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freakingoutthesquares · 1 year

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‘Freak Out...’ is laugh out loud funny, because, of course, pre-fame Pulp devised a stage set of toilet paper and tin foil only for it to crumble around them, of course they set fire to a prized palm tree in Toulouse with a misfired firework, and the highlight of their first ever Top Of The Pops performance was, of course, eating Mariah Carey’s biscuits.

Louder Than War Magazine, Issue 2, Winter 2015.

With the release of biography ‘Freak Out The Squares’, PULP man Russell Senior remains fiercely proud of the accomplishments of Sheffield’s finest. Louise Brown talks to a uniquely British man about a uniquely British band.

THE rock biography; that tome of scintillating scandal and sordid excess, where musicians can retire disgracefully airing all of their worst behaviours alongside shocking barbs against colleagues, rivals and the waifs and strays they met along their path of rock and roll hedonism. We, mere mortals, lap them up, each page depicting the charmed lives of music’s most notorious characters.

‘Freak Out The Squares: Life In A Band Called Pulp’, by Pulp guitarist, violinist and self-confessed “grownup of the group’, Russell Senior, is the latest in rock memoir overload, and we settle in for a wild ride of mis-shapes, mistakes and misfits. In fact, what we get is a lot of tea, games of chess and mild-mannered facts about minerals. Did you know that if you add iodine to an axolotl it turns into a newt?

But Pulp were a different class, weren’t they? They did not have the cockney cheek of Blur, not the brash Mancunian swagger of Oasis, they were the psychedelic avant garde art experiment, who had tried for a decade to claw themselves out of Sheffield’s agitprop pop scene, who found themselves in the right place, at the right time and stumbled upon the holy grail of indie gold with era defining anthems ‘Common People’ and ‘Disco 2000’.

Sardonic and as well-presented as Jarvis Cocker in one his jumble sale suits, ‘Freak Out...’ is ‘The Royle Family’ of rock biogs, in that nothing actually happens but it is in the ennui and the unglamorous truthfulness that the writer’s Midas touch is revealed.

This is not sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, more atypical British fumbling of the bra-straps, white-outs after one toke of Black Grape’s joint and playing so out of tune it actually made the band the unique freaks we came to love.

But if it’s not going to a be a tell-all page-turner of bolshy Britpop bragging, then why write it at all? “I kind of felt I ought to write it,” says Russell, his Yorkshire twang ever-giving him a tone of sarcasm and weariness. Speaking shortly before his appearance at Manchester’s Louder Than Words festival (Louderthanwordsfest.com).

“Astronauts, they seem very inarticulate. They’ve been to the moon, but they can’t say anything about it, so I thought, well, I can be loquacious hopefully, and as an eye-witness, I thought I should do it, especially since there were some programmes on Britpop a few years back and they seemed really lame. They didn’t get to the heart of it. I want to try and put people in that dislocated world, the duty of the witness really.”

Britpop, what actually was it? From the turn of the 1990s until the chimes of the new Millennium were rung in, it seemed like the British pop music, and art, worlds, for that matter, were The Zeitgeist. Tracey Emin was making headlines with unmade beds, Damien Hirst was pickling bovine and bands like Blur, Oasis and Pulp, who couldn’t sound more unlike one other if they tried, were as iconic as Ginger Spice in a Union Jack frock.

“It’s not a genre, is it?” Russell ponders. “It’s not like reggae, it’s not a sound. Saint Etienne were deconstructing dance and yet they were Britpop. It was a group of outsiders from different angles, having a go at making pop music that was vaguely credible. It was a rejection of the world that was around us at the time, but the rejection took different forms. It’s not a musical form, really. You can’t teach it. It’s a funny one, isn’t it? You look back and think, well, what was it? Because it didn’t seem like anything coherent at the time, certainly not artistically.”

“Great guitarists like Bernard Butler and Richard Hawley don’t intimidate me because we all do a different thing. They may be able to play ‘All Along The Watchtower’ better than Hendrix but they can’t do spare and spiky and proddy as well as me.”

One of the motifs throughout the book is just how bad Pulp were as musicians. It starts with Russell reviewing Jarvis’ band for his fanzine and referring to the songs as “dirges” but “the appearance of the frontman is entertaining”, however the two became friends and Russell joined Pulp not to bring any musical splendour to the act, in fact, it led the group down an even more outré and unconventional rabbit hole. This self-deprecation almost does as a disservice to the group that ten years later would give the British musical canon pop gold like ‘Something Changed’.

“We learned,” Russell laughs when challenged. “But one of the good things about not having the musical theory, is that you do things that are, technically speaking, out of tune. I think it frees things up. I avoided learning, I was of that mindset. I wanted to find something around another corner, so there’s an almost wilful determination to retain a naivety in a way. We were anti-muso.

We had proper, in inverted commas, musicians audition for us and we just didn’t want them because we wanted somebody that was enfant savage. It sounds a bit ridiculous now, and yeah, we did get to learn about chords as time went on, so it’s strange in a way because, in the end, Pulp craft the perfect pop song, they don’t make a random extreme noise terror, but that was the roots of it. It ended up as pop music, almost by accident really.”

The band did set out to be a pop band though, Russell makes no claim to the other throughout the first half of the book, which shows a warts-and-all side to Pulp before the Britpop boom. They didn’t shy away from the spotlight, “Or want to be an underground, sell-no-records, indie purity thing,” Russell confirms.

“With the C86 movement, they seemed to take succour from how few records they’d sold, like that was a mark of integrity. We thought that was guff and saw not selling records as failure, so I think, in a way, we stood out from the crowd, in that ‘we are going to entertain and we are going to sell records’. It was not very cool at the time.”

“Outside the Cambridge Corn Exchange a young man approached me. There was something funny about him, then he attempted to pass me a wrap of drugs. I refused and then noticed a cameraman with a long lens taking photographs. This was a set-up, imagine the consequences if I’d taken the wrap. That bastard was prepared to ruin my life for a made-up story.”

The price of fame is high, though, and Russell is candid in his dissection of it. “It’s safe to say [that I hate fame]. It was a downer, there was a certain purity and innocence to the Britpop thing, despite all the excess. It seemed a bit of a charmed life really, and then you hit reality of things and you’re cynical. I had a happy view of it and I liked our fans, and it didn’t seem like this cynical rock world to me, it seemed like something light and fluffy.

