It’s the end of a decade and time to make a list. A few publications have compiled definitive Top 10 (or Top 50) album lists, so why not me? The only problem being: I don’t think I’ve heard 10 albums from the 00s: on the contrary, this decade is when I got into music made 40 years ago. So to reach 10, I’m including albums I first heard in the 00s.

This makes my list so subjective as to be nearly useless. After all, a list is supposed to provide boundaries to something: genre, timeline or fads, etc. My list delimits nothing more than my mood over the past 10 years... which, now that I look at it, is part of the brooding artist-intellectual image I try so hard to cultivate.


Darling, I tire of my absinthe - Mick Jagger, Performance

10. War & Peace – Edwin Starr


If you had a party and could only choose a single album, you could do worse than leave this on. Starr is the definition of high-energy, his band providing solid up-tempo funk while he throws everything at the wall: wailing, pidgin Spanish, he even has a chorus where he faux-cries to the rhythm. Everyone knows War (What Is It Good For?), his breakout hit, but the rest of the album provides similarly sober highlights at odds with his enthusiasm, including Time, where he muses on his own mortality while the band mimics an alarm clock.

9. Lupine Howl – The Carnivorous Adventures of Lupine Howl


Lupine Howl formed from the bulk of Spiritualized after Jason Pierce kicked them out for labour organizing. In a fair world, they would’ve become just as big as Pierce’s ego. They take the drugs and alienation of Spiritualized and ramp it up, crafting 9 blistering odes to paranoia, loneliness and all the other things one feels once the drugs wear off. The guitars are fuzzy, the vocals are processed, the jams are spacey and psychedelic, but Lupine Howl actually go one better than their predecessor, keeping their arrangements tight and never falling into the latter’s introverted morosis. (If that’s not a word, it should be.) The Jam That Ate Itself says it best: “Gonna find me a UFO and get the fuck out of here.” Sign a better contract first, boys.

8. Alan Price – Lucky Man

Yet to be ground down - Malcolm McDowell, O Lucky Man!

Price made this as the soundtrack to O Lucky Man!, Lindsay Anderson’s post-‘68 rage against the dying of the leftist light. It’s a brilliant film, detailing the descent of Michael Travis, Malcolm McDowell’s bright-eyed naïf, into poverty and disillusion. Price’s soundtrack is like McDowell’s guardian angel, singing bittersweet foreshadowing ballads about life under capitalism. Had Travis paid attention, he would’ve heard Price telling him work & life is a struggle just to survive with a smile on your face. Travis never learns; yet Price studiously avoids mawkish folk, composing bright, upbeat, poppy numbers that belie the tragedy he’s observing.

7. Keane – Under The Iron Sea

Well turned out lads

OK, OK, guilty pleasure. Keane makes solid pop songs, with an edge of self-blame, passive-aggressivity and bitterness. What could be more British? The piano floats delicately over the melody, the background choruses are hummable: I challenge anyone to find better music for a Sunday afternoon stuck in a suburb. Sure, lead singer Tom Chaplin’s breathing can get a bit laboured at times; and on occasion I just want to slap him and tell him to be happier. But since we know pop music demands that every aspect of a failed relationship be submitted to scrutiny, I can think of few groups better suited for the task.

6. The Postal Service – Give Up


This was my soundtrack to 2004, and today when I heard it in a restaurant I still knew every melody. This is a side project of Death Cab For Cutie, whom I always found too tortured and whiny for my tastes; but The Postal Service is indie rock done right. Which is to say, with keyboards instead of guitars, and unironic levity. I hate a certain species of indie rock, one that makes a virtue of an inability to sing and a middle class affectation of detachment. I want my musicians to belt it out with genuine feeling – and here, The Postal Service prove with their bouncy electro-pop that hipsters have feelings, too.

