Hearing something truly original is a music geek’s greatest high, but it has a rough comedown: the realization that, once what’s new wears out, there’s nothing else quite like it to obsess over. For those of us who’ve played Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city into submission, there’s always a constellation of influences and collaborators to chart, but there’s nowhere to turn for so much of what makes Kendrick unique: a knack for mimicking the best and caricaturing the worst of two decades of rap; a shape-shifting sense of perspective that rejects boilerplate-rap narcissism in favour of self-probing, ventriloquism, and flights of abstraction; and a fluency in the narratives that propel songs, consolidate albums, inhibit individuals, define generations. Want more of that? You’ll have to wait for the next album.
Until then, try something even better than a substitute: Schoolboy Q’s Habits & Contradictions. Schoolboy Q, real name Quincy Matthew Hanley, is Kendrick’s fellow member in the L.A. rap collective Black Hippy. Technically, he’s Kendrick’s closest competitor; stylistically, he’s Kendrick’s polar opposite. Where Kendrick is socially-minded, coolly candid, and irrepressibly idealistic, Schoolboy’s trapped in his head, puffed up on hot air, lodged in the drug-marinated moment. Kendrick tells stories; Schoolboy clowns around.
Kendrick homes in on the ‘Real’; Schoolboy gets ‘Druggy wit Hoes Again’. Kendrick’s album is intercut with his parents’ voicemails, a one-way conversation tethering him to family, tradition, and security. Schoolboy? He prefers ‘Sexting’.
Whenever Kendrick’s and Schoolboy’s antithetical approaches converge on the same subject, Schoolboy always holds his own. Take ‘Hands on the Wheel’, the most seductive—and sinister—of Schoolboy’s many drug anthems. Egged on by A$AP Rocky, rap’s reigning champion of shallowness, Schoolboy shamelessly admits to an awful lot of questionable activities, plus one unquestionably awful one (drunk driving). Where Kendrick’s ‘Swimming Pools (Drank)’ could press pause on the drunken present to meditate on family history and the schizophrenic mindset of an addict, Schoolboy’s appetite is unwilling to negotiate: ‘Let’s get stupid high, to where I can’t reply / Love smokin’ dope, I won’t compromise.’
The album’s most surprising moments transmute these superhuman habits into human contradictions, perforating Schoolboy’s blown-up alpha-male persona with pinpricks of real life. On ‘Blessed’, a ballad that revolves around the death of a friend’s son, Schoolboy struggles to console his friend with something more meaningful than money, weed, or empty platitudes. Kendrick, in a motivational-speaker-grade guest verse, preaches redemption, but all Schoolboy can honestly offer is his condolences. When Schoolboy unites this inner realist with his outer party animal, he writes the album’s best track, ‘There He Go’. A day in the life of Q, exuberantly recited over a shimmering piano loop, it’s ‘Empire State of Mind’ for the 99%, or anyone whose 99 problems comprise the chequered fortunes of daily life: betting on
a basketball game and losing, evading your hook-up’s boyfriend then realizing he’s a fan, worrying about money but scrounging enough to swag out your two-year-old daughter. Rapping at his show-offy best, Schoolboy modulates his timbre back and forth between a gritty growl and a hyperventilating, helium-high falsetto. By the time he gets to the hook, he’s breathless, flabbergasted, sounding almost incredulous: ‘THERE HE GO?! SCHOOL! BOY! THERE HE GO?!?’ Even he can’t believe he’s this good.
If you liked… good kid, m.A.A.d city by Kendrick Lamar
Interview: Bastille
Dan Smith, lead singer and creative force behind Bastille, has built up a reputation as a perfectionist, partly through the constant delaying of the release of his debut album, Bad Blood, and it’s quickly made clear from talking to him that this is not entirely unjustified. Speaking about the fact that many of his songs will already be familiar to fans of the band, he says that while it feels a bit odd to re-release so much material, they’ve attempted to improve on their previous versions. “We want to
give a good impression to both people who have liked us and people who’ll be new to the band,” Smith says, passionately.
Bastille are indeed gathering momentum, and have just wrapped up a tour supporting Two Door Cinema Club, during which they will doubtless have picked up many new fans. Talking to Smith shortly before the band heads off, he seems very excited, having never done a support tour before, and intrigued by the different experience of playing to “people who potentially don’t give a shit.”
