Saturdayplaylist – Anecdotes and Antidotes in Burgundy

Where did all the face melting go?

There was a time when any self-respecting band featured a self-confessed king of the fret-board, a string-bender extraordinaire, a shredder. Bands played long extemporized songs featuring guitar solos for at least half the length of the song. In a twist there later developed a genre of bands whose whole style was the long rambling instrumentals that were made up on the spot, live, around a base melody or motif, the jam-band, whose music arose out of love for the Grateful Dead. However, as to be expected with a bunch of Deadheads the live noodling was short on melody or rhythm and long on meandering. As much as the blues rock of Clapton, Page and Beck was long on solos they came through the same pop training with the YardBirds to know that solos should be parts of songs not the reason for the song.

The blues from Chicago and Memphis produced great guitar highlights but few self-indulgent solos, even the magii of BB, Albert and Freddie focused on their guitar as punctuation for their songs, maybe they understood the audience in a blues club came to dance and not to play along with the guitar. The arrival of more and more ‘heavier’ music brought the long emotive solo, Skynnerd’s ‘Freebird’, Zep’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’, the Dan’s ‘Reeling in the Years’, Niel Young and Crazy Horse’s ‘Down By The River’ made way for metal and Guns’Roses ‘Sweet Child O’Mine’, and album after album of pouting masculine rock from AC/DC, Sabbath, Ozzy, Judas Priest, Bad Company, Panthera, MSG, Queens of the Stone Age, Van Halen. The list is sadly nearly endless, over the 30 year period from 1975 to 2005 nearly every rock song features as the key selling point the guitar solo, squeezed out at high decibels and high register. The perfect accompaniment for Beavis and Butthead to head nod along to before building up to the guitar climax where the aficionado would play the guitar solo themselves on an imaginary guitar in the air. The perfect climax accompanied by the face distorting into various shapes, in time to the various notes and string bends, effect pedal and shrieks in the classic ‘face melt’.

Unsurprisingly, not a lot of women were a, interested in taking part in this bizarre ritual nor b, encouraged to play this kind of guitar as it is hard visually to make the best effort at being attractive while gurning along to the guitar in your hand. Joan Jett made a career out of one song that both celebrated and parodied this phase in music with “I Love Rock’n Roll”.

The clock spins forward and the guitar solo got lost along the way, certainly as a staple. Whether it was just the self-indulgence of it all. Drum solos lasted even less time. Other than the Doors, Rick Wakeman and ELP, keyboards had never really held the crowds attention, it’s the same with the modern version with earnest looking guys hunched over computer keyboards desperately trying to look rock while yet another loop starts in a synth driven band. The fossilized white rock approach probably didn’t help and people wanted something new and while melody will always be king, his queen is a good lyric. So RnB, rap, alt-rock and pop abandoned the guitar for the most part, at least the part you could play on your air guitar.

Post rock brought the noise and the technical chops, but you would hardly accuse Mogwai of long wanky guitar solos. St Vincent is one of the hardest guitar soloists playing today, but she always tethers the solo in her song structure. Jack White has a great blues touch, but he seems to have got lost of late in a cage of fuzz and reverb, and he is too much of a smart businessman to mess with the needs of streaming, so nothing he releases is ever over 5 minutes and most under 4 minutes. So where are the guitar licks for those who hanker for some twang without the torch song accompaniment?

Well, Uncle Jim is here to help! The guitar hero is alive and well, he is just hiding out in Niger, Houston, Leuven and Peckham. I realized that what drives Mdou Moctar was wanting to play electric versions of taureg songs and having been forced to build his own first guitar he was not going to let tradition get in the way. He brings a hard rocking energy and the guitar leads everything, and he will happily solo his head off, especially since achieving some traction in the West and is now backed with a band.

Kruangbhin sound like they are also from somewhere off the beaten track yet without insulting my friends in Houston, they are not, they are Texas through and through but they have a unique sound that is not in anyway country or western. They are guitar led and long on instrumentals, a re-imagining of the classic rock power trio, Beck Bogert and Appice but Bogert is in a mini-dress and heels and the front two wearing matching Beatle-mop wigs. Mark Speer, the guitarist, has very good technical chops and can play tons of styles and his sound is unique, lots of clever down tempo stuff but he can let it rip, especially live.