5. Sir Joe Quarterman & Free Soul – I Got So Much Trouble In My Mind

But they look so happy

This was the first funk disc I ever bought, and it’s still one of the best. Sir Joe wasn’t one of the leading lights of funk, and I suspect it’s because he was a little too honest. He sings about both social and his very personal troubles: he pays too many taxes, his girlfriend is pregnant, his job is hard. He’s even got a whole song devoted to finding one friend – literally, “Gonna get me a friend one day.” He’s like the guy at the party who corners you and insists on telling you all his problems. But backed up by Free Soul, each tale of woe is transformed into a deep, funky groove: the bassline and horns play back and forth, and in a nod to the psych-RnB encounter there’s some feedback-laced guitars to provide extra edge. From the title track: “Give me the strength to carry on, because everything I got is just about gone, and I think about it, I worry about it, I dream about it.” But suddenly you’re dancing to Sir Joe’s blues and everything’s fine again.

4. Vicki Anderson – Message From A Soul Sister


Anderson was part of James Brown’s back-up band; while you can hear his influence on the extended jams and call-and-response, Anderson outshines her roots with her biggest asset, her voice. She tackles gospel-inflected soul, straight-up funk and lugubrious ballads, and the whole time she sounds like she’s standing back from the mic so she doesn’t break it. When she does let loose, like in the civil-rights themed In The Land of Milk and Honey, it’s pure longing and regret. This is not music that’s ashamed of its feelings: Anderson shares her rage and joy, and the lush orchestration is barely enough to channel it. For everyone who thinks any piece of rock music produced in the last 20 years has ‘soul’, this should be required listening.

3. Isaac Hayes – Hot Buttered Soul

Real men like cats - Isaac Hayes, Truck Turner

Isaac Hayes was the ultimate in masculinity, before that meant getting oiled up and finding a fellow MMAer to hug. If you thought you were in love, or lonely, your feelings were only margarine to Isaac Hayes' rich creamery butter. Hot Buttered Soul only has four songs, because that’s all the Man needed to express sorrow, lust, regret and love, respectively. I won’t try to describe how smooth his voice is, or how masterful his stage presence in. (Watch Wattstax to see him in 1973 at his prime, when he was the most popular RnB singer ever.) But a brief description of Track 3 will suffice. Hayes takes the most famous ballad about emotional immaturity and running away, By The Time I Get To Phoenix, and transforms it into the tragic story of a young man who devotes his life to passion and gets his heart stomped on. At the moment he discovers he’s being cheated on, Hayes breathes, “Baby, momma – why?” and thrusts more pathos into that single syllable than every single James Blunt, Nickelback and Celine Dion song put together. Check out his 19 minute arrangement for an even more epic emotional ride. The strings and his own saxophone playing are top-rate, but they’re strictly a backdrop to Isaac Hayes’ soul, which we’re lucky that he shared with us.

2. Roots Manuva – Run Come Save Me

We actually need production justice, but I'll forgive him

I realize having only one hip-hop album on this list qualifies me for What White People Like – so be it. Roots Manuva is consistently the most creative hip-hop artist on either side of the Atlantic. His deep, dub-inflected beats draw as much from Jamaica as America, veering close to Tricky’s weed-fogged haze without getting lost in it. His lyrics betray a complex, political understanding of the music industry, social problems and his Black British identity. Witness (1 Hope) was the big hit off that album and remains as infectious as H1N1; Swords In The Dirt is frighteningly danceable, while Sinny Sin Sins tells a languid tale of the contradictions of growing up Baptist. When the bass kicks in, you have to move, but you don’t have to wince at the words.

