Rock vs Pop

Bono settles it in one stroke -

Pop music often tells you everything is OK, while rock music tells you that it’s not OK, but you can change it. There’s a defiance in rock music that gives you a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Most pop music doesn’t make you want to get out of bed, I’m sorry to say. It puts you to sleep.

Radiohead

Dave Matthews famously wrote in Rolling Stone about how he wished Radiohead would someday produce an album off the mark. He finally gave up, after grudgingly learning to acknowledge that such a thing did not exist.

I got somewhat interested in Radiohead after reading this article and started listening to their album OK! Computer. As the name suggests, it reflects on a world being slowly overtaken by machines and at the same time incapacitated from the ability to emote. This has been an important theme in science fiction, in movies like the brilliant Godard film Alphaville and most famously, The Matrix trilogy. Yet while those films dealt with a future scenario in which machines already reigned, Radiohead’s music delves into the transitionary phase of such a movement and the tumult it causes.

In line with some of the absurd philosophy, which talks about an inherent meaningless structure to life, is also what Radiohead explore. We see in the music a mordant reality, an emotionless acceptance of the inevitability of pessimist outcome, the farcical nature of human revolt. In a way, it’s like humans fighting to reclaim humanity, yet at the same time aware of the impossibility of the endeavour.

In OK! Computer, we have music depressingly numb, and at the same time artistically pristine. Songs like Airbag and Paranoid Android blew me away.

The problem with Radiohead’s music, I amusingly think, is that it’s too real and let’s admit, no one particularly likes to hear the truth. I’ve never been able to effectively listen to more than five Radiohead songs at a time. While I can’t help but admire the beauty of the writing, I immediately need to shift to something like U2 or REM to act as an anti-depressant.

Radiohead’s music talks to you in a real way, and it comes without any pretenses. Its out there, encompassing rawness, poise and verve.

Modern Times

The themes of love and art as the only refuges in a world doomed to despair have been central in Bob Dylan’s mammoth body of work. Modern Times, in that sense, is no different. The songs are mesmerising and haunting in turns, right from the lustful Thunder From The Mountain to the rugged Ain’t Talkin’. Have just started listening to the album, though am getting the feeling Nettie Moore might become one of its overlooked gems. There are no false notes, instead there is a surety of touch.

It is equally dismissive of time. In fact, Dylan has become one of those rare masters whose work exists in its own sphere and independent of time. Modern Times is the masterwork of a legend at the pinnacle of artistic power, supremely confident of his own craft.

(By the way, Rolling Stone rated it as the top album of 2006. Though ratings cannot be taken too seriously, loved this conclusion in the magazine’s synopsis of the album. They wrote – Where can he go from Modern Times? Anywhere he goddam wants. )

Like a Rolling Stone

Bob Dylan said it -

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

The nights have been long. Filled with the chaos and enormity of music. Some nights I’ve been calm. Others have been premonitory with turbulence, and so they’ve been – trance-like, absurd and nihilist – and there’s only been the music.

And a fantastic journey its turning out to be. Fellow journeymen have been R.E.M. , Prince, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Nirvana, Elvis. And Janis Joplin – am not sure have experienced this rawness and honesty of emotion before. The Beatles have been there of course, intermittent, taking the centrestage as ever, omnipresent. Revolver, Rubber Soul, The White Album – no one can match them really.

Aldous Huxley famously said, “After silence, the thing that comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
Well I’ve chosen music for now.

John Lennon’s Imagine

Have been addicted to John Lennon’s most famous solo album, Imagine. Layered with depth, it is truly one of the greatest albums of all time. The album begins with the peerless title song, described by Lennon as ‘anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic’ song. In an album with a title song that has grown to acquire such stature, there’s always the fear that it will come to undermine the album itself. Though the song comes to define the album for all times (and indeed Lennon’s solo career), the rest of the album shows Lennon’s complete repertoire as an artist.

Crippled Inside attacks hypocrisy and false pretences, and takes on religion which as an atheist Lennon did not believe in. Jealous Guy was inspired by Lennon’s troubled relationship with Yoko Ono and is one of the most covered songs of all time, with ninety-two recorded cover versions. It’s So Hard verifies Lennon’s belief that ‘ rock n’ roll will never die,’ and mirrors Lennon’s own attitude towards life. I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier at six minutes long, is a rebellion against compulsory military service and argues for the primal right to not enlist in the armed forces. It talks about ordinary fears of losing one’s life, with a degree of humanity and respect.

Lennon’s exasperation against the manufactured reality of the times and the ambiguity surrounding everything comes out in Give Me Some Truth (I’m sick and tired of hearing things from uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites/All I want is some truth now/Just give me some truth now). One of the best tracks of the album, it showcases Lennon’s writing at its very best. Oh My Love (composed with Yoko Ono) is infused with love, longing, regret and desire – and it is one of my personal favourites from the record. How Do You Sleep?, a percieved rant against Paul McCartney, is for me, the weakest song of the album. At five-and-a half minutes, it is a tad too long and has a monotony about it. How? talks about confusion and lack of direction, and its contemplative tone lends poignancy, with uncomplicated emotions expressed in the simplest of words (And life can be long/And you’ve got to be so strong/And the world is so tough/Sometimes I feel I’ve had enough). Oh Yoko! is a peppy, youthful song dedicated to Yoko Ono. It has a country touch to it, and is a fitting last song, filled with optimism and hope.