That tour is followed by the band’s own biggest one yet with a whopping 19 dates. The tour has sold out, with over 15,000 tickets bought, something Smith calls, “pretty incomprehensible.” He further explains that Bastille’s music changes during live performances; the songs get “bigger and beefier” live. He likes this; feeling that people who’ve heard the record and come to see the band perform deserve to see some musical progression on stage. The rest of the time, it sounds like Bastille definitely know how to have fun, going out almost every night while on tour and “catching up on films” during the day.
Film is something that Smith has a serious interest in, and he sees many of his songs as having “their own tone and atmosphere.” He also says that many are “like a little scene or a moment of dialogue captured from a bigger story.” The cinematic aspect of Bastille’s music comes across strongly in songs such as ‘Pompeii’, a dialogue between two charred skeletons, victims of the famous eruption of Vesuvius. The song considers the fact that they’ll be stuck in this moment of time forever, immortalized in death, which is an excellent example of Smith’s ability to take a well-known story and use it to say something else as well. He says that when he was writing ‘Daniel in the Den’ he “wanted to write a song about dreams and paranoia and that seemed a really good way to go about it.”
‘Laura Palmer’ is named after the deceased central figure of the David Lynch TV show Twin Peaks, and Smith talks at great length of his love for Lynch and Twin Peaks in particular, saying that “it’s fascinating to see how someone can present an image of themselves as something totally different.” He says a lot more about the show and its influences on him, though he admits that there may be more ideas about Laura Palmer in his head than in the song (“I love it so I can talk about it for hours, sorry!”).
Smith clearly revels in discussing his music and his band, and seems genuinely sad to finish the interview, but, then, he does have a sell-out UK tour to get on with.
Bastille’s debut album, Bad Blood, is released on March 9th. The band play the O2 Academy Oxford on March 22nd.
Review: Eels – Wonderful, Glorious
★★★☆☆
Three Stars
There is no doubting that Eels’ tenth album is a solid effort. It’s well crafted, moving from the gritty defiance of the first track ‘Bombs Away’ through the more tender moments which lie at the heart of this album, and ending with more upbeat tracks such as the simple yet uplifting ‘You’re My Friend’. It’s an interesting, enjoyable listen, but the problem is, you know Eels can do so much better, inevitably leading to a nagging sense of disappointment. The chilling moments of their 1998 album Electro Shock Blues did more than bring me close to tears; they put a shiver in my heart. These moments are entirely absent from Wonderful, Glorious, leaving the listener with a set of fairly understated, snarling, occasionally sensitive tunes. Everett’s coarse singing style is in danger of getting tiresome, though the run of more optimistic songs in the middle, especially ‘On the Ropes’, saves the album from actually doing so.
The softer moments of this album are certainly its strongest, with their quiet optimism and gentle guitar riffs. The rebellious, rough style of much of the album is too guarded to be truly powerful, and the aggressive snarl of the guitars grates on the ears, rather than playing on the soul like his previous work. ‘Peach Blossom’, with its rambling monologues halfway through and blaring sound effects is the low point of the album: aimless, dull and repetitive.
E has had a famously tragic life, so it is perhaps not surprising that his best work is to be found in his more melancholy songs. It is wonderful to hear more upbeat music coming from Everett, if this means he is feeling happier. However, on an entirely selfish level, I much prefer listening to his more tortured, emotionally exposed works. Wonderful, Glorious is a good listen but the overall result is slightly
flat. That said, real sincerity lies behind that gruff voice, and it’s a joy to hear Everett singing a more upbeat tune.
Review: My Bloody Valentine – m b v
★★★★★
Five Stars
In 1991 My Bloody Valentine released their album Loveless. The creative pinnacle of the shoegaze genre, it is widely regarded as being pretty much perfect. It is the paradigm example of the eternally lauded album, so much so that it has gained an almost mythical status. 22 years later and MBV have now finally released the follow up, m b v. Both the legendary status of its predecessor and the fact that it has been in the pipeline for longer than I have been on this earth make reviewing it a some-what daunting prospect.
It doesn’t help matters that any attempt at describing the music MBV make will be horribly inadequate, inevitably ending up clichéd. In fact you could easily create an automatic MBV description generator by randomly combining adjectives like lush, warm, soft, dream-like, swirling, hypnotic, ethereal, dizzying with nouns like noise, melody, layers/waves/walls of sound, textures, rhythms etc.
The first several tracks serve as an effortless reminder of the sheer beauty of MBV’s unique form of noise. That familiar omnipresent distortion and reverb washes over you; you hear
the searing guitar melodies and completely forget that this album has been 22 years in the waiting. Chronology becomes irrelevant when the music is this exciting. It is quite remarkable that MBV have gone so long between releases, and have come back sounding just as brilliant as when they left off.
