Happy Birthday Lou Reed "Her Life Was Saved by Rock 'n' Roll" is the first line coming to my mind when I think of you. Rock music as a saviour. Rockn' roll as a modern Jesus. That is brilliant and life-affirming. When I listen to the song I know it is true. There would probably never have been punk without you and indie music neither. Thank you and keep on rockin' and rescuing Lou. 60, "it's the beginning of a new age."

Sunday, lazy Sunday "I needed so much To have nothing to touch I've always been greedy that way" Leonard Cohen: The Night Comes On

Lousy weather most of the day, rain and a little sun and more rain made me stay in-house today. Additionally I have caught a cold and my nose has been running all day long. Therefore I spent most of today reading Various Positions. A Biography of Leonard Cohen from 1996 by Ira B. Nadel. I know a little more about Cohen's life now but somehow I feel cheated as I hardly got to know anything new about his character and his thoughts. The two most important lovers of Cohen Marianne Ihlen and Suzanne Elrod apparently did not collaborate to this book. Suzanne is the mother of Cohen's two children, she is not the Suzanne of the song. Marianne on the other hand is the Marianne of So Long Marianne which was his farewell song to her. Cohen left both as so many other women.It would have been nice to hear her stories about him which would probably be much less positive than the overall tenor of the book. Cohen's perseverance and obsession with poetry and writing is something I really adore in him. The almost thirty years of Zen meditation practice underline his self-discipline. Besides I learnt that Cohen was a good friend of Joni Mitchell (who btw composed Both Sides Now and not Judy Collins as stated in the book). And apparently he fell deeply in love with Nico who told him to back off as she would only sleep with men younger than herself as for example the 18 year old Jackson Browne. Cohen was much more successful in Europe than in America. He said the reason could be that they do not understand him there(very funny). I found his behaviour at concerts in Germany a little irritating. His first concert in Germany he starts with the Hitlergruß "Heil Hitler". In the Berlin Sportpalast he salutes the crowd with Goebbels famous words "Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?". Provocation or bad taste? Cohen is a Jew which makes this even more embarrassing. The key scene for me are the recordings of his first album. In the studio he needed a mirror to see how his appearance was when he played guitar. Vain as a peacock was my first thought when I read that. Maybe I am wrong. Nevertheless I have put his last album Ten New Songs in my top ten of last year. The music is purely electronic but arranged in such a subtle way that his voice (and Sharon Robinson's in the duets) stays the angular point of the songs and the music floats calmly around Cohen's extremely low and masculine voice. The lyrics I have still to discover. They sound rather calm but also darkly philosophical as always with Cohen.

Taking Sides: New Order v. Joy Division Btw in ILM I post as "alex in mainhattan". My post:

Speaking in terms of wine and grapes. It is concentration vs. dilution. Joy Division is a very concentrated almost black wine smelling black currants and pressed from around 40-50 very ripe grapes (songs) of an amazing quality which have been hand-picked. New Order is like a light sparkling wine made of much more grapes (100+) with most of them still unripe. A few are very sweet nevertheless. The bouquet is full of lemons. Especially the electronic production methods do not add to the longevity of this wine. In short New Order's music is more fun but short-lived whereas Joy Division is stronger and for the cave. You won't regret tasting either of these wines. Both should be consumed in moderation.

JD and NO again
My favourite blog subtitle is "I start many things and have yet to finish a single one" from somnolence. That describes quite precisely how I proceed usually.
One of the things I have started in my mind which will probably never see the light of the day is a kind of Joy Division "project".
First I would like to research the story and background of each of the 40+ JD songs.
Then give an exact account of what is musically happening in each song (most difficult part for me as I am no musician, Josh is quite good at this).
After that I would like to write about the impact of each song on me. There I am thinking of listening to the songs with eyes closed and writing down spontaneously (a little like in Kerouac's spontaneous prose style which was actually very much inspired by Jazz) what comes to mind. That could be natural phenomenons like rainstorms, earthquakes or buzzing insects but it could also be more abstract. For example the feeling of being locked in a room or losing a good friend.
At the end I would try to interpret song by song from the lyrics.