I don’t know if I’ve stressed it enough in the book but we were very much ‘of’ our fans. We were jumble sale kids. People would look at you funny in the street, and then you were in the sanctity of the concert where there were other strange people, so there was this secret little club of outsiders, and it was a nice thing.”

Of all the Britpop bands, Pulp seemed the most approachable, the most down-to-earth, the most likely to invite you in for a cuppa if you were camped outside their house in December waiting for an autograph. “It’s true,” laughs Russell, as I tell him a story of a friend for whom that happened to.

“And on the whole, I have had my differences with the members of the band, but basically they’re all fairly decent. I wouldn’t say we were prudes but I suppose we were a bit, in that Yorkshire way. We were well-brought up and had decent manners, and no we didn’t hold with bad behaviour at all.”

Laughing about some of the unpretentious, no-nonsense Yorkshire-ness of ‘Freak Out The Squares’, we promise Russell that we won’t paint him completely as rock ‘n’ roll’s least likely, or as a thoroughly decent bloke too much, a real model of the common people. “If it’s true to say it,” he laughs.

“All that Northern stuff, there’s two strands to Sheffield. One is the by-heck whimsy and they get terribly excited about cooling towers getting knocked down. I can’t be doing with that professional Northern-ness, but there’s always a form of Sheffieldness that’s this Dadaist intense thing and I guess I cleave to the latter persuasion really. I don’t really do Northern whimsy.

This is an unusual interview in a way because most people are trying to get me to dish more dirt and I’m like, ‘I haven’t got any more’.

It’s honest in that it does own up to the fact that there wasn’t much in the way of groupies.”

“When we got on the bus, the back room had a general air of a Western saloon – cigarettes, whiskey and wild, wild women. The tour manager interrupted the reverie with the unfortunate phrase: ‘Excuse me ladies, we’ve got to shoot off now’. Everyone was a winner. The girls could hold their heads up high, and no one had to shag in the toilet looking at the ‘No Solids’ sign and wake up feeling like yesterday’s fish and chips.”

“The chronicle of Pulp, the true and honest chronicle of Pulp would take up a shelf of books,” Russell sighs when we do ask him if he was perhaps too polite and left out some of the more outlandish tales from the road. “If you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all.

There could’ve been lots of moaning about this, that and the other but it would all be rather trivial. There would be no major revelations, so even if I had the inclination to write a kiss-and-tell, put-the-boot-in book I’d have been really thin on material for it. I’m actually being quite frank, and in a way, brave, in admitting that it’s not always that exciting and if you win the ‘hang out with Pulp for the day’ prize you’d probably choose not to do it again."

“People want Pulp to live in the Monkees house and all be great mates and I don’t have to put the dagger, because people’s view of Pulp is quite a benign one. I can’t remember the last time anyone said anything unkind to me about it, it’s awfully fluffy all of this and I feel a little bit guilty that there’s not more bite but the truth is that people have a lot of affection for Pulp and I’ve no desire to change that.”

The book starts with Russell carefully considering Jarvis’ invitation to reunite the old gang for a one-off Glastonbury performance, flits back to when he first saw Jarvis “murder” (his words) ‘Wild Thing’ by The Troggs while his bass player fell off the stage, follows his acceptance into the Pulp fold and acts as a witty diary of the band’s 2011 comeback and mid-’90s highs.

It allows us a bird’s eye view of Britpop in ascendance – from its biggest stories (Pulp unwittingly to blame for pitting Blur and Oasis against each other with scurrilous gossip about who said what about Justine Frischmann) and wildest excesses (Russell lays claim to being responsible for Britpop folly Menswear, who signed to Island for a ludicrous fee and actually weren’t very good at all) but while he seemed, on the face of it all, to have had a jolly good time, the reunion was a one-off for him, despite protestation from both band and fans.

“Well, phone calls have come, quite a number of times, and things didn’t entirely wind down when it was supposed to, and so I can say that [I’m done] with reasonable degrees of certainty, because there were things that I’ve not done, like playing The Royal Albert Hall and so I’ve resisted those, but I’m very romantic about Pulp,” he admits, when pushed to see if he would tread the boards just one more time and had this book maybe triggered a little bit of wanderlust in him.

“Not everything in my life is as pure as that, but that’s one thing I like to keep it pure. I don’t wish to reduce it by cashing in on it, although you could say I’m doing that with this book. I could’ve tried to pump up the controversy, and I would have sold more copies but I’m quite romantic about it, and protective about the legacy.”

Now a full-time writer he admits that “I got my violin down so I could play it but I’ve not, it’s got dust on it. We weren’t musicians, I really don’t feel like I was. I don’t know how to play any other songs all the way through apart from Pulp songs, and I don’t sit around playing the guitar. What’s next? Writing! A geology-themed mystery romance, a book on the life of Edwin of Northumbria, and another one on foraging. Eclectic and uneconomic! Choose the things that are least likely to sell and do that, that’s what I’m doing.”

Of course he is, of course the foppish, besuited outsider from Britpop’s most bizarre and stubbornly contrary and peculiar band has swapped the riches and adulation of pop music for writing books about mushrooms and ancient kings. What else would he do? Like we said, Pulp and Russell Senior were of a different class, and we wouldn’t change them for the world.

‘Freak Out The Squares: Life In A Band Called Pulp’ is available now from Aurum Press Ltd

Transcription by me.

#russell senior #pulp #freak out the squares #printed article #interview #printed interview #britpop #90s

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starryeyes2000 · 1 year

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Weekly Digest: 1/15/2023

Fic Posts/Updates for the previous week and a few extras. Hope all have a great week!

Trust Love One More Time: Chapter 13 * McCoy x OFC (Cara) 🌟 Read on AO3 or FFN

(Yep, I was hit last week with post-holiday work overload as well as the usual post-holiday blues. No much writing, my bad.)

Blast from the past: Dating Advice * McCoy & Kirk & Spock, McCoy x Reader 🌟 As McCoy begins dating again, Kirk and Spock are there to offer helpful advice - whether McCoy wants it or not. Most of this fic centers around conversations between our favorite trio.

