This irritating and unsatisfying film is worth being irritated and unsatisfied by – Stanley Kauffman, review of The Ruling Class, 1971
Music Biography of the Year – To Anyone Who Ever Asks, Howard Fishman
If a tree falls in a forest? Connie Converse crafted and recorded a set of songs in Greenwich Village NY in the early-mid 1950’s which only a few people heard at the time, and which left no lasting impression on a culture that would later be moved in the direction of original, personal expression by the arrival of Bob Dylan, by which time Converse had already given up and moved on to other (equally ambitious, impressive, and ignored) projects. Her songs are wonderful, and in their absence no-one seems to have come up with anything that might have taken their place; there instead was an absence that no-one knew existed, like a dream-puzzle in a Borges fiction.
Howard Fishman’s search for the truth about Connie Converse, who disappeared for good in 1974, is driven by his sense of “co-dependency” – Converse needs his research like he needs her music, and his obsession carries the reader through what should be dull passages but never really are – it’s all connected, Fishman’s sometimes fraught struggle to connect with the survivors who knew Converse, revealing her own struggle to connect with them, and, finally, with us. Along the path of Fishman’s quest there are shattering revelations and the growing awareness that an awe-inspiring heroine, worthy of all his care, is emerging from historical obscurity.
Elizabeth “Connie” Converse wasn’t just a songwriter, but a political thinker of great acuity and prescience; and readers who appreciate To Anyone Who Ever Asks may well want to read Geoffrey Field’s Elizabeth Wiskemann: Scholar, Journalist, Secret Agent, which does a similar service to a great but much too forgotten historian of the 20th century. And of course Norman Meehan’s Jenny McLeod: A Life in Music is on my must-read, and must-write-about, list for 2024.
2023’s best compilation of music writing? Pull Down the Shades, of course. Richard Langston and some fellow enthusiasts were diligently writing about the emerging Flying Nun/Dunedin Sound scene in the mid-1980’s in Langston’s fanzine Garage. They provided much of the exposure, and the scrutiny, that half-formed creative projects need, and more rarely get today. Pull Down The Shades compiles all the issues of Garage into one volume, with their original look, and adds some new photos, essays, and interviews with the survivors, including this author. Joseph Neff of Graded on a Curve gives Pull Down The Shades an A rating.
Best Rock Film of the Year - King Loser
Yes, this is a film about, and by, my friends, and it has my song in it, but by any measure it’s the best film about music ever made in New Zealand, and as far as I know the best made in the world this year. What makes it special is, firstly, all the on-the-spot footage from the past tracking the legend in its making, courtesy of director Andrew Moore and star Celia Mancini, both keen and persistent videographers; secondly, Mancini’s star power and humour, which the screen can barely contain, no matter what state she’s in; thirdly the great music, what it’s all about; fourthly, the absence of talking head interviews; exposition is left, apart from a few wry asides, most from ex-drummer Pat Faigan, to survivor Chris Heazlewood and his gently esoteric voiceover, wonderfully blended into the montage by editor Cushla Dillon. King Loser is a film by two experienced makers of underground rock videos, entranced by their subject, in a labour of love, and it shows.
You can stream King Loser here.
https://ondemand.arovideo.co.nz/film/king-loser/
Country Pop Album of the Year - Florida
It's a good feeling to have discovered something just yesterday and know in my bones that it belongs in this list and furthermore is about to blow up. If you’re young, Pillbox Patti’s Florida is the country album Miley Cyrus wishes she could make, if you’re not, it’s the work you always knew that Bobby Gentry had in her. Modernized swamp funk on trailer park themes, lyrics written and sung with humour and pathos, songs like ‘Eat, Pray, Drugs’ and ‘Suwanee’, which bases its chorus on Stephen Foster’s 1851 minstrel song ‘Old Folks At Home’ (AKA ‘Swanee River’, and the state song of Florida) and, amazingly, pulls it off. And then there’s ‘Valentines Day’, a song about crossing the picket line at an abortion clinic at fifteen, which has me crying like Jordan Peterson. Let the men sing about their trucks.
Heritage Rock Album of the Year – Hackney Diamonds
With this valedictory, which I’ve discussed elsewhere, The Rolling Stones casually blow away everyone who has ever tried to step into their shoes. Primal Scream, Counting Crows, Aerosmith, Foxygen, even Iggy, poof, forgotten as the old men take it seriously again and pull out their best studio album since Goat’s Head Soup. Once upon a time I might have said that if the Stones hadn’t existed some other act would have grown to fill their ecological niche, but that’s nonsense - it’s nature, not art, that abhors a vacuum, just read Howard Fishman’s book. In a world without the Stones the Pretty Things wouldn’t have written Keith riffs, the Beatles wouldn’t have got darker, the Doors wouldn’t have put on cockney accents. Only The Stones are The Stones, and they’re at it again.