Imagine has guitars by George Harrison, and this collaboration leads to technical excellence, not surpassed at any time in Lennon’s solo career. Lennon’s songwriting is at its very best, the breakaway from the Beatles seemed to have provided him with a new-found freedom. More than thirty-five years later, Imagine acquires more relevance in our increasingly troubled world. The title song remains an anthem of hope and optimism, love and peace and inspires entire generations to dream for a better world.

New Year’s Day

All is quiet on New Year’s Day
A world in white gets underway
I want to be with you, be with you
night and day
Nothing changes on New Year’s Day
On New Year’s Day

It never ceases to amaze me when life can imitate art to the minutest detail. Driving back from a friend’s place having partied all night, U2’s New Year’s Day(from their 1983 album War) fitted the bill perfectly as I was struggling to drive through the foggy morning.

(I took this picture after an unplanned whistle stop on the way back home.)

The fifth Beatle

Since Beatlemania is currently on, also stumbled upon this fascinating quote from Ringo Starr, the club’s much feted drummer. He once remarked that that the group consisted of five members – “There was John, Paul, George, and me—and the fifth one was magic.”

With sorcery on their side, no wonder no one’s been able to match them ever.

Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

Of late, The Beatles have obsessed me. Their music has kept me into a trance into the late hours of the night, and now it’s like a medicine I can’t do without. Ran into this appraisal of The Beatles’ arguably greatest album, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which Rolling Stone magazine rated as the greatest album of all time. This is the Beatles at their very best, at a point in time when they had left matching suits and haricuts behind, and truly evolved into peerless artists.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the most important rock & roll album ever made, an unsurpassed adventure in concept, sound, songwriting, cover art and studio technology by the greatest rock & roll group of all time. From the title song’s regal blasts of brass and fuzz guitar to the orchestral seizure and long, dying piano chord at the end of “A Day in the Life,” the thirteen tracks on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band are the pinnacle of the Beatles’ eight years as recording artists. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were never more fearless and unified in their pursuit of magic and transcendence.

Issued in Britain on June 1st, 1967, and a day later in America,Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is also rock’s ultimate declaration of change. For the Beatles, it was a decisive goodbye to matching suits, world tours and assembly-line record-making. “We were fed up with being Beatles,” McCartney said decades later, in Many Years From Now, Barry Miles’ McCartney biography. “We were not boys, we were men . . . artists rather than performers.”

At the same time, Sgt. Pepper formally ushered in an unforgettable season of hope, upheaval and achievement: the late 1960s and, in particular, 1967’s Summer of Love. In its iridescent instrumentation, lyric fantasias and eye-popping packaging, Sgt. Pepper defined the opulent revolutionary optimism of psychedelia and instantly spread the gospel of love, acid, Eastern spirituality and electric guitars around the globe. No other pop record of that era, or since, has had such an immediate, titanic impact. This music documents the world’s biggest rock band at the very height of its influence and ambition. “It was a peak,” Lennon confirmed in his 1970 Rolling Stone interview, describing both the album and his collaborative relationship with McCartney. “Paul and I definitely were working together,” Lennon said, and Sgt. Pepper is rich with proof: McCartney’s burst of hot piano and school-days memoir (“Woke up, fell out of bed . . . “) in Lennon’s “A Day in the Life,” a reverie on mortality and infinity; Lennon’s impish rejoinder to McCartney’s chorus in “Getting Better” (“It can’t get no worse”).

“Sgt. Pepper was our grandest endeavor,” Starr said, looking back, in the 2000 autobiography The Beatles Anthology. “The greatest thing about the band was that whoever had the best idea – it didn’t matter who — that was the one we’d use. No one was standing on their ego, saying, ‘Well, it’s mine,’ and getting possessive.” It was Neil Aspinall, the Beatles’ longtime assistant, who suggested they reprise the title track, just before the grand finale of “A Day in the Life,” to complete Sgt. Pepper’s theatrical conceit: an imaginary concert by a fictional band, played by the Beatles.

The first notes went to tape on December 6th, 1966: two takes of McCartney’s music-hall confection “When I’m Sixty-Four.” (Lennon’s lysergic reflection on his Liverpool childhood, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” was started two weeks earlier but issued in February 1967 as a stand-alone single.) But Sgt. Pepper’s real birthday is August 29th, 1966, when the Beatles played their last live concert, in San Francisco. Until then, they had made history in the studio — Please Please Me (1963), Rubber Soul (1965), Revolver (1966) — between punishing tours. Off the road for good, the Beatles were free to be a band away from the hysteria of Beatlemania. McCartney went a step further. On a plane to London in November ‘66, as he returned from a vacation in Kenya, he came up with the idea of an album by the Beatles in disguise, an alter-ego group that he subsequently dubbed Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. “We’d pretend to be someone else,” McCartney explained in Anthology. “It liberated you — you could do anything when you got to the mike or on your guitar, because it wasn’t you.”