Leuven is known as the home of the largest university in Belgium that had been around since 1425, and is also the home of Stella Artois. Like Cambridge without the pretensions and lots of lager. Brutus is a hard post-rock band with classic hard rock vocals although in a twist, it’s actually the drummer Stefanie Mannaerts, who does the singing while beating the crap out of the drum set. The guitarist Stijn Vanhoegaerden can shred.

South London is the home of Dry Cleaning. In the way of the world they have been classified as yet another arty, spoken-word English rockband alongside Squid or Black Country, New Road, who both broke through around the same time, post Covid. If you listen to them, particularly live, there are two things going on, for sure the surreal visual images elucidated by Florence Shaw, and launched like float glass on top of the batshit riffs of Tom Dowse’s almost hardcore guitar. Dowse, a fan of Sonic Youth and Pavement had spells in metalcore bands, he played support once for his heroes Converge. What is interesting about Dry Cleaning is that being in their 30’s they have none of the fears of not doing something, in case it prevents fame and/or glory. There was an interesting comment by Mike Skinner, aka ‘The Streets’, who at 44 is promoting a film he has spent years putting together: “Essentially, it’s all nostalgia. Most of a musician’s career is nostalgia for those few years when they were the thing…. When you’re a musician, your 20s are amazing, and then the rest of your life is about dealing with that.” Unsurprising that many bands disappear only to decide to tour their eponymous, multi selling album 25 years later, when they are all in their late 40’s, and probably need the cash.

I wonder whether it was just the amazing options that computers delivered that killed the guitar? To the budding musician you could learn to play guitar, endlessly playing chords like ‘Play in a Day’ with Bert Weedon, trying to replay the riff you heard that you cannot get out of your head. Hope you find someone else to play with, the way that most bands started for over 50 years. Or you could learn to play basic piano and then GarageBand, Pro Tools, Reason or Logic Pro will open up a complete panoply of musical styles, sounds and rhythms just for you in your headphones – you don’t even get to annoy the neighbors “I’m calling the police!”. For sure, there are never a shortage of indie guitar bands around, but the vast majority of music is not that anymore. I am not sure many 15-year-old boys are playing, on repeat, a shredding guitar solo, while they airplay the imaginary chords and melt their faces to each note; Spotify would only go and interrupt it with something else they are sure you want to hear anyway, or at least something they have been paid to play you.

The guitar solo is not dead, it has just seen better days. If you want to air-guitar away while pretending to do some housework, play this: I added a few older guitar classics for your enjoyment – hopefully Spotify leaves it as is, it boils my brain when they decide to add a song to my playlist playback….

Mdou Moctar – Nakanegh Dich
Khruangbin – Maria Tambien
Dry Cleaning – Hot Penny Day
Brutus – Victoria
Television – 1880 or so
Taste – Blister On The Moon
Pavement – Fillmore Jive
Modest Mouse – Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine
Drop Nineteens – Delaware
White Denim – Cheer Up
Viagra Boys – Research Chemicals
The Velvet Underground with Nico – Run Run Run
Turin Brakes – Sleeper
Thee Oh Sees – The Dream

Working to Live or Living to Work

“Life isn’t nice, it’s contingent.” Kendal Roy

I was set an article to study for my French class that detailed the generational struggles with work and life. It was also accompanied by a short cartoon video exhorting the benefits of building mixed teams of energetic Gen Zers, professionally focused millennials and seasoned grizzly boomers. The cartoon boomer was me with less hair and more tummy. French businesses were being encouraged to put me on teams with the young ones to share my history of the company and my deep knowledge of the market. Meanwhile, I would be benefiting from the energy and new ideas from the newbies while we worked in shiny new ‘collaborative spaces’. The interesting thing was that in the more detailed article the new ideas the ‘petit jeunes’ are bringing seem to best summarized as “work sucks, there is more to life than a job and I get paid to do the job, I turn up on time and leave on time and do what I was asked to do so don’t talk to me about my commitment?”

