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I have recently found last year's version of this Steve Winwood classic song, and I am caught by how suited this critical but hopeful song is for this year.

"Things look so bad everywhere
In this whole world, what is fair
We will walk the line
And try to see
Falling behind in what could be


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I first blogged about the Martha and the Muffins 1980 hit "Echo Beach" back in May 2005, noting how the song resonated with me. The narrator, dreaming of an escape to an idyll beyond in the mid of a boring conventional job, speaks to me.

On a silent summer evening
The sky's alive with lights
A building in the distance
Surrealistic sight
On Echo Beach
Waves make the only sound
On Echo Beach
There's not a soul around


I was also amused to learn in 2011 that the song was going to give its name to a new performance space down at Ontario Place.

I heard the song again, sitting on my lunch break at patio of the Church and Wellesley Second Cup coffee shop when the song came on the speakers. Again, it resonated deeply: Who would not prefer a summer rather different from this one?



As I noted back in 2005, the song is a classic. It lasts; it not merely endures the decades, it thrives.
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The Eurythmics song "Would I Lie To You?" is a perennial joy, a sound of self-assertion told with Annie's imitable voice with joy and (among other instrumentation) a great horn section. The song and its album, Be Yourself Tonight, might be a break from the Eurythmics' more experimental synthpop and New Wave material on earlier albums, but they carried it off.

Would I lie to you?
Would I lie to you honey? (oh honey, would I lie to you?)
Now would I say something that wasn't true?
I'm asking you sugar, would I lie to you?


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The live version of "Express Yourself" performed in 1993 by Madonna in Sydney and released to video on The Girlie Show: Live Down Under is a joy, an energetic disco reworking that is one of my early-morning energy songs.

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  • Leah Collins at CBC Arts tells the amazing and twisty story behind the ascent of the Hampsterdance from an obscure Geocities page in 1998 to global fame.

  • Barbara Ellen at the Observer, looking at the collapse of HMV, notes the decline of the old music industry, which was at least capable of rewarding some creators appropriately. How will musicians now earn their living?

  • Briana Younger at The New Yorker responds to the horrors being exposed in R. Kelly's abuse of women and asks about the moral responsibility of the fans in consuming Kelly's music.

  • Lady Gaga has apologized for her collaboration with R. Kelly on the 2013 duet "Do What U Want", calling it an ill-thought reaction to her personal traumas of assault and pulling the song from streaming services.

  • Owen Myers at The Fader wrote a fantastic essay about the meme-worthy video for the Dua Lipa hit "New Rules".

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  • Bad Astronomer Phil Plait links to a beautiful music video showing highlights of the Moon.

  • The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly writes about failure as a learning experience.

  • Centauri Dreams writes about sensory associations, of how memories unite films and planets with things here on Earth.

  • D-Brief notes that Japan's Hayabusa2 probe is looking for a place to land on asteroid Ryugu.

  • Hornet Stories notes the plans of Russell T. Davies to launch a new dramatic series looking at the impact of AIDS in the UK in the 1980s.

  • JSTOR Daily links to a paper suggesting Adam Smith would be unhappy with modern inequality, for the disincentives it provides the wealthy to be productive and not rentiers.

  • The Planetary Society Blog explores what India has to do to meet its goal of launch an astronaut into space by 2022.

  • Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that not many worlds--not outer-system moons, not even the Kuiper belt--will survive the sun's red giant phase intact.

  • Window on Eurasia reports on a rebellion of ethnic Russians in Grozny in 1958, protesting the return of the Chechens from Stalinist deportation.

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The 1998 Madonna song "The Power of Good-Bye" , all shimmering electronica with subtle lyrics soulfully sung, bears consideration as perhaps the best song Madonna has ever had. Ray of Light is a really good album.

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The Azealia Banks song "212" is as fantastic a song now as it was at the end of 2011 when it was released. It's fresh, sonically complex, and does a brilliant job of portraying Banks' skills as a lyricist and as a vocal performer both singing and rapping.



Back in October 2012, I was in rhapsodies about Banks and her song. I predicted big things for this defiantly energetic, decidedly out queer star. I wanted them.

