Steve Albini RIP

May 8, 2024 by Leave a comment

Sad news about alt-rock legend Steve Albini, who died suddenly today, reportedly suffering a heart attack while working at his studio.

Albini engineered two of my all-time favourite albums, Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, and Pod by The Breeders, as well as Nirvana’s In Utero, which we mentioned just recently, and plenty other stuff I listened to in the late 80s and 90s, so he was definitely a major influence on the development of my musical consciousness in that era.

I was never hugely into Albini’s own music though, in Big Black or any of his subsequent projects; I did buy a copy of Songs About Fucking, but I don’t think I put it on more than a handful of times. That was at least partly due to his well-deserved reputation as an asshole; identifying as a fan wasn’t something I was entirely comfortable with. To be fair, in later years he did express what seemed like genuine contrition for the poses he struck back then, so I expect he will be remembered in a mostly positive light. His band Shellac are due to release what is now fated to be their last album later this month; I guess I could give him another chance. If nothing else it might unearth some fond memories of what I still think of as one of the more pleasant periods of my life.

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Kurt Cobain RIP

April 7, 2024 by Leave a comment

It’s hard to believe that thirty years have passed since Kurt Cobain was found dead in Seattle. I recall that I heard the news via a tabloid headline stating, with the questionable taste characteristic of the time, something like “Rock Star blows his brains out”, which I initially assumed was a figurative reference to Cobain’s well-known drug use, before reading the story and finding out that it was horribly literal.

I like to think that I was one of the earlier fans of Nirvana, in the UK at least, having picked up an imported copy of Bleach, mainly on the strength of it being on Sub Pop. I was moderately impressed, enough anyway that I bought Nevermind in October 1991, before the hype really took off. I had recently acquired my first car, and for the next few months I had a tape of Smells Like Teen Spirit and the rest on more or less constantly as I drove around town, imagining myself a fine arbiter of alternative taste.

I saw Nirvana play live once, at the Reading Festival in 1992. Kurt came onstage in a wheelchair, wearing a hospital gown, a reference to rumours of a recent near-fatal overdose. I remember it as a great show, though at that point I had been continuously awake and high for around 72 hours, which may have influenced my critical judgment a little.

That appearance, their last in the UK, was probably the peak of my fandom; I liked In Utero well enough, but it wasn’t the ubiquitous soundtrack that Nevermind had been a couple of years earlier. Still, I was shaken up by Kurt’s untimely demise, which seemed like a dark reflection of Gen-X apathy. The following week the NME featured a sombre portrait of Cobain on the cover; I carefully cut it out and framed it, keeping it on my wall in numerous apartments, before it got lost during a move.

Looking back now, it all seems part of some previous life, though one that somehow feels simultaneously recent and distant. I guess it’s because I have no frame of reference for those events other than the experience of my younger self, and I haven’t remained 27 in the way that Kurt always will be. It’s bittersweet to be reminded of the relentless passage of time, but it’s good to have some things to look back on fondly.

Oh well, whatever. Nevermind.

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Burning dilemma

September 4, 2023 by Leave a comment

There was a period back in the mid-00s when I harboured a desire to attend the Burning Man Festival, but the logistics always defeated me, and in the end I sadly accepted it was never going to happen, consoling myself by taking in the Second Life version instead.

More recently, as my life has progressed and I have become somewhat less encumbered by responsibility, the thought of going has entered my mind again, and when I read last month that tickets were more available than usual this year I wondered if I should drop everything for a quick transatlantic trip.

Predictably enough I didn’t get my act together, and just as well, as it’s turned out fairly grim. (Though not by all accounts; some people seem to be having a fine time). In any case I would probably have felt a bit conflicted by the inflation of my carbon footprint consequent on such a frivolous excursion, as well as the environmental cost of the festival itself, not to mention the morality of lavish expenditure in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Perhaps I can recreate the vibe on a more sustainable scale by getting stoned and lighting some garbage on fire in my own backyard this weekend…

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Coronation musings

May 6, 2023 by Leave a comment

One day when I was in primary school, back in the mid-1970s, we were all loaded on to buses and taken to the cinema, which was a pretty big deal, since such extracurricular excitement was a rare event in those days. The film we saw was A Queen Is Crowned, the 1953 documentary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Presented in glorious Technicolor, and narrated by Laurence Olivier no less, it was quite a spectacle, and must have been even more impressive when it was first released to a nation only just emerging from postwar austerity. I’m not sure why we were taken to see it; the obvious reason would be the Silver Jubilee of 1977, but I’m fairly sure this trip was a couple of years before that. Anyway, whatever the occasion, Liz’s big day was clearly grand enough, even at second hand, that I can recall it nearly half a century later.

There has been plenty of comment over the last few weeks noting the contrast between the forward-looking, vibrant country which welcomed a modern young Queen, and the insular, sclerotic nation, obsessed with past glories, that her elderly son has inherited. There’s no doubt that the excitement that greeted Elizabeth’s ascension has not been replicated; popular reaction to today’s events has predominantly been one of indifference. Even staunch republicans like myself are mostly irritated rather than outraged, and we’re not complaining about the extra holiday on Monday.

The gloominess may be overstated though, and it is probably confined to observers of my generation, who are looking back on their lives with vague regret. Younger citizens, who still have a future ahead of them, see a Britain that, for all its troubles, is infinitely more diverse and socially progressive than it was in the 1950s. The fact that we are no longer psychologically in thrall to the monarchy is sign of how far the nation has come. We probably won’t have to wait 70 years for another coronation, but I’m sure that next time around it will be even more of a minority interest.

