Remember when Victoria Beckham tried to have a solo pop career? Yeah, I think we can safely say that was a mistake. Her voice is just awful, even with all of the editing in post-production.
Oh man, I’m such a huge fan of Spike Jonze. I keep meaning to buy the DVD with loads of his best music videos on, as well as Michel Gondry’s. He did some fantastic videos in the 90s, most of which are above, but there’s a few notable exceptions:
The Pharcyde - Drop, filmed completely in reverse, and featuring a little cameo from the Beastie Boys, who were sampled in the track.
Daft Punk - Da Funk, following a half-man, half-dog through a lonely evening in New York. Brilliant.
Fatboy Slim - Praise You, a spoof documentary of a local dance group performing to this track outside a cinema in Los Angeles.
Ludacris - Get Back, a real satire on usual gangsta rap videos.
The man’s a genius, essentially. He’s a damn good actor too, as evidenced by his part in Three Kings, a criminally underrated film.
I’ve been listening to Roni Size a lot this week, for some unknown reason. It’s a mix of drum’n’bass and trip hop that I was really into in the late 90s, and I’m drifting back towards as a result of listening to so much DJ Shadow and the like.
I was going to post the track Brown Paper Bag by itself, but realised that it’s a 9-minute epic and wouldn’t work. Then I remembered that the video for it was a fantastic piece of art by itself. Remember, this was pre-Matrix, and not a lot of videos employed such sophisticated techniques.
Yesterday’s PopBitch email had a section which harked back to 1992, as part of their series of remembering the 90s. Amongst some random gossip, including which celebs turned 16 that year, they had a little list of some classic tunes that came out that year.
I remember 1992 as the year I really started listening to music. We moved back from Germany in the middle of 1991, and then moved house again, but in 1992 I started watching Top Of The Pops more often, and listening to the radio in my mum’s car. It was pop music at first, but even then I leaned to the more dancy side of things. Nearly 20 years later, I still love loads of the songs from that year, and PopBitch brought back some great memories.
The best of their selection was the above, Ace of Base - All That She Wants, but there were some other great tunes too:
A mate of mine told me how he was at a big dance festival called Creamfields a couple of summers ago, when this song first came out. David Guetta was playing a set, but let the music tail off into silence. He played a couple of notes from the intro to this song, sending the crowd wild.
But there was this sort of distant rumbling, getting progressively louder, and my mate said he was wondering what the hell was going on.
Then, at the exact moment that the FUCKING RED ARROWS flew overhead, he dropped it into the tune full whack. The Red Arrows then did a display choreographed to the music overhead.
Man, that must’ve been fucking amazing. And he tells the story much better than I do.
This is just insanely brilliant. A fantastic piece of music made up of only sounds from the Alice In Wonderland film. The beat is ridiculously good, and the video is perfectly in time to it all. This is some serious talent at work.
I have to echo diamondsintherough and ask if the audio is available for download anywhere.
I’ve been meaning to post this song for a while, but still don’t have internet in my new flat yet, so the mp3 will just have to wait. But I stumbled across this live version on Youtube, which is pretty damn cool.
Most Rasputina tracks are downtempo, with not much more than vocals and the cello strings, whereas this one has many more layers and sounds.
I used to think that there was a guitar involved, creating the chugging riff sound, but it seems that the whole song comes from just three cellos and the drums. Check out how the singer plucks the cello like a bass guitar about a minute in.
Some of my favourite Rasputina tracks are remixes done by people like Marilyn Manson and other DJs creating dirty industrial house material. A lot of the album tracks across their back catalogue are just crying out for a huge beat and/or guitar riff behind them.
You know what there aren’t enough of in the world?
Covers of Boney M songs.
This is the original and best with their Christmas song “Mary’s Boy Child / Oh My Lord”.
About
Londoner, thinking and writing far too much about far too many random things. Wannabe photo-/videographer of my life. More likely to be found propping up a bar somewhere.