Monthly Archives: July 2020

#740: Nas ft. AZ – Life’s a Bitch

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Long ago from now, can’t even remember what year it was but I’ll hazard a guess of 2010/2011, I was watching this film called Fish Tank while in bed. Why this was I wasn’t sure. I think I wasn’t sleeping very well, so what do you do when that happens? Turn on the TV, I guess. To put it simply, the film is about a girl who has ambitions but has a not so great life at home and also rocks up into this strange relationship with a man. At the end, she eventually leaves home and, after playing once in an emotional scene near, this song played again over the credits. It struck a chord with me. A bit of a dramatic thing to say. But I got quite invested in the film by the end of it, and the track seemed to sum up its sentiment very well. Plus the instrumental was calming to the ears. It wouldn’t be for another few years that I would listen to Illmatic in full though.

I still prefer ‘Life’s a Bitch’ to a lot of other songs on that album. Maybe because I had already heard it before. But I definitely think it contains one of the best matches of lyrical content with production on there. It opens up with a little introductory skit in which Nas and AZ shoot shit about sorting out the money they’ve earned so far, and once that’s done AZ bursts out the gate with, arguably, one of the greatest verses from a featured artist on a hip-hop song to date. I’m sure that a lot of people probably know his verse more than Nas’ which follows after the song’s hook. It’s just the energy with which he comes in and starts flowing over the beat that’s an instant hit to me.

Both rappers do their thing though. While AZ comes in with the energy, Nas follows on a calmer wave and on a positive note – feeling comfortable with the way life was at that point (he was 20 years of age and feeling good to be alive) while also pondering on the not so good stuff he did in his past. Ultimately, the aim for the two artists is to make as much money as they can and focus on the good times of today because it could all end in a split second. And then after the final hook comes that cornet played by Olu Dara, Nas’ father, that caps it off on a sweet and almost sad note.

#739: David Bowie – Life on Mars?

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Ah, 2016. Seems like such a simpler time. It was one of the best years of my life. I turned 21; I was on a hiatus from this blog but was working at a music magazine as an intern; I got to go to Glastonbury for free; I went to the USA on a long trip in the last few months that Obama was still president. It was a great time for me. But all the while that year will always be remembered as the one where everyone you loved in the entertainment industry suddenly started passing away. George Michael. Muhammad Ali. Gene Wilder. Prince. Alan Rickman. Leonard Cohen. Carrie Fisher. Debbie Reynolds, Fisher’s mother, who died the next day. There are many more I could mention. It seemed like every week of every month someone of notable fame was suddenly gone.

And it all started when David Bowie, who had just released his album Blackstar and looked like he was making a musical comeback, passed away from cancer just two days after the record came out. 10 days into January that happened. But it wasn’t until the 11th that the news came out. I was on the way to work on the underground flicking through the socials as you do, and there was a post that more or less said ‘RIP Starman’. That was how I found out. And coincidentally, the track ‘Life on Mars?’ was lined up on shuffle on my phone while I was listening to my music library. No lies. It was a sad day. And I just so happened to be working in Brixton of all places while this was going down. I just wanted to get home from work that evening. Hours later, the route I usually walked down to get to Brixton station was packed with fans paying tribute to him.

So this is ‘Life on Mars?’, and it’s on Bowie’s 1971 album Hunky Dory. It’s very much a classic. I think it’s known that Bowie took the chords of ‘My Way‘ and put his own spin on that track, adding surreal lyrics about a mousey-haired girl and Mickey Mouse turning into a cow. I don’t know what the song’s about, really. Though I think the things he describes in there are basically a way of saying, “Well if all this crazy stuff is happening here, couldn’t it be possible that there’s life on Mars too?” It’s probably much more complex than that. Even if the lyrics are quite strange, there’s no denying the beauty of the music. Rick Wakeman’s piano and Mick Ronson’s string arrangement lift the song to an entirely different level. It’s no surprise that this song is considered to be one of Bowie’s greatest, if not that, one of the greatest songs of all time.

#738: The Dismemberment Plan – A Life of Possibilities

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Think it was 2013 when I tried to listen to The Dismemberment Plan for the first time. I was on my Pitchfork tip during that time, trying to hear ‘new’ albums particularly in the indie scene. And Emergency & I, the band’s album released in 1999 is considered to be something of a classic in that genre. I went onto YouTube, searched for this track, listened to the first few seconds and really wasn’t into it. Why was this man singing like that? And what was with the squirty keyboard bass? Get that outta here. That was more or less my line of thinking from what I can recall. This was a major error.