And then, well, we didn't get those particular big things, of a stardom to rival Nicki Minaj. Her Wikipedia article contains an extended multi-paragraph passage about the various controversies she has been involved in, some involving people outside of the music world like Sarah Palin (!), almost all dealing with Twitter and Instagram. Four of the first ten links pulled up Google search relate to the various scandals. Billboard examined her most notable fights on Twitter recently, but Banks has even gotten into fights on her Instagram account. (That last baffles me. I don't know how you get into flamewars on Instagram.) I ended up unfollowing her account on YouTube after she came out with statements encouraging the election of Donald Trump.

I don't know what happened. Is this a case of an excessively familiar--excessively uninhibited--use of social networking technologies undoing a nascent star, making someone on the brink of becoming big poisonous? Does this reflect deeper issues, mental illness perhaps or racism in American society? (Banks' support of Trump apparently does reflect an apocalyptic tinge in African-American society, a hostility towards a structurally racist society that remains so despite everything.) Am I actually well-positioned, as a cisgender gay white man, to ask these questions? I don't know.

I'm left with Banks' music. I still love "212"; I still hope she can be a star. Can she? I can only hope so. "212" is so good that it simply cannot stand alone in any artist's songbook.
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I was getting ready to leave Brooklyn's Bay Ridge early Monday afternoon when the news broke on Facebook that Dolores O'Riordan of The Cranberries had died. I was taken aback; The Cranberries is one of those bands that defines my mid-1990s experience of watching music television, Canada's MuchMusic, and to have yet another star gone prematurely ... Sharing their breakthrough song "Linger" was the only response I could think of as I walked those chill street.



Oh, I thought the world of you
I thought nothing could go wrong
But I was wrong, I was wrong
If you, if you could get by
Trying not to lie
Things wouldn't be so confused
And I wouldn't feel so used
But you always really knew
I just want to be with you


The Independent has a nice feature explaining the genesis of the song, how the young O'Riordan took a song written by Noel Hogan and introduced her own lyrics, talking about her own teenage heartbreak at a nightclub.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote at Pitchfork about this song, more evidence of O'Riordan's "flinty open heart".

It was one of the first songs the band completed after O’Riordan joined, when they were just in their late teens. It’s a tale of love, deceit and the lingering feelings of desire for an impossible relationship, an impossible situation, and an impossible partner who broke the contract of love. “It's ruining every day / For me I swore I would be true / And fellow, so did you / So why were you holding her hand? / Is that the way we stand?” asks O’Riordan. “Were you lying all the time? / Was it just a game to you?…” Yeah, you don't want to be on O’Riordan’s emotional hit list.

Then the fireworks come. The twinkling guitars and staccato strings rise with her oh-so-recognizable voice and she nails the unforgettable lyrics thousands of fans have sang back to her at festivals and concerts across the globe these past 25 years: “But I’m in so deep / You know I'm such a fool for you / You've got me wrapped around your finger / Do you have to let it linger? Do you have to, do you have to, do have to let it linger?” [Shakes head. Places palm over heart.]


(Erlewine goes on to write about how the marketing practices of the music industry in the 1990s helped make "Linger", along with "Dreams" and "Zombie", such memorable songs, appearing on soundtracks and being associated with iconic moments of pop culture. Recommended.)

It was iconic, was a song that mattered to me even before (almost a decade before) I could actually get the feelings involved. "Linger" is a profoundly honest song, and Dolores O'Riordan felt like an honest person, the sort of person I'd like to know. I wasn't alone in connecting, or buying that song's album and is successors; O'Riordan's strongly Irish voice connected globally.

William Goodman at Billboard also wrote movingly about O'Riordan, how her voice was not just distinctive but distinctly Irish, perhaps symbolizing dynamic Ireland's moving forth in the world as modern but still itself.

As a kid, this was one of my first introductions to wistful alt-rock drama. In an era of male-dominated guitar rock, I discovered the Cranberries by sneaking into my older sisters’ rooms and listening to their CDs. The cover of the Cranberries’ debut, Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?, released at the height of the grunge era in March 1993, showed the band cloaked in black, perched on a couch (as would their next release... they liked couches). It was easy to sit in awe of a vocalist commanding so much emotional power, and so in control of her dynamic, unique instrument. It's a voice that left deep and lasting marks.

