State of Play: Part 1

A Pop Cultural Diary and the Lists of the Listless

You’ve got to love lists. I do. It’s the privilege of having a blog, that you have an outlet to publish them. And I’ve been listening to way too much year-end American National Public Radio to resist. For anyone interested, my top ten albums of the year would go a little something like this:

10= Wilco Sky Blue Sky, the Shins Wincing the Night Away, 9 Beastie Boys The Mix-Up, 8 Tegan and Sara The Con, 7 Jens Lekman Night Falls Over Kortedala, 6 Kanye West Graduation, 5 Ryan Adams Easy Tiger, 4 the Arcade Fire Neon Bible, 3 Andrew Bird Armchair Apocrypha, 2 LCD Soundsystem Sound of Silver, 1 The National, Boxer.

As for songs, well I couldn’t really seperate between White Stripes’ ‘Icky Thump’, Kanye West’s ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’ and ‘Stronger’, LCD Soundystem’s ‘All My Friends’ and the National’s ‘Apartment Story’. It’s been a good year for music. But really, with a wireless internet connection and a healthy sense of curiosity, these days, what isn’t?

I was originally going to devote a whole blog to the explanation of my top ten lists (which with spare time at work were both extended out to top twenties) but I think Jon did it pretty well and conclusively. (The second man to climb Everest? Anybody?) So I’m taking a different tack…

See, an afternoon or so ago, I was walking back from the supermarket. Lauren had gone to yoga (bikram, the slightly intense 45 degree heat version) so I marched the fifteen or so minutes to the local Dominion supermarket. Lauren left before me. Her I-pod was out of batteries…

(huge diversionary story edited for reader entertainment, we cut now to the relevant part of this nearly needless story)

I finished up the shopping with a sense of content. Reaching for the I-pod, I wanted an album for the walk home that was a sure thing, that wouldn’t leave me grappling with several shopping bags to awkwardly change tune. I wound up on Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere. Immediately, 2006 came flooding back to me. In my mind I was soon sitting back in the editor’s chair barking orders at Nicola (not really. Bark? Me?) and listening to my copy of St. Elsewhere that was sent free of charge to me and listened to many, many times over. Ben and I had conflicting tastes, and it was one thing that we could definitely agree on.

(Sidenote: I used to work in a job where free things were sent to me. Now the only free thing I can hope for is the odd charity box of donuts at work provided by the higher ups. Poor, poor, pitiful me…)

So it dawns on me. As much as the new Shins album entertains me, I draw similar amounts of pleasure thinking about the Enrique Iglesias Spanish language pop song that was on high rotation in Buenos Aires in June. The Gnarls Barkley was superb, but would have been slightly out of my top ten in 2006. But yet, for me the album is a vivid marker of nostalgia for that particular year. It’s also a tremendously entertaining album.

I’m a critic, I love to be clinical. But sometimes, you know, the things we end up critically appreciating can disappear into history, while lesser offerings unknowingly end up sound-tracking our lives. So I decided to veer away from traditional evaluations of “best”, and look at two things. Popular culture that became intertwined with my life in 2007, for better and for worse. Also, about half of Jon’s list would have been on mine, and he did a great job, so I didn’t have much to add.

…A Pop Cultural Diary of 2007.
Between 2001 and 2007 I spent roughly 800 dollars on a seven-year stretch at the Big Day Out. So January for me, is usually defined by a Big Day Out trip – with the various artists in attendance sneaking into high rotation on my i-Pod. In fact, on the other side of the world with the Big Day Out fast approaching, I’m pining a little. So January started off with Hot Chip’s The Warning (Hot Chip will break your legs, snap off your head!) and the Killer’s Sam’s Town very much on high rotate. And if I remember correctly, ‘When You Were Young’ was still the pop-single du jour that self-confessed “more respectable” music fans could enjoy (the Killers’ set was the last time I went near a mosh-pit. Jumping up and down to ‘When You Were Young’, feels more significant in hindsight, but I was close to tears at the time. It was beautiful, the Springsteen derived melody and song structure mixed in with all the synchronised movement made me feel like I was part of a Coke commerical.) Lily Allen’s Alright, Still was a secret pleasure, and her Big Day Out set was fun. Although my like of her was validated by a surprise 8.0 Pitchfork endorsement, Sam kind of lashed me with a solid “people only intellectualise her because they want to feel less bad about thinking she’s hot” burn. A year later? I still haven’t shaken it.

Festival season extended for me. Camp A Low Hum was something I’m glad I did, but wouldn’t do again. Mainly for length, and value reasons, and maybe, age… I was exhausted at the end. But I’ll always remember sitting watching Tommy Ill at 10am, hungover to hell, eating two-minute noodles and fearing that I’d be the only one in attendance. Luckily two others showed, dressed in chicken suits, who ended up being back up dancers, and a couple more strolled in. It was a strange few nights.

WOMAD, which I was lucky enough to cover for the Listener and unlucky enough to have my story bumped for a piece on celebrity dogs, was memorable for the weather, and my tents demise, and also for the fact I was the only member of the media contingent not in a fancy hotel.