1. Manic Street Preachers – Know Your Enemy

The Manics, in happier - er, earlier days

Despite having an insane amount of fun seeing the Manics in October, I actually don’t think they’ve had that good a decade. Lifeblood was forced; Send Away The Tigers felt like a belated stab at the teen market; and let’s forget the embarrassing covers compilation Lipstick Traces. Their last truly good album was 2001’s Know Your Enemy, in which they’re in top form, musically and politically. It sees a return to a heavier, angry sound after the stadium anthems of the late 90s; this has to be connected to their subject matter, which draws on a range of artistic and cultural references to alienation, McCarthyism and imperialism. If it sounds complex, it is, which allows the album to yield repeated listenings without getting tired – I’ve had this on heavy rotation for 9 years and it still stands up. The guitars and rhythms are hard and driving but never overwhelming. My personal favourite, Freedom of Speech Won’t Feed My Children, sees them lambasting celebrity liberals for celebrating democracy while ignoring capitalist exploitation (“We love to kiss the Dalai Lama’s ass, cos he is such a holy man, Free to eat and buy anything, Free to fuck from Paris to Beijing”). What’s not to love?

Runners-up: actually, a lot of hip-hop should be on this list. Blackalicious’ Blazing Arrow, Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album, Dizzie Rascal, The Streets. Hard-Fi deserves special mention for making anti-capitalist pub sing-a-longs. Jarvis Cocker’s solo work shows the impact of maturity on talent. Ah well – next decade.


For the next cut

Labels: Britpop, funk, hip hop, music, Top 10

The pandemic you were waiting for is on its way. Swine-flu began at a pork-processing plant in Mexico and has spread around the world. It's now a Level 4 threat: not yet a pandemic, but the World Health Organization says "there is now sustained transmission of the infection from human to human. It is two phases short of a pandemic... to raise the threat level further would require evidence that the virus was strong enough to infect whole communities across the globe."


And if not, why not? - Newswipe

I've written how our culture is suffused with catastrophe. People are faced with multiplying economic, social and ecological crises. They're unable to understand them as different facets of one larger crisis of the capitalist mode of production. Swine flu fills an existential void: we know it's a few minutes to midnight, and here's proof. Never mind that good old regular influenza kills a million people a year, and there are dozens of infectious diseases ravaging poor countries at any one moment. Swine flu is affecting us in the wealthy countries, so we have to care.



I'm waiting for the racist backlash to begin, when Mexicans start getting blamed for this crisis. In fact the pork-processing plant is owned by an American multinational with a shoddy environmental record:

Smithfield, which is led by pork baron Joseph W Luter III, has previously been fined for environmental damage in the US. In October 2000 the supreme court upheld a $12.6m (£8.6m) fine levied by the US environmental protection agency which found that the company had violated its pollution permits in the Pagan River in Virginia which runs towards Chesapeake Bay. The company faced accusations that faecal and other bodily waste from slaughtered pigs had been dumped directly into the river since the 1970s.

Survivors. I started watching the 1970s version of this and am now glad I stopped.

$12.6 million in exchange for decades of pollution - what's that, Smithfield's breakfast conference budget for a few fiscal quarters? The industrial meat industry is notorious for overcrowding, effluent run-off and overuse of antibiotics. Mike Davis brilliantly dissects their logic:

Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers.

In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

The problem is not farm size per se: it's that economies of scale are only economical when environmental costs aren't considered. NAFTA devastated Mexico's rural economy, so it makes sense Mexicans would be happy to welcome an American agribusiness and not look too closely at what, after all, are industry-wide standards. Davis goes on to show this outbreak has been predicted for some time:

Since its identification during the Great Depression, H1N1 swine flu had only drifted slightly from its original genome. Then in 1998 a highly pathogenic strain began to decimate sows on a farm in North Carolina and new, more virulent versions began to appear almost yearly.

A lot of things are - Japan: a story of love & hate

But investment wasn't made in public healthcare or preventative medicine - which might affect the business practices of the agribusinesses so precious to the economy. Nor were rich countries willing to aid poorer nations' healthcare systems, particularly not after spending the last 30 years privatizing them. The villagers at the epicentre of the swine-flu outbreak knew something was wrong a month ago, but no one listened to them:

Residents of the town of Perote said at the time that they had a new, aggressive bug — even taking to the streets to demonstrate against the pig farm they blamed for their illness — but were told they were suffering from a typical flu. It was only after U.S. labs confirmed a swine flu outbreak that Mexican officials sent the boy's sample in for swine flu testing.