Fast forward a few months later. I was in my first year of university and decided to really sit down and give the full album a listen. ‘A Life of Possibilities’, if you don’t know, starts Emergency off so there were the strange vocals and the keyboard bass again. But this time those two things sounded great together, and were backed with an undeniable groove too. This is what happens when you give a song more than a mere few seconds of your time. Then the dueling guitar hook came in and I was instantly hooked. If there is one thing about Emergency & I that I appreciated straight from the bat, it’s that almost every track has a great chorus. There’s no proper chorus in ‘Possibilities’ but those harmonizing guitars act as one, coming in between each verse in which singer and lyricist Travis Morrison goes on about – I think – someone who isolates themselves from society but finds that at some point they’ll have to get out there to truly live their life.

So yeah, do check out Emergency & I if you have the time. Don’t be like me when I was seventeen and disregard it because you don’t like a few sounds on it. The record is suitable for those going through their quarter life crisis, or just those who have hard times growing up in their 20s. That’s a large demographic.

#737: Coldplay – Life in Technicolor ii

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Coldplay’s debut album Parachutes was released twenty years ago last Friday. Though there’ll be hundreds of thousands out there who will think that they never got any better than that, I’m thoroughly in the stance that Coldplay peaked in their Viva la Vida era and haven’t matched it since. Collaborating with Brian Eno in places, the group created material that was far out by their standards and experimented with different instruments, soundscapes (they made a shoegazing track that was pretty great) and production techniques like tape loops and other bells and whistles that resulted in one of their most enjoyable albums.

The creative juices were flowing in the sessions for Viva la Vida, and so much material was made that Coldplay released the Prospekt’s March EP just a few months after Vida was available worldwide. Both album and EP go hand in hand with one another; for any time first time readers here it wouldn’t do any harm in listening to the two in one long sitting. The EP is also where ‘Life in Technicolor ii’ can be found as the opening track.

I think I read somewhere that Chris Martin had said that ‘Life in Technicolor ii’ would have been the obvious first single for Viva la Vida had it been released in its original form on the album. To prevent it from being so, they took out the parts where Martin sang, put a Jon Hopkins loop at the beginning of the track, and released it as an instrumental instead. That’s what ended up as the opening track on Vida. I was 13 when this track was eventually released as the lead single for ‘Prospekt’s March’; I seem to remember it being something of a big deal that the instrumental from their then-new album was being released with lyrics and all. It’s a nice sentiment too. Chris Martin sings about the world coming to an end because of a war that’s coming, but as long as we’ve all got love then that will guide the way. Kinda cliché thinking about it now. But it sounds terrific. The music video is a bit silly too, but what can you do.

#736: Radiohead – Life in a Glasshouse

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Continuing their run of awesome album closers, ‘Life in a Glasshouse’ is the last track on Radiohead’s album Amnesiac and, in a way, put an ominous end to their remarkable reinvention era of 2000/2001 when they wowed critics and confused listeners with the aforementioned album and Kid A eight months earlier. Obviously Radiohead always reinvent themselves in some way, but in this period people really questioned what the band were trying to do with this new anti-rock route they were going with.

‘Glasshouse’ is probably the group’s most unique track. There is no other song in Radiohead’s discography that is like it at all. And that’s not me trying to say that it differs in just a minor area from their other material. The track is this sad-sounding, jazzy funeral dirge complete with clarinets, trumpets and a huge big band section. I seem to remember lying in bed, half-asleep, listening to Amnesiac for the first time in late 2012. Though I thought the rest of the album was alright (an opinion I still hold today, it’s probably one of my least favourite Radiohead albums) this track stood out to me as a highlight while also bringing a downer to whatever dream I was having. The track itself is inspired by an incident where a wife of a famous actor covered her windows with newspapers to prevent paparazzi and the tabloids from getting any proper photos of her. But Thom Yorke’s delivery on ‘someone’s listening in’, especially at the end, is very creepy. Makes me feel like I’m being watched. We are all being watched in some way.

Because the jazzy instrumental was provided by a specific band, led by musician Humphrey Lyttelton who passed away in 2008, the band have never performed the song live. Except for that one time that they did in 2001. Below is Lyttleton’s band and Radiohead on Later with Jools Holland performing the track.