Story Masterlist | OCMasterlist | Author Masterlist

Other Recommendations:

New Blog: Check out @darsynia!

Fics: Do You Believe In Magic * @mrsmungus 🌟Ziva's beaten up and bruised after a rough case, and tells Tony that she doesn't believe in magic. Tony sets about proving to her that magic is real. Not to mention the healing powers of a kiss. A Tiva first kiss story.

Edged In Silver * @wordspin-shares 🌟Read on FFN | AO3 When Minas Tirith is evacuated during the War of the Ring, Idrin, sister-daughter of the Steward Denethor, remains in the city to continue serving at the Houses of Healing. With her work as a healer and her duties in the Citadel left nearly unaltered, things feel as familiarly quiet as ever. Yet, oftentimes the occurrences that touch one’s life are rather unassuming and not always noticed when they take place.

Anthem of the Angels: Chapter 7 * @darknightfrombeyond 🌟Excerpt: [...] my fingers tracing the hard ridges of scars cut deep into his skin. My heart thudded at the sight of them. Whiplashes. A puckered star low on his abdomen, half hidden beneath the sheets folded over his hips . . . was from a bullet . . .

Series: Jurassic World AU: Anything That Can Go Wrong - @themaradaniels 🌟 Eleanor Scott, Jurassic World's lead paleontologist and a former student of Dr Alan Grant, is tasked with showing 19 year old Joan Grant, the daughter of Alan and Ellie, around the park for the week. Masrani leaves Joan an all-access pass to enjoy the park at her leisure, including the parts normally forbidden to tourists, in the hopes that it might convince Dr Grant to endorse the park.

Taglist: @arrthurpendragon @ocappreciation @ocappreciationtag @bardic-tales @chickensarentcheap @themaradaniels

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afrobeatsindacity · 1 year

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NEW ALBUM: MAVINS - CHAPTER X

Independent Nigerian label Mavin Records celebrate its 10th anniversary with all-star compilation album Chapter X. The compilation marks a milestone moment that will see each artist in all their glory as we simultaneously celebrate the continuous efforts of the formidable label. Under the leadership of legendary producer Don Jazzy, Mavin Records has been at the forefront of music business conversations since starting the label in 2012. Mavin Records have broken onto the global scene with tangible success to show for it and their roster is now comprised of ten artists, two songwriters and five producers who have cornered their own artistry.

Spanning over 10-tracks, the album sets a new precedence for Mavin's burgeoning roster consisting of Rema, Ayra Starr, LADIPOE, Boy Spyce, Bayanni, Magixx, Crayon, and Johnny Drille. The previous single from the compilation, ‘Overdose (Overloading)’ amassed over 200 million streams, over 40 million views on YouTube and over 1.7 million creations on Tik Tok. Last month, they released ‘Won Da Mo’, an all-star single led by up-tempo production from fellow-Mavin Records producer Andre Vibes who represents the sonic worlds of each artist throughout the album. Intending to take over dancefloors far and wide, ‘Amina’ is an anthemic track that sees Rema and Ayra Starr trade verses as they maintain the high energy. The project is rounded off with the dreamy love ballad ‘You’ before ‘Jara’, which includes a guest verse from Don Jazzy, who provides additional words across the outro. Mavin’s plans of global dominance have aligned with the rise of Afrobeats’ influence on a worldwide scale. The mission is to continue pushing forward and re-writing history following an exciting year of accomplishments in 2022.

Play, Share and Enjoy “Chapter X”

Follow @AfrobeatsCity on Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

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rehcciardo · 2 years

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The chaos of Silverstone

This one is a bit late but I didn’t had time after the race and my notes were so messy, that I needed to sort them out a bit first.

I think I should start with the drivers parade.

To be honest I actually prefer the truck instead of all drivers seperated in different cars. I don’t know how it is when you are at the track but for watching it at home, the trucks are so much better in my opinion. I love the interviews and I love to see the drivers chatting with each other and fooling around sometimes and all of this is missing when they are seperated of course. But I still had a lot of fun watching it.

At first let’s talk about how cute Lando looked with his UK bucket hat. I’m not a big fan of those hats but Lando is looking so cute with them <3. I really want him to wear them all of the time xD. And I almost died laughing when they interviewed Lando and Lewis came over to steal his bucket hat! This was hilarious xD. Our Uk boys were in such a fantastic mood and I loved all about it!

But there is one thing I have to admit. I really was afraid that George will fall out of the car because he was standing in this car the most of the time. I’ve seen him landing on the track in my mind already. I’m glad it didn’t happen though.

I also have to talk about Daniel and his old fashioned racing helmet or maybe I better say hat? I don’t know how to call it right but it looked so funny! This guy is such an idiot but in a very good way xD.

The next one I want to talk about is Valtteri. He was literally sitting in the car like a boss. Yeah of course it is Valtteri but it really looked like: “Yeah I’m here and I do not give a single fuck about everything. But I’ll kick some asses in the race later!” I’ll call him Valtteri Bossas from now on. (I’m sorry for that!)

Last but not least one of my personal highlights. Carlos struggling to get out of his car was so cute and funny and I won’t ever get over this! The way he looked for the right way to get out was pricless :D

Holy shit this one will be a way too long. I just finished the drivers parade and there are still so many things coming. There are a few things I have to mention here.

First of all, Sebastian’s hemlet for this race was the cutest thing I’ve ever seen so far. I think it was even cuter than Albons helmet with his pets and this means a lot! He really has got a by his kids designed helmet as a birthday present from his family? God I can’t! This is cuetness overload guys!

The second thing I really loved was Sam Ryder performing the national anthem. Maybe I should tell you, that I’m a passionate ESC fan and seeing two of my passions collide like this was freaking awesome. And I liked his own style of the anthem.

But now it’s finally time to write about the race itself, huh?

The start had been a quiet good one for Max who could pass Carlos in the very first meters. Carlos lost his position without a single chance to fight against Max.

When we talk about good starts, I also have to mention Lewis who did an amazing start as well. I mean it really feels like Mercedes and espescially Lewis are back and are fighting more than ever. And this feels fantastic after the tough start into the season.

