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. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
“Life isn’t perfect. Your profile should be” reads the tagline for this parody website, set up by mental health charity Sanctus. I don’t know much about the charity itself; they might all be vampires (in fact, yes, they’re probably all vampires), but I think this campaign is a great idea.