It’s actually hard to argue with any of that. It’s not as if many of us are in our dream jobs, I have been in container logistics for 40 years, I never got the job doing A&R for Virgin Records or writing album reviews for NME, I’m not running my own winery, I don’t have my own restaurant. The social contract with work is and has been for however many years that one does one’s best and gets paid more or less accordingly to that effort. If your face fits you get paid more, if you are a handsome tall white guy you get paid more, if you kiss a little ass you get paid more. If you don’t kiss enough ass or even worse, are a woman or a minority, or if you demonstrate that you can actually see behind the curtain and see there is someone frantically pulling levers, you will get paid less or shit-canned. Yet ironically for most of my early working life, and more generally in the USA, there has been the ongoing pretense that companies are like some giant family, looking after you and in return for your slavish devotion, working long hours, traveling Sundays to be at work on the other side of the Atlantic first thing on Monday morning is just the baseline of personal commitment in return. The protective cloak of health care for you and your loved ones, that only comes with a job, reinforces the need to play the corporate game, the added cosseting of 401k contributions or stock options tie the restraints tighter. The bondage analogies pile up as most contracts of employment are metaphorical ballgags. In California they have the marvelous oxymoron of the ‘At Will Contract’, the device that flies in the face of any sense of mutual commitment. ‘At Will’ meaning I can fire you if I feel like it. You can then go off and rely upon whatever weak regulatory protection you can find after the event to come and complain, of course the employee is ‘at will’ to leave, as long as they work their notice, don’t go and work in the same industry for 2 years and don’t mind not having any healthcare.

One thing that does make me smile is the dance over remote working. The guy in the corner office who worked his way there by the old route of golf, kissing much butt, being a good company man and absently striving long hours while his kids were growing up is now unsettled to find that in his moment in the sun there is no-one in the office to appreciate how cool that corner spot really is. If the millennials and gen Z were already not buying into the corporate dance from a lack of credibility perspective, after all thanks to streaming they have watched every episode of The Office, the pandemic didn’t just stop the dance it blew up the dance hall.

So for 2 years everyone in office work worked from home, the world not only didn’t fall apart, but life improved on most measures. If you were fortunate to not be in healthcare or one of the working poor you worked remotely, doing the normal stuff, at times that suited you, wearing what the hell you felt like wearing, at least below the waist if you had to Zoom, not commuting. For women, not spending an hour and a half longer than most men to get hair washed, dried, make up applied, outfit put together was life changing. For those with small kids, the ability to actually achieve something like a work-life balance arrived. For everyone other than commercial real estate investors, the new way of working was so self-evidently better it continued, even when the pandemic reasons to work remotely melted away. Then we had the steady drip drip of articles, opinion pieces, straightforward shill pieces, news items and large announcements by the likes of Google that remote work would stop. That would be the same Google that fired 12,000 jobs, ‘pour encourager des autres”?

All the bullshit about the loss of culture, the loss of the networking at the water cooler, the lack of mentoring opportunities was written by people who had obviously not stepped in an office in the last 5 years. Rows of mindless cubes with no defensible space – except the BSDs in the four corners – the constant distractions of other people’s voices while you are trying to get some mundane task done. They have also not understood what headphones have done to the great office experience, go into any office and there is no smart banter, no chit-chat and certainly no informal mentoring. Everyone is working away in headphones in their own island.

The other sand in the Vaseline is the lack of people wanting to do terrible jobs. Due to largely demographic reasons reducing the intake of raw meat into the work machine and the uncomfortable fact that the boomers have lots of money in their houses and 401ks and decided en masse to stop while they could and leave the workforce, we have a situation in the US that for every 100 jobs there are only 70 jobseekers. So if you want to hire someone good, talented, experienced, do you think forcing them to come to an office under the old rules is going to help you recruit?

We also hardly need to remind ourselves how Corporate America rewards businesses who look after their employees vs those who evidently do not give a shit, of course they run screaming from the beneficent. They instead lavish high praise in terms of stock prices and glowing reviews on the studs who announce 125,000 layoffs at the FAANGs that already earned billions from the pandemic. The destructive and long term impact on complete communities when companies decided over the last half century to please the market by moving manufacturing production somewhere else is never accounted for, but it has been responsible for swathes of the North East and Mid West being reduced to random pools of despair and opioids. It should come as no surprise that the very pols whining about China having the temerity to want to look after their own people and take their turn at wielding some commercial and financial heft in their backyard are the same people who benefitted directly from the wholesale export of jobs to China to line their own pockets and allow them to endow yet another overly shiny building on an Ivy League campus in a town surrounded by rows of empty former factories.