We face a patchwork of regulations and vaccine availability, based on the ability and willingness of governments to pay. And how much is a government going to spend to prevent something that might not happen?

This may not be 'the big one', but one thing's for sure: it's not a natural epidemic. It's another capitalist crisis, to be lined up alongside global warming and foreclosures. I don't mean there are men in tophats in a back room, rubbing their hands and plotting the downfall of the world's poor. I mean that capitalism, as a system, is completely unable to take account of long-term consequences. A pandemic would shut borders and further cut trade, deepening the recession, making things worse for everyone. But the rule for all capitalists is profit or die, which means agribusiness cuts corners, governments cut costs and Big Pharma funds medicine, not prevention. Crisis is inevitable and people - particularly poor people - die.


Mmm, that's a tasty metaphor for capitalist greed! - Soviet Toys

Finally, even a pandemic has its plusses and minuses. Minus: I'm smack in the middle of the swine flu's target age range:

The new strain seems to be more lethal to those in the 25 to 45 age range - an ominous sign, as this was a hallmark of the Spanish 1918 flu pandemic that killed tens of millions worldwide. Younger people were probably hit harder by the 1918 flu virus because their immune systems over-reacted.

Here I thought I was making myself healthy: all that exercise, all that fruit and Vitamin D pills, and I was just toughening up my immune system so it'd overreact and kill me when the swine-flu hit. But that's the plus as well: if a healthy immune system is a danger, then I should be drinking, smoking and taking as many drugs as I can. That way the swine-flu will course through my body like a nasty hangover. I'm off down the pub to get immuno-compromised: who's with me?


"Are we safe yet?"
"Dunno, let's have another to be sure." - Looks & Smiles

Labels: agribusiness, catastrophe, pandemic, swine flu

The only link between them is they're all on my mind this afternoon.

1) Ian Tomlinson

On April 1, protestors gathered in London to demonstrate against the G20 leadership of the capitalist world. The police responded by 'kettling' them into tight spaces and not letting them leave, much like corralling cattle. Those who got in the way were beaten, like Ian Tomlinson, a 47 year old newsvendor who was on his way home. He collapsed and later died.


Ian Tomlinson on his last walk.

At first the police claimed they helped Tomlinson when he collapsed, but protestors threw bottles at them. The right-wing net trolls leapt all over this, calling the demonstrators monstrous and subhuman. The cops investigated themselves and found nothing wrong; a coroner called the cause of death 'heart attack'. But flaws soon emerged in the story, chiefly because someone filmed Tomlinson being struck by the police. Soon things began to unravel. An independent investigation was launched; the officers involved were suspended; a new autopsy was conducted, finding the cause of death to be abdominal hemmorhage - internal bleeding. At this point, we may be looking at the first time (to my knowledge) a police officer could be charged with manslaughter.

Anyone who's ever gone to a global justice demonstration knows the police don't hold back from beating and bloodying those who get in their way. But this appears to be the tipping point where suddenly the demonstrators' stories start being believed. The head of the independent commission is reminding police they're the servants, not the masters of the people, and he credits videos by protestors' mobile phones with the evidence needed to prosecute.


Just some bad apples.

It's sweet to see naive liberals up in arms about heavy-handed policing - it means they thought everything was working fine before. But more significant is that the words of hundreds of protestors over the years mean nothing. Even the police murders at Genoa only led to assault convictions. However, video evidence is enough to start heads rolling. All those new surveillance technologies interfere with the state's ability to suppress dissent. And as a society, we fetishize technology to the extent that it supplants the evidence of real people who, being 'biased', can't be believed.

2) Susan Boyle

She's the 47 year old Scottish spinster with a learning disability who spent her life looking after her mother and has never been kissed. Then, on Britain's Got Talent, she bucked expectations and proved she could sing.