New Years Day is one of the big movie going days of the year for me. Stupid Hawkes Bay weren’t showing The Prestige, so we decided to nurse our hangovers with dancing penguins and screaming school children by going to see Happy Feet, which I thought terrible. More because I spent twenty minutes in a stall at the cinema evacuating my stomach than anything else. Later I would see The Prestige, and it was pretty fantastic. It was a year highlight: I would struggle to find such pleasure again in a movie till the latter half of 2007. 300 and 28 Weeks Later I could take or leave. In fact – I saw a lot of movies in 2007, I’m a cinema goer, and my consumption was elevated by my split-shifts at the New Zealand Press Association on weekends that I started in February. (7am to 11am, 4pm till 8pm. Ergh.) A movie was a good way to fill in the time. But as much as I saw that I can remember, the only film that really sticks in my mind outside of The Prestige is Notes on a Scandal. Dame Judi Dench makes a pretty good pervert.

House, M.D. and Boston Legal running back to back on Tuesdays was pretty neat. And we had a pretty good thing going with our Tuesday night run of TV at Bea’s flat. Combined with Letterman and the addition of Courtenay Cox’s new (so bad it’s somehow entrancingly good) show Dirt, it was a pretty good four hours of TV.

March, April, May…. let’s see. Well, it all seems like a massive blur of music releases, a lot of new albums hitting the streets from bands that I’ve liked for quite some time – Modest Mouse, the Shins, Kings of Leon, Arcade Fire – and while most of them kept me entertained and were all stand up albums, Arcade Fire is the only album I went back to with extreme regularity. Two albums that came out in this spell that I really, really got into – Andrew Bird and LCD Soundsystem, I got onto five or six months down the track.

And then there’s June. And everything shifts. Travelling often makes staying current with popular culture near impossible. I saw the new Die Hard and Harry Potter’s in Mexico, where for about five dollars you get a ticket and all the candy bar you could eat. In Argentina I heard Enrique Iglesias’s Spanish language single (from his highly successful Spanish language album) so many times. And it was awesome. I could sing the tune perfectly, but the words’d be gibberish. Lauren turned me onto Beirut’s Gulag Orkestra in Mexico, but that album came out in 2006. And as for their 2007 release The Flying Cup Club, it’s pretty – but I don’t really dig it as much.

On the road in the U.S.A. – we had a pretty good three person bubble going on. As we idly patrolled the greater Californian region Jon and I’s hunger for music meant that idle sifts around appropriately cool looking stores were mandatory. And out of this came a deep, drastic, life-altering love of the National. Boxer got several plays, as did Ryan Adams’ Easy Tiger. Often CD’s would just play endlessly in particular towns, I know part of Lauren, Jon and myself will always think of Los Angeles whenever we hear Kanye West’s Graduation (they both developed pretty huge infatuations with ‘Flashing Lights’, which is a great track, but as to it being the best song on the album I’d say in return – “Nuh-huh, you can’t tell me nothing”…). We’d really consume what others bought to the table, Jon’s Baywatch purchase surprisingly bought Hasselhoff back into our popular consciousness. Scrubs Season Five kept us going through idle moments in Montana. Our bubble was slightly out of step with word of mouth, so we could go wrong or be completely out of step with supposed popular opinion. None us thought much of The Simpsons Movie, and I’m still reading raves. Though, if we’re back on movies, the latter half of 2007 saw some pretty stand out releases, American Gangster, Michael Clayton and No Country for Old Men were all outstanding. And the rise of the indie-comedy as the Freaks and Geeks, and Arrested Developmemt crew were all over three of my favourite lighter movies of the year, Juno, Superbad and Knocked Up was pleasing. Although when I think of American Gangster, I often think of the first time we tried to see it, where coming across a sold out cinema I convinced Jon that we could make to a “nearby” cinema in time for another showing. Nearby was actually not so nearby, and the showing sold out.

Gigs need a mention. At first we were deprived some big shows through a failure to acquire a ticket to gain entry, Wolf Parade, Wilco and Rock the Bells were sorry misses as they all sold out. Lauren even considered herself a ticket curse. But if that was the case, we definitely broke it – the gold medal for best show going to the Arcade Fire/LCD Soundsystem double bill at the Hollywood Bowl. Two great bands, playing great sets, in an amazing setting. (Apologies for the overuse of generic superlatives.) The Hollywood Bowl is a beautiful amphitheatre set into the Hollywood Hills – a glowing cross in the surrounding hills adding creepily to the Arcade Fire’s stage set up. It was a great night. Modest Mouse in Las Vegas was awesome. And Peter, Bjorn and John were very entertaining and enthusiastic. It’s just a pity we were so tired after Las Vegas.

Toronto, well – is kind of defined by sheer volume of media. Jon and I rediscovered Hi My Name is Mark podcasts, a new Angels and Airwaves album came out and several discussions were had between Jon and I on the finer minutae of the break up of Blink-182. And I could never forget the joy I discovered in downloading! 2007 I can mark as the year I realised my views on music piracy were flimsy, and they’d really only existed because I’d never had access to a decent wireless connection. I downloaded to fill the long hours of unemployment at first (Season Four of House, M.D. is the best yet, and damn the writer’s strike for depriving me of more), and then later on a wealth of podcasts came in handy to nurse me through the working week. Seriously, downloadable podcast versions of American National Public Radio are the best way to kill time at work.

Oh, and how about the ending of the Sopranos?

To be followed by a real blog…

Posted by James

Tags: Culture, Lists, reflection, Travel