So against this cheery backdrop of what actually defines corporate responsibility, together with the emetic greenwashing of large companies, is it any wonder that people who have come into the labor pool in the last 10 years think my generation and our rules about work are, unsurprsingly, full of shit. Especially if they were raised by parents like me, who had enough success under the rules to give them the kind of upbringing where they were encouraged to follow their dreams. I studiously advised my kids not to do a degree to get a job but study what you find interesting. I studied the most beige of subjects possible by doing “Business Studies” and then off I went to work without really using much, if anything, of what I studied for 3 years. So it is not surprising that the current 20 somethings with a degree in esoteria and pocketful of student debt find much of mainstream business behavior an unpleasant experience, even tech or especially tech. Tech had the hoodie-wearing hacker for freedom aura, breaking stuff and building a brighter new future was the promise. What they delivered was ubiquitous free porn, screen addiction, the total destruction of female self-esteem for anyone under 16 and the concentration of wealth in a few hands not seen since the days of the Robber Barons. The new genie to be let out of the bottle AI is not really going to improve life much, there will be no ‘AI Spring’ like there was not really an Arab Spring and many young people probably get that more than Wall Street does. Tech is not breaching the barriers to a better world, its not solving the climate problems. In fact, it’s making the whole thing worse, as the damn servers need juice. And for what? Some more ads for some more stuff. The world has not been left by us Boomers in a great state for the succeeding generations, a world, as I read earlier today: “in which a tiny sliver of the world’s population is growing richer and richer while everyone else lives in millennial poverty or circumstances of heightened economic insecurity”.

I went to San Francisco a couple of times earlier this year and the Financial District looked like it had been cleared to film a post apocalyptic horror movie, trash everywhere, homeless like extras in costume as zombies, no cars, no-one in the offices, few places to eat and mostly grab and run back to the secure space of whatever office you are hiding out in. People used to put up with the sub-optimal BART transit system to brave the crush from the suburbs into the city. But post-pandemic it’s become the preserve of the homeless and the many sadly crazy folks who sit and ride it, in comfort, from one end of the system to the other, all day long. It is shunned now by working people and ridership has fallen off a cliff. It’s not helped by the fact it’s less of a pain to drive now as if people do go in, start times are flexible, parking is easier to find and has taken a bit of a market adjustment in price.

My own business has gone to hybrid with Tuesday and Thursday being preferred days for the office with core hours of 10-2, but its not enforced, at least not by me. As time has gone by it’s less rigidly observed, and it will remain more informal than formal. We have reduced our footprint from 2 offices to one, extended our lease for a 25% reduction in rent. On balance the office is a bust, there are millions of square feet of commercial real estate that is, or is about to be, without any future income. Its a shoe waiting to drop in every large city and ultimately in everyone’s pension funds.

If you cannot provide more than a general sense of camaraderie accruing from a sense of common purpose, in so far as what your business does is not fundamentally a ‘good thing’, then our expectations must change as to what the work compact is between the company and its people. Let’s not kid ourselves, most enterprises are not helping the environment, they do not improve people’s lives other than the shareholders. They are usually some smaller part of a larger business network, a link in a value chain. People like to do good work. I have never believed there is a need to second guess every employee, that unless I am on them they will naturally slack off. People like to complete the tasks assigned to them, to get a sense of self satisfaction from doing the task well. Confinement proved that in spades. We no longer make many widgets as a society, so paying someone for the number of widgets made, like paying for the number of hours worked making widgets, is arcane. Remote work allowed people to get their tasks done when it best suited the completion of the tasks, which is when the person responsible for the tasks most feels energized to do it, rather than an arbitrary allocation of 9am until 5pm.

I think the classic work pattern, again for the fortunate white collar legions, is now disintermediated, stuff gets done when you feel it best gets done.

Many people are just getting by, going to crappy jobs, getting paid less than they need. Poverty is easy to define, its when you have too much month at the end of your money. That is the situation that over the last few years more and more people have found themselves in. Meanwhile the data shows that since 2020, the richest 1% have hoovered up around two-thirds of the new wealth (about $42tn); which is almost twice as much as the bottom 99% of the world’s population. That is part of the reason the ‘craquers’ can smash stuff up in our ongoing protests here in France. People do not stop them because everyone is feeling we, they, everyone, is being taken advantage of by the faceless system. Macron to many people is just the same as Trump, Putin or Bezos.

In that atmosphere it is hardly surprising that the bright young things entering the work force do not care about the game that everyone has obediently played for over 100 years. They will pick jobs that allow them to work wherever they want to be. They will not spend 3 hours of every day commuting. And you can forget ‘live to work’ as a mantra, they work to live and all work is suspect.

It’s another long weekend in May and I have been listening to these lovely people: check it out here.