“Linger,” along with the LP’s other single “Dreams,” would launch the band’s career -- and go on to sell five million copies worldwide. The group would ultimately sell over 40 million records across the globe. The grittier rocker “Zombie” would become perhaps their most recognizable song, but it’s always their dreamy side that stunned the most—the gliding choruses and lyrics that were like a swan dive off the Cliffs of Moher.


And now O'Riordan is gone. The police say it wasn't a suspicious death; the suspicion seems to be that, in the context of her openness about abuse she had suffered, that this was an accidental overdose or something intentional. I am so sorry for that: we all need more musicians like her. All I can do, from my vantage point as a distant fan, is to be thankful we had her for as long as we did, and that she gave us songs like "Linger."
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I largely agree with Noisey's Josh Baines: The Wham! song "Last Christmas" is one of the top contemporary Christmas songs out there.



Loss, of course, is what powers “Last Christmas.” In itself, that isn’t unusual: pop music is an extended treatise on a topic that’s troubled mankind since we emerged from the swamps, our mouths glued shut with primordial ooze. As a feeling, loss is eminently relatable; it is an indivisible inevitability of life itself, something each and every one of us experiences to varying degrees of seriousness day in, day out.

What makes “Last Christmas” a truly incredible evocation of loss, however, is that it shows rather than tells. By that I mean that anyone can sing about a break up, and a lot of people do, but crafting something that sounds almost analogous to the feeling of weightless vertigo that comes with accepting something is over when, in fact, that’s the very last thing in the world you want, is nigh on impossible. But George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley managed to do it.

It is there in that galloping bassline, a juddering thud that sounds like a lost lover desperately trying to backtrack their way into the good books. It is there in the droopy, weak, drippy synth that plinks and plonks its toytown melody over and over again, sounding brokenly childish in the way that all of us can when romantic fantasy meets adult reality. Even the oddly inert drums manage to evoke a sort of curdled stagnancy reminiscent of a post-breakup hangover where you’re convinced you’re hurtling towards an irreparable regression.

The words that “Last Christmas” uses are fine, perfunctory. They are completely adequate, as most lyrics are. You could, and I have, engender the same emotional response—firing up those same sad synapses that only light up at the sight of a half-crushed minced pie in a drain and the sound of dogs crying with cold on the beach after an ill-advised Boxing Day dip in the sea, all in the name of charity of course—with a German europop version, or a cover from Greece.

But even without the words, without George Michael’s utterly extraordinary vocal performance—and rarely has a singer demonstrated such understated mastery of phrasing, intonation, and delivery—”Last Christmas” drips with feeling. Like Leyland Kirby’s work as The Caretaker, the instrumental version “Last Christmas” manages to summon the ghosts of everyone you’ve ever loved, of everyone who’s ever lived and been loved and been left and been left unloved. The presence of something that once was and will never be again—however many stars we wish upon, however many bones we crack—haunts the song.
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Alice Glass is a rising Canadian star, a singer-songwriter active in the electronic and electropunk scenes for more than a decade, famous for her frenetic stage shows as part of the duo Crystal Castles and since 2014 a solo artist.

Inspired by the #metoo movement, Glass announced that her split was triggered by her abuse from her partner in Crystal Castles, Ethan Kath. "Without Love" is a song addressing this, first track to drop off her new EP with a video full of gorgeous apocalyptic floral imagery courtesy of Floria Sigismondi



I think I like this song better than anything she did in Crystal Castles.
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This live version of Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft's "Der Mussolini" has been playing in my head all week.

Geh' in die Knie
Und klatsch' in die Hände
Beweg' deine Hüften
Und tanz' den Mussolini
Tanz' den Mussolini
Tanz' den Mussolini
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I just discovered French singer Desireless and her 1986 international hit "Voyage, voyage".



I find myself entranced. It's a very 1980s song, dated by its production and by its video, but it lives up to its lyrics' description of a desire for escape, for the sort of transportation that leads to transformation.