The end of the album delivers the clearest point of departure from Loveless, the last two tracks are mind-blowingly weird, intense and difficult. Perhaps they make most sense as some kind of psycho-aural-experiments, almost closer in resemblance to contemporary art than anything conventionally musical. But in an age where so much music is so very boring, MBV’s commitment to producing radically original sounds should be applauded. m b v was always destined to be ‘not as good as Loveless’ and that fate hasn’t been avoided. But what is so much more important is the fact that noise hasn’t sounded this good in a very, very long time.
Be my bloody Valentine
We’re all aware of the stereotypes surrounding Valentine’s Day for the Single Girl. In theory we should have all been at home drunkenly beating a love-shaped piñata. Or sticking pins into the voodoo-dolls of our previous romantic failings.
In practice though, of course we weren’t even considering doing anything so tragic and lame.
You probably won’t believe me when I say I don’t actually mind Valentine’s Day, I just find it a little bit materialistic, unoriginal and boring… I mean if you’re going to make the person you love feel special, why all do it on the same day?
Maybe that does sound a bit bitter… Let’s move on shall we? So, V-day was going to be a plan-free day, or at least I had hoped it would be. But on Tuesday last week I was bullied (I promise I was bullied) into doing a charity ‘Take Me Out’. So like a true hero, if I’m going down, I like to take a friend with me…
We spent the entire journey to Destination Hell arguing about who had forced who into the ordeal and why would we agree to do something so stupid and cringing?!
Guess which two girls walked away with the first dates?
Admittedly my date didn’t get much choice in the matter; it was more of a default situation. He’d walked out on to the stage and barely thirty seconds into his video about him, every girl had popped her balloon.
It was awful.
But not awful enough to warrant me sticking up my hand to shout about how I’d popped my balloon by mistake.
I’m going to justify my undignified behaviour by saying I felt bad for him.
Esmeralda’s performance was a lot stronger than mine – some would even say a little too strong.
When asked which kind of dog she would be, the crowd were left shocked and stunned (but not as shocked and stunned as she was) by her “I’d be a very dirty bitch!” The other girls didn’t really stand a chance after that bombshell.
It may not be the most orthodox route to a Valentine’s Date but the main thing is, we both got one! Esmeralda may have had a lot of explaining to do and mine may have not even wanted to be there but…
The piñata lives on (for another year at least).
Review: ROPE
★★★☆☆
Three Stars
Rope is in many respects an excellent piece of theatre. The Union setting is perfect. The stone fireplace, dark wooden panelling and grand ceiling immediately throw us into the lives of the 1920s upper-class elite-to-be. And the grandeur doesn’t take away from the intimacy of the piece. The audience watch from both sides, almost uncomfortably close. Our presence reinforces the notion that Brandon (Joe Prospero) and Granillo (Jonathan Purkiss) are walking a dangerous path, unable to put even a toe out of line. The stage itself has been designed and assembled with great attention to detail. The focus is the red chest, but the periphery contains everything that’s need to convincingly create Brandon and Granillo’s front room. Beyond this, white lilies and sandwiches summon images of a wake, though their function on stage is as the trappings of a dinner party. The stage is lit by lamplight only and this works well. We are readied for a macabre evening
The opening of the play brings us straight into the action. Confronted with murder, we observe a body being hauled into the chest and are left to ponder its presence for the rest of the performance. Indeed much depends upon our reaction to the chest and for those who do not engage with it, the play will lose much of its effect. Prospero (Brandon) and Purkiss (Granillo) do an excellent job of opening the show. The contrast between the cold, calm and confident Brandon standing static in front of the fire and the panicking, active Granillo is played out competently. In a lovely directorial touch, the contrast is mirrored later by Rupert Cadell (Jared Fortune) and Brandon. This time it is Brandon who has lost control.
Unfortunately, the cast do not manage to consistently sustain the mood so well created at the start. This is a problem as the play’s impact relies on its steadily building tension. I only truly felt emotionally engaged at two specific points in the play – when Sir Johnstone hears that his son hasn’t yet arrived home and at the very end of the show. This is perhaps due to dialogue that can at times be overhasty, both between characters and individually. Some of the best lines of the play were somewhat thrown away. A second problem is in the character development of Brandon and Granillo. The audience should be drawn in by them and repulsed in equal measure. However, at the point where I should have felt most sympathetic towards Brandon – the moment he shows some humanity – I was left unengaged and unconvinced.