I know it's corny. The whole thing looks staged: for one thing, why do the audience leap to their feet as soon as she starts singing? And Tanya Gold makes the excellent point that the drama of redemption wouldn't work unless we judged her for being hideous - and therefore a talentless hag - in the first place. Moreover, her story lends itself to the worst sort of merit-based triumphalism: the narrative that 'the little person can succeed against all odds' is very handy to capitalist ideology in a recession, when little people are getting stomped on. But that said, I found her performance touching. And maybe the 30 million youtube hits show people are willing to identify with the underdog, not the glamorous and powerful.

3) Kari Ferrell


Keri Ferrell. Pic used without permission, but that's kind of the point.

Kari Ferrell is the 'hipster grifter', a 22 year old Korean-American wanted for defrauding hipsters of $60,000. Coming out of the Salt Lake City punk scene, she used her sexuality to gain friends and borrow money from gob-smacked young scene boys (and some women.) Then she moved to Brooklyn, talked her way into a job at Vice Magazine, and went through a series of boyfriends, borrowing money from them and repaying them with cheques from a closed account. She's now on the run again.

I find Ferrell fascinating for a number of reasons. Firstly, she cultivated the hipster aesthetic: she even has a tattoo on her back that reads "I love beards." Secondly, she sounds less like a calculating fraud artist, and more like someone with borderline personality disorder: she told numerous friends she was dying of cancer, to the point of showing them bloodied kleenexes which she'd apparently coughed up blood into. She sounds like someone who desperately needs drama and the attention that flows from it. Thirdly, despite my ongoing dislike for hipsters, I don't think that having skinny jeans and plastic-slat sunglasses means you deserve to be ripped off. (Except if you work at the evil, reactionary Vice Magazine - in which case you deserve everything you get.) But she was smart enough to speak the hipster code, and inveigled herself into the scene by looking and speaking the right way.


Asian, therefore cute, therefore harmless? - Cibo Matto

Finally, she's a young Asian woman who doesn't fit the proper image of aggressive huckster. The stereotypes of race and gender she falls under are 'cute, exotic and harmless'. Cibo Matto, the 1990s alt-rock fronted by two Japanese women, struggled with the trope, which dictated that no matter how much funk & hip-hop they incorporated into their act, they were seen as 'quirky' first and musicians second. Ferrell made the best of what she was given. That doesn't make her a folk-hero, but if a desperate, needy woman found herself in a world that trusted cute, Asian women, I don't think it's her fault if she used that to her advantage.

Edit: a friend of mine forwarded this to me - frickin hilarious:

Labels: hipsters, police, protestors, Susan Boyle

Most people know Shaft through his epynonymous first movie, in which Richard Roundtree plays John Shaft, hard-boiled private dick who'd risk his neck for a brother man. Shaft and its sequel, Shaft's Big Score, followed a predictable course in which Shaft fights both gangsters and police suspicions to right wrongs, save his life and get the girl.



Shaft in Africa takes the franchise in a completely different direction. An international gang of people smugglers replace the small-time hoods. Shaft is whisked from Harlem to Africa to pose as an immigrant labourer, and track down the traffickers exploiting young Africans. After many adventures he makes it to Europe, where he lives in an overcrowded tenement in Paris with other illegal workers. He must battle the smugglers to free the migrants - but not before their tenement is set on fire.



You read correctly: Shaft in Africa is a drama about the plight of illegal migrants sold into slavery in Europe. It could have been made yesterday; tenement fires in Paris are common, where undocumented workers are warehoused in sub-standard conditions to this day. To my knowledge, Hollywood has yet to touch the issue; the British film Dirty Pretty Things broached the topic of illegal workers in 2005, but the politics were a pale pink next to Shaft. In the former, Chiwetel Ejiofor sums up the immigrant experience with, "we are the people you do not see. We are the ones who drive your cabs. We clean your rooms. And suck your cocks." Which is true, but doesn't say why it's happening.



