Author: Paul Little

Going For A Song: ‘Mothers of the Sun’

Black Mountain – Mothers of the Sun

Years after the “event” I emerge from my shelter pod. I am pleased to have survived. As I join the queue of people, I am thankful others have too. I remember those who have not. The queue is long and I cannot see the end. Nor do I know what the queue is for. I ask those in the line if they know what this queue is for. They say they do not. A woman gives me some water in exchange for some of my bread. The queue moves. The overriding feeling I have, and the feelings of those in the queue with me, I’d say is hope. In the distance there is a sound. We listen. We nod. Riff.

A Brave New Web?

Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard University and author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It said: “To me, the most important function of the contract is to remind people that the web we have isn’t the only one possible. That’s both a warning – including about how aspects of the web have become – and an opportunity. The contract seeks to get those wielding the most power online to commit to some boundaries in how they treat their users.”

[…]

Some online ills can be traced back to the reliance of certain businesses on advertising, with the pursuit of better revenues spawning clickbait and fake news. But Berners-Lee said companies are looking at how to combat those, and sees other reasons to be hopeful: “People in the big companies are concerned about truth and democracy. They don’t want people to look back and say theirs was the platform that misled people to vote against their own best interests,” he said.

Tim Berners-Lee launches campaign to save the web from abuse – Guardian

It’s good to have a bit of optimism, I guess, but I do like mine with accompanying pessimism / realism:

The social media companies have shown who they are over and over and over and over. It’s not gonna change. Ever.

Going For A Song: ‘Honolulu’

Any Trouble – Honolulu

Choosing The Only Ones last week reminded me of Any Trouble. Any Trouble were signed to Stiff Records in the early 80s; the label who Wreckless Eric, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, and De Feelgood, to name a few, called home. And if you know the record label or have heard those bands, you might know what to expect from Any Trouble. And listening to Any Trouble’s first album, Where Are All The Nice Girls?, there is that same aesthetic, and it’s a great example of guitar pop from that era, but it’s more soulful than what you might expect.

Going For A Song: ‘When I Call Your Name’

Vince Gill – When I Call Your Name

Since arguing the last two weeks for and against my proposition that the best country songs are the ones which teeter on the brink of parody of the genre, I’ve completely confused myself. Where I used to think ‘When I Call Your Name’ was definitely an example of a song to support my proposition, listening to it again, now I’m not too sure.

Eno before Eno…

Is what I thought when I read the song collector William Alexander Barret’s opinion, given in a lecture in 1877, on the song ‘Streams of Lovely Nancy’:

He is reported to have said that it ‘had neither style nor reason…as though someone had wantonly taken a pair of scissors, cut the lines out of a number of songs at random, and then put them together and made a song out of them’.

Folk Song In England, Steve Roud (p.91)

Then, when double checking I was right in thinking it was Eno the technique was connected with, I came across this by Austin Kleon: The (surprisingly long) history of the cut-up technique. Kleon discovers, via the writer Paul Collins, a form of cut-up (“cross-reading”) being used in the late eighteenth century.