Days Of Obligation, side two
Posted in (subtitled These Carnival Days)
Someone (okay, it was Loz) complained about the presence of Kula Shaker on this mixtape, which set me again to thinking again about the fundamental differences in the pop landscape between the UK and America that made 1990s Britpop—so epic in the scope of both conquest and backlash at home—nothing but a minor ripple here. In the States, bands like Kula Shaker and the Stone Roses are seen as footnotes, one-hit wonders, amusing but slight.
And I was thinking again about the perfect storm of culture and demography and geography that allowed this to happen. In brief:
1990s America = big country, lots of bands; localized media (radio and newspapers); one-and-a-half weekly newsstand publications devoted to pop music (Billboard is mostly read by industry professionals, and Rolling Stone is neither a true weekly nor a true music magazine); a fistful of good monthlies; no national TV shows devoted to pop.
1990s UK = smaller country, fewer bands overall; nationalized media (BBC radio, and the London papers and the Grauniad are read all over the country); at least three ubiquitous newsstand weeklies (Melody Maker R.I.P.); a double fistful of glossy monthlies; Top Of The Pops (and earlier The Old Grey Whistle Test). Add to that ubiquitous public transportation and the influence of John Peel (whose like we in the States have never seen). So the UK musical scene is smaller overall, but the apparatus surrounding it is exponentially larger. And there you have the ingredients for the rise of a musical monoculture, with an interest in self-promotion and a mighty loud voice to do it with.
The price, of course, is accelerated burnout. All those music papers have to fill the pages week in and week out. The Beast must be fed. So you get bands signed to majors who’ve never played a single gig, who reach media saturation on the strength of a couple of singles, and are already has-beens (or have broken up) by the time they release the first full-length album.
And all that remains are the songs they left behind. (Or not even that: I mean, I know who Pete Doherty is, but I’ve yet to actually hear a Libertines song, or to meet anybody who has.) And beyond that, who cares?
So, anyway: a Kula Shaker track. And not just one: all the songs on the record flow into one another, so there are snippets of the preceding and following tracks edited in there, to give me smooth fades. (That’s the voice of Sheila Chandra doing konnakol at the top, by the way.)
Jennifer Kimball was the Art Garfunkel of The Story—the non-writing, non-playing half of a folk-pop vocal duo. You’ve heard her voice in hundreds of commercials since then, but this is an early songwriting attempt from just after the group split. It’s another one from the Respond compilation.
This mix came together pretty organically from the pile of songs I had lying around. Not sure what’s up with all the ocean imagery, but I’m pleased with the way it turned out. It also seemed very important to me to put Ani DiFranco and Bob Dylan right next to each other—she the next wave of acoustic pop, he the grandfather figure—and equally important to use a Dylan song that sounds both futuristic and ancient, like a scratchy blues 78 found in a time capsule and reinterpreted by an ensemble of Andromedans, some time after the Sun goes cold. And yeah, Sting (speaking of backlash): but I still get a catch in my throat when out of that litany of words, with no chorus to speak of, his voice suddenly rises to sing, “I loved you in my fashion.” Sue me.
The mix falters a bit towards the end, I’ll admit. The Natalie MacMaster song is—well, it’s amusing but slight. It’s fun to hear her sing, and she should do it more often—she handles the massed backing vocals perfectly well—but it was probably a mistake to have her speak the verses; that Cape Breton-by-way-of-Lake Wobegon accent kills any sexiness stone dead.
