Spank The Monkey

Kimigayo

In a little under two weeks' time, it looks like The Belated Birthday Girl and I will have to sing the Japanese national anthem in public. The reasons why need not concern you for now.

Have you ever listened to Kimigayo, the anthem in question? It's a bugger to learn, as it doesn't sit on the Western ear in an easy fashion. Its metre and key don't conform to our musical structures, and that's before you even get to the inevitable problem with the lyrics. Obviously, it'll require the aid of the internet to familiarise ourselves with the tune over the next ten days. There has to be at least one version of it knocking around on YouTube, surely?

Turns out, there are at least twenty. And you can listen to them all below.

Picks Of The Year 1993 - 2011: The Video Playlists

[Updated 20/12/2011 to include 2011 playlist, and plug some of the gaps in the earlier ones.]

At least one of the links below tells you the full story, so I won't go through it all again. But in brief: since 1993, I've been producing an annual series of Pick Of The Year compilations, collating my favourite tracks from that year's music releases. From 1993 to 1997, they were 90 minute cassettes: since 1998, I've been burning them onto CDs.

1998 was also the year that I started writing about these compilations on the interwub. The years 1993-1997 have subsequently been covered on this site as part of Spank Gold. Put all that together, and you've got a hefty collection of tracks covering my musical interests from 1993 to the present day.

And thanks to YouTube, you can hear most of them right now. The playlists below aren't complete, inevitably: some artists are less happy than others about letting their product be heard for free. But the vast majority of the songs I've chosen are there in some form or other - from official record company videos, to slapdash fan-made tributes consisting of a single still image with the song playing over the top. (I guess my own Felix Project videos fall somewhere in between those two stools.)

Anyway, you've got around an entire day's worth of music here that I've liked at one time or another. And I'll be updating this page each time I produce a new POTY compilation. Enjoy.

You've Done An Awesome Job Kevin: Pick Of The Year 2011

I've not been entirely honest with you, I'm afraid. For years, I've been telling you that my annual Pick Of The Year compilations started in 1993, as the result of a drunken conversation with Lou about the state of popular music at the time. But 1993 was, more accurately, the first year that these compilations went public - in fact, I'd been making them for my own personal amusement since 1982.

Which makes You've Done An Awesome Job Kevin number thirty in the series. Ulp.

I had this vague plan at one stage that when the POTY compilations hit a nice round number, I'd assemble all of these analysis pieces into another one of my massively unpopular books. We can discuss that further at the end of this page, when I'll also be offering you the chance to win a copy of this CD for yourselves (closing date February 29th 2012). But for now, here are my eighteen favourite songs of this year just gone, and why they're better than yours.

Billy Bragg: Never Buy The Sun

Fuck 'em up, Bill.

Updated 13/07/2011: now available as a free download.

SS/EE

Very soon, The Belated Birthday Girl and I will be celebrating ten whole years of doing that thing we do.

What’s our secret? As with any successful relationship, it involves give and take on both sides. For example, if there’s a film out that I want to see but she doesn’t, we wait until there’s a film out that she wants to see but I don’t, and then do them both back to back on the same day. Hence the slightly peculiar double bill of Paul and Black Swan we caught a few months ago.

It’s rare that we have to come to similar arrangements with music... but the other week, that very thing happened. She likes Everything Everything: I’m not fussed. I like Sufjan Stevens: she’s not fussed. Both acts were playing the south of England within 48 hours of each other. What to do?

Make a commitment to each write a review of the act we like least, that’s what. Enjoy! (Apologies for the imbalance in videos, but more people seem to have been bootlegging the Sufjan Stevens gig than the Everything Everything one.)

jPod For Japan

Over the years, there's been a lot of love for Japan on this site: its films, its music, its food, its geography. So, obviously, The Belated Birthday Girl and I were appalled by the news of the east coast earthquake and subsequent tsunami last Friday. Watching the English-language coverage on NHK World, or the slightly more seat-of-the-pants Japanese reporting on domestic NHK, it's hard for the mind to grasp the sheer scale of the destruction that's occurred.

The buzz hashtag on Twitter over the past few days has been #prayforjapan. I think my opinion on that is closer to the one expressed by @DaftLimmy: "praying after a natural disaster is like thanking Rod Hull for keeping that Emu under control." What they really need right now is people on the ground helping those that are trapped, and kickstarting the massive effort of rebuilding towns and villages. The general opinion appears to be that the Red Cross are best equipped to help out, so both The BBG and I have donated money to them, and we think it'd be nice if you did the same.

People tend to expect some sort of entertainment in exchange for their charity these days, so here's my offering. Available publicly for the first time, it's my jPod video playlist, originally constructed to back up my article about the state of Japanese pop music as of 2008. Maybe one of these days I'll write an update to that, but for now you've got two and a quarter hours of fine tunes that you probably haven't heard before. Enjoy, and then please donate. Thank you.

On Your Way To Somewhere Else: Pick Of The Year 2010

Yes, you're right, this is appalling. I burned the first copy of my latest compilation CD on December 7th 2010. I took it along to a pub that evening on the offchance that Lou might be there, but he couldn't make it. But that's not the point. The point is that it's taken me nearly three months since then to assemble my traditional discussion of the track listing, as a result of my work life balance going through one of those periods of being massively unbalanced.

So, while I've got a few minutes free, here's what has to be the last possible analysis you'll ever read of what was hot on the music scene in 2010, presented in the form of a 79 minute compilation CD. And if you make it to the end of this page before March 31st 2011, you might even get the chance to win a copy of it for yourself...

"this is up my arse for an oscar"

Here's a video I made of the Kid Carpet song Gordano, taken from his 2010 free album The Advert Break. Last week, it received the personal endorsement of the artist himself on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and his blog. Which is nice.

Gordano is also a track on my compilation On Your Way To Somewhere Else: Pick Of The Year 2010, which I will be discussing on here very soon. No, really.

Do The Funky Gibbon

March 2010: I Put A Spell On You, by Shane MacGowan And Friends, released in aid of the survivors of the Haiti earthquake. Highest chart position: unknown, but outside the top 100.

April 2010: Joy Division Oven Gloves, by Half Man Half Biscuit, released in aid of BBC 6 Music. Highest chart position: 56.

Let's be honest: when it comes to joining in on campaigns to get charity singles to number one, this site has a shit track record. Nevertheless, shall we give it one more try before the end of the year? Because, you know, gibbons.

Duck Rock

Malcolm McLaren's been dead for two weeks now: his funeral's today, in fact. Thousands of words have been written and spoken about his life, but there's one thing very few people have been able to agree on: what did McLaren do, exactly? Given all the areas he dabbled in, what occupation could he possibly have put on his passport if they still did that sort of thing?

I think I've got the answer: 'collage artist'. McLaren freely admitted that he didn't have much artistic talent of his own. What he was great at doing was identifying interesting things that were happening in the culture, and bashing them together in unexpected combinations to see what would happen. From the mixed and (mis)matched clothes he and Vivienne Westwood were selling in their shop SEX in the seventies, to the 'musical paintings' he was displaying in Newcastle as recently as last Christmas, collage was what he did best. (Yeah, I know I've gone two paragraphs without mentioning the Sex Pistols. Well, some of his collages were made out of people.)

It was inevitable that he'd be one of the first Brits to embrace hip-hop culture, given its overlap with his own artistic concerns. So in 1983, McLaren released a groundbreaking album that combined hip-hop with African pop to devastating effect: it was a huge popular success, and was the record that most radio stations reached for when the time came to broadcast his obituary. It was called Duck Rock, and for some reason it's no longer in print.