The leads were in danger of being outperformed by the rest of the cast. Imogen West-Knights played the rather thankless role of Mrs Debenham with great aplomb and conviction. Aleksander Cvetkovic, as the father of the deceased, elicits our sympathy with his gentle and good-natured portrayal of Sir Johnstone Kentley. Constance Greenfield and Alex Stutt introduce some well needed comic relief as the charming-but-dim Leila Arden and Kenneth Raglan. Jared Fortune’s Rupert Cadell became better and better as the performance progressed. Though he didn’t always react, in the background, to important overheard exchanges, his final speech is the highlight of the play. This speech brings back all the tension and urgency that is lacking in the middle of the performance.
Rope is well produced, well designed, well directed and well acted. However, it lacks the drama that would have made it a truly outstanding show.
Interview: Andrew Adonis
That Andrew Adonis, architect of the New Labour education reforms, was the Tories’ favourite minister when they were in opposition, tells you surprisingly little about the man himself. His reforms as the schools minister – subsequently adopted and pushed further by the Coalition government – have earned him the unflattering label of an ‘arch-Blairite’. But the Labour peer is scathing about today’s Conservatives and sees himself as rooted firmly in left-wing politics. Now an adviser to Ed Miliband’s team, the mild-mannered and unfailingly polite Oxonian spoke in our interview about Oxford, being caught amidst the Blair-Brown turf wars and where Labour needs to go next.
The first thing one needs to know about Adonis is that he’s a traitor, of sorts. The young Adonis was politically left-of-centre in his youth, but state socialism was too much. “I joined the SDP [Social Democratic Party] on the day it was formed.” And what a dramatic occasion it was, when the ‘Gang of Four’ broke away from Michael Foot’s dinosaur socialist Labour party to form a new social democratic one. When Adonis matriculated in 1981 the young party briefly looked like it might win the next General Election. It didn’t, and as the turbo-charged capitalism of the 80s took off Thatcher’s electoral success and popular appeal prevented the SDP from making the sort of breakthrough that third parties have failed to achieve in British politics ever since.
Roy Jenkins, who Adonis describes as his “great hero, then and now”, was one of the breakaway gang. Adonis argues that the social liberalism he pursued in two stints as Labour Home Secretary in the 1960s and 70s underpins British society now almost as strongly as Thatcher’s economic liberalism in the 1980s underpins (or “undermined”, as Adonis later put it) the British economy today. Moreover he sees Jenkins’ approach as a harbinger of the New Labour strategy. “He did more than any other minister in the 1960s to change society. And if you look at how [Jenkins] made Labour more than just a working-class socialist party, you can see parallels with how Tony Blair made Labour more liberal and open to the middle-classes.”
First and foremost therefore, Adonis was an SDP man. He wasn’t an especially political student, eschewing the Union. Its famous hacks, including William Hague, who was President when Adonis went up to Oxford, turned him off. Hague “did me a huge favour” in that regard, he now claims, since his ambitions took him elsewhere.
Academia, Oxford council politics and then journalism all preceded Adonis’ entry to No.10 as a policy advisor. Through ennoblement in 2005 he entered the third Blair government as an Education minister. “There are two morals to my career: you can’t really plan your [political] career, because it’s unpredictable; and second, do something else before politics. Don’t go into it too early. My ten years in journalism was an invaluable preparation for politics thereafter. Being the [Financial Times’] public policy editor prepared me much better than almost anything else could have done for being in government and working on education policy for Tony Blair.”
That said, he “doesn’t deride” what would seem to be the precise opposite of his prescription – being a special advisor. He describes the bag-carriers one can find busying around Westminster as “apprentice ministers”. “It’s very good training for government, because you’re part of the government.”
However, he later qualifies, “it is good to take some time out [of politics]. Ed Miliband, for instance, spent a couple of years at Harvard as a lecturer and I know from speaking to him that it was an incredibly formative period in his life.”
He chastises those special advisors who became infantrymen in the Brown-Blair wars, a conflict in which he became a “proxy” as Brownites attempted to frustrate the education agenda as a means to undermining Blair’s authority and reforming zeal. Sometimes it hurt. “You have to develop a thick skin. When I was on the front line in the earlier years I would take all the personal attacks” – what he calls the “Oxford Union bit of politics” – well, “personally”.
