Everything this person has written for TUNETHEPROLETARIAT

Nobody wants to read a poem

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Madlib – Funky Blue Note

“Funky Blue Note” is a circuit board of stuttering and scrambling vibrations and beats, guided by a visible end to sheer noise, and fascination for neighbouring sounds – the team effort. Something like that, I suppose. Through it I imagine a band of the aged; boys of ninety-three, seated and leaning, whispers and bleating. Each chasing layer of this motley-clique a spasm of their educated folly, sleight of hand and play. I see the sweat, the casual shakes, and the overhead pipe-smoke screen. The competition for air and a final breath. There’s one man on organ, holding an end note with unconcealed wincing mirth. The note, like life, colossal even as it fades. “Funky…” is thick and piercing and if you lean a shoulder too close you’ll catch a void. You’ll catch a pixel among millions, and you’ll grasp at nothing. The short straw. The point – if you can ever devise a pure point from conception to end in music – is surely that of passing on experienced devotion and with it an offering of arrested motion. Own up to the sound; it’s monstrous and demanding.

[Shades-o-blu.]

Summer tears get the best of me

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Widen yourself ever so slightly, please.

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Purity Ring – Lofticries

Megan James gives the creep of “Lofticries” flashes of a warmer depth. Whale-dance synth guards otherworldly vocals at a pacing similar to a headache and its resounding confirmation of circulation’s surging birth and plundering death. It dips and dives in repeated bursts that freshen upon constant reprise, and radiates like the dazzle of sun-hit sight. “Lofticries” is an icescape, sharply textured, hazed only by hailstone beats and lullaby strains, peaked by words so enticing: “your precious, fractured skull”, “use your oily fingers”, and “trembling thighs”.

[PURITY-RING. Matt Pasquarello, you are the artist above.]

Confusion

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The Zutons – Confusion

Where have you gone, my Zutons? Where have you been? What might you have seen?

“From day one I led you on.”

Oh, man and your reputable wit. You failed charmer. Pritchard’s double-bass – one quarter of a band so usually drowning in pep – is slavish to the emollience of the song’s tearaway from harshness, certainly as a fighter to the vocal severity of one Even McCabe, a voice prone to a Liverpudlian laden accent that just about avoids creasing (or staining) the almost caressing tones and approachable quality.

The futile balladry of “Confusion” plays out in the slight gambol of a Velvets-scented guitar solo (Reed and his radio pop), atop instrumental drone, serving as a weakened rebuttal to a whimsical moment of saxophone seduction and rare playfulness, even if entirely composed. “Confusion” is potentially endearing, potentially a treat.

[They don’t even have a website.]

This is how we do it!

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The title to be sung a little something like this. “I’m kind of buzzed and it’s all because… this is how we do it!”

Will you please explain…

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The Beatles – Come Together

I smell the hot and sticky petrichor this morning, one in which you are most certainly in love, Sir. There are whispers of reciprocation in the same air and that is surely a splendid thing. It sates my hope for legitimacy.

Or has dulled the tease of a stronger story. I’m unsure.

Sir, do you smell that same air or is yours of a fresher make? Mine is a beauty I envision. I wonder if yours is a famous painting. I hope it brings you slender ease to know you’re in on this trick. It must make the walk and the uniting cameras uncomplicated. We’re going to critique how you look at her. I hope you won’t mind. How do the apples of your garden taste? I bet they taste sweet with a hint of ironic bitter. I bet they taste better than ours and our paltry lot.

In the offing, they salute you. They come together and pay for your garden with such ease – they and their modern day offering. Sir, your garden is splendid. It is made of the many working hards now clapping.

“Come together right now over me.”

[Give it up for the…]

If the bailiffs come…

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Dead Kennedys – I Kill Children

This repellent, yogurt soiled, boy. He wore lengthy vests and nothing more, pissed in boots and drowned puppies. He wore a patch, too, had a crooked eye and hit women.

Once (“often” may be closer to the aged-truth), I urinated in my father’s Wellington boots, or “wellies”. This action must’ve secured itself in retaliation for advances made upon my mother. I assume this to be true. Even a stolen kiss goodbye before work would’ve ensured I pissed in your boots, Father. I was to be the only man in my mother’s life. You become protective about those who carry you, you see. I understand cats slightly better now; corrupt traps though they sorely are.

The idea and its calculation, the execution and the aim; and aim is crucial. The one too many juice cartons downed in preparation. Hard not to be proud of a corrupt child. The boy punched women, too. Those related by marriage that got just a tad too close. I have never endeared a stranger to my fine self by pinching the flesh of their flushed cheeks – not outside the impassioned, at least. I expect the same in return. Space, please or so arrives the lesser documented baby-fist. Imagine a hard grape flung at you. Ask my Aunt. She knows.

There’s also a story – none of them mine – about a near-drowning of a litter of pups, or maybe just one or two. Can you be angry at a child whose years are shadowed by the numbers of fingers on a single hand? The idea of forgiving a child is spoiled with farce. I was with my cousin on the day. Not sure if the let’s-see-can-they-swim idea was mine or hers. Still, that the story is known I find her guilty. She’ll marry soon. Might be best not to lead with such a story on the day.

He was a scallywag, a rascal, and, at times, a pup-hunter. These are their memories, not mine, although I tell of them as a protector would. The outcome – the harvest – of those young and troublesome would do well to birth soon.

Black Star – Children’s Story

He smears them with surface damage, before they dare expose him. “That’ll shut them up,” he’d say. A tormentor in the guise of those tormented. What a shameless prick. Thankfully not incorrigible.

[Buy some Fresh Fruit…]
[Buy Mos Def & Talib Kweli .]

Grime and moonlight

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Al Bowlly – Guilty

The audible crackle that clothes “Guilty”, and its restless fizzling layering of grime, is to music what the wash of black and white is to photography. It’s a quality fraught with permission to undermine any need for introduction of scene, instead offering in its place a time and location and specificity all through presence alone.

Bowlly’s voice is entirely triumphant, playing out stretched notes which build upon and caress vocal landscapes; those hovering above sprite piano fits, churning wisdom with every uttered word, and soaring with claims to the grandeur of his monumental love. “If it’s a crime then I’m guilty, guilty of loving you.” If persuasion was not intended, then it being a resulting emotion is surely proof of a core legitimacy. [Sweetest.]

Don’t sit down

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Nobody ever says thank you

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Emmy The Great – We Almost Had A Baby

At times you hear the sweetness of an assumed ditty and so are lured into the safe arms of not trying – not trying to assume that for three lousy minutes there may be something more to a song than immediate charm. More to a person than the aesthetic. And it doesn’t say much for the listener when he daren’t allow a piece of fervent art to steal him for three minutes. “We Almost Had A Baby” was to me, to my shame, simply a tap and clap along song of waltz and drawn out cello whisper, with twinkling piano, and sneaky electric licks, too. It was once that, but is now hauntingly affecting.

“Well you didn’t stop when I told you to stop, and there was a month when I wasn’t sure…” goes an opening line sold to us in an insouciant tone, yet rocking with harrowing suggestion. I’m thrown. How I expected such a line to be delivered I do not know. Maybe it can’t be delivered, just sung and then experienced. It’s almost poetry in its elemental presentation and involving response. From the forced claim of the partner and his unimportance, to the use of her situation for gain of pride and position, the entire piece is intricate and entirely brutal.

And then with a month came assurance. “I put my hand across my gut; I plan to feed it with a heart.” No; the false alarm. Nothing to feed. [Pledge to Emmy as she celebrates the Royal wedding.]