Basement Jaxx
Remedy

Will this age? In the way of Daft Punk might do too? Maybe it has and I haven’t noticed. It’s aged in that there’s a time I went dancing in nightclubs in Bolton to this tune and now I don’t. They’re a strange band; I loved Red Alert (on this album thankfully) but apart from that I’m not sure how much I noticed them (and really noticed them in a good critical kind of way rather than “Oh yes, I know this”, which I’m sure informs a lot of love of music and everything else) before “Where’s your head at?”. My friend Steve Elphick was learning how to DJ when we all lived in Edinburgh and I remember him playing around with that album (Booty? Rooty? Something like that) on vinyl in Tim, Adam and Jen’s flat near Tescos.

Shortly after I started this noskipsnoshuffles binge, Sam came back from shopping with this album for me. It took me ages to realise that the front cover was a variety of bodies laid out end to end. I’ve just learned how to sample “properly”, rather than just hitting “record” at the right time and hope for the best. I’m hearing the clinical neatness with new appreciation. Lots of vocoder. There’s that kind of Rahzel vocalising going on here, but it’s been copied n’ pasted rather than him doing it “live”…oh, and there’s another master’s topic I want to do one day. What is “live” in recorded music, by definition, that it ain’t, but is the opposite of “live” necessarily” dead”? I’ve had that many conversations with people about “if it’s not performed live, it’s not music”, and like I said, I thought that too, but something happened in the intervening years. I found myself today earnestly coveting a necklace of gold writing, but I want it to say something apart from “Princess” or “Superstar” and all those hideous words. Maybe “Specific” or “Architecture”. Thinking of architecture and maths as a beautiful thing rejigged the way I saw music. TS Eliot, constructionism, tradition. Humility. Fuck romanticism, it’s crass and indulgent. All those edges which blur are irrelevant and untidy (I speak as an untidy person. I aspire to living instead in squares). Never mind, Satie lived in filth.

Guest vocalist, lots of “Jump and shout” suggestions. There’s that party command again. The idea of a “crew”. Future coming. I like this, it limps along in more of a snake-fashion than the promise of a cops-and-robbers chase; it dodges instead, and feigns death where they may only be pause. When in music did it become necessary to drop in the band-name at the beginning of every song? A little slice of an advert beak, they even call it Jaxxalude, before (hooray…) Red Alert kicks in.

This might have been the first time (apart from Born Slippy) where I listened properly to the words in dance music, and found the juxtaposition between dance-good-time-y’all-welcome-to-paradise-sound that became so part of it all and the content of the words – it became easy to imagine a fire, a large-scale disorder, problem or disaster going on (such I have begun to account for in my dreams in bar charts, counting how many times the disaster is threatened, impending, ongoing or historical) in a nightclub. Having worked in a couple myself, we had all been drilled into how to evacuate buildings in case of emergency. We were always told to ask a group to move twice. If they still refused, you were to leave them to burn. Would anyone notice?

In my first year University I sang in Berio’s Sinfonia, and part of the third movement involves the 8 singers variously shouting/singing into their microphones “Stop!”, “Keep going!”, and “Stop”, time and time again (it’s wonderful). I have a vague memory of one rehearsal, where the first tenor’s microphone sputtered and died, meaning that the rest of us couldn’t hear these important cues over the huge orchestra. We had to shout to the conductor “Stop!”, but as I think I remember (or this might just be a twisted poetic memory, in which case it’s even better) he just beamed and carried on conducting, maybe giving us a thumbs up for the tremendous realism we were bringing to the piece.

Would anyone notice? Thinking politically as I’m doing at the minute anyway, who gives a fuck about Trident, increasingly alarmed polar bears waving their last from a disappearing iceberg, and the small matter of people freezing and starving to death in ugly and frightening lives here in the enlightened UK – if you want to worry and be concerned, how do you do it first without becoming part of the cogs that ensure the cogs survival? Underground becomes mainstream; Myspace, Isaiah Berlin, Bolshevism and the exclusive “you”.