans is my favourite of the two. I understand why the hipster backlash from certain quarters was so ferocious, but the core of the problem for those people is a firmly held belief that for a pop artist to be quite so transparently effected is somehow a sop to commercialism. It’s certainly easy to take that view, but are her chanteuse pretensions really so different to Madeleine Peyroux pulling a disappearing act each time she releases an album, or Regina Spektor recreating the various quirks and asides of her studio recordings when she plays live? Most people know that Katy Perry’s first shake at a music career was as a gospel singer, and switching genres quite so severely is bound to be cast in a negative light given that the transparent goal is to achieve mainstream success, and the money that brings. In itself, such an act is largely indistinguishable from, say, someone leaving teaching to take up a higher paid private sector job. What rankles people is that such behaviour seems nakedly mercenary, and a breach of the fairly widely coveted ideal of artistic authenticity. It’s certainly the case that part of the appeal of artists like Laura Marling and Tori Amos is the knowledge that their songwriting is borne out of an innate artistic impulse, as opposed to the output of Ke$ha and Lady Gaga, which often comes across as an exercise in calculated controversy — that is, enough to dominate the editorial pages of broadsheet newspapers for a few days, but not so much that it won’t get played on the radio. Lady Gaga’s sartorial habits may have become tiresome, but as long as she keeps releasing songs as good as Alejandro and Telephone, it hardly matters.

Now, Coke Talk’s wry dismissal of her as nothing more than ‘Rebecca Black with a heroin slur’? Rather less easy to dismiss out of hand, ha. If it was played acoustically, then sure, the lyrics wouldn’t be able to support a box of matches. But the actual song is exceptionally atmospheric, to the point that the naked cultural appropriation on show in the video seems entirely appropriate, and perhaps even justifiable, in a way that the video for Marina and the Diamonds’ Hollywood most emphatically is not.