It’s Sunday, and time for another Tiny Mammoth concert. Today, the Cocteau Twins rock out.
It took a couple of years of experimentation for the Cocteau Twins to develop their signature sound — vocalist Liz Fraser singing pretty gibberish over swirling, highly effected guitar, in songs with slightly twee titles like “A Kissed-out Red Floatboat” and “The Itchy Glowbo Blow.” If you’re into that sort of thing, no one does it better, partly because no one else does it.
But in their earlier years, circa 1982-83, they had more of a punky/gothy edge, sounding a bit like early Siouxsie and the Banshees. But even then Fraser’s vocals couldn’t be confused with Siouxsie’s; with her weird trill she sometimes sounded like she was dialing her vocals in from another planet.
Anyway, I like this incarnation of the Cocteau Twins a lot. Here are a few songs from that era.
This one isn’t quite so punky, but it still rocks, at least by Cocteau Twins standards.
Enjoy!
And tell us what you’ve been listening to lately.
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Well, apparently Pierre Pinochet is now going to be running the federal Tory party here. If they win the next election I’m probably screwed. The only question will likely be which gets me first, disability being cut off so I starve or being outed as an outspoken socialist and given a free helicopter ride. :/
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/09/12/fvnp-s12.html
Remarkable. John Oliver just called out various copaganda shows. Never thought I’d see anyone on the MSM stake out a position that far left on any issue:
https://tvline.com/2022/09/12/law-and-order-john-oliver-video-dick-wolf-last-week-tonight/
(The video embed on that page is broken but the text of the article gives you the gist of it.)
Now can we get him to start talking prison abolition?
Wider observation: something, perhaps around 2015, seems to have thrown a satchel nuke through the Overton window. It’s been blasted wide open at both ends, for good or for ill.
Unrelated: I’ve been hearing rumor that things are going quite badly for Putin in Ukraine now, and as a consequence, also with his hardliners at home. Keep an ear out for the sound of a traditional KGB agent retirement being arranged (that’d be two repetitions of the sound a 9mm Makarov makes when discharged, about 1/2 second apart). Unfortunately it’s hard to imagine his replacement will be any better, for the Russian rank-and-file or for the rest of this bedraggled old rock.
I guess I have my own personal thread here …
Read this earlier:
https://evonomics.com/free-market-genocide-the-real-history-of-trade/
It’s things like this that make me wonder why I’m even on this planet. I’m not in any position to fix this shit, since that requires at least one of social and financial capital, and I’m not even sure it’s ethical to live a quiet, comfortable-ish life knowing what happened, and still happens, to make it possible.
Meantime, where would be a good place to post art where it will get noticed? Don’t care about monetization options or etc. … I want to wash my hands of “the system” as much as I reasonably can, among various reasons.
@Surplus: John calls out a lot of corporate/governmental crap.
Regarding L&O, even other big city US police forces consider the NYPD the most corrupt. Which they are.
Cop joke — What’s the best thing about the NYPD? They give LAPD someone to look down on!
Pearly Dew Drops Drops, runnyrunnyrunnybicycle..
But also, legal news…
Sydney Powell, the lawyer who brought some of the challenges to the election is in a spot of bother.
I do though like her argument that its not fair just to focus on the fake affidavits she submitted when there were also some real ones.
@Surplus to Requirements,
<blockquote>Meantime, where would be a good place to post art where it will get noticed? Don’t care about monetization options or etc. … I want to wash my hands of “the system” as much as I reasonably can, among various reasons.</blockquote>
Deviant Art is one place to consider. Signup is free, and their free basic account isn’t too bad if all you want to do is show your art off. They’ve been around for many years now, and they have a good-sized user base there too. They have ways to sell prints of your stuff if you like; don’t immediately recall if you need the premium account to do so, though.
https://www.deviantart.com/
Is it heavily burdened with Nazis, like Reddit and Twitter and Youtube? And what would you need a “premium” account for? Monetization? (If so, don’t care.) Not having ridiculously cramped storage? (If so, uh-oh).
@Alan – That reminds me of a poetry exercise where we had to take a song lyric and paraphrase it in “elevated diction” (i.e. fancier language). I guess the lawyer applied that to the expression “If it walks like a duck…”
Anyway, it was fun! John Lennon’s “Imagine” started off “Contemplate the inexistence of paradise…” For “Baby Got Back,” I came up with “I appreciate large posteriors and am incapable of falsehood” (“prevarication” would’ve sounded better – hindsight is everything).
@epitome of incomprehensibility:
@Alan – That reminds me of a poetry exercise where we had to take a song lyric and paraphrase it in “elevated diction” (i.e. fancier language).
There was a whole Tumblr in the mid-Tweens, by Erik Didriksen, devoted to paraphrasing pop song lyrics as Elizabethan sonnets:
https://popsonnet.tumblr.com/
(Also available in book form: https://www.quirkbooks.com/book/pop-sonnets)
@Surplus to Requirements:
Yes, Poilievre is a hot mess of a candidate, whose primary concern looks to be recapturing some of the people who went off to the People’s Party because the Conservatives weren’t extreme enough. Our best hope at this point is that he’s not as good at either enforcing being on-message or pretending to be reasonable as Harper was.
DeviantArt, as Redsilkphoenix suggested, is a reasonable place for posting most art. The ‘getting noticed’ part is more of a crapshoot because there is a lot on there, but honestly that’s going to be a problem anywhere. And DeviantArt has at least enough people surfing the front page where recent postings get put that random people will see things, which can start the ball rolling.
That said, DeviantArt has seemed to want to become more actively a ‘social media’ site over the last couple of years, and a lot of people aren’t happy with the new JavaScript-heavy layout or other changes.
@Alan Robertshaw:
Well, my days of having less than zero respect for Powell’s arguments are certainly coming to a middle.
@epitome of responsibility:
There’s a certain amount of that going on in ‘Bardcore’, which is basically medieval-sounding recreations of pop tunes. Most of them don’t actually rewrite the lyrics much, but some do.
@Full Metal Ox:
There’s an old moribund blog out there called ‘Japes for Owre Tymes‘ which translated newspaper comic strips into Middle English because, frankly, that’s how old some of the ‘humour’ felt.
@FMOx: I have read that blog and forwarded it to all my English Lit major friends.
@Jenora: Who the hell still uses JavaScript? Are they featuring that Dancing Baby too?
.
What?
@ gss ex-noob
Ooh, I never knew you were Tralfamadorian!