uergsel

I don’t listen to music by transphobic, violence-glorifying Trump supporters and vulgar louts who, on top of that, rip off all their music from the greats of Southern rock.

Phew. Psychedelic rock as one long blues session, with lengthy improvised passages and hypnotic repetitions. Music designed for use whilst on mind-altering drugs, no question about it. But that also means that, with a clear head, this drivel is far less exciting and even a bit annoying, especially as it sounds like it comes from an era of countless albums that celebrate exactly this kind of sound. Musically, from today’s perspective, it’s not enough for me: bands like The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Cream, Vanilla Fudge, It’s a Beautiful Day, Iron Butterfly and so on have more to offer. Maybe you enjoy them, if you're into Grateful Dead. Which I'm not. This is not my cup of tea.

Phew, I’m not sure I like Leonard Cohen with that 80s synth sound. But in the eighties, the plucked acoustic guitar was (supposedly) out of fashion and Leonard Cohen wanted to sound modern. Or perhaps his record label, his producer or the people around him persuaded him to go for a ‘contemporary’ sound. Ironically, “I’m Your Man”, with its treble-heavy, 80s plastic aesthetic, sounds far more dated and old-fashioned than his timeless albums from the 1960s and 1970s. The songs – which are really just beautifully written poems recited by Cohen in his deep baritone – are no worse than before, but the sound is almost unbearable today. In my view, this is one of his weakest albums, simply because it has absolutely nothing to offer musically. Why it ended up in the ‘1001 Albums’ list is a mystery known only to the compilers themselves. For me, this is one of many lapses in taste from an era when the ‘old’ acts were desperate to sound new. It’s a shame about the lovely songs. And thank goodness there are live recordings of the most important tracks, which don’t sound quite so clinical.

For a long time, I considered Madonna to be the most overrated pop artist on the scene. A thoroughly mediocre singer producing hyper-commercial music, usually with extremely daft lyrics, all tied up in a massive image and marketing campaign. Much like David Bowie, Madonna has created so many personas that it’s impossible to say which one is the ‘authentic’ Madonna. Presumably, there is no such thing as ‘authentic’ music. Madonna – and this is something I’ve learnt to ackowledge in recent years – has long set trends and, in doing so, pushed pop music in ever-changing directions, always striving to be ‘new’ and, in some way, ‘sensational’. The Madonna phenomenon has always had a strong visual and psychological element, and for a long time her personas also reflected the prevailing zeitgeist.

In the late 1990s, trip-hop and electronic music were all the rage. Acts such as Portishead, Massive Attack, Björk and Radiohead dominated pop music with a surprisingly uncommercial sound. William Orbit was a leading producer of the era who epitomised this new sound. And it was precisely this Orbit who, as producer and co-writer alongside Madonna, crafted the sound of *Ray of Light*. Musically, this was a quantum leap for Madonna, who had previously tended to operate in shallow, crowd-pleasing territory. Suddenly she sounded mature, rhythmically structured and excitingly modernist (lyrically, however, Madonna largely stuck to her mediocre pop lyrics or grand ambiguity). “Ray of Light” is by far Madonna’s best album, perhaps because it doesn’t sound like Madonna at all, but rather like an album by a sort of ‘US-American Björk’ If you ignore the thin lyrics about heartbreak and the joys of motherhood, “Ray of Light” is still a pretty good album that’s worth listening to every now and then. Not truly avant-garde, but a very successful contribution to a fascinating phase in pop music (which was soon to be superseded by boy bands and girl groups).

Thelonious Monk occupies a special place in the history of jazz. As an avant-gardist and maverick, he first came to prominence as early as the mid-1940s and composed a body of work (now regarded as classics) including “Round About Midnight”, “Off Minor”, “Ruby My Dear”, “Epistrophy”, “Misterioso”, “Well You Needn’t”), which would later appear time and again on his albums in ever-changing interpretations. “Brilliant Corners” was released in 1957 and, for the first time in a long while, consisted almost exclusively of new original compositions. The five tracks are complex, intricate and, in a way that was probably provocative to ears of the time, modern and free. Labels such as ‘bebop’, ‘hard bop’ or ‘modal jazz’ do not apply here. Monk’s music here, as on most of his other albums, is first and foremost Monk’s music. Even 70 years after its release, “Brilliant Corners” remains, above all, edgy, unconventional and not always easily accessible – an album that demands your full attention; otherwise, its unconventional edginess can be exhausting and unnerving. So listen carefully.