Category: music

From Simon, writing in the silverdollarcircle:

amartya sen’s son, who goes under the name MC Kabir, has his hip hop album reviewed in this months Wire! this excites me more than it should, i think.

And should the degree of the excitement be a function of the enthusiasm of the review?

E. J. Thribb rises to the occasion, in this week’s Private Eye:

Im Memoriam

So. Farewell
Then
Johnny Cash.

Famous country
Singer:

Yes, you were
Known as the
Man In Black.

Were I to
Attend your
Funeral,
I too would
Be the Man
In Black.

But Tennessee is
A long way
From Tooting.

And Ryan Air
Do not
Fly there.

E. J. Thribb (aged 17 1/2)

PS. Apologies to
Leni Riefenstahl

For not writing a
Threnody,
Or a Thribbody
As they are known
On the occasion
Of her death.

“The Woman In Black
Shirt”.

Yes, that would have
Been a good title.

Or perhaps I
Should have used
It for Lady
Diana Mosley.

The same copy also reports that the verb “to hoon” means, according to the Urban Online Dictionary, “to act in an unacceptable way”.

Johnny Cash has died, aged 71.

“When I was just a baby, my mama told me, son,
Always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns,
But I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die:
When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry.”

I started listening to Johnny Cash about five years ago, starting with the Man in Black compilation, and there are now a dozen Cash CDs in my collection; and the older I get and the more I listen to his songs, the more excellent and important a musician he always seems to me to be, for all kinds of reasons.There’s the remarkably harmonious fusion in his music of a surprising number of American traditions — country, rock’n’roll, gospel, folk, a bit of blues — in a career stretching from the million-dollar quartet of the 1950s (Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash) through to the new millennium; there’s the combination of his own excellent songwriting (“Folsom Prison Blues”, “I Walk the Line”, “I Still Miss Someone”), with marvellous covers of songs by his contemporaries (Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe”, Bruce Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman”, Kris Kristoferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down”), with older American classics (“Wreck of the Old ’97”, “Cocaine Blues”, “The Great Speckled Bird”, and so on). It adds up to a body of work which treats of the most important, most difficult subjects of them all — love, God, murder, prison — with immense humanity, most remarkably displayed on Johnny Cash At San Quentin, the finest live recording I possess. And he could be very funny, too, and not just on “A Boy Named Sue”.

He had been ill for a while, though the longstanding diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease later turned out, as I recall, to have been mistaken (it was just a surprisingly long hangover, or something); his most recent album (American Recordings IV: The Man Comes Around) was alarmingly poor, its recordings of “Danny Boy” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” showing that he’d lost the plot a bit; his darling companion June Carter Cash died earlier this year: this seems to be a good time for this life to draw to a close.

But what a life — and what fantastic music.

Have you ever wanted to play “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais” on your ukelele? Now’s your chance…

For odd reasons, I find myself in possession of a duplicate copy of the LP set of Verdi’s early and generally unappreciated opera, Il Corsaro (The Corsair). If you can give it a good home, and are prepared to come round and collect it some time, do drop me a line.

I finally got around yesterday to buying The Band by, um, The Band, a record which I’ve been very fond of for a long time, and was interested to read these online notes on its best track, “Up on Cripple Creek“, which do a very nice job of unpacking many of the oddities of the lyric.