Au dessus des vieux volcans,
Glisse des ailes sous les tapis du vent,
Voyage, voyage,
Eternellement.
De nuages en marécages,
De vent d'Espagne en pluie d'équateur,
Voyage, voyage,
Vole dans les hauteurs
Au dessus des capitales,
Des idées fatales
Regardent l'océan...


Desireless seems not to have had many hits after this, and she's still closely linked to the song. Below is a 2016 performance for German television, a reworking.

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It has been a hard and unsettling year, and for many this all began with the death of David Bowie, Listening to "Lazarus", it's still hard to believe he's gone, and sad to know we'll be absent his living presence.
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Today has been a raw day for so many people, many for the obvious reasons of today's tragedy, others perhaps for less prominent reason. Finding security, somewhere, is a good idea. Van Waffle did it with a beautiful nature walk; I'll do it with a bit of music.



"L'amour existe encore", like the "Ziggy (Un garçon pas comme les autres)" that I blogged about last November, comes from Céline Dion's Dion chante Plamondon album of 1992. By Dion's standards it's a quiet song, careful, with wonderful gentle lyrics.

Quand je m'endors contre ton corps
Alors je n'ai plus de doute
L'amour existe encore
Toutes mes années de déroute
Toutes, je les donnerai toutes
Pour m'ancrer à ton port.

La solitude que je redoute
Qui me guette au bout de ma route
Je la mettrai dehors...

Pour t'aimer une fois pour toutes
pour t'aimer coûte que coûte
Malgré ce mal qui court
Et met l'amour à mort

Quand je m'endors contre ton corps
Alors je n'ai plus de doute
L'amour existe encore,
L'amour existe encore...

On n'était pas du même bord
Mais au bout du compte on s'en fout
D'avoir raison ou tort

Le monde est mené par des fous,
Mon amour il n'en tient qu'à nous
De nous aimer plus fort...

Au-delà de la violence!
Au-delà de la démence
Malgré les bombes qui tombent
aux quatre coins du monde.

Quand je m'endors contre ton corps
Alors je n'ai plus de doute
L'amour existe encore...
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Some weeks ago, the indispensable pop culture blog Dangerous Minds featured a post on Kahimi Karie, J-Pop chanteuse who was relatively big in the 1990s but never quite managed to cross over.

Influenced by the French yé-yé singers of the 1960s and finding her own Serge Gainsbourg(s) in the persons of then boyfriend Keigo Oyamada (aka the brilliant Cornelius) and quirky Scottish performer Momus, Karie’s whispery, half-spoken Claudine Longet-esque vocals were the perfect gloss on a pop confection that looked backwards and forwards equally.

Her best-known single “Good Morning World” was commissioned for use in a Japanese cosmetics company’s TV commercial. The song’s playful, nearly nonsensical dada lyrics named-checked a Fall song (“How I Wrote ‘Elastic Man’”) and it utilized a particularly effective sample lifted from the Soft Machine’s “Why Am I So Short?” Talk about two insanely cool dog whistles to smuggle into a corporate advertising jingle. Bravo!

There was much to like in the Kahimi Karie package, but for whatever reason, other than the small hipster J-Pop audience, few outside of Japan took notice.


"Good Morning World" happens to be on YouTube.



I like it. I can imagine picking this song, and its album, at a CD shop. It would be an import, but I could see it gaining some traction in the crowd of people fond of the shiny Britpop of the 1990s. I can imagine Jarvis Cocker covering this song, or Elastica giving it a harder sheen, or Karie herself crossing over.

She didn't. It strikes me that Karie's story is that of Japanese pop culture internationally generally, or at least in the West. In the 1990s, it was poised for a crossover that never happened. Or was it? What happened?
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I mentioned on the 28th of April that I owned the album Purple Rain, but I hadn't mentioned mentioned that I had was just about to see the movie Purple Rain for the first time. The Kingsway Theatre, out in the west end by the Royal York TTC station, was putting on a special showing--first two shows, then six.

Purple Rain at the Kingsway #toronto #prince #purplerain #kingswaytheater


Why not?

