None Dare Call It Music

The sound of 2024's books and films

A New Song (Berlin street scene) 1932 George Grosz

This is where our music comes from: from a disgust with Capitalism and its degradation of everything into money relations

~ Unpublished early 70’s advertisement for Henry Cow

If the cultivation of the understanding consists in one thing more than another, it is surely in learning the grounds of one’s own opinions.

~ John Stuart Mill


A year breaks like a wave on the beach, leaving flotsam and jetsam and other detritus of the culture in the mind.¹ Books and films, just as much as music journalism, explain, include, reframe and recommend music. Here are some of 2024’s other finest moments.

But first - if you’re following Songs From Insane Times to read my theories about modern music, here’s their praxis, a song I wrote and produced with Phaedra Love, singer/bassist in Dunedin nu rock band Pearly, who delivered one of the stunning gigs of 2024 at the Crown and are on the way to finishing their first album. What we’re aiming at here, Spotify might call esoteric escape room trap house. Where we landed instead is your call.

Books on Music

Daniel Beban’s Future Jaw Clap tells Wellington’s at times dystopian post-punk history through the lives of its free jazz community, the Braille Collective; their thoughts as revealed happening to resonate with themes from the current reading of Robert Wyatt’s biography Different Every Time. I appear in this book, in a minor role, as do a few of my friends; it was lovely to read a little portrait of Lindsay Maitland, the first time that an NZ historian has done my friend justice. Beban’s prose, like his subjects, is painterly, and the book’s been supplied with a Bandcamp playlist capturing the magic of its subjects’ free improvisation, which is to say, extemporaneous composition.

Freaks Out! the third part (according to me) of the Luke Haines Trilogy, which I reviewed here and there. Haines is admirably opinionated and prone to making stuff up, often stuff that’s truer than any of the available facts. Freaks Out! is also an extremely interactive book, constantly suggesting new music to check out and cool stuff to watch on YouTube, including an argument between hippie chancer Mick Farren and non-fiction paperback writer Robert Ardrey (an early proponent of evolutionary psychology in African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative), and a portrait of Gene Vincent on tour in England where the man, already approaching sainthood, discusses the evidence for UFOs. Even knowing as I did most of the artists being discussed, Hayley and I found out a lot we didn’t know.

Philip Norman’s Jenny McCleod: A Life in Music, which I reviewed for the Kapralova Journal, saying: ”New Zealanders are a modest people, easily shamed, and I have read rock histories less open about sex and drugs than Meehan’s work”. As a serious composer and academic McLeod traversed, and helped to create, the shifting landscape of New Zealand’s counterculture. Under The Sun, Mcleod’s “happening” composition performed by the city of Palmerston North in 1971, is a work without equal in the history of Aotearoa, and has aged well; her soundtrack for Yvonne Mackay’s 1985 film The Silent One is a sui generis masterpiece of rock, classical and Pasifika co-existence; the serial compositions for piano are exquisite; Meehan’s book gives her music its place in the larger story of her life and work and her country’s history.

Films

Beau is Afraid
It was the best of films, it was the worst of films, intentionally overlong but sharp as a whip where it mattered, with Beth Dutton delivering the best line from any 2024 movie, which I stole for my last blog. Ari Aster’s original idea went something like “what if Wes Anderson made horror films?”, and in Beau is Afraid this sensibility is expanded to include other stylistic shifts, from the panic delirium of Aronofsky’s Mother! to the longueur of Kevin Smith’s Tusk. At times so boring I probably fell asleep and dreamt it, yet a film I’d watch again, go figure. Can’t remember noticing the music.

MaXXXine
If the songs I like were a film instead this would be it. It’s no Pearl but it was great entertainment in its messy, noisy way. A rare example of a film nerd referencing film history way overmuch and getting away with it. Great 80’s trash soundtrack if that’s your thing, too.

The Sweet East
I wrote about The Sweet East here, a film featuring Earl Cave and Gibby Haines where the soundtrack is serious business and the sound design is well worth a look, with a theme song sung by the film’s star, Talia Ryder. There should be more films that aren’t musicals where actors step out of character, if necessary, to sing songs, and fewer musicals till someone gets that artform right again.

Poor Things
A lot of people hated this film, probably because they didn’t like the way Emma Stone portrayed them in The Curse. Me, I hated Kinds of Kindness, but appreciated Poor Things’ stylized realization of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 Scots gothic novel. I was especially taken by the soundtrack, by Jerskin Fendrix, which mucks about with the pitch of acoustic instruments, and can stand alone as a classical composition.

