“Can’t sing. Can’t act. Balding. Can dance a little”
Allegedly this was Astaire’s screen-test report for RKO Radio Pictures in the 1930s.
“ How can you “ignore” jazz? It’s like someone else’s sugar-coked toddler in the corner. Showing off, shitting herself, dribbling everywhere, noisily demanding everyone’s attention and approval. Hey, I am jazz! I have come to fill your holiday space with my wabbeda wabbeda tish tish ga-blap bap tiddly piddly drivelly meaningless squeaky shrieky pish pish drr-bap bap bollocks.
“ Wild Wolf Woman is a style we do particularly well in the UK, though of course we see it elsewhere, too. I think particularly of Björk, as well as Dory Previn, Laura Nyro, Joanna Newsom. Crucially, these artists display an eccentricity that seems inherent rather than worn, in the manner of Lady Gaga, whose attempts at the avant garde make me think of the Henry Brooks Adams line: “The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest.
“ Two-and-a half years on, that exciting new wave of non-acoustic electronic pop has mutated. The global pop sound is now, thanks to David Guetta, Pitbull, Taio Cruz and a cast of thousands attempting to recreate their partyvibezzzz, a swirling mass of mindless, in-the-club party records. It reached its nadir this summer with the release of Champagne Showers by LMFAO Feat Natalia Kills, an intensely bad piece of antimusic so alarmingly awful that it rather made you wonder whether all music should in fact be banned.
“ Results revealed that while people explicitly claimed to desire creative ideas, they actually associated creative ideas with negative words such as “vomit,” “poison” and “agony.
“ When I made this video I realized that a good 50 or 60 percent of the music videos I’ve made have something to do with astronauts or outer space. I guess I’m basically a nerdy musician who wishes he was an astronaut.
—
- Moby speaking to Wired UK about his new video
WATCH the video for ‘Lie Down in Darkeness’ over on Wired
“ Mr Christensen and his colleagues list five habits of mind that characterise disruptive innovators: associating, questioning, observing, networking and experimenting. Innovators excel at connecting seemingly unconnected things
— Schumpeter - ‘Think Different’, The Economist: Blogs
“ I like any reaction I can get with my music. Just anything to get people to think. I mean if you can get a whole room full of drunk, stoned people to actually wake up and think, you’re doing something.
—
- Jim Morrison (40 years since his death, today)
Knowledge Hoover