It’s You – LA Priest

Pul – Ya Tosiba

Lose You – Bully

Silver Velvet – The Courtneys

This is What I’m Here For – Ian Hunter ( yes Ian fucking Hunter still going)

Superficial Conversation – Madeline Kenney

Wild Geese – Amy May Ellis

Fits – Do Nothing

Its Just a Bit Of Blood – bdrmm

Doritos & Fritos – 100 gecs

Ava Adore – Smashing Pumpkins ( Rachel is filling in gaps in my musical knowledge)

Victoria – Brutus

Modern Business Hymns – Protomartyr ( Thanks Rut for encouraging me to persevere)

Bleach – Coach Party

Wet Tennis – Sofi Tukker

Don’t Be Another – Skinny Pelembe

Hot Penny Days (Charlotte Adigéry- Bolis Pupul remix) – Dry Cleaning

Settling into a Saturday

There is a glorious luxury to settling in to a lazy Saturday. Not a Saturday full of tasks around the house, no chores, no pressing need to battle the great unwashed in the shopping center. Saturdays waking slowly, slightly hung over from the relief of Friday evening, drinking in the sounds of the birds, soft light of Spring through the silk of the curtains. Saturdays rituals, reading Blind Date in the Grauniad app, debating whether to get up and get croissants from the bakery down the road, pondering the culinary choices for the weekend. Looking forward to the Fulham game, this year has been odd, not just because we have to get used to the expectation of winning but because success brings the attention of Sky and games moved to Friday nights, Sunday lunchtimes and 1.30Pm kick offs. Today is a treat, a normal British Saturday 3.00pm kick off which fills the end of my French afternoon nicely.

Dressed for an unhalfbricked Saturday morning

I dont want to go all Nigel Slater and confessional but one of the other treats is wandering through the cookery tomes to find inspiration. I have flétan, Atlantic Halibut, from the football loving fish guy at the weekly market. I also have the last remaining cabbage that survived the winter, or survived me harvesting them too early assuming they were struggling, sweet potatoes and a large cauli to do something with. Coffee and one of the French biscuits that they call “Petit Dejeuner”, which are whole grain and have chocolate nibs and nuts, accompany a catch up with Private Eye. I know my biases are just being confirmed but the journalism of the Eye is the one consistent investigative effort holding the despicable and corrupt ruling Conservative party to account as they undermine or destroy what is left of the England I had the good fortune to grow up in. It’s ironic that at this very moment, across the plagued island there are many of my peers reading through their Saturday’s Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph feeling the same disgust and distaste but about whoever their target of their privileged ire is today, likely some part of the woke, liberal elites that are in their eyes undermining their world.

Tomorrow France goes to the polls to elect the President for the next 5 years and by the time you read this we hope that we are not reliving that sense of bewilderment that we felt when the desperate and angry elected Donald Trump and voted to leave the EU. There are many desperate and angry French people who Marine Le Pen has spoke to with resonance about their cost of living, their frustrations when they fill up their battered old Peugeot 208’s with diesel to drive the 40 minutes to their poorly paid job. They blame Macron. They blame the establishment. They blame them for their lack of the piece of the western liberal pie they feel they deserve, they blame the dark skinned people for taking their jobs, for causing crime, for not being French and Mme Le Pen nods along with them and smiles in agreement when they vent their spleen. She promises France Unicorns like all populists, “tous et n’importe quoi’, no taxes for the under 30’s, reduced VAT on diesel, no hijabs, no benefits for foreigners, standard stuff. The divisions across Europe and the Western World that are exploited by the Populists are thanks in no small part to the efforts of Mr Putin aided and abetted by the uncontrolled greed which powers social media to be such a sustained force for evil. However, globalisation and capitalism has failed all but a moderately sized slice of French society and that is reflected in the polls where over 60% has voted for either far left or far right candidates. If there were such options in the USA we would probably see that kind of reflection too.

Saturday is also a day to reflect on what music have I been listening to or newly discovered this week, new vinyl arrivals have been slower of late as I am trying to be less compulsive. I got the quite lovely Wet Leg album this week and its no surprise they are the darlings of the rock media currently, as well as the new Jack White which is a nice and quite surprisingly good return to form. It’s also a day to dig through the back catalog and revisit old favorites. I consume vast amounts of music but quite a lot of it blends into itself. I definitely have different preferences for different moods and contexts.

As my Saturday moves sleepily at first it gathers pace and then late morning the coffee kicks in and energy levels go up so this playlist brings its game from folky to funky to just fun, enjoy!

Listen here to: