Not… a particularly recent tune, this one. 1998, in fact.
But for some reason, even though I was pretty obsessed with dance music at the time, Faithless passed me by. I think perhaps because I assumed that you can’t have a great dance track with truly meaningful lyrics. Turns out I was wrong. (more…)
There… aren’t that many amazing YouTube channels out there on music, I feel. #ControversialOpinion. There are a lot… but very few that I personally rate. There’s a lot on technique, construction, kind of ‘hard theory’. But no one has really done an Every Frame A Painting take on music.
What Nahre Sol does, I think, is really interesting. She goes in a completely different and wonderful direction. She doesn’t do video essays, so much as video poetry. (more…)
Way back in March, when H and I were visiting a Lucien Freud exhibition in Dublin, one of the rooms had televisions showing a discussion between a number of women about what ‘the nude’ represents in the history of Western art. (Spoiler: nothing good, basically.) And one or two of the phrases that one of the women stuck in my mind enough for me to hit Google when I got back to the hotel, and find out what the programme was.
It turned out to be Ways of Seeing, a British documentary from 1972 that is recognised as one of the great documentary series on art. (more…)
It all started the morning after a bout of insomnia, when I was trying to get stuff done but was too tired to reasonably function. I wanted something on in the background, but nothing that would confuse or irritate me. (I have reached that age where 70% of all media irritates me.)
And I found this on Netflix, and it was perfect.
Or, at least… it was when I watched it with the sound turned off. I’ve learnt my lesson with Luc Besson over the years. His sci-fi films look amazing, but they are very, very silly. (more…)
I initially picked the 10 Years of Akala album. Because the man is, in my opinion, the most interesting thing happening in UK culture right now. (He’s been ‘happening’ for a while obviously, hence the album title, but as ever I’m late to the party.) But I started listening to his music at around the same time as I started reading his new book Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire, which looks set to make him a mainstream intellectual nationally, and maybe internationally. And it’s the book rather than the album that’s really hooked me — I chewed through it in big gulps in no time at all.
The book is part life story, part political essay and part pan-African history, and for anyone interested in British, particularly English, culture… you really need to know this stuff. (more…)
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