Turn one. I don't even know how to start writing about what happened because I'm still shocked. There was this big accident and at first I didn’t know what happend. I just saw George slowing down because he obviously had a crash and suddenly he jumped out of the car to run towards another car. After a short time it became clear that Zhou had a horrendous accident with George and Albon crashed as well because he tried to avoid the bigger one. The red flag has been waved and I knew it must have been something real serious. I was nearly in tears already because I didn't know if Zhou was ok and I honestly thought about the worst case scenario. The time passed by and it felt like hours until the commentators finally said that Zhou is okay. Of course I was afraid about Albon as well but after seeing a replay of this nasty crash and how Zhou's car was upside down slippering through the gravel into the barrier and over it....fuck this shit could have ended badly. I'm nearly in tears again while writing about the crash. I'm sooo sooo glad that Zhou and Albon are okay and thank you halo for saving a live once again!

Oh and by the way. Daniel had so much luck to haven't been involved in the accidents. Albon almost hit him. This was goddamn close. But Yuki and Esteban got involved by it and I think Pierre as well. But at least the could still drive the car back to the pit lane.

And can we please talk again about George who jumped out of his car and run towards Zhou to look after him and checking if he is okay? George is truly one of my heros today! I'm so so sad that he was out after his crash because he couldn't manage it to come back into the pit lane on his own during the red flag like Yuki or Esteban did. And he looked so sad when he got interviewed. I wanted to hug him so so badly. Much love for Georgie <3

During the red flag, Lewis ran into the Aston Martin garage and my very first thought was, that Mick may have started a new trend in Canada with sneaking into other team's garages xD

They restarted the race with the positions the drivers gained in the qualifying and this was really sad for Lewis who had this incredible start and he gained two positions with it already. But due of the positions of the qualifying he was back on P5 at the restart and I was so mad about it.

The fights at the restart were so tight and intense. The fight between Charles and Checo was a really hard one and they had some touchy moments with each other. Due of this fight Perez had to do a pit stop and ended at the back of the field after it and Charles had a slighty damaged nose as well.

Both Alpha Tauri took each other out off track and were almost at the and of the field? Okay actually Tsunoda took both of them out. But it looked nicely synchron. Maybe they should apply on a ballet school? Not me imagine Yuki and Pierre dancing ballet while they are wearing a cute tutu xD

Again Carlos couldn't handle the pressure and made a mistake and Max had the opportunity to overtake him again. Please Carlos you have to stay focused and not making silly little mistakes when you are under pressure. It's painful to watch. But fortunately for him Max had an issue on his tyres, slowed down and went in for a pit stop. But the issue was still there becaus it wasn't a puncture in one of his tyres but he was still able to stay out even he struggled like hell. But still better as retiring the car.

The next DNF. This time Valtteri. Okay no kicked asses this race. Do someone know what was the problem with his car? I don't know if they said it to be honest. But what a bad day for Alfa Romeo in Silverstone. Double DNF. I'm sorry for them.

Vettel passed Verstappen. VER FUCKING STAPPEN. Yeah of course he was struggeling but who would have thought that something like this will happen this season? Me neither! And I'm so sorry but everytime someone passes Max I have this fucking song on loop in my mind. Pass the Dutchie 'pon the left hand sight xD I like Max. I admire his driving skills and his talent but this song is instantly playing in my head every fucking time xD

Here we go again with another DNF. Pierre had to retire his car. I think his tow accidents affected his car more than expected? This time again I do not remember that they said something during the broadcast about this DNF and the reasons. Maybe my brain was so full of informations and emotions already that it wasn't able to handle more informations? I couldn't blame it xD

Just right after passing Verstappen, Ocon's car had an technical issue. Just if his car was thinking: "My job here is done! I passed Verstappen. I've reached all I ever wanted. I'm out, bye!" But of course he parked it on the track and caused a SC. Sir you can't park here! Don't get me wrong I don't blame him. It just fited exactly well to this hell of a race xD

And when we are talking about this SC. Ferrari messed up with their strategy again. Traditions... This is one of the safest things you can cross out on your bullshit bingo every race weekend. Once again they screwd up on Charles because they didn't let him pit. Guys, do you even know that Charles is in an actual fight for the championship with Max? I mean it was great for Carlos in the end but Charles would have needed any single point when Max is struggeling and barely in the points.The SC instead helped Lewis get closer to Ferrari and while Charles tried to keep him behind, he didn't stand a chance on his old set of hard tyres.

The next restart was as intens as the one after the red flag. Thight and exciting fights. And I think a few of them were really close to get under investigation. On of the most exciting fights for me was the one between Mick and Max the last laps. I really screamed at my TV that Mick should not fight this much and rather safe his first ever points in Formula 1. And what should I say? He eventually did it. POINTS. P8! I'm proud of him! I was so relived, when Mick crossed the finish line.

But there is someone else who deserves to be mentioned. Carlos Sainz, who won his first GP. Well done! It really was about time for him getting his first win. The only bad thing is, that this win would have been Charles' when Ferrari wouldn't messed up that much. But I'm happy for him and seeing him on the podium was so wholesome.

The second place for Sergio was incredible, too. He had absolutely one of his best races so far. Coming back from the end of the field stright onto P2. Fantastic drive Sergio!

I need kind of a "Lewis doing so well" - appreciation part here. Lewis did a hell of a race! One fastest lap after the other. INCREDIBLE!!!! And he got another podium!I hope it's not to early to say that Lewis is back in the fight?

This race was full of emotions and epic fights. Exept of the crash in turn 1, this was an amazing and exciting race. But I've been so done after it. I need to get some rest during this week before we are back again in Austria next weekend I guess xD There is nothing more to say besides that I'm so glad that Zhou and Alex are fine.