As can Laura Karpman’s soundtrack for American Fiction, the best black American satire since Cell Block 4, which roots itself in Harlem renaissance classical style, with echoes of Florence Price, William Grant Still, and Margaret Bonds, and from there reaches into jazz. A choice that resonates with the film’s theme, a defense of the black American middle class’s right to be taken seriously within bourgeois artforms (the novel in the film) instead of being seen as defaulting gangster rappers. This moving collection was the soundtrack of the year in my book.

Anora
Sean Baker’s films are made within a paradigm alien to Hollywood - reality is economic, sex is desirable, and sexual desire is exploitable. Instead of being erotic in the way of the 70’s Golden Age sex film, Anora was hectic, with a soundtrack to match; Ani’s gripe at her workplace, HQ is that the 40-yo DJ doesn’t respect her playlist, and when she makes a show for Ivan at his crib it’s to Brooke Candy and Erika Jayne’s stark and mercenary ‘Drip’ from Candy’s 2019 album SEXORCISM.²

Later, Slayyyter’s ‘Daddy AF’, an altogether more imaginative composition, soundtracks a return to HQ that’s just as much a vision of matriarchy distorted by neo-liberalist turbocapitalism as is Darya Ekamasova‘s literal Russian matriarch.³

The music stops playing about halfway through Anora, and the cathartic final scene fades to silent credits.⁴

Some great songs/albums I didn’t know existed, then discovered in 2024/25:

On Sound Barrier, a 2CD compilation of modern NZ classical music found in an op shop, I heard, alongside a nice tone clock study from Jenny McLeod and much other good music, David Downes’ ‘Ironlung’, an outstanding industrial composition from 1998, which someone, maybe you, could easily turn into a song today.

Kittie’s debut album Spit from 1999 is a perfect example of fans taking in an artform, then making the best version of it. In this case, the confusing hybrid that was nu metal is being made sense of by an all-girl band. Literally - the members of Kittie were 12-14 when they wrote these songs and 16-18 when they recorded them, in a 10-day onslaught that left time for homework. Great playing and sympathetic production make Spit the perfect explainer as to why nu metal is enjoying a resurgence today. ‘Brackish’, one of its standout tracks, manages to include every element of the complex nu metal recipe along its winding way and come up fresh every time.

Yoko Ono’s work - I discovered this late last year, but Hayley keeps turning up new evidence of her greatness, like 1982’s self-produced It’s Alright (I See Rainbows), a pioneering work of pop electronica.

Yoko had the hardest job of any of the Beatles, who, according to Luke Haines, had the worst fans of any band in the history of bands (Paul “dead”, John dead, George injured, that whole Manson thing, and then the endless reversioning of the story and the, admittedly outstanding, music). She’s honest, sometimes brutal about this in her art, however hippy dippy it seems; there’s nothing glib about the optimism expressed on It’s Alright (I See Rainbows).

What is the matter with people?

Shadow Wizard Money Gang - I discovered this trap/hiphop/house crossover posse via Reid HT’s Every Genre Project, in this summary of unexpected fusion genres. The Azealia Banks recommendation therein led me to this 2012 set from DJ Smokey, which sounds, to my laggard ears, a decade ahead of its time.

And the latest from Christ Dillinger, which brings trap house into the club.

There is as yet no end to the ways in which rapping or trapping can be combined with faster beats - on ‘I Don’t Wanna Love Her’ siblings Pthuggin’ and FakePerks3x ramraid a lively techno rave-up into a crawling, deadly trap beat and just leave it there, lights flashing and siren blaring, for the duration of the song.

Oh OK, just one more, because there’s disco too.

1. According to Thomas De Quincey this expression is derived from legalese, as for example, might be used in those cases where an act of barratry has been alleged.
Flotsam is the goods washed off a ship by the sea and jetsam is the goods thrown overboard to save a ship in distress.

2. If you like this sort of thing try Stunna Girl’s ‘Rotation’.

3. Coincidentally or not, Slayyyter collaborated with Pussy Riot on 2022’s Matriarchy Now.

4. Some Substack critics of Anora have faulted the film for failing to explain Ani’s character with a ‘trauma” backstory. But such a deference to the current therapeutic model would make the film’s story a specific one - I’d argue that its value lies in its universality - Ani, first seen in a factory floor montage (as it were), can stand for all workers, and the expanding class of technofeudalist minions - Substack writers, Spotify singers, and so on.