Remix Album of the Year - I<3UQTINVU
I’m old enough to remember when a “remix” was just some trendy poser ruining a decent song with a doof-doof beat and some scratching. I was pleasantly surprised to find the Rasputina remixes, showing some convincing artistic development in the genre by the end of the century. Now, remixes are usually better than the real thing, vide the UMO remix of Benee’s ‘Green Honda’. Jockstrap’s I Love You Jennifer B was one of my Albums of 2022, uncannily mixing original and finely played folk and jazz and pop ideas with dance electronica glitching. Every second Jockstrap project is an in-house remix of the last by Taylor Skye, so now we get I<3UQTINVU, a cut-up fold-in set of what are mostly new songs, made from the ruins of the old ones, mostly tooled up for the dancefloor – and it’s a banger. There are one or two less mangled cuts, like ‘I Touch’, the remake of ‘Glasgow’, that show us the original track in a new light, and there’s the lovely ILYJB outtake ‘Sexy 2’ for a bonus track. Like those Rasputina EPs back in the day, this is a remix album worth keeping and playing even if you don’t own I Love You Jennifer B.
Best Gig of the Year – Lana Del Rey at Glastonbury
Last week I mentioned Pitchfork rescoring Born to Die now that it’s obvious that Lana Del Rey has become the queenpin of a whole new movement. In fact if you want to know why some of my picks are the way they are, it all started with Blue Bannisters. Still, I approached these live clips with trepidation because the press around Glastonbury made a big deal about alleged unprofessionalism, and festival gigs rarely present any artist at their best, but Lana’s performance viewed on YouTube was moving, magnificent and note-perfect, even lying on her back and covered with dancers for ‘Pretty When You Cry’, something almost impossible to pull off. The stage show blended perfectly with the music, and the musicians were enjoying themselves. It was great to have a new LDR album this year, but Glastonbury was amazing.
Also a shout-out to Princess Chelsea and her band, who managed to make TV1’s Breakfast show exciting - again, something that’s almost impossible to do.
Worst Gig of the Year –Nova Festival - the Rave in the Desert
This 3-day rave doesn’t qualify for worst gig for its music. Man With No Name was one of the headliners, a creator of fascinating long form psytrance beats to which the peace-loving hippies in attendance danced all night. But, as with Altamont, the festival’s first location wasn’t available, and the gig was shifted at the last minute into what turned out to be less hospitable territory. On the morning of the last day, the festival site was invaded by hundreds of armed male fighters from Hamas, a homophobic terror gang affiliated with the misogynistic rulers of Iran. What happened next doesn’t belong in a music blog and what you can find out about it, even just from Wikipedia, will ruin your day, your week, possibly your life. These horrific crimes seem to have driven not only Israel but the whole world mad. Björk and Regina Spektor got into a Twitter brawl, and In New Zealand a well-regarded DJ cancelled a support slot with a touring band because that band’s singer made a tweet accusing Hamas of using human shields. Provocatively worded though it was, the accusation hardly seems false. Why would a local DJ with no obvious ties to Islamism or Zionism take the side of Hamas, or anyone else, and not identify with all the young people brutalized and slaughtered while listening to DJs? Marina Oswald was right, politics is a sickness; it’s a system of false alliances intended to deprive people of their natural connections.
An hour of psytrance will do more than a minute’s silence to mark respect and to heal you.
Rap Album of the Year (2021) - STUNNA THIS STUNNA THAT
The best rap album I heard in 2023 was released in 2021 and that’s okay because there isn’t time to scan everything anymore. Stunna Girl - allegedly, because it’s hard to get good info from ChatGPT’s blogs so I’m relying on her raps as well - spent “three years in the pen” for various crimes and may be looking at more time after she allegedly abducted rival Rocky Badd, locked her in a dog cage, and made that her story on Insta or TikTok or whatever. But that’s not my business, except that I felt it was right to give Rocky Badd some plays and tell you she’s interesting too in a different way1 - what is very much my business is Stunna Girl’s album STUNNA THIS STUNNA THAT. Her raps are solid and seethe with girl-on-girl aggression and the easy objectification of men, seen as prizes easily taken from her rivals; the big trap beats, some of the best I’ve ever heard, ride out one after another like a battalion of main battle tanks; and every track is tipped over the line throughout by a second vocalization of Stunna Girl’s that’s a mewling, bratty, taunting, and ultimately irresistible chorus of mostly wordless mischief. Rap doesn’t get any better than this.
Art-rock Album of the Year - Country Justice
Country Justice by i.e. crazy is one heavy slab of industrial doom-folk, much of it on New Zealand true crime themes from the history of man’s inhumanity to woman. The disposability and deniability of female bodies - unfortunately, this is still topical stuff. If you want black metal lyrics there’s no need to make them up, you can just tell the truth sometimes, and i.e. crazy has found the strength to be our guide, pulling some of our darkest and most troubling stories into their wider context of sexism and present-day social and personal malaise. i.e. crazy’s Non Compos Mentis was my favourite album of 2015, but Country Justice is more pointedly dark and has better songs. This music is very much the audio equivalent of the films in our Cinema of Unease tradition, but there’s also a fine understanding of good pop music involved, with one of the best New Zealand voices, whether in sweet and heavenly choir, screamo, or theatrical moods. This album’s not perfect, there’s a 6 minute 30 second spoken word monologue with noises over, like one of those interludes on the new Lana Del Rey LP that I also didn’t enjoy, from a performance art event I’m glad I didn’t attend, but the rest of Country Justice is great. I wouldn’t put it on at a party, mind.