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biglisbonnews · 1 year

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Kimbra Embraces Life's Many Reckonings Throughout history, the emotions of women were branded as a series of harsh, clinical words. Hysteria was most prevalent, serving as a diagnosis for sexually active, irritable and/or anxious women. When existing within society's margins, every move is pathologized. For Kimbra, an unraveling was brought on by the pandemic, when she exited her massive deal with Warner Records and heartbreak propelled her into a period of self-examination. The signs of life that emanated from New York streets in the dead of lockdown eventually morphed into a more cautious but nonetheless bright-eyed community of people looking to reconnect with art, their peers and the world around them. It was a period of reflection that the New Zealand-born artist desperately needed after a decade of standard industry fare.Kimbra's contribution to Gotye's 2011 smash hit "Somebody That I Used To Know" crystallized after she signed her Warner Records deal. While tinkering with songs she wrote throughout her teenage years and making new ones to eventually land on her debut album, Vows, she struck gold on the song. It was an unexpected hit that took the world by storm in the midst of the early '10s obsession with electro-pop, folksy stomp-clap anthems and bubbling Soundcloud rap. Instead of relishing in having one of the best-selling digital singles in history, it was on to the next thing. Kimbra's subsequent albums following Vows highlighted the conflict of artistic freedom and the pressure to follow up a hit with an even bigger one. Nonetheless, she took advantage of the wealth of resources to check off dream collaborations and experiment with new sounds, even if it didn't always spell a commercial hit.Related | Kimbra Gets Stuck on 'replay!' in Explosive New VideoReinvigorated by her independence and a close working relationship with Ryan Lott, best known as a member of Son Lyx, Kimbra channeled these emotions into her music – both visible and invisible. She wrote songs that never intended to see the light of day and wrestled with inner conflict. Inspired by near-universal experiences such as the strange urge to stare at your reflection a bit longer after a good cry, a split-second thought of violence while in the face of adversity and the primal urge to thrash and shriek, A Reckoning was born, putting sound to emotions without a proper name. Kimbra is free, her voice reaching soaring highs and sultry whispers over Lott's textured production. Punk, hip-hop, electronic and R&B tumble as she writhes around in a state of ecstasy. There's an almost orgasmic quality to Kimbra's work, capturing tragedy, sensuality and release in a multi-sensory overload. In her world, there's no such thing as the tragic female lead, irrationality, hysteria or subtlety. It reassures the ugly parts of humanity that are pathologized, mocked and dismissed through a uniquely feminine perspective. Read on for PAPER's conversation with Kimbra about A Reckoning, what it means to capture uncomfortable emotions and life's many taboos. What has changed between your last album and now that informed your headspace?I already had a lot of songs floating around by the end of the last album. I knew that I wanted to write a lot of new material, especially because I've gone through a lot during the pandemic, like the end of a relationship in 2020. So I was committed to sitting down at the piano every few days, my Wurlitzer at home, really trying to write some very heartfelt ballads. When songs like "save me" and "i don't want to fight" emerged, it became clear that I was going to be touching on some really big themes. One of them was the theme of conflict and anger. Where do these parts of us live and how do we find healthy ways to express them? How do I lean into the ugly stuff? I'm like, I don't want to look at my own rage and I'll probably have to if I'm going to evolve. When I had that theme in mind, I started collecting photographs of people about to break. I love those four seconds when you watch someone and they're deciding whether they're going to react or respond kindly. I wanted to capture that moment of reckoning with yourself, facing yourself and deciding how you're going to move clearly. That was the inspiration. So then out of that, I brought back songs like "gun" that I had written for Rihanna at a songwriting camp back in the day. She never picked it up so I brought that back. Then I wrote "replay!" and I was like, Wow, this is about a woman really reckoning with a lot of her difficult emotions and trying to break cycles. I'm really interested in loops. I've always been interested in looping cycles, circles, patterns. I think the way we evolve as humans is often to witness those loops, see the habits we have and then work to soften them and break them. That's kind of where it all came from. Then I picked my co-producer Ryan Lott from Son Lux. That was my person that was going to sonically present these characters. I had the vulnerable softness of a woman surrendering and then the fighter, the warrior, the aggression. So his role was to be like, How do I make characters out of this? How do I make synthesizers that sound like knives?One of my notes is about the textures on this record. The sounds are almost tangible. I want my songs to sound like my internal landscapes. I have these inner worlds. Some of them are calm and controlled, and then some of them are schizophrenic and claustrophobic and the way that I keep myself in check is to make music from that place. What does it sound like in my head today? Do you feel that making music to let these feelings out is healthy for you, or do you have other outlets?You gotta have other ones. If your life is only about music, it can become a bit single-minded. I try to do yoga and run and do things that are physical. I like to do watercolors and express myself, but the impulse to create is to bring clarity out of confusion. When I'm confused about what I'm feeling, it's a very scary place for me. I sit down and make a beat that sounds like my internal rhythm and sing a melody that sounds like the longing or the regret or the fear. If I make that melody, then I relax like, Ah, I made something invisible, visible. I made something that was abstract and scary into a tangible thing that can now help someone else and turn suffering into joy.How does that process work, to create something that intuitively feels like something invisible?It's an act of faith. You don't know what's going to come out and it might be shit, right? And you're scared of that! If I lean in, start tinkering and playing chords, I might strike on something that needs to come out. It's kind of like a dance with the subconscious. You're trusting that something in the subconscious is going to emerge. If you just stop trying to control it, you have to be out of it. You have to be like a child. And when you're playing, guessing, stepping into the dark, then you land and are like, "That sounds like how I feel." You see how that's fate? You're not controlling the process. You're leaning into something more divine and you're hunting and smelling around to see something.Going back to the fear of something sounding like shit, is that something you are still conscious of?Of course! That's the risk you take every time you try to create because you're immediately face-to-face with the inner critic who's going to sit there and go, that's not good enough, you should be making better music. You're gonna have to wrestle with the inner critic. It's faith that you'll create something that is meaningful even when you're scared because creatives are scared. There's an illusion that an artist just walks into a creative space and unfolds something beautiful. No, they're scared that it's not going to be good enough. For example, "save me" was a song that I wrote because my therapist told me to write something that no one would ever hear. So in that sense, it took away the inner critic. Now I decided to put it out, but initially, no one's gonna hear this so it doesn't matter if it's shit. I'm just gonna make it for me. A really great way to write something is if you take away the audience and the witness altogether. You might find that you want the witness later. But for the moment of creation, you're trying to get rid of that voice of where it's gonna go and just do it purely for the sake of expression, with no outcome with no life span. Just pure expression in the moment.It must be strange to make music without the intention of anyone else hearing it after spending so long doing the exact opposite, creating with the purpose of eventually releasing it and having an audience always in mind. Of course. It's been a lot easier on this record because it was just me and the co-producer the whole time. We didn't have any record labels assigned to the record. I parted ways with Warner Brothers so I didn't have people in the room saying, "Make the chorus bigger," or, "This isn't commercial enough." I just made the record I wanted to make. I made what I wanted to listen to. It is easier when you remove the industry voices because that adds a lot of pressure.You can really hear the difference between a squeaky-clean record and one with more freedom, although it may be my own bias. I'm guessing working so intimately with one other person definitely helped rein in some of the ideas.