Only two songs on the final LP, both McCartney’s, had anything to do with the Pepper character: the title track and Starr’s jaunty vocal showcase “With a Little Help From My Friends,” introduced as a number by Sgt. Pepper’s star crooner, Billy Shears. “Every other song could have been on any other album,” Lennon insisted later. Yet it is hard to imagine a more perfect setting for the Victorian jollity of Lennon’s “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” (inspired by an 1843 circus poster) or the sumptuous melancholy of McCartney’s “Fixing a Hole,” with its blend of antique shadows (a harpsichord played by the Beatles’ producer George Martin) and modern sunshine (double-tracked lead guitar executed with ringing precision by Harrison). The Pepper premise was a license to thrill.

It also underscored the real-life cohesion of the music and the group that made it. Of the 700 hours the Beatles spent making Sgt. Pepper (engineer Geoff Emerick actually tallied them) from the end of 1966 until April 1967, the group needed only three days’ worth to complete Lennon’s lavish daydream “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” “A Day in the Life,” the most complex song on the album, was done in just five days. (The oceanic piano chord was three pianos hit simultaneously by ten hands belonging to Lennon, McCartney, Starr, Martin and Beatles roadie Mal Evans.) No other Beatles appear with Harrison on his sitar-perfumed sermon on materialism and fidelity, “Within You Without You,” but the band wisely placed the track at the halfway point of the original vinyl LP, at the beginning of Side Two: a vital meditation break in the middle of the jubilant indulgence.

The Beatles’ exploitation of multitracking on Sgt. Pepper transformed the very act of studio recording (the orchestral overdubs on “A Day in the Life” marked the debut of eight-track recording in Britain: two four-track machines used in sync). And Sgt. Pepper’s visual extravagance officially elevated the rock album cover to a Work of Art. Michael Cooper’s photo of the Beatles in satin marching-band outfits, in front of a cardboard-cutout audience of historical figures, created by artist Peter Blake, is the most enduring image of the psychedelic era. Sgt. Pepper was also the first rock album to incorporate complete lyrics to the songs in its design.

Yet Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is the Number One album of the RS 500 not just because of its firsts — it is simply the best of everything the Beatles ever did as musicians, pioneers and pop stars, all in one place. A 1967 British print ad for the album declared, “Remember Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Is the Beatles.” As McCartney put it, the album was “just us doing a good show.”

The show goes on forever.

Inside The Doors

Stumbled upon a fascinating insight into the mind, the madness and the genius of Jim Morrison -

You could say it’s an accident that I was ideally suited for the work I was doing. Its like a bowstring being pulled back for 22 years and suddenly being let go. I’ve always been attracted to ideas that were about revolt against authority. I like ideas about the breaking away or overthrowing of established order. I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos – especially activity that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road towards freedom – external revolt is a way to bring out internal freedom. Rather than starting inside, I start outside – reach the mental through the physical.

This constant living on the edge produced some of the most breathtaking music in the Swinging Sixties, in the haze of drugs and alcohol, when existence became a blur.

Truly an Atomic Bomb!

For all those who are looking for that great album to listen to, I suggest U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. If you’ve already listened to it, most probably you’ll be raving about it by now. The album’s just sensational and I’m so glad it won the Grammy – it truly deserved it. This is U2 at their best – a combination of serious rock and groovy soundtracks with a shade of pop (though the purists might disagree) . Bono insists they sound like a punk band trying to play Bach, while also suggesting, ‘It may just be our best.’

The album starts with the chartbuster Vertigo, the shouts of Spanish chants, and Hola! we’re ready for the ride. With Miracle Drug, the serious side of U2 comes to the fore. This is a song that says so many things at once. The lyrics are beautiful, though sometimes really abstract. Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own is the third track of the album, and its most personal. Bono’s dedication to his late father, this song exudes intimacy, passion, regret, anger, longing – so many emotions juxtaposed, overlapping each other.

And can a U2 album be complete without demanding peace on earth? And so we have, Love and Peace or Else, an irresistible track, though not in the same league as One or Sunday Bloody Sunday. City of Blinding Lights takes you back to the U2 of old, the U2 of Where the Streets Have No Name, the U2 of the late 80’s. This is a song of a long standing affair with New York – an affair that began on Bono’s first trip in ‘80 and a dream to own an apartment in Manhattan.

All Because of You and A Man and a Woman continue the album’s quest for constant evolution, and is followed by my personal favourite, Crumbs from Your Table – a track so good, its impossible to ignore. One Step Closer isn’t exactly a great song, but is engaging nevertheless. The tenth track, Origin of the Species is vintage seductive U2, in the league of Beautiful Day, a song you’ll return to again and again, without really knowing why. It is really sad that an album of such beauty and magic has to end with a dud, for that’s what exactly Yahweh is.

For all those who thought that All That You Can’t Leave Behind was the best they could create, U2 have truly dropped an atomic bomb this time.