Ticket #toronto #prince #purplerain #kingswaytheatre #kingswaytheater #tickets


My Friday night showing was, alas, not very populated. I was one of five people sitting in the theatre at the 11 o'clock showing, and the only single guy. I have no idea whether the wonderfully restored Kingsway Theatre decided to continue with the full slate of showings planned. (I hope it picked up.)



How was the film? The segments of Purple Rain which work the best are the performance scenes. Here, Prince is electrifying. The rest of the film does not work especially well as anything but a framework for these scenes: Few of the major characters are portrayed by competent actors, the script needed some work to become a tighter and more cohesive narrative, and the direction seemed workmanlike. The movie has to rank as a relatively minor pop culture artifact of the 1990s, secondary to the music. Since that's apparently how Prince saw his ventures into film, and how his fans saw it, I can't say that it was a failure on its own terms.

I'm still glad I went--even at its worst, Purple Rain was at least fun. As I mentioned Friday, I'll be going off to the Regal Theatre downtown to see the concert film Sign o the Times. Yes, I will share my impressions with you all.
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NOW Toronto's Norman Wilner describes this showing Sunday of Prince's concert film Sign o' The Times. I think I will be trying to make it.

His name was Prince – and Christ, was he funky.

There is no greater filmed evidence for this than his amazing 1987 concert movie Sign O’ The Times, which is pretty hard to find in most of the world. There wasn’t even a DVD release in the US, thanks to a rat’s nest of rights issues; in Canada, Alliance Atlantis put out a decent disc but it’s gone out of print and now fetches a fortune. If you have a Blu-ray player, you can always import the Japanese edition – Japan is in the same region as North America – but it ain’t cheap.

I can feel you getting depressed. Well, don’t! I have great news for you: the Canadian theatrical rights for Sign O’ The Times are still in place, and my friends Matthew Price and Sasha James have secured an honest-to-god 35mm print to screen on Sunday (May 15) at The Royal as this month’s Musicale! feature.

And it is an absolutely fantastic concert movie, organizing performances of his 1987 concert tour into a thrilling, coherent whole. Prince (who also directed the film) captured himself at an absolutely electric point in his career, just after breaking up The Revolution and exploring every possible direction he might take in the years to come. You honestly won’t be able to tell whether that’s sweat dripping off of him, or just excess talent.
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  • blogTO notes that the Canadian government has prevented Conrad Black from selling his Forest Hill mansion on account of taxes.

  • Dangerous Minds shares a beautiful 1981 live performance by The Church.

  • Language Log notes the inclusion of Singaporean and Hong Kong English words into the OED.

  • The Map Room Blog notes the four Italian nuns who helped the Vatican map prt of the sky.

  • Marginal Revolution notes the increasing concentration of the Quakers in Kenya, and by extension other Christian denominations in Africa.

  • The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer looks at the success of solar energy in Mexico.

  • Strange Maps notes the history of Middle Eastern migration into Europe.

  • Torontoist looks at a Kensington Market project displaying graffiti from around the world.

  • Towleroad notes Donald Trump's refusal to reveal his tax returns.

  • Window on Eurasia looks at the role played by Vladimir Zhirinovsky in Russian politics.

  • Zero Geography links to a paper co-authored by the blogger looking at the online representation of Jerusalem.

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Dangerous Minds' Richard Metzger pointed me to this superb video, recording a performance of very early New Order in New York City.



Before they recorded their classic 1983 album Power Corruption & Lies, New Order made an extended trip to New York and absorbed some of the city’s more upbeat sounds into their own morose and world-weary music. Latin salsa, 12” remix culture and the electronic beats they heard in nightclubs like Danceteria and the Roxy were obvious inspirations for the music they would soon come to make.

But at the time this was videotaped—live at the Ukrainian National Home in New York’s East Village on November 18, 1981—New Order were still largely Joy Division minus Ian Curtis, a post punk band, not the electronic dance quartet they would soon become. It’s a fascinating document of the group during what is perhaps the least documented era of their long career. As I would personally chose Movement over anything else in their catalog, this was a real treat to watch.

Low lights, the intense musicians saying almost nothing to the audience, a concert held in a hot sweaty dance hall—there’s an extremely underground quality to this show.

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