He’s now more reflective, rather than reactionary, about those who levied attacks on him. But a thinly veiled critique of some of those advisors was forthcoming. “There’s a problem with rising too fast in politics,” Adonis says, “which is that you lose social awareness and perspective”. Many of that era’s special advisors – most notably ‘Bruiser Balls’ – are now members of the shadow Cabinet. Adonis suggests that the sort of politicos who shoot from university straight into the Westminster bubble – and never leave it on the way up – will lack the sort of self-control in handling relations which each other.
His support for Labour remains dogged. Though a backer of David Miliband in the leadership contest, Adonis is now firmly on Ed’s team. He rigidly stays on message when it comes to free schools – “I don’t support a free for all [in education] where anyone who wants to come with a half-baked plan to set up a school can do so” – despite an interview with The Spectator in 2011 in which he described himself and Blair as “enthusiastic about the idea of entirely new schools being established on the academy model, as in Michael Gove’s Free Schools
policy.”
In general terms though the continuity from Adonis to Gove is undeniable. The Labour front bench has been distinctly lukewarm about the expansion of the academies programme, but Adonis doesn’t distance himself from the policy– he stakes a claim to it. “There is a good deal of consensus but let’s be clear – the consensus is a New Labour one. It’s about privilege for all, rather than the old Tory policy of privilege for a few.
“[Furthermore] Michael Gove is now coming behind my call for private schools to sponsor comprehensives. Labour can take pride that in important areas of public policy the Tories have been forced to accept a New Labour consensus.
“I very much hope that Michael Gove will read my book,” he says later. I expect that the Education Secretary, who has expressed admiration for Adonis, already has. If you care about modern social democracy, so should you.
Hilda’s joins Catz in declaring war on Magdalen
On Sunday night, St Hilda’s College JCR passed a motion declaring war on Magdalen. The motion, proposed by Raphaelle Vallet, noted, “[St Hilda’s] hate Magdalen, for their walled fortress aims to separate us from hunting grounds, preventing us from hunting deer in the winter”, before resolving to “declare war on Magdalen college”. This motion comes a week after St Catz made a high-profile declaration of war. Hilda’s motion contains the resolution to “declare a formal alliance with St. Catz against the aggressors.”
Raphaelle Vallet, who identified herself as “Chief General of the Hildabeasts”, informed Cherwell that she had been “impressed” with the St Catz motion and that it was “their act of courage which inspired us to shake off the chains of fear and sharpen our battle-axes.” Vallet’s main grievances with Magdalen appear to be related to both their geographical expansion and the general attitude of Magdalen students, which she described as “haughty” and “superior”. Vallet went on to say that, along with the war committee at St Catz, St Hilda’s were intending to “fight until Magdalen grounds have become the common property of Hilda’s and Catz – and Magdalen acknowledge the bridge for what it has always been: St Hilda’s Bridge.”
It has been revealed to Cherwell that Chris Starkey, proposer of the St Catz motion, has written to the St Hilda’s contingent to express his excitement at the “great news”. Starkey added that he “will begin preparations for a conference, and extend the same hospitality to your warriors” and that they may “consider Catz bar a haven, for all who stand against the Magdalen scourge.”
Making reference to this alliance, Vallet informed Cherwell that the Allied Forces would “do their best to spare Magdalen’s civilians if Magdalen’s JCR was to apologise to Catz for its acts of aggression, come to terms with its neighbours and abandon its superiority complex.”
Despite the, seemingly, growing threat facing Magdalen, Millie Ross, the College’s JCR President responded to the St Hilda’s motion by musing, “Perhaps it should be my job to rally the troops, but since my real role is to accurately represent the sentiment of the JCR, I think that I should really just vocalize our apathy.”
This line of thought was reiterated by Magdalen JCR spokesperson Tim Slatcher who observed, “Given its location and architecture, I always assumed Hilda’s was a Brookes hall of residence.”
Ross went on to speculate, “Other colleges are offering support to our inferior enemy out of sympathy, or indeed to also get their colleges noticed in the same way Catz have been.”
There are rumours that further colleges, including New and St Hugh’s, might declare war on Magdalen, yet Magdalen has no plans to recruit allies of their own. Ross told Cherwell that the JCR is “yet to seek support for this apparent threat – if anything more than just ‘talk’ materialises then perhaps we will feel the need to.”
Officials from Catz and Hilda’s have suggested that any aggressive action might wait until Trinity, giving the Allies time to recruit further supportive colleges.