[Ryan Lott] oversaw a lot of the final ideas. Of course, I'm at the center of a lot of sound design and coming up with arrangements and stuff, but it was always me and him. Even though there are other people involved, it was always me and him aligning our vision for the ultimate sound, which I think creates cohesion to this record and a feeling of not too many cooks in the kitchen, which can make a record sound confused sometimes.It's also a shorter record! I think albums are getting longer and I kind of enjoy a journey from start to finish. It's very focused and takes you many places, but I lean toward a slightly conceptual idea. And I like the number 10! It provides such symmetry to an album. You get a middle point and then you get act two. Those were the 10 [songs] that told the story for me. Of course, there's plenty of others, but I just wanted to make a statement that didn't have filler or songs that were there to bulk it up. I wanted every song to be very much a side of the central theme. To be fair, I have a lot of work ready to go up to this. I've been piling it up for shorter releases rather than one long one.I love that you're talking about an almost universal taboo about female anger and the label of the "hysterial" woman. What was it like to embody those emotions? I would say they're all different sides to the experience of conflict, rage and anger that lives within us. It's confronting. It's almost difficult to live inside these songs because I'm having to get so intimate with the parts of myself that are difficult to look at. When I'm making whimsical fantasy music, I get to escape myself. For this record, I went into myself in a very direct way, so sometimes I have to take a breather. Even the music videos are exhausting. The work is exhausting, because it is. It's very raw in terms of the things that I feel within, but this is what I do as an artist. As I say to my audience, I'll go there so you can join me too and feel less afraid to go there. It always helps when you've got a hand, someone to lead you through the darkness or into the fun! There's a lot of fun on this record. There's a lot of playful sexuality and discovering your womanhood in these really cool, exciting ways. You can only do that when you go through the hard stuff and see what's really there. It's scary, but then it opens up all these other parts of yourself and you can let go of shame and regret. There's a whole multifaceted experience of being what I identify as, which is a woman. We're scared to look at all these different sides of ourselves. We put people in boxes and for me to break out of my box, I have to first take a good look at what's in there. That helps me expand. And like I said, there's a heaviness to the first half of the record and then it's a real freedom that emerges towards the end. Songs like "GLT" and "new habit" are about the other side of anger. And when you move through that stuff, you get to see all the beauty that is there too.Did you feel like you were going through this process of rediscovering yourself, your womanhood and sexuality when making this record?Yeah, for sure. I express myself in new ways. You know, I think part of looking at the emotion of anger is that it's tied to your life force. Your life force is also erotic and sensual and sexual, and so when you look at this emotion and its deeper root, you find all of these other expressions of vitality. They are all good things for our world. Protest is fueled by the same thing that makes us violent. I think I've grown into my own skin and my own body. I've wanted to embrace my physicality in new ways and incorporate dance and movement more into things. I'm contemplating motherhood now that I'm in my 30s, so there's also that strong female experience of realizing that you're wanting to think about being a creator, a mother. I think there's a real strength in seeing your body as a vessel for life. It takes time for everyone to feel comfortable expressing themselves on those different levels, and that's the journey of an artist! You're accessing yourself in different ways. Sometimes I do it through escapism, sometimes I do it in this really grounded, bodily way. This is why it takes four to five years to make a record because you live with yourself for a bit.It seems that even while you were at a major label, you were able to work on your own artistic timeline. Right. I tended to push back on that. I think there's always that pressure to deliver sooner, but I tended to be quite forthright about needing time and I'm glad that they were understanding of that. And often, I just want to wait until I actually have something to say that's worthwhile. There's a lot of music out there. There's a lot of female pop artists. What do I have to contribute here that is authentic to my experience, and is going to be helpful to other people?Are you nervous about bringing these songs on tour when they are even more vulnerable than usual?I'm mentally preparing. What gives me life is looking into the eyes of other people and seeing them reflect back the same emotions and feel the same things. It makes me feel safer to say these things out loud because there's other people in the room. It's like the beauty of an AA meeting. When people come together and all share their experiences, everyone goes, "Thank you for sharing. I understand that." It's a lot better than me sitting alone in my apartment going through it on my own. The community that comes from live performance is very healing for me because the music basically has a second life after you release it. I've lived with the songs and I've cried to the songs and I put them on my headphones and I've gone, "Fuck yeah, this is exactly what I want to say." But now they're yours. Now they're someone else's. I'm on to the next thing! It's like a service that you are giving. You're now allowing for the songs to unfold in the lives of others, and I look at that as my offering.On "gun," you open with the line, "I earned the right to talk this way." I think that was when the album really started come together for me and communicated that internal conflict of anger and femininity.I've spent a lot of my career and time in my life giving my power over to other people, so there's a reclamation of finding yourself again in this record. And sometimes you forget your sense of self in this industry. "gun" is really realizing that a lot of the words that people spoke over me which were meant to free and empower me were actually like a gun to the head. They're actually trapping me. Sometimes you think that you owe a lot to other people but at the end of the day, you're the one that turns up for yourself. You're the one that gets you through the hard times. I wrote those words for Rihanna, so I wrote it for a woman that I felt was stronger than me. I think there was that reclamation of like, Why can't I say that? I need my music to be my strongest self because sometimes I can't speak like that. I am shy, I get nervous, but in my music, I get to say those things like, "I earned the right to talk this way." Was there any emotion that felt particularly difficult to create?I think "la type," which is a song about my experience dating in LA and just some of the bullshit that comes with a city that's built on entertainment. That one was hard because I had so many different versions and approaches. It's a tongue-in-cheek song. It's obviously having a bit of a laugh. I love LA and I'm not bagging on it, but there's also a culture that I'm talking to that is very distorted and superficial, right? But it was hard to capture the nuance of that. I wanted some sparkle and that Hollywood feel, but I also wanted it to be sassy and feel like Betty Davis. It had to shine. That was the hardest one to finish. And the final icing on the cake was actually getting Questlove to play drums on the track! We cut that at Electric Lady. So he played on that song and it suddenly had just the right feeling of pocket and groove and throwback, because the thing is, I'm always nervous to do throwback sounds — I don't want it to sound derivative. For "la type," I had to make it feel modern but also had to throw back to stuff that I loved. It's hard when you have a Prince-inspired