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Tom Verlaine RIP

January 29, 2023 by Leave a comment

Sad news today; Tom Verlaine has passed away, at the age of 73. I was just getting into music when Television broke up in 1978, so I didn’t catch up with them until later; Marquee Moon has been a favourite since my college days, and after their reunion I saw them when they toured in 2014, and again in 2016.

Much has been written about Television’s musical legacy, but equally important, for me at least, was their sartorial influence; I’ve been trying to carry off that 70s New York underground look for most of the last 40 years…

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BBC centenary

November 14, 2022 by Leave a comment

It was one hundred years ago today that the British Broadcasting Company, as it was then, transmitted its first programme on the wireless, a news bulletin from London, covering, among other things, billiard scores and the foggy weather. Or it may have been a children’s programme broadcast the previous day from Manchester; records of those pioneering days are a little sketchy.

Whatever the details, when viewed from the perspective of today’s fractured and fractious media landscape it’s hard not to feel a sense of longing for the days when broadcasting was viewed as a way of “spreading culture and good sense”, an antidote to the horrors of the Great War. More recently, the internet seemed to hold similar promise, but that hasn’t really worked out either. Perhaps the next telecommunication revolution will be more successful…

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Sterling work

September 26, 2022 by Leave a comment

Regular readers will know that I am fond of waxing nostalgic about the early 90s, when I was young and carefree, so perhaps I should be grateful that the government has chosen to stir up memories of that era by arranging a rerun of the 1992 Sterling crisis.

As I recall, that particular debacle came to a head a week or so before I took a trip to the US, somewhat curtailing my spending power, so I’m glad that this time around I’ve had my summer holiday before the pound started flirting with dollar parity. That’s about the only bright spot though, as Kwasi Kwarteng’s horribly misjudged mini-budget threatens to deepen the coming recession into a full-blown depression.

The gloomiest forecasts are predicting that interest rates will have to go up to around 6% to arrest the fall in sterling, with the resulting increase in mortgage costs set to hit the middle-class bedrock of Tory support particularly hard, so political reality suggests that Liz Truss will perform a signature U-turn and adopt a marginally more sustainable fiscal policy. Failing that, we might have a new Prime Minister even sooner than expected.

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Fifteen Years Ago

May 26, 2022 by Leave a comment

Second Life Shrink made its debut on May 26th 2007, an exciting time when technology promised a future of unlimited opportunity. The must-have communication gadget was a BlackBerry, all the cool kids were on MySpace, and it was still possible to dream of making a living by blogging.

A decade and a half later, after nearly 700 posts, we’re still going strong, or still going at least. This would seem like a good opportunity to reflect on how the dream of internet liberation degenerated into the post-truth social-media dystopia that we live in today, but that sounds like hard work, so in true SLS slacker style I’ll just do what I did on our fifth and tenth birthdays, and list my favourite posts from the past 5 years:

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

Perhaps this review will inspire me to post a bit more frequently again; we’ll see. In the meantime I’ll revive a favourite feature that has lain dormant since 2017, the post-title-related music link.

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@R.Mutt

March 24, 2021 by Leave a comment

After posting our last piece about non-fungible tokens, it struck me that perhaps I was missing the point, and that such works should be read conceptually. Interpreted thusly, NFTs would be akin to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, mass-produced objects given significance by being chosen by the artist, and could even be seen as a critique of the commodification of art, rather than just a particularly crass example of it. It does seem like a lot of meaning to hang on a five-word tweet though, even one worth $2.9 million.

Thinking about Duchamp reminded me of seeing his work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, during a visit to that city nearly thirty years ago. I don’t recall much else about that trip, though I was there for a few days, so I guess I must have seen the Liberty Bell, and all the other historical sights. I do remember the youth hostel, a rambling wooden structure in what didn’t seem to be the most salubrious part of town. The weather was good though, so it was nice to sit in the garden in the evening, chatting with the other travellers. I need to take another long vacation in the US sometime; hopefully it won’t be too long before that’s possible again.

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Neil Peart RIP

January 11, 2020 by Leave a comment

When people ask me what the first record I ever bought was, I usually tell them Heart of Glass by Blondie, which was the first single I purchased, but the first LP that I bought was Moving Pictures by Rush. I’ve been a little reluctant to admit that over the years, as Rush are not generally felt to be the coolest act on the planet, but I was definitely a big fan for a while, and they were one of the first bands that introduced me to the idea that music could be something beyond an ephemeral distraction.

After Moving Pictures I quickly acquired all their previous albums, and their next release Signals, but my initial enthusiasm didn’t last, partly for reasons I’ll mention below, and I hardly listened to them at all over the following three decades, until some nostalgic impulse prompted me to get 2012’s Clockwork Angels, which in turn led me to revisit my collection of their old material. I’m not sure that I would sit and listen to any of the albums all the way through, but there are certainly some highlights, especially on Fly by Night, Permanent Waves, and the aforementioned Moving Pictures.

So I was sad to read in the paper this morning that Neil Peart had passed away, at the early age of 67. Much of the appeal of Rush’s work lies in the storytelling of his lyrics, particularly on the earlier albums, where he crafts some intriguing Tolkienesque fantasy, while (mostly) avoiding any lapses into ridiculousness.

There are some problematic elements to Peart’s legacy though; 2112, dedicated to “the genius of Ayn Rand”, is difficult to forgive. It’s said that Peart later disavowed Rand and identified himself as a “bleeding heart libertarian”, but the official Rush website featured a sympathetic portrait of the alt-right icon as late as 2012, and in 2018 Peart was still describing 2112 as the story of “a hero who fights against collectivist mentality (depicted by the evil red star)“, so I probably won’t be putting that back on the turntable any time soon.

I much preferred Peart when he stuck to the elf-related whimsy, so I think that’s how I’ll remember him.

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