I feel a little bit ashamed of the fact that New Order shows up first in my best of 2001 list on the left. That is just because it was the last purchase. Somehow I am still looking for this year's grand cru Bordeaux. Get Ready would certainly qualify for a cool, fresh and sparkling viñho verde with the gaz slowly emanating.

Some thoughts on Joy Division/New Order
When thinking of Ian Curtis disbanding Joy Division May 18th 1980 by hanging himself the end of The Doors comes to mind.
Jim Morrison died under never fully explained circumstances probably on an overdose in Paris in the spring of 1971. Their end is not the only similarity between them. I doubt that Morrison was an epileptic like Curtis but nevertheless when you see him in some live videos it becomes clear that this guy was mentally insane. The way he danced and did not look at the public shows that he was on an extreme ego trip. Same is true for Curtis. Even the way Curtis sang with this grave low baritone voice is very reminiscent of Morrison. Only difference is that even if The Doors music is quite dark for the US of the late sixties it is incredibly sunny compared to Joy Division. The Doors were from LA and that is not exactly a very sombre place. Manchester on the other hand...

Very soon after Curtis suicide the remaining band members decided to continue under the name of New Order. After the release of the terribly foreboding Love Will Tear Us Apart which Curtis had written shortly before his death New Order toured the US substituting Joy Division who had planned that tour already. In the beginning Bernard Sumner, the guitarist and singer of NO tried to sing with the same mannered grave voice as Curtis. But very soon NO followed a totally different path. I think they did this musical U-turn consciously. JD’s sound had been dooming and dark and the lyrics had been depressing and devastating. NO created dance music relying very much on electronics. The drum machine and the synthesizer play an important role in their music. And the lyrics sung by Sumner in a boy’s voice are devoid of any meaning. They consist of banalities and platitudes. They just sound nice and fit very well to the sunny shallow music. I think that this is intended. The remaining members of JD decided maybe unconsciously that they could not continue with the serious music JD had created. That music with those sad and pessimistic philosophical lyrics had been a dead end. It had cost the life of one band member. They had invested too much of themselves in that music. To no avail except Curtis death. Therefore they reinvented themselves completely. They tried to make perfect dance pop music, the most superficial kind of music imaginable. JD had been an album and a live band. NO was just a singles band. The lp records and the live concerts were rubbish.

Somehow both bands are great. JD as a legacy of punk and probably the most influential indie band (together with the Smiths) after Velvet Underground. NO as the New Wave band which opened the way for Techno.
The new album of NO is great as I said before. I would say it is their first real album. Only track 9 is a bit weak. The rest is not on par with their best singles but it is amazingly consistent slightly melancholic dance music with the typical NO sound. And the lyrics are totally useless again. I think it is an art to write hollow lyrics which sound good to the music. NO have succeeded in this discipline again. I was inspired to these ramblings by this really bad negative review of the new album which misses the point completely.

The Strokes are dud
Just listened to the four songs I linked to below. Sorry but to compare the Strokes to VU is a blasphemy. They are just another boring retro-sounding band.
Masonic Boom (Kate St. Claire) got it totally right on I Love Music:
"The Strokes are to the Velvets/NYC punk what Oasis are to The Beatles. End of story."
Last Nite has got the garage sound of VU. But it is hollow. And after having listened to it three times it is very annoying as well.
Barely Legal starts quite well with a stolen riff (where from?). But after one minute 30 it runs out of steam. There is some 70s sounding guitar free-style wankery going on. The voice of the singer is not so bad in the beginning when it is rough.
NYC Cops is the worst song of the four. The singer sounds like Jim Morrison here. The song goes nowhere. And the chorus together with some more 70s guitar work is sooo bad.
The Modern Age is a bad copy of VU again. The singer sings like Lou Reed. He even repeats Lou's manierisms like "gogogogogogogogogo". The song is probably the best of the four. If there would not be this guitar shite in the second half again.
So my advise: Do not waste your precious hard disk space for this music.
Some more discussion on ILM here.