song to not go full Prince. That's why I lean into juxtaposition and duality because that's when you get something original. When you mix regret with sexual desire. When you mix guilt with pride. That's where originality comes in. I like to find the paradoxes in me.Have you written a lot for others?A little bit! I do get called in to write for other people. I think there's a cool thing that happens when you step outside of yourself and your own insecurities and you write it for someone else to sing. You're not overly attached to whether or not you mean it from the bottom of your heart. It's for them! You imagine a different character, like the version of Kimbra that walks into a room and says, "I earned the right to talk this way." What's that version of me that can say that? And then when I take on that character, I get better at living it out in the real world. It's like my practice. What does it feel like to speak like that in industry meetings when I speak to men who make me feel small? It has now been over a decade since "Somebody I Used To Know." Do you still feel bound to that song and wish for that not to be the main focus of your catalog?Probably. Luckily, I love the song and the world loves the song and it's a great song. So it's like, I'm proud to be associated with it. It's not a moment of my career where I'm like, Oh, that was embarrassing. That was an amazing moment. There's a little bit of a punk in me that says I'm gonna make something totally different. I just want to say I like to subvert expectations. That song gave me a lot of faith in pop music that you don't have to conform. It's a pretty weird pop song and it's not traditional. It made me dream big about what I could do as an artist, and if that's what people can connect with, it's just raw emotion not presented in the Top 40. It made me really ambitious as an artist, rather than shrinking and thinking that I have to play by all the rules. So have you always wanted to be a pop artist?Well, I like pop because you get given this format of verse one, chorus, verse two, chorus, bridge. But then within that, you can kind of do whatever. Look at artists like Prince and Michael Jackson. They made weird shit poppy because they put a hook on it and they performed it with theatrics and entertainment. I like the theatrical aspect of pop and the way that you can make it larger than life. I think that's cool! Pop has the potential to reach so many people. I like the challenge of making a pop song while integrating stuff that would not normally be pop, like listening to Brazilian music for a month and then sampling something Brazilian or taking a vocal technique from that style and making it palatable and understandable for people that might be intimidated by that kind of music.The pandemic must've allowed you to sit with some music that ended up really impacting your process.Yeah, we had to face ourselves. I was thinking a lot about how certain artists use danger in music to shock people and wake them up, like a Kanye West record. It just subverts. There's a Nina Simone sample and then a symphony! It reminds me of waking people up! I didn't want my contribution to just be flat. I wanted it to be really dynamic. So for A Reckoning, it's a fucking direct conversation record. Artists like, I think Rosalía came into the scene at a really exciting time. She had this slap-in-the-face attitude and I love the nature of power in that work.It's an exciting time for pop music. Think of Chloe x Halle! The R&B artists coming out of this time were just very different. You know, James Blake and other great songwriters were doing these weird sonic worlds that are so haunting. Stuff that's memorable while also trying some more simplicity at times. I can hide sometimes behind a lot of vocal effects and ethereal production and I wanted there to be a directness to this.You're a hip-hop fan, and with this record, it feels like you're really finding the confidence to approach that space more.The project I'm working on is going a lot more in that direction. I'm always making a lot of collaborative stuff and rap is one of the biggest influences on my sound world and rhythm. Rap has so much punk in it and so much rebellion and exciting rhythmic information — Kendrick is still probably the most influential artist for me as a songwriter because he can make his voice sound like so many different characters! It's so jazz to me. It's totally jazz, which is protest music, right? Jazz is nonconformity, so I think integrating rap more into the work featuring rappers I love feels very natural to me because I take so much inspiration from the rhythmic world of rap and hip-hop. And yet, there have been many collaborations that I've been working on that haven't felt quite right for this record, so I've continued to keep them aside for an eventual new release that will be very focused on some of these bangers with rappers and venture into just exploring that side of my influence. I grew up with so much '90s and '00s R&B and hip-hop and my work as an artist is keen on unfolding the little pockets of who I am because that's all I've got to work with. It's the raw material of my life and my influence. You're taking from the world around you, but I believe that you first have to go within to be able to make comments about the outer world. Each project is a way to search for something within. What do I want to say with this and what pocket have I not yet discovered inside of myself? What have I not looked at yet? Is there a specific moment on this record that you're attached to?"the way we were" is a song where the melodies have a really classic feeling about them, especially the chorus. I really like when I write melodies that feel like you've heard them before, but you've never heard them before. You know, that feeling where it's like the song has always existed. It almost reminds me of some of the '80s anthems that I love where the chorus just soars. I'm proud that I was able to achieve a moment that really reflects what it's like to miss someone and the longing for the way we were. It's great when you nail an emotion you're trying to convey.What dualities are in this record and what are these central characters?I think the two characters are chaos and energy or vitality. And then there's contemplation, reflection, peace, surrender. It's true of my life! I live in New York, but I also come from New Zealand. I come from this contemplative, peaceful land where there's only four million people. I go and I meditate and be quiet and sit with the trees. Then I come back here to improvisation, collective jazz punk, stimulation, anxiety. I have a lot of anxiety, but I'm always going back and forth between this very controlled calm state. Instead of trying to annihilate that, I'm gonna just try to accept that and make it my gift to the world. Do they work together? Yeah, because they live in me and they live in all of us. They do work together. We can't have one without the other. Also, the record is a woman trying to wrestle with something that is misunderstood, like rage. We've been told that it's mania. We've been told that when you're angry, you're having a breakdown instead of a breakthrough. That's reframing. It's looking at what is beautiful about the original emotion. There's something really powerful about vitality and people feeling the urgency to act. It's an important emotion, you can't shut that down. You've just got to find healthy outlets for it.What do you get from going back and forth between New York and home, especially emotionally and creatively?I think of it as an inhale. New York is an exhale. It's an output. But when I'm there, I try to be very present to my family and to the trees. I get a lot from being in a forest. It's really about input. It's really about quiet and just being around other people's lives. My life in New York is very self-focused. I spend a lot of time looking at myself, and when I go to New Zealand, it's a time to be focused on the people I love and go inward a little bit and realign with the self that isn't a musician.Do you feel like people can't separate the watercolor and yoga Kimbra from the performer Kimbra?There's always going to be that disconnect because of social media and the ways that people see you on the outside. They make assumptions about who you are and your day-to-day. You must be so glamorous and confident and extroverted. Not at all, but it's nice to keep that for yourself and have a world that looks very ordinary and just hang out with my dog and make food and just watch dumb reality TV and all those things. I really hang on to my community of friends who see me as just Kim. That's very grounding — to not have people consistently viewing you through the lens of your career.Photo courtesy of Spencer Ostrander https://www.papermag.com/kimbra-a-reckoning-2659314389.html

