pampelmoose Dave Allen of Gang of Four’s Music and Media Blog — music . media . web. culture

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Listen carefully and you’ll hear the lyrics “21st Century Schizoid Man” from the King Crimson song of the same name.

The song is titled ‘Power’ and it looks like Kanye is getting all political on us…

From Wikipedia:
“The song’s lyrics consist of a short poem with one or more metaphors in every line. The song makes reference to the Vietnam War as exemplified in the lyric “innocents raped with napalm fire” and “politicians’ funeral pyre.” Before a live performance of the song on 14 December 1969 (as shown in the live album Epitaph), Fripp remarked that the song was dedicated to “an American political personality whom we all know and love dearly. His name is Spiro Agnew.”

I loved this guy when I was growing up in England. The punk rock star of snooker. R.I.P. wild guy..

This article was written by Clive Everton, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 24th July 2010 18.21 America/Chicago

Alex “Hurricane” Higgins was snooker’s anti-hero, seeking neither acceptance nor respectability. A fast, flamboyant shotmaker in his prime, whose acute non-verbal intelligence instantly read the implications of any configuration of the balls, he constantly undermined his extraordinary talent with self-destructive excess.

Higgins died yesterday, aged 61, after a long battle with throat cancer. When he won the first of his two world titles in 1972, the venue for the final, a now demolished British Legion function room in a Birmingham suburb, symbolised snooker’s status as a down-at-heel folk sport. By the time he regained the title 10 years later at the Crucible theatre, Sheffield, it had become a major television entertainment.

His 16-15 semi-final win over Jimmy White provided the most often reprised item from the BBC’s snooker footage. Trailing 0-59 in the penultimate frame, Higgins produced, like a gunfighter down to his last bullet, a clearance of 69 to level the match and added the decider comfortably. This was the death or glory situation in which he revelled. His compulsive urge to live on life’s dangerous edge, stronger than any mere desire to win, was like an addiction to the thrill of gambling. Always at his most dangerous and most fascinating in a situation of peak emotional intensity, he accessed a similar seam of inspiration in the final when, from 15-15, he ran through a trio of frames to beat Ray Reardon 18-15.

Crying with emotion, he beckoned his wife, Lynn, and 18-month-old daughter, Lauren, to join him in a surreal but spontaneous winner’s tableau that has remained one of snooker’s most iconic images. Three years later, though, he and Lynn were divorced.

He served his snooker apprenticeship in the Jampot, a Belfast billiard hall where older men would unforgivingly take his money if they could. He lived on fizzy drinks and chocolate bars. At 18, he won the Northern Ireland Amateur Championship and, playing for Belfast YMCA, won the British team championship at Bolton almost single-handed. A couple of local enthusiasts arranged exhibition engagements for him and he based himself in Blackburn, at one point being successively resident at 9, 11, 13, 15 and 17 Ebony Street, moving along as each house was demolished.

Tales of dashing centuries, bust-ups, punch-ups, drinking, gambling and women spread through the snooker world. His challenge matches against the late John Spencer, then the reigning world champion, packed venue after venue as he acquired an army of supporters who were to give him their unqualified support throughout his career.

In those days, the world championship lasted for a year. Each match took at least three days and the latter stages were a week’s duration. The organising body, the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association, was simply a group of leading players, some of whom did not think Higgins was “the right type” to join their ranks. They were overridden by those who saw that as a box-office attraction he was clearly going to help them all make money.

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I was listening to the Piano Magic album, Writers Without Homes, today and it dawned on me how there’s a trifecta of artists all making music with similar atmospheres and sensibilities. Take a listen to the track below and then compare to the new Menomena album and the Radiohead album Kid A. You might make the same connection.

If you like them as much as I do they have a pretty extensive discography here. Their latest album is Ovations. I sincerely hope that they don’t keep getting overlooked.

Piano Magic – Music [Won't Save You From Anything But Silence]

Ahh, Shriekback. A former life, great times, mighty hearts. We made strange and wonderful music together..this track, New Home, is from Jam Science.

Click image for free mp3

I was very happy to get this in my inbox this a.m. Wonderful way to start the day. Click the image above to get your free MP3 or take a listen below.

Agnes Obel – Close Watch

I read an interesting article today by Richard Florida author of The Creative Class called Music and the Mega-Region. I though I’d share it with you as he discusses how bands like The Walkmen and others live in separate cities yet still work and record together regularly.

From the article:
Nearly 40 years ago, the geographer Jean Gottmann documented the rise of the great megalopolis of Bos-Wash – the Boston-New York-Washington corridor – as a massive new kind of geographic form. My own research (PDF) has used satellite imagery to plot the rise of mega-regions – integrated systems of cities and their suburbs – across the globe. The world’s 40 largest mega-regions produce two-thirds of all economic output and nine in 10 of the world’s innovations. With their massive scale and market size, mega-regions are becoming a key economic and social organizing unit of our time.

But mega-regions are not only important to markets, economics, and technology, now it appears they are important to music as well. Case in point, the indie-rock band The Walkmen whose newest single was recently released. Half the band live in New York, half live in Philadelphia. They maintain recording space in both places, and recorded their upcoming album from BOTH studios. Walkmen frontman Hamilton Leithauser described the logistics of their arrangement to Pitchfork in February:

Read the whole article here.