Stealing, copying and recycling
Some quoting (mainly myself) from ILM of a recent thread about Radiohead:

"I loved Creep when it came out. Nowadays I find it unlistenable. Somehow this image of Yorke as a creep has stayed in my mind. After that nothing touched me for a while. Then there was the Help sampler for the children of Bosnia and the standout track was Lucky, the best song they ever made I guess.
Kid A did not impress me, Soft Machine and King Crimson have made similar stuff in the early seventies. I used to love those groups but somehow progrock has become a bête noire for me.
A week ago I purchased Amnesiac and I am still not sure what to make of it. The first track I liked was Knives out where the sadness in Yorke's voice really hit me. Of course Pyramid Song is great as well. The progressive stuff I have to listen to again. But the big problem with Radiohead I guess is Yorke's voice. It really touches me in the beginning but after listening to one whole album or several times to one song, it really gets annoying.
I do not really hate Radiohead but I hate all the fuss about them. They are a group like all other groups. They will not save rock music. On the contrary I think maybe rock has saved Thom Yorke's life (remember that Lou Reed song?). "
-- alex in mainhattan (alex63@...), July 18, 2001.

"which King Crimson album would that be?Radiohead have committed the crime of releasing albums that have to be listened to in their entirety,and all of a sudden they are prog-rock?they do one song that's got a bit that's not in 4/4 time and they are prog-rock? examples,please - but try not to list Pink Floyd.it's partly the truth,but it's also lazy. "
-- Damian (spacelab@...), July 19, 2001.

"What's wrong with being prog? Oh, and RH were only prog circa OK Computer. "
-- Sterling Clover (sterling_clover@...), July 19, 2001.

"Radiohead were prog for a few minutes in Paranoid Android,and as far as I'm concerned,that was it.I don't hate prog - hell,I like King Crimson and Yes - but just because Radiohead made something thematic and remotely complex,it doesn't mean they are prog,does it?They used mellotrons - does that make them Genesis?I don't think so. "
-- (spacelab@...), July 19, 2001.

"Ok. Ok. I guess I have to row back a little. The prog-rock comparison is maybe a little dubious (OK Computer nevertheless is not so far off this drawer) considering that Radiohead reinvent themselves every two albums or so. But the point is something else. They are deeply eclectic. And not in a way like Beck who I think is the genius of eclecticism (where is he now, haven't heard of him for a while). They do not create anything groundbreakingly new. The sum is not more than the parts in their case. But the press celebrates them as the most innovative group of our times which they are definitely not. When I listen to them I always feel that I have heard it before. They are chameleons. Yesterday brown today green. They do not have a distinctive sound except Yorke's voice. And that is something I really have to reproach them. Every great band has a unique sound, be it The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Fall, The Cure, Joy Division, The Cocteau Twins, The Gun Club, My Bloody Valentine, Nirvana just to name a few. "
-- alex in mainhattan (alex63@...), July 20, 2001.

"I don't really know what to say to that to change your mind, but I really disagree. At the very least, I think that the guitarists, drummer, and vocals together make them pretty distinctive, when they're playing like a "real band" with instruments in real time etc. The last two albums are pretty distinctive, too, in my opinion. One might cynically say that they just sound like the sum of their influences, but for the most part they still sound distinctive even when you might be able to say, e.g., 'this sounds like a Warp Records outtake'. "
-- Josh (kortbein@...), July 20, 2001.

"I thought that part of the beauty of the new Radiohead was that you could turn your radio on and hear something fucked up and there was always a possibility that it could be a new Radiohead song - there's an element of surprise that none of the wouldbe Radioheads can provide.A distinctive sound is something that surely can only be established through repetition,isn't it?And that's something that can only sustain itself for so long,which is why it was fitting that you used Joy Division and MBV as examples - their music is great,but there isn't much of it. "
-- Damian (spacelab@...), July 20, 2001.

Strange thing here as soon as one person criticises Radiohead there are at least two people joining in to defend them. Yesterday I listened for the first time to Amnesiac in its entirety. It is probably their best album (though I do not really know them). But there they do not have any sound whatsoever, every song is different and there is this surprise element but I still do not think they are innovative. The album seems like patchwork to me. Not the sequencing of the album is bad, but the songs do not fit together. Radiohead still have ordered them in the best possible way. Mostly alternating between an experimental and a more tuneful track. What I like about them nevertheless that they are keeping such a low profile. What we really do not need nowadays is another Sting or Bono.