Compare this to Shaft, who encounters a smuggler overcharging him and the Africans for an overcrowded room in a tenement:

"Fellows, I take care of everything. Now, this room cost you each 100 francs a month.

We only earn 200 francs a month. For this room, we pay half.

No space in Paris. Very costly. No room, you in street. In street, police come. Ask questions, send you home. But how you go home? No money! So: go to prison. Lock up. 100 francs a month, everybody stay happy."

That's a good summary of the undocumented worker's condition: as long as you're illegal, the threat of deportation keeps you silent. At one point the smuggler shows his evil capitalist colours and rants, "I've given thousands of jobs to Africans and they don't complain. But because of that black bastard and that troublemaker Shaft I've had to leave this country!" Later, a French police sergeant tries to mollify Shaft after a fire in the tenement fire kills some of the Africans:

"The law will punish him, monsieur."

"Fuck the law. What is the law doing about the shitheads who charge 100 Francs a month to stay in a craphouse like this? Why don't you really clamp down on the slave trade? I'll tell you why. Because the black ghettos of Paris is as far away from the Champs Elysee as 125th Street is from Park Avenue. You need a bunch of poor bastards to work on your roads and your goddamn kitchens. So don't lay any of that 'law will punish you' shit on me!"

Shaft connects exploitation, racism and ghettos to the profit motive. No One Is Illegal couldn't say it better. And this wasn't some earnest documentary, it was an action film: though it lost money, the movies were popular enough that CBS tried to leverage Shaft into a TV series. We know illegal immigrants are the first to be targeted during a recession - imagine the impact of mainstream audiences encountering Shaft's sympathetic portrayal today. For that alone, Shaft in Africa is worth watching.



There's another reason to see the film. It's obvious you don't watch a movie named after a euphemism for a penis for progressive gender politics. His character is defined by his sexual prowess - though I suspect that, like a lot of blaxploitation films and hip hop afterwards, much of that is braggadocio, not meant to be taken seriously. Which is what makes Shaft in Africa so fascinating: it elevates Shaft (pun intended) to the status of a sex god. And not because he's good in bed, but because his penis is so large. It's like Shaft as told by Rainer Wolfcastle; there's absolutely no subtlety.



Shaft meets the girlfriend of the head smuggler, and she tries to seduce him:

"How long is your phallus, Mr. Shaft?"

"My what?"

"Your cock."

"Baby by now it shrunk down to 20 inches..."

"You can usually tell by the size of a man's nose. Or the length and thickness of his thumbs. I always look for a man with a prominent nose. And long thick thumbs."

"Baby you're not turning me on. I got too many things on my mind."

Of course he relents, telling her "Baby my nose may not be too prominent, but I got two of the longest, thickest thumbs..."

And it gets better. Shaft meets an African princess, whose culture dictates she has her clitoris amputated on reaching 'womanhood'. She soon learns the ways of Shaft:

"Were you disappointed I wasn't a virgin? Hmm?"

"Hell no baby, you had some good teacher."

"John, this is hardly the time to talk about it, but I've made an important decision. Because of you."

"Well, my daddy told me, he said John, the one time you should never ever make an important decision is right after you've made love."

"It's about my clitorectomy."

"That's an important decision all right."

"February comes, I'm not going to let them do it."

He didn't even have to send her to Clitoraid. Shaft's penis is so great, he can overturn entrenched cultural traditions with it. Yes, Shaft features a black man being objectified for his animal sexuality; yes, it reduces women to slavish conquests. But at this point my analytical ability breaks down and I'm simply dumbfounded that something like this could get written and filmed. Shaft is not a lover, he's a force of nature with transformative sexual powers... who's a friend of exploited migrant labour. Watch it and deconstruct it if you can.

Labels: blaxploitation, movie review, Shaft in Africa