#Kimbra #A reckoning #Music #Interview #Jade Gomez#PAPER

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lunapaper · 1 year

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Album Review: 'SOS' - SZA

SZA is making up for lost time.

After an exhausting five-year tug-of-war with her record label, Top Dawg Entertainment, the singer’s long-awaited second album, SOS is a sprawling 23 tracks, clocking in at just over an hour.

As expected, there’s a lot for Solana Rowe to process, all delivered in her usual rambling stream of consciousness.

‘I might kill my ex, not the best idea/His new girlfriend's next, how'd I get here?’ she sings on the woozy, twilit psychedelia of ‘Kill Bill,’ preferring jail time over loneliness. She revels in self-destruction on ‘Seek and Destroy,’ setting the mood with a nervous rattle of synths. On ‘Blind,’ she craves violence and dysfunction, boldly proclaiming ‘My pussy precedes me/My, my, how the times change.’ OG track ‘Shirt,’ meanwhile, is all dusky agitation, Rowe turning her anger into full sensory overload. It also serves up what I consider to be one of the best, most cutting lines on a pop song in recent years (‘Bloodstain on my shirt/New bitch on my nerves’).

There’s a lot of humour and pathos throughout SOS. ‘Ghost in the Machine’ (featuring Phoebe Bridgers) has a jewellery box tenderness about it, backed by an ethereal choir as Rowe pleads for a little humanity, just wanting to ‘fuck, eat, sleep, love happy.’ On ‘Conceited,’ she’s betting on herself, no longer seeking validation and upfront about her past cosmetic procedures. But Rowe’s finds herself back in the chokehold of insecurity not one track later, thanks to her loser ex, owing quite a bit to TLC’s own empowerment anthem, ‘Unpretty.’

There’s a ton of throwback appeal on the album. ‘Gone Girl’ is late night 70s soul complete with soft-focus vignette. Both the title track and the home-spun acoustic of ‘Open Arms’ channel the aching, full-throated emotion of Lauryn Hill. ‘Good Days,’ much like Beabadoobee’s ‘Sunny Day,’ is Furtado-style folk pop that sees Rowe on her ‘empty mind shit,’ while ‘Nobody Gets Me’ is on that massive Avril ‘I’m With You’ shit, big time.

‘F2F,’ however, manages to jump on the pop punk bandwagon without the need for a Travis Barker cameo, and it’s all the better for it. You can tell Rowe’s been listening to a lot of Pink here, specifically ‘Just Like a Pill’ and ‘Don’t Let Me Get Me’ (from her 2001 masterpiece, M!ssunderztood).

SOS crosses a lot of sonic terrain, which, unfortunately, results in a rather uneven record. The sequencing is so damn poor, with lush, atmospheric stretches disrupted by cheap filler, creating jarring tonal shifts: ‘Conceited’ immediately contradicts ‘Special’s message of empowerment; ‘F2F’ is plonked between two emotional ballads; ‘Good Days’ sees Rowe find peace, making for a solid closing track… until it’s upended by the ODB-sampling ‘Forgiveless,’ with the singer promising to remain a bad bitch. And why the hell would you not open the record with ‘Smoking On My Ex Pack’??

Some tracks feel unfinished, while others already sound dated (namely ‘Low,’ ‘Notice Me,’ ‘Conceited,’ ‘Snooze’ – exactly that). SOS, at times, seems to be produced more with virality and streaming in mind, probably at the behest of TDE and RCA, hoping for another ‘Shirt’-style blowup on TikTok.

Inside a good album like SOS is an even better album just waiting to come out. Throughout, SZA’s raw emotion is often overshadowed by weak hooks, repetitive themes and an inconsistent tone. Stripping away the emotional depth and complexity that made CTRL so compelling in order to make the album more TikTok-worthy in the short term is also rather frustrating.

SZA herself didn’t seem to hold as much confidence in SOS in the lead-up to its release, telling Rolling Stone:

‘[M]aybe up until the last week, when I texted [my label] and was like, ‘we don’t have to put this out. We could just pull out and move it to January. We can just let this go. And she’s like, ‘you can’t, you’re like, crowning... You can’t push the baby back in.’ I was like, ‘we can push the baby back in. We can!’ Even when I was [doing the] track listing, I was like, ‘Ugh, this shit is so boring’ or ‘it sucks,’ or when I couldn’t get some of the things I wanted for the initial cover idea or things weren’t working out, I’m like, ‘let’s just put it out with no cover and just leave everything blank.’ And then part of me was just like, I just wanna get it over with. I wanna meet my own fate.’

In her quest for control that started all the way back in 2017, SZA only seems to end up further sacrificing herself to the whims of others, as SOS sadly proves: to TDE/RCA, to her loser exes, to social media demand, to her insecurities. The singer has more than once referred to this as her 'final' album, and I really wouldn't blame her if it was after all the shit she’s put up with these past few years (See also: Sky Ferreira, still trapped in the cavernous depths of record label hell after almost a decade).

But I really hope it’s not: When given the chance, SZA has proven herself to be a more interesting artist than she’s usually given credit for, and you do see glimmers of that on SOS. Instead of wasting her time with pointless one-off singles and petty label politics, she might actually have the chance to put together a more cohesive body of work. Let’s just hope we don’t have to wait another five years for it...

– Bianca B.

#music #sza #sos #new #reviews #albums #Bianca B

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