Starting from the sidewalk, how many feet from here
10 feet wide and six feet down, & two buried in a pair
Down Victoria Tunnel, into its gaping mouth
The black hello, the toothless "O" that comes without a sound
Into tiny pieces I'll shatter with my spade
Your body, bloated full of babe
This wretched place will always bear a woman's name
This wretched place will always wear a woman's face2
Electronica Album of the Year
***Most Played Album 2023 Award***
You saw all the lovely bones
You know me as the flesh in the soil
Just me I’m the food for the worms
Watch me as I go it alone. Farewell
These four lines aren’t from Country Justice, they’re from ‘You Saw’ on Zheani’s I Hate People On the Internet, which was Album of the Year 2022 at Songs From Insane Times. The Spiritual Meat Grinder is on the face of it a lighter thing, a 20-minute party song mixtape in more-or-less hyperpop electronica styles, and it opens with the ringtone-perfect ‘FML’, because this is the kind of party where you “release your inhibitions (but with occasional mental breakdowns in the bathroom)”. Inhibitions are released in short, rapidfire bursts of weaving, bopping 303 lines and thrashing 808s, abruptly crashing into hyperemotional autotuned pseudoballads, covering a variety of electronic dance and pop styles, each one twisted with black metal humour. Here are the blueprints for nine different musical futures; a Here Come the Warm Jets for our time. Exceeding a lifetime’s expectations of what is possible through art, messily, like it’s 1977 again, Zheani even finds an original way to warn us about climate change:
Weird and Cool Experimental Act of the Year – Mona Evie
Hài Độc Thoại is an experimental rap group from Vietnam affiliated with the Mona Evie collective, and Hài Độc Thoại (phần II) is a weird cinematic trip into the mind of some Vietnamese art gangsters. If you like your World Music rapping crap you can’t understand without google translate (apart from the odd Family Guy reference) about drugs and guns and scenes you’ve never heard of, over autotune bvs, sped-up pop song samples, video game noises and tripping 808s, you’re going to enjoy this a lot. Mona Evie proper, whose Bandcamp profile this is, are always worth a listen, from the Faust Tapes-like LSD collage ‘Bicycle Day’, through the US pastel-trap-pop pastiche Jesse, My iPhone White Like Justin Bieber, the glitch-tripping ‘Mad Hatter’, to a mind-blowing but endearing full-length album Chó Ngồi Đáy Giếng (2022). Despite the language barrier I find the Mona Evie project very relatable, like The And Band growing up online in 21st C South-East Asia surrounded by cheap technology.
Comeback of the Year - Björk
You know I have ears for hard classical music, but I hated Björk’s Fossora, even as I admired its pretension. It drove me to dig out the Sugarcubes album and play it loud to heal the insult. I’m finding it a bit more listenable while writing this, still hard work but admittedly Björk is good at this semi-electronic serious composer music. But then out comes something no-one expected, a swooning duet with Rosalia, all proceeds to stop intensive fish farming in Iceland. ‘Oral’ was written 25 years ago, back when Björk was marrying the experimental dance music of her day to some magical pop songs, and with ‘Oral’ she’s remade the rhythm track as reggaeton, Rosalia’s production style, and Rosalia has matched Björk’s distinctive phasing and accent perfectly, except for that impishly exaggerated vocal fry which distinguishes the singing of the maestra. Two great artists are brought together in a way that’s highly significant of both their careers, Björk anointing Rosalia as an artist in case you hadn’t noticed, Rosalia acknowledging Björk as the pioneer of arty dance vocal music. Just for that, I’m going to give Fossora another spin.
DIY Album of the Year – South Dunedin Astral Projection Seminar
I’ve written about Frog Power’s 2023 release (the first of two now) already, about how it brings Cosmo Pott’s love of thrilling 90’s music and modern weirdness into a No. 8 wire tech focus that makes the results sound like all tomorrow’s musics as they might be conceived in some rustbelt toolshed. There’s a production lesson in two uptempo cuts on South Dunedin Astral Projection Seminar, ‘hare krishna in the club’ and ‘pariah’, each of which replicates modern dance styles, alluding to the dnb and jungle techniques that are the roots of hyperpop by a well-thought-out set of tricks; throwing in bursts of expertly played live drums to mimic 808s, or putting a whooping synth in the same pitch lane as a distorted vocal to trick you into hearing wild autotune. It’s the Dunedin Sound Jim, but not as we know it.
Thank you, 2023!
Rocky Badd’s biggest hit ‘Oppressed’ portrays her sense of victimhood, while Stunna Girl’s thing is pretty much bullying. Another way of putting this is that one shows vulnerability and the other won’t, ever. She’s not even trying to be good, whatever she tells her probation officer.
RIP Phyllis Symons, knocked unconscious and buried alive – aged 17 and seven months pregnant – by her romantic partner George Coats at the construction site of Mt. Victoria's "tooting" Tunnel in Hataitai, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand in 1931. – i.e. crazy